Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Sure enough, it began to rain.

There were cranes and cement mixers in the hospital grounds, where a new extension was being built, an ugly concrete cube that was to be a recovery ward for young mothers who had suffered complications giving birth. It would be called the Griffin Wing, after the late Judge Garret Griffin, Quirke’s adoptive father, as it happened, who had left money in his will to build it. Oh, yes, Quirke thought. Conscience money.

The rain was coming down heavily now, whipped sideways by the sudden wind, and he sprinted the last twenty yards and at last gained the shelter of the red-brick portico. He stopped, and took off his hat and tried to shake the rain from it. The legs of his trousers were cold and clammy against his calves. A young couple appeared behind him, coming out from Reception, the fellow holding the door for his wife, who seemed hardly more than a girl, drained and dazed-looking, with lank blond hair. She was carrying a baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket. She smiled shyly, tentatively, at Quirke, while the young man scowled. He had an oiled quiff and long sideburns and wore drainpipe trousers and a coat-length jacket with high shoulder pads. Through the doorway the hospital breathed out its sharp, caustic smell; it was a smell Quirke had never got used to, although it was in his pores by now and must be the smell he too gave off. The teddy boy, for all his scowling, went on holding the door until Quirke, nodding at him and his drab wife, had stepped through. They must think he was a doctor; a real doctor.

There was a new nurse at Reception, pretty in a mousy sort of way, and painfully young. Often these days Quirke had the feeling that he was older than everyone around him. He realized suddenly that he was missing Isabel. He was glad she was not young, at least not young like this nurse or like the couple he had encountered in the doorway, half-grown-up children. When he smiled at the nurse she blushed and bent her head and pretended to be looking for something on the desk.

He went down the big curving marble staircase, and as he did so he had, as always, the panicky yet not entirely unpleasant sensation of slowly submerging into some dim, soft, intangible element. He thought again of being a child at Carricklea and how when he was having his weekly bath and if there was no Christian Brother around to stop him he would let himself slide underneath the water until he was entirely submerged. He would keep his eyes open, for he liked the shiny, swaying look of things through the water, the gleaming taps and the rippling edge of the bath and the ceiling that all at once appeared immensely far off above him. Often he had stayed like that for so long it had seemed, thrillingly, that his lungs would burst. More than once, when things were bad, and things at Carricklea could be very bad indeed, he had thought of keeping himself under until he drowned, but had never been able to summon up the courage to do it. Besides, if there was a world waiting for him on the far side of death he had a strong suspicion it would be another version of Carricklea, only worse.

At the foot of the stairs he turned left along the green-painted corridor. The walls down here had a permanent damp sheen, like sweat, and the air smelled of formaldehyde.

Why, he wondered, did he think so much about the past? The past, after all, was where he had been most unhappy. If only he could forget Carricklea his life, he was sure, would be different, would be lighter, freer, happier. But Carricklea would not let him forget, not ever.

Bolger, the porter, with mop and bucket, was swabbing the floor of the dissecting room. He was smoking a cigarette; it dangled from his lower lip with a good inch and a half of ash attached to it. Bolger, Quirke reflected, could smoke for Ireland in the Olympics and would win a gold medal every time. How he managed to keep the fag adhering to his lip like that, without the ash falling off, was a mystery. He was a stunted fellow with a sallow face and a big set of badly fitting dentures through which, when he spoke, tiny whistling sounds escaped, like faint background music. Quirke, as far as he could recall, had never seen him without his drab-green coat, which gave him, oddly, something of the look of a greengrocer.

“Morning, Ambrose,” Quirke said. Everyone else called him Ambie, but Quirke always gave the name its full flourish, for the mild comedy of it.

Bolger returned the greeting with an awful grin, showing off those outsized and unnervingly regular teeth. “Rain again,” he said with grim satisfaction.

Quirke went into his office and sat down at his desk and lit up a Senior Service. He still had that tinny taste in his mouth. The strip of fluorescent lighting in the ceiling made a continuous fizzing. There was a slit of window high up in the wall that was level with the pavement outside, where heavy rain was still falling. Now and then a passerby was to be seen, the feet only, hurrying past, oblivious of walking over this place of the dead.

Bolger came to the open door, mop in hand, bringing with him a whiff of stale water. “There’s a new one in,” he said. “Fished out of the canal in the small hours. Young fellow.”

Quirke sighed. He had been looking forward to an idle morning. “Where’s Dr. Sinclair?” he asked.

“Off today, I believe.”

“Oh. Right.”

Bolger detached the cigarette from his lip and knocked the ash from it into his cupped palm. Quirke could see he was getting ready for a chat, and stood up quickly from the desk. “Let’s have a look at him,” he said.

Bolger sniffed. “Hang on.” He laid his mop aside and crossed to one of the big steel sinks and dropped the cigarette ash from his palm into it, then went out and returned a moment later wheeling a trolley with a body draped in a nylon sheet. The rubber wheels of the trolley squeaked on the wet tiles, setting up a brief buzzing in Quirke’s back molars. He wondered how many years there were to go before Bolger’s retirement; the man could be any age from fifty to seventy-five.

Bolger had reinserted the butt of his cigarette into the left side of his mouth and had one eye screwed shut against the smoke. He drew back the sheet. Red hair in a widow’s peak plastered to a skull small enough to be that of a schoolboy. Bruises on the face, purple, mud blue, yellow ocher.

“Right,” Quirke said, “get him on the table, will you?” He began to move towards the sinks to scrub up, then stopped, turned, stared at the corpse. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I know him.”

Grafton Street was redolent of rain on sun-warmed concrete. Another shower had passed and the sun had come out and already the roadway was steaming. Quirke stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of violets. Violets were his daughter’s favorite flowers; to Quirke they smelled a little like dead flesh. The stallkeeper, a jolly, raw-faced woman, gave him his change and said she hoped the rain would keep off. He said he hoped so too. They both looked at the sky and the great bundle of icy-white cloud boiling above the rooftops — Quirke thought again of the corpse on the trolley — and the woman laughed skeptically and shook her head. He tried to think of something more to say; he was not eager to get to where he was going. He had a difficult task ahead of him, and he did not relish the prospect of it.

He moved on at last, but still he dawdled, watching vans being unloaded, the second post being delivered, and stopping at every other shop to stare vacantly into the window. He was like a schoolboy, he thought, with homework undone, trying not to get to school. He considered going into Bewley’s for coffee and a bun. What he really needed was a stiff drink, of course, but that, as he resentfully acknowledged, was out of the question, at this hour of the day, for it was not long past noon and he was supposed to have sworn off midday drinking.