Mefisto (18 page)

– We’re searching for the meaning of life, he said.

And then laughed. He looked at me with contempt.

– How do I know what he’s doing! he said. You’re supposed to be the genius, you tell me. Statistics, probabilities, blind chance, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him? He’s half cracked, anyway.

But there was no asking anything of the professor, he would pretend he had not heard, and turn away, muttering.

Leitch’s animosity was pure and disinterested. He directed it equally at all who came near him. It was like a task that had been assigned to him, irksome, and thankless, from which he was not allowed to relax. His name was Basil. He suffered from attacks of breathlessness, which he tried to hide from me. His feet were bad too, something was wrong with the arches, he walked in his slippers with a rolling gait, the voluminous seat of his trousers sagging. He had a painful, polished look that spoke of long sessions in the bathroom, of dousings and dustings, and ashen gloomings into a cruel mirror. He wore a gold chain on his wrist, and a ring with two gold hands holding a gold heart. He consoled himself with food. He ate alone, a lugubrious sybarite, sitting in a far corner of the room with a plastic bag open in his lap and a paper napkin tucked under his cravat. He had sandwiches, meat pies, cakes, cold chicken legs. I pictured him, bent at a table in a greasy room somewhere, some other Chandos Street, slicing and buttering, as the light faded on another solitary winter afternoon. Yet there was something almost impressive in his intransigence and grim self-sufficiency. Sucking at a bruised peach, or gobbling a fistful of purple grapes, he had the air of a ruined emperor, with those curls, that great pallid face, those wounded, unforgiving eyes.

– Just do your job, will you? he said. Just do your job, and leave me alone.

I had hardly spoken a word to him all night.

– What job? I said. Is this a job?

He turned to me with blood in his eye.

– You’re here, aren’t you? he snarled. What more do you want?

Nothing, I wanted nothing, I was almost happy there. How calm the nights were, with only the hum of the machine, and the professor’s soft mutterings, and all around us the darkness. We might have been a mile under the ocean. We saw no one. We lived in downtime. The machine’s real users were those who came here during the day, from the offices above. I wondered about them, and searched for their traces. Sometimes there would be a coffee cup left behind, or an ashtray in which a half-smoked cigarette had burned itself out, leaving a fragile fossil of ash and a smear of tar. One night I arrived and found a yellow cardigan draped on the back of a chair, where someone had forgotten it. We did not move it, even Leitch avoided touching it, and as the night wore on it became a more and more insistent, numinous presence, unsettling as a pair of golden wings.

The machine was a presence too, a great tame patient beast, tethered in its white cage. It had its voices, the faint flutter and tick of the memory bank scanning, the printer’s crash and clatter. One of the storage discs produced an unaccountable, piercing shriek when it was first switched on. And always there was that dense hum, that made the very air vibrate. Sometimes, in the early hours, when one or other of my limbs began to sing, like a burning stick singing in a fire, I would seem to hear a sort of chime, like a small, sustained chord, as if the machine’s voice and the voice of my pain had found a common note. When something went wrong we were supposed to call for an engineer, but we never did. Instead, Leitch would get out his forceps and his probes and delve into the delicate innards of the machine, past the lattice of switches and bundles of wires fine as hair, down into the secret core itself. Then for a moment, forgetting himself, he would be transformed, kneeling there in the midst of that white light, absorbed, intent, like an attendant figure in the foreground of a luminous nativity. He talked to the machine in a fierce undertone, cursing and cajoling it. Always it gave in. He would sit back on his heels then, grey sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, wiping his hands, his fat shoulders drooping and his eyes going dead.

I brought in the black notebook, and in idle hours went over again the old, insoluble problems, playing them over, move by move, like drawn grandmaster games. Infinity was still infinity, zero still gaped, voracious as ever. The professor stopped behind me, and peered over my shoulder.

– Pah, he said. Antique stuff. History.

At dawn, without a word, the three of us went our separate ways, the professor bundled in his black coat, Leitch with his empty foodbag under his arm, and I behind them, dawdling. I liked to walk the streets at that early hour. The wind rustled over pavements hard and grey as bone, and gulls scavenged in the gutters. Traffic lights blossomed from green to red and back again, silent as flowers. A solitary motor car would pass me by, the driver propped like a manikin behind a windscreen flowing with reflections of a cold grey sky and paper-coloured clouds. Sometimes I went to Chandos Street, in hope that Adele would be there. Instead I would often find the professor, sitting at the table by the big window in the kitchen, still in his coat and hat, gazing out at the street, a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. These encounters were faintly, inexplicably embarrassing.

Adele never asked where I went at night, as I never asked where she was when she disappeared for days on end. I think when I was away from her she forgot about me. Oh, I don’t mean forgot, exactly, but that she lost hold of something, some essential of the fact of my existence. For that is how it was with me, when she was not there, something of her faded in my mind, she became transparent. Even when she was in my arms she was also somehow absent. I never had, not for an instant, her entire attention. Perhaps it is as well. It occurs to me I might not have survived the full force of her presence. What does that mean? I don’t know, I don’t know – there’s so much darkness here. She regarded my injuries as if they were not part of me, as if they were something that had attached itself to me, like a stray dog. She would raise herself on an elbow and study me, touching my withered arm, or running a finger over the knots and whorls of my chest, frowning to herself. What was she thinking? I never asked. She would not have answered. One day she said:

– Did you think you were going to die, when it happened?

She was sitting up in bed, with a blanket around her shoulders, and an ashtray on the mattress beside her. The day outside was bitter under a louse-grey sky, down in the garden the bare trees shuddered. I think of that moment, and I’m there again.

– Something inside me is wearing out, she said. Some part, wearing out.

