Christine Falls: A Novele (18 page)

Josh tore the mask from his face and flung it aside. “Get me out of here!” he snarled, gasping. He was furious at being seen like this by the workers. The nurse made to take the handles of the chair but he twisted about and swung a fist at her. “Not you!” There was white froth on his lips. Rose smiled at the nurse in her blithe, bland way and turned the chair about and set off toward the archway that led into the house proper. Josh was scrabbling now with his nails at the leather armrests of the chair and muttering to himself some word that sounded like
pipit
. Birds, Rose asked herself—why was he talking about birds? From the dropsical caverns of his chest he produced a deep, rolling rumble that she recognized as laughter. When he spoke again she had to lean forward and put her face beside his, as the nurse had done earlier.

“Not a bird!” he croaked. He had heard what she was thinking, as he so often did; it impressed and alarmed her, in equal measure, this uncanny telepathic knack he had. “A pipette,” he said, “that’s what it is, the thing that chemists use.”

“Whatever you say, darling,” she answered with a sigh, “whatever you say.”

WHEN CLAIRE GOT ANDY ONTO THE FLOOR HE WOULD NOT DANCE,
could not, he was that drunk. The room was spinning around him and everywhere he looked there were faces shiny and red from laughing. Claire, worried at what he might do—the expression in his half-closed eyes was truly scary now—drew him by the hand back to their table, making sure to keep on smiling so no one around her would see how she was really feeling. Little Christine had woken up and the woman at the next table had her on her knee and was talking to her. The baby was dressed in the white satin christening robe that a young nun at St. Mary’s had made for her; she had nearly grown out of it by now, but it was long in the skirt and hung down sideways like, Claire thought, the tail of a star. She took her, her little shooting star, her little angel, and sat down with her on her own knees, and thanked the woman for minding her, and then felt bad, for she guessed from the look the couple exchanged, smiling but sad, that they were childless themselves, and she knew how
that
felt. She pretended not to notice Andy standing over her, breathing heavily and swaying a little and glaring, she was sure, at the child, as he always did when he had drunk too much. He grabbed a beer bottle by the neck and threw back his head and poured the beer into his open mouth; the look of him as he swallowed made her think this time not of being in bed with him but of a mule her father had on the farm that used to hold up its head like that and hee-haw, because it was lonesome for love, or so her brother Matty told her with a leer, Matty who years later was to die in a helicopter crash in Korea. Poor Andy, she thought, lonesome, too, because no one had loved him until she came along, to which although she tried not to she heard herself adding,
too late
.

Somebody Andy knew, one of the drivers he worked with, had promised them a ride back to town. They went to look for him, Claire moving ahead quickly with the baby in her arms and Andy slouching after her in a beer sulk, belching and muttering to himself and lugging the empty bassinet. They had to go through the double doors that led out of the Crystal Gallery into a high, stone hall with a huge fireplace with a bearskin in front of it and animal heads and old brown paintings on the walls. The place was noisy and crowded with people putting on storm coats and galoshes and calling good-bye and wishing each other a merry Christmas. Claire, looking back to make sure Andy was still following her, bumped into someone who had stepped backwards into her path, and gave a little cry, afraid she would let the baby fall, which she might have done had the other person not put out a strong hand to steady her. Claire recognized Mr. Crawford’s nurse. She had a real Irish face, wide and friendly, from which her reddish hair was pulled back in two shells that covered her ears and were pinned under her cap at either side. She had been talking to one of the young truckers, flirting with him, by the look of it, for there were spots of color on her cheekbones and she was still smiling when she turned and put a hand instinctively under Claire’s arm that was holding the baby.
Oh, sorry!
both women said at the same time, and both looked down at little Christine, who was watching them in her puzzled, inquisitive way out of the folds of the pink blanket she was wrapped in. The nurse was about to say something more but Andy pushed forward, breathing his beer breath, and the trucker the nurse had been talking to moved aside, seeing that Andy was drunk and not caring to be in his way, for Andy had a reputation, and Claire said thanks to the nurse and they smiled at each other and Claire and Andy moved on, Andy squeezing Claire’s arm hard to make her move faster. When they had gone past, Brenda Ruttledge stood frowning to herself a moment, then shook her head and turned back to look for the trucker, but he had disappeared into the crowd.

