John Banville - Eclipse

I cannot think how Lily fills her day. I find myself straining to monitor her movements. I will stop and stand listening for her, not breathing, in a sort of anxious expectancy, in the same way that in the early days here I would wait for my phantoms to appear. She will be silent for hours, not a sound, and then suddenly, just when I have relaxed my vigilance, there will be a ripping blare of music from her transistor radio—it goes everywhere with her, like a prosthesis—or a bedroom door will bang open and shut, followed by the clatter of her heels on the stairs, like the sound of a window cleaner falling down his ladder. I will come upon her practising her dance steps, shaking and shuffling to the tinny beat in her earphones and singing along to the melody in a bat-squeak nasal falsetto. When she sees me observing her she will snatch off the earphones and turn aside, directing a surly backward glance in the region of my knees, as though I had taken unfair advantage of her. She pokes about the house as I used to do when I was a child here. She has been in the garret—I trust she did not meet my Dad—and in my room, too, I suspect. What secrets does she think she will uncover? There are no more bottled frogs for her to find. My stash of pornography has gone too, thrown out one day in a sudden attack of self-disgust—I think I have at last cured myself of sex; certainly the symptoms are clearing up nicely.

She gets up to things. She started a scrapbook in one of my mother’s old cloth-bound account books, sticking photographs of her pop idols over the columns of pencilled figures with paste that she made herself from flour and water; afterwards I had to call in Quirke to unblock the kitchen sink. I think he hit her for that, for next day she had an angry blue and yellow bruise on her cheekbone. I do not know if I should speak to him about this. Certainly I shall not tell tales on her again. She lay low for a day or two, then yesterday a wall-shaking crash, like that of a heavy piece of furniture falling over, made me leap out of my chair and hare off upstairs three steps at a time, expecting disaster. I found her standing in the middle of my mother’s room with her hands behind her back, grinding the toe of her sandal into an imaginary hole in the linoleum. “What noise?” she said, giving me a look of offended innocence. And indeed, I could find nothing amiss in the room, although there was a strong whiff of stale wood dust, and the sunlight at the window was aswirl with motes. If things go on like this she will have the place down about our ears.

She seems to eat nothing but potato crisps and chocolate bars. The latter come in a baffling variety of flavours and fillings. I find discarded wrappers all over the house, torn and twisted like pieces of shrapnel, and read them, marvelling at the confectioners’ inventiveness. The chocolate seems to be not chocolate at all, but a blend of unpronounceable multisyllabic chemicals. How did I miss all this, the jungly music, the gaudy, fake food, the clumpy shoes and skimpy, acid-coloured skirts, the hairstyles, the vampire make-up, the livid lipsticks and nail polish shiny and thick as clotted blood? Was Cass never young like this? I cannot recall her adolescence. She must have gone straight from stormy childhood to being the mysterious young woman she is now, with nothing in between. I have suppressed the second act, with its cast of consultants and therapists and mind-menders, charlatans all, in my not unbiased opinion. She passed through their ministrations like a sleepwalker pacing the roof’s leads and guttering, beyond the urgent reaching out of hands from attic windows to restrain her. Despite everything, despite all my suspicions, disappointment, fury, even—why could she not be normal? —I always secretly admired her intensity, her drivenness, the unrelenting using up of the store of herself. There were moments onstage, sadly rare, when I felt in my own nerves something of her irresistible repeated compulsion to risk the self’s stability.

As the days progress I have noted a modulation in the jaded indifference with which Lily at first regarded me. She has even initiated a rudimentary attempt at what in other circumstances might be called communication. That is, she asks short questions in expectation of long answers. What can I tell her? I have not mastered the language of Lilyland. It seems she looked me up in a reference book in the town library. I am impressed; a girl of Lily’s tastes and attitudes does not venture lightly among the stacks.

When she confessed to these researches she blushed—quite a thing, to see Lily blush—and then was furious with herself, and frowned fiercely and bit her lip, and gave her hair a hard toss, as if she were giving herself a slap. She marvels at the number of productions I have been in; I tell her I am very old, and that I started young, which bit of winsome bathos makes her curl her lip. She asked if the awards that Who’s Who says I have garnered had a cash element, and was disappointed when I told her sadly no, only useless statuettes. Nevertheless, she has obviously begun to take me for a person of at least some consequence. Her interest in the possibility of knowing someone famous is tempered by her scepticism that anyone famous would choose to come to this dump, which is how she invariably refers to her birthplace, and mine. I asked if she has ever been to the theatre and she narrowed her eyes defensively.

“I go to the pictures,” she said.

“So do I, Lily,” I said, “so do I.”

Thrillers she likes, and horror movies. What about romances? I asked, and she snorted and mimed sticking two fingers down her throat. She is a bloodthirsty child. She recounted in yawn-inducing detail the plot of her favourite film, an action picture called Bloodline. Although I probably saw it, refracted through tears, on one of my clandestine afternoons in the cinema—I must have seen every feature shown in those three or four months—I could not follow her account of it, for the story was as populously complicated as a Jacobean tragedy, though with a far higher quotient of corpses. In the end the heroine drowns.

Lily is sorely disappointed, I can see, that I have not starred in a picture. I tell her of my triumphs and travels, my Hamlet at Elsinore, my Macbeth in Bucharest, my notorious Oedipus at Sagesta—oh, yes, I could have been an international star, had I not been at heart afraid of the big world beyond these safe shores—but what is any of that to her compared with a lead role on the silver screen? I demonstrate the lurch I devised for my Richard the Third at Stratford—Ontario, that is—of which I used to be very proud, though she thinks it comic; she says I look more like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I suspect she finds me generally hilarious, my poses, my actor’s burr, all my little tics and twitches, too funny for laughter. I catch her watching me, moon-eyed with expectation, waiting for me to perform some wonderful new foolishness. Cass used to look at me like that when she was little. Perhaps I should have gone in more for comedy. I might have been a—

Well. I have made a momentous discovery. I hardly know what to think of it, or what to do about it. I should be angry but I am not, although I confess I do feel something of a fool. It might have been ages before I found out had I not decided on a whim to follow Quirke when I spotted him in the town today. I have always been a secret stalker. I mean I follow people, pick them out at random in the street and shadow them, or used to, anyway, before I became what the newspapers, were they still to be interested in me, would call a recluse. It is a harmless vice, and easy to entertain—human beings have scant sense of themselves as objects of speculation in the world outside their heads, and will rarely notice a stranger’s interest in them. I am not sure what it is I hope to find, peering hungrily like this into other lives. I used to tell myself that I was gathering material—a walk, a stance, a way of carrying a newspaper or putting on a hat—some bit of real-life business I could transfer raw on to the stage to flesh out and lend a touch of verisimilitude to whatever character I happened to be playing at the time. But that is not it, not really, or not entirely. And besides, there is no such thing as verisimilitude. Do not misunderstand me, I am no Peeping Tom, hunched over in a hot sweat with throbbing eye glued to keyhole. It is not that kind of gratification I am after.