I had met her in the hall. She was in fur boots and a beret, and a moth-eaten fur coat. Her mood was frenetic she fixed her icy fingers on my wrist and laughed, and a bubble of saliva came out of her mouth and burst. Upstairs I took her coat. Slivers of the cold air of outdoors fell like silverfish from its folds. In bed she held my sex in her chill hand and laughed and laughed, throwing back her head and offering me her throat to feed on. She would not let me inside her, shut her legs. I clutched her against me, muttering and moaning, and at last, to placate me, she knelt impatiently and put her head in my lap, and I spilled myself in a series of voluptuous slow shivers into the hot wet hollow of her mouth. Her arm lay across my chest, with its track of puncture marks running from wrist to elbow, like the stippled scar of a briar scratch, and I thought of childhood.

Felix was in the front room, lounging on the horsehair sofa reading a newspaper.

– Ah, there you are, Grendel, he said. How are you? Sit down, talk to me. We haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ve been neglecting your old friends.

I sat down at the table. A pigeon landed on the sill outside and looked in, the wind ruffling its neck feathers. Felix tossed the paper aside and leaned forward with his hands pressed between his knees. He was wearing his mac, and a flat cap pushed back on his head. There were shallow indents at his temples, I had never noticed them before. Sometimes when I looked at him closely like this he seemed a stranger.

– How goes the great work? he said. Is the prof treating you right? And what about the fat boy, does he stick to you, hey?

Adele came from the bedroom, barefoot, in her fur coat. Seeing him there she paused, then came to the table and searched in her bag for a cigarette with one hand, holding her coat shut with the other. He grinned at her, bending low to look up into her face. She said:

– How did you get in here?

– Ah, he said. Good question.

He went on grinning. There was silence. Adele smoked, frowning vaguely, her eyes fixed on the table. Felix looked from her to me, and then at her again. He chuckled.

– Having fun, you two, are you? he said. Fun and games, yes?

The pigeon flew from the sill with a clatter of wings. Felix leaned back on the sofa, one ankle crossed on a knee, and fished out his tobacco tin.

I said:

– Why did you say that he wanted me to work for him?

He lit up a butt, and blew two thick cones of smoke from his pinched nostrils. He looked at me narrowly and smiled.

– Because he did, he said. Why else?

– He doesn’t say a word to me.

– Ah, but that’s his way, you see.

Adele went and sat in front of the electric fire, holding up one bare foot and then the other to the heat. The last wan light of day was fading in the window.

– It’s true, Felix said, I may have exaggerated a little. But I didn’t say he
said
it, did I? I only said he wanted you, and that’s different.

He rose and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to the room, looking out into the winter twilight.

– People don’t recognize what it is they want, he said. They have to be shown. I have to … interpret.

He glanced at me merrily over his shoulder.

– Oh, yes, Pinocchio, he said. By jiminy, yes.

Adele suddenly laughed, one of her brief, high shrieks, and threw her cigarette into the grate and lit another. Then she put a hand to her forehead and bowed her head. Felix was smiling back at me still. Darkness advanced into the room.

I ONLY WENT TO
the hospital now when I needed a new supply of pills. I avoided Dr Cranitch. Matron looked at me with her sad eyes, saying nothing. I gave all my attention to the notices on the walls in the dispensary while she filled up the little mauve phials for me. She put a fresh wad of cotton wool in each one, and wrote out new labels in her neat, schoolgirl’s hand. Miss Barr was asking after me, she said, Father Plomer too. She did not look up. Through the window behind her I could see down into the grounds. A wash of sunlight fell across the grass and was immediately extinguished. An old man on a crutch was hobbling up the drive. I picked up the pills. She watched my hands, and then she turned away.

At the gates a car pulled up and Felix stuck out his head and hailed me.

– What a lucky chance, he said. Hop in, we’re going to a party.

The car was a shuddering, ramshackle machine, coughing and farting in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. The young man with the shakes was at the wheel. His girl sat behind him in the back seat, huddled against the window. It was starting to rain.

– Come on, Felix said to me, don’t be a spoilsport.

The young man’s name was Tony. When I got in he turned and winked at me.

– Hiya, pal, he said.

There were livid bags under his eyes.

We crossed the river. Gusts of wind were smacking the steel-blue water, and pedestrians on the bridge walked at an angle, their coat-tails whipping.

– There are these people, Felix was saying, we’re to meet them at the Goat …

Tony laughed, a high-pitched whinny.

– The Goat! he cried.

The girl shrank away from me, staring out the window beside her with a fist pressed to her mouth. She had a blank white face and frightened eyes and a tiny, pink-tipped nose. Her name was Liz. Big drops of rain swept against the windscreen.

– Fucking wipers, Tony said.

Then abruptly the rain stopped, and there was sun. We drove along by the canal. The poplars were still bare. Great bundles of cloud were sailing across a porcelain sky. Felix turned around in his seat to face me.

– Seeing the lady in white, were you? he said. Wangling bonbons out of her again? Let’s have a look.

He held the little bottle of Lamias aloft between a finger and thumb, squinting at it as if it were a rare vintage, and shook his head in laughing wonderment.

– Do you know what these things are worth? he said. Do you?

– They’re gold, pal, Tony said, nodding at me in the driving mirror. Pure gold.

He wanted to take one. Felix laughed.

– Anthony, is that wise?

– Fuck wise, said Tony.

Beside me Liz was rolling a cigarette in a little machine. Twice she had to stop and start all over again. Then she spilled a box of matches on the seat. For a moment it seemed she would cry. I tried to help her gather up the matches, but when I put out a hand towards her she flinched in fright and went suddenly still, averting her face from me, her little pink nose twitching.

We were heading towards the mountains.