Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Before taking up the job, Phoebe had worried that she would have to spend her days dealing with crazy people. On the contrary, however, Dr. Blake’s patients all seemed, so far — Phoebe had only been in the job a matter of weeks — not mad at all, and were nearly always polite and respectful. It was true that some of them gave off an unsettling air of barely suppressed excitement and tension; pop-eyed and tremulous, they seemed constantly on the point of jumping up and breaking into shouts and gesticulations, though they never did. Others were timid, watchful, worried.

A large proportion of the patients, she had noticed, were nail biters. It could be disturbing, listening to them as they sat there gnawing away like squirrels, as if they were trying to get at the sweet, crisp core of themselves. Sometimes they spat fragments of nail on the carpet, though discreetly, watching her out of the corner of an eye. One of them, a youngish man with enormous ears and so thin it seemed he must be starving himself to death, not only bit his nails but also, on occasion, sucked his thumb. She tried not to look at him, sitting there sucking away, like a big, emaciated baby.

There was never more than one patient waiting; that was Dr. Blake’s rule. Her consulting room had two doors, the one behind Phoebe’s desk and another one, on the far side of the room, where the patient could exit unseen when the session was at an end. No sounds ever came out of that room. The door had been specially installed, and was extra thick, and Phoebe found uncanny the fraught, unbroken silence always at her back.

She was happy enough in the job, though at times she was bored. In the shop the customers were normal — most of them, anyway — and used to chat to her, talking about the weather and stories in the news, and gossiping about well-known people misbehaving themselves. Here, at Dr. Blake’s, there was a feeling sometimes of being in church; she might have been an assistant outside the confessional, monitoring the penitents as they silently waited their turn to slink into the shadowed chamber and tell their shameful sins.

David Sinclair teased her about her job. “How were the head cases today?” he would ask, crossing his eyes and letting his tongue hang out. She was displeased. Usually he was sensitive and didn’t mock people. Maybe, being a doctor himself, he felt threatened by psychiatry, this strange, almost mystical practice that the church kept trying to ban and forbade its members from having anything to do with. Freud was a Jew, however, and so was David, which surely should have made him have sympathy with, or at least understand, the thinking that psychiatry was based on. But maybe that was a foolish assumption.

Today was slow, so far. The thumb sucker had been in first thing, with his aggrieved and accusing stare. Then there had been a harassed woman with her feral ten-year-old son, then a shady man in his sixties who, although he was dressed in slacks and a sports shirt, had the definite air of a priest — why did priests, when they tried to disguise themselves in ordinary clothes, always give the game away by wearing white socks? It was as if, through old habit, they had to have some sign of sanctity about their persons. Now it was nearly lunchtime, and the next patient who was due, Mr. Jolly — that really was his name — hadn’t appeared yet, although he was down in the appointments book for twelve-thirty. Mr. Jolly liked to chat and had told Phoebe all about his problem, which was that he couldn’t resist beating his wife, even though he claimed to love her dearly. There had been occasions when Phoebe felt Mr. Jolly wouldn’t need to bother going in to see Dr. Blake, since he had already poured out all his most intimate troubles to her, here in the waiting room.

In the end Mr. Jolly didn’t turn up, and at one o’clock Dr. Blake came out and told Phoebe that since there were no more patients due today, she could take the afternoon off. It was not unusual for Dr. Blake to let her go like this, which was another nice thing about the job. The doctor was in her early middle age, a large, handsome woman with untidy hair, prematurely flecked with gray, which Phoebe was convinced she cut herself, as no hairdresser would have let her leave the salon looking like that, like a ragged and tipsy page boy. Her husband, a surgeon, had died not long ago in a car crash on the Naas Road. She was taciturn but not unfriendly, and she rarely smiled, though when she did she was transformed. She had a broad, soft face and strikingly large, almost black eyes. Her manner was slow, and she had an air of faint melancholy that Phoebe guessed was congenital and not due to her recent bereavement. She wore tweed skirts and floppy silk blouses and sensible flat shoes. She was what Phoebe imagined she herself would be, one day, except, she hoped, for the hairstyle.

Phoebe put the plastic cover over her typewriter, wondering if Mrs. Jolly was getting an extra beating today, and if that was what had delayed her husband. In fact, she suspected there was no Mrs. Jolly, except in Mr. Jolly’s fevered imaginings.

The day was hot but there was a cool breeze coming down from the mountains, the pale outlines of which she could see far off past the end of the street. She walked along by the green railings of the square, savoring the smell of cut grass — the petrol mower had already been going when she arrived at the office that morning. At the bottom of the street she turned left and walked along Merrion Row to St. Stephen’s Green.

She hadn’t been to the Country Shop since Jimmy Minor’s death; it was the place where she and Jimmy used to meet. Now as she went down the steps she recalled fondly how he would come rushing into the café and fling himself down at the table and launch straight off into a scurrilous story about some politician or businessman, heedlessly dropping ash on the table, while his tea got cold and his sandwich began to curl at the corners. Poor, dear Jimmy, beaten to death one dark night and flung into the canal like a dog.

She sat at a table by the window and ordered tea and a ham sandwich, in Jimmy’s honor. She took out her packet of Gold Flake and her lighter and put them on the table. She had taken up smoking again, she wasn’t sure why, on her last day at the hat shop. She wasn’t a real smoker, and hardly inhaled at all. She just liked the image of herself sitting on her own at a café table with a cigarette and a book, looking mysterious, or at least interesting. She had always been solitary, and was so still, despite the fact that she was going out with David Sinclair. He was solitary, too. The result was that they were never really together, only side by side, like two trees growing close by each other in a forest.

The waitress brought her order. She was a plump, friendly girl with a wen on the side of her nose who had been working here for as long as Phoebe could remember. “Oh, and miss,” she said, “there’s this for you.” She handed Phoebe a folded slip of paper. “A person asked me to give it to you.”

It was a half sheet torn from a copybook, like the copybooks they used to use for shorthand practice at the agency when she was doing her course there. The message on it was scribbled in pencil and was, indeed, in shorthand, as she saw with a small shock of recognition.

Could we meet? I’ll wait in the Green, on the bench at the pond. I need to talk to you. You will know me from the agency. Please come. Lisa.

Phoebe read it three times, then beckoned to the waitress. “Who was it that gave you this?” she asked.

“A girl, miss,” the waitress said, a little nervously.

“What sort of girl?”

“Just a girl, miss. A young woman.”

“Where was she? Was she here, in the café?”

“No, she was passing by. I think she saw you, through the window, and came down and called me over to the door and gave the paper to me and pointed you out and asked would I give it to you.”