A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel

by Glen Duncan

  He’s lucky. First in that it’s his habit to move quietly and second in that he hears the unfamiliar voice while he’s still outside.

  “Look at the fucking state of this place. How can you stand it?”

  “Don’t wreck it, Paulie, please.”

  “Jesus Christ it’s a shit-hole.”

  Augustus keeps very still, surprised in the detached part of himself at how you forget this level of alertness, this hypersensitivity of skin and hair. The body, as he’s learned, supplies effects on causal demand. Adrenaline rushes to the sites of action. There in his knees is the feeling of pooled weakness that is in fact sprung readiness.

  The question is: the front door or the back door? He can see himself doing it, one hand holding the gun steady at just below chest height, the other flinging the door open. The front door involves a step up. The back door involves creeping and ducking two windows. And in any case it’s irrational to suppose that just because it’s the back door he’ll have his back to it. He. Him. Paulie, whose rule is no smack and at first it’s like you’re a princess.

  Augustus shifts the weight to his good leg. The gun’s a thing of humming sentience against his chest, sensing proximal destiny, the call to its function. Even without relinquishing the stick he should be able to get a good grip on the—

  Suddenly the door flies open. Augustus doesn’t have much time to take Paulie in—registers artfully chopped dark hair, bony good looks, maroon leather jacket—before he’s grabbed by his coat collar and yanked stumbling over the threshold into the croft. The stick gets away from him and he crashes to his knees.

  Morwenna’s on her side on the floor, struggling to get up. Her mouth’s bleeding. She’s got one elbow under her but keeps the other arm wrapped around her abdomen.

  “Oh this is great, this is. Please tell me this rancid old coon’s not sticking it in you?”

  Which means he doesn’t know about the gun. If he did that would come first. That’s the ace. Absolutely everything from here must be designed around that. You’re a rancid old coon who doesn’t have a gun.

  “Don’t hurt him, Paulie, please.”

  “Because if he has you’re going to douche with fucking Domestos. Jesus Christ.”

  “He hasnie touched me,” Morwenna gasps, still trying to get onto her knees. “Honest to God, he hasn’t. Juss don’t hurt him, don’t—”

  Augustus on all fours senses the kick coming but can’t move fast enough and Morwenna’s scream synchronizes perfectly with all the breath leaving his body as if it’s the scream that’s pulled it out of him.

  “Like that, you mean?” Paulie says.

  “Paulie don’t I’ll do anythin you want I’ll come back with you anythin you want juss don’t hurt—”

  “Or like this?”

  The boots are steel-capped and this one goes hard and sharp into the side of Augustus’s left leg. He can’t scream, since his breath’s gone, can’t make a sound. He feels his face wide-eyed, open-mouthed and deep reflex curling him fetally though he mustn’t, must not let the gun clunk or fall out of his pocket and through the pain is asking himself which grades of British police carry firearms, she said plainclothes, didn’t she? Which means what? Yes? In any case he’ll have to assume a gun or maybe more than one. But Jesus for a few seconds just a few seconds he’s got to get air into his lungs. He can absorb violence to preserve the gun’s secrecy but not so much that he’ll be incapable of using it.

  Morwenna, weeping, says, “Stop it, stop it, stop it—”

  “Shut up!” Paulie turns and kicks her in the ribs and when she doubles up, the back. “Shut up you stupid. Fucking. Cunt. I can’t believe you’ve dragged me all the way up here to find you gobbling a fucking darkie granddad and living in a fucking chicken coop. What’s the matter with you? I mean seriously, what is the matter with you?” He addresses an invisible presence, his like-minded guardian angel: “You try’n instil a bit of class in these girls, a bit of savoir faire. What do you get? Aged niggers and fucking out-buildings.”

  Augustus twists to see Morwenna hunched on her side with her back to him, her arms covering her head, silently sobbing. Through all this the fire shimmies and snaps softly around two almost consumed logs, the window shows clear blue sky that makes him think of the empty Technicolor sky of Soldier Blue.

  “Why do you make me do this? And Jesus Christ woman look at your hair. You’ve let yourself go. I don’t like to say it but you’ve let yourself go and you look like a shopping bag. When we get back first thing you’re getting is a makeover. That hair is a criminal offense. Christ Almighty.”

