Free This is the Life by Joseph O'Neill

house. But the first floor seemed dry as well, with dust coating everything, and walking through the abandoned, creaking hallways, I felt I was treading the sidewalk of one of those corny ghost towns you see in Westerns, the ones with tumbleweed rolling down the main street.
    But then I opened the door on a room where the atmosphere was different. If every ghost town has its stubborn old-timer who refuses to leave, who sits tight with his mule in an old shack on the mountainside, certain that the geologists are wrong, that a bonanza waits in the rock, then this room was that shack. It showed clear signs of life. Books were opened and marked with yellow tabs, newspapers lay crinkled on the floor, and a shallow pile of sky-blue notebooks sat up on the desk. Clearly this was Donovan’s study. Periodicals and law reports lined the walls: the
Common Market Law Reports, Weekly Law Reports, Recueil de la Jurisprudence de la Cour, Cambridge Law Journal
and so forth. Then I spied it. In the corner, alongside an overflowing waste-paper basket, was a bottle of Bushmills. I congratulated myself: I knew it. I knew I’d find something if I kept looking.
    I found a glass in the bathroom and poured myself a double shot. It was nine o’clock, and although the cloudburst seemed over, rain continued to fall, making a racket on a plastic surface somewhere. There was no point in rushing backhome, not in that weather. I leaned back in Donovan’s functional chair and drank deeply. That’s better, I thought, as the liquor made a hot path through my insides. That’s more like it.
    It was about then, after the first, satisfying mouthful, that my eyes focused on the notebooks. There were about four or five of them in a stack. My thoughts elsewhere, I took one down and fluttered the pages with my thumb. I was not trying to read anything, I was simply fidgeting with the first thing that came to hand. Whenever I make myself comfortable with a drink, I compulsively reach out to manipulate the nearest object I can get hold of – a newspaper, or the channel controller for the television. That night at Donovan’s was no different. The notebook that I picked up – well, to my mind it was no different to a magazine you instinctively pick up at the barber’s or the dentist’s. How was I to know what it contained?
    Although I was not concentrating, although the pages moved under my thumb in a blur, I did notice that there was something unusual about them. There was an inordinate number of lists, and I thought I saw entire sentences, whole paragraphs even, written down in capital letters. Then there was the question of the handwriting. I knew Donovan’s handwriting, a scribble in biro that only became legible with practice – how many tens of thousands of his words had I read in my time? – I knew his every quirk in that department. The script that I saw in these pages was similar to his but nevertheless different; the words were too legible, the lettering too neat and tidy. The script, in the blue-black ink of a fountain pen, belonged to someone taking care about presentation, someone making a calligraphical effort. That was not like Donovan; the Donovan I knew was a scrawler.
    All in all, then, the autography on the pages I saw did not strike me as his, nor did their contents appear to square with what one might expect to see in an international lawyer’snotes. There was something different here, something unusual. I decided to take a closer look.
    The first page of the top notebook had a date written at the top right corner: 23 September 1988. (Leafing through the pages, I realized that the entries in the book were chronological – and that the books themselves were piled in calendrical sequence.) And then came the strange part: a row of squares was drawn along the top half of the page; below that row was a row of triangles, and below both of these was a further row of triangles placed on top of squares: they looked like children’s drawings of