Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Then he noticed the girl, the one he had seen with the woman earlier. She was sitting on the other bed, half concealed by the swath of lace curtain beside her. She had her back to the end wall, and had drawn her knees up and encircled them with her arms. She was watching Quirke with a solemn and unwavering gaze. He smiled at her, smiled as best he could. She did not smile in return, only went on gazing at him, as if she had never seen him or the like of him before.

The dog, abandoned outside, whimpered piteously. The woman stretched out a leg sideways and pushed the bottom half of the half door shut. Inside the stove a log fell with a muffled thump.

The woman sat forward, with her elbows on her knees, the cigarette in her mouth, and looked at Quirke. He fumbled for his lighter. The flame lit her face briefly, and found a glint in her glass-green eyes. “Sit down, will you,” she said. “You’re making me dizzy, standing up there like some sort of bloody bird.”

He took off his overcoat and laid it on the end of the bed where the child was sitting, and set his hat down on it, then sat himself between it and the silent child. He and the woman were almost knee to knee now, as he and Hackett had been this afternoon. Was he here, he suddenly wondered, or was he imagining it? Was this another phantasmagoria he had stumbled into?

“This is my place,” the woman said, “my own, so you needn’t be fearing anyone will come.”

“Why would I be afraid?” he asked.

The only answer she gave him was an arch, thin-lipped smile.

She smoked her cigarette. She seemed wholly incurious as to why he was here, why he had returned so soon. He could hear the child’s congested breathing.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Quirke.”

She nodded. He had the impression of her taking the name and testing it, as she would test a gold coin between her teeth. “I’m Molly,” she said. “Molsh, they call me— he calls me.”

She watched him through the smoke of her cigarette. The girl on the bed was still fixed on him too, and he felt himself shrinking snail-like before these two pairs of unrelenting eyes.

“And that’s Lily,” the woman said, indicating the child with a lift her chin.

“Is she your — is she your daughter?” Quirke asked.

Molly went on gazing at him, as if she had not heard, as if he had not spoken. Her mind seemed permanently elsewhere, engaged in some subtle and absorbing calculation. “She’s aras, ” she said, and seeing his blankness she touched a finger to her temple and gave it a half turn clockwise. “Born that way, and nothing to be done for it.” She turned to the child and spoke in a loud, calling voice: “Are you all right there, Lily?” The child said nothing, only shifted her slow gaze from Quirke to the woman, as if turning some heavy thing on a pivot, with much effort. “Ah, you’re grand,” the woman said to her soothingly. “You’re grand, so you are.”

The dog gave a final, angry yelp, and they heard it trotting away, grumbling to itself.

“Were them two nyaarks outside, did you see?” Molly asked of Quirke. “Mikey,” she said, “and Paudeen.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Quirke said.

“Packie’s sons. I saw them giving you the eye, yourself and the peeler, when the two of yiz were going off today.”

“No,” Quirke said, “I didn’t see anyone, except you.” He did not know why he had lied.

She gave a grim little laugh. “That’s good,” she said. “Them boys would make short work of you.”

“Would they? Why?”

This time she laughed aloud. “Oh, aren’t you the innocent, now,” she said merrily.

There was a brief pause. “Is Packie here?” Quirke asked.

“And where else would he be?”

“I don’t know. I thought he might have business somewhere.”

This amused her. “Business, is it? He always has business, but he don’t move much from the home place here.”

“Is he your — your husband?”

She scowled faintly. “I’m his mull .”

“Mull,” Quirke said. “Does that mean wife?”

“ Mull is woman,” she said, and turned her face aside with a grimace of distaste, as if something sour had come into her mouth. After a moment she spoke again. “My sister was his missus. She died.”

He lowered his voice to a murmur. “And Lily? Is she yours?”

She wrinkled up her face in disgusted incredulity. “Are you joking me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…”

Cinnamon, that was what he had been smelling: cinnamon, a soft brown fragrance. For a moment in his mind he saw a desert under moonlight, the clifflike dunes glimmering, their edges sharp as scimitars, and in the distance, at the head of a long plume of dust, a line of camels and their drivers, and mounted on the camels swarthy sharp-faced men in turbans, and behind them their women, veiled, bejeweled, plump as pigeons.

“There was a young man,” he said. “He worked for the newspapers, Jimmy Minor was his name. Small fellow, small as a child, almost. Smoked a lot. Did he come here? Did you see him, ever?”

She moved sideways along the bed to the stove, and with a metal hook opened the fire door and threw the butt of her cigarette into the flames, and shut the door again. No, Quirke thought, he was wrong; what he was smelling was not cinnamon but some kind of sweet wood that was burning in the stove, maybe rosewood, or cedar. He wondered again if he was really here. Yet would he be smelling this smell if it was all in his imagination? This woman sitting before him, the girl on the bed, would they be so real? He made a fist of his right hand and dug the nails into his palm. He could feel that, all right. Yet how could he be sure his nerves were not deceiving him? Thinking this, he felt the by now familiar dizziness, as if he were standing on the rim of a precipice and the dark emptiness were calling to him to jump, to jump . But he would not jump, no, he would not. He had so many things to do yet, so many things. He would not die.

The woman was rolling another cigarette. She was expert at it, shaping the slim white cylinder between her fingers and licking the gummed edge of the paper with the sharp moist tip of her scarlet tongue. When she had finished the cigarette she offered it to him. He took it, and thanked her. She began to roll another for herself.

“Did Jimmy Minor come here?” Quirke asked. “Did you see him?”

“The sharog ?” the woman said, tapping one end of the rolled cigarette on her thumbnail.

“Sharog,” Quirke said. “What’s that?”

She took a light again from his lighter and leaned back and expelled a cone of smoke upwards into the vault of the ceiling. “The redhead,” she said.

Quirke nodded. “Yes, that’s right — Jimmy Minor had red hair.”

She edged along the bed again, and took up a kettle from somewhere on the floor, and with the metal hook lifted the cover of the stove and put the kettle on the hot plate. A few drops of moisture hissed and skittered on the glowing metal.

Again Quirke was aware of the child’s labored breathing. Asthmatic, he thought, distractedly. She stirred herself now and got on all fours and crawled along the bed, past the loop of lace curtain, and reached out a hand towards Quirke and made to take the cigarette from his fingers. He drew back instinctively but the child reached after him, until he felt he had no choice but to relinquish the cigarette. She took it, holding it between two fingertips and a thumb, and sat back against the wall as before and took a deep draw of smoke. The woman laughed. “You’ll be grit ,” she said to the child, who ignored her, and took another puff.