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What was I doing, why was I following these people – what enlightenment was I looking for? I did not know, nor care. I was puzzled and happy, like a child who has been allowed to join in an adults' game. I kept at it for hours, criss-crossing the streets and the squares with a drunkard's dazed single-mindedness, as if I were tracing out a huge, intricate sign on the face of the city for someone in the sky to read. I found myself in places I had not known were there, crooked alleyways and sudden, broad, deserted spaces, and dead-end streets under railway bridges where parked cars basked fatly in the evening sun, their toy-coloured roofs agleam. I ate a hamburger in a glass-walled café with moulded plastic chairs and tinfoil ashtrays, where people sat alone and gnawed at their food like frightened children abandoned by their parents. The daylight died slowly, leaving a barred, red and gold sunset smeared on the sky, and as I walked along it was like walking under the surface of a broad, burning river. The evening crowds were out, girls in tight trousers and high heels, and brawny young men with menacing haircuts. In the hot, hazy dusk the streets seemed wider, flattened, somehow, and the cars scudded along, sleek as seals in the sodium glare. I got back late to Charlie's house, footsore, hot and dishevelled, my hat awry, but filled with a mysterious sense of achievement. And that night I dreamed about my father. He was a miniature version of himself, a wizened child with a moustache, dressed in a sailor suit, his pinched little face scrubbed and his hair neatly parted, leading by the hand a great, tall, dark-eyed matron wearing Greek robes and a crown of myrtle, who fixed me with a lewd, forgiving smile.
I have had a shock. My counsel has been to see me today, bringing an extraordinary piece of news. Usually I enjoy our little conferences, in a lugubrious sort of way. We sit at a square table in a small airless room with no windows. The walls are painted filing-cabinet grey. Light from a strip of neon tubing above our heads sifts down upon us like a fine-grained mist. The bulb makes a tiny, continuous buzzing. Maolseachlai
By the way, what an odd formulation that is: to get life. Words so rarely mean what they mean.
Today I saw straight away he was in a state about something. He kept clawing at the collar of his shirt and clearing his throat, and taking off his half-glasses and putting them back on again. Also there was a smeary look in his eye. He hummed and hawed, and mumbled about the concept of justice, and the discretion of the courts, and other such folderol, I hardly listened to him. He was so mournful and ill at ease, shifting his big backside on the prison chair and looking everywhere except at me, that I could hardly keep from laughing. I pricked up my ears, though, when he started to mutter something about the possibility of my making a guilty plea – and this after all the time and effort he expended at the begi
Maolseachlai
I have been doing calculations in my head – it keeps my mind off other things – and I find to my surprise that I spent no more than ten days in all at Charlie's house, from midsummer day, or night, rather, until the last, momentous day of June. That is ten, isn't it? Thirty days hath September, April, June – yes, ten. Or is it nine. It's nine nights, certainly. But where does the day end and the night start, and vice versa? And why do I find the night a more easily quantifiable entity than day? I have never been any good at this kind of thing. The simpler the figures the more they fox me. Anyway. Ten days, thereabouts, more or less, is the length of my stay with Charlie French, whose hospitality and kindness I did not mean to betray. It seemed a longer time than that. It seemed weeks and weeks. I was not unhappy there. That's to say, I was no more unhappy there than I would have been somewhere else. Unhappy! What a word! As the days went on I grew increasingly restless. My nerves seethed, and there was a permanent knot of pain in my guts. I suffered sudden, furious attacks of impatience. Why didn't they come for me, what were they doing? In particular I resented the Behrenses' silence, I was convinced they were playing a cruel game with me. But all the time, behind all these agitations, there was that abiding, dull, flat sensation. I felt disappointed. I felt let down. The least I had expected from the enormities of which I was guilty was that they would change my life, that they would make things happen, however awful, that there would be a constant succession of heart-stopping events, of alarms and sudden frights and hairbreadth escapes. I do not know how I got through the days. I awoke each morning with an anguished start, as if a pure, distilled drop of pain had plopped on my forehead. That big old house with its smells and cobwebs was oppressive. I drank a lot, of course, but not enough to make myself insensible. I tried to achieve oblivion, God knows, I poured in the booze until my lips went numb and my knees would hardly bend, but it was no good, I could not escape myself. I waited with a lover's rapt expectancy for the evenings, when I would put on my hat and my new clothes – my new mask! – and step forth gingerly, a quavering Dr Jekyll, inside whom that other, terrible creature chafed and struggled, lusting for experience. I felt I had never until now looked at the ordinary world around me, the people, places, things. How i