Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  Returned to his little room in the boarding house on the seafront, he puts a kettle on the bachelor’s stove in the inglenook and prepares to shave. His ninth home in sixteen months, always little flats and bedsitters around the northside coastal villages, rooms at the tops of staircases. Probably he’ll move again soon.

  The thought of the evening meal with his fellow boarders settles like dust. A quintet of perfect, mutually uncomprehending misery, failure, mummery and halitosis. A tableau vivant (on a good day) of chances-all-gone, of peas-on-the-knife-eating hideousness. What dystopia of roaring shame has he wandered into that he must share a table with this confederacy of the damned? Mr Miggs, Mr Briggs, tall Mr Lawlor, small Mr Lawlor and Mr Strange. Beige-eyed Mr Miggs, a bean-counter in Guinness’s, from some godforsaken wind-lashed crossroads in the midlands. Getting away from it had sapped every bubble of manhood he had. Scallops evinced more life. Mr Briggs, so it was whispered, had been a girls’ school teacher in Exeter but, following a series of apprehensions in that city’s public parks, seemed unlikely to be allowed to be one again. Small Mr Lawlor had flakily poor skin, his lank namesake a goitre and a habit of picking his ears. Dribbling Mr Strange was painfully meek but was not going to inherit the earth. ‘Ah, Stoker,’ the ruined would ask as he sat to the cabbage soup. ‘How goes the gay life of the Castle?’

  On the crooked windowsill, his old copies of Sheridan Le Fanu, Maturin, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, their pages loose and spilling, his often-pawned Complete Shakespeare. The Black Prophet by William Carleton, stolen from Marino Library. A Guide to the Munich Dead-House. On the corkboard above the monkish bed, souvenir postcards of actors he loves: William Terriss, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry.

  Seven times he has seen Irving play, Ellen Terry thirteen. Her gift, her presence, enthrals him. Like the changelings he has read of in his mother’s mouldering storybooks, she has a magic that seems otherworldly, dangerous.

  In a pewter frame on the window ledge, a daguerreotype of two people on their wedding day: white-eyed, stiff, in funereal black. To imagine these waxworks participating in the act that made them his parents is beyond his wildest powers. They emigrated to Brussels some years ago, with his sisters, to save money. He decided to remain in Clontarf.

  Shave completed, he prepares a pot of tea with the seaweed he has gathered and begins lifting his dumb-bells in sequence, huffing with the effort, wrists throbbing. Eight o’clock now. He needs to hurry on. The two-pounders, the sixers, the half-a-stone. He tries to keep his grunting to a minimum so as not to upset the landlady downstairs or her elderly mother, the latter having the hearing of a dog. (‘Go up and tell that Stoker article this is not that sort of house.’ ‘Mr Stoker is at his exercises, Mammy, for the love of God stop shouting.’ ‘I’ll exercise him in a minute. With the tip of my boot. The queer-looking Protestant shitehawk.’)

  Pain rippling through the sinews of his forearms, tautening, straightening, and he finds himself wondering if Irving lifts weights; it would be wise for all actors to do so. Acting is about the body as much as the words, and the body gets lazy, resentful of being inhabited. The Roman Catholics believe in pain, think it’s redemptive, bracing; like the buttress of an old cathedral, pain stops you collapsing. They punish their bodies for the mortgage of their souls. It’s good that the punishment is for something.

  The little kettle on the stove starts whistling meekly, as though intimidated by the display of underclad manliness it has been forced to watch. As he crosses to damp the flame, he sees, through the yellowing lace curtains, a familiar figure downstairs on the street.

  It’s the walk he recognises first, its show-offy sense of performance, the saunter of a libertine wearing the most expensive clothes in this protectorate of the Empire, a man for whom being watched has become an art form.

  Stoker ducks behind the pelmet. Doesn’t want to be seen. Especially not by him.

  What can he be doing out here in Clontarf, and so early? Why has he wandered from the city? The bell trings downstairs, followed by three sharp raps on the knocker. He hears the landlady lilting ‘The Verdant Braes of Screen’ to herself as she limps through the hall, the clatter as she opens the sticky door. Then her crutches on the creaking staircase, her breathlessness as she knocks.

