Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (28 page)

When the picture was over they boarded a bus, and went up to the top deck and sat at the front, Phoebe and David together in one seat and Sally sitting alone on the other side of the aisle. A fine rain was falling that misted the windows, and the neon signs above the shops wobbled like undersea lights. The three of them hardly spoke. The pictures always had that effect. Phoebe had noticed it before: people came out like zombies, caught halfway between the screen fantasy they had been absorbed in and the ordinary, familiar world of buses and rain and huddled passersby.

When they got to the flat Phoebe lit the gas fire and went into the kitchen to make coffee. But there was no coffee, and she returned to the living room to ask if cocoa would be all right. Sally was standing by the window, as David had stood earlier. She was looking down into the street, though there could not have been much to see, with the darkness, and the rain. David was sitting in an armchair, leaning forward with his elbows on the armrests, smoking a cigarette. They looked, Phoebe thought, like a couple who had just had a fight and had turned away from each other in a seething silence.

When Phoebe spoke, David gave her a strange, blank stare that lasted only a second but that shook her nonetheless. Had they said something to each other, had there been a disagreement between them? How would there have been time? She had been away in the kitchen for no more than a minute or two. Had one of them said something about what had happened earlier, when they had known each other for only a matter of minutes?
Had
they kissed then? Had they? She could not believe it; it seemed preposterous, a figment of her overheated imagination. Yet the possibility gnawed at her. What was she to believe, what was she to trust?

She made the cocoa in a saucepan. Her hands would not stay steady. Outside, the horn of a passing car sounded. Why would anyone need to blow a car horn in a deserted street, at night? She carried the saucepan to the table and began to pour the cocoa into three mugs. Abruptly she remembered who it was that Sally’s smell reminded her of—Jimmy, of course! How could that be? Jimmy, a chain-smoker, had smelled of cigarettes and not much else, as she remembered him. Yet it was definitely Jimmy who had come unbidden to her mind as she sat in the cinema feeling the warm proximity of Sally’s body and breathing in her milky, violet smell.

They drank their cocoa and talked a little about the picture. David had thought it silly, though he admired Bette Davis’s acting, or so he said. Sally gave no opinion. She seemed distracted. David smoked another cigarette, and when he had finished it he rose and said that he should be going. He nodded good-bye to Sally, who smiled at him absently. Phoebe walked him to the door of the flat. On the landing she expected him to kiss her, but he only smiled instead, vaguely, as he had smiled at Sally, and went off down the stairs.

When she returned to the living room, Sally was sitting in the armchair where David had sat, leaning forward with the mug clasped between her hands. She glanced at Phoebe, but said nothing. Phoebe waited. Did she not have anything to say about David, this man she had met for the first time tonight, Phoebe’s boyfriend? But Sally, it seemed, had nothing to say.

“I have a headache,” Phoebe said. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

She was angry, at David, at Sally, at herself.

“A walk?” Sally said, turning to her. “In this weather?”

Phoebe did not answer, only took up her coat. She had never realized before how much she disliked the smell of cocoa.

*   *   *

Sally had been right, of course: it was foolish to have come out like this, in the darkness and the drifting rain. She had not even thought to bring an umbrella. Yet she could not go back. At the foot of the front steps she turned left and walked in the direction of Huband Bridge. She could see the willow tree there, beside the bridge, leaning in the light from the streetlamp with a fuzz of sallow mist surrounding it.

The street was deserted, and the only sound was that of her own footsteps clicking on the pavement. Her mind was in turmoil. Inside, she seemed to be suddenly in a strange place, where she no longer knew the people she had known, the people she thought she had known. Was this jealousy? Was this what it felt like to be jealous, this frenzy of the mind and this dull hard pain in the breast? Faces rose up, David’s face, Sally Minor’s, and hung there before her, stark, hollow-eyed, like the masks in an ancient Greek play. She was in a sort of panic; she imagined herself revolving slowly round and round, like someone who had been hanged. She did not want to feel this way; she did not want to be thinking these thoughts.

