Christine Falls

by Benjamin Black

  “And leave me with this crowd? Not on your nelly.”

  Maggie made a sound that might have been a snigger. Phoebe, shaking her head in mock disbelief at Quirke’s willingness to abandon her, took a shawl that was draped over the stair post and wrapped it around her shoulders. Firmly she grabbed his hand. “Lead on, big boy.”

  Maggie grew suddenly agitated. “What’ll I say if they ask me?” she demanded, a rising whine.

  “Tell them I’ve run away with a sailor,” Phoebe told her.

  Outside, the night had turned chilly and Phoebe clung close to him as they walked along. Above the light of the streetlamps the massy beeches that lined the street had a spectral aspect, their leaves drily rustling. All the drink that Quirke had drunk had begun to go stale in him in the night’s chill, and he felt a clammy melancholy creeping along his veins. Phoebe too seemed despondent, suddenly. She was silent for a long while, and then asked: “What were you and Mummy fighting about?”

  “We weren’t fighting,” Quirke said. “We were having a conversation. It’s what grown-ups do.”

  She snickered. “Oh, yes? Some conversation.” Eagerly she clutched his arm. “Were you telling her you still love her, and that you’re sorry you didn’t marry her instead of her sister?”

  “You read too many trashy magazines, my girl.”

  She lowered her head and laughed. The night air breathed on him, and he realized how tired he was. It had been a long day. From the eager manner in which Phoebe was clinging to him he feared it was not over yet. He would have to cut down on his drinking, he told himself sternly, while another part of his mind laughed at him in mockery.

  “Granddad really is fonder of you than he is of Daddy, isn’t he?” Phoebe said, and then, when he did not answer, “What was it like, being an orphan?”

  “Smashing,” he said.

  “Did they beat you in that place you were in, in Connemara-what was the name of it?”

  “Carricklea Industrial School, so-called. Yes, they beat us. Why wouldn’t they?”

  Dull smack of leather on flesh in the gray light of morning, the huge, bare windows above him like indifferent witnesses looking down upon one more scene of hurt and humiliation. He had been big enough to defend himself against the other boys in the place, but the Brothers were another matter: there was no defending against them.

  “Until Granddad rescued you?” Quirke said nothing. She joggled his arm. “Come on. Tell me.”

  He shrugged.

  “The Judge was on the board of visitors,” he said. “He took an interest in me, God knows why, and got me away from Carricklea and sent me to a proper school. Adopted me, as good as, him and Nana Griffin.”

  Phoebe kept a thoughtful silence for the space of a dozen steps. Then she said: “You and Daddy must have been like brothers.”

  Quirke fairly cackled. “He wouldn’t care to hear you say it now.”

  They stopped on a corner, under the grainy light of a lamp standard. The night was hushed, the big houses behind their hedges shut fast, the windows dark in all but a few of them.

  “Have you any idea who your parents were, the real ones?” Phoebe asked.

  He shrugged again, and after a moment said: “There are worse things than being an orphan.”

  A light was flickering through the leaves above them. It was the moon. He shivered; he was cold. Such distances, such deeps! Then there was a blur of movement and suddenly Phoebe had thrown her arms around him and was kissing him full on the mouth, avidly, clumsily. Her breath tasted of gin, and something that he thought might be caramel. He could feel her breasts against his chest, and the springy struts of her underwear. He pushed her away. “What are you doing!” he cried, and wiped a hand violently across his mouth. She stood before him staring in shock, her body seeming to vibrate, as if she had been struck. She tried to say something but her mouth slid askew, and with tears welling in her eyes she turned and ran back towards the house. He turned, too, and strode off drunkenly in the opposite direction, stiff-legged and snorting, his hurrying footsteps those of a man in flight.