  ‘It’s myself, Mr Stoker, sir? You’ve a caller below? Are you after going out to your work?’

  He doesn’t move. Scarcely blinks. Points at the kettle. ‘Keep quiet, you bastard,’ he whispers.

  Minutes later, hurrying from the house, he collects the calling card and scribbled note from the hall stand.

  My dear Bram. Was taking the sea air this morning and popped by on the chance you might be tempted to a constitutional. Quel dommage to have missed you. A pleasure deferred. Ever yours, Oscar Wilde.

  — III —

  In which a young man receives counsel on the avoidance of sinful occasions

  The village seems asleep, its little shops darkened, the storm-blown frontage of the funeral parlour bedecked in lengths of sodden black crêpe, garlands of grey rosettes. By the drapery, a scummy lake-like puddle where the landlady’s mother’s dogs are nuzzling. Loamy smells from the haggards, from the unseen yards. Wind flaps the faded Union Jack on the post office roof, a sound like the guttering of a flame as it furls itself around its trembling pole.

  A girl in radiant yellow emerges from the shadowed alley by the dairy, a yoke of blackened milk-cans borne crossways on her left shoulder, and regards him for a moment as she passes on the footpath with an after-aroma of sweet warm soap. Her bare feet are white, her brown hair loose, a crucifix in the bosom of her chemise. He finds himself recollecting a morning in Paris, when, stopping on his way to visit the crypt at Notre Dame, he had been approached in the street by a dark-eyed girl who had asked him for directions to the Mabillon. She was Irish, a Dubliner, she thought him an Englishman and for some reason he didn’t say he wasn’t. He knew what was happening, had read in his Gentlemen’s Guide to Paris that this was how such girls approached one.

  She had spoken of the weather, of the bookstalls by the Seine, as the students hurried by to their lectures at the University and then she had asked, in almost a whisper, if he wished to accompany her to a room. It was nearby, she said, off the rue des Canettes. She spoke quietly, without shame. He’d been afraid to do so, had sent her away. He had not the twenty francs, he told her. Ten, then, sir. There is no need to be shy. He had given her what he could spare but not gone with her.

  He thinks about her now, as he walks damp Clontarf, through the dung and the mud of the almost empty street and the zizzing of unseen flies. That evening in Paris, the thought of what he had declined had blazed in him so fiercely that he couldn’t sleep. At midnight he dressed quickly and hurried back to the rue de l’Université, drunk with a smoulder he didn’t want to call lust. The thought of warm hands, of low, Irish laughter. The thought of being alone with another in a room.

  The lobby of Clontarf Police Barracks is small, dimly lit, papered with advertisements for dog licences, interdictions, ordinances, tattered old warnings about gorse fires. A placard forbidding public meetings is nailed to the wall by the hatch.

  Everything is quiet. Still not too late to stop. What he is about to do is insane. A worm of steely pain uncoils itself in his gut. His temples are drumming. From behind the counter the old constable looks at him assessingly, drawing a ledger tied on a string from some recess and opening it.

  ‘You wish to report an intruder, sir. Your address if you please?’

  ‘Number 15, The Crescent, on the far side of the village. It is my landlady’s house. I lodge there.’

  ‘Mr Stoker isn’t it, sir?’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘By dad I’m not rightly sure, sir. People talk, I suppose.’

  The constable sips gloomily from a chipped enamel mug and riffles through the stiff pages in a methodical way, removing a length of leather strap doing duty as bookmark. The fingers of his right hand are nico
tine-umbered.

  ‘When did this incident occur, sir?’

  ‘Earlier this morning. Dark fellow, muscular, rather flamboyantly dressed for a man. A middleweight. Felt hat. I happened to look out of my window and saw him in the side garden sort of mooching about.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I opened the window and let him have it.’

  ‘Verbally, sir?’

  ‘Of course verbally.’

  The constable nods as he writes.

  ‘Go on, sir. Anything more?’

  ‘My landlady’s gardener, old Hoggen, has a potting shed there. I saw this character trying the lock and challenged him immediately. He let loose with a few remarks of the sort you can imagine.’

  ‘Of what nature were the remarks?’

