John Banville: Mefisto

CHANCE WAS IN the beginning. I am thinking of that tiny swimmer, alone of all its kind, surging in frantic ardour towards the burning town, the white room and Castor dead. Strange, that a life so taken up with the swell and swarm of numbers should start, like a flourish between mirrors, in the banal mathematics of gemination. The end also was chance.

There was a Polydeuces too, of course. Who only is escaped alone etcetera.

We were not the first, of our kind, in our tribe. On my mother’s side there had been another pair, monovular also, though they both perished, their lives a brief day. Pity they weren’t bottled, I could have them for a mascot, my translucent little grand-uncles, fists clenched, frowning in their fluid. There is too a more subtle echo in the symmetrical arrangement of grandparents, Jack Kay and Grandfather Swan and their miniature wives. Thus the world slyly nudges us, showing up the seemingly random for what it really is. I could go on. I shall go on. I too have my equations, my symmetries, and will insist on them.

When did my mother realize the nature of the cargo she was carrying? What archangel spoke? Dualities perhaps would fascinate her, glimpsed reflections, coincidences of course. A pair of magpies swaggering among the cabbages gave her a fright. Old sayings might strike her with a new significance: peas in a pod, two new pins, chalk and cheese. Maybe now and then she fancied she could hear us, horribly together in our crowded amniotic sea, crooning and tinily crying.

She was herself undergoing a kind of gemination. Her condition did not so much change her as produce another person. Her ankles swelled, her hips thickened. Even her shoulders seemed broader, packed with soft flesh. She began to wear her hair pulled back in two tight, gleaming black wings and tied at the nape in a netted bun. When she went out to Ashburn, Jack Kay gazed at her mournfully and said:

— Where is my girl gone, my little girl?

She looked at him askance, unsmiling, and for an instant clearly he saw his own mother. He shook his great grizzled head.

— Pah! he said sourly, you’re a woman now.

I picture her, in that last springtime of the war. Mine is yet another version of her, not the mother she was becoming, nor the daughter Jack Kay had lost, but a stranger, silent and enigmatic, disconsolately smiling, like a dark madonna in the brownish sea-light of some old painting. The burden she carries under her heart weighs on her like a weight of sadness. She had not asked for this outlandish visitation. She begins to feel a secret revulsion. Blood, torn flesh, the gaping lips of a cut before the seepage starts, such things have always appalled her. In the butcher’s shop she cannot look at the strung-up waxen flanks of meat surreptitiously dripping pink syrup on the sawdust floor. She feels like a walking bruise, fevered and tumescent. Certain smells sicken her, of cooked cabbage, coal tar, leather. Images lodge in her head, anything will do, a cracked egg, a soiled dishrag, as if her mind is desperate for things with which to torment her. She cannot sleep.

— I’m not well. I don’t feel well.

— You must pray, child.

His eyes glint behind the grille, his teeth seem bared in a smiling grimace. She can smell the altar wine on his breath.

— I’m afraid.

— What’s that?

— I’m afraid, father.

— Oh now. Ask the Blessed Virgin to help you.

Everything crowds in on her. Her parents are evicted from the cottage at Ashburn, and move in with her. Her mother, already limbering up for death, soon fades into the county hospital. Jack Kay remains. He paces the house silently, looking at her out of tragic eyes, as if somehow everything were her fault.

She cannot be still. She is suffocating. She takes long, aimless walks, dragging herself through the town and out along the Coolmine road, by the rubbish dump. One day a crow falls down dead out of a tree on her head. She does not know whether to laugh or scream. For weeks she will keep hearing the sudden thump, the crackle of feathers, and feel the limp, blue-black thing sliding down her front. The summer is hot. Europe is in ruins. She straggles home, and finds Jack Kay sitting on the window-sill beside the front door, swinging one leg, his big white hands folded on the crook of his stick. She says:

— The key is there.

— Key, what key? I don’t know about any key.

— There! It’s always there!

He looks on mildly as she snatches up the doormat furiously and points. An agile beetle scuttles for safety. She crushes the key into the lock. Dank air in the hall, and a sullen silence as of things interrupted at furtive play. She begins to say something, but stops, catching her breath. Jack Kay, purblind in the gloom, almost collides with her, and steps back with a grunt. She is leaning against the wall, holding herself. When she turns to the light from the doorway her face is ashen, with a sheen of sweat.

— Go get someone, she whispers. Quick!

He opens his mouth and shuts it again.

The sumptuous light of summer fills the bedroom. A lace curtain billows lazily in the wide-open window. It all seems so heartless. She thrashes slowly on the bed, shielding her face in her arms, as if trapped beneath a press of forms fighting in silent ferocity. Jack Kay has followed her up, and stands now in the doorway, goggling.

— Get out! she cries. Get out!

She understands at last what it means that the thing inside her is alive, alive.

Jack Kay descended the stairs, stopping at every third step to look back at the bedroom door, muttering. It was not right she should shout at him like that, like a madwoman. He opened the front door cautiously. An ordinary afternoon in summer. He listened a moment, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him, holding the flap with his heel and letting it down quietly. Go get someone , he mouthed, wagging his head, quick quick ! He spat. A dog approached him. He lifted his stick and the animal cringed, licking thin lips. The stick was a comfortable weight in his hand, good stout malacca worn to the texture of wax, with a hallmarked silver band and a steel ferrule. He frowned, trying to recall when or where he had come by it. He thought briefly of death, then tipped the brim of his hat over one eye and sauntered off across the square. And did not hear the cry that issued from the open upstairs window behind him, nor the second, weaker wail, that wavered, and sank, like a tiny hand going under.

I DON’T KNOW when it was that I first heard of the existence, if that’s the word, of my dead brother. From the start I knew I was the survivor of some small catastrophe, the shock-waves were still reverberating faintly inside me. The mysterious phenomenon that produced us is the result, the textbooks tell me, of a minor arrest in the early development of a single egg, so that the embryonic streak begins dividing by binary fission. I prefer to picture something like a scene from a naughty seaside postcard, the fat lady, apple cheeks, big bubs and mighty buttocks, cloven clean in two by her driven little consort. However, the cause is no matter, only the effect. The perils we had missed were many. We might have been siamese. One of us might have exsanguinated into the other’s circulation. Or we might simply have strangled one another. All this we escaped, and surfaced at last, gasping. I came first. My brother was a poor second. Spent swimmer, he drowned in air. My father, when Jack Kay fetched him home at last, looked in dull wonderment at the scene: the infant mewling in its mother’s arms, and that lifeless replica of it laid out on the sheet.