A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel (17 page)

She turned back to him. He could see her forcing herself to keep a little doubt in reserve in case he agreed with her father about an abortion. He noticed the fine silver chain she wore around her neck had broken and was lying on her scarf. Its pendant was a single pearl. She'd had it since she was twelve, never took it off: one of her superstitions. If he hadn't spotted it, it would probably have later fallen off undetected and she would have been upset. It was a pleasure to him that he could spare her that little loss.

“I'll tell you something,” he said. “This kid's going to be fucking beautiful.”

 

T
he rain doesn't ease off. Eventually Augustus knows he has to eat, which means either forcing the girl out into the elements or offering her something too. Not offering isn't an option. An annoying surprise, the durability of manners. There are these perversions, the survival of negligible things. She's remained on the floor by the fire, legs tucked under her, hands in the leather jacket's pockets. It must be hurting her knees and shins but she seems oblivious.

“I have to eat,” Augustus says. “Do you want something?”

She looks up at him out of a fire trance. There's a smudge of smut on her chin. Her face is small, he sees as if for the first time. Young. No more than twenty, he's sure. Again he feels the slight force trying to knit between them. The force is a habit of mind. Instantly he burns through it to emptiness and just the facts of the room.

“You're gonnie cook something?”

“No, I'm going to open a can. Do you want some?”

She takes her hands out of her pockets, rests them on her thighs. “I've still got some of that money,” she says.

“What money?”

“That fifty pound.”

“Look forget the money, will you? I don't need it. Now do you want something or not?”

“No, I'm okay thanks. D'you not care I was gonnie thieve your gun?”

“Apparently not.”

His stick's by the stove but he doesn't want to ask her to pass it to him. Instead he grits his teeth and struggles up from the bed
unaided then limps to the doorless cupboard next to the sink. Heinz ravioli. Heinz baked beans. Heinz scotch broth. John West yellowfin tuna chunks in brine. Plumrose hot dog sausages. Must have eaten the creamed chicken. A small disappointment reveals another perversion: your animal heart still sets itself on things. In a knotted Costcutter carrier bag are four wrinkling apples and half a stale sliced white loaf. His chefs would shudder. Augustus stokes the wood burner, adds two logs, opens the beans and the ravioli and tips them into the pan. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her wince slightly.

“What's the matter?”

“Eh?”

“Are you in pain?”

She shakes her head, no. “Need the loo. Sorry.”

“It's through there. Don't expect the Ritz.” Woeful under-statement. By some miracle the toilet's survived the croft's vandalization with only seat and cistern lid missing. It flushes, but the little room's icy and stinking, its one narrow window long since smashed and only half boarded up. Augustus sits on the rim without the seat, it's nothing to him, but when she closes the door behind her he realizes she'll have to squat and feels a twinge of pity for her at the image it conjures, her bent awkwardly trying to hold her skirt and underwear clear of the floor, trying not to touch anything.

She's in there a while. He wonders if she's got her period. Thinking of a woman getting her period gives me a funny feeling in my own insides, he'd said to Selina, as if I had a womb in a former life. Maybe you did, she said. What kind of funny feeling? Like a bud being snapped from a stem, a small weird pain that
can make you double up or puke if you think about it too long. It's not like that, Selina told him. Buds and stems, that'd be nice. Try
like being slowly bayoneted
.

By the time the girl comes out he's washed the tin plate and the tin bowl and his one spoon and one fork. The stale loaf's on the table. She emerges drying her hands on a wad of toilet roll, looks around for a bin, tosses it on the fire instead where it blooms brilliant yellow for a moment then disappears. Selina used to say: Metaphors for brevity are everywhere. It's not like God's not dropping plenty of hints.

