But the relics wouldn’t be the last to wake. There was still one place he hoped the light hadn’t touched. If it strained credibility to ask that the entire hospital remain unwoken, unawares—as if everyone inside had fallen victim to a resurgence of encephalitis lethargica, the sleeping sickness of the 1920s they dubbed a “global catastrophe”—then he would settle for the daylight sparing that small room which was not a room, just a curtained-off space. Though the light might reflect off the white surfaces of the ward, bouncing between wall, ceiling, and doctor’s coat until it was so powerful it bleached the retina and killed the eye, still he hoped it could let Malea sleep an hour more, even a minute—duration didn’t matter. A single second was as much a reprieve, a suggestion of grace, as the sudden tilt of his world as the plane banked steeply right. This long, slow turn culminated in a heading committed to journeying east; it swapped a view of burning land for that of water with the sheen of scales. With each second, more land slipped from view, not just in the present, but also the future, because Sam wasn’t coming back, not ever, not even if they had kids. He saw green fields, a rocky beach, then waves, but this wasn’t the end of the land. There were fifteen seconds before they passed the island that was its full stop. After that there was just water; ash coloured and so infinite seeming it was hard to believe there would be anything solid again. Looking out from the end of the pier, the feeling is the same. No boats interrupt the waves. The space is so open, so empty, it demands to be filled; part of me has to oblige. As much as I am here, standing on wood, pressed against metal, I am also at the edge of vision, paused at the horizon. It is a necessary, futile expansion that makes me feel foolish. There’s so much more that I could do. And yet we remain. Dead, dying; alive.
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO THOSE WHO READ this book in all its incarnations: Ronan Ryan, Jason Morton, Lynsey May Sutherland, Krystelle Bamford, Jon Sternfeld, Magda Boreysza. I’m also grateful to Gail Durbin for help with some of the “found” photos in the book. Thanks to Duncan Macgregor for help with graphs and other moral guidance.
Thanks to three people without whom: Beth Weinstein, Nicole Sohl, Ryan van Winkle.
About the Author
NICK HOLDSTOCK’s fiction and essays have appeared in a wide range of U.S. and U.K. publications, including the London Review of Books, The Southern Review, n + 1, Dissent, Vice, The Independent, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge (Luath Press Ltd, 2011), a book about life in China’s Xinjiang province, and China’s Forgotten People (I. B. Tauris, 2015). In 2012 he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship for fiction. He lives in Edinburgh. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
1. A Curious Man
2. Lost
3. The Lump
4. More
5. Mrs. Maclean
6. The Ballad of Rita and Sean
7. Sinead
8. Fahad
Part II
Epigraph
9. Autumn Begins in Us
10. Found
11. No Place Like Home
12. Less
13. The Trial of Samuel Clark
14. June
15. Five, Four
16. Three, Two
17. One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE CASUALTIES. Copyright © 2015 by Nicholas Richard Francis Holdstock. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Part of this book appeared on the PEN Web site in 2013.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph: Thomas Hofer / Image Brief
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-05951-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-6459-7 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466864597
First Edition: August 2015
The Casualties Page 25