‘What’s the bloody use.’
‘Yes, what is the bloody use?’
‘Bastard.’
‘What good does it do?’
‘You’re dead, aren’t you?’ He thumps his heart. ‘Stone dead, boy.’
‘Because I’m not yelling and howling?’
He clenches his fists. ‘You don’t even know.’
‘I know you’re doing enough for both of us.’
‘Oh, I’m just a dumb hori. So’s she. I mean, what the hell. A couple of horis.’
‘There’s no audience. Go on if you want. Nobody can hear you.’
‘Is that why I’m yelling and howling? Because I thought someone was listening? Ahh! I really must be dumb, eh boy?’
‘You know why you’re doing it.’
I am in deep, now. Is that going too far? He tenses and comes closer again.
‘Why? Come on. Tell me. Why?’
‘You’re doing it for yourself.’
Only the fact that I hold steady against the reflex to flinch as he jerks his fist back stops him from hitting me, from completing the action. He freezes. Then, ‘You bastard.’
His arm drops. Again, he shakes his head, reasserting his defences and his control. ‘You just don’t know, do you? You’re just dead.’ And he turns and walks back to the bedside and sits down again. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he says; ‘too right, it’s no good, you wouldn’t know. It’s a waste of time.’
There is a long pause. He stares vacantly at the bed. I move towards the door and look back.
‘You ought to take a valium,’ I say.
He doesn’t even bother to glance up.
‘Go screw yourself,’ he says.
The shotgun is fully loaded. I check the .38 revolver and make sure the safety catch is off. I lock the door.
In the evening he bangs on the door and calls my name. I open the door. My jacket is hanging over a chair nearby, the revolver easy to hand in the top inside pocket.
‘I have to go and see to the generator,’ he says. ‘Stay with her.’ His face is set hard. He goes out.
The woman is in pain again, on the borderline of separate nightmares; the moments of apparent waking seem to mark the transition from one horror to another.
What I detected beginning, in the space of ages ago, is still going on. Her resistance is fierce and blind and immensely strong, as though the pain had found it could feed on itself. Her face seems to have shrunk.
I hear him returning. You were wrong, I think, about how I felt towards her. But it is too late for that to make any difference now, and I will say nothing.
He takes a chair, turns it round, and sits astride it, elbows resting on the back. After a long silence he says, ‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
What else can I say? What does he expect?
‘I suppose we keep giving her the morphine.’
I nod. When I look at him I want to judge how much he is willing to rescind so that we can continue to have some kind of existence. After this admission, it is now only a matter of our survival. I must force myself to make allowances for him. I have to try.
But his hand is resting on his mouth and his eyes show nothing but a hard glittering. Suddenly he says, ‘You know what mercy killing means?’
My lungs seem to be compressed momentarily, and I have to swallow a deep breath to keep back the pain from my ribs. It is like being struck.
‘What?’
‘Mercy killing. You know, don’t you?’
I stand up and move away, stumbling over something.
‘You don’t walk out on this,’ he says.
But I find my way to the next room, slam the door, lock it and lean against it. My brain holds me back from an immense sloping surface down which I would slide until my weight has taken into space and dropped.
The door shudders. His fists pound on the other side. I won’t hear what he’s shouting. I get the revolver and hold it up in both hands, pointing it at the door only centimetres away. The gun sways wildly. The banging on the door has vibrated my spine. I think of the bullet pulling apart his face if I fire the gun. My hands go down. He stops. I can hear him breathing and coughing. Then he moves away, and minutes later there is the sound of his voice murmuring; I strain to listen. Verses from the Bible. At first the voice is urgent. After a while it falls and becomes a monotonous droning. Useless, wretched gibberish.
I pace to the window and down to the other end of the room and back, again and again. The terror has begun to run faster, to go beyond control. There is no escape.
‘Listen to me. Listen. I know about the clocks. I have to tell you. You hear me?’
It is much later, in the middle of the night, and he is thumping on the door again. I don’t know if I should answer. But he persists. Finally I stand by the closed door.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know why the clocks stopped. Six-twelve. At that time.’
I pause. His voice becomes calmer.
‘Look, for God’s sake, man. Open the bloody door. We have to talk.’
I take my jacket off the chair and drape it over my arm, hiding the revolver which I hold in my right hand, finger on the trigger. Then I carefully unlock the door and open it. He stands there, dishevelled, clutching the Bible, an odd bright look on his face. Because the generator is still humming away in the basement the electric lights are on, although he has dimmed them all except a wall light and the small lamp by the bed. The woman is lying there, drugged, her head on one side on the pillow.
‘Well?’ I say. He holds up the Bible tightly in his left hand.
‘It’s in here,’ he says. My heart pushes down, as if deflating, like my lungs as I let my breath out. I pretend to fold my arms within the draped jacket so that the concealed gun is aimed at him. He turns towards the wall light and opens the book, flicking through the pages.
‘The number of the beast. Six and six plus six. That’s when the clocks stopped. Six-twelve. The number of the beast, in Revelations.’ He glances up. ‘You saw the beast on the road, that night. Listen: ‘the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and every free man, hid themselves… and said hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne…for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’
I begin to say something but he shakes his head and stares away into a vacant part of the room to deliberately avoid my eyes. Then, quickly, he says, ‘You tell me the truth, if you think this is wrong. You can’t. You don’t know. I believe this. Every man is hidden. Everyone. It’s a prophecy. The end of the Bible, the very last thing. There’s nothing else.’
For a moment, unlocking the door, I had let myself believe from the tone of his voice that there might have been an answer. Now I look down at the carpet and feel the old weariness, the anger flattened by disappointment.
‘Don’t you see?’ he says.
A new voice suddenly pronounces a sentence, what sounds like a whole coherent sentence in Samoan, a question. The woman’s eyes have opened. They stare vividly black against white; large, shining in the electric light. She speaks the sentence again, not looking at us. Apirana moves across to her, still clutching the Bible. I follow and stand behind him as he sits on the edge of the bed. Of course we don’t understand what she is demanding. Her lips seem dry.
‘I’ll get some water,’ I say, turning.
‘In the jug. Glass over there.’
Awkward, with the gun still clasped beneath the jacket, I fumble to pour a glass of water. The two Polynesians, he with his back to me, she whispering the important sentence again, are together in the pool of light by the bed; and for the first time I realise what must be at the centre of his own solitary horror: of not being able to understand a single word, not able to help her even by speaking. Everything is a total, closed, secret. It seems like a cruelty meant precisely for him. And I think: he must be insane by now.