Even the Dead by Benjamin Black

U-turn. He got into the back seat. The driver was a countryman with a large round head and red ears.
    “Upper Mount Street,” Quirke said.
    Home, he thought. It wasn’t a term he often brought to mind, not when he was thinking of himself, anyway.
    *   *   *
    And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of bruised blue radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled. Serene: the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene. Why had he stayed so long at the Griffins’? Why in the first place had he let them take him into their arid lives, in that cold house?
    The flat smelled slightly musty, but it didn’t matter. Yes, he was home.
    He wondered what to do, how to pass this endless night. It was such a luxurious sensation, having again no one to please or even think about except himself. He couldn’t go to bed; he wouldn’t be able to sleep—who could sleep in these white nights? In the old days he would have gone round to the 47 on Haddington Road, or up to the Shelbourne, where he would have been bound to find someone to drink with him. But he couldn’t go back to that old life. If he started drinking now, he’d never stop. He had fallen off the wagon too many times and had the bruises to show for it, the permanent lacerations.
    He took his hat and went down to the street.
    The whores were out, half a dozen of them, the elderly one with the walking stick who had been in business for as long as he had lived here, and a couple of youngish ones, too, dressed in black and stark as crows, who must be new on the game since he hadn’t encountered them before. He often wondered about their lives, where they came from, how they had ended up on the streets. He might have talked to them, asked them about themselves, but he could never work up the courage. He had been brought up in a male world, a world first of priests and Christian Brothers, then of medical students, then doctors, like himself. He had known women too, of course, but it had always been a special kind of knowing, one that stopped just below the surface or, in most cases, just above it. Would things have been different for him if there had been a mother to take care of him, to teach him things, to let him in on the secrets that only mothers were privy to? He would never know. But he supposed he was exaggerating the preciousness of all the things he had not known.
    It was a sweet, secret luxury, to feel sorry for himself now and then, to lament his losses and his woes.
    Sometimes it seemed to him that all his life he had been standing with his back to a high wall, on the other side of which an endless circus show was going on. Now and then there would come to him on the breeze the sound of a drumroll, or a snatch of brassy music, a gasp of wonderment or a surge of raucous laughter from the crowd. Why could he not scale the wall, haul himself up the side of it, even if his hands bled, his fingernails splintered, and jump down and run to the flap of the big top and peer in? Just to see what the performance looked like, even if he didn’t go inside, even if he were only to have that one, hindered glimpse of the dingy, sequined magic—that would be something.
    He walked along Merrion Square. The greenery behind the railings was giving off its nocturnal scents. He met no one. The whores didn’t come down this far, for some reason, but stayed around Mount Street and the canal, Fitzwilliam Square, Hatch Street. He was aware of a pleasantly melancholy sensation around his heart, as soft and pervasive as the fragrance of the trees and the plants. He was alive. It seemed an amazing fact, the unlikeliness of it, this mysterious and seemingly aimless project