Mefisto (23 page)

– Yes, he said bitterly under his breath, just like us.

One night he came up behind me in the lavatory and put his arms around my waist. I tried to free myself, and we tussled briefly, rolling from side to side in a sort of laborious hornpipe. We staggered out the door into the corridor, where our grunts and gasps echoed like the sounds of a real fight. I got an elbow into his chest at last and gave him a tremendous push. He fell back, winded, and leaned against the wall with his mouth open and a hand pressed to his breastbone. His cravat was twisted under one ear, and he had lost a slipper. He glowered at me with a smeared eye.

– What’s up with you! he said. He told me …

He paused.

– He told you what, I said. He told you a lie.

I wanted to kick him, I could almost feel my foot sinking into that soft belly, could see him on all-fours puking up his sticky supper. I was angry not because he had laid hands on me, but because I knew that now I could not be there any more.

– Look at you, he was saying, Jesus, what a freak.

He turned his face to the wall and wept, in sorrow and in rage, his chubby shoulders shaking. I went out into the night. The air was black and wet, foghorns were blaring in the bay. The building towered above me, seeming to topple slowly in the drifting mist, all windows dark. No one was about. I walked away. Another sanctuary was gone.

Adele sat on a chair beside her bed, brushing her hair with slow, stiff strokes. She was wearing an old dressing-gown tied with a frayed cord. Her face, bare of make-up, was pale and blurred, as if she had scrubbed at it so hard the features had become worn. She gazed before her dully. Father Plomer stood at the window, facing the room, with his arms folded and his head thrown back. Behind him the sun shone on the flat roof and the smoking funnel, and far away a tiny aeroplane glinted, crawling athwart a clear blue sky. His face was in shadow, the silvery lenses of his spectacles gleaming like coins. Matron was there too, standing behind Adele, quite still, and leaning forward a little, in that way she had, her arms hanging. They seemed posed, the three of them, as if they had been placed just so, for a group portrait. Adele did not look at me, as if she did not know that I was there. I had brought cigarettes for her. Matron put out a hand silently and took them.

– Adele has given up smoking, Father Plomer said. Haven’t you, my dear? A new life. She’s going to lead a new life.

And he smiled, blank-eyed and bland. Adele went on pulling the brush through her hair, stroke by stroke. Matron continued to look at me for a moment, then turned away, for the last time.

When I went to the chapel that evening Adele was not there. I was not surprised. She was in her room, asleep, stranded among the tangled sheets as if a wave had deposited her there. I sat for a while in the stillness, watching her. It was bright yet outside, but the blind was shut, a grey half-light suffused the room. Twilight, her hour. Hers too that lost, wan, tender shade of grey. Her lips were open, one hand lay on the pillow beside her cheek. I put the ampoules into the pocket of her dressing-gown and went out quietly and shut the door behind me.

The bus swayed and pitched along the narrow roads, wallowing on the bends, the gears roaring. Trees advanced at a rush into the headlights, their branches thrown up in astonishment, then plunged past us into the darkness again. I was in the seat by the door, near the driver, a lean, pale, taciturn man who sat with his bony knees splayed, turning the big flat steering wheel with a rolling motion of his arms, as if he were hauling in a rope. At the stops he would lean forward and rest his elbows on the wheel, his wrists crossed, and suck his teeth and gaze out at the road. We went through a village, and halted at a dark crossroads where an old man with a crutch got on. He paused on the step and looked at me, panting, his old mouth open toothlessly at one side. We climbed for a long time, then bounced across an open plateau, I could see faint stars low down to right and left, and a gibbous moon perched on the point of a far peak. Sometimes too, when the road wound back on itself, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the city far off in the distance behind us. Then we rolled down into a hollow and stopped, and the driver looked at me.