  ‘Remarks of a filthy and scurrilous stamp. Regarding Protestants and so on. “West-Britons.” He took off pretty sharpish in the direction of the Strand when I told him I had a shotgun in the house.’

  ‘Have you, sir?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘A shotgun in the house.’

  ‘Had I a shotgun in the house, I would have used it.’

  ‘Is anything afterbeen took that you know of?’

  ‘I’m not certain. I don’t believe so. But I was concerned for my landlady and her mother. Her mother is an invalid.’

  ‘What class of height was our nice friend?’

  ‘About my own, I should say.’

  ‘Anything distinguishing about him?’

  ‘As I mentioned, his clothing. He was rather effeminately dressed. A Latin Quarter hat and a cloak affair with a fur collar.’

  ‘In Clontarf?’

  ‘But look here, what concerns me most is that I have seen him hanging about near the gate of the house previously.’

  The constable raises his old eyes gravely as though this impartation is important.

  ‘Excuse me a tick, sir,’ he says, sloping away into the dimly lit office behind him where his fellows are talking and smoking, a cloud of purple dusty smoke. He exchanges mumbles with a colleague, a bullet-headed man who looks as though life has been hard on him. Comes back to the hatch pulling on a raincoat.

  ‘I’ll stroll up to the house with you and take a gander about, sir.’

  ‘I say, must you? I am late for my work.’

  ‘It won’t take but a few minutes. I’ll require you to accompany me if you’d be so good. You’ve made a serious enough charge, after all.’

  Now he is walking back up the avenue with the elderly constable at his side. They make small talk about the weather, the birds. The constable is a Galwayman, ‘a blow-in’ as he puts it, and the phrase seems to bounce in the air between them. A limping boy on the way to school with a string of books under his arm glances over his shoulder at the curious duo.

  ‘And you work inside in the Castle, sir, unless I’m greatly mistaken?’

  ‘You seem to know a great deal about me.’

  ‘That’s a place seen a share of suffering, sir, God knows, down the years. Prisoners went into that place and never seen daylight again. Bricked up in the walls. Buried alive. But forgive and forget, that’s what I says myself. Still, there’s a ghost or two walking them battlements, I’ll go bail. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I have never seen one if so.’

  ‘’Tis more than we see does go on in the world. And what sort of duties would you be having at the Castle, sir, if I may ask?’

  ‘I am a clerk in the Office of Petty Sessions.’

  ‘The courts and so on?’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘’Tis a man of the law you are, so, sir. Like myself.’

  The constable opens the whiny little gate and walks around the front garden, staring silently at the grave-like mounds of earth, before approaching the potting shed and examining its lock. He tries the bolt a couple of times, wrinkles his nose. Wind moves the branches. A filigree of sunlight surrounds him.

  Snapdragons lick their lips. Nettles unfurl. A thicket of briars begins drooling.

  ‘It was here you saw My Nabs, sir?’ the constable asks. ‘Over here by the door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quare there’s no boot prints. With the ground being damp.’ He toes at the clay as though the action might uncover something.

  ‘I saw what I saw.’

  ‘Certain sure you did, sir. You seen what you seen.’

  The constable bends heavily and plucks an object from the flower bed, testing its point with his uncommonly plump fingertips.

  Tomatoes in the glasshouse wither open their skins.

  ‘You’d want to let your garden-man know not to be leaving a dangerous auld yoke like that lying about. That’s a thing could do a body a damage, so it could.’

  ‘He has been putting up a fence,’ Stoker replies, accepting the leaf-draped twelve-inch wooden stake. The constable lunges towards him, baring small white incisors –

  ‘MR STOKER.’

  Dry-mouthed, hot, he shudders awake at his desk. His superior, Mr Meates, is standing in the door frame like an undertaker come to collect on his bill. A profoundly biblical Ulsterman, he talks with clipped contempt for anything he suspects might be human nature.

  ‘At what time did you delight us with your appearance this morning, Mr Stoker?’

  ‘Some time after half past nine, sir.’

  ‘I am well aware that it was some time after half past nine, Mr Stoker. I have not lost the use of my senses. My question, if you’d be so good – if I do not interrupt your reveries – is how much time after half past nine.’

  ‘I should say ten or fifteen minutes afterwards, sir. I was detained coming in to the office.’

