The Hour of the Donkey

there was one thing he could do that might help. One last thing.

'Willis,' he said.

Sandy-hair's jaw dropped. 'Willis?'

Bastable nodded. 'W. M. Willis. Captain, Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers,' he said defiantly. He was rather pleased with his own cleverness; it was satisfying to know that he had done one clever thing, worthy of Wimpy himself, even if it was the very last thing he did.

Now all he had to do was to keep his mouth shut, so as not to give himself away. But as he usually didn't know what to say that shouldn't prove difficult.

Sandy-hair was frowning at him. 'Willis?' he repeated to himself as though he couldn't believe his ears. And then he dummy4

looked quickly down the track and held up his hand. 'Go back! It's all right—go back!'

He looked at Bastable again. 'Willis?'

It was as good a name as any other to die under.

'My God!' murmured Sandy-hair. And looked down the line again quickly—and back to Bastable again. 'Fall— like you're dead— now!' He raised the pistol. 'Now! Willis— now!'

The order was so categorical that Bastable obeyed it without thinking, letting himself fall flat on his back. And before he could question his own irrational obedience the pistol jerked above him with a loud cracking sound—the blast from its muzzle hit his face and granite chips struck his ear like stinging nettles. He flinched at the shock and tensed himself against the impact of the bullet he would never hear.

' Lie still.' Sandy-hair hissed, bending over him, fumbling at the buttons of his denim jacket. 'Where's your identification?'

Identification?

He had no identification—

'For God's sake—where's your identification?'

'Trouser pocket!' Bastable heard himself say to the blurred red face and blue sky above him, without knowing what he was saying.

The hands left his chest: they patted the pockets of his denim trousers, and felt a lump in one of them—a knotted lump which, until this confusion of light and thought in his brain, hadn't been in any conscious reckoning there.

dummy4

Sandy-hair retrieved the lump—the lump unravelled itself above Bastable as Sandy-hair stood up, into the primrose-yellow-and-dove-grey lanyard of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers— the symbol of pride and privilege!

'Lie still. ..' Sandy-hair looked down at him again—and then away again, and waved down the track. '. .. stay dead until I come back ... if I come back ... or we'll both be dead, Willis—

savvy?'

Bastable heard the chippings crunch once more, away into a distance of sound made up of aeroplane-drone and the blood in his own ear-drums.

He had been dead so many times that being dead was no longer a burden, it was a memory drilled into him by long practice and experience. So many pieces of him had died along the way, during these last hours, that another piece made no difference. One piece lay under the carrier, and another was among the Tynesiders and Germans on the grass behind the field hospital, where he had dropped the lanyard—and picked it up; and another piece remained in the attic, with his uniform, where he had consciously-unconsciously transferred the lanyard from one pocket to another—

the last surviving piece of his identity as himself.

And now even that was gone. He was stripped bare to the bone in the sunlight, full of separate pains—hands and knees and face stinging, the unyielding stones beneath him digging dummy4

into his aching back.

Yet the pains were as nothing compared with the utter bewilderment he was experiencing; rather, they were the spur to an awareness that he was still alive, when he should be finally dead at last. For although he could otherwise have argued with himself that some fragment of consciousness might still continue after death-that the brain might continue kicking and twitching with thoughts as darkness closed in—

he could not reconcile such an imagining with the ordinary discomfort he continued to feel.

He was alive, when he ought to be dead.

Sandy-hair had quite deliberately spared him, when that should have been the coup-de-grace—

And more, and more confusing than that: Sandy-hair had quite deliberately pretended to kill him—

'Lie still! Stay dead until I come back!'

It didn't make sense.

For it had been Sandy-hair who had fired at him from behind, as he had jumped the rails; and it had been that which had made him miss his footing and fall.

But then Sandy-hair had fired that second time—but to miss

—

It didn't make sense, and the nonsense of it made his head ache with the effort of thinking about it.