Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

front of him on a horizontal and so close up to his own that he could see the gray stubble on the other’s ancient, wrinkled chin.
    “Will I give you a hand?” the old fellow said, speaking with measured distinctness, as if he were addressing a child. Quirke had an image of himself being hauled to his feet and of the two of them tottering together down the steps hand in hand, both of them bent over, with limbs akimbo, like a pair of chimps, the old one leading the younger and hooting soft encouragements. “No no,” he said, “no, I’m fine.”
    At last he got himself up and stood swaying. His knees seemed to be all right, after all. The old man squinted up at him, that tawny side tooth bared again. “Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of tea,” he said.
    They made their way through the house again, the old man going ahead, hobbling along crablike at a surprisingly rapid pace, paddling the air beside him as before with a long and seemingly boneless hand. The pounding in Quirke’s chest had subsided, though he was weak all over, as if he had come to the end of some extended and inhumanly demanding task. Yet he was certain now that he would survive. This knowledge afforded him curiously little comfort. On the contrary, he had a vexed sense of having been let down, by someone, or something. There had been a moment, out there on the front step, while he had watched the questing blackbird, when everything had seemed on the point of a grand, final resolution. It was not death he had been cheated of, he thought, for even death was incidental to whatever it was that had been coming and had not come, that had been withheld from him, at the last instant.
    “How are you doing there?” the old man asked, twisting round and glancing back at him. “Are you all right?”
    “Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, I am, I’m all right.”
    It came to him suddenly: Nike. It was Nike, the memory of him, that had sent him stumbling in a panic out of Father Dangerfield’s room. Nike, with his thin smile, an eyebrow permanently cocked, a cigarette smoldering in his slender fingers. Nike the Inevitable.
    The kitchen to which the old man led him was an enormous room with grayish-white tiled walls and a long refectory table of scrubbed deal, and two big twin stone sinks with old-fashioned copper taps stained with verdigris. There was a mighty stove, too, the top of it black and the sides the color of porridge, and there were ranks of pots and pans, venerable and battered, hanging on hooks about the walls. A big metal-framed window looked out on a concrete yard where dustbins loitered, their lids askew, like mendicants waiting in hope of scraps. All this was somehow familiar.
    “Sit yourself down there now,” the old man said, and went to fill a kettle at one of the sinks.
    Quirke sat. It seemed to him that he was suspended inside himself, intricate and frail, like a ship in a bottle.
    The dissecting room, that was what this kitchen looked like. The light was the same, stark white and shadowless, and there was a sense of chill numbness, as if the very air had been anesthetised.
    The old man, still holding the kettle under the running tap, gave him a sly, backwards glance. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a bit stronger?” he said, and winked.
    Quirke said nothing, but the old man nodded knowingly and put the kettle aside. He went out through a narrow door into what must have been the scullery, whence there came a clink of glass, and he reappeared cradling in both hands, like a baby, a bottle of Powers Gold Label. “Would you ever,” he said, “get yourself down one of them tumblers off of that shelf.”
    Nike, at Carricklea. Dean of Discipline; the title had always struck Quirke as absurdly grand. His name was Gallagher, Father Aloysius Gallagher. No one knew why he had been called after a Greek goddess, for the nickname had been conferred on him immemorially. He was tall and thin, like Father Dangerfield, had the same scraped-looking dry jaw, and wore the same kind of wire-framed spectacles. He had sour breath and his soutane always smelled of stale tobacco. He chain-smoked, holding the cigarette in a curious fashion, not between the first and middle but between the middle and third fingers of his left hand, even though he was right-handed. Sitting at his desk, with his bony knees crossed under his soutane and that hand held upright with the fag in it, like the hand of the Sacred Heart statue lifted in benediction, he had