John Banville - Mefisto

— Help me, I said.

He gazed out over the darkening sward, nodding to himself.

— Oh, Caliban, he said, you should have come with me when I asked you. Didn’t I tell you it was all finished there, didn’t I warn you? And see what happened.

He sighed. A band of masked children ran out of the bushes, shrieking. I put a hand up to my face.

— Help me.

— You want to be a real boy, eh?

He sat back on the seat and crossed his legs and gazed up into the shadowy branches above him.

— We had some fun, didn’t we, all the same? he said. High times. It seems so long ago, now, all of it. Still at the sums?

— Yes.

The laughing children returned, and ran in a circle around the bench where we sat.

— I think they want you for a guy, Felix said.

He rose, and they fled away into the bushes. He stood a moment, looking about him pensively in the dusk. Then he produced a scrap of paper and a pencil stub and scribbled an address and handed it to me.

— I’m there sometimes, he said. In the evenings. It’s not far.

He walked off a little way, stopped, came back.

— You see? he said. I told you, I never forget a face.

Chandos Street was a decaying Georgian sweep with a Protestant church at one end and a railed-off green square at the other. I loitered there night after night, pacing under the streetlamps, watching the house, one of a tall terrace, with worn granite steps and a black front door. People came and went. No, no one came, no one went, the door never opened. Sometimes a lame whore sat on the steps, tipsily singing. Once she asked me for a match, and called me a cunt when I said I had none. We were not the only loiterers. A couple appeared on the corner by the church, at the same time every night, a sick-looking young man with the shakes, and his shivering wraith of a girl, straggle-haired, with matchstick legs. They would hang about for an hour, peering anxiously up the ill-lit street, then turn and shuffle away miserably. The young man took to saluting me, touching a jaunty finger to his forelock and trying to grin. One night he stopped me, put a shaky hand on my arm and looked behind him carefully, as if he were about to impart some valuable secret. Instead he asked me for money. The girl stared blankly at my midriff. I gave him a handful of Empusa tablets. He looked at them in wonderment and whistled softly.

— Fucking ace, pal, he said. I’ll offer up a novena for you.

And there was another girl, skinny also, with skinny legs and a pinched face and pale, narrow wrists. She wore a plastic raincoat and white shoes, and clutched a white plastic handbag. She smoked cigarettes, and paced from one trembling patch of lamplight to another, watching the street, the houses. She ignored me. The young man with the shakes approached her, his hand out, she ignored him too. She smoked and paced, smoked and paced. One night I tried to follow her. After we had gone a street or two she turned aside suddenly and jumped on a bus. I shrank back in the darkness and watched as she was borne past me, sitting up very straight at the window, her sharp little stark white face and cropped, crow-black hair.

At the end of a week Felix appeared at last, strolling up the street with his coat open and his hands in his pockets. The girl walked across swiftly and accosted him on the steps. He stopped with his finger lifted to the bell and retreated a pace. She spoke to him quietly, fiercely. I crossed the road and stood below them on the pavement. The girl immediately fell silent. Felix looked over his shoulder.

— My dear fellow, he said, there you are.

The girl turned an inch in my direction, but kept her eyes lowered. There was a silence. Felix glanced from one of us to the other.

— Are you together? he said. No? What a coincidence, then.

He rang the bell, but no one came. He rang again. We waited. Then the girl, with a furious gesture, opened her bag and produced a key. Felix grinned at her. She ignored him, jabbing the key into the lock.

A gaunt, dim hall, olive walls, a dirty lightbulb in a brown paper shade. The stair carpet was threadbare. In silence we ascended into the gloom. Felix smiled to himself, whistling softly. The girl walked ahead of us. Her hair stuck up in tufts at the back, as if someone had tried to pull it out in handfuls. She knocked at a door on the third floor, but it was only a gesture, she had a key for here as well. Inside was dark save for a faint sodium glow seeping down through the tops of tall windows. Felix switched on a light.

— What ho! he called. Are you there, truepenny?

No one answered.

There were cardboard boxes on the floor inside the door, and piles of books, and a black overcoat and an umbrella hanging on a peg. The kitchen smelled of gas and oilcloth and something going bad. Felix lit the stove, opened a cupboard. The girl walked into the front room. I followed her. She stood at the window looking out. The church spire loomed in the dark against an acid sky. Clutter here as well, more boxes, books, soiled plates on the table. The girl was lighting a cigarette. The match flame shook.

— You followed me, she said. That night.

She went on looking out the window. Her mind seemed to be on something else.

— You shouldn’t follow me.

Felix came in, carrying a teapot.

— Now! he said brightly. Nice cup of tea.

He was wearing an old raincoat and scuffed, sharp-toed shoes. He set the teapot down on the table, sweeping aside smeared plates and scattered cutlery.

— Getting acquainted, you two, I see, he said.

He carried three cups to the fireplace and emptied their dregs into the littered grate.

— I don’t want any of that stuff, the girl said.

He frowned, looking about him in exaggerated puzzlement.

— Stuff? he said. Stuff? Oh, the tea, you mean. Oh.

He laughed to himself and went back to the table, shaking his head. He poured three cups of tea, and handed one to her. She took it.

— Did you know, he said to her, our young friend here has been in hospital too. Did he tell you?

For the first time now she looked at me directly. She had small, dark eyes, close-set, with a slight cast. She studied me for a moment, biting her lip. Her plastic raincoat was buttoned to the throat.

A door behind us opened, and a small, fierce-looking man came in. He was wearing long woollen underwear, with a blanket draped over his shoulders. His hair stood up in sprouts of ginger bristles, and he had three or four days’ growth of reddish beard. He began to say something but sneezed instead. His bare feet were small, with horny, yellow nails.

— Ah, professor, Felix said. We thought you must be out.

The little man glared at him.

— I am sick, he said.

As if for emphasis, he sneezed again violently. Felix pointed to the blackened pot on the table.

— Some tea, professor.

This time the little man ignored him. The girl had turned back to the window. He hitched up his blanket, looking at her, and then at me.

— Who are you? he said.

Felix coughed.

— This is the one I told you about, he said. You remember.

The professor opened his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. We waited, but the sneeze did not come.

— Ah, he said sourly. The prodigy.

His name was Kosok.

HAVE I MENTIONED the buses? I liked them, the way they trundled through the streets, gasping and shuddering, like big, serious, labouring animals. I would board one at random and ride to the end of the line, hunched in the front seat upstairs, watching the city unfurl around me, the tree-lined avenues and the little parks, the domes and turrets and curlicued façades. A hoarding would slide past, then a burnished stretch of river, then a dead-end street with parked cars and children playing ball under a rusted railway bridge. I got to know the top half of things, the shabby upper storeys of smart shops, the fire escapes, the pots of geraniums in little sooty windows, the faded signs on brick walls for carbolic soap and plug tobacco and ship’s chandlers. And then the suburbs, the windswept wastes of housing estates, with straggly gardens, and toddlers dabbling in the gutters, and the sudden, quicksilver flash of a mirror in the drab depths of a bedroom window.