Mefisto

by Banville, John

  Pain had a smell, flat, grey, faintly sweet, I imagined a mixture of scurf and faeces. It was how I recognized my fellow sufferers, the ones for whom pain was a constant presence, a sort of second, ghostly self. There was the silence too, a special kind. We would sit in what was called the recreation room, a group of us, doing nothing, not saying a word, and yet communing somehow, like participants in a seance.

  There were times when I fancied I was only this ectoplasm, floating, transparent, invisible to the hale. One day I found my way on to the maternity ward, and stood at the glass wall of the nursery, gaping at the rows and rows of prune-faced mites in their plastic cots, and was for a moment baffled, an old ghost stumbling on a new world. They looked like me! I pressed my forehead to the glass, yearningly. A mother in a pink bed-jacket glanced up from her babe and shrieked, and I was led away, shaken, speechless, that one foot dragging behind me, in the grave.

  I thought of all my dead. I thought of Sykes, or Stokes, who had gone under the knife. He was not anywhere any more. Oh, part of him was still about, in the morgue, probably, and probably still in better shape than I, with half my flesh fallen from the bone. But the rest of him, that grin, the sharp glance, the jokes, where was all that? Gone. That was death. No cowled dark stranger, no kindly friend, not even empty space, with all the potential that implies, but absence, absence only. The nothing, the nowhere, the not-being-here. But how then this something, wafting me onwards irresistibly, as if all around me a great, slow breath were being indrawn?

  – Don’t die, Father Plomer said. Not a good idea.

  He sat beside the bed, regarding me gaily, with his legs crossed, swinging one large, black-shod foot. He was the hospital chaplain. He had an aura of shaving balm and warm wine.

  – Of course, he said comfortably, life is a wretched thing, and practically worthless. Yet we must live, all the same.

  I was tired of him, his big smooth face and plummy voice, his genial detachment.

  – For what? I said.

  To laugh was complicated, with my face, I did not do it often. He smiled, compressing his lips, as if he were nibbling a tiny seed in his front teeth.

  – Why, he said, to practise for the eternal life to come!

  Now it was his turn to laugh, he leaned back, his glasses flashing, ha, ha, haa! A vision came to me of his face peeling from the skull, the crimson flop, the sinews, gleet, glint of bone, the eyeballs wallowing.

  – I think we have a young pagan here, matron, he said. Oh yes, I shall have to take him in hand.

  She stopped behind him and looked at the back of his head in silence for a second, then turned away. He laughed his laugh again, a series of soft, plosive puffs, his lips pursed as if he were blowing smoke rings.

  He taught me to play chess. He had a plastic travelling set, we balanced it between us on the edge of the bed. It did not take me long to learn. It was a kind of moving geometry. He played a ramshackle game, swooping about the board, making sudden, lunging moves and then taking them back again with a giggle, only to get himself at once into a worse muddle.

  – You’re better now? he said to me, frowning over a tangle of pawns. Improving, I mean? Check, by the way. Or is it? No.

  He stared owlishly at the board, humming unhappily under his breath. His last remaining bishop made a bolt for freedom. He had not noticed my knight.

  – Yes, he said distractedly, life, life is the …

  The knight reared, slewing sideways, stamped to a stop.

  – Mate, I said.

  He gave a little shriek of surprise, throwing up his hands.

  – Why, so it is! he cried, laughing. So it is!

  Go out, they told me. Take a walk, yes. Go into the city, see the sights, mingle. Simple, ordinary things. It’s all there, waiting for you, your birthright. Be one of the living, a human being. They gave me clothes, a shirt, shoes, trousers, a coat. When I dressed I felt a sort of excited revulsion, as if I had put on not only someone else’s outfit, but someone else’s flesh as well.

  ON THE HOSPITAL steps I stopped. A high gold autumn evening was sinking over the rooftops. Forever after I would think of the city like that, like a waste of magnificent wreckage, going down. My hands shook, stuffed into these unaccustomed pockets. Such space, such distance. I was dizzy, I felt that if I fell I would fall upwards, into the limitless air. A panic of disconnected numbers buzzed in my head. Grass, trees, railings, the road. The road! A bus hurtled past, swaying on the bend. It might have been a mastodon. The evening visitors were arriving. I turned my face away from them and plunged off down the drive.

