She snorted softly. She pretends to regard Lydia as a figure of fun, but I think she is jealous of her, and possibly a little afraid of her, too. She can be formidable, can Lydia, when provoked, and I know that she finds Lily provocative. In bored languor Lily rose now and waded on her knees as through water to the edge of the bed and stepped lightly to the floor; the bedsprings gave a dismayingly familiar jangle. Is Lydia right, in that mismatched marriage was my poor mother the injured party, not my father? But then, is there ever an uninjured party? Lily dropped to one knee to fasten the strap of her sandal, and for a moment an Attic light glowed in the room. When we were on the stairs she stopped and gave me an odd look.
“Are you going to let us keep on living here,” she said, “my Da and me?”
I shrugged, and tried not to smile—what was it that was making me want to smile?—and she laughed to herself and shook her head and went on quickly, leaving me behind.
Queer, how much of a stranger I am in this town. It was always that way, even when I was a child. I was hardly here at all, just bid-ing my time; the future was where I lived. I do not even know the names of half the streets, and never did. I had a mental map of the place that was wholly of my own devising. I found my way about by designated landmarks: school, church, post office, picture-house. I called the streets by what was in them. My Abbey Street was where the Abbey Cinema stood, my Pikeman Place was where there was a statue of a stylised patriot, whose verdigrised curls and stalwart stare for some reason always made me want to snigger. There are certain parts of the town that are more unfamiliar to me than others, places I rarely had cause to be in, and which over the years took on in my mind an almost exotic aspect. There was a hill with a patch of wasteland—it is probably built over now—traversed by a meandering track, where tinkers used to let their horses loose to graze; I had a recurring dream of being there, in hazy sunlight, looking down on the town, with something extraordinary about to happen, that never did. A lane that ran behind the back of a public house had a sour green smell of porter that made my stomach heave, reminding me, I don’t know why, of a frog I once saw a boy inflate to an eyed balloon by sticking a straw down its gullet and vigorously blowing into it. Buildings, too, gave off an alien air, the Methodist Hall, the old chandlery in Cornmarket, and the malt store, built like a fortress, with a double rank of low, barred windows that at certain times emitted wraithlike clouds of evil-smelling steam, and where I was convinced I could hear rats scampering over the grain. In such places my fancy tarried uneasily, frightening itself with the thought of nameless terrors.
I was describing to Lily the malt store and those rats, making her do her dry-retching routine, when we came into a little open space bounded at the far end by a fragment of the old town wall that Cromwell’s cannons missed. There we sat down on a bench beside a disused public lavatory, under the shade of a gnarled tree, and she began to tell me about her mother. The sun was hot, and there was not a soul about save for a lame dog that circled us warily, wagging a limp tail, before mooching off. I suppose it must have been this deserted atmosphere, the noontide stillness, and the tree, and the glare of the whitewashed lavatory wall beside us and the faint understink of drains, that made it seem that we were somewhere in the far south, somewhere hot and dry, on some harsh coast, with peeling plane trees and cicadas chirring under a merciless sky. What seas what shores what granite islands… As she talked, Lily picked at a loose thread in the hem of her dress, squinting in the light. A breeze rattled the leaves above us and then all settled down again, like an audience settling down for the next act.
“Where were you living, when she died,” I said, “your mother?” She did not answer, pretending not to have heard.
