John Banville - Birchwood

THE PAST COMES BACKtransformed only to startle us with its steadfastness. It is our fractured vision which has transformed it. My broken kingdom all was changed and yet was as it always was. The house was in better repair, and eyed the world through its blazing windows with a steely new assurance, and there were new slates on the roof, and the garden was elegantly barbered, but these trimmings could not disguise the sad fastidious heart of Birchwood, my Birchwood. In the hall the tall clock still bravely tocked. Dead roses scattered amidst bits of a shattered bowl considered their splintered reflections in a mirror laced with cracks. A fat lozenge of sunshine sat on a chair. I could touch nothing, nothing. They had maimed my world. I climbed the stairs to the high window on the landing. Spring sunshine and shadow swept the garden, and the blood gleamed in the grass. The fountain below the window was broken. On the surface of the water a fallen sky trembled. A blue butterfly flickered across the lawn. My fists were wet. I held them up before me and stared at them with stinging eyes, unable to recognise my tears for what they were.

‘Make a stir, boy, and by fuck I'll blow your head off.’

It was Cotter, perched like a ramshackle crow in the doorway of the bedroom across the landing with a shotgun clenched against his hip. He spat on the floor at my feet, and without taking his eyes from me he twisted his mouth over his shoulder and roared,

‘Lookat here, I have him!’

Silas appeared behind him and stared for a moment, and then smiled, and came at me with open arms. I stepped aside. Cotter lifted the shotgun and aimed it at my head.

‘Will I shoot the bugger now?’ he asked eagerly of Silas, who waved a white-gloved hand at him and snapped,

‘Go away, you, go away!’

He went, banging his boots on the stairs and grumbling, and Silas beamed at me fondly.

‘My boy, how are you? I thought you were lost to us forever. Why do you weep? Come, Gabriel, talk to your old friend. You know I never wished you harm. Gabriel?…’

I turned away from him to the window. There were figures moving through the wood, carrying things. Silas saw them too, and sighed and said,

‘Burying the dead. Terrible, terrible.’ He lit his pipe and then linked his arm through mine, and together we paced up and down the landing. ‘It was terrible, Gabriel, truly awful. I didn't expect such…such… None of us expected it, believe me. You've seen those wanton creatures in their dresses? The Molly Maguires, they call them. He led us to believe they were freedom fighters, Gabriel, patriots! Ah, I should have known, but I did not.’ He glanced at me sideways and sucked fiercely on his pipe. ‘It was all his fault, you know. Such… such…’

Such vengeance. From my lair on the cart I saw them drag old John Michael across the lawn and stand him against the glasshouse and shoot him in the face with a shotgun. I saw them cut a woman's throat. They beat and kicked and throttled the Lawlesses all to death, and Silas and the circus were in the thick of that slaughter, battling shoulder to shoulder with the Molly Maguires. And I did nothing, nothing. Silas squeezed my arm.

‘Come away with us, my boy. We have money now, and the caravans are loaded with provisions. No worries. It's not a bad life, you know, better than staying here. What do you say, eh? Let him have the damn house if he wants it so badly. What good will it do him-or you?’ He halted and spun me about to face him and laid his hands on my shoulders. ‘Don't be a fool, boy.’ I stepped away from him and he dropped his arms. From the garden came a low whistle. Silas glanced toward the window and fixed his eyes on me again. ‘Well?’ The whistle came a second time. I would not speak. ‘Gabriel, Gabriel, you disappoint me. I credited you with wisdom, or at least the base cunning of your class, and now here you are ready to make a fool of yourself for this…this shamblesV He peeled off his gloves and offered me his hand, and gave me a last long look in which there was mixed amusement, fondess and reproach. ‘Goodbye, my Caligula. We have one last duty to discharge, unpleasant but necessary, and then we are off. I shall not ask you again to go along with us, for I see you're determined. Farewell, my foolish Caligula. Enjoy your inheritance.’

He turned and skipped away down the stairs, pulling on his gloves. I heard him below muttering with Cotter as they went out into the garden, and from the window I watched them set off across the field toward the caravans. Cotter plodded along on his flat feet, and the shotgun, open at the breech, flapped like a flail by his side. Silas was laughing. Even at that distance I could see his fat shoulders quiver. I began to miss him already, the sly old evil bastard. They disappeared behind the caravans, and at that moment the Molly Maguires stepped out of the trees on the drive, three stark men in tattered dresses, with cropped heads and murderous eyes, carrying shovels over their shoulders. They went down to the camp, but as they drew near it Cotter appeared again by the black caravan with the shotgun raised. Here was the last act. The gun roared twice, and two men fell, and a shovel flew up like a spear and glittered in the bright air. Cotter calmly reloaded, and the last of the Mollies turned and ran. The dress clutched at his legs and tripped him, and, as he went down, the third blast, both barrels at once, burst open his head and sprayed the spring grass with blood. The circus moved out. Under the lilacs a figure in a white gown appeared, and a face leaned out into the sunlight and looked up at me with terrible teeth clenched in a grimace and red hair glittering.

I STUMBLED FRANTICALLYaround the house barring the doors and windows. I was not trying to lock him out, but to lock myself in. From the kitchen window I peered out across the lawn. There was no sign of him now, but that absence only increased my panic. I found a malevolent friend in a drawer of the dresser, a sleek black knife, a Sabatier. The blade crooned and quivered as I drew it from its wooden sheath and tried the edge against my thumb. I fled with it upstairs to the attic and squatted there in the oniony gloom, moaning and muttering and gnawing my knuckles. The day waned. Rain fell, and then the sun again briefly, then twilight. The tenants of the little room, a brassbound trunk, the dusty skeleton of a tricycle, that stringless tennis racket standing in the corner like a petrified exclamation of horror, began their slow dance into darkness. My face with its staring eyes retreated stealthily out of a grimy sliver of mirror, and then I knew that he was in the house, for I could feel his presence like a minute tremor in the air. I waited calmly. The stairs creaked, and the spokes in the wheels of the tricycle tingled, and the door swung open. Michael, with his legs swaying and the wide skirts falling around him, stood on his hands out on the landing like a huge white mushroom upside down. I could have killed him then, with ease, I even imagined myself flying at him with the knife and plunging it down into his heart, but he was, after all, my brother.

Yes, he was my brother, my twin, I had always known it, but would not admit it, until now, when the admitting made me want to murder him. But the nine long months we had spent together in Martha's womb counted for something in the end. He flipped over on his feet and threw out his arms and grinned, and I picked up the knife in its sheath and pushed it under my belt. His grin widened. He had not changed. His red hair was as violent as ever, his teeth as terrible. I might have been looking at my own reflection. Only his eyes, cold and blue as the sea, were different now. He disappeared. Night fell, blueblack and glossy.