Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

middle of the floor and framed and faded hunting prints on the walls. There was a single window, four square blank panes holding back the darkness. In a tiny grate in one corner a coal fire was burning. The air in the room was so warmly heavy that Quirke at once felt a headache starting up. The only light was that of a standing lamp beside the fireplace. Mal was sitting under the lamp in a ragged old green-upholstered armchair that sagged so low he seemed almost to be reclining on the floor. Now he put aside his newspaper and rose from the depths of the chair, uncoiling his long, angular frame—Quirke was reminded of the outsized wooden calipers that some Christian Brother in some institution long ago used to beat him with—and came forward, smiling, and fumbling with his rimless spectacles, which seemed to have got entangled somehow in his hair. “Quirke,” he said in greeting, “you’re looking well!”
    Quirke and Rose exchanged a glance.
    “How are you, Mal?” Quirke asked.
    Direct and simple questions always seemed to confuse Malachy. He had got his glasses off at last and stood blinking, still vaguely smiling. He wore a checked shirt and a dark red bow tie and a fawn cardigan with leather buttons in the shape of some kind of nut. Quirke glanced down and was surprised to see that his brother was wearing shoes, not slippers; over the years Mal had become definitively a carpet-slipper man.
    “How about a drink, boys?” Rose asked, setting a hand on her hip. “Quirke—what will you have?”
    “Brandy, if you’ve got it.”
    She gave him a wry look. “It’s the Dry Gulch Saloon here, Doc—you can get anything you want.”
    She went out, and the two men stood facing each other in a suddenly discomforted silence, which Mal at last broke. “ Y ou said on the phone you—” he began, but Quirke lifted a hand to stop him, saying, “Let’s wait till I’ve had my drink.” He looked about at the brown walls with their sporting prints dimly illumined by the lamp with its skin-colored shade. He felt a sudden sinking of the heart. What help would there be for him here? And yet he heard himself say, “I think I’m sick, Mal.”
    Mal nodded, as if this were not news at all. “In what way?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. My mind, my brain—I think there’s something wrong with it.”
    “Have you been drinking?”
    “For Christ’s sake, Mal!”
    “I don’t mean now, I mean have you been drinking lately? Have you been on a binge?”
    Quirke shook his head. “It’s not the drink.”
    “That’s what everyone says,” Mal said, with a faint smile.
    “Well, in my case it’s true,” Quirke snapped. “I know what it’s like, I’ve had the DTs. This is different.”
    Mal was gazing at him myopically, smiling with an almost mournful tenderness. “Yes,” he said “I can see you’re in distress. Tell me what I can do.”
    Quirke gave a sort of laugh. “I was hoping you ’d tell me that.”
    Rose came back then, carrying a silver tray with glasses, a brandy snifter, and a decanter and various bottles. “Here’s your medicine, Doctor,” she said to Quirke. She put the tray down on the table and picked up the decanter and began to pour. “Say when.”
    After she had distributed the drinks—Quirke’s goblet of brandy, a thimble of sherry for Mal, rye whiskey for herself, on the rocks—they sat down in front of the fire, she and Quirke on a small sofa covered in crimson velvet with bald patches and Mal reclining again in the green armchair with his long legs stretched out almost horizontally in front of him. The chair reminded Quirke of some aquatic animal, a denizen of moss-hung everglades.
    He fixed his eye on the heart of the fire, a tremulous white-hot hollow. “I’ve begun to see things,” he said. “I’m having hallucinations.” He sensed Rose and Malachy looking quickly at each other and away. He leaned forward heavily, nursing the brandy glass in both hands. Beside him Rose exhaled a breath and moved back on the sofa. He looked sidelong at the whiskey glass she was balancing on her knee. She would despise him, he knew, for what he was confessing. Rose did not believe in infirmities of the mind, put all that down to weakness and sickly self-indulgence.
    “What are these hallucinations?” Mal asked. He was running a fingertip around the rim of his sherry glass. If the glass were to produce the high-pitched note that glasses did when they were stroked like that, Quirke thought,