John Banville - Mefisto

I spent hours shut away in my room above the square, hunched over my textbooks, scribbling calculations. Half the time I hardly knew what I was doing, or how I was doing it, or what would come next. Things happened in a flash. One moment the question was there — an equation to be solved, say — the next it was answered, presto! In between, I was aware of only a flicker, a kind of blink, as if a lid had been opened on a blinding immensity and instantly shut again. There might have been someone else inside me doing the calculating, who was surer than I, and infinitely quicker. Indeed, at times this other self seemed about to crack me open and step forth, pristine and pitiless as an imago. Bent there at the table by the bedroom window, I would stop suddenly and lift my head, as if waking in fear out of a muddled dream, my heart thudding dully, while around me in the deepening stillness a sort of presence struggled to materialize. I remembered a picture pinned on the classroom wall when I was a child in the convent school. It was done in satiny pinks and dense, enamelled blues, and showed a laughing little chap playing ball on the brink of a tempestuous river, watched over by a huge figure in white robes, with gold hair and thick gold wings. That was his guardian angel, the nuns said. Every child had a guardian angel. I stared at the picture, struck by the thought of this creature hovering always behind me, with those wings, those wide sleeves, and that look, that to me expressed not solicitude, but a hooded, speculative malevolence.

I had no friends. Figures were my friends. The abacus in my head was never idle. I would devote days to a single exercise, drunk with reckoning. Sometimes at night I woke to discover a string of calculations inching its way through my brain like a blind, burrowing myriapod. A number for me was never just itself, but a bristling mass of other numbers, complex and volatile. I could not hear an amount of money mentioned, or see a date written down, without dismantling the sum into its factors and fractions and roots. I saw mathematical properties everywhere around me. Number, line, angle, point, these were the secret coordinates of the world and everything in it. There was nothing, no matter how minute, that could not be resolved into smaller and still smaller parts.

My mother worried about me. What was I doing up there in that room, all those hours?

— Nothing, I said. Sums.

— Sums? Sums?

She shook her head, bewildered. Behind her, Jack Kay looked at me and smirked.

She nagged me to go out in the fresh air, play games, be a boy like other boys. She would stand motionless on the stairs, as she used to do when I was an infant, and listen to my presence beyond the bedroom door, like a doctor auscultating a suspect heart. I was run down, she said, run down, that was all. She plied me with patented tonics. They tasted of blood and phlegm.

— I’m all right, I would mutter, warding off the brimming spoon. I’m all right.

And when she persisted I would get up and walk out, slamming the front door behind me, making the whole house flinch.

I walked and walked. People in the streets passed before me in a blur, like the bars of a cage. When I had exhausted the town I took to the outskirts. I trudged along the Coolmine road, by the rubbish dump, in the sun, my palms wet and my hair hot. There had been a pit-head here in the days when the anthracite was still being worked, the great mine-wheel stood yet, skeletal, motionless and mad. Now the place was a tip for the factories of the town. Lorries from the brick works and the iron foundry would lumber down a rutted track, slewing and whining like crazed ruminants, stop, squat, and drop a pile of rubbish in a fecal rush from their tilted rear ends. Among the dust-hills bands of tinkers scavenged for scrap metal, and old women with sacks slung at their sides grubbed after nuggets of coal, while enormous seagulls settled in flocks, and rose and settled again, furiously crying. Below ground there was a network of tunnels and deep shafts where the mine had been, and now and then suddenly a hole would open in the earth, into which with a sigh a cliff-face of rubble and dust would slowly collapse. It was here that I had my first glimpse of Mr Kasperl. He strolled out of the gateway of the dump one morning with his hands clasped at his back and a cigar in his mouth, a large man with short legs and a big belly. He had an odd, womanly walk, at once ponderous and mincing. He wore a sort of dustcoat that billowed behind him, and black rubber overshoes. The coat, and the galoshes, incongruous on a summer day, were impressive somehow, as if they might have a secret significance, as if they might be insignia denoting some singular, clandestine authority. He had a blunt, cropped head, and little ears, mauve at the tips and delicately whorled, like an exotic variety of fungus. As he passed me by he glanced at me without expression. His eyes were of a washed, impenetrable blue. He went on, in the direction of the town, leaving a rich whiff of cigar smoke behind him on the surprised, sunlit air.

Sometimes I went out to Ashburn, and walked where I had walked with my mother years before. Even Miss Kitty was gone now. The big house was padlocked, the park had turned into a wilderness. Here and there, under the dilapidations, signs of a vanished world endured. Pheasants waddled about in the long grass. In the midst of wind-shivered foliage a deer would silently materialize — a glossy eye and a glistening tear-track, a stump of tail, a unicorn’s dainty hoof. In a patch of brambles a broken statue leaned at an angle, goggle-eyed and glum, like an inebriated queen. I picked my way through the mute forge, the empty stables, where the air was still hung with the smell of horses. I stood amid the ruins of the cottage where my mother was born. A rapt, intent silence surrounded me, as if everything were watching me, shocked at my intruding in these deserted places. A shell of lupin seeds would pop, or a thrush would whistle piercingly, making me jump. A handful of brick-dust trickling out of a crevice in a crumbling wall seemed a threat hissed at my back.

One day I heard voices. It was noon. A hot wind was blowing. I was standing in an overgrown orchard. No, wait, I was walking along an avenue of beeches, sycamores, something like that. The trees thrashed in the wind, each leaf madly aquiver. The voices wavered, because of the wind I imagine, and at first I could not tell from which direction they were coming, these curiously quaint, miniature sounds. Beyond the trees there was a thick high hedge. I came to a gap and squeezed through it, and found myself in a dappled glade that sloped down gently to the edge of a sun-drenched strip of meadow. I stood still, hearing my own breathing, and the wind churning in the trees behind me. My hands were rank with the catpiss smell of privet. Mr Kasperl was walking in the meadow, with a girl at his side. I recognized him at once, there was no mistaking that pigeon-toed gait. Today he wore a shabby white linen jacket and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and was carrying a cane, with which he cuffed the grass idly as he walked. The girl was tall and pale, with long heavy dark hair. Was she clutching a posy of wildflowers? No, no. Her flowered skirt reached to the ground. I noticed the tips of her black pumps, like demure little tongues, peeping out, turn and turn about, at each step, from under the billowing hem, that was damp from the deep grass, and stuck with hayseeds and the dust of buttercups. Mr Kasperl stopped, and lifted his head and looked about him, at the sky, the swaying trees, puffing contemplatively on his cigar, which I could smell even at that distance. The girl went on a little way, but then she stopped too, and stood blankly gazing, her arms hanging at her sides. There was about the two of them a sense of oppression, of stifled restlessness, as if they were captives and this was their daily sip of freedom. I felt an itch of excitement, skulking there in the gloom amid the fleshy odours of leaf and loam. Then nearby something stirred, and my heart plopped on its elastic. Not ten yards from me, leaning against a riven tree, or twined about it, as it seemed at first, was a young man, who must have been there all the time, watching me, while I was watching the others. He was thin, with a narrow foxy face and high cheekbones and a long, tapering jaw. His skin was pale as paper, his hair a vivid red. He wore a shabby pinstriped suit, that had been tailored for someone more robust than he, and a grimy white shirt without a collar. He detached himself from the tree and came forward, examining me with amiable interest.