23
FEBRUARY BROUGHT A FALSE SPRING AND, ALLOWED FREE AT LAST, Quirke ventured out on walks by the canal in the pale, chill sunlight. On the day that he left the hospital the redheaded nurse, whose face was the first thing he had seen when he woke briefly after Billy Clinch had finished working on his leg, and whose name was Philomena, had given him a present of a blackthorn stick which she said had belonged to her late father-“Big brute of a thing he was, like you”-and with this stout aid he punted himself cautiously along the towpath from Huband Bridge to Baggot Street and back again, feeling ancient, his knuckles white on the knob of the stick and his lower lip gripped between his teeth, mewling in pain like an infant and swearing at every lurching step.
The walking stick was not the only gift that green-eyed Philomena had given him. The day before he was to be discharged, when she was on the afternoon shift, she had come into his room and shut the door and wedged a chair under the handle, and turned and shrugged off her uniform with dazzling ease-it unbuttoned handily down the front-to reveal a complicated armature of ribbed and boned pale-pink underwear, and approached the bed with a playful, ducking smile that gave her a double chin suggestive to Quirke’s suddenly inflamed imagination of other, nether folds, and laughed in her throat and said:
“God, Mr. Quirke, you’re a terrible man-look what you have me doing.”
She was a big girl, with strong limbs and big broad freckled shoulders, but she accommodated herself to his encased leg with tender inventiveness. She had left on her garter belt and her stockings, and when she set herself astride him, a flame-haired Godiva, the taut nylon of the stockings chafed his flanks like fine, warm emery paper. She was delighted with the size of him, huge and helpless lying there, trapped between her plunging thighs. He realized how long a time it was since he had held a woman in his arms and heard her laugh. He wished he too might laugh but something held him back, not just his throbbing knee but some mysterious new access of woe and foreboding.
Next day she put on, merely for his sake, he knew, a sad but stoical face, saying she supposed he would forget her as soon as he was outside the hospital gates. She walked him down the corridor to the main exit, with a hand under his arm to support him and letting her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve. He asked for her address, being dutiful in his own way, but she said there was no point, that she only had a room in the nurses’ quarters at the hospital and went home at the weekends, home being somewhere still unspecified down in the deep south. He thought of other country girls, of that other nurse Brenda Ruttledge and, less willingly, of Christine Falls, poor, pale Christine who was fading steadily from his remembering, every day a little more gone of the little of her that had been there in the first place. “And anyway,” Philomena said with a sigh, “I have a fella down there.” She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Though he never gets what you got.”
He had told no one the date of his leaving, unable to bear the thought of finding Sarah waiting for him at the gate, bravely smiling like a war bride, or Phoebe with her new, hard-eyed manner, or even, God forbid, Mal, lugubrious in his secret torment that he wore like a penitent’s sackcloth. The anger he had not felt through all the weeks in hospital had suddenly boiled up in him, out of nowhere, so it seemed, and as he lurched along the canal path on Philomena’s father’s blackthorn stick in the eerie silence of those unseasonably sunlit afternoons, with the moorhens scuttling among the reeds in a deluded mating fever, he busied himself devising all manner of vengeful stratagems. He was surprised at the violence of these fantasies. He imagined in almost erotic detail how he would search out Mr. Punch and fat Judy one by one and hurl them down the same area steps in Mount Street where they had hurled him and beat them with his fists until their flesh burst, their bones splintered, their blood gushed from ruined mouths and punctured eardrums. He saw himself snatching off Costigan’s glasses and plucking the Pioneer pin from his lapel and plunging it into his undefended eyes, first one, then the other, feeling the fine steel spike sinking into the resistant jelly and savoring Costigan’s howls of agony. There would be others to be dealt with, the ones whose identities he could as yet only guess at, standing in a huddle behind Costigan and Mal and Punch and Judy. Oh, yes, they too, the faceless Knights, would have to be called out and skewered with their own lances. For Quirke knew by now that all that had happened, to Christine Falls and Dolly Moran and to him, was more than a matter of Mal and his poor, dead girl, that it was a wide and tangled web in which he had become enmeshed.
AND SO, ONE DAY NOT LONG AFTER LEAVING HOSPITAL, HE FOUND himself maneuvering his stiff and still strapped-up leg out of a taxi at the gates of the Mother of Mercy Laundry. The day was clammily cold with the sun shining whitely through the morning mist. It was Saturday and the front of the place was shut and silent like a clenched mouth. He started towards the entrance, intending to ring the bell and wait however long it took for it to be answered, but veered off instead and made his way around the side of the building, not knowing what it was he was hoping to find. What he found was the young woman with the shapeless red hair who on his previous visit had almost run into him in the corridor with the laundry basket. She was standing by a drain emptying a basin of soapy water. She looked different in a way that he could not make out at first. She wore the same gray smock she had worn the last time and the same hobnailed boots. He saw her thick ankles, the skin swollen tight and shiny and diamond-mottled. He could not remember her name. When she saw him she stepped back and looked at him with her head to one side, clutching the emptied basin before her in both hands like a breastplate. In the middle of that featureless face she had Philomena the nurse’s startlingly pellucid green eyes. At first he could not think what to say, what to ask, and they stood for a long moment in silent, baffled regard.