Different air, and the smell of pines, and a crisp wind, and stars. I watched the bus depart, the rear-lights weaving slowly up the side of the hill. Then quiet, and the sound of water. A dim light burned over the door of the pub, and there was a light in the dirty window too. I walked across the gravel. He must have heard the bus stopping, or maybe he was watching from the window. He hung back in the darkness of the doorway until he had got a good look at me, then he came forward with a hand lifted in greeting.

– Ah, Melmoth, he said softly. We’ve been expecting you.

When I think of that second visit to the Goat I imagine a long, low, turf-brown tavern with oil lamps and glinting copper mugs, and hams and things hanging from the rafters. The picture only needs a pot-boy in an apron and a merry old codger with curly side-whiskers and a meerschaum warming his shanks in the inglenook. Where do they come from, these fantasies? When I entered first the place seemed deserted. Fat Dan stood behind the bar, picking his side teeth delicately with the nail of a little finger. He wore a shirt without a collar, and a green sleeveless pullover, tight as a harness, that stopped halfway down his belly. He greeted me with a large, slow wink, involving less the closing of an eye than the opening sideways of his mouth.

– A hot toddy, Dan, for the traveller, Felix said.

We sat on stools at the bar. As I became accustomed to the gloom I picked out a few other customers here and there, big silent countrymen in caps and long, buttonless overcoats, whose eyes veered away like fish when they met mine. Felix watched me as I supped the steaming liquor. He was wearing plus-fours and argyle socks, and a cloth cap with a button in the crown.

– I’m glad you’ve come down, he said, really I am. It gets awfully monotonous here.

I told him Tony’s body had been found. He put a finger quickly to his lips and cast a meaning glance in Dan’s direction.

– Yes, he said quietly, I saw that too. Most sad. I was shocked, I can tell you.

I said nothing. He studied me with a rueful little grin.

– I say, he said, I hope you don’t think I was to blame, do you? I didn’t lead them to Chandos Street, after all. It wasn’t me they followed.

He took out his tobacco tin and lit up a butt, and watched me through the smoke, still smiling.

– Now don’t get down in the dumps, he said. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a sort of accident.

– An accident, I said.

He tittered.

– But of course, he said, you don’t believe in accidents, do you, I forgot. Everything is a part of the pattern. Well, perhaps poor Anthony’s demise is indeed a link in some grand plan, or plot, but that still doesn’t mean that anyone is to blame, now does it?

He smoked in silence for a while, brooding, then laid a finger on my wrist and said:

– And you’re not to worry, either. Just remember, ships must sail, eventually.

– They come back, too, I said.

He laughed.

– Oh, yes, he said.
Die ewige Wiederkunft
, eh?

Fat Dan approached, and leaned a forearm on the bar and inclined his head towards me in a confidential manner. Would I be wanting to stay? he wondered.

– Any friend of Mr Felix is welcome here, he said, breathing warm sincerity and smiling.

He led me up a narrow stairs, his great shiny backside swaying ahead of me. I remember him holding a candle, but surely that’s another fantasy. At the back his hair was shaved to the top of his head, where a boyish little lick stuck up. His neck was a big wad of red fat with bristles. On the landing he paused, panting softly, and looked at me with a sort of ogling grin, as though there were some faintly scandalous secret unspoken between us. He nodded back down the stairs, in the direction of the bar, and said:

– He’s a queer card, all the same though, what?

He showed me into a tiny room with a low, sagging ceiling, a single small square window, and an enormous brass bed. The wallpaper, embossed with flower shapes, had once been white, but was now a sticky amber colour, it seemed to have been varnished. The wainscoting was brown, the paint combed to look like grained oak. Dan stood gazing a moment in the doorway with a solemn air.

– This used to be the mammy’s room, one time, he said quietly.

He sighed, and more quietly still he added:

– Before she fell into flesh.

