The Quarry (9 page)

and then

and then he swung the bottle and the wine exploded redly like blood like blood or perhaps it was blood he had blood all over his hand i cut it on a piece of wire next to the road when i stopped
but you must clean that she said

She cleaned him all over with a cloth she sat him up in the bed and wiped him under the arms the neck

It will never come off, he said

Don’t talk, she said

Thank you for doing this

It’s all right, she said

But it will never come off

What are you talking about, she said

She lay him back down on the bed, the cool sheets He slept and

‘It’s music,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘What music?’

‘Circus music,’ she said.

It carried over the plaza, tinny and distant, and found its way through the high barred window into the cell. The three men lifted their heads for a moment.

‘What’s that?’ Small said.

‘It’s circus music,’ said the lawyer. ‘They’re practising.’

The lawyer was a soft short man with stiff brown hair combed back and a front tooth made of gold. His hands as they shuffled papers had a nervous air to them. He wouldn’t look directly at
the men.

He had come into the cell shortly before. They hadn’t asked for him. The door had opened and he was standing there with a striped suit on and a briefcase and with his pale face and his
out-turned feet he was himself not unlike a clown.

‘Who are you?’ Small said.

‘I’m your lawyer.’

‘We didn’t ask for a lawyer.’

‘I’ve been appointed for you by the State. Your trial is coming up, gentlemen.’

He sat on the edge of the bed. His briefcase was open on his knees. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands which he kept referring to intently and his demeanour was slope-shouldered and unhappy.
It was clear that he wished himself elsewhere.

‘We don’t want a lawyer,’ said Valentine.

They were all very still in the cell.

‘But you –’

‘We don’t want a lawyer. Get out.’

‘Without a lawyer there isn’t much chance –’

‘Get out, I said. Get out.’

The lawyer sat rigid for a moment. Then he gathered his papers together and neatened them with his fingertips and put them into his briefcase. He closed it and got up. He looked at them and
walked to the door. He knocked on it loudly and waited. His vast pinstriped back to them. When the door was opened he went out.

Small looked at Valentine. Small’s face was frightened. Valentine took from his shoe what looked like a silver splinter or a blade. But it wasn’t. It was a spoon. It was bright and
precise in his palm. He crouched down and began to rub it against the wall. The sound it gave off was high and thin like a baby crying.

He stopped and looked up at Small.

‘What are you doing?’ said Small.

Valentine gestured once. ‘Watch at the door,’ he said.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

Small watched at the door. Valentine started and again the cell was filled with the thin high noise.

‘What are you going to do with that?’ Small said.

‘I’ll find something to do with it.’

Small watched him. For an instant the movement stopped and Valentine looked at his brother in the gloom with his eyes glinting dimly like a rodent’s eyes. Then his hands started moving
again. The spoon was outlined in a thin thread of heat and Small was very still at the door. Only Valentine’s hands were moving with a separate volition like creatures he couldn’t
control as if by their repeated and violent agitation making up for what both of them had lost.

‘This high it was growing. This high.’

‘They say that he –’

‘They’ll say anything. To save themselves.’

‘Shame.’

‘I hope they –’

‘And they tried to blame –’

‘Do you think it’ll be full?’

‘You better go early, if you go. Are you going?’

‘I’m going.’

‘It’s the circus tomorrow too.’

‘The circus will come again.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I can’t go. The shop –’

‘I’m going.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I’m going.’

The youngest of them was a child and the oldest a man of ninety. There were whole families and couples and some single people, all dressed in the smartest clothes that they
had, dark suits or dresses of floral crimplene, hats and button-holes and rosettes and one of them even in medals that had been awarded to somebody else in a war.

There were too many of them. They could not all fit into the white church, which was where the court was held, there being no courthouse in the town, and they milled around on the slate outside,
speaking brightly to each other, all of them edging closer to the door that was still closed but very soon would be opened.

Their eyes moving quickly.

‘There. That’s him.’

‘Where? Where?’

‘Him there. Isn’t that him?’

‘No. That’s somebody else.’

‘Where are
they
?’

Then the doors were opened. The people started to go through into the church. Some of them had never been here before and they looked around at the ordered rows of pews and the tall windows made
of fragments of coloured glass and at the altar and the huge crucified figure only slightly smaller than an actual man affixed to the wall in bronzed and perpetual torment. They sat. There were
policemen here and there at various points in the church. The church filled quickly. Then the doors were closed again. The policeman stood at the back and turned the latecomers away and there were
many disappointed that day.

But from outside the church the top of the striped tent was visible in the distance and it was towards this that they began to go now, streaming across the uneven ground singly or hand in hand
like pilgrims setting out on a journey and soon the slate was empty again.

Now those inside the church were looking around, whispering to each other. A desk and a chair had been set out at the front and a flag was hung hugely behind it. The choir was the single area as
yet unoccupied and it was clear that this was to be the dock but of the accused there wasn’t a sign. Nor of the minister or the policeman or of any other official.

And the heat. And the waiting. And the eyes. That audience began to grow restless.

Then the side door to the vestry opened and Captain Mong came in, followed by the two prisoners. He led them to the choir-stall and watched them sit. He unlocked the padlocks on their wrists and
took the handcuffs with him. He went back to the vestry door and stood there.

The crowd watched the prisoners in the dock. How they sat. At what they were looking. The two men were very still and apart on those lonely wooden benches.

