Ancient Light (33 page)
Authors: John Banville
Billie Stryker too will shortly set out on a journey, to Antwerp, Turin, Portovenere. Yes, I have commissioned her to retrace whatever slime-trail Axel Vander may have left along that route ten years ago. More unfinished business. What things she will unearth I do not care to think but yet would know. I fear there is much that is buried. She is eager to be off, looking forward to getting away from that husband of hers, I do not doubt. I have signed over to her what I have been paid for playing Vander these past weeks. To what better use could I have put such a tainted bounty? Billie, my sleuth.
When I was a child I too, like Cass, suffered from insomnia. I think in my case it was that I deliberately kept myself awake, for I had bad dreams, and was prey to an abiding fear of sudden death—I would not lie on my left side, I remember, convinced that if my heart should fail while I was asleep I would wake up and feel it stopping and know I was about to die. I cannot say what age I was when I suffered this affliction; probably it was about the time of my father’s death. If so, I added to my bereaved mother’s torment by tormenting her with my wakefulness, night after night. I would beg her to leave her bedroom door open so that I could call out to her every few minutes to make sure she too was still awake. Eventually, exhausted no doubt by her own grief and my merciless importunings, she would fall asleep, and I would be left alone, wide-eyed and with scalding eyelids, crouched under the night’s stifling black blanket. I would stay there like that, in terror and anguish, for as long as I could bear it, which was not long, and then I would get up and go into my mother’s room. The convention was, and it never varied, that I had been asleep and had been wakened by one of my nightmares. Poor Ma. She would not allow me to get into bed with her, that was a rule she enforced, this least forceful of souls, but she would pass something to me, a blanket or an eiderdown, to put on the floor beside the bed to lie on. She would reach out a hand, too, from under the covers, and give me one of her fingers to hold. In time, when this ritual had become the norm, and I was spending a part of every night on the floor beside her bed, clutching her finger, I devised my own arrangement. I found a canvas sleeping bag in the attic—it must have been left behind by a lodger—and kept it in a cupboard, and would drag it with me into my mother’s room and wriggle into it and lie down in my place on the floor by her bed. This went on for months, until in the end I must have surmounted some barrier, crossed into a new and sturdier phase of growing up, and began to keep to my own room, and to sleep in my own bed. And then, years later, one night in the immediate, agonised aftermath of Mrs Gray’s departure, I found myself scrabbling in the cupboard for that old sleeping bag, and finding it I crept with stifled sobs into my mother’s room and spread it on the floor, as I used to. What did my mother think? I believed she was asleep, but presently—did she know I was weeping?—I heard a rustling sound and her hand came out from under the sheet and she touched me on the shoulder, offering me her finger to hold on to, as in the old days. I went rigid, of course, and shrank back from her touch, and presently she withdrew her hand and turned over with a heave and a sigh, and soon was snoring. I watched the window above me. The night was ending and the dawn was coming on, and light, uncertain as yet, a faint effulgence, was seeping in around the edges of the curtain. My eyes ached from weeping and my throat was swollen and raw. What I thought could not end had ended. Whom now would I love, and who would love me? I listened to my mother snoring. The air in the room was stale from her breath. One world was ending, without a sound. I looked to the window again. The light around the curtain was stronger now, a light that seemed somehow to shake within itself even as it strengthened, and it was as if some radiant being were advancing towards the house, over the grey grass, across the mossed yard, great trembling wings spread wide, and waiting for it, waiting, I slipped without noticing into sleep.
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First published 2012
Copyright © John Banville, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
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ISBN: 978-0-670-92063-1
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