Authors: John Banville
Things are sort of smeared and splintery after that, as if seen through an iridescent haze of tears. I walked here and there about the house, with Van going along softly behind me with that dancer’s dainty tread. I poked about in bedrooms and even looked through drawers and cupboards, but it was no good, I could make no impression. Everything gave before me like smoke. What was I looking for, anyway? Myself still, the dried spoor of my tracks? Not to be found here. I gathered a few bits of clothes together and took down from the top of a wardrobe an old cardboard suitcase to put them in. The clasps snapped up with a noise like pistol shots and I opened the lid and caught a faint smell of something that I almost recognised, some herb or fragrant wood, a pallid sigh out of the past. When I looked over my shoulder Van was gone, leaving no more than a fading shimmer on the air. I saw myself, kneeling on the floor with the case open before me, like a ravisher hunched over his splayed victim, and I stuffed in the last of my shirts and shut the lid and rose and hurried off down the stairs. In the kitchen the back door with its broken pane still stood open; it had a somehow insolent, insinuating look to it, like that of a tough lounging with his elbow against the wall and watching me with amusement and scorn. I went out skulkingly, clutching my suitcase and flushed with an inexplicable shame. I shall never, not ever again, go back there. It is lost to me; all lost. As I emerged from the gap in the hedge I felt myself stepping
out of something, as if I had left a part of my life behind me, snagged on the briars like an old coat, and I experienced a spasm of blinding grief; it was so pure, so piercing, that for a moment I mistook it for pleasure; it flooded through me, a scalding serum, and left me feeling almost sanctified, a holy sinner.
I was surprised to find Billy still waiting for me. After all I had been through I thought he would be gone, taken by the whirlwind like everything else I seemed to have lost today. Someone was leaning in the window of the van, talking to him, a thin, black-haired man who, seeing me approach, straightened up at once and legged it off around the bend in the road, stepping along hurriedly in a peculiarly comic and somehow ribald way, one arm swinging and the other hand inserted in his jacket pocket and the cuffs of his trousers flapping.
The air in the van was thick with cigarette smoke.
‘Who was that?’ I said.
Billy shrugged and did not look at me. ‘Some fellow,’ he said. He threw his fag-end out of the window and started up the engine and we lurched on our way. When we drove around the bend there was no sign of the black-haired man.
‘See the family?’ Billy asked.
‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I have no family. I had a son once, but he died.’
I
THINK OF THAT TRIP SOUTH
as a sort of epic journey and I an Odysseus, homeless now, setting out once more, a last time, from Ithaca. The farther we travelled the lighter I felt, the more insubstantial, as if I were steadily throwing out bits of ballast as we went along. The van kept breaking down, and Billy, shaking his head in rueful amusement, would get out and hammer at something under the bonnet while I leaned across and pumped the pedals at his shouted command. It was strange, sitting there in the sudden quiet in the middle of nowhere. The countryside around wore a look of surprise and tight-lipped disapprobation, as if by these unexpected stops we were flouting some general rule of decorum; deep silence stood over the fields and the trees stirred restlessly, rustling their silks in the soft, varnished air. This lovely world, and we the only blot on the landscape. We, or just me? Sometimes I think I can feel the world recoiling from me, as if from the touch of some uncanny, cold and sticky thing. I recall one day when I was a child walking with my mother into a hotel in town, one of those shabby, grand places that are gone now, and halting on the threshold of the lounge as all the people there in the midst of their afternoon tea fell silent suddenly. It was only a coincidence, of course, it just happened that everyone had stopped
talking at the same moment, but I was convinced it was because of me this dreadful hush had fallen, that somehow I had infected the air and struck the people dumb, and I stood there hot with shame and terror as stout matrons paused with teapots lifted and rheumy old men looked about them in startlement and blinked, until the next moment the whole thing calmly started up again, and my mother took my hand and gave me an impatient shake, and I trailed dully after her, stumbling in all that noise and light.
An early dusk was falling when we got to Coldharbour, a humped little town clinging to a rocky foreland facing the Atlantic. The houses shone whitely in the failing light and smoke swirled up from chimney-pots, mussel-blue against the paler blue of evening, and beyond the harbour wall the thick sea heaved like a jumble of big, empty iron boxes bobbing and jostling. I seemed to hear melodeon music and smell kippers being smoked. Billy parked outside a large pub that looked like a ranch and we went in for a drink. We sat before a turf fire in a low room with fake rafters and smoked yellow walls and listened to the wireless muttering to itself. Horse-brasses, plastic ivy, an astonished, stuffed fish in a glass case. We were the only customers. The publican was a big, slow man; he stood behind the bar ruminatively polishing a pint glass, frowning vacantly as if he were trying in vain to remember something very important. What did he make of us, I wonder? He seemed a decent sort. (Mind you, there are probably times when even I seem a decent sort.) His daughter, a skinny little thing with a pinched face and bitten fingernails and his eyes, came down from upstairs, still in her green school uniform, and said he was to help her with her sums, her mammy had said so. While he muttered over her jotter, a fat tongue-tip stuck in the corner of his mouth, she leaned against the bar and hummed a tune whiningly and made a great show of not looking in our direction. He showed her the solved sums and spoke to her
softly, teasing her, and she kept saying: ‘Oh, da!’ and sighing, throwing up her eyes and making an El Greco face. We crouched over our grog, Billy and I, and watched them covertly, our noses pressed to the briefly lit window of all we had forfeited, and Billy, prompted I suppose by something in the example of this little familial scene, suddenly launched into a halting confession, keeping his head down and speaking in a stumbling monotone. He had no girl, he said. He had made it all up, the hairdressing salon, the wedding plans, everything. There was no job, either, no iffy brother-in-law in the delivery business; he had been on the dole since he got out. Even the stuff about his mam was an invention: she had not been at home keeping his dinner hot for him, she was in the hospital, dying of a rotted liver. And now his parole officer would be after him for leaving the city without telling him.
