Free Eclipse: A Novel by John Banville Page A

pierced heart in the silver and neon-pink picture that hung beside the hatstand in the hall. I see him, ashen, lost inside his clothes, and always, like me now, with a three-day stubble, moving wraithlike without sound through rooms gaunt with summer’s stillness, a stooped figure flickering from sunlight into shadow, fading with no footfall, leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.
    The day of his death is memorable too as the day my mother slapped my face. When she turned from the range I thought she was reaching out quickly to give me something. I can feel still the hard hot quick smack of her hand on my jaw, the jolt of it. She had never hit me before. She did it too not as a parent slapping a child, but as one angry adult turning suddenly on another. I do not remember what I had said or done to provoke her. Her look immediately afterwards was one almost of triumph. She lifted her head back and widened her nostrils, like Snow White’s wicked step-mother, and something came at me out of her eyes, sharp and glittering and swift, like a blade shown and promptly pocketed. Then without a word she turned back to whatever it was she had been doing at the range. I did not cry, I was too surprised to cry, but only sat with one hand laid flat before me on the table, feeling the tingle along my jaw where she had slapped me, as if tiny droplets of something scalding were falling on my skin. The oilcloth cover on the table was wonderfully cool and smooth and moist under my hand, almost like something living, almost like skin. Then my father came down, clutching a blanket tight around his drawn, ill-shaven neck. There were shadows in the hollows of his face and feverish red spots on his cheekbones that looked as if they had been painted there. My mother’s expression was blank, as though nothing had happened, but my father wrinkled his nose, testing the pressure of her anger on the air, and gave me an odd, sidewise glance, half-smiling, almost sly. Late that night I was wakened by muffled noises outside my room. When I went to the door and looked out I saw my mother in her nightdress crossing the landing hastily with a blue bowl in her hands, and heard through the open door of my father’s room a high whistling noise that was the noise of him struggling for breath, and I shut my door hurriedly and got back into bed, and when I woke again it was morning, and I knew that my father was gone.
    At the funeral it rained briefly, as if just for us. A small round cloud appeared in an otherwise empty sky above the cemetery and let fall upon the circle of mourners a gentle drizzle, warm and fine. I watched every step of the ceremony with frowning attention, determined not to miss a thing. My mother kept glancing off with a vague, anxious look in the direction of the cemetery gate, as if there were something far more urgent elsewhere calling out plaintively for her attention. Later in the day, when the mourners had all dispersed, I came upon her sitting on the sofa in the parlour, weeping, with her face in her hands, and feeling grown-up and solemnly responsible I walked up quietly and stopped just behind her and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. I can still feel the cool smooth brittle texture of her newly bought black dress. She wrenched herself away from me, making cat noises and scrubbing at her cheeks, and I had the sense of a small, slightly shameful and gratifying victory.
    Why is it not she who appears to me? Her own last years were haunted. I would hear her in the night, pacing the floor by her bed, endlessly pacing. She grew confused, and mistook me for my father, and would fly into fits of unprovoked rage. Then one morning I found her lying on her side on the floor in the downstairs lavatory with her bloomers around her knees. Her face had a bluish cast and there was froth on her lips. I thought she was dead; I felt strange, very cold and calm and