When he was gone I put out the light and sat on the bed in the dark for a long time. The moon was higher now, riding in a corner of the window. I could see the vague shapes of pines outside, swaying in the wind, and beyond them, far off on the sides of the surrounding hills, the little lights of cottages and farms dotted here and there, frail beacons in the midst of so much darkness. I heard the last of the drinkers leave and tramp away along the hill road, and then the sounds of Dan locking up for the night. A dog barked for a while in the distance, listlessly. My scars ached.

What was I thinking about?

Nothing. Numbers.

Nothing.

We tramped the hills for hours, Felix and I, day after day. The weather was windy and bright, the last of spring, the flushed air rife with the singing of larks. It made me giddy, to be for so long up so high. Everything tended skywards here, as if gravity had somehow lost its hold. White clouds would fly up from behind a granite peak, billowing upwards into the zenith. There was nothing to hold on to, all around us as far as the horizon stretched the browns and flat greens of bracken and bog. Then suddenly we would come to a turn in the path and find ourselves on the edge of a stony crater, with a steel-grey lake far below us and a little puff of pale cloud floating in midair.

– Ah, wonderful! Felix cried. Doesn’t it make you feel like something out of Caspar David Friedrich?

He laid a hand on his heart and breathed deep, smiling for bliss, his eyes closed and nostrils flared. He was wearing his plus-fours and his cap, and carried a tall spiked stick. I watched shadows streaming like water down the far flank of the crater.

– What did you say about me to Leitch? I said.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me in exaggerated startlement. Then he broke into silent laughter, the tip of his tongue coming out and quickly vanishing again.

– Why? he said slyly. Worried for your reputation, are you?

– That was a place to be, I said. Now I can’t go there any more.

At that he laughed out loud, striking his stick on the stony ground.

– Boo hoo! he said, sneering. Listen, that place is finished, you know it. They thought the old boy was doing something brilliant, until they found out he was using their precious machine to prove that nothing can be proved.

He walked to the edge of the path and lifted hieratic arms above the abyss, thrusting the alpenstock aloft.

– O world in chaos! he intoned. Blind energy, spinning in the void! All turns, returns. Thus spake the prophet.

He came back, hobbling and wheezing, a bent old geezer now, using his stick as a crutch, and squinted up into my face.

– Here’s place enough, and time, he said.

Wind swooped past us down the slope and wrinkled the steely surface of the lake. The sunlight sparkled. He took my arm and walked me along slowly, with priestly solicitude.

– Put yourself in my hands, he said. I have high hopes for you, you know. Really, I have.

We rounded another turn in the path and came out on a rocky ledge. From here we could see in the distance a dense blue smear of smoke that was the city. Below us was the pub, and the road winding away. He squeezed my arm against his ribs.

– What do you say, eh? he said. Think of the times we’ve had, you and me. And think of the future.

I went ahead of him, down the side of the hill. On the bridge over the little stream behind the pub I paused to swallow a pill. He stopped a pace behind me, with his head on one side, smiling faintly and scraping in the dust with his stick.

– And behold, he said, angels came and ministered unto him.

I left that night. Felix and I waited in the bar for the time when the bus would arrive. The setting sun blazed briefly in the window, then the shadows gathered. Fat Dan was offended that I would not stay. He wiped the top of the counter with slow strokes of a dishcloth, glancing at me soulfully now and then. In the end, though, curiosity overcame his sense of umbrage, and he edged closer and closer, wielding the cloth in ever narrowing sweeps, and spoke at last.

– Them burns, he said, did you get acid on you, or what?

Felix rolled his eyes.

– It’s the mark of Cain, Dan, he said.

I told my tale. Dan was enthralled, he had never heard such a thing, grafts, tinfoil bandages, all that. He folded his arms on the counter and leaned his plump breasts on his arms and gazed at me in awe, as if it were some marvellous feat I had performed.

– Holy God, he said, you’ve been through the wars, all right.

– And now he’s banished, in the land of Nod, Felix said.

Dan paid him no heed, but glanced about the bar, as if there might be someone who would overhear, and leaned closer to me with a portentous air.