文档介绍：A Day and
a Night
and a Day
a novel
Glen Duncan
For
Jon and Vicky
Contents
Begin Reading 1
Acknowledgments 243
About the Author
Other Books by Glen Duncan
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
The room he wakes up in has the fraught stink of a phone
booth, which in spite of everything evokes escort ads and brings
a pang of loss, not for sex but for tenderness. The last woman was
a young dark-haired prostitute in Barcelona he’d paid extra to lie
with him for an hour postcoitally, his nose in her downy nape.
Just lie here? Yes, if that’s okay. She’d been palpably uneasy, as if
affection was an edgy perversion, but what could he tell her? He
was astonished himself.
Dry-mouthed, he lifts his head off his chest and feels a gran-
ular crunch in his neck. No idea how long he’s been out. The
handcuffs look brand-new, glamorous against his dark skin.
Sikh men wear those steel bangles and often have showgirl eye-
lashes yet appear superbly masculine. He wouldn’t have minded
being a Sikh. Selina years ago said the turban had deep phallic
allure—which was the sort of thing she came out with apropos
of nothing. Naturally non-sequiturial, by the time he met her she
was exploiting the trait having learned it charmed people. Their
friends regarded her as someone enviably at ease in her own skin.
He, privy offstage and after hours, knew her hung about with su-
perstitions and fears, all the trinkets and bogeymen of her half-
shucked Catholicism. heless she glimmered in the crowd:
women knew to be at the top of their game, men made adjust-
ments, maximized themselves. Standing at the bar he’d watch
her and remind himself he was the one going home with her.
1
Glen Duncan
What the women objected to, aside from the standard injustice
of random beauty, was her intelligence. Intelligence on top of
the long legs and natural blond was sheerly immoral. That and
having the guts to do what they stopped short o