Authors: John Banville
Quirke had not seen me there behind the grimed glass of the booth, crouched over the receiver in the attitude of a man nursing a toothache, and I decided to follow him. But I should not say that I decided. I never do set out wholly consciously to stalk anyone. Rather, I will find myself already on the way, absent-mindedly, as it were, half thinking of something else, yet with my . . . my
victim,
I was about to say, firmly fixed in view. It was a morning of warm wind and heavy sunlight. Quirke was going along on the shady side of the street and almost at once I nearly lost him, when he ducked into a post office, but there was no mistaking that broad stooped back and its following down-at-heel grey shoe and grubby white sock. I dawdled at the window of a chemist’s shop opposite, waiting for him. How hard it is, as I the stalker know from long experience, to concentrate on a reflection in a shop window without letting one’s attention drift to the wares on offer, however less solid they may seem than the fleeting, burnished world mirrored on the surface of the glass behind which they stand in uneasy display. Distracted by posters of bathing beauties advertising sun creams, and in particular a coy arrangement of gleaming steel pincers designed, I believe, for castrating calves, I almost missed Quirke’s reappearance. Empty-handed now, he bustled off with accelerated step and turned a corner on to the quays. I hurried across the road, making a delivery boy on a bike swerve and swear, but when I rounded the corner there was no sign of Quirke. I stood and surveyed the scene with a narrowed eye, searching for a sign of him among wheeling gulls, those three rusted trawlers, a bronze statue pointing with vague urgency out to sea. When a stalkee vanishes like this the uncanniness of ordinary things is intensified; a telltale gap opens in the world, like the chink of blue evening sky the Chinaman in the fable spots between the magic city and the hill on which it is supposed to be standing. Then I noticed the pub, wedged into a corner between a fish shop and the gate of a motor car repair yard.
It was an old-style premises, the nicotine-brown varnish on the door and window sills combed and whorled to give the illusion of wood grain, and the window painted inside an opaque sepia shade to a filigreed six inches of the top. The place had somehow the mark of Quirke about it. I went in, stumbling on the worn threshold. The place was empty, the bar untended. In an ashtray on the counter a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself in surreptitious haste, sending up a quick straight plume of blue smoke. On a shelf an old-fashioned wireless muttered. Behind the usual pub smells there was a mingled whiff of machine oil and brine from the next-door premises on either side. I heard from somewhere in the shadowed rear a lavatory flushing and a rickety door opening with a scrape, and Quirke came shambling forward, hitching up the waistband of his trousers and running a quick finger down the flies. I turned aside hastily, but I need not have bothered, for he did not even glance at me, but walked straight past and out the door with a self-forgetting look, squinting into the light.
I am still wondering which of the world’s secret administrators it was who left that cigarette burning on the bar.
In the minute that I had been in the pub the morning had clouded over. A great grey bank of cumulus fringed in silver hung above the sea, moving landward with menacing intent. Quirke had crossed to the wooden quay and was walking along with what seemed a blundering step, like that of a man purblinded by tears. Or was he tipsy, I wondered? Surely he had not been long enough in the pub to drink himself drunk. Yet as I followed along behind him I could not rid myself of the notion that he was somehow incapacitated, in some great distress. All at once I was seized on violently by the memory of a dream that I dreamed one recent night, and that I had forgotten, until now. In the dream I was a torturer, a professional of long experience, skilled in the art of pain, whom people came to—tyrants, spy-catchers, brigand chiefs—to hire my unique services, when their own efforts and those of their most enthusiastic henchmen had all failed. My current victim was a man of great presence, of great resolve and assurance, a burly, bearded fellow, the kind of high-toned hero I used to be cast to play in the latter years of my career, when I was judged to have attained a grizzled majesty of bearing. I do not know who he was supposed to be, nor did I know him in the dream; seemingly it was a condition of my professionalism not to know the identity or the supposed crimes of those on whom I was called to work my persuasive art. The details of my methods were vague; I employed no tools, no tongs or prods or burning-irons, but was myself the implement of torture. I would grasp my victim in some special way and crush him slowly until his bones buckled and his internal organs collapsed. I was irresistible, not to be withstood; all succumbed, sooner or later, under my terrible ministrations. All, that is, except this bearded hero, who was defeating me simply by not paying me sufficient attention, by not acknowledging me. Oh, he was in agony, all right, I was inflicting the most terrible torments on him, masterpieces of pain that made him writhe and shudder and grind his teeth until they creaked, but it was as if his sufferings were his own, were generated out of himself, and that it was himself and not I that he must resist, his own will and vigour and unrelenting force. I might not have been part of the process at all. I could feel the heat of his flesh, could smell the fetor of his anguish. He strained away from me, lifting his face to the smoke-blackened ceiling of the dungeon, where a fitful light flickered; he cried out, he whimpered; sweat dripped from his beard, his eyeballs bled. Never had the person I was in the dream experienced so strongly the erotic intimacy that binds the torturer to his victim, yet never had I been so thoroughly shut out from my subject’s pain. I was not there—simply, for him I was not there, and so, despite the intensity, despite the passion, one might say, of my presence in the midst of his agony, somehow I was absent for myself as well, absent, that is to say, from myself.