CLAIRE HAD NOT KNOWN SHE WAS ASLEEP UNTIL THE CRYING FROM
the baby’s room wakened her. She had been dreaming she was still at the party and the dream had been so real it had seemed she was really there and not here, at home, in her own bed, in glimmering snow-light, with nothing to disturb the huge hush coming in from the snowy streets all around except the baby’s familiar, coughing cry that always made her heart beat faster the way she knew it was only supposed to do if she was the natural mother. Natural! What could be more natural than the love she lavished on her little Christine? She put out a hand and felt only a warm but already cooling space beside her where Andy should have been. He must have heard the baby before she had and got up to see to her. She could hear his voice, talking, and saying,
Ssh, ssh!
She must have fallen back to sleep then for a minute. When she woke again it was the silence that awakened her, a silence that had something wrong with it. She did not leap up straightaway, as she knew she should, but lay there motionless, fully alert, all senses atingle. She thought afterward that she must have known, known without knowing, that these were the last few moments of innocence and peace that she would have on earth.

She was not conscious of running, of her legs carrying her, of her feet striking the floor, but only of moving, effortlessly and unhindered—
like the wind,
those were the very words that came to her—across the bedroom, and the passage outside, and into the open doorway of the baby’s room, where she stopped. The light was not switched on in the room, yet she saw the scene as if lit like the film sets there were sometimes pictures of in movie magazines, with a harsh, unreal brightness. Andy was standing beside the baby’s crib, motionless, his shoulders hunched, knees bent, his eyes shut and eyebrows lifted, as if, she thought, as if he were waiting for a sneeze to arrive. What he was holding in his hands might have been a wadded-up sheet, but she knew, of course, that it was not. They remained like that for an impossibly long time, she in the doorway and he by the crib, and then, hearing her, or maybe just sensing her there, he opened his eyes and blinked two or three times like a hypnotized person coming out of a trance and gave her a guilty, furtive look, frowning, trying, she could see, to think of something to say.

It was all so strangely calm. She walked to him and he handed her the bundle he had been holding, pushed it into her arms almost as if it were a gift he was presenting her with, a bunch of flowers, say, that he had grown tired of holding while he waited for her. The baby was in her sleep-suit, a limp, warm weight lying in her hands. Claire cradled the head in her palm, feeling the familiar texture of the skin, like a patch of velvet, loose over the skull.

“Oh, Andy,” she said, as if he and not what she was holding were the child. “What have you done?”

An accident, he said it was. An accident. He kept saying it over and over; it might have been something he had been set to learn by heart. They were in their own room now, and she was sitting on the side of the bed, upright, her back very straight, with the baby laid out unmoving across her knees. Andy was pacing in front of her, running a hand repeatedly through his hair from his forehead all the way to the back of his neck. He was in his jeans and undershirt—when they came home he had started to undress and then, too drunk to finish, had collapsed into bed in his clothes—and a pair of white, ankle-high socks. She could smell the stale beer on his breath. Yet he seemed so young, in that undershirt and the little socks. She stopped looking at him; she wished, in a weary, wistful way, that she might never have to look at him again. The baby’s eyelids were not quite closed, she noticed, and something glittered between them.
Dead
. She spoke the word to herself as if it were a word in a foreign language.

“She was crying,” Andy was saying. “She was crying and I shook her.” He spoke in a low, urgent voice, not to her but not to himself, either; he was like an actor desperately trying to memorize the lines that presently, when the curtain went up, he would have to deliver with such force and sincerity that the whole house would be convinced. “It was an accident. A terrible accident.”

She felt a prickle of impatience. “Phone St. Mary’s,” she said.

He stopped, stared. “What?”

She was so tired, suddenly; so tired. “Sister Stephanus,” she said, speaking again in a slow, distinct voice, again as if to a child; perhaps, she thought, from now on she would never be able to talk any other way, to anyone. “At St. Mary’s. Phone her.”

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, as if suspecting a trick. “What will I tell her?”

She shrugged, and at the movement little Christine’s lifeless arm lolled sideways, her tiny fat hand upturned, as if she too were about to ask a question, demand guidance, plead for help.

“Tell her,” Claire said, in a tone of sudden, harsh sarcasm, “tell her it was an accident.”

Then something broke in her, she felt it like the snapping of a bone, and she began to weep.

He left her there, sitting on the bed in her cotton nightdress with the baby lifeless on her splayed knees and the tears running down her face. There was something about her that scared him. She looked like a stone figure some red Indian or Chinaman might worship. He threw a coat over his shoulders and hurried down the outside stairs. Ridges of frozen snow on the steps were glass-hard under his bare feet. The storm had cleared and the sky was high and clear and hung all over with glistening stars. Cora Bennett was awake—did she ever sleep?—and let him in at the back door. The telephone, he told her before she could speak, he needed to use the telephone. She had thought he had come for something else but when she saw his face and heard the way he spoke she just nodded and gestured toward the front hall, where the telephone was. He hesitated. She wore a slip and nothing else. He could see the goose bumps on her forearms.

