Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

than everyone around him. He realized suddenly that he was missing Isabel. He was glad she was not young, at least not young like this nurse or like the couple he had encountered in the doorway, half-grown-up children. When he smiled at the nurse she blushed and bent her head and pretended to be looking for something on the desk.
    He went down the big curving marble staircase, and as he did so he had, as always, the panicky yet not entirely unpleasant sensation of slowly submerging into some dim, soft, intangible element. He thought again of being a child at Carricklea and how when he was having his weekly bath and if there was no Christian Brother around to stop him he would let himself slide underneath the water until he was entirely submerged. He would keep his eyes open, for he liked the shiny, swaying look of things through the water, the gleaming taps and the rippling edge of the bath and the ceiling that all at once appeared immensely far off above him. Often he had stayed like that for so long it had seemed, thrillingly, that his lungs would burst. More than once, when things were bad, and things at Carricklea could be very bad indeed, he had thought of keeping himself under until he drowned, but had never been able to summon up the courage to do it. Besides, if there was a world waiting for him on the far side of death he had a strong suspicion it would be another version of Carricklea, only worse.
    At the foot of the stairs he turned left along the green-painted corridor. The walls down here had a permanent damp sheen, like sweat, and the air smelled of formaldehyde.
    Why, he wondered, did he think so much about the past? The past, after all, was where he had been most unhappy. If only he could forget Carricklea his life, he was sure, would be different, would be lighter, freer, happier. But Carricklea would not let him forget, not ever.
    Bolger, the porter, with mop and bucket, was swabbing the floor of the dissecting room. He was smoking a cigarette; it dangled from his lower lip with a good inch and a half of ash attached to it. Bolger, Quirke reflected, could smoke for Ireland in the Olympics and would win a gold medal every time. How he managed to keep the fag adhering to his lip like that, without the ash falling off, was a mystery. He was a stunted fellow with a sallow face and a big set of badly fitting dentures through which, when he spoke, tiny whistling sounds escaped, like faint background music. Quirke, as far as he could recall, had never seen him without his drab-green coat, which gave him, oddly, something of the look of a greengrocer.
    “Morning, Ambrose,” Quirke said. Everyone else called him Ambie, but Quirke always gave the name its full flourish, for the mild comedy of it.
    Bolger returned the greeting with an awful grin, showing off those outsized and unnervingly regular teeth. “Rain again,” he said with grim satisfaction.
    Quirke went into his office and sat down at his desk and lit up a Senior Service. He still had that tinny taste in his mouth. The strip of fluorescent lighting in the ceiling made a continuous fizzing. There was a slit of window high up in the wall that was level with the pavement outside, where heavy rain was still falling. Now and then a passerby was to be seen, the feet only, hurrying past, oblivious of walking over this place of the dead.
    Bolger came to the open door, mop in hand, bringing with him a whiff of stale water. “There’s a new one in,” he said. “Fished out of the canal in the small hours. Y oung fellow.”
    Quirke sighed. He had been looking forward to an idle morning. “Where’s Dr. Sinclair?” he asked.
    “Off today, I believe.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    Bolger detached the cigarette from his lip and knocked the ash from it into his cupped palm. Quirke could see he was getting ready for a chat, and stood up quickly from the desk. “Let’s have a look at him,” he said.
    Bolger sniffed. “Hang on.” He laid his mop aside and crossed to one of the big steel sinks and dropped the cigarette ash from his palm into it, then went out and returned a moment later wheeling a trolley with a body draped in a nylon sheet. The rubber wheels of the trolley squeaked on the wet tiles, setting up a brief buzzing in Quirke’s back molars. He wondered how many years there were to go before Bolger’s retirement; the man could be any age from fifty to seventy-five.
    Bolger had reinserted the butt of his cigarette into the left side of his mouth and