Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  The shadows on the road were sharply slanted. As he walked, an occasional car went past, none of them a taxi. He didn’t mind; he was no longer in a hurry. He had a new sense of freedom, even of lightness. He was an escapee.

  He came to Merrion Road and turned left, in the direction of the city. A Garda squad car came up behind him and slowed. The Garda in the passenger seat peered out at him suspiciously. He supposed he did look odd, a man in a dark suit and a dark hat, with a suitcase, strolling aimlessly. The car went on. Then a taxi approached, going in the opposite direction. He hailed it, and it did a U-turn. He got into the back seat. The driver was a countryman with a large round head and red ears.

  “Upper Mount Street,” Quirke said.

  Home, he thought. It wasn’t a term he often brought to mind, not when he was thinking of himself, anyway.

  * * *

  And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of bruised blue radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled. Serene: the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene. Why had he stayed so long at the Griffins’? Why in the first place had he let them take him into their arid lives, in that cold house?

  The flat smelled slightly musty, but it didn’t matter. Yes, he was home.

  He wondered what to do, how to pass this endless night. It was such a luxurious sensation, having again no one to please or even think about except himself. He couldn’t go to bed; he wouldn’t be able to sleep—who could sleep in these white nights? In the old days he would have gone round to the 47 on Haddington Road, or up to the Shelbourne, where he would have been bound to find someone to drink with him. But he couldn’t go back to that old life. If he started drinking now, he’d never stop. He had fallen off the wagon too many times and had the bruises to show for it, the permanent lacerations.

  He took his hat and went down to the street.

  The whores were out, half a dozen of them, the elderly one with the walking stick who had been in business for as long as he had lived here, and a couple of youngish ones, too, dressed in black and stark as crows, who must be new on the game since he hadn’t encountered them before. He often wondered about their lives, where they came from, how they had ended up on the streets. He might have talked to them, asked them about themselves, but he could never work up the courage. He had been brought up in a male world, a world first of priests and Christian Brothers, then of medical students, then doctors, like himself. He had known women too, of course, but it had always been a special kind of knowing, one that stopped just below the surface or, in most cases, just above it. Would things have been different for him if there had been a mother to take care of him, to teach him things, to let him in on the secrets that only mothers were privy to? He would never know. But he supposed he was exaggerating the preciousness of all the things he had not known.

  It was a sweet, secret luxury, to feel sorry for himself now and then, to lament his losses and his woes.

  Sometimes it seemed to him that all his life he had been standing with his back to a high wall, on the other side of which an endless circus show was going on. Now and then there would come to him on the breeze the sound of a drumroll, or a snatch of brassy music, a gasp of wonderment or a surge of raucous laughter from the crowd. Why could he not scale the wall, haul himself up the side of it, even if his hands bled, his fingernails splintered, and jump down and run to the flap of the big top and peer in? Just to see what the performance looked like, even if he didn’t go inside, even if he were only to have that one, hindered glimpse of the dingy, sequined magic—that would be something.

  He walked along Merrion Square. The greenery behind the railings was giving off its nocturnal scents. He met no one. The whores didn’t come down this far, for some reason, but stayed around Mount Street and the canal, Fitzwilliam Square, Hatch Street. He was aware of a pleasantly melancholy sensation around his heart, as soft and pervasive as the fragrance of the trees and the plants. He was alive. It seemed an amazing fact, the unlikeliness of it, this mysterious and seemingly aimless project that was his life.

  He turned up Merrion Street. There was lamplight in a few of the windows of Government Buildings. He thought of the poor drudges in there, ordered by their ministers to stay on and finish that report, draw up this schedule, frame those parliamentary questions. He wondered if Leon Corless had sat up at one of those windows, late into the night, doing—doing what?

  For a while, before he started on his medical studies, Quirke had thought of going for the Civil Service. He had done well in his final school examinations, came out among the top fifty in the country; a career awaited him as a bureaucrat, a mandarin. Strange to think that he might have been behind one of those windows himself now, hunched over his desk, his fountain pen scratching away, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap, as the long day faded into the half-night of midsummer. Strange to think.

  At the corner of Merrion Row a lone car was stopped at the traffic light. He drew level with it, and saw that it was Phoebe behind the wheel. The light changed to green just then and the car moved off. He sprinted after it, and caught up, and rapped with his knuckles on the roof. Phoebe braked, and looked up at him in alarm. He opened the passenger door and leaned in. “It’s just me!” he said, laughing.

  “Quirke! You gave me a fright—I thought it was a tramp or something. What are you doing, wandering the streets at this hour?”

  A car came up behind them, and the driver sounded his horn.

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said, still with his hand on the door. “I just saw you and I—I thought I’d—I just thought I’d say hello.”

  Behind them the horn honked again, a longer blast.

  “Get in, for goodness’ sake!” Phoebe said.

  Quirke sat beside her, feeling foolish, and foolishly happy. “Sorry,” he said again.

  “What’s the matter?” Phoebe said, and drove forward and turned onto Baggot Street.

