Elegy For April

house, a queer one with a fag in the corner of her mouth and a head of yellow curls that would have looked too young on someone half her age, had said she had not seen him since the day before, though his bed had been slept in- oh, it certainly had, she said with a sniff and a significant look. She thought she had heard noises in the night-”those sort of noises, you know?”- but she could not be sure, and normally he was a quiet young fellow and kept to himself, though of course with them you could never tell what they might get up to. He had asked to see the room, but there was nothing there of interest, on a cursory glance, at least. He asked Goldilocks if she knew where he might have gone to, but she did not. Like April Latimer, the black man had left without taking any of the necessities with him, so probably, unlike April, he would soon return. Hackett hoped so; he looked forward to having a word with Mr. Ojakewu.

Just before Baggot Street bridge he spotted a dim shape huddled on a bench beside the lock, and stopped to have a look. It was a tramp, cocooned in a bundle of rags, peacefully sleeping, and he decided not to disturb him. How did they survive, these poor creatures, out all night in any weather? It must be a couple of degrees below freezing to night. Should he have roused him and given him a few shillings to find shelter and a bed for himself somewhere? He would probably only be cursed for his trouble, and likely the money would be kept and spent on drink in the first pub to open in the morning. He sighed, thinking how hard a station life is for some, and how little there is to be done for the world’s unfortunates.

The young trees on Haddington Road made no sounds, unlike their older cousins along the canal. He counted off the houses on the other side of the street until he came to the one where the Quirke girl lived- no, he remembered, she was not called Quirke, but Griffin. That was all a strange and painful business, Dr. Quirke discovered to have given away his baby to his sister-in-law and her husband, the man who was as good as a brother to him. What got into folk, at all, to do such things? He supposed he was not much of a policeman if he was still capable of being surprised by the waywardness of human beings.

There were no lights to be seen in the house, save a faint glow in the transom over the front door, which would be the hall light. He stood on the opposite footpath, under one of the young trees, in a shadowed place midway between two streetlamps, looking up at the shining black windows of what he knew to be Phoebe’s flat. His thoughts turned once more to Quirke, that difficult, troubled man. They had so little in common, the two of them, and yet he felt a closeness between them, a bond, almost. Strangely, the person Quirke most reminded him of was his sister, who had died. Poor Winnie. Like Quirke, she could not escape from the past. She had been a sickly child, and, as she grew older, something had happened to her mind; she became prey to nightmares and all kinds of waking horrors, and there was no helping her. She lived with her head turned away from everyone and everything in the present; she was like a person stumbling over stony ground and always looking backwards, terrified of losing sight of the place where she had set out from, however sad and painful a place it had been. And then one day she tripped and fell. They found her in her bed with her rosary beads in one hand and the empty pill bottle in the other. “Now she’s where she always wanted to be,” their father said. That was Quirke, looking back longingly to a past where he had been so unhappy.

He heard a sound. Or not a sound, not exactly, more a feeling, a sensation. What first alerted him was his hearing making an adjustment by itself. It was as if a waveband had been changed and he was listening now on a higher, more finely tuned frequency. There was someone nearby in the street, he was sure of it. He looked to his left, barely moving his head. He was attending so hard now that he seemed to hear the frost itself falling, a faint ringing, needle-sharp, all around him in the darkness of the air. He could see no one. There was the line of trees, evenly spaced, and in every third space a lamppost, shedding its circle of chalky radiance. What should he do? Should he move, step into the light, call out a challenge? Slowly, slowly, he took a step backwards, paused, took another step, until he felt the cold hardness of garden railings at his back. He was still looking to the left. Then he saw it, the person-shaped shadow, a good fifty yards off, next to the trunk of a tree, just out of the lamplight. He began to edge sideways in that direction, putting his hands behind him and feeling his way along the railings to guide and steady himself. As he advanced into the light of the first lamp he shrank back, but all the same he knew he could be seen, if the watcher were to turn in this direction. On he went at his crabwise pace, slowly, steadily, and then, when there were no more than twenty yards between him and his quarry, he came without realizing it to an open gateway, and reaching his hands back into the sudden emptiness behind him he felt himself swaying sideways, and the thermos in his pocket struck the metal gatepost with a dull, metallic thunk. He swore under his breath. The shadow turned, crouched, and then sprinted away into the darkness and in a moment was gone. He cursed himself again, leaning in the gateway. Tomelty, he thought, young Tomelty would have given chase, as he could not, on his middle-aged legs, with that damned flask banging against his knees.

He listened and heard an engine starting up, and ran out into the street and saw the car speeding away in the direction of Ringsend. He stood there for a moment, fuming and sighing. What had he seen? Nothing. A crouched figure, fleeing. Had he even heard the sound of those running feet? He could not swear that he had. If it had not been for the car, he might have thought he had imagined there was someone there. And could he be sure the car was not someone else’s, someone who had come out of a house farther down the street, a law- abiding citizen, going off to a night shift, maybe? He was getting old, too old, certainly, for this kind of thing. What was that in his other pocket? The bag of biscuits. Without taking it out of his pocket he clawed the bag open and brought out a biscuit and peered at it. Rich Tea. Not his favorite. He turned, gloomily munching his dry rations, and walked away.

QUIRKE WAS DREAMING THAT THERE WAS A FIRE. HE WAS IN A TINY room inside what he knew was a large house. It was nighttime, and there was a window that looked out on a broad, deserted street where the streetlamps were making a dull gleam on the tarmac. He could see no sign of flames, yet he knew that there was a conflagration somewhere very close by. A fire engine was on the way, or was here, indeed, was under the very window where he stood peering out, although he could not see it, either, in spite of the fact that its bell was ringing so loudly and so insistently that it seemed it must be in the room with him. He felt frightened, or at least felt that he should be frightened, because he was in grave danger, for all that there was no sign of the fire. Then he saw a dog loping along the street and someone running after it. The two figures, the dog and its owner, seemed not to be fleeing, as he felt they should be, on the contrary seemed to be happily playing a game, a game of chase, perhaps. They came closer, and he saw that the one in pursuit was a girl or a young woman. She was carrying something in one hand- he could see it fluttering madly as she ran, it was a paper, or a parchment, with scalloped edges, and it was on fire at one corner, he could see the flame blown back by the air rushing against it, and he knew that the girl or young woman was trying to put it out, and although she was having no success she was laughing, as if there were no danger, no danger at all.

It was the telephone. He struggled out of sleep, rising off his side and flailing one arm wildly to find the machine and stop the awful noise. He found the switch of the bedside lamp. It always seemed to him a ringing telephone should be hopping, but there it sat on the little locker by the bed, quite motionless, squat as a frog, yet making such a racket. He snatched up the receiver.

“I know, I know,” Hackett’s voice said, “I know it’s late, and you were asleep. But I thought you’d want me to call you.”

Quirke was sitting on the side of the bed now, rubbing at his eyes. “Where are you?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“I’m in a phone box, in Baggot Street. I was down on Haddington Road-”

“What? Why were you there? What’s happened?”

“Nothing, nothing. I went round to have a look, after what you told me about your daughter, thinking she’d seen someone in the street.”

Quirke could not take it in. “You went to Haddington Road to night?”

“Aye. It’s a grand night, and I took a stroll.”

Quirke looked to the bedroom window, rimed outside with frost. “You realize,” he said, “it’s… what time is it?”

“It’s late, it’s late. Anyway, I went and had a look. Your daughter wasn’t seeing things. There was someone there, right enough, across the road from the house. At least I think there was.”

“Someone there?”

“Aye.”

“Doing what?”

“Just… watching.”