Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Quirke and Rose exchanged a glance.

“How are you, Mal?” Quirke asked.

Direct and simple questions always seemed to confuse Malachy. He had got his glasses off at last and stood blinking, still vaguely smiling. He wore a checked shirt and a dark red bow tie and a fawn cardigan with leather buttons in the shape of some kind of nut. Quirke glanced down and was surprised to see that his brother was wearing shoes, not slippers; over the years Mal had become definitively a carpet-slipper man.

“How about a drink, boys?” Rose asked, setting a hand on her hip. “Quirke — what will you have?”

“Brandy, if you’ve got it.”

She gave him a wry look. “It’s the Dry Gulch Saloon here, Doc — you can get anything you want.”

She went out, and the two men stood facing each other in a suddenly discomforted silence, which Mal at last broke. “You said on the phone you—” he began, but Quirke lifted a hand to stop him, saying, “Let’s wait till I’ve had my drink.” He looked about at the brown walls with their sporting prints dimly illumined by the lamp with its skin-colored shade. He felt a sudden sinking of the heart. What help would there be for him here? And yet he heard himself say, “I think I’m sick, Mal.”

Mal nodded, as if this were not news at all. “In what way?” he asked.

“I don’t know. My mind, my brain — I think there’s something wrong with it.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“For Christ’s sake, Mal!”

“I don’t mean now, I mean have you been drinking lately? Have you been on a binge?”

Quirke shook his head. “It’s not the drink.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Mal said, with a faint smile.

“Well, in my case it’s true,” Quirke snapped. “I know what it’s like, I’ve had the DTs. This is different.”

Mal was gazing at him myopically, smiling with an almost mournful tenderness. “Yes,” he said “I can see you’re in distress. Tell me what I can do.”

Quirke gave a sort of laugh. “I was hoping you ’d tell me that.”

Rose came back then, carrying a silver tray with glasses, a brandy snifter, and a decanter and various bottles. “Here’s your medicine, Doctor,” she said to Quirke. She put the tray down on the table and picked up the decanter and began to pour. “Say when.”

After she had distributed the drinks — Quirke’s goblet of brandy, a thimble of sherry for Mal, rye whiskey for herself, on the rocks — they sat down in front of the fire, she and Quirke on a small sofa covered in crimson velvet with bald patches and Mal reclining again in the green armchair with his long legs stretched out almost horizontally in front of him. The chair reminded Quirke of some aquatic animal, a denizen of moss-hung everglades.

He fixed his eye on the heart of the fire, a tremulous white-hot hollow. “I’ve begun to see things,” he said. “I’m having hallucinations.” He sensed Rose and Malachy looking quickly at each other and away. He leaned forward heavily, nursing the brandy glass in both hands. Beside him Rose exhaled a breath and moved back on the sofa. He looked sidelong at the whiskey glass she was balancing on her knee. She would despise him, he knew, for what he was confessing. Rose did not believe in infirmities of the mind, put all that down to weakness and sickly self-indulgence.

“What are these hallucinations?” Mal asked. He was running a fingertip around the rim of his sherry glass. If the glass were to produce the high-pitched note that glasses did when they were stroked like that, Quirke thought, he would scream.

“They’re just — hallucinations,” he said, lifting a hand. “I see things, things that usually only happen in dreams, but I’m not asleep, I’m there, walking through them, being part of them.” He described his visit to Trinity Manor and what had happened in the kitchen with the old serving man, whatever his name was — what had happened, or what he had imagined had happened. “Other things, too,” he said. “I see animals, weird animals that I know are not there, and yet I see them. And then there’s this light…”

He stopped. In the fire a coal fell and a drop of molten tar ran out of it, hissing in the flames. “What light?” Mal asked after a moment.

Quirke could smell the tar boiling in the fire. He shut his eyes. Childhood again, and him as a boy prizing lumps of tar from cracks in a metaled roadway. Arrows, their heads made from six-inch nails hammered flat and pushed into the cleft of a stick and lashed tight with twine that in turn was smeared with tar. The feathering, how was that done? He could not remember. Bows and arrows, the harsh cries of boys pretending to be red Indians, and someone making the sound of a ricocheting bullet. He opened his eyes and looked again into the white heart of the fire. He felt dizzy. “What?” he said.

“You were talking about a light,” Mal prompted.

“Yes. I don’t see it. I just know it’s there”—he waved a hand again—“off to the side, but when I try to look directly at it, it moves out of range.”

Mal nodded slowly. His puzzlement was obvious, though he was trying not to show it. “I could have a look at your eyes — I think there’s a ’scope somewhere in the house.”

“No no no,” Quirke said with weary impatience. “It’s not my eyes, my eyes are all right. It’s my head — my mind. My brain.”

Mal coughed, and drew himself forward in the armchair, linking his fingers together. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps you need to see a specialist? There’s a good one in St. John’s, they say he studied in Vienna—”

Rose stirred and with a faint grunt got to her feet. She stood a moment looking down at Quirke. A melting ice cube in her whiskey glass gave a submerged, agonized crack. “I think,” she said, “I’ll leave you two to get on with this. I have some needlepoint that needs attending.”

She left the room, humming to herself. The two men sat in silence, gazing into the fire. There was a faint, urgent sound — a bush outside the window was tapping one of its twigs against the glass. “I don’t need to see anyone at St. John’s,” Quirke said wearily. He had been there already, more than once, to be dried out; he did not want to see those grim interiors ever again. “I need an X-ray. I need”—he gave a short laugh—“I need my head examined.”

“I see,” Mal said, and unclasped his fingers and put the tips together and steepled them under his chin. “You should see Philbin, in the Mater. He’s still the best there is.” It was Philbin, Quirke remembered, who had treated Mal’s first wife, Sarah. She used to say that too, I need my head examined, making a joke of it. And then she had died. “I could call him in the morning for you, if you like,” Mal said.

“I can call him myself.”

“Yes, I know you can.” Mal did his melancholy smile. “But let me do it for you.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Mal rose from the depths of the armchair and picked up a pair of metal tongs and began to put coals on the fire, scrutinizing each lump as if he were measuring it for size and quality. Quirke watched him with grudging fondness. Mal had helped him before, in the past, but he had done him disservices, too.

“What are you up to, these days?” Mal asked.

Quirke was lighting a cigarette, it was the fourth or fifth since he had sat down, and the inside of his mouth was raw and his throat felt scratchier than ever. “You remember Jimmy Minor, Phoebe’s friend?”

“Yes, I read about him in the papers. A tragic business.” Holding a lump of coal aloft in the claws of the iron tongs, he glanced back at Quirke with an almost mischievous glint. “I suppose you’re investigating his death, you and your friend Hackett.”