I have discovered Quirke’s lair, did I say that? I stumbled on it in one of my prowls about the house the other day. He picked a modest room, I will say that for him. It is hardly a room at all, up near the attics; my mother would not have offered it to even the most indigent of our lodgers, and used it for storing lumber, and, after his death, my father’s old suits and shoes that her sense of thrift would not let her throw away. It is low-ceilinged, and slightly wedge-shaped, with a single, crooked window at the narrower end, long ago painted shut, as the cheesy air attested. There is a camp bed with a thin horsehair mattress, and a blanket but no sheets. He uses a chamber pot, I noticed, the handle of it protruded from under the bed like an ear eagerly cocked. He is not the most fastidious of persons. There was dust on everything, and some worrying smears on the walls, and used plates, and a tea mug that does not seem to have been washed for a very long time, and three far from clean shirts hanging in an overlapping row on the wardrobe door, like a trio of close-harmony singers. I trust he will not invite Lydia up here, no matter how chummy they may become, for she would surely smack him smartly on the wrist and have him down on his knees again with the scrubbing brush and pail. Despite the squalor and the sadness of the place—those shirts, that mug, a pair of cracked shoes, one lying on its side, both with their tongues hanging out, that looked as if they had dropped off a corpse as it was being dragged out—I experienced a childish tingle of excitement. I have always been an enthusiastic snooper; diaries, letters, handbags, nothing is safe from me—why, sometimes, though I should not admit it, sometimes I will even take a peek into other people’s laundry baskets, or used to, in the days when Lydia and I had friends, and would go out to their houses, for parties, and dinner, and summer lunches… Unimaginable, now. In Quirke’s room, though, the tingly sensation I had was more than merely the pleasure of delving into someone else’s belongings. I am thinking of the hare’s nest I found one day at the seaside when I was a child, a neat deep whorl hollowed out of the coarse grass on the back of a dune, containing three tiny, throbbing leverets huddled so close together they looked like a single animal with three heads. I picked them up and put them inside my jersey and carried them back to the two-roomed wooden chalet where my mother and I were enduring a holiday together. When I showed them to her she gave a small cry of dismay and took a hasty step backward; she was not long a widow, and her nerves were bad. She said the creatures were probably diseased, or had lice, and would I please take the dirty things away this instant. I plodded out to the dunes again, where now a fine rain was slanting in from the sea, but of course I could not find the nest, and in the end I lodged the poor things, unpleasantly slippery now in their wet fur and seeming even tinier than before, in a sandy hollow under a stone, and when I returned the next day they were gone. But I have not forgotten them, their helplessness, the hot soft feel of them against my heart, the faltering way they kept moving their blind heads from side to side and up and down, like those toy dogs that people put in the back windows of motor cars. Quirke, for all his bulk and his sardonic humour, has something of the same motherless lost incompetency about him. I searched his things, of course, but the dearth of secrets, indeed, the absence of anything much of interest, was more dispiriting than would have been the most shaming discovery. As I turned over the bits and pieces of his gimcrack life a bleak awfulness came down on me, and despite myself I felt ashamed, though whether for my prurience or the paltriness of his life I could not rightly tell. In a leather wallet polished with age and shaped to the curve of a buttock I found a photograph, similarly curved, and finely craquelured, in faded shades of pearl and grey. The picture was of a thin, youngish woman with an unfortunate perm, standing in a summer garden smiling bravely into the lens. I took it to the window and scanned it hungrily, cursing the lack of a magnifying glass. The woman was holding herself in an awkward pose before the camera’s bulging eye. She had a hand lifted to her forehead against the glare of the sun, so that most of the upper part of her face was in shadow. Minutely I examined what features I could make out—delicate pointed chin, somewhat vapid mouth, her smile disclosing the hint of a discoloured front tooth, that lifted arm, nicely curved but pathetically skinny, the little, weak, defensive hand—searching for the slightest suggestion of familiarity, the faintest echo. In the bottom left corner a part of the photographer’s shadow was to be seen, a sloping shoulder and one side of a big round head, Quirke’s, most likely. And the garden? At the woman’s back there was a tree of some sort, birch, perhaps, in full leaf, and under her a bit of lumpy lawn. Could be anywhere. Discouraged, I pocketed the photo, and with a last gloomy look around I went out softly and shut the door behind me. On the stairs I stopped, struck by a flaw in the stillness, as if someone, fled now, had been listening at the door, or spying on me through the keyhole. Lily, probably; it did not matter.