“It's up to you,” Augustus says, “but there's enough if you want some.” The croft smells of the heated food. Now he's faced with it Augustus isn't sure he can eat. His leg wounds are full of tiny movements. The heat suddenly gets to him. He goes to the door, opens it, looks out. Cold steady rain and the fresh smell of waterlogged turf, one fishy waft from the beach. Maddoch or the boy must have been down with the dog to move the sheep. The land's empty. He turns back to see she's taken a seat on the upturned crate, leaving the chair for him. When he sits down and begins serving himself from the pan he feels embarrassed. After two or three mouthfuls he stops eating.

“What's your name?” he asks her.

“Morwenna,” she says. “It's not Scottish. It's Welsh. My mum.”

Augustus nods, slowly, fearing a rapid unraveling of information he doesn't want—but it doesn't come.

“You're Mr. Rose?”

“Augustus.”

“Okay, right.”

“Who's after you?”

“What?”

“You wanted the gun. Who's the enemy?”

She looks down at her hands. Opens her mouth but doesn't speak.

“I don't actually care,” Augustus says. “I'm just…In fact never mind. Maybe it's time you left.” These seem the first unthought-out words he's spoken in a long time. Some quick current's shot him into them. It brings him out in a sweat. She reaches down and slowly lifts her shoulder bag onto her lap, waits a moment, gets to her feet. Slowly, he supposes, to give him time to change his mind. Or maybe she's worried sudden movement will trip his lunatic switch irreversibly. He forces down another mouthful of food. There's an increasing claustrophobic irritation, as if he's just realizing that all day he's been wearing a too tight shoe.

“Sorry,” she says. “I thought you—”

“Jesus what is it you
want
?” His aggression surprises him—and her. She flinches as if there's a blow coming. He's between her and the door, feels the space between them filling with her calculated bolt. He forces himself to untighten, puts his fork down, leans back in his chair. “Sorry,” he says.

“'S all right. Best be off anyways.”

“It's okay, forget it. Sit down. It's still pouring.”

“Yeah, but you said—”

“I know but forget what I said. Sorry.”

The shock of his outburst resonates but a practical part of him nonetheless notes the timeliness of Maddoch's roof repairs. They'd be afloat by now otherwise. As it is he wonders how long the water will take to climb the shallow front step and creep like
an eclipse across the floor. Has it been raining for two whole days? His education's wrecked matrix endures, erratic synaptic firings that right now give him among other things
antediluvian deluge flood ark new covenant water baptism water water everywhere he blesses the water snakes and the albatross drops from his neck and suddenly he can pray this
if she's the water snake is the opportunity to bless or would have been but that's what would be what's supposed to happen. Thinking like this the old thing of making connections only connect is again like the phantom limb reaching out because of course under all the connections is nothing.

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. It's fine.”

She remains on her feet, uncertain.

“Now I've made this I can't eat it,” he says.

Slowly she resumes her seat on the crate, slides the bag off, lowers it to the floor. She bends, searches in it a moment, straightens up with rolling tobacco and lighter in hand.

“I'll go outside,” she says.

“No need.”

“'S no bother for me.”

“No I mean there's no need because I smoke. I'm out though.” He watches her unpack the idiom. He's out: He's none left.

“Will you have one of these?”

It's a long time since he's rolled a cigarette. He doesn't want to lean close for a light but it's unavoidable. You're still a man. Don't make me take that away from you. Harper's a disease he's got for the rest of his life. Harper
flares up
. You lean close to share a light and there he is, as if in an instant your body's web of veins burns and shows.

“Hang on.” Augustus gets up and brings a bottle from by the stove, Glenfiddich, half full. But only the one tin mug. His scalp prickles again. As soon as you start having dealings with—then he sees a solution. He pours half the scotch into the mug and gives that to her. He can drink the rest straight from the bottle.

“Could you not have poured me a large one?” she says when she sees how much is in the mug. “There's enough f'ra week in there.”

“Just drink what you want,” Augustus says.

