Ghosts

by John Banville

  ‘Where’s this?’ he said.

  ‘Home.’ I laughed. The word boomed like a foghorn.

  ‘Nice,’ Billy said. ‘The trees and all.’ I marvelled anew at his lack of curiosity. Nothing, it seems, can surprise him. Or am I wrong, as I usually am about people and their ways? For all I know he may be in a ceaseless fever of amazement before the spectacle of this wholly improbable world. He twitches a lot, and sometimes he used to wake up screaming in his bunk at night; but then, we all woke up screaming in the night, sooner or later, so that proves nothing. All the same, I am probably underestimating him; underestimating people is one of my less serious besetting sins. ‘Your family still here?’ he said. ‘Your mam and dad?’

  He frowned. I could see him trying to imagine them, big, bossy folk with loud voices clattering down this road astride their horses, as outlandish to him as medieval knights in armour.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘All dead, thank God. My wife lives here now.’

  I opened the door of the van and swung my legs out and sat for a moment with my head bowed and shoulders sagging and the gin bottle dangling between my knees. When I lifted my eyes I could see the roof of the house beyond the ragged tops of the hedge. I found myself toying with the notion that this was all there was, just a roof put up there to fool me, like something out of the Arabian Nights, and that if I stood up quickly enough I would glimpse under the eaves a telltale strip of silky sky and a shining scimitar of moon floating on its back.

  ‘Did I ever tell you, Billy,’ I said, still gazing up wearily at those familiar chimney-pots, ‘about the many worlds theory?’

  Of the few scraps of science I can still recall (talk about another life!), the many worlds theory is my favourite. The universe, it says, is everywhere and at every instant splitting into a myriad versions of itself. On Pluto, say, a particle of putty collides with a lump of lead and another, smaller particle is created in the process and goes shooting off in all directions. Every single one of those possible directions, says the many worlds theory, will produce its own universe, containing its own stars, its own solar system, its own Pluto, its own you and its own me: identical, that is, to all the other myriad universes except for this unique event, this particular particle whizzing down this particular path. In this manifold version of reality chance is an iron law. Chance. Think of it. Oh, it’s only numbers, I know, only a cunning wheeze got up to accommodate the infinities and make the equations come out, yet when I contemplate it something stirs in me, some indistinct, fallen thing that I had thought was dead lifts itself up on one smashed wing and gives a pathetic, hopeful cheep. For is it not possible that somewhere in this crystalline multiplicity of worlds, in this infinite, mirrored regression, there is a place where the dead have not died, and I am innocent?

  ‘What do you think of that, Billy?’ I said. ‘That’s the many worlds theory. Isn’t that something, now?’

  ‘Weird,’ he answered, shaking his head slowly from side to side, humouring me.

  Spring is strange. This day looked more like early winter, all metallic glitters and smooth, silver sky. The air was cool and bright and smelled of wet clay. An odd, unsteady sort of cheerfulness was gradually taking hold of me – the gin, I suppose.

  ‘What’s the first thing you noticed when you got out, Billy?’ I said.

  He hardly had to think at all.

  ‘The quiet,’ he said. ‘People not shouting all the time.’

  The quiet, yes. And the breadth of things, the far vistas on every side and the sense of farther and still farther spaces beyond. It made me giddy to think of it.

