Kitty & Virgil: a Novel by Paul Bailey

Author:Paul Bailey [BAILEY, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781468305555
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2012-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

as though the words formed part of the Divine Liturgy.

Du-te în pizda mãtii

they recited in unison as the object of their devotions peered at their solemn faces through bullet-proof glass. The Conducator waved to his worshippers, who persisted in advising him to get back into his mother’s cunt.

Kitty had taken his hand in hers, he realised. He was beside her in the English church. The chanting was over. There was one last carol to sing.

‘We shan’t need these,’ said Kitty, removing the two hot-water bottles Nelly had put between the sheets. ‘We’d have perished from frostbite without them those first winters we lived here. When it was really cold, when the wind came howling down the valley, the three of us slept together, huddled up like eskimos, in Nelly’s bed. But you can keep me warm tonight.’

In the poem ‘Breaking the Glass’, which he spoke to her before they joined Nelly for breakfast on Christmas morning, the soul of a dead man is anxious to be released from the body in which it has been confined and constricted for a lifetime. The dead man’s brother goes to the window facing the deathbed and tries to smash it with his fist. The glass doesn’t break. He tries again, with a hammer. The glass – ordinary, fragile, everyday glass – remains unbreakable. The dead man’s son runs out to the street, looks about him and finds a large stone, which he brings back and hurls at the window, confident of success. The stone bounces off the window, as if it were a rubber ball.

The corpse is washed from head to toe and the cooling water poured on the roots of a tree. The man is buried in his finest clothes, according to ritual. The priest says the final blessing – ‘May the earth be light on him’ – and the grave-diggers begin their business of covering up the coffin. A cry of anguish, no louder than a whimper, is heard from the grave.

The dead man’s family – his brother, his son, his son’s wife, his grandchildren, his multitude of cousins – return to the house. Wine is drunk and cakes are eaten. At dusk, the curtains are drawn. The son enters the bedroom where his father died and stands in thought at the window. He touches the stubborn glass with his fingertips. There is a cackle of laughter as the glass shatters into fragments.

‘Mumbo-jumbo, Kitty. “Breaking the Glass” is my mumbo-jumbo poem. I think I believe every word of it.’

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