The Blasphemer: A Novel by Nigel Farndale Page A

to Nancy to ask if she recognized him.
    ‘Recognize who?’ she said, distractedly plucking a leaf from a bush, rubbing it and smelling her fingers. ‘Is this a bay leaf ? Smell it.’
    Daniel walked the length of the stalls looking for the young man, all the while being jostled and accosted by traders with outstretched hands, but he was gone.
    ‘You OK?’ Nancy asked when he returned.
    ‘I feel peculiar.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I feel …’ His voice trailed away, his eyes closed and his knees buckled. When he slumped to the ground in a detonation of red dust, Nancy ran to him. She lifted up his head and, using water from a bottle she was carrying, splashed his face. He had cut his lip and the water made the injury look worse than it was, swelling the trickle of blood down his chin. Daniel came round to the sound of a stallholder hailing a taxi for them. Nancy supported his arm as he climbed unsteadily into it.
    At the hotel, the receptionist eyed them suspiciously as they stumbled up the stairs. ‘Good news, señor,’ she called after Daniel. ‘The electricity is back.’ A pause. ‘And your flight is cleared to leave in the morning.’ When they reached their room they found the door ajar. A maid was vacuuming the floor with a machine that was so loud they couldn’t hear, at first, that their phone was ringing.

CHAPTER FIVE
    TOWARDS THE END OF THE FLIGHT, WITH HIS FOREHEAD PRESSED against the Plexiglas window, Daniel counted to three and opened his eyes. They were flying over a cluster of miniature islands – little more than sandbanks with gently scalloped bays – and between them he could see the white sail of a yacht and the dark outline of what he guessed was a shoal of dolphins. The Galápagos archipelago was not yet in sight but Daniel could sense its naked proximity. He closed his eyes again. After another count of three he opened them and saw the seaplane’s undulating shadow, their shadow, below them. ‘“The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”,’ he said under his breath. As a practising atheist he was not normally given to quoting from the Old Testament, ironically or otherwise. He had surprised himself; an unfamiliar feeling.
    He lowered the blind and checked his watch with a double tap of its face. It was 8.46am. Next he gave his armrest two taps with his knuckles, a ritual that helped him cope with his fear of flying – like touching wood, except that he was not superstitious or, rather, he had not allowed himself to be infected by what he called ‘that virus of the mind’.
    Nancy was sitting next to him, flicking with a licked finger through his copy of National Geographic . ‘How long before we land?’ she said.
    ‘Mm?’
    ‘How long before we land? … Hello?’ She tapped his head. Hermood was frivolous. It had been that way since before take-off when the flight attendant, a thin-lipped Latino, had read safety instructions from a laminated card. He had included the line: ‘In the unlikely event of a landing on water …’ This had given Nancy the giggles; they were, after all, sitting in a sixteen-seater, twinengine amphibian. Daniel managed a grim, nervous smile.
    ‘How you feeling?’ Nancy asked.
    ‘Fine, fine,’ Daniel said. ‘I think it was altitude sickness. When I fainted, I mean …’ He touched his swollen lip and frowned, losing his train of thought. ‘Was I out for long?’
    ‘A minute, maybe two. You remember getting back to the hotel?’
    ‘Not really … I remember the phone was ringing.’
    Nancy was polishing her sunglasses with a paper napkin. ‘Didn’t get to it in time.’ She held the glasses up to the window and turned them to catch the light.
    Daniel frowned. ‘This bloody music.’
    Incongruously, throughout the 600-mile flight, the pilot had been playing a Hall and Oates greatest hits CD over the speaker system – fairly quietly, but loud enough to annoy Daniel. He signalled the flight attendant over and asked if it