  There’s a little conflict going on in Paulie, Augustus knows. Prudence says get in, grab the girl, get out. But this self’s cramped and ravenous. Here’s an opportunity for expansive play.

  Morwenna coughs, chokes, retches. Tries to get up onto her elbows. Can’t.

  “I told you I’d find you,” Paulie says. “Why didn’t you—why doesn’t anyone ever take me at my word? Did I tell you I’d find you or not? Eh?”

  Morwenna nods. Augustus is within reach of his stick, but there’s no point yet: he’ll need both hands for the gun. He’s managed to take a breath.

  “Did you tell him? Did you tell him I’d find you? And he didn’t believe you, did he? Took it with a pinch of salt, didn’t he? You failed to convey my uncanniness. I’m not surprised. We’re living in skeptical times.” He takes a step toward Augustus, notices the nearness of the stick, bends and picks it up himself. Augustus is lying in an approximation of the recovery position, left arm and left knee bent. The gun under him presses his lowest rib. Paulie rests the tip of the walking stick on Augustus’s neck and applies light pressure. “Been filling the aged nigger head with fabulous tales of tribulation, has she?”

  Hardwiring says there must be something that will defuse the aggression. Find out how you’re provoking your aggressor and stop doing it. But not here. Augustus knows the type. What provokes Paulie is Paulie’s existence. His existence fills him with fear. He needs the radical distraction of your suffering. When he gets it it’s not sufficient, which brings his existence back, and thus fear, and thus the need for radical distraction, and thus your suffering, and so on. Like all cruelty, even the nuanced, it’s a failure of nerve and imagination, nerve because facing the fear requires courage, imagination because making someone suffer requires nothing but will. A child can do it, a moron. Paulie’s the single psyche version, in fact (Augustus could laugh if he had breath) of Husain and his crew. The collective realization these guys share, Harper had said, is that where God and faith and the soul should be in fact is Nothing. Simply Nothing with a capital N. They can’t hack it. They don’t have the imagination to hack Nothing. It terrifies them, this Nothing. They have to make it into something. So they turn religion into politics, prayers into bombs. Now they’ve got something. Now they’ve got a shitload of insulation between themselves and Nothing: historical grievances, training camps, weapons, targets. Now they can relax. Now there’s a point. Thank fuck, because for a moment back there they were staring into the void. What fundamentalists from the Inquisition to Al-Qaeda share isn’t faith, it’s faithlessness. The real war on terror’s being waged in the arena of their own terrified hearts.

  Another two breaths. Since for the moment Augustus can’t speak he’s spared the trouble of choosing what to say. A blessing: anything you say to Paulie is grist for the provocation mill. Unfortunately so is your silence, which lets the sound of his existence back in. Augustus closes his eyes, mentally rehearses the maneuver with the gun. He needs Paulie to return his attention to Morwenna for a moment but wonders how much more the girl can take. She’s very still. A rib’s most likely gone.

  “Aged Sambo,” Paulie says, tapping Augustus’s neck with the stick. “I’m addressing myself to you. Have you put dew on this lily? Have you interfered with her in a Biblical fashion? Come on, speak up.”

  Augustus shakes his head: no. There’s a certain type of firework that wriggles up
into the sky with a movement like swimming sperm. This is how he pictures the pain’s signals from his belly up into his throat. His left leg’s dead but is going to have to be made to bear weight. There isn’t time to let it come back to life.

  “No? How come? Not your type?”

  “Leave him alone, Paulie, he’s not well.”

  “What, aside from being old and black with a gammy leg and B.O. you mean?”

  “He just lets me stay here. He doesn’t know antythin. Let’s juss go, please. I’ll do what you want. Whatever you say.”

  Paulie removes the stick from Augustus’s neck and leans on it with both hands, feet apart, as if he’s about to start a Fred Astaire dance routine. “Hear that?” he says. “She really doesn’t want you hurt. Fatherly, is it? Grandfatherly. What about if I just cut one of his ears off, Mor?”

  “No!”

  “Both ears then.”

  “Leave him out of it! He’s an old man for fuck’s sake.”

  “Old people depress me like nothing else. Come here.”

