A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel by Glen Duncan

For the first time since therefore Socrates is mortal a new reality raised itself into view and he realized it had been embedded all along, waiting for him to be ready to see it so it could shiver free. You saw the word love all over the place then suddenly got your license for it. A delicious panic filled him. He daren’t wonder if it filled her too. Maybe it did: there was something displaced about their conversation now—the latest bombing campaign; the absurdity of Ronald Reagan becoming governor of California; Jack Ruby’s death and the reawoken migraine of the Kennedy assassination—this was their métier but the new reality (once the word love was in there was no getting it out) was a pulse of mockery behind it all. They’d done this thing—after weeks of mutual stalking and the building expectation of the Harry’s clique—fucked each other, and what emerged from it shrank everything else. Ludicrous that a whole world could be washed away like that, but here it was, a new heaven and a new earth. He imagined the ten-thousand-strong rally crowd standing in stunned silence having watched the two of them at it on the mattress. You go to bed together and discover disloyalty to everything else. Except—he caught himself—hers to her brother. He did it to spite me . No doubt she’d done this to spite him in return. Her eyes had had plenty going on. She’d wrapped her legs round him and pushed her breasts up for his mouth but he knew she was moving dreamily between motives. Even without the shadowy presence of Michael there was the giant fact of her father and fucking Northrop Aircraft. Earlier, when Augustus had walked her to her door and she’d slipped her hand into his and looked at him in the way that meant yes she’d said: I should warn you, I’m trouble. So am I, he’d said, the kind of trouble that eats trouble like you for breakfast.
    â€œIt was a good time,” Augustus says, seemingly involuntarily since the sound of his own voice surprises him. “We thought we were shining.”
    â€œBut you’re not using it now. The memory of love.”
    Augustus coughs up something ironish and pulpy, retains it on his tongue for the moment it takes Harper to say with a nod he can get rid of it, then turns his head and spits it into the corner.
    â€œWouldn’t be any point,” Augustus says. “You need something that hasn’t already failed.” Telling this lie feels sacramental, a small victory. In Barcelona just before the bombing Selina had said: Everything’s better now. Coffee tastes better. Breathing feels better. Talking, waking up, watching a movie. Peeing feels better. Her body had kept its shape though naturally not its tension. That first hot afternoon she’d been nervous, closed the hotel room’s leaden drapes. Three decades take their toll on a gal, she’d said. You’d better prepare yourself. They’d stood face to face. He’d opened her robe and slowly covered her with kisses. He wanted toget down on his knees and thank the Lord. In fact he got down on his knees and tenderly kissed her cunt. On the morning of their second day, after they’d made love and were lying together she’d said: Are we really to be given this, so late in the day? And in a state of complete muscular and skeletal peace he’d smiled and said: Yes, we are. God’s got a romantic streak after all. She slid her leg over his, nuzzled his chest, pinched the soft flesh under his ribs (as if every moment required its own proof that yes, here they were, after all these years together again) and said, If He’s responsible for this I might consider giving the old bastard a second chance. How do you feel about ordering up a couple of Long Island Iced Teas, by the way?
    â€œThis is the crux,” Harper says. “The failure of the scripts. Love, justice, equality, salvation. There’s a script here and now