  I got myself up at last, feet squelching in the boggy verge, and walked a little way along the road. I had nothing particular in mind. I had no intention as yet of going near the house – the gate was in the other direction – for in my heart I knew my wife was right, that I should stay away. All the same, now that I was here, by accident, I could not resist looking over the old place one more time, trying my feet in the old footprints, as it were, to see if they still fitted. Yet I could not feel the way one is supposed to feel amid the suddenly rediscovered surroundings of one’s past, all swoony and tearful, in a transport of ecstatic remembrance, clasping it all to one’s breast with a stifled cry and a sudden, sweet ache in the heart, that kind of thing. No; what I felt was a sort of glazed numbness, as if I were suspended in some thin, transparent stuff, like one of those eggs my mother used to preserve in waterglass when I was a child. This is what happens to you in prison, you lose your past, it is confiscated from you, along with your bootlaces and your belt, when you enter through that strait gate. It was all still here, of course, the ancient, enduring world, suave and detailed, standing years-deep in its own silence, only beyond my touching, as if shut away behind glass. There were even certain trees I seemed to recognise; I would not have been surprised if they had come alive and spoken to me, lifting their drooping limbs and sighing, as in a children’s storybook. At that moment, as though indeed this were the enchanted forest, there materialised before me on the road, like a wood-sprite, a little old brown man in big hobnailed boots and a cap, carrying, of all things, a sickle. He had long arms and a bent back and bandy legs, and progressed with a rolling gait, as if he were bowling himself along like a hoop. As we approached each other he watched me keenly, with a crafty, sidewise, leering look. When we had drawn level he touched a finger to his cap and croaked an incomprehensible greeting, peering up at me out of clouded, half-blind eyes. I stopped. He took in my white suit with a mixture of misgiving and scornful amusement; he probably thought I was someone of consequence.

  ‘Grand day,’ I said, in a loud voice hollow with false heartiness.

  ‘But hardy, though,’ he answered smartly and looked pleased with himself, as if he had caught me out in some small, deceitful strategem.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, abashed, ‘hardy indeed.’

  He stood bowed before me, bobbing gently from the waist as if his spine were fitted with some sort of spring attachment at its base. The sickle dangled at the end of his long arm like a prosthesis. We were silent briefly. I considered the sky while he studied the roadway at my feet. I was never one for exchanging banter with the peasantry, yet I was loth to pass on, I do not know why. Perhaps I took him for another of this day’s mysterious messengers.

  ‘And are you from these parts yourself, sir?’ he said, in that wheedling tone they reserve for tourists and well-heeled strangers in general.

  For answer I made a broad, evasive gesture.

  ‘Do you know that house?’ I asked, pointing over the hedge.

  He passed a hard brown hand over his jaw, making a sandpapery noise, and gave me a quick, sly look. His eyes were like shards from some large, broken, antique thing, a funerary jar, perhaps.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know it well.’

  Then he launched into a long rigmarole about my family and its history. I listened in awed astonishment as if to a tale of the old gods. It was all invention, of course; even the few facts he had were upside-down or twisted out of shape. ‘I knew the young master, too,’ he said. (The young master?) ‘I seen him one day kill a rabbit. Broke its neck: like that. A pet thing, it was. Took it up in his hands and – ’ he made a crunching noise out of the side of his mouth ‘ – kilt it. He was only a lad at the time, mind, a curly-headed little fellow you wouldn’t think would say boo to a goose. Oh, a nice knave. I wasn’t a bit surprised when I heard about what he done.’

  What was this nonsense? I had never wrung the neck of any rabbit. I was the most innocuous of children, a poor, shivering mite afraid of its own shadow. Why had he invented this grotesque version of me? I felt confusion and a sort of angry shame, as if I had been jostled aside in the street by some ludicrously implausible imposter claiming to be me. The old man was squinting up at me with a slack-mouthed grin, a solitary, long yellow tooth dangling from his upper gums. ‘I suppose you’re looking for him too, are you?’ he said.

  A cold hand clutched my heart.
/>   ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Who else was looking for him?’

  His grin turned slyly knowing. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s always fellows like that going around, after people.’

