The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [28]
‘It’s late. I thought you’d be asleep.’
‘I couldn’t sleep until we’d had our hunt. The idea’s grown on me, old man. We might have a monthly prize. I can see the time coming when other people will want to join in.’
Wilson said with irony, ‘There might be a silver cup.’
‘Stranger things have happened, old man. The Cockroach Championship.’
He led the way, walking softly on the boards to the middle of his room: the iron bed stood under its greying net, the armchair with collapsible back, the dressing-table littered with old Picture Posts. It shocked Wilson once again to realize that a room could be a degree more cheerless man his own.
‘Well draw our rooms alternate nights, old man.’
‘What weapon shall I use?’
‘You can borrow one of my slippers.’ A board squeaked under Wilson’s feet and Harris turned warningly. ‘They have ears like rats,’ he said.
‘I’m a bit tired. Don’t you think that tonight...?’
‘Just five minutes, old man. I couldn’t sleep without a hunt. Look, there’s one - over the dressing-table. You can have first shot,’ but as the shadow of the slipper fell upon the plaster wall, the insect shot away.
‘No use doing it like mat, old man. Watch me.’ Harris stalked his prey. The cockroach was half-way up the wall, and Harris, as he moved on tiptoe across the creaking floor, began to weave the light of his torch backwards and forwards over the cockroach. Then suddenly he struck and left a smear of blood. ‘One up,’ he said. ‘You have to mesmerize them.’
To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into comers: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson’s imagination. At first their manner to each other was ‘sporting’; they would call out, ‘Good-shot’ or ‘Hard Luck’, but once they met together against the wainscot over the same cockroach when the score was even, and their tempers became frayed.
‘No point in going after the same bird, old man,’ Harris said.
‘I started him.’
‘You lost your one, old man. This was mine.’
‘It was the same. He did a double turn.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Anyway, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for the same one. You drove it towards me. Bad play on your part’
‘Not allowed in the rules,’ Harris said shortly.
‘Perhaps not in your rules.’
‘Damn it all,’ Harris said, ‘I invented the game.’
A cockroach sat upon the brown cake of soap in the washbasin. Wilson spied it and took a long shot with the shoe from six feet away. The shoe landed smartly on the soap and the cockroach span into the bam: Harris turned on the tap and washed it down. ‘Good shot, old man,’ he said placatingly. ‘One D.D.’
‘D.D, be damned,’ Wilson said. ‘It was dead when you turned on the tap.’
‘You couldn’t be sure of mat. It might have been just unconscious - concussion. It’s D.D. according to the rules.’
‘Your rules again.’
‘My rules are the Queensberry rules in this town.’
‘They won’t be for long,’ Wilson threatened. He slammed the door hard behind him and the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock. His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpits. But as he stood there beside his own bed, seeing the replica of Harris’s room around him, the washbasin, the table, the grey mosquito-net, even the cockroach fastened on the wall, anger trickled out of nun and loneliness took its place. It was like quarrelling with one’s own image in the glass. I was crazy, he thought. What made me fly out like that? I’ve lost a friend.
That night it took him a long while to sleep, and when he slept at last he dreamed that he had committed a crime, so that he woke with the sense of guilt still heavy upon him. On his way down to breakfast he paused outside Harris’s door. There was no sound. He knocked, but there was