They had not kissed. David and Sally, they had not kissed, she was sure of it. That was all the work of a fevered imagination. It was.
It was
.

If only Sally had said something about David, something simple and innocent.
He’s nice. I like him. You’re lucky.

She wished Sally would go; she wanted her to go now, to be gone when she returned, gone back to Kilburn or wherever it was, to her flat over Mr. Patel’s shop, to the smell of curry and the sound of the grocer’s children squabbling. She wanted never to have known her. She wanted that kiss not to have happened. She wanted—

She had not heard him come up behind her. Afterwards, it seemed to her that before anything else she had caught his smell, of cigarette smoke and wet sheepskin. He was wearing the same cloth cap; she recognized it at once. Strange, how she could think of so many things in such a short span of time, a couple of moments, no more than that, before he stepped in front of her and caught her by the wrist. He was the man who had come into the café that first day and looked at Sally and at her before going out again, into the rain. He was the same man who had been standing opposite the flat, by the railings above the towpath, with a cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand. Why had she not paid him more attention?

He had thrust his face close up against hers and was saying something. He had not twisted her arm, he was only holding it, but in such a steely grip that she feared he would crush the little knob of bone at the side of her wrist. Should she scream? She was sure her voice would not work.

What was he saying? She could not make it out. She tried to concentrate. The police would ask her what he had said, they would want to know the words, the exact words.
“Listen,”
he said in a savage whisper.
“Listen to me, you fucking bitch.”

Behind him she saw the willow tree by the bridge, its hanging head wreathed in glowing gray light. With the greatest feeling of surprise she asked herself if this was where she was going to die, if this was the moment.

19

The rain, the endless rain, was still drifting slantwise when the taxi swung into the main street in Tallaght. The driver, a burly fellow with a wheeze, had already complained breathily of having had to come so far out of the city, and Quirke had annoyed him all the more by pointing out with weary sarcasm that it was a taxi he was driving, and that the meter had clocked up two pounds so far and was still running. “Bleeding middle of the night, too,” the driver said with an angry gasp, and lapsed into a sulk. It was not yet nine o’clock. Quirke sighed. He had done so much in this long day, had traveled so far, and he was tired. He had the sense of things closing up, of the big top being dismantled and the animals being shut away in their cages, of the spangled bareback rider taking off her greasepaint by the light of a flickering lamp.

They passed through the village and at the crossroads Quirke pointed to the muddy lane leading to the tinkers’ site. “I’m not going down there,” the driver protested indignantly. “That’s where them knackers have their camp.” Quirke told him to stop, saying that he would walk the rest of the way. The fellow turned in his seat and peered at him incredulously. “I’m telling you,” he said, “there’s nothing but tinkers out here.” Quirke, getting out his wallet, did not reply.

Outside, in the darkness and the stealthy rain, Quirke stood and watched the headlights of the taxi as it reversed along the boreen, until it turned with a crashing of gears and drove off. The night closed suddenly around him. It had a wild smell, like the smell of an animal’s wet pelt. He waited for his eyes to adjust. The darkness had a glassy shine. When he took a step there was a squelching sound, as his right foot, in its expensive Italian shoe, sank into the mud of the laneway. He lifted his head, flaring his nostrils. He was aware of a sense of violent exultation, of feral hunger—but what was he was exulting at, for what was he hungering?

The darkness was so dense it doused even the imagined searchlight that for days had been trained upon him from just beyond the perimeter of his vision. He spied, off at a distance, the real lights of Packie the Pike’s encampment. He did not know why he had come here. In his mind he saw again the black-haired woman walking away from the caravan, and the child with her, and the two of them looking back at him with something in their eyes, some dark knowledge. He blundered onwards. Despite the lights ahead of him and the muddy and all too palpable ground underfoot he had no real spatial sense. He might have been in flight, not through the sky, exactly, but in some sort of elevated, clouded medium in which he was weightlessly sustained.

