Birchwood (17 page)

I STUMBLED FRANTICALLY
around the house barring the doors and windows. I was not trying to lock him out, but to lock myself in. From the kitchen window I peered out across the lawn. There was no sign of him now, but that absence only increased my panic. I found a malevolent friend in a drawer of the dresser, a sleek black knife, a Sabatier. The blade crooned and quivered as I drew it from its wooden sheath and tried the edge against my thumb. I fled with it upstairs to the attic and squatted there in the oniony gloom, moaning and muttering and gnawing my knuckles. The day waned. Rain fell, and then the sun again briefly, then twilight. The tenants of the little room, a brassbound trunk, the dusty skeleton of a tricycle, that stringless tennis racket standing in the corner like a petrified exclamation of horror, began their slow dance into darkness. My face with its staring eyes retreated stealthily out of a grimy sliver of mirror, and then I knew that he was in the house, for I could feel his presence like a minute tremor in the air. I waited calmly. The stairs creaked, and the spokes in the wheels of the tricycle tingled, and the door swung open. Michael, with his legs swaying and the wide skirts falling around him, stood on his hands out on the landing like a huge white mushroom upside down. I could have killed him then, with ease, I even imagined myself flying at him with the knife and plunging it down into his heart, but he was, after all, my brother.

Yes, he was my brother, my twin, I had always known it, but would not admit it, until now, when the admitting made me want to murder him. But the nine long months we had spent together in Martha's womb counted for something in the end. He flipped over on his feet and threw out his arms and grinned, and I picked up the knife in its sheath and pushed it under my belt. His grin widened. He had not changed. His red hair was as violent as ever, his teeth as terrible. I might have been looking at my own reflection. Only his eyes, cold and blue as the sea, were different now. He disappeared. Night fell, blueblack and glossy.

I rattled down the rickety stairs, stumbling in the gloom, and paused on the lower landing and lifted my head and listened. Dark laughter floated up the stairwell. I peered over the banisters. He was down in the hall, juggling with a ball, a blue block and a marble. I started after him, and he fled into the library clutching his dress around him and shedding laughter in his wake, and when I got to the door he had already plunged through the french windows. He danced across the garden like a mad bird, hooting and shrieking and flapping his arms.

In the wood the silver leaves whispered. There must have been a moon, wind, stars. I remember none of them. A pale form glimmered among the trees, but when I swung at it the blade whistled in empty air and the dress fluttered to the ground. Something collapsed under my feet, one of those treacherous hidden caverns in the turf, and I fell headlong into a tangle of thorns. Again that laughter. I lay for a long time with my face in the briars, and he began to sing afar. The anguished evil music settled like black rain on the thorns and trees, the trembling leaves, and soon all of the wood was singing his terrible enthralling song. I went on again on hands and knees. The singing ceased. I came to the edge of the lake. The windows of the summerhouse were faintly lit, and the door was open wide. I crept up the steps. The place was still cluttered with bits of Birchwood's past, deck chairs and straw hats and broken mirrors, but in the midst of it all a kind of lair had been scooped out, and there was a brass bed, and a packing case, and an oil stove and a lamp, a folding chair unfolded. On the bed Papa lay in his black suit and waistcoat with a blue face and staring eyes and a thick protruding tongue. Michael stepped out of the shadows and smiled down upon him faintly.

‘Our father, which art dead.’

He looked up at me and the smile faded, and there again in his eyes was that icy white fury as of old. From its sheath I slipped the gleaming panther and clasped it in both hands above my head so tightly that the blade shivered and sang under the strain. He stared intently at the wicked weapon and glided backward slowly, slowly, toward the open doorway, into the shadows, until only his anguished eyes remained, burning in the dark, and at last they too were extinguished. I lowered the knife and spoke aloud my own name seven times and listened to the echoes, and then returned through the wood and across the garden to Birch-wood.

I SLEPT THAT
night on the billiard table in the study, I do not know why, there were beds enough. At first light I was up tramping about the house. A few chairs had been moved, and Papa's desk with its bundles of unpaid bills was gone, but apart from cavities such as these, and the healed rot and the sound roof, the Lawlesses might never have been. I had to see everything, touch everything, as though by those contacts alone did I exist. Papa would have been proud of my performance, and amused by it. A real son and heir! By the windows in the dining room I halted in a haze of luminous pink light reflected from the garden. The field where the Molly Maguires lay dead was thronged with poppies, the lawn too, blazing blood-red things, terrible and lovely. The dawn was awash with their radiance.

Birds gaily sang about me as I made my way down to the summerhouse. The lake with the sun on it seemed to hover above the ground like something on the point of flight. I opened the shutters in the summerhouse, and there on the floor was that charred patch, Granny Godkin, her mark. My father looked no different by daylight, he was still dead. It was Cotter who throttled him, I think. I cannot be sure of it, but my fierce friend had proved himself an assiduous executioner, and I suspect him before all others. I folded the sheets over Papa and bound him tightly with twine, and dragged that stiff cold larva into the wood. It was a heavy burden, and I made slow progress. In the clearing where the Lawlesses were buried there were more poppies. I thought of burying him there under those flourishing passionate flowers, but although it would have made my task lighter, I had not the heart to plant him among his enemies. Instead I hauled him up the ridge and dug a hole among the birch trees, cursing the rocky ground and the blunt spade and the dead weight that nearly pulled me with it into the grave. I covered him up, and tried to think of a prayer that I might say, not that I thought there was anyone to hear it, but that it might lend a touch of solemnity to this farcical ceremony. All that crimson death sprouting around me in the sparkling green morning had made me light-headed. I could remember no prayers, and so a song, the only one I knew, had to suffice.

O there's hair on this
There's hair on that
And there's hair on my dog Tiny
But I know where
There's plenty of hair—

It cheered me up, standing there weeping and giggling, with my hands devoutly clasped, singing for my father. I know that he would have savoured the scene.

—On the girl I left behind me!

There is no girl. There never was. I suppose I always knew that, in my heart. I believed in a sister in order not to believe in
him
, my cold mad brother. No Prospero either, there never is. O but I so wanted to keep that withered wizard, with his cloak and his black hat, stumping on ahead of me always with his stick and his claw and his piercing eyes, leading me slowly toward that rosy grail. Now the white landscape was empty. Perhaps it is better thus, I said, and added, faintly, I might find other creatures to inhabit it. And I did, and so I became my own Prospero, and yours.

I left Papa there to put down what roots he might, and went back to the house. He too had wanted a pet homunculus to comfort him, but what a blow it must have been to realise, with sudden cold clarity—I can see him striking his forehead with his fist—that if Beatrice were to produce a child it would be half a Lawless. And what a mixed relief it must have been to discover that Beatrice was barren, for by the time that fact became plain Martha had come up trumps with her two-card trick. I wonder how many of the family knew of the misalliance between brother and sister? Granny Godkin did, but not Granda. I knew, but denied the knowledge, as Beatrice did for as long as her fractured brain would allow, and then went conveniently mad, and died caged. And Michael? O he knew, yes, yes.

They struck a bargain, Martha and Joseph, admirable in its deviousness, whereby I would stay at Birchwood to be Papa's longed-for son—a
real
Godkin, by god—and Martha would retire with Michael to a secret lair somewhere financed by the Birchwood coffers. There was one condition, namely, that I would be the son of the house, but Michael must be the heir. Agreed! How did they make their choice between identical twin babies? Perhaps Papa shut his eyes and stuck a pin in me, or did Martha see in Michael's puckered face a trace of that cold sly fury and recognise a villian after her own heart? I do not know, but I know that they made the wrong choices, and thereby came their ruin.

I find it incredible that Martha believed her brother to be a man of honour, although he might have been honourable but for his wicked sense of humour. It was not fondness for me, for I was a bitter disappointment, nor hatred for her and Michael, but just an unwillingness to let pass the opportunity of laying the framework for a perfect delayed-action joke that made him, on the very day of their departure, sit down to his desk and carefully inscribe my name into his will. How he must have grinned, crouched there in the gloom of his study admiring that little word and pouring out a brandy. Ah father, I loved you in my fashion.

His plan to lighten with derisive laughter the darkness of his grave went askew, for Martha began to suspect him, and came flying back to Birchwood with her claws out. She found the will, or perhaps he showed it to her, and the battle began. But she was no match for Joe. He brought forward his post humous merriment and laughed at her then. What did she want? Was it that, like me, she had to touch the house in order to believe that she existed? These questions puzzle me still, and many more. Perhaps she only wanted to fight, for while they bickered they hardly noticed that the estate was falling apart. How explain such foolishness? They were Godkins, and no more need be said.

Michael, of course, wanted to be squire, to ride on a black horse around his land and hunt the foxes and thrash the peasants. He wanted all that I had, and hated me for having it and despising it. I think he would have killed me, willingly, it would have been so easy, but something held him back, that same something which stayed the knife in my own hand when we faced each other in the murderous dark of the summerhouse, and so, instead of fratricide, he played with Martha her sly game, and between them they sent me off in search of a sister. But by then all that was Birchwood had collapsed, the Lawlesses were taking over, and Michael too had to fly. Wherever I went he was ahead of me, dogging the steps I had not taken yet. He found the circus, and joined the Molly Maguires, brought them to fight the Lawlesses, and the circus to fight the Mollies. All that blood! That slaughter! And for what? For the same reason that Papa released his father into the birch wood to die, that Granny Godkin tormented poor mad Beatrice, that Beatrice made Martha believe that Michael was in the burning shed, the same reason that brought about all their absurd tragedies, the reason which does not have a name. So here then is an ending, of a kind, to my story. It may not have been like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily.

The weather held for weeks, limpid and bright, wind all day, sun and rain and a luminous lilac glow above the trees, then the evenings, night and stars. At first the silence troubled me, until I realised that it was not really silence. A band of old women came one day and took away the bodies of the dead men down in the field. I watched from my window, fascinated. I wanted to go and help them, to say,
Look, I am not my father
, I
am something different
but they would have run away from me, horrified. The poppies languished. I worked on the house, cleared out the attic, boarded up the windows smashed during the siege, tended the flowerbeds, I do not know why. The summerhouse was invaded by pigeons, starlings, a hive of bees. I let them stay there. They were alive, and I had enough of death. Perhaps I shall leave here. Where would I go? Is that why they all fought so hard for Birchwood, because there was nowhere else for them to be? Outside is destruction and decay. I do not speak the language of this wild country. I shall stay here, alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever known. Yes.

The kitchen still bore traces of Josie's peculiar odour. I wondered if she had been a part of those rights which Cotter had come back to claim. I doubt it. She had slipped into a crevice in time and lain there until forgotten. I could no longer remember what she looked like. How many have I lost that way? I began to write, as a means of finding them again, and thought that at last I had discovered a form which would contain and order all my losses. I was wrong. There is no form, no order, only echoes and coincidences, sleight of hand, dark laughter. I accept it.

Spring has come again, St Brigid's day, right on time. The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations? Intimations abound, but they are felt only, and words fail to transfix them. Anyway, some secrets are not to be disclosed under pain of who knows what retribution, and whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent.

Also by John Banville