The phantoms work their immanent magic on her. She reclines in the places where they appear, in their very midst, a grubby and all too actual odalisque, scanning her mags, and sipping her cola with subdued snorkelling noises. Does she sense their presence? Yesterday she looked up quickly from her comic, frowning, as if she had felt a ghostly touch on her shoulder. Then she glared at me suspiciously, chin tucked into her throat and brows drawn darkly down, and demanded to know what I was smiling at. Had I been smiling? She thinks me a fond old fool; she is right. I wonder if the ghost woman, on her side, registers the living girl? Am I right in feeling I detect in the ghostly one’s appearances now a growing sense of puzzlement, of faint dismay, even? Can she be jealous? I await the moment, which is bound to come, when she will exactly coincide with Lily, will descend on her like the annunciatory angel, like the goddess herself, and illumine her with the momentary benison of her supernatural presence.
Here now in this for me transfigured house I have an inkling of how it must be for Cass, moving always in the midst of familiar strangers, uncertain as to what is real and what is not, unable quite to recognise the perfectly recognisable, spoken at by voices out of the air. The presence of living people in it has robbed the house for me of an essential solidity. The Quirkes have made me too into a ghost—I am not sure I would not be able to walk through walls, now. Does my daughter, I wonder, have this abiding sensation of lightness, of volatility, of there being always a sustaining skim of nothingness between foot and floor? Yet everywhere around me there is substance, eminently tangible stuff, the common old world itself, hard and dense and warm to the touch. The other night, instead of taking the girl away with him as usual, Quirke parked his bicycle in the hall and came into the kitchen and boldly brought a chair up to the table and sat down. There was a momentary pause while he waited to see what I would do. I did nothing, of course, only sat down, and we played cards, the three of us. I am no good at cards, never was. I sit and frown wildly at my hand, making a lunge for the dwindling deck when it seems required of me, uncertain even as to what suit or value I should be hoping to draw. Quirke plays with elephantine circumspection, holding the cards close up to his face and peering over them craftily at Lily and at me, one eye shut and the other a slit. He loses too, though. Lily is the one who wins. In the excitement of the game she is transformed, becomes a different child, whooping and cackling when she picks the right card, groaning at reverses and rolling her eyes and banging her forehead dully on the table in simulated despair. When she has assembled the winning trick she slams the cards down with a Red Indian ululation of triumph. We are too slow for her, Quirke and I, as we fumble and sigh over our hopeless hands. She screams at Quirke to hurry up, shaking her head disgustedly, and when I am being particularly dilatory she punches me in the small of the back, or painfully on the upper arm, with her hard little pointed fist. Waiting for the last required card she goes silent, fixing her eye on the deck, watchful as a vixen. She calls the three a trey, and what I know as knaves are jacks to her. We play by candlelight, at Lily’s insistence; she says it is romantic, pronouncing the word with a deep-voiced trill—“soo romawntic”—in a way that I suspect is meant to be a parody of me. Then she crosses her eyes and lets her mouth sag in an idiot leer. The weather is still warm, we leave the windows open on the vast soft star-struck night. Moths come in and do their drunken clockwork spirals around the candle flame, and the dust of their wings falls into the shivering, soot-black puddle of shadow in which the candle stands. Tonight when the game was over and Lily was gathering up the cards and Quirke sat vacantly at gaze I heard an owl out in the darkness, and I thought of Cass, and wondered where she might be at that moment, and what doing, my Minerva. Perilous speculation. Even in the softest lee of summer night the mind can conjure horrors.
I was right again, Lily is sleeping in my mother’s room. I looked in early this morning and there she was, in the smouldering dawn light, crouched in a heap in a corner of the big bed, snoring. She did not wake up, even when I came to the side of the bed and put my face down close to hers. What a strange spectacle it is, the slumbering human. She smelled of sleep and young sweat and that sickly sweet cheap perfume that she douses herself with. Except for the scent and the snores it might have been Cass. Whole days my girl would keep to her bed, ignoring all entreaties, all reproaches. I would tiptoe into her room and lift a corner of the sheet and there she would be, like something that had crept in from the wild, stark pale and tousled, lying stiffly on her side and staring at nothing, a knuckle pressed against two bared front teeth. Then at dead of night she would drag herself up at last and come down and sit with her knees against her chest in front of the television with the sound turned off, watching the flickering images with a fixed, hungry stare, as if they were so many hieroglyphs she was struggling to decipher.
Over our nightly card games Quirke has been telling me his life story, such as it is: mother ran a pub, father drank it dry, Quirke fils sent to work at fourteen as a solicitor’s runner, been there ever since; wife, child; later, dead wife, widower. He recounts all this with a bemused air, shaking his head, as if these were things that had happened to someone else, someone he had heard of, or read about in the papers. The family home he lost through legal finagling of some kind, whether by him or another he does not say, and I do not press for details. From an inner pocket he produced a creased and yellowed newspaper cutting announcing the sale of a house by auction. “Ours,” he said, nodding. “Went for a song.” The paper is warm from being close to his chest with its womanly bubs; squeamishly, between thumb and forefinger, I hand the clipping back to him, and he studies it a moment, making that clicking noise in his cheek, then stows it and turns his attention to the cards again.
The future he seems to regard as an entirely improbable prospect, like a win of the sweepstakes, or the promise of eternal life. How long does he think I will allow him to live here, I wonder? I marvel at his equanimity. His mother knew my mother, he says. He remembers well this house when there were lodgers here, claims he was brought on visits with his Ma. He says he remembers me, too. I find all this obscurely disquieting. It is like being told of indecent things that had been done to one in sleep, or under anaesthesia. I trawled and trawled my memory and at last obligingly the deeps gave up an image that might be him, not as he would have been then but, ludicrously, as he is now, got up in a schoolboy’s outfit bursting at the buttons, with a skullcap perched on his big round head, a Tweedledum to my identically attired Tweedledee. We have been sent into the garden to play, while our mothers sit in the parlour murmuring over their tea and fairy cakes. We stand in moody silence, the man-child Quirke and I, looking away from each other and kicking holes in the lawn with the toecaps of our school shoes. Even the sunlight seems bored. Quirke treads on a slug and squashes it, leaving a long smear like snot on the grass. I would have been his senior by some years, yet we seem to be the same age. From the back pocket of his short trousers he brings out a photograph, which shows a fat girl in a cloche hat and flapper’s silks lolling on a kitchen chair with her legs wide open, insouciantly inserting a cucumber into herself; he says I can keep it, if I want, he is fed up looking at it. A thunder-head is forming in the sky above the garden. We stand with heads bent, gazing down at the picture of the girl. I can hear him breathing. “Some tart,” he says, “what?” A first fat splash of rain falls on the photo. The day is darkening like a bruise.