Ghosts

by John Banville

  (Of course, at times I think of that other self not as my better half but my worse; if he is the bad one, the evil, lost twin, what does that make me? That is an avenue down which I do not care to venture.)

  I climbed the stairs. I felt oddly, shakily buoyant, as if there were springs attached to the soles of my shoes and I must keep treading down heavily to prevent them from bouncing me over the banisters. On the first landing I stopped and turned from side to side, poor baffled minotaur, my head swinging ponderously on its thick tendons, a bullish weight, my humid, blood-dark glower groping stubbornly for something, for some smallest trace of my past selves lurking here, like the hidden faces in a comic-book puzzle. As a child I loved to be alone in the house; it was like being held loosely in the friendly clutches of a preoccupied, mute and melancholy giant. Something now had happened to the light, some sort of gloom had fallen. It was not raining. Perhaps it was fog; in these parts fog has a way of settling without warning and as quickly lifting again. At any rate I recall a clammy and crepuscular glow. I walked down the corridor. It was like walking in a dream, a sort of slow stumbling, weightless and yet encumbered. At the end of the corridor there was an arched window with a claret-coloured pane that had always made me think of cold churches and the word litany. The door to one of the bedrooms was ajar; I imagined someone standing behind it, breathless and listening, just like me. I hesitated, and then with one finger pushed the door open and stepped in sideways and stood listening in the softly thudding silence. The room was empty, a large, high, white chamber with a vaulted ceiling and one big window looking out into the umbrage of tall trees. There was no furniture, there were no pictures on the walls, there was nothing. The floorboards were bare. Whose room had this been? I did not remember it; that elaborate ceiling, for instance, domed and scooped like the inner crown of a priest’s biretta: there must have been a false ceiling under it in my time that now had been removed. I looked up into the soft shadows and felt everything fall away from me like water. How cool and calm all was, how still the air. I thought how it would be to live here in this bone-white cell, in all this emptiness, watching the days ascend and fall again to darkness, hearing faintly the wind blow, seeing the light edge its way across the floor and die. And then to float away, to be gone, like dust, dispersed into the vast air. Not to be. Not to be at all. Deep down, deep beyond dreaming, have I ever desired anything other than that consummation? Sometimes I think that satyr, what’s-his-name, was right: better not to have been born, and once born to have done with the whole business as quick as you can.

  A bird like a black bolt came flying straight out of the trees and dashed itself with a bang against the window-pane.

  Something jogged my memory then, the bird, perhaps, or the look of those trees, or that strange, misty light in the glass: once, when I was sick, they had moved me here from my own room, I cannot think why – for the view, maybe, or the elevation, I don’t know. I saw again the bed at the window, the tall, fluted half-columns of the curtains rising above me, the tops of the autumnal trees outside, and the child that I was then, lying quietly with bandaged throat, grey-browed and wan, my hands resting on the turned-down sheet, like a miniature warrior on his tomb. How strangely pleasurable were the illnesses of those days. Afloat there in febrile languor, with aching eyes and leaden limbs and the blood booming in my ears, I used to dream myself into sky-bound worlds where metallic birds soared aloft on shining loops of wire and great clouded glass shapes sailed ringingly through the cool, pellucid air. Perhaps this is how children die; perhaps still pining somehow for that oblivion out of which they have so lately come they just forget themselves and quietly float away.

  A faint reflection moved on the glass before me and I turned to find my son standing in the doorway, watching me with a placid and enquiring smile. I thought, I met Death upon the road. I sat down on the window-sill. I felt feeble suddenly.

  ‘Van!’ I said and laughed breathlessly. ‘How you’ve grown!’

  Did he know me, I wonder? He must be seventeen now, or eighteen – in my confusion I could not remember his birthday, or even what month it falls in. I had not seen him for ten years. Would it upset him to come upon me suddenly here like this? Who knows what upsets him. Maybe nothing does, maybe he is perfectly at peace, locked away inside himself. I picture a far, white country, everything blurred and flat under a bleached sky, and, off on the horizon, a bird, perhaps, tiny as a toy in all that distance, flying steadily away. But how huge he was! – I could do nothing at first except sit leaning forward with my hands on my knees, gaping at him. He was a good half head taller than I, with a barrel chest and enormous shoulders and a great, broad brow, incongruously noble, like that of a prehistoric stone statue standing at an angle on a hillside above the shore of some remote, forgotten island. The blond curls that I remembered had grown thick and had turned a rusty shade of red; that is from me. He had his mother’s dark colouring, though, and her dark, solemn eyes. His gaze, even at its steadiest, kept pulling away distractedly to one side, which created a curious, flickering effect, as if within that giant frame a smaller, frailer version of him, the one that I remembered, were minutely atremble. In my imagination I got up out of myself, like a swimmer clambering out of water, and took a staggering step towards him, my arms outstretched, and pressed him to my breast and sobbed. Poor boy, my poor boy. This is awful. In reality I am still sitting on the window-sill, with my hands with their whitened knuckles clamped on my knees, looking up at him and inanely, helplessly smiling; I never was one for embraces. He made a noise deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle and walked forward with a sort of teetering and unexpectedly light, almost dancing step, and peered at the stunned blackbird perched outside on the sill, glazed and motionless and all puffed up around its puzzlement and pain. It kept heaving shuddery little sighs and slowly blinking. There was blood on its beak. What a shock the poor thing must have had when what looked like shining air turned suddenly to solid glass and the world snapped shut. Is that how it is for my boy all the time, a sort of helpless blundering against darkly gleaming, impenetrable surfaces? He pointed to the bird and glanced at me almost shyly and did that chuckle again. He had a musty, faintly sweet smell that made me think of wheelchairs and those old-fashioned, cloth-padded wooden crutches. He was always fascinated by birds. I remembered, years ago, when he was a child, walking with him one blustery autumn day through the grounds of a great house we had paid a shilling to see. There was a peacock somewhere, we could hear its uncanny, desolate cry above the box hedges and the ornamental lawns. Van was beside himself and kept running agitatedly back and forth with his head lifted in that peculiar, angled way that he had when he was excited, looking to see what could be making such extravagant sounds. But we never did find the peacock, and now the day came back to me weighted with that little absence, that missed, marvellous bird, and I felt the pang of it, distant and piercing, like the bird’s cry itself.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said to him. That curious, dense light was in the trees and pressing like gauze against the window-panes. ‘Are you happy?’

  What else could I say? His only response was a puzzled, fleeting frown, as if what he had heard was not my voice but only a familiar and yet as always incomprehensible, distant noise, another of the squeaks and chirrups thronging the air of his white world. I have never been able to rid myself of the notion that his condition was my fault, that even before he was born I damaged him somehow with my expectations, that my high hopes made him hang back inside himself until it was too late for him to come out properly and be one with the rest of us. And no matter what I may tell myself, I did have hopes. Of what? Of being saved through him, as if the son by his mere existence might absorb and absolve the sins of the father? Even that grandiloquent name I insisted on hanging around his neck – Vanderveld! for God’s sake, after my mother’s people – even that was a weight that must have helped to drag him down. When he was still an infant I used to picture us someday in the far future strol
ling together down a dappled street in the south somewhere, he a grown man and I still miraculously youthful, both of us in white, my hand lightly on his shoulder and him smiling: father and son. But while I had my face turned away, dreaming of that or some other, equally fatuous idyll, the Erl King got him.

  Suddenly, as if nothing at all had happened, the blackbird with a sort of clockwork jerk rose up and flexed its wings and flew off swiftly into the cottony white light. Van made a little disappointed mewling noise and pressed his face to the glass, craning to see the last of the bird, and for a second, as he stood with his face turned like that, I saw my mother in him. Dear Jesus, all my ghosts are gathering here.

  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 t
ell 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.