Mefisto (22 page)

She knelt at the step in front of the altar to blend her brew, while I sat on a bench and watched. She worked with loving, rapt attention, biting her lip and frowning, forgetting herself. I hardly knew her, kneeling there, transfigured, lost in her task, a votive priestess. Now and then she had to stop and wait for the shaking in her hands to subside, and looked about her dimly, with unseeing eyes. She lit a stump of penny candle and set it on the step and warmed the mixture in the spoon. Then she sat back on her heels and rolled the sleeve of her gown to the shoulder. Her naked arm glimmered in the fading light. She found a vein, and squeezed and squeezed until it stood up, plump and purple, gorged with blood. At first the needle would not penetrate, and she prodded and pushed, making a faint mewling sound and arching her back. Then suddenly the tip went in, and the swollen skin slid up around it, like a tiny pouting mouth, drawing the fine steel shaft deep inside itself, and she pressed the plunger slowly, while the pulsing vein sucked and sucked, and at last she leaned her head back, her eyelids fluttering, and exhaled a long, shivering sigh.

I knelt on the cold floor and held her. She stared at me sightlessly. Her hand, still holding the syringe, lay limply beside her on the step. I crushed the chill silk stuff of her gown in my hands.

– You promised, I said. You promised.

I lifted her up and walked her to the door, and made her stand with her back to it so that no one could come in. She put one arm across my shoulders, and with the other held my head in a fierce embrace, grinding her chin into my jaw. Her thighs were cold. I listened in vague wonder to my own hoarse quickening gasps. The back of her head beat dully against the thick oak door. She was laughing, or crying, I don’t know which.

– You’ll get more for me, won’t you, she said into my ear. Say it, say you’ll get more.

– Yes, I said, yes.

But I did not have to get it, I had it already, enough to keep her going for weeks, it was still in my pocket, enough to keep us both going, for weeks.

And so at the same time evening after evening we came there to the chapel, and I gave her that day’s ration of peace, and in return she opened her gown and briefly held me, gasping, pressed to her shivering flesh. I recall the quiet around us, the light dying in that garish window, and the smell of the place, like the smell of coffins, and the vague clamour of teatime outside in the wards, a noise from another world. Afterwards we would sit for a long time together in the dim glow of the flickering altar lamp, as another day died and night came on. Sometimes an old woman in a dressing-gown would creep in and kneel for a while, sighing and mumbling, with her face in her hands. She paid us no heed, perhaps she never noticed us. It was May, the month of Mary, fresh flowers were placed on the altar every day, daffodils, and tulips, and lilies of the valley. Adele sat with head bowed and her hands in her lap, so still she seemed hardly to breathe. I told her about numbers, how they worked, how simple they were, how pure. I do not know if she was even listening. I told her too about that moment on the mountain, how it had come to me afresh, with more weight than ever, that under the chaos of things a hidden order endures. A kind of rapture thickened in my throat, I gagged on it as if on grief. She leaned her shoulder wearily against mine.

– I have to get out of this place, she said. Help me.

A bell was ringing, they would come in soon to say the rosary. I rose to go. She looked up at me, out of her dark, dazed eyes.

– Help me, she said.

Felix listened to me, he understood. That’s it, he said, that’s it! smiling and nodding, urging me on. To know, to do, to delve into the secret depths of things, wasn’t that what he had always urged on me? And now he would help me. He had contacts, he had influence. There were people other than the professor, there were other machines, too, bigger, and better, oh yes, yes, he would show me! I liked to listen to him talk like this, it set up a kind of excited hum inside me that had alarm in it, and presentiment, and dark pleasure. And if now and then I looked up unexpectedly and caught him watching me with a merry eye, smiling that artful smile of his, well, I didn’t care.

In the afternoon sometimes I walked about the city with him. We went to the zoo, one of his favourite haunts. He found everything irresistibly funny there. He would stand in front of the tiger’s cage, or in the torpid gloom of the alligator house, and fairly split his sides. The animals in their turn watched him with what seemed to me a puzzled, wary eye. Oh look, look! he would cry, in a transport, clutching my arm and pointing a trembling finger at a baboon picking at its purple arse, or a hippo trying to mount its mate.

– What a strange old world, all the same, he said, that has such monsters in it, eh, Caliban?

He met people there, they would step out from behind a tree, or lower a newspaper and look at him with a humid stare. There was something about them, an air of tension and vague torment, that fitted with the place. They might have been peering through invisible bars. When he spotted them he would laugh softly to himself and walk over rapidly and talk to them, keeping his back to me. He never referred to these encounters afterwards, but fell into step beside me again and blandly took up talking where he had left off. But some days I noticed him looking about with a watchful eye, and a trace of strain crept into his smile, and he kept to open ground.

– If you ever have to look for me, he said, you know where I’ll be, don’t you?

We were walking by an ornamental lake. The day was overcast, the air a sheen of damp pearl. He was eating a pink ice-cream cone, and kicking idly at the ducks crowding the churned mud of the water margin.

– I mean, he said, if you can’t find me, if I’m not around. When matters become complicated, a period of withdrawal is the best thing, I find.

He glanced at me and grinned. A black swan sailed past us in silence, with its chaste, bashful mien. The ducks gabbled. He tossed the last of his ice-cream into their midst and there was uproar. On a little island in the lake a pair of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches of a dead tree.

– We should stick together, Felix said. We’re two of a kind, you and me.

He linked his arm in mine then, and we went through the gate and up the hill to the bus stop. The city was below us, crouched under a lowering sky. We were stopped in traffic by the river when the rain came on, rattling against the side of the bus. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and a pale wash of sunlight fell across the rooftops and the shining spires, and at a great height a solitary white bird soared against a bruise-coloured wall of cloud. How innocent it all was, how unconcerned, I remember it, the drenched light, the spires, that bird, like a dreamy background, done by an apprentice, perhaps, while in front horses plunge and blackamoors roll their eyes, and a poor wretch is dying tacked to a tree.