Then a voice said All Rise and another side door opened, one near the apse of the church, and the judge came in and went to the table near the altar and sat. He wore a red robe and without it he
would be in no way remarkable. He was a small man with hair turned prematurely ashen and brushed straight back from his forehead. His hands were plump and freckled and he took a long time to settle
at the desk. When his papers were arranged about him he looked around across the top of his glasses until his gaze fell on the prosecutor and he nodded.

In an office next to the vestry the man sat waiting to be called. He could hear through the wall faint intimations of what was taking place in the church. Raised voices, chairs
shifting, the gavel. He coughed. It was hot in the room. He sat with his hands together, palm to palm.

Now another sound carried into the room. It was reedy and percussive and merry and came in intermediate staccato phrases. Circus music. He listened for a while. Then he got up and walked around
the room.

He stopped when he came to the window. He looked out into the deserted stretch of street on which the sun was whitely pouring but his gaze seemed fastened on some vista or happening elsewhere
and his lips shaped words he didn’t speak. He looked down at his hands. On his finger the cut had healed by now but there was the faint brown outline of a scar and he brought it up to his
mouth and touched it with the tip of his tongue. Then he lowered his hand again. He walked back to his seat but something had changed in him now and he sat differently to how he had sat before.

He wore the same clothes in which he had first come to the town and which he took off only to wash. The stains were less distinct than before but they were still there on the front of the shirt,
the pants, like the outline of a continent on a map, a private marking known only to him. Sun came in the window. It fell in a yellow beam on the carpet and there were flies lying dead at the base
of the glass and a clock was ticking somewhere with a soft glottal sound like somebody swallowing over and over.

At noon the court broke for an hour. Though the church was empty and the silence it gave off was immense he didn’t himself leave the room and he asked for nothing to eat or drink. In the
afternoon the proceedings resumed and shortly afterward the circus. Once again these separate discords were mingled in the room as if produced only for his torment. There was a quality to his
waiting now of expectation, of imminence, and his chin was resting on his hand and his eyes were no longer downcast.

Then the door was opened and it was Captain Mong. ‘They want you now,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He stood up.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’

He followed the policeman into the court. He walked to the witness box. A lectern had been set up for this purpose with an iron chair behind it. Over his clothes the man wore as always that
scorched black robe and he looked more like a beggar than a preacher and there was a sound of breath from the spectators in the pews. The judge rapped once with his gavel. Yet even the judge was
watchful. The man turned at the edge of the lectern and across the breadth of that sanctified space faced the eyes of the two men accused. He looked at them and then he looked down.

On top of the lectern was a bible. Captain Mong had been walking behind him. Now he came and took the bible in his hands and held it out.

‘Put your right hand on the bible,’ he said. ‘Raise your left hand in the air.’

The man put his right hand on the bible. It was a book and meant nothing to him. The leather was cool under his fingers. He raised his left hand in the air.

‘Are you Frans Niemand,’ said Captain Mong, ‘minister of the mission church of – ’

‘No,’ he said.

Silence in the church.

‘Are you the Reverend Frans Niemand –’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

Now into the silence a buzzing. In the choir-stall Valentine stood up and held the railing and sat down again. The judge rapped smartly with his gavel.

‘Order,’ he said. ‘Order.’

Captain Mong turned to the judge. ‘The minister has been sick,’ he said.

‘I’m not a minister,’ he said.

Now the murmuring was words and somewhere somebody laughed. The man turned his head and for the first time looked at that audience which gave off sound without seeming to produce it just as bees
do or water.

Then the back door of the church was kicked open and a man came running in. He was bawling out words that few people could make out except for the name of Captain Mong. There
was consternation. The policeman and the newcomer held a whispered conversation and the policeman whispered to the judge and then the policeman ran out of the church. The judge struck again with
the gavel. He said that the court was adjourned. Then a voice said All Rise and the judge went out and the people were left sitting in a stupor of amazement before they all began talking to each
other. Someone had heard animal and someone had heard cage and someone else had heard the word escape.

‘What kind?’

‘A lion.’

‘I heard a bear.’

‘There weren’t any bears.’

‘It was a goat.’

‘He killed a goat?’

‘In the middle of the street.’

‘No, it was in the quarry. That’s what I heard.’

‘It wasn’t in the quarry.’

‘A goat? Why would he –’

‘It wasn’t a goat.’

‘What was it?’

‘Whatever it was.’

‘
Ja
, whatever.’

Everybody in the court stood up and was moving around and everybody was speaking at once. Out of the bedlam a policeman emerged and went up to the prisoners. He was a policeman
that none of them had seen before, a nameless person, arbitrary. He gestured to them to follow. Then he turned his back.

As Small walked out of the box Valentine bent and took from the inside of his sock the sharpened sliver of metal that had once been a spoon. It had been filed against the wall until its point
was fine. Since the time that he had left the cell that morning it had rested flatly against the surface of his skin until it was as warm as his body and now he pushed it with surprising ease into
the blue back of the policeman and the blue changed colour in an instant.

The policeman fell. Or he didn’t fall but went down on his knees. He was trying to reach round behind him. To pull it out. Valentine went past him quickly and past his brother Small too.
Through the opened door of the vestry. There were shirts and jackets hanging on a rack and a basket of little oddments and a safe set into the wall. A large single window looking out on a garden
and he ran very hard at the glass. It gave way like water and he fell through its surface and was lying on leaves, amongst rock. All this seemed to happen without sound.