He Died with His Eyes Open Read Online Free

on at five and got out one of the tapes from Staniland's collection and put it on my cassette player.
    People stroll about in Battersea Park among the dogs' turds as if they had all time before them. I hope they really believe it—they might as well. They go round and round the park, then they turn about and go back to the flats which border it. There they sit and worry about their problems and wait for the pubs to open. In spite of their clothes, a lot of them are sitting tenants and on social security. If you tell them that you're a writer, they tell you that they are writers too, though they haven't an ounce of talent in them, only resentment and nastiness. They come on very liberal: this is false. The moment you have anything interesting going in your room—a discussion, a party, a screw—they start banging on your floor with a broom handle like a jealous mother-in-law in a hopeless, elderly way. These are your 'neighbours'. Next evening you see them in the bar of the Princess Caroline wearing secondhand snappy coats, sporting gold buttons with anchors on them and peaked caps at an angle, Leninstyle. They look ready to denounce anybody; they are obsessed with their middle-class status right down to the last assumption, down to the mongrel which they strain against their feet in their balding suede bootees just as if these snappish animals had a pedigree. When I have had a few drinks these people turn into predatory birds, hornets and wasps. If I criticize them, they tell me I have no pity. If I do not, they have none for me.
    Under its strictly tended foliage, the keepers of Battersea Park shut the gates at ten-thirty at night, reminding you that you aren't in the country now, while not three streets behind the Rastafarians roam and howl. Shut out of the pubs down there by unwritten law they rule the streets— their prey the Asians, those whites who are too defenceless to retaliate and, in general, intelligent-looking and therefore possibly rich people. The only things the jobless blacks can call their own are the paving stones. Battersea is representative of a hopeless national situation, and only a succession of typical British governments could ever have got us out into it. I loathe Battersea. I just want to go mad.
    I turned the tape over, but the other side was blank.

4
    Morning came. It shone through my uncurtained bedroom window, but I still listened. I came to a grim account that began:
    France. The moment I got back to Duéjouls after the others had left, the first thing I did was burn all my daughter's clothes—all her books and toys that had been left behind. As I couldn't bear to look at them I took everything up behind the house into the courtyard and made a huge fire of them. It was August, and the heat was so great that I was afraid everything would catch fire—the house, the whole village, the sky. I watched her books burn up: Ant and Bee, A Busy, Busy Day, Mister Clumsy and Mister Clever . Her drawings of houses and cats and snails soaring over her impression of the house on the wind wrinkled and flared; the flames gusted through them. The evening breeze from the causses flailed and tossed her works lightly up to heaven, as lightly as if they had never been. I felt horribly faint inside as I stoked the fire—as if I had been transformed by a fever that left only my twisted body behind, listless and hideous. I knew only that it had to be done as I burned her clothes and shoes; it was the cost of my failure as a father and a man. Everything would have to be explained and paid for—but not tonight, not now.
    Wine now: I drank the cold wine from the bottle while the fire burned, destroying our past for us, my daughter's and mine. When the fire looked like dying of exhaustion under its ash I threw some eau-de-vie on it and raked the slabs of half-burned paper and material with a hoe they call a harpe round here to give the fire more air. When everything was burned I knew I had done right as I reeled