Free Birchwood by John Banville

bicycle. In spring it was, of course, an April evening, sunlight, wind in the trees, the crocuses sprouting. A dog followed us, a miserable creature with a swollen belly and moist eyes. Granda Godkin loathed animals, he picked fights with them. That evening he would stop suddenly, turn, stamp his foot, growl. The tyke stopped too, looked at him attentively, one ear quivering, and set off after us again. The old man held the back of the saddle and trotted beside me, wheezing and gasping, roaring encouragement. I sat perched on this impossibly spindly, wobbling contraption with my heart in my mouth, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere until Granda, with one last tremendous shove, let go his hold and sent me sailing on alone. The handlebars trembled, the front wheel hit a stone, I squealed in fright, and then I felt a kind of click , I cannot describe it, and the bike was suddenly transformed into a fine and delicate instrument as light as air. The taut spokes sang. I flew! That gentle rising against the evening air, that smooth flow onwards into the blue, it is as near as earthbound creatures ever come to flying. It did not last long, I jumped down awkwardly, landed on my crotch on the crossbar, and the back wheel ran over my foot. I turned and looked back at Granda Godkin, shuffling behind me. He was speaking. Congratulations, surely?
    ‘I'm after twisting me hip!’ he cried.
    He lived until late in the night, when I was awakened not by a sound but by something in the silence going awry. There was someone in the corridor. I peeped out. A shimmering pale figure descended the stairs swiftly and disappeared from view. The front door opened, I heard it, and felt the faint night air. A gleam of light fell across the landing and was immediately extinguished. The air bore traces of a woody perfume which at first I could not identify, I think because it was so familiar. There was a soft rustling sound followed by a gasp, and another figure appeared and crawled on hands and knees to the head of the stairs. He slithered down the first few steps, paused, and with a tiny cry plunged on down into the darkness. I was turning back into my room when I heard, far below, a bark like that of an animal in pain, and when I looked out from my window I saw him again, scuttling like a maimed crab across the lawn into the wood where a bird was singing, such beauty, such passion, a nightingale perhaps, although I do not think there are nightingales in this part of the world. Was it near dawn then? I went back to bed. Cigar smoke, yes, yes, wearily, sleepily, I admitted it.
    They found him early in th& morning in the birch wood, curled like a stillborn infant in the grass. His ruined mouth was open, caked with black blood, and it was not until they were moving him that they discovered, in the tree beside which he lay, his false teeth sunk to the gums like vicious twin pink parasites in the bark. Aunt Martha came to my room to break the news to me. All I could do was sit on the side of the bed, speechless and numb, with my socks in my hand, and stare at her shimmering white nightgown, admitting to myself what I already knew, that I had not been dreaming. Exasperated by my dullness, she caught my shoulders and shook me until my jaws rattled.
    ‘Do you never cry !’
    Not yet.

WITH GRANDA GODKIN gone at last my father came into his inheritance. On the very day that the will was read, confirming his freedom, Papa sold off fifty acres to old man Gaddern of Halfmile House, who, it was rumoured, was financing the rebels in the area, partly from sympathy but mostly as a means of ensuring the safety of his portion of the new State the revolution would found. Along with other sales made on the sly while my grandfather was still alive, this latest iniquity left Birchwood crippled, with the Gaddern swine crowding us on three sides and the sea at our back. Papa got drunk at dinner that night, and when Granny Godkin launched her inevitable attack on him he