  “Nothing’s the matter. I—” He stopped. What could he say? How to explain something so ordinary as happiness? “I was out for a walk,” he said.

  “You’re very far from Ailesbury Road.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, you see,” he said. “I’m not at Ailesbury Road anymore. I’m back in the flat.”

  She glanced at him sidelong. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course. I thought you were mad to go and stay there in the first place.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Quirke, don’t you know anything?”

  “Funny, Rose said something the same to me just this morning.” He laughed. “Anyway, the answer, of course, is yes—I don’t know anything about anything.”

  They looked at each other, a little helplessly, smiling. It seemed to Quirke somehow an emblematic moment, as if this was how it was always meant to have been between them, meeting by chance, at dusk, and not knowing what to say to each other, and not minding. For it didn’t matter; they could speak or be silent, it was all the same. He felt it again, that happiness, a twinge in his breast, a kind of precious pain.

  She drove them to Herbert Place. They climbed the dimly lit stairs to her flat on the first floor. Large shapes of shadow hung in the living room, and at the window a parallelogram of yellowish radiance from the streetlamp outside was laid out on the floor like an illustration in a geometry book, one corner of it bent at an angle where it was intersected by a chair leg.

  Phoebe dropped her handbag and her keys on the table and went to the window. “I often don’t turn on the light,” she said, “and just leave the curtains open. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I like to be in the dark and see the night outside, so glossy and quiet. I imagine there’s a h
uge animal out there, pressed against the house, sleeping.”

  “The midnight cat,” Quirke said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what your mother used to call it—the midnight cat. She liked the dark, too, said she preferred it to daytime. It appealed to her feline side.”

  He thought of Delia, long dead, of how she used to curl up against him, purring; her feline side. He was glad it was dark; he didn’t want Phoebe to see his face, how he looked. He didn’t often think of his dead wife, nowadays.

  “Will I make us some coffee?” Phoebe asked.

  When she turned to him, away from the window, her face became a blank mask, featureless.

  “If you want to,” he said. “I mean, if you’re going to have some yourself.”

  “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “can’t you ever just say yes or no, and leave it at that?”

  He followed her into the kitchen. Here she had to turn the light on. He watched her at the sink, filling the kettle. How pale she seemed; tired, too. He wondered where she had been, in the car, Sinclair’s car. She didn’t like to drive, he knew, especially not at night.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She didn’t look at him. “Yes. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You seem—I don’t know.”

  “You worry about everyone,” she said. “Except about yourself, of course.”

  “People are always telling me that.”

  “Don’t you think they might be right?”

  “Maybe. I doubt it. Sometimes it seems to me I’m all I ever think of, all I’m capable of thinking of. I’m much more selfish than anyone realizes.”

  “Everyone feels that way, Quirke. We’re trapped inside ourselves.”

  She put the kettle on the stove and lit the flame under it. There was the flabby smell of burning gas. Someday, he thought, someday, for no reason, I’ll remember all this, the darkness in the window, the gas flame sputtering, the red-and-white checked tablecloth, the cups, the smell of the ground coffee, and Phoebe in her black dress with the white lace collar, my nunlike daughter.

  “What’s the matter, Phoebe?” he said.

  This time she did look at him, the merest glance. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. Let’s wait and have our coffee.”

  The kettle came to the boil, and she poured the steaming water into the percolator and put the percolator on the ring and turned down the gas. Soon the coffee began to burble into the glass lid. She got down cups, saucers, spoons. She poured the coffee. He watched her. Sometimes he thought he would have made a better physician than a pathologist. He had an eye for the way people moved, their tics, their tensions. But would he have been able to deal with the living? As it was, even the dead were almost too much for him.

  They returned to the living room, carrying their cups. It took some moments for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Quirke barked his shin on something. Phoebe asked if she should switch on the light, but he said no. He guessed that she didn’t want him to see her face, either. They both preferred the anonymity of darkness.

  He groped his way to the table and sat down on a cane-backed chair, while Phoebe went and perched on the arm of the sofa, the light from the streetlamp falling across her knees.

  “I met someone today,” she said. “Someone I used to know, in the agency where I was doing that shorthand course. It was the strangest thing. I was in the Country Shop, having lunch, when the waitress brought me a note, just a scribble, asking me to come across to the Green.”

  She paused and watched Quirke light a cigarette. The match when he struck it made a suddenly expanding sphere of yellow light in which for a moment his face loomed like a caricature, the nose grotesquely hooked and the eye sockets empty.

  “Who was it from, this note?” he asked.

  “A girl called Lisa, Lisa Smith. I hardly knew her during the course, except to nod to or say hello. She’d seen me through the window of the café and wrote the note and gave it to the waitress to give to me. I went over to the Green, as she’d asked, and sure enough there she was, waiting for me, by the pond.” She paused. “Give me one of your cigarettes, will you? I’ve run out.”

  He rose and went to her, offering his cigarette case. “Did I know you were smoking again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you?”

  “Probably. I forget everything, all the time. My brain is addled.”

  She laughed. “That’s what Nana Griffin used to say.”

