John Banville - Nightspawn

‘Have I seen you before?’

He did not understand me, but he was not the one to admit that. Gravely he said,

‘I am Yusef, Sair.’

‘Well, that’s nice.’

Lights burned in every window of the house, and powerful lamps, concealed about the garden, lit up the walls. Yusef moved ahead on quiet feet, the murmurous billowing of his robe lending a peculiar sinuous movement to the darkness. He led me through the tunnel into the courtyard. The place was crowded, the guests tightly packed into the little space, all in that early-party stance, one knee bent, one foot turned out, glass joggling in the hand. Yusef murmured a fair approximation of my name, and Julian rose from the table to greet me.

‘Benjamin, here you are. Have a drink.’

Perceive this scene: that empty blue room behind the fountain, filled now with tipsy revellers. At one end, a makeshift dais, plywood and ill-driven nails. Upon the dais there stands, draped mysteriously in a canvas shroud, a square object five feet by five, four in breadth. Julian, thinking that he is not observed, slips up there for a gleeful peek beneath the shroud. I have an intimation of steel cords and springs, tense, taut, and humming faintly. Julian catches my eye, or I catch his. He winks. I wonder what mischief he has planned.

I wandered in the garden around the house. Dim figures lurked in the shadows, among the scented mimosas, the bougainvillaea. Once I startled the guests in the dining-room by pressing my face to the window and gaping in at them. I found french windows standing open on a darkened room, the curtains softly billowing. I went inside, into the house, and drifted silently across the halls and rooms. Distant music whispered to me. There was uneasiness in the air.

A cocktail was thrust into my paw, most of which spilled when Julian gave me a hearty thump on the back.

‘What do you think?’ he cried, inserting a gentle elbow into the chest of a tiny senile old man who was making vain efforts to gain his attention.

‘Very impressive,’ I murmured.

Julian inclined a furry ear towards my face.

‘Eh? Can’t hear you with all this noise.’

‘I said it looks very impressive, the party.’

He reared away from me, two plump hands patting his chest, a wide smile on his chops.

‘The last grand gesture,’ he said.

A dim figure slunk toward us, spectacles gleaming. Julian threw an expansive arm around its shoulder, almost dislocating its neck. Almost. Pity. I knew from somewhere the pale forlorn face, the soft-boiled eyes behind their thick panes. The mouth gave an indecipherable groan.

‘Pardon?’ I shouted.

‘I said, hello.’

‘Oh. Hello.’

‘Benjamin, you remember Charlie Knight, don’t you?’Julian said. ‘The island that day…?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

A humble ghost, risen from the past. Hello Charlie, old fiend — sorry, insert an ‘r’. Julian beamed at his friend, and cried,

‘My old procurer. Off you go now and have some jelly.’

Charlie gave us both an unhappy smile, and slunk away. I watched him being sucked helplessly into the throng.

‘I love parties,’ Julian sighed.

I cleared my throat, and shuffled the gravel with the toe of my shoe.

‘A bit tiring,’ I said.

Julian cast a glance at me.

‘But there are so many possibilities, my boy, so very many possibilities.’

‘For what?’

He waved a hand.

‘All kinds of things. Look around. You might meet old friends.’

I looked around.

Over the banisters of the stairs a woman hung, pale arms and hair pointing resolutely downward. I touched her carefully. She seemed to be unconscious. A tall man with grey hair, a dead cigarette in his fingertips, emerged below us, halted, and looked up at me in surprise. I smiled. He stepped forward and inspected the woman’s purplish face. Then he shrugged, and strolled away. I gently unwound her from her perch and laid her down on the stairs, where she gave a great sigh and reclined in a pose reminiscent of those naked Spanish majas. I followed the winding stairs. Somewhere below me, a woman’s strident voice was calling for Melissa, Melissa, Melissima. Tinkle. That music.

Julian was looking at me, grinning and biting his lip. I could think of nothing to say to him. Had I been calmer in those days, I might have listened to him more closely, and heeded that subtle warning which rolling Uncle Victor had been made to carry to me. I have said it before, I shall say it again, I say it now: fool, fool, fool. Helena stood on the dais, holding the rip cord in her hand, biting her lip, trying not to look too ridiculous. She need not have bothered. No one heeded her. Lips were being gnawed all around me. I felt that at any moment a concerted burst of laughter would ring out, and everyone would turn to me, screaming derision. I checked my zipper. Julian said,

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please, your attention.’

In the middle of a deserted room, I found a strange grinning figure standing storklike on one pointed slipper, masked, dressed in a harlequin suit, a pale finger pressed to its lips, another pointing to the shadow beneath a couch, its ear bent to the silence following a sentence broken behind a door. I looked to the couch and caught the flash of a tiny claw, and when I turned back to that figure, it was gone. Tink.

I was perched against a wall with a glass of something in my hand. I was drunk. There was a storm, a lavish production banging about in the sky. The current was uncertain, and the lights kept dipping crazily, and flaring up again, brighter than ever, to catch the guests by surprise in frozen attitudes of inexplicable guilt. Rabin came and talked to me. Could it really have been Rabin? I do not think I heard one word of what he said. He shook his head and went away. I saw an unmistakably twisted back lurch out into the hall, but when I made to follow it, a hand was laid upon my shoulder, and I turned to find friend Charlie, the knight of the night, goggling at me through his goggles.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Your German friend —’

‘Charlie, I must go.’

‘I want you to tell him something. Listen to me. Will you tell him that —’

‘Must go —’

‘Twinbein will be…’

The rest was lost. What did I care? I went into the hall, shaking my head, a stupid thing to do, for a set of billiard balls began to knock against each other quite sickeningly inside my skull. Walls, doors, a carpet with two cigarette burns and one guilty-looking butt.

Horrible brown smoke was soaking through the pores of the canvas. Helena watched it in horrified fascination, forgetful of the cord still clutched in her hand. Someone said,

‘It’s a bomb.’

The crowd backed away. Yack, the thing barked. They backed farther away. Helena looked at me, her mouth open, her head shaking in disbelief. Something prodded me in the back.

‘For God’s sake, do something,’ said Julian.

And I wonder now, here in this autumn, by this sea, whatever became of Julian’s club foot. Could it be that my jaundiced mind afflicted him with it? Jaundiced memory. Given the chance, I think I would cripple the world. I am doing my best to nail a number of its creatures.

I was in a room near the front of the house. The shapes of the furniture impressed themselves but dimly on my eyes, their outlines drawn against an odd purple radiance. That radiance came from the sky: a huge sheet of plate glass formed one wall. There was the hill sloping away, traversed by the white road. The city glimmered, and its sibling, the sky of stars. My knee Struck something low and solid, and there was a tinkle of glass. It was a little cabinet with a royal stock of liquor. I groped my way to an armchair and turned it to face the night. The enormity of the darkness assailed me. Lightning flashed along the line of the far mountains. Tink. I made myself a drink at the cabinet, working by smell, for I could not read the labels. I found brandy. Clink of glass, tinkle of liquor.