“What happened?” she said.

He told her there had been an accident and she nodded. How come, he wondered, women never seemed surprised when things went wrong? Then he saw something in her eyes, a light, an eager flash, and he realized she thought it was Claire the accident had happened to.

He had to look up the number of the orphanage in the phone book. There were dozens of churches, convents, schools, all called St. Mary’s. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind, a spindle with a dial and mouthpiece, and a receiver slung on a hook at the side. Again he hesitated. It was the middle of the night—would anyone be awake there to answer his call? And even if there was, what chance was there that he would be put through to the Mother so goddamned Superior? He began to dial the number, then stopped, and stood with his finger resting in the little hole, feeling with vague satisfaction how tensely the sprung dial pressed itself against the side of his nail. Cora came up silently and stood beside him. He had never noticed before how much taller than him she was. He never minded when women were taller, even liked it, in fact. She asked whom he was calling but he did not answer. The coat had slipped from one of his shoulders and she lifted it and set it tenderly back in place. Her fingers brushed his neck. He closed his eyes. He could not remember picking up the kid from her crib. She had been crying, and would not stop. He had not shaken her hard, he knew that, but how hard was hard? There must have been something wrong with her, some weakness in her head, it would have shown up sooner or later. It had been an accident. It was not his fault. He put the receiver back on the hook and turned to Cora wordlessly with his head bowed and she took him in her arms, pressing his face to her cold breast, as if he was her child.

AFTERWARDS QUIRKE TRIED TO PUT IT ALL BACK TOGETHER IN HIS
mind like a jigsaw puzzle. It would never be complete. The bits he remembered most clearly were the least significant, such as the smell of the drenched laurel behind the railings in the square, a streetlamp’s rain-pocked reflection in a puddle, the cold, greasy feel of the area steps under his desperately scrabbling fingers. There was, throughout, a sense of deep embarrassment—that must have been the reason he did not cry out for help. Embarrassment, and a kind of incredulity. Such things simply did not happen, yet this one did, he had the wounds to prove it. He had thought, when he reached the bottom of those steps, in the wet, glistening darkness there, that he was going to die. An image had flashed before him of his pallid corpse laid out on the dissecting table under merciless lights and Sinclair, his assistant, standing over him in his green apron, flexing his rubber-gloved hands like a virtuoso about to set to at the piano. Pain had come flying at him from all directions, sharp, black, angular, and he thought of another image, of rooks at nightfall wheeling and spinning above bare trees against a winter sky. Or no, that was what he thought of afterwards, when he was reassembling the bits and pieces of what had happened. At the time he was not aware of his mind working at all, except to register trivial things: wet laurel leaves, the lamp’s reflection, the slimed steps.

It had seemed at first an absurd instance of events repeating themselves, and in the confusion of the initial moments he had thought a joke was being played on him. It was the end of twilight and he was walking homewards along the square. There had been a Christmas drinks party at the hospital in the afternoon, a staid and wearying affair which Malachy had presided over with uneasy bonhomie, and although Quirke had drunk no more than a few glasses of wine he felt blurred and heavy-limbed. A halfhearted wind was blowing, and it was raining in a desultory way, and smoke from chimneys was flying this way and that in the sky above the square. Just as they had done the previous time, and at just the same place, the two appeared as silently as shadows out of the gloom and fell easily into step on either side of him. They were bareheaded and wore cheap, transparent plastic raincoats. The thin one, Mr. Punch himself, gave him a regretfully reproving smile. “Compliments of the season, Captain,” he said. “Out in the damp and the dark again, are you? Didn’t we warn you about that?”

“We did, we warned you,” fat Judy agreed, nodding vigorously his great round head on which a fine sprinkling of raindrops sparkled.

They had begun to crowd in on him from either side, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing him between them. They were shorter than he was and surely not as strong, yet pincered like this he felt helpless, a great, soft, helpless child. Mr. Punch was making tut-tutting noises. “You’re a very inquisitive man, do you know that?” he said. “A real Nosey Parker.”

It seemed imperative to Quirke that he should not speak, for if he did it would give them an advantage; he was not sure how, but he knew it was so. They came to the corner of the square. A few motorcars went past, their tires on the wet roadway making a sound like frying fat. One slowed for the turn, its lighted orange trafficator sticking out. Why did he not call to the driver, wave his arms, or run forward, even, and jump onto the running board and be borne away to safety? But he did nothing, and the car continued down the square, trailing gray exhaust smoke.

