Publish and Perish by James Hynes

Author:James Hynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

nine

GREGORY AWOKE AGAIN TO STARLIGHT, OPENING his eyes to a vivid sky full of stars. He had never seen stars like this, so bright and so hard. The light seemed to penetrate him, the stars like brilliant, diamantine spearpoints, pointed directly into his eyes. He wondered if he was dead and this was some sort of passage, but the stars didn’t seem to be moving. And at any rate, he didn’t believe in an afterlife. If he was seeing stars, then he was still alive.

Then he began to hear the wind, as if someone were turning up the volume slowly, and then the murmur of voices, somewhere out of sight. He wanted to look toward the voices, but he found he couldn’t turn his head. All he could do, in fact, was blink, and when he closed his eyes the sky appeared in negative, hard black points in a vast sea of white. He opened them again.

His powers of concentration were returning, and he was able to separate the voices he heard into two separate groups. One was nearby, a pair of voices, male and female, engaged in some sort of project, the woman commenting to the man, who replied in monosyllables. At first he couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying; he could hear the words clearly enough, but he didn’t know what they meant. Then a shadow moved against the stars he saw above him and stayed there, the outline of a head.

“Look here, Ross,” said the woman’s voice. “You’ve missed a spot.”

The outline of the head turned and another head joined it, blotting out more of the sky.

“Where?” said the man.

“Just there,” said the woman, pointing.

The man grunted and stooped out of Gregory’s sight, and he recognized the voices at last. It was the old colonial couple from the bus, Ross and Margaret.

“How’s that, then?” he heard Ross say.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Margaret skeptically. Gregory could begin to make out her features in the starlight.

“Blast this wretched brush,” Ross said. “I shall have to give Trevor a piece of my mind.”

“It’s a poor workman,” said Margaret, “who blames his tools.”

“Perhaps you’d care to take a hand, my dear,” Ross said, with just a modicum of irritation in his voice. He moved into view, holding up something long and thin. A paintbrush.

“Oh Ross, really,” said Margaret.

The sound of the other set of voices rose behind them, and Gregory shifted his attention there. An argument was going on among several people, out of his sight, some of their words carried away by the moaning wind. Everyone was talking at once, and then an angry male voice rose out of the racket, silencing everyone.

“Look,” the man said firmly. “Is it the night of the Seven Sisters or is it not?”

“Yes it is, but …” said a woman, who might have been Gillian.

“And did he walk a right-hand circuit of the stones?” Gregory thought it might be the voice of the man on the riding mower, the one with the leather cap.

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