In Chandos Street we found Liz huddled on the steps outside the front door. When we approached her she flinched and put up her arms to protect her face. There was a livid bruise under her eye, and her lower lip was split and caked with blood. She would not stand up, but cowered against the door with her knees pressed to her chest. I knelt beside her, but she turned her face away from me with a sob. Felix stood before her with his hands in his pockets, tapping one foot.

– Tony being impetuous again, is he? he said. That boy is so excitable.

Liz mumbled something. One of her front teeth had been knocked out, it was hard to understand her.

– Come again? Felix said, leaning down with a hand cupped to his ear.

– He’s gone! she cried.

There was silence, save for her muffled sobs. It was growing dark in the street. Felix considered her pensively, jingling coins in his pocket.

– Gone? he said softly. How do you mean, gone?

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming. Her lip had begun to bleed again. She held herself by the shoulders, trembling.

– They were waiting for us on the corner, she said. They made him go with them.

Felix looked up and down the street, then leaned down to her again, with his hands on his knees, and smiled.

– They, now, he said. Who were they, exactly?

She shook her head.

– Ah, he said. Strangers. Tell me, my dear, would you say they were, perhaps, seafaring gentlemen? Yes?

He glanced at me, still smiling.

– Well well, he said, a pair of jolly tars, no less. I wonder, now, who they can have been.

He skipped down the steps and stood on the pavement, peering about the street again, more carefully this time. Then he came back. He examined Liz’s face closely, squatting on his heels in front of her and shaking his head.

– You don’t look at all well, he said, do you know that? Not at all well.

She watched him warily, snuffling, running a hand through her matted, ash-coloured hair. He smiled at her and lifted his eyebrows, holding his head to one side.

– Tell you what, he said, how about a treat, to make it all better. What do you think? Wouldn’t that be nice?

He brought out from an inside pocket a tiny square plastic envelope and held it up for her to see, wagging it gaily under her nose. At once she sprang at him and tried to snatch it, but he drew back, grinning.

– Ah ah! he said. First, a question. What did they want, precisely, these sailor laddies?

She watched the little envelope, licking her broken lips.

– You, she said. It was you they were looking for.

He stared in mock astonishment, clapping a hand to his heart.

– Me? he gasped. Me? Good gracious!

He laughed, and rose from where he had been squatting and turned away from her. With a cry she scrambled after him on her knees, clutching at the tail of his mackintosh. He paused.

– Oh, your fizz-bag, yes, he said. Here.

He tossed the envelope on the step. She grabbed it, and clawed it open, and with her fingers drew down her swollen lower lip and shook the contents into the crevice between lip and gums. Then she crawled back and sat down at the door again, hugging her knees to her chest. She was crying, we could hear her as we walked away into the dusk.

At a phone box on the corner of the square Felix stopped. He cradled the receiver under his chin, holding the door open with his knee and winking at me as he spoke.

– Yes, Chandos Street, yes. I think she must have taken something, she looks very … What’s that? Me, officer? Oh, just a citizen, doing his duty. Bye bye, now.

He let the door bang shut behind him, and turned up the collar of his coat and rolled his eyes.

– The plot thickens, he said, eh, Watson?

It was in the final editions, foul play down the docks, the body of a young man taken from the river, severe injuries to head and face, unrecognizable. Police were keeping an open mind.

THE CITY I HAD THOUGHT
I knew became transfigured now. Fear altered everything. I scanned the streets with a sort of passion, under the glare of it things grew flustered somehow, seemed to shrink away from me, as if stricken with shyness. They had never been noticed before, or at least not like this, with this fierce, concupiscent scrutiny. I saw pursuers everywhere, no, not pursuers, that’s not it, that’s too strong. But nothing was innocent any more. The squares, the avenues, the little parks, all my old haunts, they were a façade now, behind which lurked a lewd, malignant presence. Panic smouldered in me like a chronic fever, ready to flare up at the smallest fright. Walking along the street I would suddenly speed up my steps, until I was flying along, head down, heart hammering, my breath coming in little cries, yet when I stopped at last, exhausted, and looked behind me, there was never anything there, only a sense in general of low, gloating laughter. Twilight I found especially alarming, that hour of shadows and dim perspectives, I fled from it into the fluorescent sanctuary of the white room, where everything seemed its own source of light, and surfaces were impassive, without deceptive depths, and the atmosphere was neutral and inert, like a thin, colourless gas.

There was little to do there now. The transmissions from abroad had ceased altogether. The professor paced and scowled in furious silence, a man betrayed. The telephone was left permanently off the hook. Some nights he did not appear at all, and Leitch and I were left alone in a fraught, uneasy intimacy. Leitch was restless too, he prowled about softly in his slippers, his hands stuck in the drooping pockets of his trousers. No matter where he was in the room I fancied I could hear him breathing. He told me his jokes, and offered me choice tidbits from his foodbag. I had preferred the old animosity to this somehow menacing warmth. I felt as if I were holding on to a tether in the dark, at any moment what was at the other end might rear up and savage me. He tended the machine now with a kind of frenzied vigilance, watching over it like a thwarted, jealous parent, cursing it, kicking it, throwing crusts of bread at it. The thing suffered these affronts in silence, dully, its attention somehow averted, as if it were thinking about something else entirely. It maddened him, its imperturbability, its complete, ponderous, irredeemable stupidity.

– It knows nothing, the professor said, nothing it has not been told.

Leitch drew his great head down into his shoulders, his bruised dark gaze wandering here and there about the room.