August by Bernard Beckett

moved closer. He imagined the earth beneath them—beetles scurrying, worms tunnelling through the lines of their lives—waiting.
    â€˜My life is heavy with failures, but this is the greatest of them. I did not follow.’
    Silence wrapped itself around the admission as if to cushion its collision with the world. Tristan was out of talking. Then the dryness in his mouth brought on a round of retching he could not control. There was no release and he gasped for air, grasping in vain for that space where the pain and fear could not enter. In the darkness he could sense her waiting, preparing to speak.
    He had rehearsed the story so often there was no way of knowing which parts belonged to the moment and which had since grown around it like vines taking hold of a tree. But he had never spoken it out loud. Not a word. Nor had he intended to tell it tonight. He waited, his ailing heart knocking out uncertain time.
    â€˜You should have followed me,’ she said.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I was frightened because you did not speak.’
    â€˜I know. I should have spoken.’
    â€˜My name is Grace.’
    â€˜I know that too.’
    And so it was finished with, their game of pretending. He waited for more but she held on tightly to her thoughts. Did you recognise me tonight? Tristan wished to ask her. And what did you think of me back then, in the shadows behind St Paul’s? Does it sicken you, to know how I thought of you? Can you guess I think it still? Would the knowledge have kept you from the car tonight? Does it make you want to laugh or cry that fate has so entwined us? These and a hundred other questions he burned to ask this woman who had taken hold of his dreams, who lay too close too late. But he did not ask them, and she did not speak. Silence was her counsel, and shame was his. Regret roared loud in his ears, great waves of it dismantling him.
    Time passed and death did not visit. Tristan heard a gust working its way through the valley below, the pitch rising as it squeezed between mighty walls of rock. The wind ripped over them and a squall caught beneath the exposed chassis, making the whole car shudder. Wherever it was they had landed, it was not the bottom.
    â€˜Do you believe in God?’ Grace asked him. The question was not strange. They were past strangeness.
    â€˜Of course,’ he replied. It was easier than the truth, simpler.
    She coughed and its sound was the colour of red—heavy drop-laden hacking, clearing the way for another question.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Because without God,’ he started, his voice slipping easily into the lilting rhythm of recitation, ‘we have no reason to believe in reason. Without God, our reason is an accident of the cosmos, as ultimately inconsequential as the spinning of the planet or the pulling of the tides. Reason becomes unimportant, and hence untenable. Without God we have only belief, yet we are left with nothing to believe in.’
    The line had once delighted him, the way the argument made a weapon of its opponent’s strength.
    â€˜And do you believe that,’ she asked, ‘or is it just the shit they teach you?’
    â€˜There is nothing wrong with being educated,’ he replied, springing to the defence of the institution that had brought him low. Habit, the ballast that chains a dog to his own vomit. He had read that somewhere.
    â€˜Unless you’re taught to speak without thinking,’ Grace challenged.
    â€˜We weren’t,’ he replied.
    â€˜Then you must be a natural.’
    â€˜You have a pretty way of talking.’
    â€˜You should have stayed on the road,’ she replied. ‘My talk is nothing.’
    â€˜You have a cruel way of talking too,’ Tristan said. So this would be the way. They would not mention it. They would pretend it had not been said.
    â€˜Pretty cruel. Isn’t that what you pay for?’
    â€˜I was just beginning to like you.’
    â€˜And I