John Banville - Eclipse

Cass was watching the swifts. To be in her presence, even when she is at her most calm, is to be always a little on edge. But no, calm is the wrong word, she is never calm. It is as if she is filled to the brim with some highly volatile substance that must not be interfered with, or even subjected to overly close scrutiny. One must watch her sidelong, as it were, drumming one’s fingers and nonchalantly whistling; I have been doing it for so long I have developed a cast in my eye, I mean the eye of my heart. In childhood her inner turmoil would manifest itself in a series of physical ailments and minor mishaps; she suffered constantly from nosebleeds, earaches, chilblains, verrucas; she burned herself, scalded herself; she fell down. All this she bore with amused impatience, as if these inflictions were a price she must pay for some eventual blessing, the conferring of which she is awaiting even yet. She bites her nails so deeply that the quicks bleed. I want to know where she is. I want to know where my daughter is and what she is doing. There is something going on, something no one will tell me, I am convinced of it. I shall get it out of Lydia, I shall beat it out of her, if that is what it takes.

“Remember,” Cass said, leaning forward a little at the table to get a better look at the bird-specks swooping, “remember the stories you used to tell me about Billy in the Bowl?”

I remembered. She was a bloodthirsty child, was my Cass, as bad as Lily, worse. She loved to hear the ferocious escapades I used to invent for that fabled legless wretch who in olden times went about the city streets at night in a cut-off barrel with wheels and drank the blood of babies, it was said.

“Why do you think of that, now?” I asked.

She rubbed a hand on her shorn pate, making a raspy sound.

“I used to make believe that I was him,” she said, “Billy in the Bowl.” At last she looked at me. Her eyes are green; my eyes, so they tell me, although I cannot see the resemblance. “Do you like it, my haircut?”

Faintly from on high I could hear the cries of the gorging swifts. One day when she was small she climbed into my lap and gravely said that there were only three things in the world she was not afraid of, toothpaste, ladders, and birds.

“Yes, Cass,” I said. “I like it.”

Lily is scratching at my door again. The circus is about to start, she says. Well, let it.

When eventually I came down from my ivory tower I found Quirke on his knees in the kitchen, shirtsleeves and trouser bottoms rolled, going at the floor with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of suds. I stood and stared, and he sat back on his heels and gave me back a wry look, not at all abashed. Then Lydia came through from the hall with her hair tied up in a scarf and carrying a mop—yes, a mop—looking every inch the cockney charlady; there was even a cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth. This really is becoming ridiculous. She frowned at me absently. “When are you going to shave off that awful beard?” she said, the cigarette joggling and letting fall a light spray of ash. If Lydia were ever to become lost, the search party could simply follow her cigarette droppings. Quirke was grinning now. Without a word I turned aside from this absurd scene of domestic industry and went in search of Lily, the only one left in this house, seemingly, whom I can depend on to be as irresponsible as I am. She was in her room—I think of it as hers now, no longer my mother’s, which is progress, I suppose, though toward what, exactly, I cannot say—lying on her belly on the bed with her legs up and ankles crossed, reading an inevitable magazine. She was in a sulk, and would not look at me, hesitant in the doorway. Her bare feet were filthy, as usual; I wonder if the child ever bathes. She swayed her legs lightly from side to side in time to some dreamy rhythm in her head. The window was a big gold box of light; the far hills shimmered, dream-blue. I asked if she would care to come for a walk with me.

“We went for one this morning,” she answered in a mumble, and still would not lift her eyes from the page.

“Well,” I said mildly, “we could go for another.” She had been smoking, I could smell it in the air. I picture her Lydia’s age, a wizened slattern, hair dyed yellow and those delicate purple veins in her spindle legs all varicosed. “Mrs. Cleave is going to come up any minute and make you scrub the floor,” I said.

She snorted softly. She pretends to regard Lydia as a figure of fun, but I think she is jealous of her, and possibly a little afraid of her, too. She can be formidable, can Lydia, when provoked, and I know that she finds Lily provocative. In bored languor Lily rose now and waded on her knees as through water to the edge of the bed and stepped lightly to the floor; the bedsprings gave a dismayingly familiar jangle. Is Lydia right, in that mismatched marriage was my poor mother the injured party, not my father? But then, is there ever an uninjured party? Lily dropped to one knee to fasten the strap of her sandal, and for a moment an Attic light glowed in the room. When we were on the stairs she stopped and gave me an odd look.

“Are you going to let us keep on living here,” she said, “my Da and me?”

I shrugged, and tried not to smile—what was it that was making me want to smile?—and she laughed to herself and shook her head and went on quickly, leaving me behind.

Queer, how much of a stranger I am in this town. It was always that way, even when I was a child. I was hardly here at all, just bid-ing my time; the future was where I lived. I do not even know the names of half the streets, and never did. I had a mental map of the place that was wholly of my own devising. I found my way about by designated landmarks: school, church, post office, picture-house. I called the streets by what was in them. My Abbey Street was where the Abbey Cinema stood, my Pikeman Place was where there was a statue of a stylised patriot, whose verdigrised curls and stalwart stare for some reason always made me want to snigger. There are certain parts of the town that are more unfamiliar to me than others, places I rarely had cause to be in, and which over the years took on in my mind an almost exotic aspect. There was a hill with a patch of wasteland—it is probably built over now—traversed by a meandering track, where tinkers used to let their horses loose to graze; I had a recurring dream of being there, in hazy sunlight, looking down on the town, with something extraordinary about to happen, that never did. A lane that ran behind the back of a public house had a sour green smell of porter that made my stomach heave, reminding me, I don’t know why, of a frog I once saw a boy inflate to an eyed balloon by sticking a straw down its gullet and vigorously blowing into it. Buildings, too, gave off an alien air, the Methodist Hall, the old chandlery in Cornmarket, and the malt store, built like a fortress, with a double rank of low, barred windows that at certain times emitted wraithlike clouds of evil-smelling steam, and where I was convinced I could hear rats scampering over the grain. In such places my fancy tarried uneasily, frightening itself with the thought of nameless terrors.

I was describing to Lily the malt store and those rats, making her do her dry-retching routine, when we came into a little open space bounded at the far end by a fragment of the old town wall that Cromwell’s cannons missed. There we sat down on a bench beside a disused public lavatory, under the shade of a gnarled tree, and she began to tell me about her mother. The sun was hot, and there was not a soul about save for a lame dog that circled us warily, wagging a limp tail, before mooching off. I suppose it must have been this deserted atmosphere, the noontide stillness, and the tree, and the glare of the whitewashed lavatory wall beside us and the faint understink of drains, that made it seem that we were somewhere in the far south, somewhere hot and dry, on some harsh coast, with peeling plane trees and cicadas chirring under a merciless sky. What seas what shores what granite islands… As she talked, Lily picked at a loose thread in the hem of her dress, squinting in the light. A breeze rattled the leaves above us and then all settled down again, like an audience settling down for the next act.