Caught up as I was in trying to recapture this dream, in all its cruelty and mysterious splendour, I almost lost Quirke a second time, when just as we were coming to the edge of town he veered off and plunged down a laneway. The lane was narrow, between high whitewashed walls with greenery and clumps of buddleia sprouting along their tops. I knew where it led. I allowed him to get a good way on, so that if he turned and I had nowhere to hide myself he still might not know me, at such a distance. He had quickened his pace, and kept glancing at the sky, which was growing steadily more threatening. A dog sitting at a back-garden gate barked at him and he made an unsuccessful kick at it. The lane dipped and turned and came to a sort of bower, with a pair of leaning beeches and a lichen-spattered horse trough and an old-fashioned green water pump, at which Quirke paused and worked the handle and bent over the trough and cupped the water in his hand and drank. I stopped, too, and watched him, and heard the plash of the water falling on the stone side of the trough, and the murmurous rustling of a breeze in the trees above us. I did not care now that he might see me; even if he had turned and recognised me I think it would not have made any difference, we would have gone on as before, him leading and me following after him with unflagging eagerness, though for what, or with what cause, I could not tell. Still he did not look back, and after a moment of silent pondering, leaning there in the greenish gloom under the trees, he was off again. I went forward and stood where he had stood, and stooped where he had stooped, and worked the handle of the pump and cupped my hands and caught the water and drank deep of that uncanny element that tasted of steel and earth. Above me the trees conferred among themselves in fateful whispers. I might have been an itinerant priest stopping at a sacred grove. Abruptly then it began to rain, I heard the swish of it behind me and turned in time to see it coming fast along the lane like a blown curtain, then it was against my face, a vehement chill glassy drenching. Quirke broke into a canter, scrabbling to turn up the collar of his jacket. I heard him curse. I hastened after him. I did not mind the wetting; there is always something exultant about a cloudburst. Big drops batted the beech leaves and danced on the road. There was a crackling in the air, and a moment later came the thunderclap, like something being hugely crumpled. Now Quirke, head down, his sparse hair flattened to his skull, was fairly sprinting up the last length of the lane, high-stepping among the forming puddles like a big, awkward bird. We came out into the square. I was no more than a dozen paces behind Quirke now. He went along close under the convent wall, clutching the lapels of his jacket closed at his throat. He stopped at the house, and opened the door with a key, slipped into the hall, and was gone.
