The Quarry Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the passage to his room and stood there, looking around him. There was the desk and the chair and the bed on which he had
slept. They didn’t seem familiar to him. He stood there, rubbing his arms. He heard voices behind him in the house and he closed the door of the room and pressed his ear to the wood.
Listened. A door, her door, opened. Feet went quickly down the passage. He went to the window and saw the woman emerging from the house. A policeman in uniform was behind her and they walked
together to the car.
    He moved back behind the curtain and again stood rigid and immobile. His hands trembling. He felt events and objects thickening in collusion against him and began to tear at his clothes. Then
the action took on meaning and he got undressed very quickly and threw the clothes down on the bed. His body was long and pale, like a blade. Naked, he ran down the passage but he couldn’t
find a bathroom anywhere. He went into her room and stood very still among her things the unmade bed the mirror on the wall shoes lying discarded stockings cigarettes and on her dressing-table a
white enamel bowl and he remembered the water she had brought him last night and he ran back to his own room again. He washed the clothes in the bowl and scrubbed at them with the cloth. But blood
is a durable quantity and isn’t easily undone. His hands were hurting and the clothes were wet but when he put them on the stains were lessened and he didn’t feel so utterly
accused.
    Then a knock at the door.
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    She said, ‘Captain Mong would like to speak to you.’
    ‘I’ll come out,’ he said.
    He heard her walk down the passage. He looked at himself in the mirror. Then he followed her. The day was clear. Now the plaza was silent and deserted except for these two tiny figures at the
one edge of it near the car. He went to them.
    The policeman was standing facing the other way. He turned around slowly. His uniform was clean and immaculate and he was somehow transformed by it so that he was not immediately familiar. He
held out his hand to the minister and the minister took it in his and as the two men shook hands they were staring with intent at each other. Then they let go and stood there. But the minister
continued to stare. It was a face he had seen yesterday in a washroom mirror and hadn’t thought about again. The mouth swollen redly like some edible fruit, the mole in the centre of the
forehead.

 
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    He followed the policeman across the cracked plane of concrete towards where he didn’t want to go. They passed the red motorbike he had also seen yesterday and went past
the sandbags and inside. Through an office with a counter and a pimply boy sitting behind it through a door and into another office. A desk and a filing cabinet and yellowed blinds on the window
and a bowl in which a goldfish was swimming. A noticeboard filled with memos and papers and a picture of Jesus on the wall.
    The two men sat opposite each other with the surface of the desk between them. The Captain had a white pad in front of him and a ball-point pen in his hand. The minister had nothing. He sat very
upright in the chair with his body angled slightly away from the Captain, fingers held together in his lap.
    He told the policeman what had happened. He started from the time he had arrived in the town and recounted events simply, unhurried. He spoke in a low, flat voice. The policeman looked from him
to the page and only his hand was moving. He wrote quickly. The man saw he had a neat and tiny writing and that he pressed down hard on the page. When he bent his head his parting was visible like
a clean line ruled down his scalp. He saw these things as he sat there. Then at some point his eyes moved sideways and on the noticeboard behind the Captain’s shoulder there was a photograph
of his own face looking out. He stopped speaking.
    The Captain looked up at him. He started speaking again. The Captain’s hand moved as it