The three of them crossed the street to the other corner. Quirke had a sense of almost comic inadequacy. He thought what a trio they must make, the two hunched in their smoke-colored plastic coats and him huge in his old-fashioned tweed ulster and black hat. Those two student types passing along on the other side, would they notice, would they remember, would they be able to describe the scene to the coroner’s court,
in their own words,
as they might before long be asked to do? Despite the chill of the ending day Quirke felt the sweat along his hairline under the band of his hat. He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him for it to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son. Crazily the thought came to him that he might be dead already, that he might have died of fright back there on the corner, and that this big body stumping along helplessly between its captors was only the mechanical remnant of the self that was out here observing the sad end of his life with pity and shame. Death was his professional province yet what did he know of it, really? Well, it seemed that now he was about to receive firsthand instruction in that dark knowledge.

It was lightless at the bottom of the area steps and smelled of urban weeds and wet masonry. Quirke was aware of a barred basement window and at his back a narrow door that he felt sure had not been opened for many a year. He had a moment almost of peace, sprawled there with his legs twisted under him, looking up at the railings, each one with an identical, liquid smear of light down its side from the nearest streetlamp, and above them the soiled sky, faintly lit too, with the sickly radiance of the city. The fine cool rain prickled on his face. Seen from this angle his assailants looked almost comic as they came clattering down the steps after him, two jostling, foreshortened figures, their knees and elbows working like piston rods and their plastic raincoats crackling. They began kicking him, in wordless concentration, hampered by the narrow space where he had lodged after the fall. He turned himself this way and that as best he could, trying to protect his vital organs, his liver, his kidneys, his instinctively retracted genitals, knowing what these parts of him would look like when Sinclair opened him up. The pair labored on him with skill and expertise, the thin one displaying an almost balletic finesse while the fat one did the heavier work. He was aware, however, of a certain angry restraint in their efforts—they confined their kicks to his legs and his upper torso and avoided his head when they could—and it came to him that they had been ordered that he was not to die. He greeted this realization with an indifference that was almost disappointment. Pain was what mattered now, more, even, it seemed, than survival itself; pain, and how to bear it, how to—the word came to him—how to accommodate it. In the end his consciousness found the solution for him by letting itself lapse. As he passed out he seemed to see a face, round and rocky as the invisible moon, floating above the railings and regarding him with dispassion, a face he recognized yet could not identify. Whose? It troubled him, not to know.

IT WAS STILL THERE, THAT FACE, WHEN HE CAME TO THE FIRST TIME.
The darkness was different now, softer, more diffuse, and it was not raining. Everything, in fact, was different. He did not understand where he was. It was Mal who was leaning over him, frowning and intent. But how had Mal known where to find him? Someone seemed to be holding his hand, but when he turned his head to see who it was a wave of nausea rose in him and he hastily shut his eyes. When he opened them, no more than a moment later, so it seemed to him, Mal was gone, and the darkness had changed again, was no longer darkness, indeed, but a grayish mistiness with something throbbing slowly and hugely at the heart of it—it was he, he was what was throbbing, in dull, vast, hardly believable pain. Cautiously this time he turned his eyes to the side and saw that it was Phoebe who was holding his hand, and for a moment in his drugged, half-dreaming state he thought she was his dead wife, Delia. She was sitting beside him, on the area steps, was it? Something like fog lay between them, or a bank of cloud, but solid enough for his hand in hers to rest on. For a giddy moment he was afraid he was going to burst into tears. It was not fog, but a white sheet with a blanket under it.

Sleep, he must sleep.

When he next awoke it was daylight, and Mal was there again, and Sarah was sitting beside the bed where Phoebe had sat, and off behind her there were other people, moving, speaking, and someone laughed. There were colored paper shapes strung across the ceiling.

“Quirke,” Sarah said. “You’ve come back.” She smiled. It seemed to cost her an effort, as if she, too, were in some pain.

Mal, standing, took a deep breath grimly in through his nostrils. “You’re in the Mater,” he said.

Quirke shifted, and his left knee buzzed like a beehive. “How bad is it?” he asked, surprised to find that his voice worked.

Mal shrugged. “You’ll live.”

“I meant my leg,” Quirke said. “My knee.”

“Not so bad. They put a pin in it.”

“Who did it?”

Mal’s eyes skittered off to the side. “The Guards don’t know,” he said, mumbling. “They’re assuming it was an attempted robbery.”

Quirke’s aching ribs would not allow him to laugh. “The pin, Mal,” he said. “Who put in the pin?”

“Oh.” Mal looked sheepish. “Billy Clinch.”

“Billy the butcher?” The sheepish look turned cold.

