Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“Here.” She gave him back his cigarette. “Oh, too bad,” she said, “I always do get lipstick on them, don’t I.”

Dusk was gathering in the tops of the trees along O’Connell Street. Phoebe, who had been sitting on the upper deck of the bus, got off before it turned the corner onto Parnell Square, and walked over to the Shakespeare. The pub was crowded with theatergoers who had rushed down from the Gate to snatch a quick drink during the interval. She hoped she wouldn’t run into Isabel Galloway, who often acted at the Gate. Isabel had been her friend, once, but her affair with Quirke and its petering out had soured relations between them. Phoebe regretted this, but there was nothing to be done about it.

David had kept a place for her at the bar. She sat up on the stool beside him and asked for a gin and tonic. She noticed that he didn’t kiss her, yet otherwise everything seemed as usual. She never knew quite where she was, with David. Somehow his mind always seemed to be elsewhere.

She asked him about his day, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it, that it was too boring. This was how it always was, she asking and him refusing; it had become a sort of unfunny comic turn between the two of them. But she supposed he was right: there probably wasn’t much to be said, if you had spent the past eight hours dissecting dead bodies. She wondered, not for the first time, why he had become a pathologist in the first place. Quirke, now, could have been born into the job, but David always seemed to her to have been meant for other things, though she couldn’t imagine what those other things might be.

She told him about Lisa Smith, and the note in the parcel of laundry. They talked about it for a while, and about Leon Corless’s death and Lisa Smith’s connection with him.

“Quirke loves to get mixed up in this kind of thing, doesn’t he,” David said.

“He doesn’t go looking for trouble, if that’s what you mean. Don’t you ever feel the urge to follow up on something you uncovered in a postmortem?”

“I’m a doctor,” he said, “not a detective.” He fingered his glass, rotating it on its base and frowning. “He shouldn’t involve you, you know.”

“Shouldn’t he? Why not?”

He turned his head and gave her a long look. “Because it’s dangerous. You didn’t see Leon Corless’s body, or what was left of it. I did. If I were your father, I’d make very sure you didn’t go anywhere near people capable of doing that kind of thing.”

She began to say something but stopped herself. She didn’t want to fight with David. Once, she would have; not now.

They drank in silence for a while. Phoebe liked the way the ice cubes, submerged among the rushing bubbles, creaked and cracked, though the place was so crowded with noisy drinkers that to hear the effect she had to put the glass close to her ear. She had the secret notion that all things, even inanimate objects, had a life of their own, and their own way of expressing themselves. She knew David would laugh at her if she told him this, and so she never had. There were, she reflected, many things she didn’t tell him, and she was sure there were many things too that he didn’t tell her. They were not, she reflected, your ordinary couple. If, indeed, they were a couple at all.

“Have another drink,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

He was finishing a pint of Guinness. “Mind if I do?”

“Of course not.”

He signaled to the barman by lifting the empty glass and waggling it. The barman nodded, and took down a fresh glass and put it under the spout and pulled slowly on the wooden handle, and the gleaming black liquid gushed out in a thin, frothing stream.

“I had a letter from my friend Yotam today,” David said.

“Oh, yes? In Tel Aviv, is it?”

“He lives in Tel Aviv, but he’s on a kibbutz at the moment, helping out in the medical center.”

“That must be interesting.”

“Yes,” he said. He was watching the barman pulling the last of the pint and putting the finishing touches to the creamy head. “He certainly makes it sound interesting.”

“You haven’t been to Israel, have you?”

“No. My father was there. He went out in forty-eight, to fight the Arabs.”

“Was he all right? I mean, he didn’t get wounded or anything?”

“No. But there were other kinds of scars, of course. It was a dirty war.”

The barman brought the pint. David paid for it, and left it sitting on its cork mat, and folded his arms on the bar and watched a slow trail of cream sliding down the outside of the glass.

“He suggested I should come out there,” he said, not looking at her.

She was confused. “Your father?”

“No, no.” He laughed. “Yotam. He says I’d enjoy it, that the country is buzzing, really alive.”

She said nothing for a moment. The last of the ice cubes were melting in the bottom of her glass. The slice of lemon looked abandoned and forlorn. She had known a girl at school who used to eat lemons. She would cut them into four segments and suck the juice out of them. She used to look funny, with the slice in her mouth, like a set of smooth, bright yellow dentures.

“Do you think you’d like to go there,” she said at last, “on a visit?”

He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “Oh, I don’t know. Somehow Israel isn’t the kind of place you go to for a holiday. Everything is too — too serious, for that. I can’t see myself sightseeing in a country that’s fighting every day for its very existence.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know what you mean. I think I do, anyway.”

“He tells me — Yotam tells me — there’s a job going in Haifa.” He laughed shyly. “He says it would suit me perfectly.”

“A job as a pathologist?”

“No. As a general physician.”

“Could you do that, could you be an ordinary doctor? I mean, a doctor who deals with living people?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I could. I’d probably have to take a course or two, but that wouldn’t matter.”

They were silent again. A sense of something — embarrassment, perhaps — was seeping up between them like fog, like smoke. The pub was rapidly emptying as the Gate crowd downed the last of their drinks and hurried back to the theater.

“So you’re thinking about it, are you?” Phoebe said carefully. “You’re thinking about the job in Haifa?”

He turned to look at her. “Yes, I suppose I am. The thing is”—he touched a hand to his forehead; he looked miserable suddenly—“the thing is, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a pathologist. A bit late to come to that realization, you’ll say, and you’ll be right. But you have to look at things squarely, and if they’re wrong you have to do something about it, or try to, before it’s too late.”

Phoebe didn’t look at him. “I think I will have another drink,” she said, swallowing.

David signaled again to the barman, pointing to her empty glass. Again the barman nodded. It must be strange, Phoebe thought, to be a barman, standing behind the bar all night, serving out drinks and watching people getting tipsy while you had to stay stone-cold sober. That must be why barmen were so slow and taciturn, a bit like policemen; that was their professional pace, the way they had trained themselves to be.

If things are wrong, you have to do something about it. Well, yes.

Her drink arrived and she took a large swallow from it — too large, and the bubbles went up her nose and made her sneeze. She laughed, groping in her bag for a handkerchief.

“Here,” David said, “take mine, it’s clean.”

“Thanks.”

She blew her nose. She felt as if she were going to cry, but she was sure it was just the effect of the bubbles still fizzing in her sinuses.