telling you-they laugh about that sort of thing these days, saying people of my generation are exaggerating, but I can tell you, it’s no exaggeration. The boots around the neck, and a roasted spud and a bottle of milk with a bit of paper for a stopper and that was our rations for the day. Josh Crawford and myself, two lads from the same townland. Half the time we had no backsides to our trousers.”
“And look at you now,” Quirke said, “you the Chief Justice and him a Boston millionaire.”
“We were the lucky ones. People talk about the good old days, but there was precious little that was good about them, and that’s the sad truth.” He paused. The room was almost in darkness now, the lights of the city coming on and twinkling fitfully afar in the window. “We all have a duty to try to make the world a better place, Quirke.”
“And the likes of Josh Crawford are out to make a better world?”
The Judge chuckled. “When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.” Again he paused, as if to test what he would say before he said it. “You’re not much of a believer, are you, Quirke? You realize it’s a great disappointment to me, that you left the church.”
The effect of the cigarette had worn off and Quirke was sinking again into a dull fatigue. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice growing thin, “that I was ever in it.”
“Ah, but you were-and you’ll come back, sooner or later, don’t you mistake it. The Lord stamps his seal on every soul”-he gave a coughing laugh-“even one as black as yours.”
“I’ve cut up a lot of corpses in my time,” Quirke said, “but I’ve never found the place where the soul might have been.”
Feeling himself rebuked, the Judge fell huffily silent. Quirke did not care; he wanted to be left alone now, so that he might sleep. Pain was a pyramid, heavy and dull at the bottom and excruciatingly sharp at the top, the top being his shattered kneecap. The Judge upended the bowl of his pipe and knocked it on the tin plate. He was shaking his head.
“You and Mal,” he said. “I thought you’d be like brothers.”
Quirke had a sensation of drifting into himself, a self that had grown cavernous and dark. “Mal was always jealous,” he murmured. “So was I. I wanted Sarah and got Delia.”
“Aye, and were sorry you did, I know that.” The Judge stood up and reached above Quirke’s head and pressed the nurse’s bell. He waited in the dark, looking down at what he could see of Quirke, the great white-swathed bulk of him laid out corpselike on the narrow bed. “I realize, Quirke,” he said, “that your life didn’t go as you hoped it would, and as it should have, if there was any justice. You made too many mistakes-we all did. But go easy on Mal.” He leaned down closer to the supine form. But Quirke, he saw, was asleep.
22
FOR QUIRKE THE YEAR ENDED AND A NEW ONE BEGAN IN A BLUR OF days each one of which was hardly distinguishable from its predecessors. The gaunt hospital room reminded him of the inside of a skull, with that high ceiling the color of bone and the window beside him looking out like an unblinking eye on the wintry cityscape. Phoebe on one of her visits had brought him a miniature plastic Christmas tree complete with plastic ornaments; forlornly festive, it stood a little lopsided in the deep embrasure of the window, growing increasingly incongruous as that seemingly interminable first week dragged itself painfully toward New Year. Barney Boyle came to see him, furtive and lightly sweating-“Christ, Quirke, I hate hospitals”-bringing two naggins of whiskey and an armful of books. When he asked what had happened to him Quirke said what he had said to everyone else, that he had fallen down the area steps in Mount Street. Barney did not believe him, but made no mention of Ambie Tormey’s brother or Gallagher who was not the full shilling; Barney knew when to mind his own business.
On New Year’s Eve the staff held a party somewhere in the upper regions of the building. The night nurse when she came with his sleeping pill was halfway tipsy. He listened to the city’s bells at midnight crazily ringing in the new year and lay back against the pillows and tried not to feel sorry for himself. Billy Clinch, a fierce little sandy- haired terrier, had come to tell him, with a certain relish, Quirke could see, that his leg would never be right-
And day after day his drug-dimmed thoughts circled upon the question of who it was that had set those two on his trail. He kept doggedly posing the question, he knew, only so that he would not have to answer it. He told himself it was impossible that Mal could have done such a thing-imagine Mal on the step of a dark doorway in Stoney Batter handing out their instructions to Mr. Punch and his fat partner!-yet the vistas that stretched beyond that impossibility were murkier still. When he summoned to mind the image of the face he had seemed to see hovering gloatingly above the area steps that night, watching as he was beaten, its features began to shift and rearrange themselves-or was it he who was shifting and rearranging them?-until it was no longer Mal’s long, unmoonlike countenance, but one squarer and more roughly hewn. Costigan. Yes. But those dim, faceless others crowding in turn behind him, who were they?
PHOEBE PAID HIM A VISIT ON NEW YEAR’S DAY. A FITFUL WIND WAS driving sleet like spittle against the window, and the smoke from the city’s chimneys no sooner appeared than it was blowsily dispersed. Phoebe wore a black beret pulled down at one side and a black coat with a fur collar. She seemed slimmer than when he had last been awake enough to look at her, and her face was pale, and the cold had given a raw, pink edging to the wings of her nose. There were other changes, less easily identified. He seemed to detect in her manner a certain watchfulness, and a sense of willed restraint, that had not been there before. He supposed this new hardness in her, if that was what it was-he looked at her knuckles, the white shine of them where the small bones were pressing up under the flesh-must be the result of the loss of Conor Carrington, of all the suppressed violence and anger at that loss, against which she had honed herself like a knife against a stone. But then he thought, no, it was not losing him that had embittered her, but the taking of him from her. She had been bested, and she was furious for it. He found her presence, in her grown-up’s coat and ironically tilted Left Bank beret, faintly unnerving. The girl that had been was suddenly a woman.
She did not want to talk about the trip to America, she said. When Quirke mentioned it she shunted her mouth sideways and shrugged her shoulders in faint, listless impatience.
“They’re getting rid of me,” she said. “They want a rest from my accusing eye following them everywhere, as they imagine. Actually, I don’t care about any of that anymore.”
“Any of what?” he asked.
She shrugged again, and scowlingly regarded the Christmas tree on the windowsill, then suddenly turned her eyes to his and, coldly and calculatedly mischievous, said:
“Why don’t you come with me?”
He had noticed that his damaged knee inside its cast seemed to have taken on the task of alerting him at moments of surprise or alarm, moments which he in the narcotic haze in which he was still afloat could not register with sufficient force or instantaneity, so that the pinned-up joint of his leg must bring them to his attention by way of a twinge, a sort of pinch, such as a sadistically jolly uncle might give, meant to be playful but leaving a bruise. Phoebe took his indrawn gasp of pain now for a dismissive laugh and turned her vexed face again to the window. She unclasped her little black handbag-he thought:
