'What's all them weasel words s'posed to mean?'
'Pint of Best Bitter,' said Morse. 'If you insist.'
'Would you ever think of giving me a music lesson.9'
' she asked, as after a wait at the lights in Longwall Street the Jaguar made its way over Magdalen Bridge.
'No.'
'Why not?'
'You want me to be honest?'
'Why not?'
'I just couldn't stick looking at those rings in your nose.'
She felt the insult like a slap across the face; and had the car still been queuing at the Longwall lights she would have jumped out of the Jaguar and left him. But they were travelling now quite quickly up the Iffiey Road, and by the time they reached Princess Street she was feeling fraction-ally less furious.
'Look! Just tell your sergeant somethin' from me, will you?'
'I'm in charge of the case,' said Morse defensively, 'not Sergeant Lewis.'
'Well, you could a' fooled me. You never asked me nothin'--not at the station, did you? You hadn't said a sin-gle word till we got in the car.'
'Except on the phone. Remember?' said Morse quietly. 'Yeah, well, like I said, that was good fun.... 'But the wind had been taken from her sails, and she glanced across at Morse in a slightly new light. In the pub, as she'd no-ticed, he'd averted his gaze from her for much of the time. And now she knew why.... He was a bit different--a lot different, really--from the rest of them; the rest of the men his age, anyway. Felix had once told her that she looked at people with eyes that were 'interested and interesting,' and she would never forget that:, it was the most wonderful compliment anyone had ever paid her. But this man, Morse, hadn't even looked at her eyes; just looked at his beer for most of the time.
What the hell, though.
Bloody police!
'Look, somethin' for you or your sergeant, OK7 If he wants to check up about Wednesday, when I went to Bruin, I went to an abortion clinic there. Sort o' consultation. But I decided I wasn't goin' to go through with it--not this time, OK? Then, about last night, I went out with Ashley--Ashley Davies--and he asked me to marry him. With or without me bloody nose-rings, mister, OK?'
With that she opened the near-side door and jumped out. She slanamed it so hard that for a moment Morse was worried that some damage might have been incurred by the Jaguar's (pre-electrics) locking mechanism.
'And you can stuff your fuckin' Mozart, OK?'
Chapter Forty-four
No small art is it to sleep: it. is necessary to keep awake all day for that purpose (FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE)
It is sometimes maintained, and with some cause, that in-somnia does not exist. The argument, put most briefly, is that anyone unable to fall asleep has no real need to fall asleep. But there were several key players in the present drama who would have readily challenged such an argument that night--the night of Friday, September 9.
Morse himself, who only infrequently had the slightest trouble in falling asleep, often had the contrary problem of 'falling awake' during the small hours, either to visit the loo, or to drink some water the latter liquid figuring quite prominently with him during the night, though virtually never during the day. Yet sleep was as important to Morse as to any other soul; and specifically on the subject of sleep, the Greek poets and the Greek prose-writers had left behind several pieces of their literary baggage in the lumber-room of Morse's mind. And if, for him, the whole of the classical corpus had to be jettisoned except for one single passage, he would probably have opted for the scene depicting the death of Sarpedon, from Book XVI of the Iliad, where those swift companions, the twin brothers Sleep and Death, hear the dead hero to the broad and pleasant land of Lycia. And so very close behind Homer's words would have been those of Socrates, as he prepared to drink 194 the hemlock, that if death were just one long and dreamless sleep then mortals could have nought to fear.
That night, though, Morse had a vivid dream---a dream that he was playing the saxophone in a jazz ensemble, yet (even in his dream) ever wondering whence he had ac-quired such dazzling virtuosity, and ever worried that his skill would at any second desert him in front of his adula-tory audience--amongst whom he had spotted a girl with two rings in her nose; a girl who could never be Eleanor Smith, though, since the girl in the dream was disfigured and. ugly; and Eleanor Smith could never be that....
Julia Stevens tossed back and forth in her bed that night, re-peatedly turning over the upper of her two pillows as she sought to cool her hot and aching head. At half-past mid-night, she got up and made herself another cup of Ovaltine, swallowing with it two further Nurofen. A great block of pain had settled this last week at the back of her head, and there was a ceaseless surge of something (blood?) that broke in rhythmic waves inside her ears.
During the daytime, she had so little fear of dying; but recently, in the hours of darkness, Fear had been stalking her bedroom, reporting to her its terrifying tales, and bullying her into confessing (Oh, God!) that, no, she didn't want to die. In her dream that night, when finally she drifted off into a fitful sleep, she beheld an image of the Pale Home; and knew that the name of the one who rode thereon was Covering the space over and alongside the single bed pushed up against the inside wall of the small bedroom, were three large posters, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain--rock idols who during their comparatively short lives had regularly diced with drags and death. At 1 A.M., still dressed, Kevin Costyn was sitting on the bed, his back against the creaking headboard, listen-Lng on his Walkman to some ear-blasting fury of punk mu-sic. In a perverse sort of way, he found it quite soothing. Eroticon/V, a crudely pornographic paperback, lay open on the bed beside him; but for the moment Kevin's mind was not beset with sexual fantasies.
Surprisingly, in a week of virtually unparalleled excitement, his thoughts were now centred more soberly on the nature of his surroundings: the litter-strewn front gardens along the road, with derelict, disembowelled cars propped up in drives; the shoddy, undusted, threadbare house in wb. ich he lived with his feckless mother; above all