 

A
fter the loss of his eye he tells Harper everything. You think you know the universe, its amorality, its unjudgmental accommodations, its fundamentalist adherence to the religion of cause and effect—but you don't. Not until someone gouges your eye out with the scalloped handle of a stainless steel spoon. They put the metal there, apply force, intention, and what must follow follows. What can the universe do about it? Nothing. The universe is compelled to supply effects on causal demand. You think in spite of all available evidence to the contrary the universe will draw the line at your eye, which has seen your whole precious waking life, but the universe is in no position to grant exceptions. The universe is the perfect ideologue. If this is a scalpel and this pressure then this is an optic nerve—cut. Language cooperates. Language astonishes with its fidelity:
my eye
. Disbelief keeps surging: How can it be your eye if they've forced it out? How can your eye suddenly be an object first and your eye second? How can the attachment between the words and the things endure? But your eye's part of the universe so obeys the universe's laws.
Together the universe and language radiate brilliant innocence.
They've gouged my eye out
. Your beautiful magician's eyes. And God has not yet said a word!

Harper said: I think that's about it, don't you? I don't think you want us to do that to your other eye, do you? And Augustus jackknifing against the cuffs had screamed from the tossing waves obscenities and pleas, whirled between horror and pain and desperation and disbelief but in spite of this with another part of himself already curled around the loss, the specific degradation, a thing done to you that can't be undone so that now whenever you say or think “I” or answer “me” it's with a concession to them and the miracle of brutality they performed. You can't believe the miracle—that a few small actions reveal the paltry
thing
ness of even your eye—but there it is, and the universe continues breathing normally because these are nothing but the effects of certain causes and God has not yet said a word. Nor will he. Or these are his words, the small actions, the eye, the screams, the blood and Harper's voice saying: I think that's about it, don't you? Either God speaks continuously or is nothing but silence.

The mustached guard had held Augustus's blood-slippery head back by the hair so that the screams jammed in his throat. The spoon's edge was placed at the corner of the remaining eye. Harper bent so close to Augustus's ear that when he spoke his voice entered with a tympanic tickle: Do you want to tell us what you know? And Augustus had bellowed yes through his bent throat and as soon as the guard's hand relaxed began giving up everything he had in disorderly sobbing chunks starting with Elise Merkete who even as he said her name was replayed in his head sitting up in her sleep and saying: Future generations will
thank the elephant but he kept stalling and going back in searing misery and disbelief but they had done it, they had, a fire there now, a raging white heat in his head there was no going back you couldn't reverse it had happened it had gone misery was a kind of filth, facts were filthy with innocence because what was this other than a fact what was this other than something that was the case Wittgenstein said the world is everything that is the case and there no matter what he said or yielded now was the pain, something on an alien scale, beyond negotiation.

He'd passed out, not, he thought afterward, from the pain (though the last thing he remembered was white flame filling his head and the intimate wet creep of blood) but from exhaustion. The last big adrenaline-spend pulled him under. When he came around he found they'd moved him. He was on a bed, wrists and ankles secured in leather restraints, in a room with a medicinal smell. His clothes had been replaced with a hospital smock. Two other beds and high up on the opposite wall a narrow horizontal strip of barred frosted glass letting in what he believed was natural light. He wondered if he'd died. Wasn't this a likely afterlife? A deserted ward with the whiff of old antiseptic, the feeling of having been forgotten? But there was the pain, throughout his head but centered where his eye used to. Where his eye. Someone had applied a crude dressing. There was a furor under it, the nerves' deep grieving and frantic damage control. The word
socket
intruded and he fought back the urge to vomit.

Thirst repeatedly derailed all other thoughts. He lay on his back staring at the blank ceiling, oscillating between caring and not caring about himself. It was very hard not to care, but caring forced him to keep replaying the violation. Replaying the violation
drew him again into searing rage and crippling self-pity, and into an asphyxiating panic that there was some way of getting back to before it had happened but he couldn't remember it. Horror was endlessly renewable. He knew the only solution was to stop caring but it was like turning your back on your own child and listening to its cries as you walked away. He went in and out of consciousness.