  He winked and touched a finger to his cap again, with the smug, self-satisfied air of a man who has properly settled someone’s hash, and bowled himself off on his way. I looked after him but saw myself, a big, ragged, ravaged person, flabby as a porpoise, standing there in distress on the windy road, dangling from an invisible gibbet in my incongruous white suit, arms limp, with my mouth open and my bell-bottoms flapping and the neck of the gin bottle sticking out of my pocket. I do not know why I was so upset. There came over me then that sense of dislocation I experience with increasing frequency these days, and which frightens me. It is as if mind and body had pulled loose from each other, or as if the absolute, essential I had shrunk to the size of a dot, leaving the rest of me hanging in enormous suspension, massive and yet weightless, like a sawn tree before it topples. I wonder if it is incipient epilepsy, or some other insinuating cerebral malady? But I do not think the effect is physical. Perhaps this is how I shall go mad in the end, perhaps I shall just fly apart like this finally and be lost to myself forever. The attack, if that is not too strong a word for it, the attack passed, as it always does, with a dropping sensation, a sort of general lurch, as if I had been struck a great, soft, padded punch and somehow had fallen out of myself even as I stood there, clenched in fright. I looked about warily, blinking; I might have just landed from somewhere entirely different. Everything was in its place, the roof beyond the hedge and the old man hobbling away and the back of Billy’s seal-dark head motionless in the van, as though nothing had happened, as though that fissure had not opened up in the deceptively smooth surface of things. But I know that look of innocence the world puts on; I know it for what it is.

  I found a gap in the hedge and pulled myself through it, my shoes sinking to the brim in startlingly cold mud. Twigs slapped my face and thorns clutched at my coat. I had forgotten what the countryside is like, the blank-faced, stolid malevolence of bush and briar. When I got to the other side I was panting. I had the feeling, as so often, that all this had happened before. The house was there in front of me now, quite solid and substantial after all and firmly tethered to its roof. Yet it seemed changed, seemed smaller and nearer to the road than it should be, and for a panicky moment I wondered if my memory had deceived me and this was not my house at all. (My house? Ah.) Mother’s rose bushes were still flourishing under the big window at the gable end. They were in bud already. Poor ma, dead and gone and her roses still there, clinging on in their slow, tenacious, secret way. I started across the lawn, the soaked turf giving spongily under my tread. The past was gathering ever more thickly around me, I waded through it numbly like a greased swimmer, waiting to feel the chill and the treacherous undertow. I veered away from the front door – I do not naturally go in at front doors any more – and skirted round by the rose bushes, squinting up at the windows for a sign of life. How frowningly do empty windows look out at the world, full of blank sky and oddly arranged greenery. At the back of the house I skulked about for a while in the clayey dampness of the vegetable garden, feeling like poor Magwitch on the run. A few big stalks of last year’s cabbages, knobbed like backbones, leaned this way and that, and there were hens that high-stepped worriedly away from me in slow motion, or stood canted over on one leg with their heads inclined, shaking their wattles and uttering mournful croaks of alarm. (What strange, baroque creatures they are, hens; there is something Persian about them, I always feel.) I was not thinking of anything. I was just feeling around blindly, like a doctor feeling for the place that pains. I would have welcomed pain. Dreamily I advanced, admiring the sea-green moss on the door of the disused privy, the lilac tumbling over its rusted tin roof. A breeze swooped down and a thrush whistled its brief, thick song. I paused, lightheaded and blinking. At last the luminous air, the bird’s song, that particular shade of green, all combined to succeed in transporting me back for a moment to the far, lost past, to some rain-washed, silver-grey morning like this one, forgotten but still somehow felt, and I stood for a moment in inexplicable rapture, my face lifted to the light, and felt a sort of breathlessness, an inward staggering, as if an enormous, airy weight had been dropped into my arms. But it did not last; that tender burden I had been given to hold, whatever it was, evaporated at once, and the rapture faded and I was numb again, as before.

  I put my face to the kitchen window and peered inside. I could see little except shadows and my own eyes reflected in the glass, fixed and hungry, like the eyes of a desperate stranger. Crouched there with my breath steaming the pane and the bilious smell of drains in my nostrils, I felt intensely the pressure of things behind me, the garden and the fields and the far woods, like an inquisitive crowd gathering at my back, elbowing for a look. I am never really at ease in the open; I expect always some malignity of earth or air to strike me down or, worse, to whirl me up dizzyingly into the sky. I have always been a little afraid of the sky, so transparent and yet impenetrable, so deceptively harmless-looking in its bland blueness.

