John Banville - Mefisto

— You there, Felix called imperiously. Who are you?

Clancy stopped, and peered about him with an elaborate air of startlement. He used to wait for me on the way home from school and knock me down and pummel me, sitting on my chest and breathing his feral breath in my face. His fury always seemed a sort of grief. In time a hot, awful intimacy had grown up between us. Now, stricken with embarrassment, we avoided each other’s eye, as if we had once committed sin together. He opened his mouth, shut it, then coughed and tried again. He was eyeing the gun cradled in Felix’s arm.

— From Walker’s, sir, he said thickly. With the messages.

— Messages? Felix said. What messages?

Clancy began to sweat. He licked his lips, and pointed to the parcels in the basket.

— Them, sir. The messages that was ordered.

Felix turned to me.

— What is the fellow talking about? he said. Have you any idea?

— The grocery messages, Clancy said, raising his voice. The ones that was …

— Oh, groceries , Felix said, with a little laugh. I see, yes. Well, have you the list, then?

— What, sir?

Felix looked to heaven and sighed.

— The list, sor ! The list that was given to the shop. Have you it with you?

Clancy blinked slowly and wiped his nose on a knuckle.

— I’d say I have, all right, he said guardedly.

He leaned his bicycle on its stand and produced a fistful of grubby papers from the pocket of his apron, and began to leaf through them unhappily with a thick thumb.

— Well, read it out, man, Felix cried, read it out!

A dark flush appeared on Clancy’s pitted brow. He licked his lips again and bent over his bits of paper, scrutinizing them with a stolid, hopeless stare. Felix groaned in annoyance.

— Come on, man! he said. What’s wrong with you?

Clancy, his face on fire, looked at me at last, like a wounded animal, in fury and a sort of supplication. He was not able to read. A moment passed. I looked away from those beseeching eyes. Felix chuckled.

— Oh, go on then, he said to Clancy, take your stuff around to the back door.

Clancy thrust the papers into his pocket, and mounted his bike and pushed off towards the house, crouched over the handlebars as if battling against a gale. Felix grinned, shaking his head. Suddenly he tossed the shotgun to me. The weight of it was a surprise.

— Go ahead, Barabbas, he said. Blaze away.

WORKMEN BEGAN arriving at the house, singly, with a fist in a pocket and one arm tightly swinging, or shouldering along in silent groups of two or three. Sophie and I watched them from the upstairs windows. They grew steadily foreshortened as they approached, as if they were wading into the ground. They would knock once at the front door and step back, holding their caps in their hands, quite patient, waiting. They wore shapeless jackets and white shirts open at the neck, and trousers larded with grime. Their faces and the backs of their necks glowed, I pictured them bent over sinks in cramped sculleries at first light, scrubbing themselves raw. One had a bald patch, pink and neat as a tonsure. They were roadmen and casual labourers, and a few factory hands laid off from the brick works or the foundry. Mr Kasperl interviewed them in one of the big empty rooms downstairs. He sat at a battered, leather-topped desk before the window, fiddling with a stub of pencil, while Felix walked up and down and did the talking. The men, standing in a knot in the middle of the floor, avoided looking at each other, as if out of a sort of shame. They pretended unconcern, hitching up their belts and glancing around them at the damp-stained walls and the crumbling cornices. Felix harangued them jovially, like a fairground barker.

— All right, now, all right, he said, show us your muscles there. We only want good strong types, willing to work. That right, boss?

Mr Kasperl looked at him silently, twiddling the pencil in his heavy hands. The men grinned and mumbled, shuffling their feet.

In the end they all got hired, even the one with the bald spot. One morning I arrived and found them gathered in front of the house, with shovels over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and muttering among themselves. A lorry with its engine going stood on the drive, a clumsy, upright model with a sort of chimney sticking up, and no mudguards. It shuddered like a sick horse, belching up black spurts of exhaust smoke. The tailgate was crusted with traces of dung, the mark of a previous life. Felix got down from behind the wheel and herded the workers aboard. He winked at me, and mimed exhaustion, drooping his shoulders and letting his jaw hang sideways. Mr Kasperl, in dustcoat and overshoes, paused in front of the house and looked about him at the bright morning with a grim, disparaging eye, then descended the steps with his mincing tread and hauled himself, grunting, into the cab. Felix ground the gears and swung the wheel, and the lorry moved off falteringly in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. One of the workmen standing in the back gave a halfhearted whoop, and then grinned sheepishly and stared hard ahead. The noise of the engine died away in the direction of Coolmine, and the heedless song of a thrush, that had been there all the time, welled up in the stillness.

There was a sense of airy emptiness in the house. I climbed the stairs as if ascending a rope into the blue. Sophie was above me on the landing, looking down at me, hands braced on the rail, her face suspended in a vault of air, like a trapeze artist poised to leap. We wandered through the attic. The floors were tense as trampolines under our feet. I thought of all those rooms below us with no one in them, the sky going about its enormous, stealthy business in the windows, the sun inching its complex geometry across the dusty floors.

In Sophie’s room we sat down on the bed. I had tried to teach her something about numbers here, showed her match games, and tricks with algebra, laying out my gift before her on the quilt. I had entertained high hopes. How could she resist these things, their simplicity and elegance, the way move by move the patterns grew, like crystals assembling in clear, cold air? But it was no good, she looked at the numbers and at me, her eyes empty, her face a smiling mask. Her silence was a kind of absence. And so I gave up. Now she raised herself on one knee, stretching to peer out the round window above us. She had brought up the box of marionettes and was repairing them, they were strewn on the floor among paintpots and brushes and jars of glue. She tapped me on the shoulder, wanting me to look at something down on the drive. When I made to rise she lost her balance for a moment, and fell against me in a flurry of hands and breath and tumbling hair. Her skin was cool, I could feel the heat of my own suddenly flushed face reflected back at me from her smooth brow and shadowed cheeks. She drew away from me with a little, gurgling laugh. She had kissed me, or I had kissed her, I don’t know, so lightly, so fleetingly, I thought at first I had imagined it. My heart wobbled, like something swaying on an edge and about to fall. She had raised herself to the window again and was looking out. She turned and smiled, not at me this time, but in the direction of the doorway. Felix was there, regarding us with a glint of amusement.

— Please, don’t get up, he said slyly. It’s only me.

He ambled into the room, casting a sideways glance at the marionettes on the floor. I had not heard the lorry returning. His boots had black mud on them, and there were faint black streaks, like traces of war-paint, on his forehead and his jaw. He said:

— Hell down pit, lad.

Sophie was motioning him excitedly to the window. He came and stood behind her, craning to see where she was pointing. Below, on the gravel in front of the house, Jack Kay was standing, hatted, in Sunday suit, leaning on his malacca stick. He was looking up, I wondered if he could see us, our three heads crowded in the staring window high above him. Felix turned his face to me, a grinning indian.