  Mr Meates approaches the desk slowly like a battleship bearing down on a disobedient island. He regards the sheaf of parchments on the blotter, the porcupine of unsharpened quills, the tall stack of files, the overflowing in-drawer, as he purses and unpurses the part of his face where his lips should be.

  ‘When’s this do you think I was born, Mr Stoker?’

  ‘Forgive me, I don’t take your meaning, sir.’

  ‘He doesn’t take my meaning, sir. Isn’t that wild unusual all the same. Wouldn’t you wonder what they do be teaching them in Trinity College nowadays? Lost in the fine web of thought.’

  This is another of his superior’s odd mannerisms, the addressing in paraphrase of some invisible third party, the summation of what you’ve just said. When you hear it, you know you are facing sticky going, that it will not be too much longer before he starts yattering on about having known your father.

  ‘This, Mr Stoker, is a place where governance is practised. Not a doss house or’ – he waves vaguely – ‘an opium den.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The work we do has importance. That may not always be evident to you, or even to me. But ours is not to question the will of our superiors on the mainland and the sagacity they have displayed in the organisation of our labours.’

  Please don’t start on about the bees, Stoker thinks.

  ‘I wonder if you are at all familiar with apicology, Mr Stoker. Because in a hive, Mr Stoker, everyone plays his part. If he didn’t, the queen would expire. And it falls to you, Mr Stoker, to attend here with punctuality and to give an example to the younger men, of dependability and calm purpose. You will have noticed that there are also a number of women working here, in subservient roles, cleaning, so on. What do you think would happen were the women to be given a poor example?’

  ‘Chaos, sir.’

  ‘Chaos, Mr Stoker. They would go out of their minds. And they wouldn’t have far to travel.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Do you understand the idea of presence?’

  ‘I think so, sir, yes.’

  ‘Not to be away with the faeries when you are paid to be here at your work. Not to be dreaming up nonsenses for your so-called writings in pagan socialistic rags.’

  ‘If I may say so, sir—’

  ‘In publications that
, so far as I can see, do not have the betterment of white Christian society as we know it as their aim but its overthrowal and replacement by a sort of Zululand-on-the-Liffey. Bananas and anarchy. Bananarchy.’

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘Do not interrupt me, Mr Stoker. I have seen your literary efforts. Witches and goblins and the dear knows what. You would want to catch a good grip on yourself so you would.’

  ‘I don’t believe I have ever written a story about a goblin, sir.’

  Mr Meates empurples. His eyes are damp.

  ‘Oh, wild smart, Mr Stoker. A scholar and a wit. What do you think would happen if all of us surrendered to unmanly slackness and acted the layabout whenever we felt like it? If I, for example, remained at home all day, gardening or playing the fiddle or frightening myself? What do you think would happen if I didn’t come in here at all?’

  By any standards, an unfair question.

  Without waiting for an answer the Lord of the Mummies continues. ‘I knew your father, Mr Stoker. We served many years together here in this office. It is to his intercession, I may tell you plainly, that you owe your position here. I was loath to accept you, I didn’t like the cut of you, but I overruled my better judgement out of loyalty to a man of responsibility and punctilio. A man who did not gamble away the time allotted him by the Almighty consorting with triflers, buffoons and sensualists.’

  ‘In what way do you feel—’

  ‘I’d as lief you didn’t grin at me in that supercilious manner, Mr Stoker. Dublin is small. You are a frequenter of the theatre, I am told. Don’t deny it.’

  ‘I attend the theatre sometimes.’

  ‘He attends the theatre sometimes. Lucifer’s recruiting station.’

  ‘If I may say so, sir, I think you’re perhaps taking the matter a little too seriously.’

  ‘Och and heaven forfend that any of us would do that. It is certainly not a failing that could be ascribed to yourself. Was there ever a woman of thon theatre who was more than two steps removed from harlotry? Think on your father, sir. Think on your end. The theatre is the liar’s house, a seething pit of idolatry. The fifth chapter of Ephesians counsels us plainly: “Have thee no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness but rather reprove them.” How would your father feel to see his son lost to lewd entertainments designed to thrill poor half-wits and the scum of the tenements?’