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

to the bank that slopes down from the roadside. Possible fracture of the shin, possible chipped bone in the knee, nothing broken but enough damage to double the distance home. There are times when the islanders send out their collective spirit to harass him. Look at you: old one-eyed black man lying in a ditch at the edge of the world. What the fuck are you doing here? Tell us or die but for God’s sake put an end to this.
    A sodden fox trots past, a vision of urgent purpose from tail-tip to snout that hasn’t changed since the species arrived. Without God there’s only the richness of the accident and it makes no sense to praise accident; still, creatures have the beauty of being undividedly themselves. The restaurateur, Gianni Cardillo, who fell in love with Juliet, and who was a very peripheral Mafioso, had a passion for animals, and for wild animals an infantile rapture. This is the glory of God, he’d say, watching television lions strolling the savannah. How can anyone say there’s no God when you see somethin’ like that? Jesus, people are fuckin’ blind . Augustus had of course begun with and for many years maintained a hatred of the man whose money supplemented him through college (my mother’s ass is putting me through college, he told Selina, in a tone that conceded his own disgusted willingness to take the arrangement if the alternative was having no life on a scholarship) and whose connections after college spared him the draft. But eventually in spite of himself came to see there was more to it than that. Cardillo went to women for the answer to the question of his secret worth, to be told whether, apart from the knack for getting on in the world, he was any good. Once she’d given him that, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her or those she loved. In his honorable moments Augustus knew casting his mother as whoring strategist was bogus. She was genuinely drawn to Cardillo, who had warmth, quick understanding of people, delight in the world’s contradictions and a doglike nose for pleasure. Augustus could see the change in his mother, that for the first time in his life she wasn’t worried. I know this is going to be hard for you, baby, she said, once it was apparent Cardillo wasn’t going away, but all I’m asking is that you give the guy a chance. You want himto be a lousy bastard, I know, but remember just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it is. He wants you to be a lousy bastard. Doesn’t mean you have to be. Augustus had had a dreary feeling she was right, that his soul was being confronted with a signal to grow, and, with bizarre clarity, that Cardillo’s was too. Still it took years for both men to see the war between them was a reaction to the shock of having liked each other from the start.
    The fox is gone by the time Augustus drags himself up the bank onto the road and struggles to his feet. And miles to go before I sleep. Or one mile, but there remains the question of what just happened. The lane’s ten feet to his right. How did he go so astray? The rain hammers down with continuous urgency. The downpour’s added twenty pounds to his clothes. He suddenly realizes he’s unbearably hot and begins wrestling his overcoat off, imagining himself seen through a thermal imaging camera, the observer going, Jesus this guy’s on fire .
    At his second attempt the lane really is the lane, overarched with black mourning trees just the way the illusory version had been. The darkness at least is a comfort. His time with Harper had been brutal with light. You’d never think you could feel such grief for the loss of darkness. He’d thought of it then as a lovely young goddess who used to come and lie on him but never would again. Sometimes woken in the night by a dream (the same dream, always, that he’s back in the interrogation room) he wraps himself in his sleeping bag and steps outside. Darkness