Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

“He was beaten to death, as I say. Kicked, and so on. I hardly recognized him, when they brought him in.”
    She lifted her head. “ Y ou did the postmortem?”
    “There was no one else.”
    “Doesn’t it”—her gaze drifted back to the fire—“doesn’t it trouble you, doing that to someone you know?”
    “I couldn’t do my job if I let it trouble me.”
    She gave her head a dismissive toss. “Yes yes, of course. Y ou always say that, and I always forget you’re going to say it.”
    He looked at a framed photograph beside his elbow. There were four people in the picture, and two of them, his wife and her sister, were dead. He had loved them both. “A corpse is a corpse,” he said, sounding harsher than he had intended. “There’s no one there anymore. Hard to care for flesh when the soul is gone.”
    She laughed, a soft snort. “I thought you didn’t believe in the soul.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Then what is it that’s alive, what is it that goes when the body dies?”
    “I’ve no idea.” He was tired .
    She looked at him and smiled sadly. “ Y ou’ve lived too long among the dead, Quirke,” she said.
    He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I have.” She was not the first one to have told him that, and she would not be the last.
    * * *

    He liked the coolness of her bare flank under his hand, when she lay on her side like this, turned away from him, lightly sleeping. The bed was not really wide enough to accommodate their two recumbent bodies. His right arm, trapped under her, had gone to sleep, but he left it there for fear of waking her. He had turned off the bedside lamp, and the moon was in a high-up corner of the window, a fat indifferent eye watching over the world. In his thoughts he was seeing yet again the dark canal, the silent towpath. What was out there in the night that he was longing for? Rest, quiet, escape. Death, maybe. But what kind of death? Isabel was right, he had seen too many corpses, had sectioned them out and delved into their innards, to entertain any illusions about what the priests used to call our final going forth. Dying, he was convinced, was no more than an ending.
    No, what he yearned for in his deepest heart was not death, not the grand and terrible thing that priests and poets spoke of, but rather a state of nonexistence, of simply not being here. Yet that state was unthinkable, for in it there would be no being—it would not be him, inexistent, but not-him. It would not be a state at all. It would be nothing, and nothing is inconceivable. All his life, for as long as he could remember, he had wrestled with this conundrum. Was that why he had become a pathologist, in hope of penetrating nearer to the heart of the mystery? If so, it had been in vain. The dead did not give up their secrets, for they had none; they had nothing, were nothing, only a parcel of blood and bones, gone cold.
    Without his realizing it, his hand must have tightened on the soft flesh above Isabel’s hip, for suddenly she started awake and tried to sit up, leaning on an elbow. “What?” she said sharply. “What is it?” He touched his fingers to her face soothingly, cupped her cheek in his palm, and said it was all right. She lay down again slowly on her side, facing him now. “I was dreaming,” she murmured. She was staring into the darkness, he could see the glint of her eyes in the moonlight. “Something about my—something about my father. He was crying.” She moved forward, pressing her face against his shoulder. He reached past her and switched on the bedside lamp. Isabel whimpered in protest and clung the more tightly to him. He scrabbled for his cigarettes, found them, lit one. Isabel drew back, sighing. “Where’s my slip?” she said. “I’m perished.”
    He got out of bed and picked up her clothes from where she had piled them on a chair; in the deeper folds there was still a trace of the warmth of her body. How long had they been in bed? “Give me the blouse,” Isabel said. “It’s warmer.”
    She took it from him and put it on, squirming amid the clinging bedclothes. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing a dressing gown. Isabel was sitting with her back against a bank of pillows, combing her fingers ineffectually through her hair. “ Y ou shouldn’t smoke so late at night,” she said distractedly.
    He sat down on the side of the bed, half turned away from her. She smiled, and lifted a hand and touched the comma of hair at the nape of his neck. “ Y