Read Online A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel by Glen Duncan - Free Book Online Page A

free up the brain à la Einstein never memorizing anything so as not to take up space. Maybe we’ll all become geniuses. What do you think? Augustus couldn’t answer. The remnants of the drugs and his mouth plump from the beating. Some of his teeth were gone; his tongue had given up confirming their absence. It was no surprise to him that he didn’t hate Harper. Once you saw there was no escaping the relationship you brought to it whatever gave it bearable shape. At moments Harper had been a father he’d disappointed or a lover he’d betrayed, once or twice a primitive deity seeking vengeance for all the gods abandoned by history. Imagination was condemned to make something of things. There was a narrow strip of barred glass just below the room’s ceiling letting in what Augustus believed was natural light, the first he’d seen in a long time, which soothed him, or rather which had been soothing him until he began to feel the morphine wearing off. These days, Harper said,unwrapping a peppermint and popping it into his mouth, technology’s realized it can’t surprise us any more. When a woman realizes she’s given you all the sex tricks in her repertoire and now it’s only ever going to be more of the same, panic sets in. All she’s got left is quantity so she throws more and more at you knowing it’s diminishing returns. Technology’s got the same problem. It’s getting desperate. There’s the fusion of hardware and organic life coming but that’s not going to surprise anyone. We’re there already with pacemakers and all the optical stuff for the limbless. He held up the i-phone for Augustus to see, dexterously with the lightest touch of thumb and forefinger drag-enlarged a photo of a smiling blond girl on the little screen. You show teenagers one of these gizmos and they go, Yeah, does it come in any other colors? Microelectronics was the last revolution and we’re antsy for the next one. Mass clairvoyance maybe, alien invasion. It’s hard to imagine. This is why we’re crazy for climate change: Give us something new and big. Melting ice caps, Biblical floods, anything as long as we haven’t seen it before. Genetics is the thing, I guess.
    Eddie the landlord, having worked out the punter is trying to sell him this device, is shaking his head and laughing. Och no I’ve had mine from MI5 a week ago. Jesus Christ. Charlie, c’meer an look at this wee gadget.
    Augustus swallows the last of the whiskey, grips the head of his stick and pushes himself to his feet, feels the gun swing and bump like a giant pocket watch. There’s a dip in the pub’s murmur to accompany his exit. He’s on nodding terms with Eddie, who this time incorporates a give-me-strength eye-roll to mark the hopelessness of the i-phone pitch. The landlord’s oneof the few islanders who’s accepted the black chap’s story’s not for sale. It’s established something between them which in Augustus’s old life might have become friendship.
    Outside, surprised by a lash of cold rain and a sky darker than he’d expected he stops to button his coat. Street lamps are on in their first peach phase. The air tastes of the just gone ferry’s steel handrails and diesel. He thinks of all the silvery fish that have been hauled out of these waters, creatures wrenched from their element suddenly naked under the sky. Vikings raided here, a thought which evokes a world so much less cluttered with people. Buttoning takes a long time. His hands aren’t on form and his face feels as if it’s wearing a beard of bees. A droplet of water falls from the pub sign and spends its little personality in a trickle down his neck. He decides the Costcutter carrier bag’s redundant, transfers the items to his pockets. Not the gun pocket . Only the gun in the gun pocket . Safety’s on but there’s a recurring vision of accidentally