John Banville - Mefisto

We hurried through the town. The Sunday streets were deserted. A blinding disc of sunlight bowled along beside us in the shop windows. Aunt Philomena tottered on her high heels, sweating and muttering.

— Are you a relative ? she kept saying. Are you a relative ? that’s what they asked me. A relative, indeed! The cheek!

The hospital was a big white building on a hill, impressive in the spring sunshine, like a grand hotel in some southern clime, its windows awash with the sky’s festive blue. Another species existed here, different altogether from Aunt Philomena and me, fragile, etiolated beings, ennobled by their secret wounds. Even the visitors coming down the steps had a special air — thoughtful, solemn, a little dazed — as if they had gone in tipsy, but were sober now. The entrance hall smelled of tea and floor polish. At the reception desk a nun in an elaborate, winged head-dress was writing in a ledger. Aunt Philomena and I waited, standing on the gleaming parquet in the midst of a huge silence. Presently a nurse arrived, a tiny person with red hair and pretty, pink-rimmed eyes, and a watch on a strap pinned to her breast. I noticed her neat white shoes. She told us her name, which I forgot immediately, and shook hands with us tenderly. Her hand was warm and dry, she pressed it into mine like a little present, looking at me in silence, with a kind of gentle fervour. She led us down a corridor and up a curving flight of stairs. A wide window looked out over the town to a distant strip of dark-blue sea. A life-sized statue of the Saviour stood in a niche on the landing, glumly displaying a ruby-red heart in flames. The face was that of a bearded lady, creamy, smooth and sad.

We entered an enormous ward filled with light and noise, like a gymnasium. My father and Uncle Ambrose lay on their backs in adjoining beds, still and pale as a pair of marble knights. Each had his right hand resting on his heart, and his left arm extended at his side and connected by a tube to a bottle on a stand. Their skulls were wrapped in bandages. They breathed lightly in unison. Uncle Ambrose’s nose jutted up out of his face like a stone axe-head, I had never noticed it was so large. He opened his eyes and looked at Aunt Philomena and me with a mild air of surprise.

— Mr Swan! the nurse shouted with startling force. You have visitors, Mr Swan, look!

But he made no response, and after a moment closed his eyes again with a fluttering sigh.

My father calmly slept on.

A doctor appeared, a stocky young man with restless eyes and a lank lock of fawn hair lolling on his brow. He had been at his tea, there were crumbs on the lapels of his white coat, and his breath smelled warmly of cake.

— Windscreen, he said, smacking a fist into a palm. Like that. They were lucky. Big black dog, he says, ran right under the wheel.

Aunt Philomena turned aside with a strangled sob, crushing a wadded handkerchief to her mouth. The doctor looked at his shoes and frowned. In a bed in the opposite aisle a large elderly man in striped pyjamas sat and watched us intently out of an inflamed, avid eye.

— Well, the doctor said briskly, you’ll want to …?

Aunt Philomena, still chewing her hankie, shook her head violently, giving another muffled sob.

I followed the doctor out of the ward, down the stairs past the simpering statue and the panoramic window. The rumble of tea-urns and the clatter of crockery came up through the stairwell. The doctor went heavily ahead of me, his knees working outwards like elbows and his white coat billowing. He told me his name, but I forgot that one also. A hunchbacked porter in a green hospital coat walked past the foot of the stairs. The doctor called out to him and he stopped and looked up at us warily, one hand resting lightly in his coat pocket, as if it were holding a gun. He had coarse oiled black hair, and thick glasses with heavy rims that seemed a part of him, like a bony armature growing out of his skull.

— Whassa? he said.

The doctor spoke to him quietly, and he nodded and led us away down a corridor, taking from his pocket an enormous bunch of keys on a metal ring. I could not take my eyes off his hump. We entered a curving, dull-green passageway with little round windows like portholes set high up in the wall, and came to a grey metal door, where we stopped and waited while the porter sorted through his keys. The doctor hitched back his coat and put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

— Sunday, he said, with an apologetic shrug. They lock up everything.

