John Banville - Nightspawn

‘Marines?’ he said.

‘In a manner of speaking. Tell me, sir, how are you doing, I mean really, how are you doing?’

His lips twitched (it might have been a smile) and he turned to Erik and asked,

‘How did you get out?’

Erik grinned, and gestured with his empty glass at me.

‘My friend tore up his shirt, tied it into a rope and lowered me down the wall. How do you think I got out? I walked through the gate.’

Aristotle ordered another round of whatever poison it was that we were drinking.

‘Mr White,’ he said, fumbling with his money, while the gay waiter waited, tapping a burnished fingernail against his tray. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘I’m not.’

The waiter went away. Aristotle took a sip from his glass, then laid it down and, licking his lips, he considered me for a time. Then he laughed. He did, really.

‘Soon you may have to leave,’ he said softly.

‘Ah, balls, you don’t frighten me.’

‘But I do.’

‘But you don’t.’

He seemed hurt, and snapped irritably,

‘Well I soon shall.’

‘Fuck off.’

Scintillating stuff, this. Erik, we found, was not attending to us. He sat turned away from the table, an arm laid languidly across the back of his chair. Two sailors had come down the steps, and were making their way toward the bar, with that look of sullen concentration which was meant to suggest that they were just two lads looking for a drink, too innocent and too thirsty to notice their surroundings. Later on, I knew, they would have that same look, expressing another desire, not for drink.

‘The marines,’ Aristotle murmured, and glanced at me with sour satisfaction. ‘The real marines, Mr White.’

The sailors ordered their drinks, and, catching each other’s eye in the dim mirror behind the bar, they suddenly sniggered, and then lapsed into solemnity again, ruefully. Their gazes crept about the room. Erik smiled at them, in a way that I had never seen him smile before. There was almost tenderness in his face. The sailors strolled across to our table, circumnavigating the room, and stood there behind Aristotle, shuffling their feet and gaping at the ceiling with a great show of interest in the muddy mosaic up there. They were two squat, powerfully built creatures with cropped hair and muscles that bulged like chancres against their tight woollen vests. Aristotle did not look at them; he leaned across the table and put his hand on Erik’s arm.

‘Erik, don’t,’ he said, but Erik drew his arm away, and throwing back his head, he cried,

‘My friends, join us, please.’

They joined us. Their names were Bill and Mick, and they were off a British warship, docked in the Piraeus. They were coarse and frightening creatures. Erik talked to them, asking about their families, England, their captain (a certain lewdness crept in there), asked them about the sea. They did not answer at any great length, but kept glancing at each other uncertainly. Perhaps they felt in some coil of their little brains that everything was not quite as it should be — as, indeed, it was not. Aristotle had begun to drink heavily, and now and then a horrible fit of coughing would shake him from tip to toe. Erik was punishing him, and Erik knew it. Bill looked at Mick, and Mick looked at Bill. It is extraordinary how alike they were; perhaps my memory has mislaid one of them, and duplicated the other, in that fumbling way which memory has of trying to cover up for its mistakes. Erik stood up.

‘Come, we shall go somewhere else,’ he said. ‘This place bores me.’

He turned and strode away. Bill and Mick, after the initial surprise, leapt up, boots clattering, and rushed after him, almost elbowing each other in their haste. I could never discover the root of Erik’s magnetism, but it was very real. Aristotle and I followed slowly. The old man kept a hand pressed to his paunch.

‘Take it easy,’ I said, not knowing what I might mean.

Outside, the night was cold, the square empty. I stood beside the old man and listened to the tinkling music which followed us up the steps. We walked to the corner, and turned down into Monasteraki. The air worked its chemistry in my blood, throttling those little bubbles of alcohol. Aristotle’s face was grey in the light from the street lamps. A shout, followed by a peal of raucous laughter, rushed out at us from an alleyway. Down there, Erik was wrestling playfully with those two lumbering blue bears. Aristotle said,

‘Erik.’

The German looked over his shoulder at us, and the sailors fell back against the wall, panting and laughing. Erik and the old man watched each other, and the rest of us watched them. The sailors grew still, and their eyes narrowed.

‘Erik,’ the old man said. ‘What are you trying to do to me, what?’

Erik snarled. Aristotle stepped toward him, and halted when Erik drew back his fist.

‘Would you strike me, Erik?’

Aristotle spoke in the smallest, most lost of voices. He turned his head this way and that in sharp little jerks, like an inquisitive blackbird. The whole thing was ludicrous. Erik let fall his fist. Then the sailors moved. They trundled forward and stood before Aristotle, their thumbs in their waistbands. He looked at them as though they were transparent. Erik wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and investigated the smear. Bill jabbed a blunt finger into Aristotle’s left lapel, and said,

‘You old git. Why don’t you crawl off somewhere and die.’

‘Yeh, why don’t you?’ Mick agreed.

Something was dawning in Erik’s face. He shook his head dumbly, and laid a hand on Mick’s shoulder. That was a mistake. The sailor’s thick fist shot out and buried itself in Aristotle’s stomach. The old man seemed to coil around the blow, his knees jerking up to meet his chin as it came down. Erik gave a squeal, sunk his fingers into Mick’s throat, and flung him aside. Bill, in a lazy kind of way, began to kick Aristotle where he lay on his side on the ground.

‘Stop,’ Erik cried. ‘Stop.’

Bill stopped, and grinned sheepishly. Good old Bill, he was not the worst of them. I fancy for him, old Bill, a death, far from doctors and drugs, from a virulent and peculiarly malign syphilis.

Aristotle coughed feebly. I knelt beside him. His face was foul with blood and vomit. The sailors took an arm each of Erik, and set off down the alleyway. He tore himself away from them, turned back and fixed his mad eyes on me. I tried not to look at him.

‘What do you want?’ I snarled.

He held out his hands. He was almost kneeling, a little smile on his face.

‘Help me,’ he pleaded softly.

‘Go to hell.’

Bill and Mick exchanged some more looks, their eyebrows raised. One of them called to Erik, but he ignored the call. He began to tremble.

‘ Help me.’

The very walls seemed to retreat in horror from his scream. Aristotle moaned. I stood up, shaking my head. We faced each other across the old man’s fallen form.

‘I can’t help you, Erik,’ I said, with tears sticking needles into my eyes. ‘I can’t help anyone. I can’t even help myself. You’ve got to find your own ways.’

An echo, an echo. Erik hung his head, and gave a strange little sigh; there was almost amusement in it. He turned, and with his two new friends, he disappeared into the darkness. A laugh bounced off the walls.

I dragged Aristotle to his feet and propped him up in a doorway, then went out to the street and spent an anxious ten minutes before I found a taxi. The driver, a cheerful fat man in a reefer jacket and a battered cap, helped me to bundle the Colonel into the back seat, where he subsided like a bundle of old wet clothes and blew a large red bubble.

‘These drunks,’ the driver said, and shook his head.