  Paulie turns and with pretend dependence on the stick hobbles to Morwenna. “Get up. He’s been in there I’ll whiff it in a jiffy. The Paulie Costain nose never lies. Come on, get up.”

  “Please let’s just go.”

  He whacks her buttocks with the stick. “Get up I said, I think.”

  Augustus very slowly rolls onto his back, gasping. Paulie sits on the upturned crate watching Morwenna getting to her feet, an incremental business, stopped by pain, interrogated, let go at an odd angle. The rib or ribs on her right side definitely. She holds them to prevent full expansion when she breathes in. The right leg doesn’t want any weight on it either.

  “Come here.”

  Augustus won’t get another chance and in any case doesn’t want to see this. There’s no calculating. You reach into the pocket and hope it doesn’t coincide with his glance. And if he has a gun he’ll be the part of the world that does you the favor of finishing you.

  The possibility enriches Augustus. Isn’t this what he’s been waiting for? Yeah, yeah, the Juliet-headed collective says, to be or not to be. Very grand. Get over yourself, kiddo, it’s a long time dead. This is so clear in his head he fears Paulie will have heard it. He could laugh if breathing weren’t such a challenge.

  “Come here up close. Fuck are you wearing trousers for? What did I tell you about trousers? Lesbo combat trousers at that.”

  The fit of a gun’s grip in your hand is of the deep geometry. That first time with Selina when he went inside her they looked at each other, shocked. Essential recognition. Marriages mutated into war or drifted into sadness because the physical match was minutely off. The effect like a watch losing a minute a day.

  Augustus releases the safety with no clear idea of what he’s going to do.

  “Correction,” Paulie says. “First thing when you get back is a fucking shave, woman. Jesus—”

  “Don’t move.”

  Augustus is lying on his belly with the gun gripped in both hands, pointed at Paulie. As a kid you were always on your belly with an imaginary gun, desperately outnumbered. Two little hot spots of pain in your elbows, maybe the beginnings of an erection.

  “Don’t move at all. Morwenna, pull up your pants and come over here behind me.”

  Possibly there was a time when the reversal would have been satisfying, but seeing Paulie’s face drain does nothing for Augustus now. On the other hand the gun’s introduced a verbal economy that reminds him of Harper and for the first time in a long time he feels as if he’s reentered reality. Extraordinary the way a gun pares objects and purges space.

  “You must be out of your mind,” Paulie says.

  “Morwenna,” Augustus says. “Pants up. Get behind me.”

  Morwenna reaches down—stops, jolted, wraps her left arm around the right ribs, manages to get her underwear and trousers up. She backs, limping, rib-holding, keeping out of Augustus’s line until he’s between her and Paulie.

  “Good. Now, Paulie, drop my walking stick. Just drop it on the floor. Go ahead.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Drop the walking stick.”

  To get upright he’s going to have to suffer. Weight on the left hip, bend the right knee to get it under, then elbows, keeping the gun trained. The firework pains are still shooting, crazily.

  Paulie drops the walking stick. Augustus knows if he continues giving instructions from the floor Paulie will try some move that works on television but in real life has disastrous consequences. As it is Augustus can see him growing bolder by the second, his aura tensing for masculine action. It irritates him. Paulie, suddenly, irritates him profoundly—and from Paulie his irritation without warning reveals itself as huge, exhaustive, touching everything from the Godless blue sky to the tongue pimple he’s been nibbling for days, but fueled by the fact of his own continuance, the wearying business of not having died when he should have. You think you’ll die but you don’t. Life is the most durable of the habits, the most shameless and tasteless. This is the ghoulish aspect of doctors, who see only a challenge, monstrously premature babies wired, tubed, warmed and electrified into viability. In stories the will to live is something flamy and noble. For him, now, it’s animal and revolting, at best farcical. He thinks of postpartum women weirdly compelled to eat their placentas, feels a kinship. Or dogs who must return to their vomit. The will to live isn’t in the soul it’s in the entrails, the mucous membranes, the blood and glands, the teeth. You’re still a man. Don’t make me take that away from you. But it was taken away. It went with the sound of his own voice, pleading then giving up all the information. He doesn’t think of himself as a man anymore. He’s a leftover, a freak who should have died but didn’t and now for weeks, months, has been trying to swallow the simple fact that he’s still here. Waiting to die was his inner answer to Calansay’s question. It might as well have been waiting to come back to life. For the first time his racial ambiguity’s resonantly apposite. Turns out it’s been his lifelong training in being neither one thing nor the other, neither dead nor reconciled to life. His habits of narrative—dilemma, choice, action, resolution—are still wretchedly alive, like mutilated animals who can’t shut up, who should be put down, who won’t ever die of natural causes. Otherwise why—the voice asking this is a conflation: his own, Selina’s, Juliet’s, Harper’s, possibly the disinterested subsonic interrogation of snow, rocks, sea, sky—did you tell her she could stay? From where he is right now, on the floor pointing a gun at a policeman, the core of his irritation is a binary star, laughter and disgust.