  The back door was locked. I was turning to go, more relieved I think than anything else, when suddenly, in a sudden swoon of anger, or proprietorial resentment, or something, I don’t know what, I turned with an elbow lifted and bashed it against one of the panes of frosted glass in the door. These things are not as easy as the cinema makes them seem: it took me three good goes before I managed it. The glass gave with a muffled whop, like a grunt of laughter, guttural and cruel, and the splinters falling to the floor inside made a sinister little musical sound, a sort of elfin music. I waited, listening. What a connoisseur of silences I have become over the years! This one had astonishment in it, and warm fright, and a naughty child’s stifled glee. I took a breath. I was trembling, like a struck cymbal. How darkly thrilling it is to smash a pane of glass and reach through the jagged hole into the huge, cool emptiness of the other side. I pictured my hand pirouetting all alone in there, in that shocked space, doing its little back-to-front pas de deux with the key. The door swung open abruptly and I almost fell across the threshold; it was not so much the suddenness that made me totter but the vast surprise of being here. For an instant I saw myself as if lit by lightning, a stark, crouched figure, vivid and yet not entirely real, an emanation of myself, a hologram image, pop-eyed and flickering. Shakily I stepped inside, and recalled, with eerie immediacy, the tweedy and damply warm underarm of a blind man I had helped across a street somewhere, in some forgotten city, years ago.

  I shut the door behind me and stood and took another deep breath, like a diver poised on the springboard’s thrumming tip. The furniture hung about pretending not to look at me. Stillness lay like a dustsheet over everything. There was no one at home, I could sense it. I walked here and there, my footsteps falling without sound. I had a strange sensation in my ears, a sort of fullness, as if I were in a vessel fathoms deep with the weight of the ocean pressing all around me. The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some invisible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel, and when I touched them I could not seem to feel them. I thought of being here, a solemn little boy in a grubby jersey, crop-headed and frowning, with inky fingers and defenceless, translucent pink ears, sitting at this table hunched over my homework on a winter evening and dreaming of the future. Can I really ever have been thus? Can that child be me? Surely somewhere between that blameless past and this grim present something snapped, some break occurred without my noticing it in the line I was paying out behind me as I ran forward, reaching out an eager hand towards all the good things that I thought were waiting for me. Who was it, then, I wonder, that picked up the frayed end and fell nimbly into step behind me, chuckling softly to himself?

  I went into the hall. There was the telephone she had delayed so long before answering. The machine squatted tensely on its little table like a shiny bla
ck toad, dying to speak, to tell all, to blurt out everything that had been confided to it down the years. Where had everyone gone to? Had they fled at the sound of my voice on the line, had she dropped everything and bundled the child in her arms and run out to the road and driven away with a shriek of tyres? I realised now why it was I could touch nothing, could not feel the texture of things: the house had been emptied of me; I had been exorcised from it. Would she know I had been here? Would she sense the contamination in the air? I closed my eyes and was assailed anew by that feeling of both being and not being, of having drifted loose from myself. I have always been convinced of the existence somewhere of another me, my more solid self, more weighty and far more serious than I, intent perhaps on great and unimaginable tasks, in another reality, where things are really real; I suppose for him, out there in his one of many worlds, I would be no more than the fancy of a summer’s day, a shimmer at the edge of vision, something half-glimpsed, like the shadow of a cloud, or a gust of wind, or the hover and sudden flit of a dragonfly over reeded, sun-white shallows. And now as I stood in the midst of my own absence, in the birthplace that had rid itself of me utterly, I murmured a little prayer, and said, Oh, if you are really there, bright brother, in your more real reality, think of me, turn all your stern attentions on me, even for an instant, and make me real, too.