  3

  QUIRKE LIKED McGONAGLE’S BEST IN THE EARLY EVENING, WHEN there was no one in but a few of the regulars, that skinny type at the end of the bar poring over the racing pages and ruminatively scratching his crotch, or that slightly famous dipso poet, in cloth cap and hobnailed boots, glaring at a spark of tawny light in the bottom of his whiskey glass. There was the memorials page in the Evening Mail to read-O Mammy dear we miss you still, We did not know you were so ill-and Davy the barman’s awful, raspily murmured jokes to listen to. It was peaceful, sitting there on the stained, red-velvet banquette that smelled like a railway carriage, browsing and drowsing, soothed by whiskey and cigarette smoke and the prospect of the long, lazy hours until closing time. And so, when that particular evening he heard someone approach his table and stop, and looked up and saw that it was Mal, he did not know which he felt more strongly, surprise or irritation.

  “Christ! Mal! What are you doing here?”

  Mal sat down on a low stool without being invited and gestured at Quirke’s glass. “What’s that?”

  “Whiskey,” Quirke said. “It’s called whiskey, Mal. Distilled from grain. Makes you drunk.”

  Mal lifted a hand and Davy approached, stooping mournfully and snuffling a silver droplet back up his nose. “I’ll have one of those,” Mal said, pointing again at Quirke’s drink. “A whiskey.” It might have been a bowl of sacrificial blood he was asking for.

  “Right, boss,” Davy said, and padded away.

  Quirke watched Mal looking about the place and pretending to be interested in what he saw. He was ill at ease. It was true, he usually was ill at ease, more or less, but these days he seemed like that all the time. When Davy brought the drink Mal delved in a pocket for his wallet, but by the time he found it Quirke had paid. Mal took a sip gingerly and tried not to grimace. His wandering gaze came to rest on the copy of the Mail on the table. “Anything in the paper?” he asked.

  Quirke laughed and said: “What is it, Mal? What do you want?”

  Mal set his hands on his knees and frowned, pushing out his lower lip like a superannuated schoolboy being called to account. Quirke wondered, not for the first time, how this man had succeeded in becoming the country’s most successful consultant obstetrician. It could not have been all due to his father’s admittedly considerable influence-or could it?

  “That girl,” Mal said suddenly, plunging in. “Christine Falls. I hope you haven’t been…talking about her.”

  Quirke was not surprised. “Why?” he said.

  Mal was kneading the knees of his trousers. He kept his eyes fixed unseeing on the table and the newspaper. The evening sun had found a chink somewhere at the top of the painted-over window at the front of the bar and was depositing a fat, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat.

  “She worked at the house,” Mal said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, and touched a finger to the bridge of his glasses.

  “What-your house?”

  “For a while. Cleaning, helping Maggie-you know.” Gingerly he took another sip of his drink and watched himself replace the glass on the round cork mat, positioning it just so. “I don’t want it talked about-”

  “It?”

  “Her dying, I mean, all that business. I don’t want it discussed, around the hospital especially. You know what that place is like, the way the nurses gossip.”

  Quirke leaned back on the banquette and surveyed his brother-in-law perched before him on the stool, heartsore and worried, his long neck stretched out and his adam’s apple bouncing on its elastic. “What’s up, Mal?” he said, not harshly. “You come in here, into a pub, and start knocking back whiskeys, and urging me not to talk about some girl who died…You haven’t been up to any funny business, have you?”

  Mal flared briefly at that. “What do you mean, funny business?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me. Was she your patien
t?”

  Mal gave a heavy shrug, half of helplessness and half of sullen annoyance.

  “No. Yes. I was sort of…looking after her. Her family called me, from down the country. Small farmers-simple people. I sent an ambulance. By the time they got her up here she was dead.”

  “Of a pulmonary embolism,” Quirke said, and Mal lifted his head quickly, staring. “It was in her file.”

  “Oh,” Mal said. “Right.” He sighed, and drummed the fingers of one hand on the table, and began to cast about him vaguely again. “You don’t understand, Quirke. You don’t deal with the living. When they die on you, especially the young ones, you feel…sometimes you feel that you’ve lost…I don’t know. One of your own.” He fixed his gaze on Quirke again in anguished appeal, but still with that trace of annoyance, too-Mr. Malachy Griffin was not accustomed to having to answer for his actions. “I’m just asking you not to talk about it, at the hospital.”

