The Quarry by Damon Galgut Read Free Book Online

then he walked back to where she was waiting.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We can go.’
    They closed the doors behind them. The policeman was standing behind his motorbike and he watched them as they walked back to the house. She said, ‘Do you like to give sermons?’
    ‘No,’ he said.
    He borrowed a bucket from her. In the late afternoon he walked to the communal tap and filled it and walked back. On his return he came past the red motorbike in the plaza and the Captain was
lying on the concrete.
    He got up. Smiling.
    ‘First service, Dominee, ’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
    The policeman was shirtless and his nipples were like purple medallions on a chest smeared with oil and with sweat. The minister looked away. The Captain came closer, wiping his hands over and
over on a cloth.
    ‘I have a lead,’ he said.
    The man blinked, confused. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.
    ‘With your car. With your case.’
    ‘My case,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ll be making an arrest soon.’
    ‘Yes,’ the man said. He stood.
    Then there was a silence in the plaza and the policeman was wiping and wiping.
    ‘I have to go,’ the man said.
    ‘Good luck with your service,’ said the Captain.
    He walked across to the house with the policeman’s eyes like a drill-bit in his back. He went in and down to his room. He stripped naked in front of the mirror. He washed his face and
shaved and then washed the rest of his body, the water cold as metal on his skin, and when he had finished he walked to the window and looked out but the policeman had gone.

 
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    There were twenty or thirty people in the church. They were mostly fishermen or their wives and families, the scarred and hardened people who went to sea on the boats in the
bay. They were taciturn and wary. He had stood outside, watching them go in, and they had watched him in turn.
    Now he went in and walked to the front of the church. He stood there a moment, looking at them. The candles placed in saucers here and there made a flickering yellow light by which he could see
the faces, the hands. He carried the bible. He had no cassock and he wore the same clothes in which he had arrived, marked still with faint stains of blood. He was trembling slightly.
    He started to speak. His voice was soft and they couldn’t hear him. He stopped. He coughed and swallowed and wiped his palms on his shirt and looked at them and started again.
    They listened. He told them that the world was a prison, that they were all prisoners in it. He told them that they could escape the prison of the world and that there was freedom beyond it and
as he spoke upon his theme a sort of inspiration touched him. He spoke quietly, distinctly, but a faint grey light was glimmering on his forehead and on the backs of his hands and the faces too
seemed to take on this light so that the church was lambent with its glow. He told them about freedom and the meaning of death and then he stopped speaking and stood there.
    ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray.’
    The next week there were forty people there for the service and the week after that almost sixty. They could not all fit in and they jammed up the doorway and peered in through the holes in the
bricks.

 
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    It was a huge bonfire and it had been burning for an hour in the middle of the vacant lot next to the house. There was a white heat at its centre. They had thrown into it the
minister’s letters, his identity book and the other things they couldn’t use. Valentine had picked up the minister’s clothes and he was about to consign these too to the flames
when three policemen appeared suddenly out of the darkness. They had approached quite silently. One of them had his gun drawn. They were all in uniform and the light of the fire made their buttons
shine redly like eyes. Small and Valentine stood staring at them and time changed shape as it does in instants of extremity.
    Valentine was wearing the cassock. He had taken to