John Banville - The Blue Guitar

If it was mine? If?

There is a particular shiver that travels down the spine at certain moments of peril and frightful possibility. I know it well.

—

Outside, wild gusts of wind swept through the streets, driving scuds of silvery rain before them, and enormous, claw-like sycamore leaves, fallen but still green, some of them, skittered along the pavements, making a scratching sound. Perversely, I felt invigorated and more light of heart than ever — I was turning into a hot-air balloon myself! — even though everything I held or should hold dear was threatened with dissolution. I’ve noticed it before, how in a state of deepest dread, and perhaps because of it — this is a thief talking, remember — I can be brightly alert to the most delicate nuances of weather and light. I love the autumn best, love to be about on blustery September days like this, with the wind pummelling the window-panes and great luminous boilings of cloud ascending a rinsed, immaculate sky. Talk about the world and its things! — no wonder I can’t paint. Poor Marcus shuffled along beside me with the gait of a weary old man. He was producing a different sound now, a faint, breathy, high-pitched whistling. It seemed the sound of his pain itself, the very note of it, issuing from him in these constricted, bagpipe puffs and skirls. And who, I asked myself, who was the secret cause of all that pain? Who indeed.

We went to the Fisher King, a run-down chop-house with metal tables and stainless-steel chairs and the day’s menu chalked up on a blackboard. When I was a boy it used to be Maggie Mallon’s fish shop. Maggie herself, the original fishwife, was for some long-forgotten reason an object of ridicule in the town. Small boys would chant a song in mockery of her— Maggie Mallon sells fish, three ha’pence a dish! — and throw stones through the open doorway at the customers inside. It’s not true what Gloria says, that I fled here out of fear of the world. The fact is, I’m not really here, or the here that I’m here in is not here, really. I might be a creature from one of that multitude of universes we are assured exists, all of them nested inside each other, like the skins of an infinitely vast onion, who by cosmic accident made a misstep and broke through to this world, where I was once and have become again what I am. Which is? A familiar alien, estranged and at the same time oddly content. I must have known my gift, as I’ll call it, was going to fail me. What creature is it that returns to die in the place where it was born? The elephant, again? Maybe so, I forget. I am undone, a sack of sorrow, regret and guilt. Yet oftentimes, too, I entertain the fancy that somewhere in that infinity of imbricated other creations there’s an entirely other me, a dashing fellow, insolent, devil-may-care and satanically handsome, whom all the men resent and all the women throw themselves at, who lives catch as catch can, getting by no one knows how, and who would scorn to fiddle with colouring-boxes and suchlike childish geegaws. Yes yes, I see him, that Other Oliver, a man of the deed, a kicker out of his way of milksops such as his distant doppelgänger, yours truly, yours churlishly, yours jealously; yours oh, oh, oh, so longingly. Yet would I leave again and try to be him, or something like him, elsewhere? No: this is a fit place to be a failure in.

Marcus was bent over his plate, working his way through a heaping of fried fish and mashed potato, pausing now and then to give his unstoppably runny nose a wipe with his knuckle. Heartache and distress didn’t seem to have dulled his appetite, I noticed. I watched him, engrossed in him, despite myself and the thunderous sensation of horror rumbling away inside me. I was like a child at a wake covertly studying the chief mourner, wondering how it must be to suffer so and yet still be prey to all the hungers, itches and annoyances of everyday. Then idly my gaze wandered, and I remarked to myself how smeared and scratched the tables were, how dented and stained the stainless-steel chairs, how scuffed the once-polished rubber floor-tiles. Everything is reverting to what it used to be, or so we are assured by the savants who know about these things. Retrograde progression, they call it — apparently something to do with those tempests on the surface of the sun. It won’t be long until again there’ll be wooden settles in here, and rushes on the floor and pelts on the walls, and half an ox roasting on a spit over a fire of faggots and dried cow dung. The future, in other words, will be the past, as time turns on its fulcrum into another cycle of eternal recurrence.

The past, the past. It was the past that brought me back here, for here, in this townlet of some ten thousand souls, a place that might have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm, here it is for ever the past; here I am stalled, stilled here, cocooned; I need never move again until the moment comes for the great and final shift. Yes, I shall stay here, a part of this little world, this little world a part of me. At times the obviousness of it all takes my breath away. The circumstances in which I find myself appal and please me in equal measure, these circumstances of my own devising. I call it life-in-death, and death-in-life. Did I say that?

Marcus had cleared his plate and now he pushed it aside and leaned forwards with his forearms on the table and his long thin fingers interfolded and, this time in a brusque, matter-of-fact tone that despite myself I found irritating — how dared I be irritated by a man I had so grievously betrayed? — demanded of me that I tell him what he should do about Polly and her faceless fancy-man. I lifted my eyebrows and blew out my cheeks to show him how daunted I was by his needy demands, and how little help there was that I could offer him. He gazed at me for a long moment, thoughtfully, it seemed, nibbling a speck of something hard between his front teeth. I felt like a statue in an earthquake, swaying on my plinth while the ground heaved and buckled. Surely the truth was going to dawn on him, surely he couldn’t keep on not seeing what he was staring in the face. Then he noticed I had hardly touched my food. I said I wasn’t hungry. He reached across and took a flake of mackerel from my plate and put it in his mouth. “Gone cold,” he said, wrinkling his nose and chewing. The act of eating is such a peculiar spectacle, I’m surprised it’s not permitted only in private, behind locked doors. We were both a little drunk still.

On holiday at Miss Vandeleur’s I was dawdling one day on the sandy golf course that stretched for a mile or two along the landward side of the dunes, and came upon a golf ball sitting pertly on the neatly barbered grass of the fairway, plain to see and seemingly unowned. I picked it up and put it in the back pocket of my shorts. As I was straightening up, two golfers appeared, emerging head-first from a dip in the fairway like a pair of mermen rising out of a rolling green sea. One of them, fair-haired and florid-faced, wearing yellow corduroy trousers and a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper — how can I remember him so clearly? — fixed on me an accusing eye and asked if I had seen his ball. I said no. It was plain he didn’t believe me. He said I must have seen it, that it had come this way, he had watched it until it went out of sight beyond the rim of the hollow from where he had hit it. I shook my head. His face grew more flushed. He stood and glared at me, hefting a wooden driver menacingly in a gloved right hand, and I gazed back at him, all bland-eyed innocence but shivering inwardly with alarm and guilty glee. His companion, growing impatient, urged him to give it up and come on, yet still he tarried, eyeing me fiercely, his jaw working. Since he wasn’t going to budge I had to. I moved away slowly, stepping slowly backwards so that he shouldn’t see the outline of the ball in my back pocket. I fully expected him to pounce on me and turn me upside down and shake me as a dog would shake a rat. Luckily just then the other one, who had been annoyedly hacking about in the long grass beside the fairway, called out in triumph — he had found someone else’s lost ball — and while my accuser went to look at it I seized the chance and turned on my heel and hared off for the sanctuary of Miss Vandeleur’s rackety villa. That’s how I was now with Marcus, just as I had been that day on the links, in a sweat of fear and shivery turmoil, sitting squarely in front of him, not daring to turn from him in case he should spot a telltale bulge and know at once that I was the one who had brazenly pocketed his goose-fleshed, pale and bouncy little wife.