They are too loose. I tell him.
He spends the remainder of the evening refitting them and adding holes
and buckles to his belts.
"How is it now?" - he anxiously enquires of no one in particular.
"Much better, Maurice" - I reassure him.
At night, when no one sees, he changes the soggy patch covering his
missing eye. It's nothing but a gauze and two adhesive bandages,
plastered directly over the shrivelled, murky hole that's left of the
glistening, jocular eye in Maurice's photos.
He is ashamed and doesn't want to nauseate us. Maurice has a developed
aesthetic sense. He still remembers beauty and wants it in his life.
But all he has right now is a dehydrated wrinkle above a hollow abyss
in his skull. It's where he used to gaze at beauty from. But now it's
dark. Only the muscles that surround it still react to absence. He
mocks himself self-deprecatingly. There's nothing else to do without an
eye, a leg, one's looks.
Maurice is suing the police. In his mind he has won and is already
divvying up the reparations. He is going to buy a flat, a car, and then
a girl. She is bound to adore him and they will live in happiness and
wealth and many children and Maurice will grow with them. "This is my
second childhood" - he hums along with a hit song on the radio.
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