John Banville - Mefisto

We dined in cheap cafés, sitting at plastic tables behind fogged windows, amid the smells of boiled tea and fried bread and fags. I watched the people around us, the raw-eyed lorry drivers, the dumpy girls with dyed blonde hair and laddered stockings, the gaunt, watchful young men in raincoats too small for them. They ate with a kind of dogged circumspection, crouching over their plates, their jaws working in a rhythmic, circular motion. They had a dull, shocked look about them, as if they were survivors of some enormous accident. Covertly I studied Adele too, her pinched, heart-shaped face, her chilblained hands. She hardly ate at all, but smoked without pause, drinking cups of thin, grey coffee. When she put the cigarette to her mouth she shut one eye, as if in pain, and drew in deeply, with a harsh little sigh. Sometimes she would talk, quietly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on the steamy window beside her. People followed her, she said, men stalked her at night through the streets, sat beside her on buses and touched her, murmuring things. A woman with red hair had come up behind her one day and cursed her, shrieking and spitting in her face. Then there were the tramps, the tinkers with their wild eyes, looking at her. A negro had stood behind her in a crowded shop and pressed himself against her.

— He had perfume on him, she said. The palms of his hands were pink.

Then she gave her high bird-cry of a laugh, and fixed me with that fraught, off-centre stare.

I showed her my old haunts, the alleys and archways, the streets by the river, the clay paths along the canal, where I had stalked the beggars and the madmen in those first, heady days of an autumn that now seemed an age ago. She grew restless, turning vaguely this way and that, as if she were looking for a way to escape. Sometimes still she would walk away from me abruptly, as on that first night on the quays, and jump on board a bus, or disappear down a sidestreet. She did it not from anger, or even rudeness, I think it was just that now and then my presence beside her somehow slipped her mind. I might not see her at all for days on end. I don’t know where she went. She must have had a room somewhere. She insisted she did not live at the flat in Chandos Street, though she often stayed there, sleeping in one or other of the dingy back bedrooms. She kept her things there too, dispersed among the general clutter. There was a suitcase stuffed with clothes, which would make its way from the bedrooms through the front room to the hall, and then all the way back again. Everything shifted around like this, the professor’s belongings too, the place always seemed as if a large untidy family had just moved in, or was about to move out. Adele picked her way through the jumble with her sleepwalker’s frown, as if she had been looking for something and had forgotten what it was. One evening she showed me her syringe, a big old-fashioned thing with a calibrated glass barrel and a plunger with a steel thumb-hole. It had its own special box, like a jewel case, with a lid that snapped shut, and dark-blue velvet lining.

— He got it for me, she said.

We leaned over it, our foreheads almost touching, contemplating it in silence. Then she sighed and shut the lid on it, and took it with her out of the room. I stood at the big front window. The winter evening was drawing in. I could hear the distant blare of rush-hour traffic. The remains of one of her cigarettes smouldered in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. She never managed to extinguish the stubs completely, no matter with what force she crushed them out, her mouth working.

She was in the big, bare room at the back of the house. There was a narrow bed in a corner, a single dim bulb dangling from the ceiling. A gas fire hissed. The great windows were curtainless, looking out on a drab confusion of gardens. Night like a dark gas was seeping down on the city out of a luminous, mauve sky. She sat on the side of the bed, her head bowed, one hand hanging, the other resting palm upward across her knees. She had taken off her dress. One strap of her slip had fallen down her shoulder. She lifted her head when I came in, and cast about her vaguely, with a blank gaze. She ran a hand through her hair.

— I cut it all off, she said, one time. It grew back.

She blinked, frowning, and shook her head. Then she stood up, and drew the slip over her head and let it trickle through her fingers to the floor. Frail wrists, frail ankles, meagre flanks. Her delicate, glimmering shoulders. She had a plaster on one of her toes, where a chilblain had burst. She walked here and there about the room, shedding the rest of her things absent-mindedly as she went. She looked strange to me now, that known head on this unfamiliar, thin, almond-white body. There was a little triangular space between her legs, below the smudge of black hair. She lit a cigarette. When I touched her she turned quickly, startled. Her mouth was open, I kissed her clumsily, tasting smoke. She did not shut her eyes.

She turned off the light, and we lay down together on the narrow bed. She was trembling. Gradually the dim shapes of the room came forward out of the darkness, like creatures gathering silently around us. She clasped me tightly in her arms, yet at the same time seemed to hold me off from her, as if part of her attention were elsewhere, concentrating on something beyond me. The sheet was clammy. I was cold, and burning. My hands shook. I licked her eyelids, her armpits, I put my tongue into her ears, her navel, into the cool little cup at the base of her throat. When I made to delve in her lap, however, she drew away from me, and there was a sudden, frightening silence. Cautiously I tried again, but again she drew back. She would not be penetrated, at least not where I wanted most to penetrate her, and at last, with an impatient sigh, she turned away from me.

She lay on the edge of the bed, crouched and tense, staring away into the darkness like an animal listening, ready for danger. I held one of her cold, small breasts in my hand, my mouth was pressed to the nape of her neck. Her skin had a tawny, schoolgirl smell. I was shivering. The evening was still. The windows stared out into the darkness in blank amazement. An aeroplane flew over, its engines laboriously beating, I glimpsed its ruby wing-light sailing across the corner of the window above us. I was thinking of a moment from long ago, when I was a child, there was nothing in it, I don’t know why I remembered it, just a moment on a bend on a hill road somewhere, at night, in winter, the wet road gleaming, and dead leaves spinning, and the light from a streetlamp shivering in the wind. Absence, I suppose, the forlorn weight of all that was not there, I suppose that’s what I was remembering.

We dressed in silence. The gas fire sang its tiny song. My hands still trembled. Adele paced, frowning, from room to room, looking for something. She was hungry, she announced. We went out, and she bought a bag of chips, and stood on the pavement outside the chip shop and devoured them, her eyes fixed in concentration on the ground before her, as if she were feeding not herself, but some starving thing inside her.

We went for a walk. It was a raw night, tempestuous and clear. A full moon dived and wallowed amid scudding clouds. We saw a fight outside a pub, and met a little woman pushing a little dog in a doll’s pram. On a patch of waste ground a family of meths drinkers sat around a fire like a circle of decayed stone statues. We stood on a bridge and watched a barge slide past beneath us, dark and silent, on the dark river. When we got back to Chandos Street the sick-looking young man was there, waiting on the corner, huddled in his coat against the wind, with his scrawny girl beside him. He attempted a sporty grin, his mouth twitching.

— Hello, chief, he said. Any stuff tonight? Listen, we’re in a bad way, real sick.