Read A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel for Free Online Page B

pleasantly feverish but knows the pleasant phase can’t last. The repairs outlay has hurt Maddoch, who occasionally submits to his conscience the way a woman long since disgusted by her husband might occasionally submit to marital sex. The farmer labors in contemptuous silence in the cold, plucking clout nails from his lips and hammering them in with bitter precision. Among other things his face says he’s under increased island pressure to find out what in God’s name this one-eyed black American’s doing here. Augustus nearly tells him: waiting to die. I saw this place in a book once, that’s all. It looked like the edge of the world.
    It’s a windy morning of flaring and subsiding light. Though the effort nearly kills him Augustus sticks around and tries to make himself useful, handing up hip tiles, flashing, batons. In their eyes he’s an old man, though he thinks he’s probably younger than Maddoch. He registers them selecting only the lighter things for him to handle, registers too the laconic politeness summoned because he’s black and has by his extraordinary presence on the island embarrassed a racism that would otherwise have remained barely conscious. The builder’s burning question—What happened to your eye?—goes unasked, but Augustus feels it like a smooth pebble pressing the empty socket under the patch. I imagined them doing it and they did it.
    Lunch brings awkwardness. The builder, having seen the state of the croft’s interior, retires to his van. Augustus understands: Maddoch wants to join him but without offending his tenant, therefore hovers absurdly with Tupperware box, flask and tabloid. TOBY SEARCH : NEW CLUE the headline says. The four-year-old boy who’s been missing for almost a year is still missing. The parents have become media staples, assimilated celebrity. Harper had said: Is anyone going to be surprised when they end up on a reality game show? Is anyone going to be surprised when a reality game show devised exclusively for the parents of missing children hits the screen? First prize is investigation funding for another year. Or one where the families of murder victims compete against the convicted murderers? Families win the right to execute, murderers win freedom. Who’s going to be surprised? Who’s not going to watch?
    Augustus takes his stick from behind the door and shrugs his overcoat on. “I’ve got to go into the village for a while,” he tells Maddoch. “You don’t need me here. If I’m not back just leave the key…” has to think because there’s no precedent…“on the windowsill round the back.”
    Â 
    His conviction, having set off up the track that leads over the ridge, is that he’ll have to leave Calansay. People insist on involvement. He’s been here six weeks but stand still a moment and there’s the soft beat of the island’s curiosity, its pulse of demand. A flame of anger wobbles up in him then dies. The fuel system for anger’s gone. Like all his remnants it reduces to an aspect of exhaustion. Injustice gathers in his throat, tears well but recede. He has starts of feeling that can’t come to anything. Especially injustice. The prevalence and scale of injustice let you dissolve into it anyway. The more you know the less you do. The truth is out there, Harper had said, but exposure disempowers it. Suspicion of atrocity is an aphrodisiac to the liberal conscience, proof of atrocity its climax. But the atrocity itself brings a kind of detumescence. It’s the nature of horror: you’ve got to half- see it for it to work. In Jaws you don’t see the shark until the eighty-third minute. Once you’ve seen it your fear goes flat. You know this is right. It had been one of Harper’s catchphrases: You know this is right.
    Shivering, Augustus struggles on up the path kept rhythmic company by the pain in his hip and the handle of