[Revolutions 03] The Newton Letter Read Online Free PDF Page B

doomy
eyes. I watched the hawk circling. What did I know?
Maybe at the back of a drawer somewhere there was a
sheaf of poems that unleashed would ravish the world.
A merry notion; I played with it. He went into the
kitchen and fetched the bottle. “Here,” handing it to
me, “you do the honours. I’m not supposed to drink
this stuff at all.” I poured two generous measures. The
first sign of incipient drunkenness is that you begin to
hear yourself breathing. He was watching me; the blue
of his eyes had become sullied. He had a way, perhaps
because of that big too-heavy head, of seeming to loom
over one. “You’re not married, are you?” he said. “Best
thing. Women, some of them . . . ” He winced, and
thrust his glass into my hand, and going to the chestnut
tree began unceremoniously to piss against the trunk, gripping that white lumpy thing in his flies with the
finger and thumb of a delicately arched hand, as if it
were a violin bow he held. He stowed it away and took
up his hurley stick. “Women,” he said again; “what do
you think of them?”
    I didn’t like the way this was going, old boys together,
the booze and the blarney, the pissing into the
wind. In a minute we’d be swapping dirty stories. He
took back his drink, and stood and watched me, beetling
o’er his base. He had violence in him, he would never
let it out, but it was all the more unsettling that way,
clenched inside him like a fist.
    “They’re here to stay, I suppose,” I said, and produced
a laugh that sounded like a stiff door opening. He
wasn’t listening.
    “It’s not their fault,” he said, talking to himself.
“They have to live too, get what they can, fight, claw
their way. It’s not their fault if . . . ” He focused on me.
“Succubus! Know that word? It’s a grand word, I like
it.” To my horror he put an arm around my shoulder
and walked me off across the gravel into the field beyond
the chestnut tree. The hurley he still held dangled down
by my side. There were little tufts of vulpine fur on his
cheekbones and on the side of his neck behind his earlobe.
His breath was bad. “Did you see in the paper,”
he said, “that old woman who went to the Guards to
complain that the man next door was boring holes in
the wall and putting in gas to poison her? They gave
her a cup of tea and sent her home, and a week later she was found dead, holes in the bloody wall and the fellow
next door mad out of his mind, rubber tubes stuck in
the wall, a total lunatic.” He batted me gently with his
stick. “It goes to show, you should listen to people, eh?
What do you think?” He laughed. There was no humour
in it. Instead, a waft of woe came off him that made me
miss a step. What was he asking of me?—for he was
asking something. And then I noticed an odd fact. He
was hollow. I mean physically, he was, well, hollow.
Oh, he was built robustly enough, there was real flesh
under his tweeds, and bones, and balls, blood, the lot,
but inside I imagined just a greyish space with nothing
in it save that bit of anger, not a fist really, but just a
tensed configuration, like a three-dimensional diagram
of stress. Even on the surface too something was lacking,
an essential lustre. He seemed covered in a fine
fall of dust, like a stuffed bird in a bell jar. He had
not been like this when I came here. The discovery
was peculiarly gratifying. I had been a little afraid of
him before. We turned back to the house. The bottle,
half-empty, stood on the windowsill. I disengaged his
arm and filled us another shot. “There,” I said.
“Cheers. Ah.”
    A station wagon, the back bristling with flushed
children, headed down the drive. At the gate it pulled
up with a shriek of brakes as a long sleek car swept in
from the road and without slowing advanced upon the
house. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Edward said: “The
Mittlers.” He retreated into the kitchen. The visitors were