  Oh, that first autumn. Vast tender skies, branches soot-black against blue, a sense of longing and vague hurt in the dense, luminous air. I wandered the streets like an amnesiac, everything was new and yet unaccountably familiar. I recall especially that brief hour at the exhausted end of evening, when the shop workers had gone home, and everything was shut, and a mysterious quiet settled everywhere. Then the beggars and the drunks came into their own, the dustbin-pickers, the frantic old women who lived out of shopping bags, and those ragged but strangely robust young men with blue chins and crazed eyes, marching headlong down the middle of the pavements, swinging their arms and furiously muttering. They seemed to know something awful, all of them, some secret, the burden of which had blighted their lives. And I was one of them, or almost. An apprentice, say. An acolyte. I stalked them for hours, loitering behind them on canal bridges, or under archways, where the pigeons strutted, and dust and bits of paper swirled in eddies, and everything was spent and grey and heart-breaking. I can’t explain the melancholy pleasure of those moments, from which I would turn away lingeringly as the last light of day drained down the sky, and the street lamps came on fitfully in the blued autumnal dusk.

  Oh, the squares, the avenues, the parks. A smoky, sunlit morning, smell of washed pavements, fish, stale beer. A carthorse clops past, dropping dark-gold dungballs. Snarl of traffic. A sudden dark wind, making the day flinch. Then rain. In the park the dripping trees circle slowly around me, halt when I halt. The spidery dome of the bandstand teeters, threatening. Sun again, a drenched glare. Stop on this corner, by this bridge. A butcher’s shop, a greengrocer’s, a red-brick bank like a child’s toy house, with gold lettering in the windows and a big hanging clock. A workman with a ladder strapped to his bike waits at the traffic lights, whistling. A lorry shudders to a halt with a gasp of brakes. What is it, this sense of something impending, as if a crime is biding its time here, waiting to be committed? The lights change. I detect the slow ruin of things, the endless, creeping collapse.

  And then the nights, silver and burnished black, the shadowed buildings crouched under a tilted moon. A neon sign flicks on and off, on and off, in strange silence. Somewhere a woman laughs. In a windswept street by the river two old men in rags are fighting. They caper weakly, panting, swinging their arms, their coat-tails flying. Thick smack of fist on flesh and one goes down, the other takes aim, kicks, again, then hard again. The wet street gleams. A newspaper blows along the pavement, plasters itself against a grille. A huge seagull alights on the road, fixing me warily with one round eye. I pause in a doorway, wait, eager and afraid. Some dirty little truth is being wearily disclosed here. The gull flexes one wing, folds it again. The tramp on the ground coughs and coughs, holding his face. The other one has run away. Foul breath of the river, dark slop of waters, slide, and slop again. Hush! What conjured spirit …? Hush!

  I was sitting on a park bench when I met him, when he met me. It was an October twilight, the grass was grey with dew. I was listening to the trees, their fretful rustlings. He walked past once, came back and passed by again, returned again more slowly, stopped. Thin foxy face and widow’s peak and thin, sly smile. He put his hands in his pockets, arched an eyebrow.

  – I say, he said, do I not know you?

  He studied me, my bird-boy’s profile.

  – I never forget a face, you know.

  He chuckled. I was not surprised to see h
im. He sat down beside me, settling the wings of his old coat. I told him my story. He listened, motionless, hands folded on one bony knee. Darkness advanced across the park. The bells of the city were ringing, near and far.

  – All that time in the bonehouse, eh? he said. But look at you now, a new man.

  A bat flitted here and there above us in the violet air.

  – Help me, I said.

  He gazed out over the darkening sward, nodding to himself.

  – Oh, Caliban, he said, you should have come with me when I asked you. Didn’t I tell you it was all finished there, didn’t I warn you? And see what happened.