“He was on a skiing holiday. We got him to come back specially.”

“Thanks.” A big red-headed nurse approached.

“There you are,” she said to Quirke in a broad accent—Cork, was it, or Kerry? “We thought you were never going to wake up at all.”

She took his pulse and went away, her departure leaving the three of them somehow more at a loss than they had been before. Mal screwed up his lips and put his hands into the pockets of his tightly buttoned jacket with his thumbs outside and studied the toe caps of his shoes. He had not looked at Sarah once, nor she at him. Mal’s suit was light blue, and he wore a yellow bow tie. How incongruous on him they looked, Quirke thought, these festive glad rags.

“You’ll come to us, of course, when they let you out?” Sarah said.

But they both knew she did not mean it.

THE JUDGE VISITED HIM THE NEXT AFTERNOON. BY THEN HE HAD BEEN
moved from the accident ward to a private room. The redheaded nurse ushered the old man in, impressed and excited by the coming of so eminent a visitor. She took his overcoat and hat and offered him tea, which he declined, and she said she would leave them in peace, so, but added, addressing the Judge, that if he, meaning Quirke, got in any way obstreperous, Your Honor had only to give a call and she would be here in a tick. “Thank you, nurse,” the Judge said, with his crinkliest smile, and she beamed at them both and departed. The old man looked at Quirke and arched an eyebrow. “Is that the way it is?” he said. “It’s true what they say, a doctor can’t afford to get sick.” He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Behind him a tall window looked out on a confusion of roofs and smoking chimneys and a sky filled with the flying debris of snow clouds. “Merciful God, Quirke,” he said, “what happened to you at all?”

Quirke, propped against a bank of pillows, gave a ruefully apologetic grimace. “Fell down a set of steps,” he said.

Outlined under the bedclothes his left leg, encased in plaster, was the size of a log.

“They must have been steep, the same steps,” the Judge said. In the window behind his shoulder a flock of small, black birds spurted raggedly from behind the rooftops and twirled about the tattered sky and then fell back in ones and pairs to wherever it was they had come from. “Are you all right?” The old man shifted awkwardly on the chair, chafing his squarish, liver-spotted hands. “I mean, is there anything you need?”

Quirke said no, and added that the Judge was good to come. At the top of his nose and between his eyes he had again that tremulous, hollow sensation of incipient weeping, an effect, he assumed, of delayed shock—his system, after all, would be in turmoil still, working desperately to fix itself, and why would he not want to weep?

“Mal and Sarah were here,” he said. “Phoebe, too, at some stage, when I was still half comatose.”

The Judge nodded. “Phoebe is a good girl,” he said, with a faint note of insistence, as if to forestall an objection. He molded his hands against each other again in a washing motion. “She’s going to America, did she tell you?”

Quirke felt a breathless, lifting sensation in the region of his heart. He said nothing and the Judge went on: “Yes, to Boston, to her Grandfather Crawford’s.” He was looking everywhere except at Quirke. “A holiday, only. Or vacation, as I believe they say out there.”

He fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out his tobacco pipe and pouch and busied himself with them, plugging the damp dark strands into the bowl with the discolored ball of his thumb. Quirke watched him from the bed. The afternoon light was failing fast in the room. The old man struck a match and put it to the pipe and smoke and sparks flew up. Quirke said:

“So the boyfriend has been given his final marching orders, has he?”

The Judge was looking about for an ashtray in which to deposit the spent match. Quirke made no attempt to help, but lay and watched him, unblinking.

“These mixed marriages,” the Judge said, trying to sound unconcerned, “they never work.” He leaned forward and placed the match carefully on a corner of the wooden locker beside the bed. “Besides, she’s…what is she?”

“Twenty, in the new year.”

At last the Judge looked at him, the glimmer from the window making his faded blue eyes seem paler still. He said:

“A life is easily ruined, at that young age.”

Without lifting his head from the pillows Quirke put down a hand beside the bed and tried gropingly to open the locker, but in the end the Judge had to help him, and found his cigarettes for him and gave him one and struck a match. Then Quirke rang the nurse’s bell and the nurse came and he told her to fetch an ashtray. She said he should not be smoking but he ignored her, and she turned to the Judge and threw her eyes to heaven and asked him if he did not think Quirke was
a holy terror
, but went back into the corridor and a moment later returned with a tinfoil pie plate and said that would have to do them for it was all she could find. When she had gone they smoked in silence for a while. The old man’s pipe had fouled the air and Quirke’s cigarette tasted to him of burning cardboard. The last of the daylight was dying away into the shadowed corners of the room but neither man made a move to switch on the lamp beside the bed.