Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

immediately consoled a little: if he could complain to himself about so banal a thing as the weather then surely he was not dying.
    At last he freed himself from the bedclothes and stood up, then quickly sat down again, his head spinning. He shut his eyes but that made the dizziness worse. His hands were clutching the edge of the mattress. Everything seemed about to tip over, as if he were sitting on the deck of a foundering ship. Then, gradually, his brain righted itself and he stood up again, more cautiously this time. He went to the wardrobe and searched in the pockets of his jacket hanging there and found his cigarette case. He had always liked the smell of mothballs. What was it they were made of? Camphor. Was that the word? He mumbled it aloud: “Camphor.” It did not sound right; it sounded like a nonsense word.
    He went back and sat on the side of the bed again and lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled like singed hair.
    Isabel—where was Isabel? She had been here in the night and now she was gone. Then he remembered that she had left in the early hours, had called a taxi and gone home. It was tacitly understood between them that on these occasions she would not stay the night; Quirke liked his mornings to himself.
    He went out to the living room. A parallelogram of insipid sunlight lay on the floor under the window like the parts of a broken kite. He stood and looked about himself, feeling dazed. The morning’s watercolor tints lent a novel sheen to familiar surfaces. Everything was as it always was, yet somehow he could recognize nothing. It was as if all that was formerly here had been swept away in the night and replaced with a shiny new version of itself, identical in every aspect, yet one-dimensional and hollow, like props in a fantastically detailed stage setting.
    He walked into the kitchen and saw Isabel sitting at the table in a haze of cigarette smoke, wearing a dark blue dress and high heels, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. The silky stuff of her dress had a metallic glitter that hurt his eyes; he shut them for a second, and when he opened them again no one was there. I’m seeing things, he thought. The commonplace phrase, trite and harmless, had never before struck such fear into his heart.
    He took extra care shaving that morning. His hand was steady enough, but that was more than could be said for his thoughts. A small fuzzy something lay at the center of his consciousness, an unfocused point that seemed to be throbbing in time with his pulse. Everything around him had a discolored look, the bathroom shelves, the shaving mirror, the porcelain sink—the very air in the room, as if a heavy gas had seeped out of the walls and spread itself everywhere. He knew from experience how certain dreams, weighty and disordered, could infect the waking world for hours, sometimes for days. But had he been dreaming? On the way from the bathroom he stopped in the kitchen doorway again and looked at the table where half an hour ago he could have sworn he had seen Isabel sitting, smiling at him. Everything about the scene had seemed solid, and real, even the incongruously formal outfit the phantom woman had been wearing.
    What could they mean, these convincingly vivid hallucinations, first the old man at Trinity Manor and now Isabel—what did they signify?
    He left the house and walked to the corner of Merrion Square. Sunlight glared on the wet pavements, though in the great trees the shadows of dawn still lingered. He hailed a taxi, and sat in the back seat, eyes fixed unseeing on the streets passing by. He felt as if he were made of an impossibly fine and breakable form of crystal.
    Inspector Hackett, it seemed, had not been as careful as Quirke with the morning razor, and had cut himself. A piece of lavatory paper with a stain of dark blood at its center was stuck to the side of his chin. He took his boots off his cluttered desk and stood up as Quirke was shown in. “There you are, Doctor!” he said brightly. “Isn’t it a grand morning? Do you like the spring, the birdies singing, all that?”
    Quirke did not bother to reply. The Inspector pointed him to the only chair in the room other than his own, a spindly hoop-backed affair that had seen better days. He sat down. Hackett had his jacket off and was in his shirtsleeves, his braces on display. Quirke eyed that tie of his. It was broad and greasy, and had once been red but was now so old and ingrained with dirt that in patches it