  He sighed. A band of masked children ran out of the bushes, shrieking. I put a hand up to my face.

  – Help me.

  – You want to be a real boy, eh?

  He sat back on the seat and crossed his legs and gazed up into the shadowy branches above him.

  – We had some fun, didn’t we, all the same? he said. High times. It seems so long ago, now, all of it. Still at the sums?

  – Yes.

  The laughing children returned, and ran in a circle around the bench where we sat.

  – I think they want you for a guy, Felix said.

  He rose, and they fled away into the bushes. He stood a moment, looking about him pensively in the dusk. Then he produced a scrap of paper and a pencil stub and scribbled an address and handed it to me.

  – I’m there sometimes, he said. In the evenings. It’s not far.

  He walked off a little way, stopped, came back.

  – You see? he said. I told you, I never forget a face.

  Chandos Street was a decaying Georgian sweep with a Protestant church at one end and a railed-off green square at the other. I loitered there night after night, pacing under the streetlamps, watching the house, one of a tall terrace, with worn granite steps and a black front door. People came and went. No, no one came, no one went, the door never opened. Sometimes a lame whore sat on the steps, tipsily singing. Once she asked me for a match, and called me a cunt when I said I had none. We were not the only loiterers. A couple appeared on the corner by the church, at the same time every night, a sick-looking young man with the shakes, and his shivering wraith of a girl, straggle-haired, with matchstick legs. They would hang about for an hour, peering anxiously up the ill-lit street, then turn and shuffle away miserably. The young man took to saluting me, touching a jaunty finger to his forelock and trying to grin. One night he stopped me, put a shaky hand on my arm and looked behind him carefully, as if he were about to impart some valuable secret. Instead he asked me for money. The girl stared blankly at my midriff. I gave him a handful of Empusa tablets. He looked at them in wonderment and whistled softly.

  – Fucking ace, pal, he said. I’ll offer up a novena for you.

  And there was another girl, skinny also, with skinny legs and a pinched face and pale, narrow wrists. She wore a plastic raincoat and white shoes, and clutched a white plastic handbag. She smoked cigarettes, and paced from one trembling patch of lamplight to another, watching the street, the houses. She ignored me. The young man with the shakes approached her, his hand out, she ignored him too. She smoked and paced, smoked and paced. One night I tried to follow her. After we had gone a street or two she turned aside suddenly and jumped on a bus. I shrank back in the darkness and watched as she was borne past me, sitting up very straight at the window, her sharp little stark white face and cropped, crow-black hair.

  At the end of a week Felix appeared at last, strolling up the street with his coat open and his hands in his pockets. The girl walked across swiftly and accosted him on the steps. He stopped with his finger lifted to the bell and retreated a pace. She spoke to him quietly, fiercely. I crossed the road and stood below them on the pavement. The girl immediately fell silent. Felix looked over his shoulder.

  – My dear fellow, he said, there you are.

  The girl turned an inch in my direction, but kept her eyes lowered. There was a silence. Felix glanced from one of us to the other.

  – Are you together? he said. No? What a coincidence, then.

  He rang the bell, but no one came. He rang again. We waited. Then the girl, with a furious gesture, opened her bag and produced a key. Felix grinned at her. She ignored him, jabbing the key into the lock.

  A gaunt, dim hall, olive walls, a dirty lightbulb in a brown paper shade. The stair carpet was threadbare. In silence we ascended into the gloom. Felix smiled to himself, whistling softly. The girl walked ahead of us. Her hair stuck up in tufts at the back, as if someone had tried to pull it out in handfuls. She knocked at a door on the third floor, but it was only a gesture, she had a key for here as well. Inside was dark save for a faint sodium glow seeping down through the tops of tall windows. Felix switched on a light.

  – What ho! he called. Are you there, truepenny?

  No one answered.