We were silent for a long time, as if listening to the reverberations after an enormous crash, and then I heard myself in a flat voice say:
‘Where did you get the gin?’
Hardly what you would call an adequate response, I know, but it was an awkward moment. Billy shrugged.
‘Robbed,’ he said.
‘Ah. I see.’
I was not surprised by all this – I think in my heart I had known all along that the whole thing was a fantasy – and certainly I did not disapprove: after all, why shouldn’t he make up a life for himself? I confess, though, that I was cross, not because he had lied to me but, on the contrary, precisely because he had changed his mind and owned up, damn it. Had I asked for honesty? I had not. In my opinion the truth, so-called, is a much overrated quantity. The trouble with it is that it is closed: when you tell the truth, that’s the end of it; lies, on the other hand, ramify in all sorts of unexpected directions, complicating things, knotting
them up in themselves, thickening the texture of life. Lying makes a dull world more interesting. To lie is to create. Besides, fibs are more fun, and liars, I am convinced, live longer. Yes, yes, I am an enthusiastic advocate of the whopper. But now bloody Billy had developed scruples and what on earth were we to do? From some things there is no going back. We sat and stared solemnly into the fireplace for a while, slumped in another horrible silence, and the publican’s daughter went back upstairs and the publican returned to his glasses, and then – oh, my God, it was appalling! –Billy began to cry. In all the years we had spent together in the jug I had never once seen him shed a tear, even on his worst days. And this was not even proper crying, he did not blub or wail, as I would have made sure to do, but just sat there with his head bowed and the water squeezing out of his eyes and his shoulders shaking. The embarrassment of it! – I was thankful the place was deserted. I glanced at the publican but he was carefully looking the other way, his lips pursed, whistling without sound. I cannot imagine what he thought we were or what was happening. I had been sure it was I who would be the one to do the weeping today. I touched Billy’s shoulder, less to console, I’m afraid, than as a signal to him that really I thought it was time for him to get a grip on himself, but I snatched away my hand at once, for the feel of that warmly quivering flesh brought back disturbing echoes of old intimacies: behind bars, Eros finds his comforts where he can. I finished my drink and stood up, clearing my throat, and said, still in that toneless voice that I hardly recognised as my own, that I had to go outside for a minute. Billy nodded but did not look up, and I walked away from him almost on tiptoe, a craven Captain Oates, and went through the lavatory and across a yard and came out in a lane at the back of the pub and stood for a little while in the marine darkness with my eyes closed, breathing deep the stink of another dirty little betrayal.
I got my suitcase out of the van and set off in the direction of the harbour. It was black night by now and I had nothing to guide me but the starshine on the cobbles and an occasional, dim streetlamp shivering in the wind. I seemed to be going somewhere. My steps took their own way, down a sloping street and along by the sea wall and on to the pier. A few dim boats reared at anchor out on the jostling water, their mast-ropes tinkling. Have I mentioned My Search For God? Every lifer sooner or later sets out on that quest; I have seen the hardest inmates, fellows who would slit your throat before you could say knife, kneeling meek as toddlers beside their bunks before lights-out, their fingers clasped and eyes shut tight and lips moving in silent communion with the Lord. I am glad to say I managed to hold out for what I consider was a creditably long time. I had never really thought about religion and all that; this world had always been enough of a mystery for me without my needing to invent implausible hereafters (the adjective is redundant, I know). True, I had, and have still, off and on, a hazy sort of half belief in some general force, a supreme malignancy in operation behind the apparent chaos and contingency of the world. There are times, indeed, when I even entertain the notion of a personal deity, a God out of the old books, He that laughs, the
deus ridens.