  Quirke returned him a level look and they sat like that for a long moment, facing each other, until Mal let drop his gaze. Quirke was not convinced by this account of Christine Falls’s death, and wondered why it did not surprise him to find himself disbelieving it. But then, he had as good as forgotten about Christine Falls until Mal came in tonight to talk about her. She was, after all, only another cadaver. The dead, for Quirke, were legion. “Have another drink, Mal,” he said.

  But Mal said no, that he would have to be going, that Sarah was expecting him home, because they were invited out to dinner, and he had to change, and…His voice ran down and he sat gazing at Quirke helplessly with an expression of desperation and mild suffering, so that Quirke felt he should do something, should reach out and pat his brother-in-law’s hand, perhaps, or offer to help him to his feet. Mal, however, seeming to sense what was going through Quirke’s mind, withdrew his hands from the table and stood up hastily, and was as hastily gone.

  Quirke sat thinking. It was true, he was not much concerned with the exact circumstances of the girl’s death, but it interested him how much it obviously did concern Mal. And so, later that night, when Quirke left the pub, not sober but not quite drunk, either, he did not go home but instead went to the hospital, and opened up his office, and looked in the cabinet, intending to read again the file on Christine Falls. But the file was no longer there.

  MULLIGAN THE REGISTRY CLERK WAS TAKING HIS ELEVENSES. HE SAT tilted back in his chair with his feet on the desk; he was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette; a steaming mug of tea stood handily on the floor beside his chair. The paper was last Sunday’s People and the story he was engrossed in was a juicy one about a tart in Bermondsey, wherever that was, and her sugar daddy, who had done in some old one for her money. There was a photo of the tart, a big blonde in a little frock that her front was falling out of. She looked a bit like the nurse from upstairs who had left the other day to go to America, the one who was sweet on the boss-and be damned, but he was just thinking that when the boss himself came bursting in, full of piss and wind, as usual, and he had to get his feet off the desk and stub out the fag and stuff the paper in the desk drawer, all in the one smart go, while Quirke stood in the doorway with his hand on the knob, giving him the cold eye.

  “An emergency case,” Quirke said. “Name of Falls, Christine. A wagon was sent for her the other night. Wicklow, Wexford, somewhere down there.”

  The clerk, all business now, went to the files and took down the current month’s ledger and opened it flat on the desk and licked his thumb and began to turn over the pages. “Falls,” he said, “Falls…” He looked up. “F-a-l-l-s, right?”

  Quirke, still in the doorway, still watching him with that cod’s cold eye, nodded.

  “Christine,” he said. “Dead on arrival.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Quirke. No Falls, not from down the country.” Quirke stood thinking, then nodded again and turned to go. “Hang on,” the clerk said, pointing at a page. “Here she is-Christine Falls. If it’s the same one. Wasn’t down the country, though-she was collected in the city. They picked her up at one fifty-seven A.M., Crimea Street, Stoney Batter. Number seventeen. Key holder there is”-he peered more closely-“one Dolores Moran.”

  He looked up with a smile of modest triumph-one Dolores Moran; he was proud of that-expecting at least a hint of gratitude for his alertness. But no thanks were forthcoming, of course. Quirke only took up a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk and had him repeat the address as he wrote it down, then turned again to go, but paused, eyeing the tea mug on the floor beside the chair.

  “Busy, are you?” he asked mildly.

  The clerk shrugged apologetically. “Bit slow, this time of the morning.” And when Quirke was gone he slammed the door after him as violently as he dared. “Sarky bastard,” he muttered. Who was this Christine Falls, he wondered, and why was the boss so interested? Some wagon, maybe, that he was banging. He chuckled: a wagon to pick up a wagon. He sat down at the desk and was about to resume his reading of the paper when the door opened again and Quirke reappeared, filling the doorway.

  “This Christine Falls,” he said, “where was she taken to?”

  “What?” the clerk snapped, forgetting himself. Seeing Quirke’s look he scrambled to his feet. “Sorry, Mr. Quirke-what was it?”

  “The body,” Quirke said. “Where did it go?”

