Free A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale Page A

There were attractive colour plate illustrations too, from the relevant sections of the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures .
    He meant to wrap it in cellophane like the other, better books but then, having poured himself a large glass of Riesling, he began to read and he read on through the rest of the night and the bottle. He carried on reading it all that week, whether there were customers in the shop or not, neglecting all other tasks, even to go to the public baths for his weekly wash. He read a Gospel a day and the Acts on Friday, was alternately bored and baffled by the Epistles on Saturday, when he should have been attending a bankruptcy sale in Gosport, and was so disturbed by the Book of Revelation on Sunday that he drank most of a bottle of gin as he read it and would ever after taste juniper on his tongue and feel breathless and a little dizzy when he heard a reading from it.
    He had done nothing so intently and consistently since he was a student and the experience left him profoundly unsettled for days afterwards, despite attempting an exorcism by reading the least biblical texts the shelves could offer, from de Sade’s Justine to Angela Carter to ‘Readers’ Wives’ Confessions’. He kept having dreams in which Jesus, who had become conflated in his unconscious with the doe-eyed prison novelist, talked kindly to him in words he could not catch, Aramaic possibly, or, most disturbingly, came to sit at the end of his tiny bed, held his foot firmly through the bedding and said, all too clearly in English, ‘He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages.’
     
     
    It was high summer, the sort of sticky August weather that brought out the crudest in everyone. Men paraded in nothing but Union Jack shorts. Every child seemed fractious and smeared with ice cream. Pubs spilled threateningly onto the pavements around them and the streets reeked of grilling, sweat and onions.
    Out of wine, overcome by thirst, he had gone to the grimly genteel lounge bar of one of the least noisy of the neighbourhood pubs for a drink or two – nothing excessive – and was walking home in the sodium-lit non-night alternately seething at the rudeness of people and startled by the blare of music from passing cars.
    ‘Oi! Excuse me.’
    It was a bunch of sailors on leave. Even without the crew cuts and tattoos, he would have known this from the pub they were leaning against – one few civilian youths would dare frequent.
    ‘Oi! Fatty!’
    Used to abuse, he did what he always did, ignored it, crossed the road and quickened his pace without actually breaking into a run.
    ‘I said Fatty. That’s you!’
    Suddenly they were on the pavement before him. Behind him too. He remembered prison, combs improvised into blades, toothbrush handles patiently scraped to dagger sharpness, and turned so that his back was to the bricks.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, putting on a stammer to make them find him ridiculous rather than offensive. ‘I’m a bit deaf.’
    ‘Excuse me,’ the leader said again. They were all drunk, unsteady on their feet but fired up. They reeked of beer and noxious cologne.
    ‘We only wanted to ask you a question.’
    ‘Don’t be frightened,’ another added.
    ‘I’m not frightened,’ he lied, wishing he could scale the wall behind him like a spider. ‘What’s the question?’
    ‘Well, Fatty. We were just wondering … Would you die for Queen and Country?’
    ‘I’m a bit old.’
    ‘Yes. And a bit fat. But would you? Would you die for Queen and Country?’
    It was a trick, of course. If he said yes, they would kick him. If he said no, they would kick him. ‘Actually,’ he said. ‘Probably not, these days.’
    The punch was so rapid he did not see which one delivered it. It came full in his face so that he flew back hard against the house wall and struck his head. There was another blow to his stomach that winded him and had him doubled over.
    ‘Yup. Really fat,’ one of them said. ‘Disgusting.’
    They