Read Online The Death of William Posters by Alan Sillitoe - Free Book Online

suppose you’re too young to bother with it,’ he grinned.
    â€˜You’re wrong. I’m full of it, the future, it’s on my mind all the time. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that there’s going to be any future. You remember that last crisis? Planes were going over day and night and I used to watch their vapour trails from the factory roof – all loaded to the gills with hydrogen bombs ready to go off any minute towards Russia. I felt my nerve going as I saw what might come – a complete deathfire burning everybody. But I’m strong, too bloody strong, and I just went back to my machine. “What’s the use?” I thought to myself. But I wondered why everybody was dead at a time when they should be alive. And I thought: maybe it’s because everybody’s talking about it on the telly and reading all about it in the papers, and while this goes on they think it’s a game and can’t happen. You don’t have a bleeding future while you’ve got the telly on, and that’s a fact. I feel I’ll go looney though if I don’t get on the move. I’d like to walk ten miles every day for ten years. I feel as if I’m being strangled. This country’s too little for me – you can walk to any coast in a week – a bit of eagle-crap dropped out of the sky. I look at all the people round me who have boxed their future up in the telly, and it makes me sicker than that whisky I slung down. The wide open spaces would frighten any dead bastard who didn’t like other people. That’s what the telly does anyway, teaches you to despise your fellow man. There’s nothing left to believe in in this country, nothing left, not a thing.’
    â€˜Careful,’ Harry said. ‘That’s because you’ve got nothing to believe in yourself.’
    â€˜You may be right. I’ll have to find it then. There’s nothing in this country that can help me do it and that’s a fact. There’s a spirit of rottenness and tightness in it.’
    â€˜You can’t condemn a whole country.’
    â€˜I don’t. I never wanted a country to believe in, either. I’m out of a factory. A machine will do me. I was just talking about the feeling. I feel like an ant on a gramophone record that can’t get off.’ He was sitting up, legs spread along the floor, having eaten his way through a bacon sandwich and drunk the mug of tea. Harry had said little, let him rave on, let the fire in his eyes burn undiminished, glowing as if he’d put back a bottle of paraffin instead of whisky. A hard wind kept up a continual bumping against the hut, as if a huge dog running blind across the gardens stumbled at the hut it could never learn to see: ‘You can talk, but the world will go its own way.’
    â€˜As long as I go mine. That’s all I feel fit for now.’ He felt good for even less, but couldn’t admit it to Harry: head full of stones, legs dead, body paralysed and yet to be woken up from, as if the whisky had killed him, stopped his heart so that he had actually wandered around in the black limitless emptiness of unearthly death in the hour before Harry found him; travelled among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks, hands and shoulders that, thanks to the bacon and blind talk, and after so long, were getting blood through them again.
    Harry spread more slices in the pan. ‘It’s all right you blabbing about England being rotten, but it’s better than some places I could name, for all its faults.’
    â€˜That don’t say it can’t be better though. It won’t last much longer.’
    He laughed, and turned the bacon over. ‘It’ll last me out.’
    â€˜Enjoy it then, while you can.’
    â€˜I’m not enjoying it. I’m too bloody busy living to let things get my goat the way you do.’
    â€˜There’s