Mefisto (15 page)

I was sitting on a park bench when I met him, when he met me. It was an October twilight, the grass was grey with dew. I was listening to the trees, their fretful rustlings. He walked past once, came back and passed by again, returned again more slowly, stopped. Thin foxy face and widow’s peak and thin, sly smile. He put his hands in his pockets, arched an eyebrow.

– I say, he said, do I not know you?

He studied me, my bird-boy’s profile.

– I never forget a face, you know.

He chuckled. I was not surprised to see him. He sat down beside me, settling the wings of his old coat. I told him my story. He listened, motionless, hands folded on one bony knee. Darkness advanced across the park. The bells of the city were ringing, near and far.

– All that time in the bonehouse, eh? he said. But look at you now, a new man.

A bat flitted here and there above us in the violet air.

– Help me, I said.

He gazed out over the darkening sward, nodding to himself.

– Oh, Caliban, he said, you should have come with me when I asked you. Didn’t I tell you it was all finished there, didn’t I warn you? And see what happened.

He sighed. A band of masked children ran out of the bushes, shrieking. I put a hand up to my face.

– Help me.

– You want to be a real boy, eh?

He sat back on the seat and crossed his legs and gazed up into the shadowy branches above him.

– We had some fun, didn’t we, all the same? he said. High times. It seems so long ago, now, all of it. Still at the sums?

– Yes.

The laughing children returned, and ran in a circle around the bench where we sat.

– I think they want you for a guy, Felix said.

He rose, and they fled away into the bushes. He stood a moment, looking about him pensively in the dusk. Then he produced a scrap of paper and a pencil stub and scribbled an address and handed it to me.

– I’m there sometimes, he said. In the evenings. It’s not far.

He walked off a little way, stopped, came back.

– You see? he said. I told you, I never forget a face.

Chandos Street was a decaying Georgian sweep with a Protestant church at one end and a railed-off green square at the other. I loitered there night after night, pacing under the streetlamps, watching the house, one of a tall terrace, with worn granite steps and a black front door. People came and went. No, no one came, no one went, the door never opened. Sometimes a lame whore sat on the steps, tipsily singing. Once she asked me for a match, and called me a cunt when I said I had none. We were not the only loiterers. A couple appeared on the corner by the church, at the same time every night, a sick-looking young man with the shakes, and his shivering wraith of a girl, straggle-haired, with matchstick legs. They would hang about for an hour, peering anxiously up the ill-lit street, then turn and shuffle away miserably. The young man took to saluting me, touching a jaunty finger to his forelock and trying to grin. One night he stopped me, put a shaky hand on my arm and looked behind him carefully, as if he were about to impart some valuable secret. Instead he asked me for money. The girl stared blankly at my midriff. I gave him a handful of Empusa tablets. He looked at them in wonderment and whistled softly.

– Fucking ace, pal, he said. I’ll offer up a novena for you.

And there was another girl, skinny also, with skinny legs and a pinched face and pale, narrow wrists. She wore a plastic raincoat and white shoes, and clutched a white plastic handbag. She smoked cigarettes, and paced from one trembling patch of lamplight to another, watching the street, the houses. She ignored me. The young man with the shakes approached her, his hand out, she ignored him too. She smoked and paced, smoked and paced. One night I tried to follow her. After we had gone a street or two she turned aside suddenly and jumped on a bus. I shrank back in the darkness and watched as she was borne past me, sitting up very straight at the window, her sharp little stark white face and cropped, crow-black hair.

At the end of a week Felix appeared at last, strolling up the street with his coat open and his hands in his pockets. The girl walked across swiftly and accosted him on the steps. He stopped with his finger lifted to the bell and retreated a pace. She spoke to him quietly, fiercely. I crossed the road and stood below them on the pavement. The girl immediately fell silent. Felix looked over his shoulder.

– My dear fellow, he said, there you are.

The girl turned an inch in my direction, but kept her eyes lowered. There was a silence. Felix glanced from one of us to the other.

– Are you together? he said. No? What a coincidence, then.

He rang the bell, but no one came. He rang again. We waited. Then the girl, with a furious gesture, opened her bag and produced a key. Felix grinned at her. She ignored him, jabbing the key into the lock.

A gaunt, dim hall, olive walls, a dirty lightbulb in a brown paper shade. The stair carpet was threadbare. In silence we ascended into the gloom. Felix smiled to himself, whistling softly. The girl walked ahead of us. Her hair stuck up in tufts at the back, as if someone had tried to pull it out in handfuls. She knocked at a door on the third floor, but it was only a gesture, she had a key for here as well. Inside was dark save for a faint sodium glow seeping down through the tops of tall windows. Felix switched on a light.

– What ho! he called. Are you there, truepenny?

No one answered.

There were cardboard boxes on the floor inside the door, and piles of books, and a black overcoat and an umbrella hanging on a peg. The kitchen smelled of gas and oilcloth and something going bad. Felix lit the stove, opened a cupboard. The girl walked into the front room. I followed her. She stood at the window looking out. The church spire loomed in the dark against an acid sky. Clutter here as well, more boxes, books, soiled plates on the table. The girl was lighting a cigarette. The match flame shook.

– You followed me, she said. That night.

She went on looking out the window. Her mind seemed to be on something else.

– You shouldn’t follow me.

Felix came in, carrying a teapot.

– Now! he said brightly. Nice cup of tea.

He was wearing an old raincoat and scuffed, sharp-toed shoes. He set the teapot down on the table, sweeping aside smeared plates and scattered cutlery.

– Getting acquainted, you two, I see, he said.

He carried three cups to the fireplace and emptied their dregs into the littered grate.

– I don’t want any of that stuff, the girl said.

