D'Alembert's Principle (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback) by Crumey Andrew

Author:Crumey, Andrew [Crumey, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2013-01-31T02:00:00+00:00

At some point our attackers ran off, horrified perhaps by the sight of their own work. I was sitting up, holding my cheek in place with my hand, and Ferguson was at my side, bleeding profusely himself, but tearing strips from his own shirt with which to try and bind my wound. Arnott had bravely got up to run in pursuit of the gang, hoping, to rejoin the rest of our companions so as to retaliate in strength. Ferguson meanwhile tied my face up with the torn scraps of his clothing. I remember the warmth of his hands, and the gentleness with which he tended to my wounds, quite ignoring his own injuries.

I was able to stand now. Ferguson supported me, and we made our way to Joe Hendry’s. As we walked together in silence, I shuddered at the recollection of what had happened, the sudden out-burst of violence which had occurred for no reason. While I lay bleeding I had felt strangely calm, but now fear was beginning to overpower me. Ferguson explained later that a similar experience had happened to him. As he lay curled on the ground, the kicks and blows had gradually come to feel lighter, as if he were being struck not by boots and fists, but by pillows or heavy sacks whose force was dull and painless.

“And the strangest thing,” he later told me, “was that I suddenly felt I was no longer myself. I don’t know if it was as if I was another person, or else no-one at all. But my sense of my own identity, my own existence, completely disappeared for a moment.”

I had experienced something similar, though not perhaps so extreme. In any event, the brutal episode that night formed a bond between us which would never be broken. We reached Joe Hendry’s, and in the light there the extent of my injuries was so plain that a woman fainted at the sight and had to be carried out. Ferguson was badly bruised but otherwise relatively uninjured, and he sat silently in a corner holding a poultice to his gashed forehead while a surgeon was called for, who stitched up my cheek with catgut, and of all the ordeals which I endured that evening, the surgeon’s work on me was the most hellish. Even the half-pint of whisky they gave me could not mask the pain, though I had already been drinking all evening. I cursed and swore between clenched teeth each time the surgeon’s needle pierced my flesh, and I felt the catgut being dragged through, as large and coarse to my senses as if it were a length of rope. Ferguson sat silently in the corner throughout.

Some months later, we had occasion to discuss the incident, and this was when he told me of his singular impression concerning his own identity; the fleeting sensation while the blows landed on his body that he was not himself. I had seen little of Ferguson in the intervening period, but I

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