A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [213]
Anand lost his temper. ‘When I get to your age I don’t want to be like you.’
He regretted what he had said. He was, indeed, fatigued; and Mr Biswas’s dismissing manner had seemed to him callous. But he made no apology. He talked instead about the headaches he was getting and said he was sure he was suffering from brainfag and brainfever, crammer’s afflictions, which his rivals at school had often prophesied for him.
Mr Biswas said, ‘I haven’t got a red cent on me. I don’t get pay till the day after tomorrow. Right now I am dipping into the Deserving Destees’ petty cash at the office. Go and ask your mother.’
As usual, it turned out that she did have some money. ‘How much you want?’
Anand calculated. Adult, twelve cents, children, half price. Just to make sure, however, he said, ‘Thirty-six cents.’ He would return the change afterwards.
‘Thirty-six cents. Well, boy, you clean me out. Look.’
All he saw in her purse were a few coppers. But she always managed. And pay day was the day after tomorrow.
The evening show began at half past eight. Mr Biswas and Anand left the house at about eight. Not far from the cinema there was a Chinese café. Something had to be bought there; it was part of the cinema ritual. They had eighteen cents to spend. They bought peanuts, chauna and some mint sweets, six cents in all.
The entrance to the London pit was through a narrow tunnel, as to a dungeon of romance. It allowed not more than one person to advance at a time and enabled the ticket-collector, who sat at the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to repel gate-crashers. Mr Biswas and Anand arrived to find the mouth of the tunnel blocked by a turbulent, unaccommodating mob. They stood hesitantly at the edge of the mob, and in an instant, driven from behind, found themselves part of it. They lost control of their hands and feet. Anand, wedged between tall men, shut off from light and air, could only allow himself to be carried along. Cries of frustration and anguish ran through the mob: the film had started: they could hear the opening music. The pressure on Anand increased; he feared he would be crushed against the angle of wall and tunnel; Mr Biswas called to him in a voice that seemed to come from far; he could not answer; he could not look up or down. There was only the thought that at the end of this lay Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy and Tyrone Power, all of whom, despite what he had said at school, commanded Anand’s highest esteem. He heard men crying for tickets; they were getting near. Through a small, semicircular, lighted hole in the wall of the tunnel money was being pushed in, tickets out, and the hands of the ticketseller occasionally flashed: a woman’s hands, fat and cool.
It was Mr Biswas’s turn. Struggling to remain in front of the hole, to prevent himself being swept down, ticketless, to the ticket-collector with the stick, he placed a shilling on the smooth, shining wood. ‘One and a half.’
A woman’s voice said, ‘Half price only at matinée.’ The hands, about to tear a ticket from the reel, waited.
‘Two, then.’
Two green tickets were pushed towards him, and he and Anand yielded gratefully to the pressure at their backs.
‘Hey, you!’ the woman’s voice called from the hole.
Selling had stopped, and the clamour redoubled all down the tunnel.
‘You!’
Mr Biswas went back to the lighted hole.
‘What you mean, giving me only a shilling?’ The coin lay on her palm. ‘Two twelves.’
‘Two twenties. Sixteen cents more.’
Anand stood where he was. The turmoil and the shouting became remote.
The soundtrack indicated that a fire was in progress. People who had seen the film before recognized the sound; it wound them up to a frenzy.
How could he have forgotten that there was half price only at matinées? How could he have forgotten that on Mondays as on Saturdays and Sundays, the price was not twelve cents, but twenty?
Mr Biswas put the two green tickets down. One was torn off and given back to him, with four cents.
They stood against the wall next