John Banville - The Blue Guitar

“This was all your father’s stuff,” she said, gesturing about, “all these tools and things.” She always speaks of our dad as being mine, as if to extract herself from the family equation. I said I hadn’t known he went in for woodwork. She shook her head to show how she despaired of me. “He was always out in the shed, sawing and hammering. That’s how he got away from her.” She meant, I had to assume, my mother, our mother. I took up a mitre-box and fingered it, frowning. “I suppose,” she said, “you’ve forgotten, too, how I made the wooden frames for them canvases you used to paint on?” Stretchers — did she make stretchers for me? If she remembered that, why did she claim to think that I wrote stories? She has an ineradicable streak of slyness, my sister. “Saved our ma a fortune, I did,” she said, “considering there wasn’t anything you couldn’t have, no matter how dear it was.” I examined the mitre-box more closely still. “I used to size the canvas for you, too, with wallpaper paste and a big brush. Is all that gone, all the work I did for you, all forgotten? You’re lucky — I wish I had a memory like yours.”

Slender lengths of hardwood were stacked in a corner, and along the front edge of the bench hung a dozen or more identical Christs, each held in place by a tiny nail driven through the palm of one hand, so that they dangled crookedly there like a line of sinking swimmers frantically signalling for help. They were made of hard plastic, and had the moist, waxy sheen of mothballs. Each one had a crown of plastic thorns and a dab of shiny crimson paint at the left side of the chest just under the rib-cage. Olive doesn’t go in much for religion, so far as I know; in another age she would probably have been burned at the stake. I pictured her here in her witch’s den of an evening, nailing these voodoo dolls to their wooden crosses and cackling softly to herself. “I’ve sent off for luminous paint, to do the eyes,” she said casually, pursing her lips and fingering a stray lock of hair — it was clear she thought this a particularly inspired innovation. I asked what she did with the crucifixes when they were made. Here she turned shifty. “I sell them, of course,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, lifting one bony shoulder and letting it fall again, and busied herself with the selection and lighting of yet another cigarette. I watched her drop the still smouldering match on to the shavings at our feet. I asked to whom did she sell them; I was genuinely curious. She began to cough again, leaning against the bench with her shoulders hunched and softly stamping one foot. When the attack had passed she stood with her head lifted, making a sort of mooing sound and pressing a hand to her chest. “Oh, there’s a shop that buys things like that,” she panted. This was patently a fib. I suspect she throws them away, or uses them for kindling in the kitchen stove. She took a deep drag from her cigarette and blew smoke at the window, where it became a soft billow, like a flattened pumpkin; so much of the world is amorphous, though it seems so solid. I could see Olive casting about hastily for a change of subject.

“How’s your friend?” she asked. “The fellow that fixes watches.”

“Marcus Pettit?”

“ ‘Marcus Pettit?’ ” she squawked, parroting me, and made an idiot face and waggled her head, which made her look like Tenniel’s long-necked Alice after she ate the Caterpillar’s magic mushroom. “How many watchmakers do you think there are in this mighty metropolis?”

I put down the mitre-box and cleared my throat. “I haven’t seen Marcus,” I said, looking at my hands, “for some time.”

“I’d say not.” She laughed huskily. “A nice game you have going, the gang of you.” The back of my neck had gone hot. One is never too old, I find, to feel oneself childishly admonished. “I suppose you haven’t seen his missus, either, for some time. ”

I was about to reply, with who knows what kind of riposte, when suddenly she held up a hand and cocked her head to one side on its long stalk of neck, listening to some sound from the house that only she could hear. “Oh, there she goes,” she said, with flat annoyance, and at once was out of the shed and plunging across the garden towards the back door. I followed, at a slower pace. I think I was still blushing.

Dodo in her armchair was in great distress, her little face screwed up, uttering bird-like squeaks and fluttering her hands and her feet, while big, babyish tears rose up in her eyes. Olive, who was leaning down to her and making soothing noises, cast a dark glance at me over her shoulder. “It’s nothing,” she said, in a stage whisper, “only the old waterworks.” She turned back to Dodo. “Isn’t that all it is, Dodie,” she shouted, “only the waterworks, and not the other?” She leaned lower, and sniffed, and turned to me again. “It’s all right,” she said, “just a bit of damp, nothing worse.” She straightened up and took me by the arm. “You go out in the hall,” she said, “and wait.” A wind had sprung up suddenly; it groaned in the chimney and lifted the lid of the stove. Dodo, shamed and shamingly undone, was weeping freely now. “Go on, go on!” Olive growled, shooing me out.

It was cold in the dim hallway. A weak shaft of pink-stained light angling down through the ruby glass of the transom over the front door brought back to my mind the line of crookedly leaning, semi-crucified Christs out in the shed. I always found church statues frightening, when I was a child, the way they just stood there, not quite life-sized, with melancholy eyes cast down and slender hands held out, wearily imploring something of me the nature of which I couldn’t guess and which even they seemed to have forgotten long ago. The sanctuary lamp, too, was worrying, red like the glass in that lunette above the door here and perpetually aglow, keeping an unwavering watch on me and my sinful ways. Sometimes I would wake in the night and shiver to think of it there, that ever-vigilant eye pulsing in the church’s vast and echoing emptiness.

In the hall now a host of things out of the past hovered around me, there and not there, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

Muffled sounds of struggle and stress were coming from the kitchen, where I supposed Dodo’s linen was being changed. I could hear the fat little woman’s tearful cries and Olive’s gruff comfortings. This, I thought, must be love, after all, frail and needful on one side, briskly practical on the other. Not something I could manage, though: too plain and unembellished, for me; too mundane, altogether.

Why didn’t I leave the house, right then? Why didn’t I just slip out at the front door and creep away into the freedom of the afternoon? Olive probably wouldn’t have cared, probably wouldn’t even have noticed I was gone, while I’m sure poor Dodo would have been glad to be rid of a witness to her humiliation. What held me there in that hallway, what fingers reaching out of a lost world, caressing and clutching? Smell of linoleum, of old wallpaper, of dusty cretonne, and that beam of sanctified lurid light shining on me. I was astonished to feel tears prickling at my eyelids. For what or whom would I weep? For myself, of course; for whom else do I ever weep?

Presently I was summoned back into the kitchen. All seemed as before, except for a strong ammoniac smell, and Dodo’s high colour and downcast gaze. I sat again by the table. The wind was pounding at the house now, rattling the windows and setting the rafters creaking and making the stove shoot out spurts of smoke through tiny gaps in the door and along the rim of the red-hot lid. Sitting there, I felt myself being absorbed into the listless rhythm of the room. Olive, making yet another pot of tea, ignored me, and manoeuvred her way around me as if I were no more than a mildly awkward obstacle, one that had always been there.