I was not surprised. From the start I think I had known where our destination lay. It seemed the most natural thing that he should have led me home. I stood shivering in the wet, uncertain of what would come next. The rain was pelting the cherry trees; I thought how patient they were, how valiant. For an instant I had a vision of a world thrashing without complaint in unmitigable agony; I bowed my head; the rain beat on my back. Then gradually there arose behind me the muffled sound of hoofs, and I looked up to see a young boy on a little black-and-white horse trotting bareback toward me across the square. At first I could hardly make out horse and rider, so thick was the web of rain between them and me. It might have been a faun, or centaur. But no, it was a boy, on a little horse. The boy was dressed in a dirty jersey and short pants, with no shoes or socks. His mount was a tired poor creature with a bowed back and distended belly; as it clopped toward me it rolled a cautiously measuring eye sideways in my direction. Despite the downpour the boy seemed hardly to be wet at all, as if he were protected within an invisible shell of glass. When they were almost level with me the boy hauled on the length of rope that was the reins and the animal slowed to a wavering walk. I wanted to speak but somehow felt that I should not, and anyway I could not think what I might say. The boy smiled at me, or perhaps it was a grimace, expressing what, I could not guess. He had a pinched pale face and red hair. I noticed his belt, an old-fashioned one such as I used to wear myself when I was his age, made of red-and-white striped elastic with a silver metal buckle in the shape of a snake. I thought he would say something but he did not, only went on smiling, or grimacing, and then clicked his tongue and heeled the horse’s flanks and they went on again, into the lane whence I had come. I followed. The rain was stopping. I could smell the horse’s smell, like the smell of wetted sacking. Hard by the side gate into the garden of the house they halted, and the boy turned and looked back at me, with a calm, impassive gaze, bracing a hand behind him on the horse’s spine. What passed between us there, what wordless intimation? I was hungry for a sign. After a moment the boy faced forward again and gave the bridle rope a tug, and the little horse started up, as if by clockwork, and off they went, down the lane’s incline, and presently were gone from sight. I shall not forget them, that boy, and his pied nag, cantering there, in the summer rain.
I examined the gate. It is what I think used to be called a postern, a wooden affair, very old now, dark and rotted to crumbling stumps at top and bottom, set into the whitewashed wall on two big rusted rings and held fast with a rusted bolt. Often as a boy I would enter by this gate when coming home from school. I tried the bolt. At first the flange refused to lift, but I persisted and in the end the cylinder, thick as my thumb, turned in its coils with a shriek. Behind the gate was a mass of overgrown creeper and old brambles, and I had to push hard to make a gap wide enough to squeeze through. The rain had fully stopped now and a shamefaced sun was managing to shine. I shoved the gate to behind me and stood a moment in survey. The garden was grown to shoulder-height in places. The rose trees hung in dripping tangles, and clumps of scutch grass steamed; there were jewelled dock leaves big as shovels. The wet had brought the snails out, they were in the grass and on the briars, swaying on the tall thorned fronds. I set off toward the house, the untidy back of which hung out in seeming despair over this scene of vegetable riot. Nettles stung me, cobwebs strung with pearls of moisture draped themselves across my face. All of childhood was in the high sharp stink of rained-on weeds. The sun was gathering strength, my shirt clung wetly warm to my back. I felt like a hero out of some old saga, come at last, at the end of his quest, unhelmed, travel-worn and weary, to the perilous glade. The house out of blank unrecognising eyes watched me approach, giving no sign of life. I came into the yard. Rusted bits of kitchen things were strewn about, a washboard and mangle, an old refrigerator with its eerily white innards on show, a pan to the bottom of which was welded a charred lump of something from an immemorial fry-up. On all this I looked with the eyes of an expectant stranger, as if I had seen none of it before.
Now, through the top part of the barred basement window, I caught sight of Quirke, or of his head at least, turned away from me, in quarter-profile. It was an uncanny sight, that big round head resting there behind bars at ground level, as though he were interred up to the neck in the floor of a cage. At first I could not make out what it was he was up to. He would lean his head forward briefly and then straighten again, and would seem to speak in some steady, unemphatic way, as if he were delivering a lecture, or committing lines to memory. Then I stepped forward for a better look and saw that he was sitting at table, with a plate of food before him, on which with knife and fork he was methodically working. The sun was burning the back of my neck now, and my skin smarted from thorns and nettle stings, and the rich deep gloom in which Quirke sat seemed wonderfully cool and inviting. I crossed to the back door. It had the look of a square-shouldered sentry standing in his box, tall and narrow, with a many-layered impasto of black paint and two little panes of meshed glass set high up that seemed to glare out with suspicion and menace. I tried the knob, and at once the door opened before me, smoothly silent, with accommodating ease. Cautiously I crossed the threshold, eager and apprehensive as Lord Bluebeard’s wife. At once, as if of its own volition, the door with a faint sigh closed behind me.