'The Composites': Pinkie Brown

Pinkie Brown, "Brighton Rock," Graham Greene

"He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like an old man's in which human feeling has died... Grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes... From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went... The eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into... The eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two... In the tipped mirror on the washstand he could see himself, but his eyes shifted quickly from the image of smooth, never shaven cheek, soft hair, old eyes... 'They nearly got me too,' and he raised his bandaged hand to his scarred neck."