He came to the gateway into the camp, though he felt it rather than saw it, a yawning gap in the moist and somehow restive gloom. He walked through it. The mud was deeper now, more viscous. There was a smell of horses. Then a dog barked, close by, and he stopped. The animal approached, a slithering dark shadow against the deeper darkness. He saw a flash of fangs, and was frightened, but then the thing was rubbing its flank against his legs, whimpering. He leaned down and touched its slick, wet coat. “Good dog,” he said softly. To this creature, he supposed, he would seem a new species of human, soft-voiced and ingratiating, harmless, unworthy of serious challenge.

He moved on, the dog keeping close at his heels. There was music somewhere, someone playing a melodeon, or maybe it was a mouth organ. Before him there was the light of a bonfire. Was it the tires burning still? No, the fire was smaller, and in a different place, and against its flickering glow he saw the ring of caravans. He stopped again, thinking of the two young tinkers he had seen earlier, sitting in the rusted wreck of the car, watching him and Hackett. He could die out here, he could have his throat slit and no one would know. Packie and that gang of children he had seen around the bonfire would take his body and bury it somewhere, or throw it on the fire, even, and burn it to ash. Thinking these things, he experienced a renewed and almost sensuous thrill of fear.

Again he walked forward; again the dog followed.

He saw her, as he had seen her the first time, putting her head out at the door of one of the caravans, the light of the fire lacquering her raven-dark hair and lighting her thin sharp face. Would she be able to see him, out here in the darkness? She was sure to have keener eyesight than he—they could probably see in the dark, these people. He moved towards her. The ground was uneven and he was afraid of slipping in the mud and falling. He felt like a sleepwalker, walking in a dream. The woman still leaned there, her arms folded on the door frame. The rain must be falling on her—did she not mind it? There was lamplight at her back, and her eye sockets were blank black hollows. How had he recognized her, in the dark, and at such a distance? He had just known it would be she, and she it was.

He came up to the caravan and stopped. Her face was no more than a foot above his, yet her eyes were still lost in pools of darkness. She seemed to be smiling, coolly, unsurprised. “Wisha, it’s yourself,” she said softly. “I thought you’d be back, all right.” He did not know what to say in reply. His rain-sodden overcoat hung heavy on his shoulders, and his feet in their wet shoes had begun to ache from the damp and the cold. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. “Will you come in, itself?” she said. Her tone was one of amusement and faint mockery.

“I don’t know if I should,” he said.

She appeared to consider this for a moment, then gave a low laugh. “You should not,” she said. “But all the same you will.”

She withdrew her head, and he heard the sound of her bare feet on the floor inside, and the caravan swayed a little, its axles creaking. He stepped forward and pushed open the bottom half of the door and, grasping the frame at either side, as he had seen Packie the Pike do earlier, he hoisted himself aloft, and ducked through the narrow entrance.

The interior of the caravan was fitted out in much the same way as the one he had been in that afternoon, with a bed or bench along either side and an iron stove beside the door. There was a lace curtain above each of the beds, both of them drawn back and tied at the bottom with a piece of blue ribbon. Illustrations cut from glossy magazines were pinned to the sloping walls—pictures of landscapes with castles and greenswards, reproductions of paintings, a color photograph of Marilyn Monroe pouting at the camera. An oil lamp was suspended from the ceiling, and the stove was burning, and the air was heavy with the smell of kerosene and of wood smoke, but behind these smells there was a fragrance too, of some herb or spice that he could not identify.

The woman was sitting on the bed on the right, rolling a cigarette. Her fingers were slender and delicate, but the nails, like her toenails, had sickles of black dirt underneath them. She had on the same white blouse she had worn earlier, and the same red skirt. There were small pearl studs in her earlobes. She did not look at him, but concentrated on making the cigarette, a tongue tip stuck at the corner of her mouth. He could think of nothing to say, and merely stood there, in his wet overcoat, holding his hat.

Then he noticed the girl, the one he had seen with the woman earlier. She was sitting on the other bed, half concealed by the swath of lace curtain beside her. She had her back to the end wall, and had drawn her knees up and encircled them with her arms. She was watching Quirke with a solemn and unwavering gaze. He smiled at her, smiled as best he could. She did not smile in return, only went on gazing at him, as if she had never seen him or the like of him before.