The door swung open on a small, high room lit by a dangling bulb. A large press with steel doors was set into the wall. The porter threw it open, revealing three chilled corpses neatly stacked on sliding shelves. I looked at the tops of their heads, their bleached ears wreathed in wisps of frosty smoke. The porter leaned down and read the name-tags on the shelves, screwing up his eyes behind their thick lenses and baring his side teeth.

— No, he said, not there.

He shut the press and slouched into a farther room, beckoning us to follow. There was a sink in the corner, and a desk with a stool, and a tiny window through which there streamed an incongruous thick gold shaft of sunlight. Our shoes squealed on the rubber floor. A trolley. A shrouded form. The doctor belched softly into his fist.

— There’s a formality, I’m afraid, he said, in a confidential tone. Identification. We have to have it, in a case like this. You just say it is her, and that’s it. Right?

The porter folded back the sheet.

— Now, he said, giving a professional little sniff.

The woman on the bier did look somewhat like my mother. She was older, she had a narrow forehead, and her hair was different too, but there was a resemblance, all the same, and for a moment I did not know what to think. Could it be that this really was my mother, and they had arranged her face all wrong somehow? Was that why they needed me to identify her, so they could make the necessary readjustments? I shut my eyes. No, no, impossible. Then there was the problem of what to say. Embarrassment opened its jaws and breathed its hot breath in my face. I felt a fool, as if in some way it were all my fault. The moment stretched, thinner and thinner. The doctor was beginning to fidget. I stepped back a pace. I had to cough to get my voice to work. No, I said, no, I did not think, there must be some, this was not … The doctor blinked.

— Not …?

— My mother. No.

He turned swiftly to the porter, who scratched his head and frowned. Then he opened his mouth.

— Oh, jay, he said, hold on.

He crossed the room, and from behind a screen, almost with a flourish, he wheeled out on its rubber wheels another trolley, on which my mother’s body was laid, wrapped in a tartan blanket. Her hands were folded. She was still wearing one white glove. Her face was turned aside, her cheek pressed against her shoulder. Her eyes were not quite closed. I could see no marks of the crash save for a small cut on her forehead. But there was something in the way she was lying, all bundled up like that, as if she had been snatched up and shaken violently, and everything inside her was broken and in bits. I caught a faint whiff of her face powder. The doctor was hovering at my shoulder. I nodded dully, identifying what was not there, for this was not my mother, but something she had left behind, like a mislaid glove.

Things are confused after that. There are gaps. I remember sitting in a cramped little room, a dispensary, I think it was, with a mug of grey tea going cold in my hands. There were coloured posters on the wall beside me, showing cross-sections of lungs, and seething stomachs, and an enormous, crimson heart with all its valves and ventricles on show. I felt a deep calm, as at the end of some daring and exhausting exploit. Part of my mind had been working away by itself all this time, suddenly now, as if out of nowhere, a solution to one of the equations in Mr Kasperl’s black notebook came to me, in three smooth transformational leaps, tumbling through the darkness in my head like a spangled acrobat executing a faultless triple somersault. In the corridor Nurse Er was talking to Doctor Blur. Without warning I began to weep. It was like a nosebleed. My sobs were a kind of helpless, inward falling, as if a huge hollow had opened up inside me and I were plunging headlong into it. The storm ended as abruptly as it had begun. I wiped my eyes, startled, a little sheepish, and yet obscurely proud of myself, of such lavish, all-embracing grief. Then the doctor went off, and I followed him. We climbed the curved staircase again. It was evening already, I could hardly believe it. A vast, garish sunset was sinking on the horizon, like a disaster at sea. My father and Uncle Ambrose were still sleeping. Aunt Philomena’s face was blotched and crooked. She leaned on my arm and we left the ward. The entrance hall was ablaze with thick sunlight. The nun with the head-dress was gone, had winged away, leaving the ledger open on the desk. No, there was no nun, I invented her. We walked home slowly through the deserted streets. The sky was pale blue, ribbed with red, so high, immensely high. Aunt Philomena snuffled and sighed. I wanted to get away from her. The trees were in blossom in the square, pink and ivory, purest white. A crow flapped past low overhead, clearing its throat. The key was under the mat.