I remember, when I was a young man and tenderly impressionable, reading in some book of an event in the history of the Xhosa people of the eastern Cape Province. Do you know about the Xhosa? They were a proud and sophisticated race, and great warriors, too, yet unaccountably, for nigh on a hundred years, they had been losing battle after battle against the armies of the white settlers. Again and again they had stormed across the veldt and hurled themselves with perfect confidence against the bullets and the bayonets of these grub-coloured pygmies in their scarlet tunics and were repulsed every time, suffering terrible losses. Then one day in a vision a young
girl whose name was Nongqawuse was instructed by the voices of her ancestors to inform her people that they must slaughter all their cattle and give up all forms of agriculture, after which sacrifices the tribe’s ancestral dead would return to life, bringing with them great new herds and boundless supplies of corn, to form a ghostly, invincible army that would drive the white man into the sea. The tribal elders conferred and decided that the people must do as they were bidden; even the wise king Sandili (see, I have even remembered the names), who had been sceptical at first, in the end declared himself a believer in the New People. The livestock was slaughtered, the fields were laid waste, and the tribe settled down in confidence to await the day of days, which came and went, of course, without the appearance of a single phantom warrior. Nothing happened. The sun did not stand still in the sky, no great herds came thundering out of the dust, not a grain of corn appeared in the emptied bins. In that year of 1857 alone seventy thousand of the Xhosa died of starvation. Clearly I remember letting the book fall from my hand and staring before me with the mad light of the convert shining for a moment in my eyes and thinking yes, yes, there must be a God, if such things can happen! And I pictured Him, a rascally old boy with a tangled yellow beard and a drinker’s nose, reclining on a woolly cloud with his chin on his fist and chuckling to himself as that proud people walked out in solemn ritual into the fields and butchered their cattle and burned their crops. Probably by the time the famine came He had lost interest, had turned his attention somewhere else entirely, leaving the Xhosa to die alone, huddled and speechless, on the parched savannah. In time, of course, I lapsed from my faith in this prankster God, preferring to believe in the Great Nothing instead, which when you think about it is itself a kind of force. However, the moment came one impossible night in prison when I felt so far from everything, so lost in fear and anguish, that I
found myself reaching out, like an abandoned baby reaching out its arms beseechingly from the cold cot, for someone or something to comfort me, to save me from these horrors. There was no one there, of course, or not for me, anyway. It was like coming to in the dark on the battlefield amid the cries and the flying cannon-smoke and feeling around for a limb that had been shot off. I had never known a blackness so vast and deep as that which my groping soul encountered that night. Almost as bad as the emptiness, though, was the fact of the need itself, that bleeding stump I could not bring myself to touch. And now as I stood on the pier, whirled about by the night wind, I felt pressing down on me the weight of another vast darkness and another unassuageable need, for what, I could not say precisely. I looked back at the town; how far off it seemed, how distant its little lights, as if I had already embarked and my voyage were under way. It came to me that I had reached the end of something, that this long day drawing to a close was the last of its kind I would know. What next, then? The voices spoke to me out of the wind, the dead voices. I stood above the black, heaving water and imagined how it would be, the blundering leap and then the plunge and the sudden, bulging silence as I sank. And in the morning they would find my suitcase standing on the pier, unique and incongruous, a comic prefigurement of my tombstone. Strange: I never seriously considered doing away with myself, even in prison, where regularly fellows were found strung up by ropes of knotted bedsheets from the waterpipes in their cells. But what did I have to lose now, that I had not lost already, except life itself, and what was that worth, to me? Cowardice, of course, plain funk, that was a stalwart that could be counted on to keep me dragging along, but there are times when even cowardice must and does give way to stronger, irresistible forces. Yet I knew I would not do it; not even for a moment did I think I might. Was it that in a way I was
already dead, or was I waiting for some new access of life and hope? Life! Hope! And yet it must have been something like that that kept me going. Unfinished business, a debt not paid – yes, that too, of course, of course, we know all about that. But beyond even that there was something more, I did not know what. I felt that whatever it was – is! – it must be simple but so immense I cannot see it, as immense as air: that secret everyone is in on, except me. When I look back all seems inevitable, as if under everything there really were a secret structure, held immovably in place by an unknown and unknowable force. Every tiniest action I ever took was a grain of sand in the flow of things tapering towards that moment when I let go of myself, when with a great
Tarraa!
I flung open the door of the cage and let the beast come bounding out. Now I am condemned to sit here in my filthy straw and sift through the bones of it all over again. Eternal recurrence! That is what I realised that night, standing in the blackness at the end of the pier above the roiling, seductive sea: there was to be no end of it, for me; my term was just beginning. But what I was sentenced to this time was freedom. Freedom! What a thought! The very word gave me the shivers. Freedom, formless and ungraspable, yes, that was the true nature of my sentence. For ten terrible years I had yearned to be free, I had eaten, slept, drunk the thought of it, lay in my bunk at night, heart racing and eyes popping, panting like a decrepit masturbator towards that fantastic moment when the gates would swing open and I would be released, and now it had arrived and I was appalled at the prospect. I am free, I told myself, but what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me. Forget the past, then, give up all hope of retrieving my lost selves, just let it go, just let it all fall away? And then be something new, a sticky, staggering thing wi th myriad-faceted eyes and wet wings, an astonishment standing up in the world, straining drunkenly for flight. Was that it, that I must imagine myself
into existence before tackling the harder task of conjuring another? I closed my eyes. My poor brain throbbed. I did not know what to do, whether to go on or go back or just stay here, somehow, forever. Presently I turned and retraced my steps to the town, ploddingly, confused as always, lost, and alone.