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

shooting himself in the foot or shin. Whether his life will flash before his eyes is one of the things he still wonders about, though he tells himself that even if it does it’s just the brain superheroically rifling its files for anything that might help.
    The fever’s no joke now. He’s let it romance him among the whiskey blooms for two hours but out in the cold and these skirls of rain he can’t imagine it allowing him home without trouble. The sky’s low and soft and the hills beyond the village are dark. Black water chock s at the jetty. The road back follows the coast before turning inland. Two miles and most of it uphill. Some miscellany to be found dead with: soap, toothpaste, tuna, rice, razors, a gun. He realizes he needn’t have waited so long: the rain would have sent Maddoch and the builder back to the farm.
    Marle’s ferry port is also its bus terminus, a tarmac turning circle called for a reason he can’t be bothered to discover “the banjo.” Buses on Marle are erratic and he’s never inquired which one, if any, goes his way. There’s a timetable in the bus shelter.
    â€œFuck!”
    The girl’s in there and he startles her—disproportionately it seems to him until she plucks her earphones out. The light in the shelter’s broken. She’d been sitting in the dark bent forward with her head bowed.
    â€œGod almighty.”
    â€œSorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    One hand’s spread over her heart. In her young face he sees shock at how lost in herself she’d been but also light-speed threat assessment that takes in everything from his possibly bogus bad leg to the nearness of Costcutter’s lights and the half-dozen fishermen seeing to their boats in a dour trance. Factors flare around the core calculation—black man; eye-patch; not local—but she keeps them out until the priority work’s done: no immediate danger. Her shoulders relax—then tense again: she mistrusts all her conclusions. The world shows you okay then lashes out.
    â€œNo, it’s me,” she says, laughing not genuinely. “Miles away.”
    â€œJust wanted to check the schedule,” Augustus says. “I’m sorry.”
    Consulting the timetable’s impossible without the light, and in any case someone’s sprayed graffiti over half of it. The girl stuffs the earphones in a pocket. Used to be if someone had gadgets they weren’t homeless or broke. Now anyone can be anything. Impatient with categories, Harper had said. Augustus billows and shrinks hot and cold, wrists maddeningly sensitive to the coat’scuffs. The thought of all the land between here and the croft empties his legs. The track down’ll be waterlogged. Maybe just curl up on the bench here. Go out, go out, quite go out.
    â€œCan’t see a damn thing,” he says. “Guess I’ll walk.”
    â€œYou American are you?”
    The “guess I’ll walk” was so he could turn and do just that but she got the question in. Nothing to stop him ignoring it except he finds himself wondering what “American” means to her, supposes rippling stars-and-stripes, limousines, Coke, the prongs of Lady Liberty’s crown. He thinks of these images as a layer of cellophane spread over a dark sea.
    â€œYeah, I’m American,” he says.
    â€œThe accent,” she says. “’S great. Anyway sorry, sticking my nose in.”
    His concentration goes, reeled back in by the fever. Peripherally he’s aware of her consciousness settled on him. Their little contact demands a phatic exit line but he can’t think of anything. He turns his back and takes two unsteady steps into the blowing rain.
    Headlights dazzle him and he stops. A bus pulls up at the shelter. Its doors gasp open and passengers one by one alight with a processional quality that mesmerizes him. Time seems to stand still. The brightly lit bus