Read Online The Infinities by John Banville - Free Book Online Page A

the sunken roofs and spires, the streets where currents glide, the people phosphorescent as fish, drifting in and out of houses, through half-familiar rooms, their seahorse eyes wide open. He is frightened; he does not want to drown, as they have drowned; he knows that he soon will. He feels the tide drawing him on, drawing him on. He grasps at tendrils but they slip through his hands, slimy and cold. There is a gleam, a glint, but when he scrabbles in the sand he finds nothing, only shells and jagged coral and bits of bone, and all around him is soon obscured. His breath is running out. He feels his heart beat, hears the blood in his veins, a hollow, rushing roar. He struggles. The water coils around him, heavy aschains and ungraspable. A great bubble bursts from his mouth. Mother!—
    He wakes, but what he wakes to is not waking.
    He is once again in the humpbacked town above the estuary, with its church, its ruined tower, its steep-roofed, jostling houses. He sees it in raw April weather, a rinsed blue sky with smudges of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, fawn. From all the chimneys flaws of smoke fly back, as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea from here. The wind ruffles the widening river, pricking up white-caps. It is all there, compact and tiny, like a toy town in a snow-globe. He is a child, trudging up a hill beside a high, grey-stone wall. He wears a tweed coat with a half-belt at the back, and a peaked cap, and thick woollen stockings the tops of which are turned down to hide homemade, soiled white elastic garters. He has his satchel on his back. It is four o’clock. There are houses on the other side of the sharply tilted street, each one set a step higher up than the other. On the front door of one a black crape bow is tied to the knocker with a pasteboard card attached with a name on it, and dates, written in black ink. The door is ajar. Someone has died and anyone may go in to view the corpse. The town drunks are always there first, for a free drink in which to toast the dead man on his way. He stops and stands for a moment, looking at the house. He could go in. He could just push open the door and walk straight into the parlour. There would be someone there, a woman wearing black, standing with her hands folded in front of her, her eyes pink-rimmed and her nostrils inflamed along the edges. He would shake her thin, chilly hand and murmur something; it need not even be words. He would cross the room, his school shoes squeaking, and gaze down stonily at the dead person laid out inthe coffin in his unreal-looking suit, his waxen knuckles wound round with a rosary. There would be that smell, of lilies and ashes, which the recently dead give off, or which at least is always there when someone has died. The woman would offer him cake on a plate and a tumbler of tepid lemonade. There would be others there before him, sitting in the gloom on straight chairs ranged against the walls, gripping whiskey glasses in red fists or balancing cups and saucers on their knees, sighing and shifting, murmuring pious complacencies that set his teeth on edge.
    But he does not cross the road. Instead he turns and walks on up the long hill towards home.
    Spring winds flow through the streets like weightless water. The blued air of April. The trees tremble, their wet black branches powdered with puffs of green. The tarmac shines. A strong gust pummels the window-panes, making them shiver and throw off lances of light. The priest’s car passes, its tyres fizzing on the wet road. The boy salutes dutifully and in return is gravely blessed, as a reflected cloud slides smoothly, fish-like, over the windscreen.
    A fellow in an old black coat and corduroy trousers that are bald on the knees comes out of the church gate with a spade over his shoulder. Without stopping he leans sideways and shuts one nostril with a finger pressed along the side of it and from the other expertly ejects a bolus of snot.
    O lost, raw world!
    The house