He frowned, looking about him in exaggerated puzzlement.

– Stuff? he said. Stuff? Oh, the tea, you mean. Oh.

He laughed to himself and went back to the table, shaking his head. He poured three cups of tea, and handed one to her. She took it.

– Did you know, he said to her, our young friend here has been in hospital too. Did he tell you?

For the first time now she looked at me directly. She had small, dark eyes, close-set, with a slight cast. She studied me for a moment, biting her lip. Her plastic raincoat was buttoned to the throat.

A door behind us opened, and a small, fierce-looking man came in. He was wearing long woollen underwear, with a blanket draped over his shoulders. His hair stood up in sprouts of ginger bristles, and he had three or four days’ growth of reddish beard. He began to say something but sneezed instead. His bare feet were small, with horny, yellow nails.

– Ah, professor, Felix said. We thought you must be out.

The little man glared at him.

– I am sick, he said.

As if for emphasis, he sneezed again violently. Felix pointed to the blackened pot on the table.

– Some tea, professor.

This time the little man ignored him. The girl had turned back to the window. He hitched up his blanket, looking at her, and then at me.

— Who are you? he said.

Felix coughed.

– This is the one I told you about, he said. You remember.

The professor opened his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. We waited, but the sneeze did not come.

– Ah, he said sourly. The prodigy.

His name was Kosok.

HAVE I MENTIONED
the buses? I liked them, the way they trundled through the streets, gasping and shuddering, like big, serious, labouring animals. I would board one at random and ride to the end of the line, hunched in the front seat upstairs, watching the city unfurl around me, the tree-lined avenues and the little parks, the domes and turrets and curlicued façades. A hoarding would slide past, then a burnished stretch of river, then a dead-end street with parked cars and children playing ball under a rusted railway bridge. I got to know the top half of things, the shabby upper storeys of smart shops, the fire escapes, the pots of geraniums in little sooty windows, the faded signs on brick walls for carbolic soap and plug tobacco and ship’s chandlers. And then the suburbs, the windswept wastes of housing estates, with straggly gardens, and toddlers dabbling in the gutters, and the sudden, quicksilver flash of a mirror in the drab depths of a bedroom window.

When I think of those aimless, dreamy journeys, I think always of the girl. When she left the flat that first night I went with her. We walked through the dark streets in silence. When the bus came we were the only passengers, except for a drunk slumped on the bench seat at the back. We watched the glossy darkness sliding past the window. She smoked a cigarette. Her name was Adele. She looked at me sharply.

– I’m not a Jew, you know, she said. You needn’t think I’m a Jew.

The conductor told her she was not to smoke. She paid him no heed. She held the cigarette aloft in her thin, white fingers, flicking the end of it with a bitten thumbnail. We went by the river, under the jagged shadows of warehouses and cranes. The drunk woke up and shouted for a while, then fell into a stupor again. The conductor walked up and down between the rows of seats, chewing a matchstick, getting a good look at us, my face, her frantic hair, grinning to himself. Adele kept her eyes fixed on the window, flicking her cigarette, flicking, flicking, vibrating faintly, as if a thin, continuous current were passing through her.

– I hate him, she said. That hair. The way he walks, as if he had no backbone.

I knew who she meant.

Suddenly she laughed, a brief, psittacine cry. Then she frowned, and stood up quickly and pressed the bell. The drunk mumbled in his sleep. We alighted at a deserted corner, under a leaning lamp. There was a bit of broken wall painted blue, and a high rickety wooden fence with things scrawled on it, names and curses and hearts with arrows in them, and a bulbous, cleft woman drawn in chalk. Adele looked about her with a preoccupied expression, clutching her handbag to her narrow chest. Her lips were black in the lamplight. The silence of the night arranged itself around us.

– Is this where you live? I said.

She looked at me in surprise.

– No, she said. Why?

A dull pain throbbed in my right arm, like an old dog yanking at the leash. I swallowed a pill.

– Where do you get them, she said, those?

I offered her one. An Oread, the last of my supply. She examined it, and put it in her mouth and swallowed it carefully, as if it were not a pill but a bit of my pain itself I had given her. For a second time she looked at me directly.

– Gabriel, she said. Is that your name?

She never smiled. She had only that laugh, and now and then a sort of grin, wild-eyed, distraught. There was a bus coming on the other side. She put her head down and walked away from me quickly across the road, the heels of her white shoes tap-tapping the asphalt. The headlights of the bus caught her briefly. She got on board and it churned away, trumpeting, into the darkness.

I went down the quays again next morning, but everything looked different by day, I could not find that corner with the blue wall and the wooden fence. The cranes and the blank sides of the warehouses had the look of things turned away, smirking in derision.

Felix came with me to the hospital for my weekly visit. We had to wait a long time, sitting in a row of wooden benches in the outpatients’ hall. There were mothers with cowed children, raw-faced young men in suits, and doll-like girls with impossible hairstyles, their mouths painted scarlet. All stared before them with the same expression of mingled boredom, disbelief and fear. At intervals a door in front of us would open and a nurse would appear and call out a name, and a boy in splints would get up, or a rheum-eyed old fellow with the shakes, and shuffle forward meekly. Then all would shift, sliding sideways, and the one at the end of each row would nip into the place vacated on the bench in front. Felix laughed.

– Like a little chapel, he said. And we’re all going to confession.

He sat at ease with his legs crossed and one arm draped along the back of the bench, smiling about him at the whey-faced coughers and the painted girls. He nudged me and whispered:

– What a bunch, eh?

When my turn came he rose eagerly to accompany me, but the nurse prevented him. He got to the threshold of the consulting room, and managed a good look inside before the door was shut in his face.