  “City morgue, I believe.” The clerk opened the ledger that was still on the desk. “That’s right-the morgue.”

  “Check if she’s still there, will you? If the family haven’t collected her, get her back.”

  The clerk stared. “I’ll have to-I’ll have to fill in the forms,” he said, although he did not know what forms they might be, since he had never before been told to fetch a stiff back from the morgue.

  Quirke was unimpressed. “You do that,” he said. “You get the forms, I’ll sign them.” Going out he stopped, turned back. “Business picking up, eh?”

  AFTERWARD HE WONDERED WHY OF THE TWO JUNIOR PATHOLOGISTS it was Wilkins he had asked to stay on and assist, but the answer was not hard to find. Sinclair the Jew was the better technician, but he trusted Wilkins the Prod. Wilkins asked no questions, only looked at his fingernails and said with studied diffidence that he could do with an extra day off next weekend to go home to Lismore and visit his widowed mother. It was not an unreasonable demand, even though there was a backlog of scheduled work already, and of course Quirke had to concede, but the exchange sent Wilkins down a degree in his estimation, and he was sorry he had not asked Sinclair after all. Sinclair, with his sardonic grin and acid wit, who treated Quirke with a faint but unmistakable hint of disdain, would have been too proud to ask for time off in return for lending assistance in what must have seemed was likely to be no more than another of Quirke’s whims.

  As it turned out, Christine Falls was quick to give up her poor secret. The body was returned from the morgue at six and it had still not gone seven when Wilkins had washed up and departed, in his usual flat-footed and somehow stealthy way. Quirke, still in his gown and green rubber apron, sat on a high stool by the big steel sink, smoking a cigarette and thinking. The evening outside was still light, he knew, but here in this windowless room that always reminded him of a vast, deep, emptied cistern it might have been the middle of the night. The cold tap in one of the sinks had an incurable slow drip, and a fluorescent bulb in the big multiple lamp over the dissecting table flickered and buzzed. In the harsh, grainy light the cadaver that had been Christine Falls lay on its back, the breast and belly opened wide like a carpet bag and its glistening innards on show.

  It sometimes seemed to him that he favored dead bodies over living ones. Yes, he harbored a sort of admiration for cadavers, these wax-skinned, soft, suddenly ceased machines. They were perfected, in their way, no matter how damaged or decayed, and fully as impressive as any ancient marble. He suspected, too, that he was becoming more and more like them, that he was even in some way becoming one of them. He would stare at his hands and they would seem to have the sa
me texture, inert, malleable, porous, as the corpses that he worked on, as if something of their substance were seeping into him by slow but steady degrees. Yes, he was fascinated by the mute mysteriousness of the dead. Each corpse carried its unique secret-the precise cause of death-a secret that it was his task to uncover. For him, the spark of death was fully as vital as the spark of life.

  He tapped his cigarette over the sink and a worm of ash tumbled softly into the drain, making a tiny hiss. The postmortem had only confirmed a thing that, he now realized, he had already suspected. But what was he to do with this knowledge? And why, anyway, did he think he should do anything at all?

  4

  CRIMEA STREET WAS LIKE ALL THE OTHER STREETS ROUNDABOUT, TWO facing terraces of artisans’ dwellings with low, lace-curtained windows and narrow front doorways. Quirke walked along in the late-summer dusk silently counting off the numbers of the houses. All was calm under a still-bright sky piled around the edges with copper-colored clouds. Outside No. 12 a fellow in a flat cap and a waistcoat shined with dirt and age was depositing a load of horse manure from the back of an upended cart onto the side of the pavement. The legs of his trousers were bound below the knees with loops of yellow baling twine. Why the twine, Quirke wondered-to keep rats from running up his legs, perhaps? Well, there were certainly worse livelihoods than pathology. As he came level with him the carter paused and leaned on the handle of his fork and lifted his cap to air his scalp and spat on the road in friendly fashion and observed that it was an aisy oul’ evenin’. His little donkey stood stock-still with downcast eyes, trying to be elsewhere. The animal, the man, the light of evening, the warm smell of the smoking dung, all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not quite recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank.