Athena Read online

  All I saw was a cellar, long and low with a vaulted brick ceiling criss-crossed by a network of wiring from which were suspended a dozen or more naked light bulbs, which despite their profusion shed only a sullen, sulphurous glow that trickled away into corners thick with blackness and died. Along one wall there was a workbench with old wooden planes and mitre boxes and other such stuff, and a battery of powerful electric lamps, turned off, that struck me as vaguely minatory, leaning there ranked and hooded in an attitude of silent alertness. A. began to say something, too loudly, and stopped and laughed again and put a hand to her mouth as the echoes flittered up like bats into the vault of shadows above us. There was a smell, a mixture of sawdust and glue and pungent oil, that seemed familiar, though I could not identify it. Is it hindsight that has conferred on the place a pent-up, mocking air? I felt a silent breeze from somewhere on the back of my neck and I turned to speak to A. only to find that she was no longer there. I was about to call out to her when I heard the sound of clicking claws rapidly approaching along the passageway outside and my heart gave a sort of sideways lurch and then righted itself with a frightening thump. The clicking ceased and Prince the dog appeared soundlessly in the doorway and looked at me, jaws agape and red tongue softly throbbing. A moment passed. I spoke to the creature in a hoarse, high voice and put out a cautious hand. I felt an equal mixture of anger and alarm; how had I allowed myself to be lured into this trap? For this was what I had been expecting for the past half hour, to be discovered like this, caught in surprise and dismay and unaccountable guiltiness. A bead of sweat slid down between my shoulder-blades cold and quick as the point of a knife. Then Francie with his hands in his pockets materialised beside the dog and eyed me smilingly and sucked his teeth and said, ‘Private view, eh?’ He scanned the cellar with a swift, sharp glance and dog and master delicately sniffed the air: A.’s perfume; I could smell it too. Francie ambled forward and picked up a miniature hammer from the workbench and turned to me and—

  Enough of this. I do not like it down here, I do not like it at all. A wave of my wand and pop! here we are magically at street level again.

  Francie invited me to go with him to The Boatman for a drink, hunching his shoulders and looking away and smiling to himself. We walked along Fawn Street through the hazy, brazen light of early evening with the low sun in our faces. The dog kept close behind us, head down and sharp ears flattened along its skull. The office crowds were hurrying homeward; buses reared, bellowing, cars coughed and fumed. I thought of A., her pale face and vivid lips, the leaf-rustle of her silk dress. Spindly girls dressed all in black with stark white make-up passed us by, hanging on the arms of enchained, bristled young men; they glanced at Francie and nudged each other. He was in his usual outfit: threadbare tweed suit of a peculiar, gingery shade, a flat cap and collarless shirt and cracked brown sharp shoes curling up at the toes. He had the look of one of those characters who used to appear now and then at our door when I was a child, itinerant knife-sharpeners, rag-and-bone men, tinkers selling cans: timeless figures of uncertain origin who went as silently as they had come, and who afterwards would appear along the margins of my dreams.

  We turned into Hope Alley and came upon Quasimodo – remember him? – singing The Green Hills of Antrim Are Calling Me Home and waggling an empty plastic cup at passers-by. I had been noticing him about the streets for some time, and took an interest in him. Down-and-outs have always appealed to me, for reasons that should be obvious. This was a new and fallen state for him; the last time I had seen him he was working as a signboard man for a jeweller’s shop tucked up a laneway off Arcade Street. Those must have been his salad days, perched on a high stool at the sunny corner of the lane with flask of tea and mighty sandwich and the newspaper to read. His sign had borne the ambiguous legend, The Bijou – Home of Happy Rings, in front of which was painted a stylised hand with rigid index finger imperiously pointing up Tuck Lane. He was a little nut-brown fellow with curiously taut, shiny skin and a smear of oily black hair plastered to his skull as if he had just taken off a tight-fitting cap. His hump was not very pronounced, more hunch than hump, really; seen from the front, with his tortoise’s flattish head thrust forward and that fixed, worried grin that he always wore (was it a tic?), he seemed to be flinching from a playful blow constantly expected but never delivered. I felt proprietorial about him, and I was not pleased when Francie pointed at him now with his chin and snickered and said, ‘He’s come down in the world. It will be the knacker’s for him next.’ We drew level with the hunchback and Francie stopped and set himself squarely before him with hands in pockets, feigning enthusiastic appreciation, swaying his head in time to the poor fellow’s tuneless bellowing. Quasimodo, alarmed by this unexpected attention, roared all the louder and looked rapidly from one of us to the other in mulish panic, showing the yellowed whites of his eyes. I was wondering where he lived, what hovel sheltered him, and thinking in that slow, amazed way that one does that he would have had a mother once. I tried to picture him as a suckling babe, but failed. At last the song warbled to a close and he wrapped himself in his old grey coat and sidled off, glancing back at us over his hump. Francie watched him go and said, ‘Off for a bracer, I don’t doubt.’ We walked on. Francie was laughing softly to himself again and shaking his head. ‘Have you heard this one? Raggedy old geezer staggers into a chemist’s shop. Bottle of meths, please, miss. Girl brings the bottle, old boy feels it, hands it back. Have you got one chilled, my dear? – it brings out the bouquet, you know.’

  I must say something about Francie’s laugh, though I am not sure laugh is the right word. With eyes slitted and his upper lip curled at one side to reveal a wax-coloured canine, he would produce a low, rasping, squeezed-out sound in falling triplets, a sort of repeated nasal wheeze, while his shoulders faintly shook. It was a guarded, costive sort of laugh, as if he were enjoying too much the world’s sidesplitting ridiculousness to let others in on the fun and thus risk diminishing it for himself. Even when, as now, he told the joke himself there was the suspicion that it was only a blind and that what was really amusing him was something else altogether that only he was privy to. He gave the impression always of a sort of surreptitious squirming, of slipping and ducking in and out of view. He was like the trickster who comes up silently at your left shoulder and taps you on the right, and when you spin around you think no one is there until you hear his soft chuckle on the other side of you.

  The Boatman was loud with nine-to-fivers released for the day, callow young men in cheap sharp suits and watchful girls with crinkled hair and baked-chicken skin. We sat on stools at the bar and Francie took off his cap and set it on his knee and leaned back against a partition with a mirror in it in which I could see reflected the two taut strings at the back of his neck and one of his uncannily flat ears; I was there, too, or half of me: an oddly startled eye and gloomy jowl and one side of a mouth fixed in a sort of rictus over which I seemed to have no control. I drank gin while Francie toyed with a glass of thin beer; he would suck up a mouthful and strain it back and forth through his teeth and then let half of it wash back fizzing into the glass, so that after a while a clouded, stringy deposit that I tried not to look at gathered at the bottom of the glass. One of my headaches was coming on. Even with his eyes fixed on mine Francie gave the impression of looking me up and down with a sort of muffled amusement.

  ‘And you’ve got down to it already,’ he said and gave a low whistle. ‘Well, there’s eager!’ For a moment I thought he was talking about A. and I experienced a hot heave in the region of the solar plexus, sure he must have seen into my mind, where the image of her supple young silken back was still before me, climbing the steps of a steadily ascending scale of speculation. He was watching me with a narrowed eye, and I caught something, like the flash of a weasel’s tooth down in the dark of the burrow. ‘So what do you think?’ he said.

  A tall young woman with naked shoulders and extraordinary, glaucescent eyes bumped into me and apologised and immedi
ately burst out laughing and passed on.

  What did I think? I thought I should keep mum. Give him the slightest sign and next thing we’d be plotting to make off with Morden’s pictures and split the take between us. Not such a bad idea, I suppose. The trouble with Francie was that he was not really real for me. He seemed made-up, a manufactured man, in whose company (if that is the word for what it was to be with him) credence was not required. And this air of fakery that he carried with him infected even his surroundings. Take this day, now. The whole thing had a contrived look to it, the pub, the girl with the grey eyes, the crowd of over-acting extras around us, that theatrically thick yellow beam of sunlight slanting down through the window and lighting up the bottles behind the bar, and Francie himself, sitting in the middle of it all with his cap on his knee, reciting his lines with the edgy, unconvinced air of an actor who knows he is not going to get the part. Why do I allow myself to become involved with such people? (I should talk; who is the real actor here?) I have – I admit it – I have a lamentable weakness for the low life. There is something in me that cleaves to the ramshackle and the shady, a crack somewhere in my make-up that likes to fill itself up with dirt. I tell myself this vulgar predilection is to be found in all true connoisseurs of culture but I am not convinced. I present myself here as a sort of Candide floundering amidst a throng of crooks and sirens but I fear the truth (the truth!) is different. I wanted Morden and his dodgy pictures and all the rest of it, even including Francie, longed for it as the housewife longs for the brothel. I am not good, I never was and never will be. Hide your valuables when I am around, yes, and lock up your daughters, too. I am the bogey-man you dream of as you toss in your steamy beds of a night. That soft step you hear, that’s me, prowling the unquiet dark where the light of the watchfire fails. Your sentries are asleep, the guard at your gate is drunk. I have done terrible things, I could do them again, I have it in me, I—

  Stop.

  Francie was about to speak again but

  Was about to speak again but then a change occurred, and he went still and sat at an angle looking at his drink with a fixed, unfocused smile.

  Christ, look at me, I’m sweating, my hands are shaking; I shouldn’t, I really should not let myself get so worked up.

  When Morden arrived I did not hear but rather sensed him behind me. He leaned down to my ear and with mock-menace softly said:

  ‘You’re under investigation, you are.’

  Today he wore an expensive, ash-grey, double-breasted suit the jacket of which was wrapped around and buttoned tightly under his big bull chest like a complicated sling, so that he seemed even more top-heavy than usual, set down on those thick, short legs and small, incongruously dainty feet. He was not tall, you know; big and wide, but not tall; I must have had at least a couple of inches on him. Not that it made any difference, I was still afraid of him (I know, I know, afraid is not the word, but it will have to do). It would always be thus, I realised, in an odd sort of musing way which must have been partly an early effect of the gin; even if I were to get the better of him in some worldly dealing I would still quail inwardly before him. He made me feel off-balance, as if in his presence everything were pitched at an angle and I must keep constantly at a tilt in order to stay upright. But then, that was the way I felt with all three of them, more or less. I was, I was Candide. I made my way amongst them in a daze of uncertainty, looking the wrong way and tripping over myself, picking my shaky steps, as in a panic dream, athwart the treacherous slope of their unnervingly knowing regard. What a dolt I was. Morden must have loved me for it; I was his entertainment, his straight-man, his – what do they call it? – his patsy. Why do I not think more harshly of him than I do? Because – it has just come to me this moment – because he reminded me of myself. Well, that’s a surprise; I shall return to it when I’ve given it some thought. Meanwhile he is standing in his Rodin pose with a hand in his pocket and his head thrown back, looking at me down the sides of his broad nostrils and smiling in his glintingly jovial way.

  ‘Yes,’ he said almost gaily, ‘we’re running a few checks on you. A few scans. Francie here thinks you may not be the thing at all. He thinks he’s come across you somewhere before, in another life. Don’t you, Francie? There’s talk—’ lowering his voice to a conspiratorial growl ‘– there’s talk of serious misdemeanours, of grave misdeeds.’

  And he laughed, still eyeing me merrily, as if it were all a grand joke. Francie said nothing and sat with lowered gaze, sucking his teeth and turning and turning his beer glass slowly in its own puddle on the bar top. I want you to see the scene: evening, the crowded, chattering pub, smoke and dust motes coiling in the last, thick rays of sunlight slanting down over the roofs of Gabriel Street, and the three of us there in that little pool of stillness, Francie and me facing each other perched on our stools with our knees almost touching and Morden standing at his ease between us with a hand in the pocket of his jacket as if he were cradling a gun, admiring his reflection in the flyblown mirror behind the bar. You were there too, of course, I could feel your presence vividly, the ghostly fourth of our quartet. Already, you see, I was carrying you with me, my phantom, my other self. And nothing else mattered very much.

  ‘What do you say?’ Morden said to Francie in the mirror. ‘Is he the real thing or not? Because if he’s not …’ He took his hand out of his pocket and with finger and cocked thumb shot me silently and grinned. ‘Bang. You’re dead.’

  I am always surprised and gratified by the composure I am capable of in the face of shocks and sudden perils. Morden in his menacingly playful way had brought my past, my buried past, sitting bolt upright out of its coffin, wide-eyed and hideously grinning, and there I was sipping my drink and looking at the ceiling with what I considered an admirable show of unconcern. It is not always thus, of course, but when it is it’s wonderfully convincing, I believe. At least, I hope it is. Francie still had not spoken and Morden nudged me and said, ‘Sherlock is silent.’ He waved a hand in which a glass has suddenly appeared: mineral water – he does not drink, remember? ‘Well, in that case, case dismissed,’ he said and tapped the base of his glass gavel fashion on the bar. The dog is there too, lying on the floor beside its master’s stool with front paws extended and ears pricked up, doing its Anubis impression. Francie scowls. Everything seems small and distant in the tremulous, gin-blue air. For no reason at all I felt suddenly, fatuously, cheerful. Morden put his gun-hand on my shoulder; extraordinary grip, have I said that already? ‘Listen,’ he said into my ear with mock-sincerity, ‘don’t worry, I like a self-made man.’

  Now everything shifts again, the false panels and secret compartments slide this way and that with an oiled, surreptitious smoothness, and it is another day and we are somewhere else, and the sun is shining steadily as before but from a different angle and not thick but piercing in white-gold filaments through shutters, is it? or wooden blinds? We must be having an indian summer. Morning, I believe, calm and bright, with that clear-edged, headachy look to things as if they were exhibits set out under polished sheets of glass. We are in the lounge of one of those imitation grand hotels that had begun to spring up on the edge of the quarter, all chrome and honey-coloured wood and the woolly smell of expensive bad dinners. I was delivering a small, well-rounded lecture on the pictures, sitting with my hands clasped between my knees and frowning at the floor. Morden was in a restless mood and had begun to fidget, shifting massively in his chair and casting about him with impatient sighs. ‘Yes yes,’ he kept saying, trying to silence me, ‘that’s fine, fine,’ and puffing on a vast cigar and clawing angrily at the smoke as though it were a tangle of cobwebs in front of his face. I kept on imperturbably, undeterred. It will not be news to you, I suppose, but I have come to realise that there is a strain of pedantry in me which I enjoy, in a quiet way. It dulls the senses, soothes the heart. It is satisfying to set out things just so, the facts on one side, speculation on the other, the strategies, the alternatives, the possible routes toward a desired
conclusion. Perhaps there really is a scholar lost in me. (Need I add that I never believe a word I hear myself saying?) There in the flocculent hush of that hotel lounge I expounded on Josiah Marbot’s bizarre collection in what used to be called measured tones, and was aware of a familiar calm descending on me at the centre of which there flickered a pilot-light of unemphatic happiness. And as I talked I listened to myself in mild surprise and admiration. It might have been another voice that was speaking for which I was only the medium. That is all I ever want, in a way, to be here and not here: a living absence. Sometimes in public places I fancy that if I were to stop and stand quite still people would be able to walk through me. I imagine them, that woman with the shopping bag, that girl on her bike, faltering for a second on the other side of me and frowning and giving an involuntary shiver, thinking someone had walked over their grave, while I, the invisible man, smile on them and hold my breath.

  ‘Look,’ Morden said, pressing his elbows down on the arms of his chair and squirming forward with knees splayed and ankles crossed, ‘all we want to know is, are they genuine?’ He waited, squatting before me like an ill-humoured frog. I paused for effect and then quietly pointed out, in my coolest, primmest tone, that the pictures were signed. He flexed an eyebrow; I could hear him breathing, a low, stertorous roar down those big nostrils. ‘Which means,’ I went on, ‘that they are either genuine, or fakes.’