  “You’re not going to fucking—”

  He pulls the trigger.

  Deafening. Literally. For a moment the shot wipes out sound. Paulie, hit in the left ankle, jackknifes and pitches forward off the crate to the floor reaching for the wound. Augustus takes this underwater opportunity to wrestle himself up onto his knees, then using the edge of the camp-bed for support, onto his feet. He’s aware of Morwenna frozen behind him. Paulie’s face is crimped with pain and disbelief. Also misery and injustice. The water drops and sound surges back in, Paulie’s incredulous gasps and the shot’s echo bouncing off the croft’s walls.

  “I’LL KILL YOU YOU FUCKING CUNT! Oh God oh God you fucking cunt Jesus fucking Christ.” The last word degenerates into a gargle as Paulie gripping his ankle doubles up, shuddering.

  Slowly, because he can’t move quickly, comically, because the left leg remains dead, Augustus gets to his stick and picks it up. The familiar transfer of weight’s a relief. He stands over Paulie.

  “Take your jacket off.”

  “What?”

  “Take your jacket off.”

  Paulie in pinched shock merely looks at Augustus. With a force and accuracy that surprises everyone, especially himself, Augustus reverses the stick and whacks Paulie on the head with the heavy end. Paulie screams, throws up an arm to protect himself, then in an access of rage lunges at Augustus, screaming: You fucking black cunt I’
ll fucking kill you I’ll fucking kill you I’ll fucking—

  It’s a close thing, a second’s blurred calculation, but Augustus doesn’t fire. She’s an accessory. The machinations of dull justice will follow. Which means what? This is the labored business of being involved with someone. He should never have said she could stay. But again why did he if not for something like this?

  He hits Paulie ferocious blows in rapid succession. The stick’s not cudgel enough to knock him out but it hurts, can’t be withstood. Paulie takes a shot on the right hand that breaks a bone (Augustus believes he hears it) and with a scream curls up on the floor, crying and repeating: Black bastard…black…bastard.

  “Take your jacket off.”

  “I’m not fucking armed!” Paulie screams. This rage is the satanic toddler’s who for once is telling the truth.

  “Take it off or I’ll shoot you in the other foot.” Augustus is thinking this would have been less of a problem in summer. Getting away in this weather’s going to be an ordeal. Practicalities, the first buzzing outriders of the swarm, are starting to arrive. You don’t get any concessions. Which thought makes him laugh, quietly. Lame one-eyed leftover no longer a man freak. Vigilante restaurateur.

  Paulie struggles out of his jacket.

  “Throw it to the girl.”

  Paulie tosses the jacket. “I’ll find you, Mor. I’ll find you and—”

  Augustus whacks the broken hand with his stick and Paulie spasms in silence as if he’s been electrocuted. He can’t, Augustus sees, get past the outrage, can’t accept the power relationship’s been reversed. It’s a mental block. Harper wouldn’t have had it. Harper understood power aside from himself, a neutral tool that serves anyone who acquires it.

  “Go through the pockets,” Augustus says to Morwenna. She’s very calm, holding her ribs, saddened by her satisfaction in this, underneath it angry that he’s turned her into someone who can take such satisfaction. Augustus can imagine how she fell in love, what Paulie can be to a fifteen-year-old runaway with his diver’s wristwatch and quick decisions and casual knowledge of everything and all the people who know him and smile when he walks in. He needs you to love him first, the foxy glamorous ease of him. He has to make you his princess. That’s the whole point.