  “Did she? Well, it’s apt. These days I feel as old as everyone’s granny.”

  “Oh, Quirke!”

  He went back and sat by the table again. He was using his saucer as an ashtray, though he knew Phoebe would chide him for it. “Go on,” he said, “tell me about this girl—what did you say her name was?”

  “Lisa Smith. That’s what she said it was, anyway.”

  “I thought you said you knew her?”

  “I told you, she was in the same course as I was, that’s all. I don’t think I ever even knew her name. She was just one of the class.” She thought for a moment. “‘Lisa Smith’ doesn’t sound right, somehow. Lisa, yes, but not Smith. It sounds made up.”

  “What did she want from you?”

  “She wanted help. She’s in trouble of some kind. She’s pregnant, for a start.”

  “And not married?”

  “No.”

  “Then yes, she is in trouble.”

  Phoebe waved a hand dismissively, the glowing tip of her cigarette making a brief arabesque in the darkness. “I don’t mean that, I mean real trouble. Her boyfriend was killed.”

  In Quirke’s left ear, or just above it, where his brain was injured, something seemed to click, like a light switch being flipped on. One day, he thought, that may be the very last sound I’ll hear, and the light won’t be going on.

  “Killed?” he said. “How?”

  “He was in some kind of accident. A car crash, a fire, I don’t know. She started to tell me, and then stopped and wouldn’t say any more.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Sometime last night, or early this morning.”

  He stood up, making a clatter. “In the Phoenix Park?”

  She tried to see him in the darkness. “How did you know?”

  He went to the mantelpiece and groped for the small lamp that he knew was there, and switched it on. It shed a cone of weak light downwards.

  “His name was Leon Corless,” he said. “His car crashed into a tree and went on fire. David did the postmortem on him this morning. He called me in, wanted my advice.”

  She was watching him intently now, the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers, sending up a wavering trail of smoke. “Why did he need your advice? What was wrong?”

  Quirke began pacing the floor, watching his feet. It was a thing he did.

  “There was something on the side of the skull, a contusion. It looked wrong—don’t ask me why. You get a sixth sense for these things.” He stopped close to her, and looked into her face. Down in the street a car with a faulty exhaust went past, hiccuping and whining. “Tell me what the girl said.”

  She shrugged. “It was all confused,” she said. “I didn’t even know whether to believe her or not, it sounded so far-fetched and melodramatic. Yet she was so frightened—I can’t stop thinking of the look she gave me as I was leaving, the fear in her eyes.” She paused, remembering, then shook her head, as if to shake away the image of Lisa sitting in the kitchen, shriveled into herself, seeming so small and frail and defenseless. “She said she was in the car with him, he was driving her home from somewhere, a party or something. They had a fight, I suppose about her being pregnant, and she made him stop and she got out. She didn’t expect him to drive off, but he did. Then another car went past; she thinks it was following him. She was trying to find a taxi when she saw the glow of the burning car, in the park. She went up to where the car was. She recognized it. She could see—what did you say his name was?”
<
br />   “Leon. Leon Corless.”

  “She could see him slumped against the wheel, and the flames all round him.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing. She was frightened, and ran off. I suppose she was in a panic by then. She went home to her flat—I think she must have walked all the way to Rathmines—and slept for a while. Or tried to sleep. I don’t know where she was going when she saw me in the restaurant. I think she was just wandering around in a daze, not knowing what to do.”

  Quirke took another cigarette from his case on the table and lit it. A wedge of ice seemed to have lodged itself between his ribs, on the inside. He wanted a drink; he needed a drink; but he must not, must not, must not have a drink.

  “So what did you do,” he said, “when you met her in the Green?”

  “I borrowed the car from David and drove her down to Wicklow.”

  “To Wicklow?”

  “To the house in Ballytubber. She needed somewhere to hide, she said, somewhere where no one would find her.”

  “Like who?”

  “What?”

  “Who would want to find her, who was she hiding from?”

  “I don’t know. I asked her but she wouldn’t tell me. She was too frightened.”

  He walked to the window and stood looking out. Even yet there was a streak of silver radiance in the western sky, and a long smooth plume of cloud the color of smoke.

  “Who was he?” Phoebe asked. “Leon Corless, I mean.”

  Quirke shrugged. “A civil servant. His only claim to fame is that his father is Sam Corless.”

  “Who’s Sam Corless?”

  “The Communist. Socialist Left Alliance, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Oh, him. Yes. Was he—the son—was he in politics, too?”

  “No. He had no interest in that kind of thing, so his father says.”

  They were silent, lost in their thoughts. Quirke was recalling Sam Corless sitting in his cluttered little room above the tobacconist’s, hands clamped on his knees, haggard and lost. He had always had a certain admiration for Corless, for his fearlessness, his effrontery, for the jeering speeches he made, excoriating state and church, laughing at the golf club plotters, the dinner dance conspirators, all the whited sepulchres, the Judge Garret Griffins and the Josh Crawfords and the Joe Costigans of this mean and mendacious little city.