  There were cardboard boxes on the floor inside the door, and piles of books, and a black overcoat and an umbrella hanging on a peg. The kitchen smelled of gas and oilcloth and something going bad. Felix lit the stove, opened a cupboard. The girl walked into the front room. I followed her. She stood at the window looking out. The church spire loomed in the dark against an acid sky. Clutter here as well, more boxes, books, soiled plates on the table. The girl was lighting a cigarette. The match flame shook.

  – You followed me, she said. That night.

  She went on looking out the window. Her mind seemed to be on something else.

  – You shouldn’t follow me.

  Felix came in, carrying a teapot.

  – Now! he said brightly. Nice cup of tea.

  He was wearing an old raincoat and scuffed, sharp-toed shoes. He set the teapot down on the table, sweeping aside smeared plates and scattered cutlery.

  – Getting acquainted, you two, I see, he said.

  He carried three cups to the fireplace and emptied their dregs into the littered grate.

  – I don’t want any of that stuff, the girl said.

  He frowned, looking about him in exaggerated puzzlement.

  – Stuff? he said. Stuff? Oh, the tea, you mean. Oh.

  He laughed to himself and went back to the table, shaking his head. He poured three cups of tea, and handed one to her. She took it.

  – Did you know, he said to her, our young friend here has been in hospital too. Did he tell you?

  For the first time now she looked at me directly. She had small, dark eyes, close-set, with a slight cast. She studied me for a moment, biting her lip. Her plastic raincoat was buttoned to the throat.

  A door behind us opened, and a small, fierce-looking man came in. He was wearing long woollen underwear, with a blanket draped over his shoulders. His hair stood up in sprouts of ginger bristles, and he had three or four days’ growth of reddish beard. He began to say something but sneezed instead. His bare feet were small, with horny, yellow nails.

  – Ah, professor, Felix said. We thought you must be out.

  The little man glared at him.

  – I am sick, he said.

  As if for emphasis, he sneezed again violently. Felix pointed to the blackened pot on the table.

  – Some tea, professor.

  This time the little man ignored him. The girl had turned back to the window. He hitched up his blanket, looking at her, and then at me.

  — Who are you? he said.

  Felix coughed.

  – This is the one I told you about, he said. You remember.

  The professor opened his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. We waited, but the sneeze did not come.

  – Ah, he said sourly. The prodigy.

  His name was Kosok.

  HAVE I MENTIONED the buses? I liked them, the way they trundled through the streets, gasping and shuddering, like big, serious, labouring animals. I would board one at random and ride to the end of the line, hunched in the front seat upstairs, watching the city unfurl around me, the tree-lined avenues and the little parks, the domes and turrets and cu
rlicued façades. A hoarding would slide past, then a burnished stretch of river, then a dead-end street with parked cars and children playing ball under a rusted railway bridge. I got to know the top half of things, the shabby upper storeys of smart shops, the fire escapes, the pots of geraniums in little sooty windows, the faded signs on brick walls for carbolic soap and plug tobacco and ship’s chandlers. And then the suburbs, the windswept wastes of housing estates, with straggly gardens, and toddlers dabbling in the gutters, and the sudden, quicksilver flash of a mirror in the drab depths of a bedroom window.

  When I think of those aimless, dreamy journeys, I think always of the girl. When she left the flat that first night I went with her. We walked through the dark streets in silence. When the bus came we were the only passengers, except for a drunk slumped on the bench seat at the back. We watched the glossy darkness sliding past the window. She smoked a cigarette. Her name was Adele. She looked at me sharply.

  – I’m not a Jew, you know, she said. You needn’t think I’m a Jew.

  The conductor told her she was not to smoke. She paid him no heed. She held the cigarette aloft in her thin, white fingers, flicking the end of it with a bitten thumbnail. We went by the river, under the jagged shadows of warehouses and cranes. The drunk woke up and shouted for a while, then fell into a stupor again. The conductor walked up and down between the rows of seats, chewing a matchstick, getting a good look at us, my face, her frantic hair, grinning to himself. Adele kept her eyes fixed on the window, flicking her cigarette, flicking, flicking, vibrating faintly, as if a thin, continuous current were passing through her.