Poor bugger, he thought, Rex, poor bugger, I wish I had loved you.
There was a funny something going on. People, thugs, were being brought in to hear him sing. The room was fuller. He could feel that. He didn’t care. Rise into it, he thought.
He was thinking that if you were able to add up the amount of fun anyone had had in their lives, fun had, a quotient, it would tell you something. This singing was fun. It was deep.
He sang hard,
Then, really hard and wild,
He had inhabited a song that had been a curse to him. Now he would sing like someone else, because he was not through singing, no.
“Come in,” he said to no one.
Now he would sing as himself. He was lost in himself. He would sing “Carrickfergus” the way Joyce would have sung it, may have sung it, he had no idea. How he knew this song, he had no idea. He had heard it sung at a party and he had heard it on a record at another party and because of God he had it, most of it, the greatest song ever written expressing being totally drunk, it was being drunk at its best, stupid best, and he had remembered it and at another party he had volunteered to sing it and Iris had said No in the name of God, no, don’t. Because it would embarrass her because he had been at the time very drunk. But then that part of their life had come to a close long ago and he had been fine since.
And he was starting to sing before he even intended it, and not as himself, as a drunken soul, the inspiration of this expression… He was full of song.
He wanted to startle them with his loud sound.
He did.
He was certain there was an assemblage in the room. Someone began to applaud but the act was quashed. Ray seemed to have nonplussed his tormentors, for the moment. He felt a little triumphant. He even felt a little drunk. They could applaud if they wanted. He had sung piercingly, Irishly.
Someone was softly laughing. Ray wanted water badly. He thought he could sing the part about the handsome rover singing no more till he got a drink. His throat was dry. It was stinging.
He relished the silence that his effort had produced.
“I’ll take a drink, now,” he said, retaining a touch of the character he had sung as.
There was laughter, and some murmuring, and then like a slash water was flung in his face. He caught some, enough to make a decent swallow. He had been ready. It was a triumph. He had bitten some water out of the air, was the way it felt.
“Tomorrow you’ll give us another show, meneer. Yah, man, but with less music.”
Ray was unstrapped from the chair without ceremony, roughly. His hood was jerked fully down and retied more tightly than was necessary. He was pulled to his feet and pushed forward. He almost fell, but saved himself by clutching onto Quartus’s table and leaning on it until the whiteness behind his eyes receded.
Definitely they were rougher, hustling him along, two of them, than before. Everything is a signal, he thought.
Crossing the open ground back to his cell was hard, at the faster pace being forced on him. He wasn’t being allowed to place his feet tentatively enough to knock rocks and pebbles and other impedimenta out of the way. He needed his shoes back. He was in stocking feet and the soles of his socks had turned planklike with sweat and filth, which was some help. But he wanted his shoes. And he wanted his wristwatch and he wanted to know how he looked, as a subject of abuse. He was curious. His beard was coming in. He wanted a mirror. He needed a haircut. He needed Iris, his barber. He was going to have to go to barbers, regular barbers, after she went away. She was going to. He knew everything that was going to happen.
“How do I look?” he asked stupidly, as he was thrown into his cell. He did the drill, stood with his back to the door while they took his hood off and then left, leaving him standing there locked in, with more to say.
He needed help. He collapsed onto his pallet and all his injuries began pulsing in unison. He felt like an ad, a display.
