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

breathe. He’s hanging from the ceiling hook, shackled ankles dangling. His wrists are on fire. A film of wet heat clings to hisface. The waistband of his trousers has slipped down to expose his pelvis and the sensitive zone above his pubes Selina used to deliberately dawdle over. That they haven’t touched him there yet makes the area a screaming invitation. The predictability of his future adds to the room’s bulk of warmth. He imagines a camera zooming out from him suspended here—room, building, desert, city, country, world—how quickly the details of his situation would get lost. Millions of television news reports: political reshuffles; sports results; quirky or heartwarming codas; the weather. Not long ago an item about a woman who prayed nightly to David Beckham.
    â€œBut if you know the technique you know its limitations,” Harper says. “Generally effective while the subject knows the injury’s recuperable.”
    Then why bother with the recuperable injury phase at all? As if telepathically tuned Harper says: “On the other hand escalation teaches nuance, and the longer this goes on the more important nuance gets. I need to be able to read you properly.”
    The information Harper wants isn’t—Harper believes—time-sensitive. He wants names, places, the infrastructure, the how . There’s no hurry. Augustus has been fighting this thought since they brought him in but now without warning his resistance goes, a tiny violence like a loose tooth tweaked free. When he closes his eyes his body knows what a drop into darkness sleep would be. Lying with Inés after sex he’d felt himself drifting off, it was so quiet and still; resisted because her waking him would have brought transaction back. If Harper lets him fall asleep now (he pictures his head’s galaxies and nebulae going out as if their plugs are being pulled) he’ll never wake up again.
    â€œTell me something,” Harper says. “Have you ever been in love?”
    Augustus opens his eyes. Harper smiles and says, “Academic interest only. Here, rest a minute.” He slides the chair back under Augustus’s feet so he can stand and take the strain out of his arms. The blood in his shoulders begins unpacking itself, draining joy into him. Harper sits down, puts his hands in his pockets, stretches his legs. Come on, seriously, if you talk I’ll listen. Augustus doesn’t doubt it. This is the other thought he’s been avoiding, that Harper wants more than just the information, that his life’s gone a certain way and he can’t resist the opportunity to test the choices he’s made. The man knows himself but rarely gets the chance to take a sounding. By now Augustus knows he’s one such chance. Knows too that if he wants this over as quickly as possible he should keep his mouth shut or tell Harper to go fuck himself. He sees the sort of courage that would take, the cleanliness of it, could laugh at how filthy he is with fear.
    â€œWhen I was young,” Augustus says.
    â€œWhite girl.”
    â€œYou know all about it already.”
    â€œYou’re black, you grow up with a white girl myth. You’re too smart and handsome not to have got one. How old were you when you met her?”
    â€œNineteen. Same as her.”
    â€œWas she beautiful?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you were full of what, brilliant shame?”
    Augustus hears the question but is detained by the previous one. That rat-faced little bitch, his mother had called Selinaonce, suddenly revealing the jewel of jealousy having until then inveigled her into wry sorority in the matter of their shared burden, namely him, His Smartass Highness Who Always Had To Be Right. Rat-faced showed him for the first time it was partly the hint of meanness in Selina’s sharp nose and chin that drove him crazy. As a little girl she’d tripped running with a glass jar of pennies and