A Many Coated Man Read Online Free PDF

just for physical and material needs, but for the hungers of the spirit. Hungers for moral certainty, for the validation of love, for less parsimony in an experience of life and less secrecy in death. He speaks of his new faith that beyond the cumulative, sporadic, stultifying assemblage of experience which is life there is a secular redemption possible through empathy and co-operation.
    ‘In the hospital,’ says Slaven, ‘I had moments of vision. Should I be ashamed to admit that? Ashamed of my convictions because I can’t account for their origin?’ Before him some of the small audience make unconscious movements of support. ‘I was still fried I suppose.’ Some laugh, uneasily. ‘The best civil defence it seems to me is civil action, restoring the deliberative power to the people and insisting on a spiritual dimension in politics as in life. No citizen is dispensible. The most sustaining idea we have, surely, is that collectivism will work, and the most enduring fear that we have no part in the direction of our lives.’
    Slaven has mulled over his ideas lying in his hospital bed at night and expressed them in conversational fragments to Marianne Dunne, to Miles Kitson and to Kellie, but he is himself amazed at the fluency which has come to him. He hears his voice ring in the operations room and feels himself the focus of the twenty-three people gathered there. He can stand a little apart from himself, regulate his breathing, calculate the ongoing performance and make the fine tuning adjustments, yet all the time a convert anew to the power of his own message.
    He has tapped a new man within himself — born from the fire perhaps.
    This first time, Slaven retains something of caution. He pauses only twenty minutes after he has agreed to finish. The applause is sudden and fierce, some of the audiencealmost embarrassed by the intensity of their reaction. They will be unable to account for it by any reiteration of Slaven’s speech that they can manage. In the midst of the clapping a male voice cries, ‘Yes, a message at last,’ and Ayesbury’s thanks are disregarded in the press and chatter. A red-headed woman takes the opportunity to seize Slaven’s arm.
    ‘How wonderful,’ she says, ‘to hear someone talk openly of practical Christianity again.’ She is in middle-age, attractive in a horsey way: all nose and blunt, sound teeth. Her name tag identifies her as Marjorie Usser, Red Cross. ‘In particular I commend your emphasis on gender equity,’ Marjorie says, another aspect of his speech of which Slaven has been unaware. Several other people are grouped here, smiling, nodding in agreement with Marjorie’s congratulations. One tall, diffident man has a half-smile of entreaty and a tear, surely, glistening at the bottom of his left cheek.
    ‘Good one,’ he says and all the while his entreating eyes meet Slaven’s to say, you and I know, don’t we, you and I know the workings of the bloody world.
    Slaven feels a sharp gratification that he has moved them, but even with Marjorie Usser’s hand on his arm and in the gaze of other admirers, his eyes slide away for an instant in defence against the unspoken, yet insistent, emotional demand. By the door, looking uncertain whether to join the queue for coffee, approach Slaven, or leave altogether, is a bald-headed man in shorts and tramping boots. Maybe he is a CD volunteer on stand-by, thinks Slaven. He wears a tartan shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his brown arms and the muscles on his legs would satisfy any life drawing class. On the wall behind is a dark glass square which can be activated to display a map of the city in any one of four modes — location of diesel and petrol stores, hospital services and GP clinics, supermarkets and grocery warehouses, warden posts and CD zone divisions.
    ‘You must, must talk to us at the Red Cross,’ says Marjorie. Her upper lip has the soft, pink fullness some horses’ lips have and it is finely lined.
    ‘Yes,