I think of that brief bout of ague as marking the end of an initial, distinct phase of my life as a murderer. By the morning of the second day the fever had abated. I lay in a clammy tangle of sheets with my arms flung wide, just breathing. I felt as if I had been wading frantically through waist-high water, and now at last I had gained the beach, exhausted, trembling in every limb, and yet almost at peace. I had survived. I had come back to myself. Outside the window the seagulls were crying, looking for Mammy French, they rose and fell with stiff wings spread wide, as if suspended on elastic cords. I rose shakily and crossed the room. There was wind and sun, and the sea glared, a rich, hazardous blue. Below in the little stone harbour the yachts bobbed and slewed, yanking at their mooring-ropes. I turned away. There was something in the gay, bright scene that seemed to rebuke me. I put on Charlie's dressing-gown and went down to the kitchen. Silence everywhere. In the calm matutinal light everything stood motionless as if under a spell. I could not bear the thought of food. I found an open bottle of Apollinaris in the refrigerator and drank it off. It was flat, and tasted faintly of metal. I sat down at the table and rested my forehead in my hands. My skin felt grainy, as if the surface layer had crumpled to a sort of clinging dust. Charlie's breakfast things were still on the table, and there was spilled cigarette ash and a saucer of crushed butts. The newspapers I had bought on Thursday were stuffed in the rubbish bin. This was Saturday. I had missed, what, nearly two days, two days of accumulating evidence. I looked for the plastic bag in which I had put my clothes, but it was gone. Charlie must have put it out for the binmen, it would be on some dump by now. Perhaps at this very moment a rag-picker was rummaging in it. A spasm of horror swarmed over me. I jumped up and paced the floor, my hands clasped together to keep them from shaking. I must do something, anything. I ran upstairs and swept from room to room like a mad king, the tail of the dressing-gown flying out behind me. I shaved, glaring at myself in the fish-eye mirror, then I put on Charlie's clothes again, and broke into his desk and took his cash and his wallet of credit cards, and went down the stairs three at a time and stormed out into the world.
And paused. Everything was in its place, the boats in the harbour, the road, the white houses along the coast, the far headland, those little clouds on the horizon, and yet – and yet it was all different somehow from what I had expected, from what something inside me had expected, some nice sense of how things should be ordered. Then I realised it was I, of course, who was out of place.
I went into the newsagent's, with the same cramp of fear and excitement in my breast as I had felt the first time. When I picked up the papers the ink came off on my hands, and the coins slipped in my sweaty fingers. The girl with the pimples gave me another look. She had a curious, smeared sort of gaze, it seemed to pass me by and take me in at the same time. Pre-menstrual, I could tell by her manner, that tensed, excitable air. I turned my back on her and scanned the papers. By now the story had seeped up from the bottom of the front pages like a stain, while reports on the bombing dwindled, the injured having stopped dying off. There was a photograph of the car, looking like a wounded hippo, with a stolid guard standing beside it and a detective in Wellington boots pointing at something. The boys who had found it had been interviewed. Did they remember me, that pallid stranger dreaming on the bench in the deserted station? They did, they gave a description of me: an elderly man with black hair and a bushy beard. The woman at the traffic lights was sure I was in my early twenties, well-dressed, with a moustache and piercing eyes. Then there were the tourists at Whitewater who saw me make off with the painting, and Reck and his ma, of course, and the idiot boy and the woman at the garage where I hired the car: from each of their accounts another and more fantastic version of me emerged, until I became multiplied into a band of moustachioed cut-throats, rushing about glaring and making threatening noises, like a chorus of brigands in an Italian opera. I nearly laughed. And yet I was disappointed. Yes, it's true, I was disappointed. Did I want to be found out, did I hope to see my name splashed in monster type across every front page? I think I did. I think I longed deep down to be made to stand in front of a jury and reveal all my squalid little secrets. Yes, to be found out, to be suddenly pounced upon, beaten, stripped, and set before the howling multitude, that was my deepest, most ardent desire. I hear the court catching its breath in surprise and disbelief. But ah, do you not also long for this, in your hearts, gentlepersons of the jury? To be rumbled. To feel that heavy hand fall upon your shoulder, and hear the booming voice of authority telling you the game is up at last. In short, to be unmasked. Ask yourselves. I confess (I confess!), those days that passed while I waited for them to find me were the most exciting I have ever known, or ever hope to know. Terrible, yes, but exciting too. Never had the world appeared so unstable, or my place in it so thrillingly precarious. I had a raw, lascivious awareness of myself, a big warm damp thing parcelled up in someone else's clothes. At any moment they might catch me, they might be watching me even now, murmuring into their handsets and signalling to the marksmen on the roof. First there would be panic, then pain. And when everything was gone, every shred of dignity and pretence, what freedom there would be, what lightness! No, what am I saying, not lightness, but its opposite: weight, gravity, the sense at last of being firmly grounded. Then finally I would be me, no longer that poor impersonation of myself I had been doing all my life. I would be real. I would be, of all things, human.
I took the bus to town, and got off at a street where I used to live years ago, when I was a student, and walked along by the railings of the park in the warm wind under the seething trees, my heart filled with nostalgia. A man in a cap, with terrible, soiled eyes, stood on the pavement shaking a fist in the air and roaring obscene abuse at the cars passing by. I envied him. I would have liked to stand and shout like that, to pour out all that rage and pain and indignation. I walked on. A trio of light-clad girls came tripping out of a bookshop, laughing, and for a second I was caught up in their midst, my side-teeth bared in a frightful grin, a beast among the graces. In a bright new shop I bought a jacket and trousers, two shirts, some ties, underwear, and, in a flourish of defiance, a handsome but not altogether unostentatious hat. I thought I detected a slight stiffening of attention when I produced Charlie's credit cards – my God, did they know him, did he shop here? – but I turned up my accent to full force and dashed off his signature with aplomb, and everyone relaxed. I was not really worried. In fact, I felt ridiculously excited and happy, like a boy on a birthday spree. (What is it about the mere act of buying things, that it can afford me so much simple pleasure?) I seemed to swim along the street, upright as a sea-horse, breasting the air. I think I must have been feverish still. The people among whom I moved were strange to me, stranger than usual, I mean. I felt I was no longer of their species, that something had happened since I had last encountered a crowd of them together, that an adjustment had occurred in me, a tiny, amazingly swift and momentous evolutionary event. I passed through their midst like a changeling, a sport of nature. They were beyond me, they could not touch me – could they see me, even, or was I now outside the spectrum of their vision? And yet how avidly I observed them, in hunger and wonderment. They surged around me at a sort of stumble, dull-eyed and confused, like refugees. I saw myself, bobbing head and shoulders above them, disguised, solitary, nursing my huge secret. I was their unrecognised and their unacknowledged dream – I was their Moosbrugger. I came to the river, and dawdled on the bridge, among the beggars and the fruit-sellers and the hawkers of cheap jewellery, admiring the wind-blurred light above the water and tasting the salt air on my lips. The sea! To be away, out there, out over countless fathoms, lost in all that blue!