Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

After supper he had put on his coat and hat and his woolen scarf and told his missus that he had a thing to do and that she should not wait up. She had stared at him but made no comment; she was used to his peculiarities by now, though sauntering off into the night like this was a new one. She stopped him in the hall and asked if he was likely to be outside on such an icy night, and when he said yes, maybe, probably, she told him to sit down on the chair beside the hat stand and wait there, and went off to the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a flask of tea and a handful of biscuits in a brown paper bag. She stood in the doorway and watched him walk down the short path to the gate and then turn right towards the river.

He had promised himself he would take a taxi if the cold was really bad, but it was a fine, sharp night, the kind of night he remembered from when he was a boy, the air clear and the sky sparkling with stars, and the moon graying the houses and throwing sharp-edged shadows across front gardens. The last buses had gone and there was little traffic, only the odd car, its dimmed lamps lighting up dense scatterings of diamonds on the frosty roadway, and, when he got to the canal, a fleet of newspaper vans on the way down the country with the first editions. He hummed to himself as he walked along. The flask of tea in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat kept banging against his knee, but he did not mind; it was good of her to think of it. He crossed a hump backed bridge and turned left. He thought of taking the towpath, but despite the moonlight it was too dark down there- a fine thing it would be if he lost his footing and went into the water arse over tip- and he kept to the upper, concrete path instead, under the trees, the bare branches of which made a faint, restless clicking, although there was not a breath of wind to stir them. He stopped, and stood to listen, looking upwards into the dark tracery of twigs. Was it the cold, the frost falling on them, that made them move and tap against each other? The sound was like the sound of someone knitting while half asleep. He ambled on.

He had no plan, no specif c action in mind. When Dr. Quirke telephoned him to say his daughter had seen someone outside her flat, he had thought he would get the duty sergeant to put someone from the squad on it, maybe that young fellow he had been given as an assistant, red-haired Tomelty, who chafed at office work and could not wait to get out on the streets and start apprehending wrongdoers. A four-hour stint on a winter night quartering the same fifty-yard stretch of pavement would cool his ardor nicely. But he had not asked for Tomelty, he was not sure why. He would be thought mad, of course, if anyone knew he had taken on the job himself, but he did not care; anyway, most of them at the station considered him already partway cracked. The truth was he was savoring a sweet, intense nostalgia for former days, when he was young, like young Tomelty, and probably just as irritatingly eager.

Quirke had told him too about the black man, Ojukway or what ever he was called, that his daughter in turn had told Quirke about. So the old woman in the flat had been right, after all. He had got one of the squad-car men to drive him round to the house in Castle Street, but the fellow was not there, and the woman in the house, a queer one with a fag in the corner of her mouth and a head of yellow curls that would have looked too young on someone half her age, had said she had not seen him since the day before, though his bed had been slept in- oh, it certainly had, she said with a sniff and a significant look. She thought she had heard noises in the night-” those sort of noises, you know?”- but she could not be sure, and normally he was a quiet young fellow and kept to himself, though of course with them you could never tell what they might get up to. He had asked to see the room, but there was nothing there of interest, on a cursory glance, at least. He asked Goldilocks if she knew where he might have gone to, but she did not. Like April Latimer, the black man had left without taking any of the necessities with him, so probably, unlike April, he would soon return. Hackett hoped so; he looked forward to having a word with Mr. Ojakewu.

Just before Baggot Street bridge he spotted a dim shape huddled on a bench beside the lock, and stopped to have a look. It was a tramp, cocooned in a bundle of rags, peacefully sleeping, and he decided not to disturb him. How did they survive, these poor creatures, out all night in any weather? It must be a couple of degrees below freezing to night. Should he have roused him and given him a few shillings to find shelter and a bed for himself somewhere? He would probably only be cursed for his trouble, and likely the money would be kept and spent on drink in the first pub to open in the morning. He sighed, thinking how hard a station life is for some, and how little there is to be done for the world’s unfortunates.

The young trees on Haddington Road made no sounds, unlike their older cousins along the canal. He counted off the houses on the other side of the street until he came to the one where the Quirke girl lived- no, he remembered, she was not called Quirke, but Griffin. That was all a strange and painful business, Dr. Quirke discovered to have given away his baby to his sister-in-law and her husband, the man who was as good as a brother to him. What got into folk, at all, to do such things? He supposed he was not much of a policeman if he was still capable of being surprised by the waywardness of human beings.

There were no lights to be seen in the house, save a faint glow in the transom over the front door, which would be the hall light. He stood on the opposite footpath, under one of the young trees, in a shadowed place midway between two streetlamps, looking up at the shining black windows of what he knew to be Phoebe’s flat. His thoughts turned once more to Quirke, that difficult, troubled man. They had so little in common, the two of them, and yet he felt a closeness between them, a bond, almost. Strangely, the person Quirke most reminded him of was his sister, who had died. Poor Winnie. Like Quirke, she could not escape from the past. She had been a sickly child, and, as she grew older, something had happened to her mind; she became prey to nightmares and all kinds of waking horrors, and there was no helping her. She lived with her head turned away from everyone and everything in the present; she was like a person stumbling over stony ground and always looking backwards, terrified of losing sight of the place where she had set out from, however sad and painful a place it had been. And then one day she tripped and fell. They found her in her bed with her rosary beads in one hand and the empty pill bottle in the other. “Now she’s where she always wanted to be,” their father said. That was Quirke, looking back longingly to a past where he had been so unhappy.

He heard a sound. Or not a sound, not exactly, more a feeling, a sensation. What first alerted him was his hearing making an adjustment by itself. It was as if a waveband had been changed and he was listening now on a higher, more finely tuned frequency. There was someone nearby in the street, he was sure of it. He looked to his left, barely moving his head. He was attending so hard now that he seemed to hear the frost itself falling, a faint ringing, needle-sharp, all around him in the darkness of the air. He could see no one. There was the line of trees, evenly spaced, and in every third space a lamppost, shedding its circle of chalky radiance. What should he do? Should he move, step into the light, call out a challenge? Slowly, slowly, he took a step backwards, paused, took another step, until he felt the cold hardness of garden railings at his back. He was still looking to the left. Then he saw it, the person-shaped shadow, a good fifty yards off, next to the trunk of a tree, just out of the lamplight. He began to edge sideways in that direction, putting his hands behind him and feeling his way along the railings to guide and steady himself. As he advanced into the light of the first lamp he shrank back, but all the same he knew he could be seen, if the watcher were to turn in this direction. On he went at his crabwise pace, slowly, steadily, and then, when there were no more than twenty yards between him and his quarry, he came without realizing it to an open gateway, and reaching his hands back into the sudden emptiness behind him he felt himself swaying sideways, and the thermos in his pocket struck the metal gatepost with a dull, metallic thunk . He swore under his breath. The shadow turned, crouched, and then sprinted away into the darkness and in a moment was gone. He cursed himself again, leaning in the gateway. Tomelty, he thought, young Tomelty would have given chase, as he could not, on his middle-aged legs, with that damned flask banging against his knees.