Free Ghosts by John Banville Page A

his shoulder. She could not remember his face now, but she recalled how lightly he had skipped down the steps, whistling, his head with its oiled hair and neat white parting sinking from sight. The pain, the outrageous pain of being abandoned had surprised her, the way all pain always surprised her in those days, like news from another world, the big, the real one, where she did not want to go but to which each day brought her a little closer. She was six years old when he left. Her mother lay in bed at night and cried; night after night, Sophie could hear her from across the hall, moaning and gulping, stuffing the pillow into her mouth, trying to stop herself, trying not to be heard, as if it were something shameful she was doing, some shameful act.
    There was a scrabbling at the door and Croke came in cautiously, first a big, liver-spotted paw, then bigger head, then knees, then last of all the bowed back. He glanced about the room and did not see her curled up in the shadowed corner of the sofa. He advanced to the window, stepping over the carpet with a camel’s ponderous slouch, seeming to lag half a pace behind his legs, his long head swaying on its drooped stalk. The rain was coming down heavily now, like a fall of dirty light. He stood with his hands behind his backand stared out bleakly, his loose lips pursed as if he were trying to remember how to whistle.
    ‘The golden world!’ he muttered, in a tone of deep disgust.
    He farted, closing one eye and scrunching up his face at the side. At Sophie’s soft laugh he started in fright and peered wildly at her over his shoulder.
    ‘Jesus!’ he cried. ‘Do you want to kill me?’ He waggled his fingers at her as if he were sprinkling water. ‘Sitting there like a ghost!’
    She laughed again. He was a game old brute: when she had stumbled on the bridge and he caught her his big hands had been all over her. She shivered, remembering the feel of his old man’s arm, the slippery, fishy flesh inside the sleeve and beneath it the bone hard and sharp as an ancient weapon. Now he paced agitatedly in a little circle, mumbling to himself and shaking his head. He halted, looking down at his feet.
    ‘My shoes are wringing still,’ he said and did his phlegmy laugh. ‘Leaky as an unstanched wench. Ha!’ He peered at her but she said nothing and he resumed his pacing. He stopped at the window and looked out again balefully at the rain. The world out there had turned to an undulant grey blur.
    Silence. Picture them there, two figures in rainlight. Something, something out of childhood.
    ‘I was trying to think,’ Croke said, ‘of the name of that thing they keep the host in to show it at Benediction. What do they call that? The thing shaped like the sun that the priest holds up. Did you ever see it? What is it, now. I’ve been trying to remember all morning.’ He sighed. ‘And I was an altar boy, you know.’ He turned to her stoutly, expecting her to laugh. ‘I was.’
    But she was not listening. She sat and rocked herself in her arms, her eyes fixed on the floor. Croke shrugged and turned away and fiddled with the knobs of a huge, old-fashioned radio standing on a low table beside the window.The green tuning light came on, a pulsing eye, and as the valves warmed up a distant crackling swelled, as if it were the noise of the past itself that was trapped in there among the coils and the glowing filaments. He spun the dial, and out of the crackling a faint voice emerged, speaking incomprehensible words, distantly. Croke listened slack-eyed for a moment and then switched it off.
    Felix came in. When he saw Sophie he hesitated and let his gaze go blank and wander about the room. Croke he ignored.
    ‘What a place!’ he said. ‘You know there is no telephone?’
    She watched him, her eyes narrowed against the smoke of her cigarette. She had heard him creeping about in the hotel corridor last night, until that little bitch had let him in, she was sure of it. She had been