Free Mefisto by John Banville Page A

himself from side to side, plucking at the bedclothes, like a footless drunkard trying to get up and fight. One day he fell out of bed, we found him on the floor in a tangle of sheets, waving his arms weakly as if to ward off an assailant. His pot was overturned.
    – Oh, look what you’ve done, my mother said. Just look!
    He glared at her, suspicious, bewildered, afraid.
    – Mother, he said gruffly, are you there, mother?
    He groaned. There was no way out of the huge confusion into which he had blundered. He let us lift him into bed, and lay back on the pillows meekly. He turned his eyes to the window, and one fat, lugubrious tear ran down his temple, over the livid vein pulsing there.
    At the funeral my mother could not cry. She watched with melancholy interest as the coffin was lowered into the hole. My father stood to one side fingering his tie. The violet shadow of a cloud swept a far-off meadow. At the edge of the small circle of mourners a figure had appeared, half hidden among a cluster of headstones, his hands in his pockets, a lick of foxy hair plastered on his narrow brow. He smiled at me and winked, and made a little sign, raising three fingers and sketching a sort of rapid blessing. Behind him a stained seraph towered on widespread marble wings.

 
    QUEER THE LANDSCAPES that memory, that old master, chooses for its backgrounds, the twilit distances with meandering rivers and mossy brown crags, and tiny figures in costume doing something inexplicable a long way off. When I think now of that autumn, in a flash I see the malt store, I don’t know why. It was a grey stone fortress with a slate roof, and a row of small, barred windows high up under the eaves. Through an opening over the arched entranceway a block and tackle stuck out, like the arm of a complicated gibbet. The malt was dried there before being sent to the breweries. Insinuations of steam escaped at the windows day and night, and the sour, beery stink of the simmering grain pervaded the air. My father’s job must have taken him there often, though I never saw him – indeed, now that I think of it, I never saw anyone at all there. Where it stood was known as the Folly, a windswept angle between the backs of two mean streets. The place wore an air of dejection, and a sort of weary knowing. It seems always an overcast and cold October there. Dry leaves like the hands of dead pianists skitter along the pavements with a scraping noise. The wind soughs in the trees, and panels of pale, lumpy cloud pour in silence down a tilted rectangle of sky. A dog is barking in the distance, something is monotonously creaking, and I halt and stand expectantly, as if everything might be about to gather itself together and address me.
    School was grotesque now, an absurd and shameful predicament. I had outgrown all this, the noise, the smells, the tedium. Every afternoon when the bell went I set off at once for Ashburn. At Coolmine the gate had been mended, and a warning sign had been put up, with a skull-and-crossbones stencilled on it. From the road I could see the workmen over at the pit-head, toiling like ants. Sometimes I spotted Mr Kasperl too, pacing up and down, or with Felix poring over charts spread out on the bonnet of the lorry. The old women were no longer let in to hunt for coal, I would meet them, with their blurred faces, and their stumpy legs wrapped in rags, wandering dazedly along the road, by the new barbed-wire fence.
    As the year darkened so the house grew sombre, standing stark against a knife-coloured sky, a ragged flock of rooks wheeling above the chimney-pots. The first gales of the season stripped half the trees in the park, opening unexpected vistas. Indoors it was like being on a great ship at sea, the windows in their warped frames banged and boomed, and a grey, oceanic glow suffused the ceilings. Beneath the creaks, the rattlings, there was a deep, undersea silence. This was Sophie’s medium. It was as if something had been left switched