Ghosts by John Banville Page B

wrapped round his knees and watching them from under half-closed lids. Circumspectly then they advanced and stood beside me and we stared all three into the fire. Around us the wind swept wetly through the trees and the leaves dripped and the damp sunlight flickered. Each fresh gust brought with it faintly thesound of the sea: the far, faint thud of waves and the hiss of water running on the shingle. I closed my eyes and the past was like a melody I had lost that was starting to come back, I could hear it in my mind, a tiny, thin, heartbreaking music.
    ‘What’s this place called?’ Hatch asked.
    ‘The Land of Nod,’ I said, and they laughed without conviction and then lapsed again into silence.
    I studied them with covert attention. Hatch was sly and unhappy and Pound was sharper than he looked. Pound’s mother was supposed to have accompanied them on the boat trip but something had come up. He frowned into the fire, gnawing his lip. I wondered what his mammy would say if she knew her plump little boy was consorting unchaperoned with the ogre himself in the wild wood now. Sometimes I wonder if it was wise of the authorities to free me like this. But perhaps they knew me better than I know myself? I am harmless, I’m sure. Fairly harmless. No longer dangerous, anyway. Or not very.
    Hatch said nothing; Hatch had no mother.
    A strong gust shook the trees and the wet leaves clattered.
    ‘This is worse than at home,’ Pound said with sudden vehemence and kicked the embers at the fire’s margin. ‘Nothing to bloody do.’
    I remembered suddenly how when I was young like them I sat in a hazel wood one winter Sunday by a damply smoking fire like this one as night came on and a boy whose name I cannot recall (Reck, I think it was, or Rice) arrived and told us a woman had been beaten to death in her sweetshop down a lane. I pictured the scene, distorted, wavering, the colours seeping into each other, as if I were looking at it all through bottle-glass, and felt fearful and inexplicably guilty. I have never forgotten that moment, that sudden, blood-boltered vision, intense as if I had been there myself. First such stain on my life.
    The boys watched me uncertainly, waiting for me tospeak. I said nothing. They must have thought I was cracked. I am, a little. I must be, surely. It would be a comfort to think so.
    A squashy, wet, warm smell rose from the greenery around us as the sun dried out the rain, and suddenly summer stood up out of the undergrowth like a gold man, dripping and ashine. Between the trees the lapis glint of sea. The air was gaudy with birdsong.
    I left them and made my way down the hillside, carrying a stick; my shirt, still damp, clung to my back. The wind had grown gay and the sun was hot. The house stood below me, closed on itself. I sat down on a rock under a flowering thorn bush. There are times when my mind goes dead, as if something had switched itself off in my head. Some mornings when I wake I do not remember who I am or what it is I have done. I will lie there for a minute or more, unwilling to stir, basking in the anaesthetic of forgetfulness. It is like being new-born. At such moments I glimpse a different self, as yet unblackened, ripe with potential, a sort of radiant big infant swaddled in shining light. Then it all comes seeping back, spreading like a slow, thick liquid through my mind. Yet sometimes even when I am fully awake, in the middle of the day, I will imagine for a second, as if I were walking in a dark place and suddenly stepped through a patch of sunlight, that none of it had happened, that I am what I might have been, an innocent man, though I know well I have never been innocent, nor, for that matter, have I ever been what could properly be called a man. Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life?