John Banville - Mefisto

— Don’t worry, padre, Felix said to him jauntily, she’ll find her own way to the light.

That night she was gay, she sat with her ankles crossed under the covers and an ashtray in her lap. She had put on lipstick and mascara, and painted her fingernails scarlet. She waved her cigarette about, fluttering her lashes and pouting like a vamp.

— He tried to put his hand under my clothes, she said. Imagine!

Felix fairly whooped.

— Oh my, oh my! he cried, clutching himself. So much for salvation, eh?

When he was gone she sat and plucked at the bedclothes, frowning. She would not meet my eye. She picked up a magazine and flipped through it distractedly.

— Listen, she said, you’ll have to get me something. That bitch will only give me that stuff, that method stuff, what do you call it, it’s no good.

She ceased turning the gaudy pages and sat quite still, her head bowed. There was silence. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and watched with narrowed eyes the thin blue plume of smoke pouring upwards.

— I can’t, I said. How can I.

For a moment she said nothing, and did not stir, it was as if she had not heard.

— Yes, she said quietly. That’s what he says, too. And then he laughs.

She looked up at me and tried to smile. The sore patch at the corner of her painted mouth was raw. Her lower lip was trembling.

— She gives you things, doesn’t she? she said. Pills, those things? You can ask her. You can say it’s for yourself.

She struggled up, overturning the ashtray, and knelt on the edge of the bed and clasped her arms around my neck and pressed her trembling mouth on mine. She began to cry. Lipstick, smoke, salt tears. That taste, I can taste it still.

— I’ll let you do it to me, she moaned. Everything, everything you want. Everything …

I STOLE IT FOR HER. I knew where to look, what to take. Matron was not at her desk, the key to the dispensary was in her drawer. I walked upstairs. It was teatime, no one paid me any heed. In a hospital even I could go unnoticed. I locked the dispensary door behind me. How quiet it was there suddenly, like being underwater, amid all those shelves of greenish glass, those phials brimming with sleep. I found what I had come for, but still I lingered, leaning by the window. It was a gusty twilight. A sky full of wreckage flowed overhead in silence. Down in the grounds a cherry tree whipped and shuddered, its fallen blossoms washing in waves back and forth over the grey grass. How many moments had I known like this, when everything faltered somehow, like a carousel coming briefly to a stop, and I saw once again with weary eyes the thing that had been there all the time. I pressed my forehead to the glass. To stay here, to stay here forever, like this. To have it over, finally. She was up pacing the floor, holding herself tightly in her arms. She flew at me, where had I been! I handed her the tiny plastic ampoules. She thrust them into a pocket of her gown and stood a moment motionless, with a sort of vacant grin, gazing at nothing. Then she frowned. No, she muttered, no, the room wasn’t safe, there was no lock on the door, anyone could walk in. Besides, her things were not here, she had hidden them. She paced again, talking to herself, one hand stuck in her hair and the other tearing at the sore on her mouth. Then she halted, nodding.

— There’ll be no one there, she said. There’s never anyone there at this time, it will be all right.

She clutched my arm.

— Yes, she said, yes, it will be all right.

It strikes me suddenly how like cloisters were those corridors, with their arched ceilings, their statues and their lilies, that quiet that was not quite silence. She hurried ahead of me, keeping to the wall, a barefoot wraith. She led me to the chapel. It was a little vaulted cell hung with flags and pennants and holy pictures in big brown frames. A stained-glass window, from which the last light was fading, depicted the assumption of the Virgin in pinks and gaudy blues. There were daffodils on the miniature altar. A brass oil lamp with a ruby-red globe was suspended from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The place, festooned and dim, had a jaded, vaguely sybaritic air, like the tent of a desert chieftain. There was a smell of wood and wax. The silence here too was somehow murmurous, as if thronged with lingering echoes. Adele reached behind a picture of a skewered St Sebastian and brought out a plastic bag that had been taped with sticking plaster to the back of the frame. We stood for a moment in the holy hush, with our heads together, admiring her treasures. There was a little bottle and a spoon, a rubber dropper, and a disposable syringe, its needle bent, that she had salvaged from a waste bin. I was thinking of another occasion, when we had stood like this, in each other’s warmth, our breath mingling. Outside the wind was blowing. Her hands trembled. The wounded saint considered us with his level, sad, lascivious gaze.

She knelt at the step in front of the altar to blend her brew, while I sat on a bench and watched. She worked with loving, rapt attention, biting her lip and frowning, forgetting herself. I hardly knew her, kneeling there, transfigured, lost in her task, a votive priestess. Now and then she had to stop and wait for the shaking in her hands to subside, and looked about her dimly, with unseeing eyes. She lit a stump of penny candle and set it on the step and warmed the mixture in the spoon. Then she sat back on her heels and rolled the sleeve of her gown to the shoulder. Her naked arm glimmered in the fading light. She found a vein, and squeezed and squeezed until it stood up, plump and purple, gorged with blood. At first the needle would not penetrate, and she prodded and pushed, making a faint mewling sound and arching her back. Then suddenly the tip went in, and the swollen skin slid up around it, like a tiny pouting mouth, drawing the fine steel shaft deep inside itself, and she pressed the plunger slowly, while the pulsing vein sucked and sucked, and at last she leaned her head back, her eyelids fluttering, and exhaled a long, shivering sigh.

I knelt on the cold floor and held her. She stared at me sightlessly. Her hand, still holding the syringe, lay limply beside her on the step. I crushed the chill silk stuff of her gown in my hands.

— You promised, I said. You promised.

I lifted her up and walked her to the door, and made her stand with her back to it so that no one could come in. She put one arm across my shoulders, and with the other held my head in a fierce embrace, grinding her chin into my jaw. Her thighs were cold. I listened in vague wonder to my own hoarse quickening gasps. The back of her head beat dully against the thick oak door. She was laughing, or crying, I don’t know which.

— You’ll get more for me, won’t you, she said into my ear. Say it, say you’ll get more.

— Yes, I said, yes.

But I did not have to get it, I had it already, enough to keep her going for weeks, it was still in my pocket, enough to keep us both going, for weeks.

And so at the same time evening after evening we came there to the chapel, and I gave her that day’s ration of peace, and in return she opened her gown and briefly held me, gasping, pressed to her shivering flesh. I recall the quiet around us, the light dying in that garish window, and the smell of the place, like the smell of coffins, and the vague clamour of teatime outside in the wards, a noise from another world. Afterwards we would sit for a long time together in the dim glow of the flickering altar lamp, as another day died and night came on. Sometimes an old woman in a dressing-gown would creep in and kneel for a while, sighing and mumbling, with her face in her hands. She paid us no heed, perhaps she never noticed us. It was May, the month of Mary, fresh flowers were placed on the altar every day, daffodils, and tulips, and lilies of the valley. Adele sat with head bowed and her hands in her lap, so still she seemed hardly to breathe. I told her about numbers, how they worked, how simple they were, how pure. I do not know if she was even listening. I told her too about that moment on the mountain, how it had come to me afresh, with more weight than ever, that under the chaos of things a hidden order endures. A kind of rapture thickened in my throat, I gagged on it as if on grief. She leaned her shoulder wearily against mine.