The Best of Roald Dahl Read online

  'Always choose a respectable woman to deliver your game,' Claud announced. 'That's correct, Charlie, isn't it?'

  'Bessie's a right smart girl,' Charlie said.

  We were driving through the village now and the streetlamps were still on and the men were wandering home from the pubs. I saw Will Prattley letting himself in quietly by the side door of his fishmonger's shop and Mrs Prattley's head was sticking out the window just above him, but he didn't know it.

  'The vicar is very partial to roast pheasant,' Claud said.

  'He hangs it eighteen days,' Charlie said, 'then he gives it a couple of good shakes and all the feathers drop off.'

  The taxi turned left and swung in through the gates of the vicarage. There were no lights on in the house and nobody met us. Claud and I dumped the pheasants in the coalshed at the rear, and then we said goodbye to Charlie Kinch and walked back in the moonlight to the filling-station, empty-handed. Whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we went in, I do not know. We saw no sign of him.

  'Here she comes,' Claud said to me the next morning.

  'Who?'

  'Bessie - Bessie Organ.' He spoke the name proudly and with a slight proprietary air, as though he were a general referring to his bravest officer.

  I followed him outside.

  'Down there,' he said, pointing.

  Far away down the road I could see a small female figure advancing towards us.

  'What's she pushing?' I asked.

  Claud gave me a sly look.

  'There's only one safe way of delivering game,' he announced, 'and that's under a baby.'

  'Yes,' I murmured, 'yes, of course.'

  'That'll be young Christopher Organ in there, aged one and a half. He's a lovely child, Gordon.'

  I could just make out the small dot of a baby sitting high up in the pram, which had its hood folded down.

  'There's sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little nipper,' Claud said happily. 'You just imagine that.'

  'You can't put sixty or seventy pheasants in a pram.'

  'You can if it's got a good deep well underneath it, and if you take out the mattress and pack them in tight, right up to the top. All you need then is a sheet. You'll be surprised how little room a pheasant takes up when it's limp.'

  We stood beside the pumps waiting for Bessie Organ to arrive. It was one of those warm windless September mornings with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.

  'Right through the village bold as brass,' Claud said. 'Good old Bessie.'

  'She seems in rather a hurry to me.'

  Claud lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. 'Bessie is never in a hurry,' he said.

  'She certainly isn't walking normal,' I told him. 'You look.'

  He squinted at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.

  'Well?' I said.

  'She does seem to be going a tiny bit quick, doesn't she?' he said carefully.

  'She's going damn quick.'

  There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard at the approaching woman.

  'Perhaps she doesn't want to be caught in the rain, Gordon. I'll bet that's exactly what it is, she thinks it's going to rain and she don't want the baby to get wet.'

  'Why doesn't she put the hood up?'

  He didn't answer this.

  'She's running!' I cried. 'Look!' Bessie had suddenly broken into a full sprint.

  Claud stood very still, watching the woman; and in the silence that followed I fancied I could hear a baby screaming.

  'What's up?'

  He didn't answer.

  'There's something wrong with that baby,' I said. 'Listen.'

  At this point, Bessie was about two hundred yards away from us but closing fast.

  'Can you hear him now?' I said.

  'Yes.'

  'He's yelling his head off.'

  The small shrill voice in the distance was growing louder every second, frantic, piercing, nonstop, almost hysterical.

  'He's having a fit,' Claud announced.

  'I think he must be.'

  'That's why she's running, Gordon. She wants to get him in here quick and put him under a cold tap.'

  'I'm sure you're right,' I said. 'In fact I know you're right. Just listen to that noise.'

  'If it isn't a fit, you can bet your life it's something like it.'

  'I quite agree.'

  Claud shifted his feet uneasily on the gravel of the driveway. 'There's a thousand and one different things keep happening every day to little babies like that,' he said.

  'Of course.'

  'I knew a baby once who caught his fingers in the spokes of the pram wheel. He lost the lot. It cut them clean off.'

  'Yes.'

  'Whatever it is,' Claud said, 'I wish to Christ she'd stop running.'

  A long truck loaded with bricks came up behind Bessie and the driver slowed down and poked his head out the window to stare. Bessie ignored him and flew on, and she was so close now I could see her big red face with the mouth wide open, panting for breath. I noticed she was wearing white gloves on her hands, very prim and dainty, and there was a funny little white hat to match perched right on the top of her head, like a mushroom.

  Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an enormous pheasant!

  Claud let out a cry of horror.

  The fool in the truck going along beside Bessie started roaring with laughter.

  The pheasant flapped around drunkenly for a few seconds, then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the road.

  A grocer's van came up behind the truck and began hooting to get by. Bessie kept on running.

  Then - whoosh! - a second pheasant flew up out of the pram.

  Then a third, and a fourth. Then a fifth.

  'My God!' I said. 'It's the pills! They're wearing off!'

  Claud didn't say anything.

  Bessie covered the last fifty yards at a tremendous pace, and she came swinging into the driveway of the filling-station with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.

  'What the hell's going on?' she cried.

  'Go round the back!' I shouted. 'Go round the back!' But she pulled up sharp against the first pump in the line and before we could reach her she had seized the screaming infant in her arms and dragged him clear.

  'No! No!' Claud cried, racing towards her. 'Don't lift the baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!' But she wasn't even listening, and with the weight of the child suddenly lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the pram, fifty or sixty of them, at least, and the whole sky above us was filled with huge brown birds clapping their wings furiously to gain height.

  Claud and I started running up and down the driveway waving our arms to frighten them off the premises. 'Go away!' we shouted. 'Shoo! Go away!' But they were too dopey still to take any notice of us and within half a minute down they came again and settled themselves like a swarm of locusts all over the front of my filling-station. The place was covered with them. They sat wing to wing along the edges of the roof and on the concrete canopy that came out over the pumps, and a dozen at least were clinging to the sill of the office window. Some had flown down on to the rack that held the bottles of lubricating-oil, and others were sliding about on the bonnets of my second-hand cars. One cockbird with a fine tail was perched superbly on top of a petrol pump, and quite a number, those that were too drunk to stay aloft, simply squatted in the driveway at our feet, fluffing their feathers and blinking their small eyes.

  Across the road, a line of cars had already started forming behind the brick-lorry and the grocery-van, and people were opening their doors and getting out and beginning to cross over to have a closer look. I glanced at my watch. It was twenty to nine. Any moment now, I thought, a large black car is going to come streaking along the road from the direction of the village, and the car will be a Rolls, and the face behind the wheel will be the great glistening