Texas Pages

Quirke did not recognize the name. it seemed familiar but
he could not put a face to it. Occasionally it happened
that way; someone would float up without warning out of his
past, his drinking past, someone he had forgotten, asking
for a loan or offering to let him in on a sure thing or
just wanting to make contact, out of loneliness, or only to
know that he was still alive and that the drink had not
done for him. Mostly he put them off, mumbling about
pressure of work and the like. This one should have been
easy, since it was just a name and a telephone number left
with the hospital receptionist, and he could have
conveniently lost the piece of paper or simply thrown it
away. Something caught his attention, however. He had an
impression of urgency, of unease, which he could not
account for and which troubled him.

Billy Hunt.

What was it the name sparked in him? Was it a lost memory
or, more worryingly, a premonition?

He put the scrap of paper on a corner of his desk and tried
to ignore it. At the dead center of summer the day was hot
and muggy, and in the streets the barely breathable air was
laden with a thin pall of mauve smoke, and he was glad of
the cool and quiet of his windowless basement office in the
pathology department. He hung his suit jacket on the back
of his chair and pulled off his tie without undoing the
knot and opened two buttons of his shirt and sat down at
the cluttered metal desk. He liked the familiar smell here,
a combination of old cigarette smoke, tea leaves, paper,
formaldehyde, and something else, musky, fleshly, that was
his particular contribution.

He lit a cigarette and his eye drifted again to the paper
with Billy Hunt's message on it. Just the name and the
number that the operator had scribbled down in pencil, and
the words "please call." The sense of urgent imploring was
stronger than ever. Please call.

For no reason he could think of he found himself
remembering the moment in McGonagle's pub half a year ago
when, dizzily drunk amidst the din of Christmas reveling,
he had caught sight of his own face, flushed and bulbous
and bleary, reflected in the bottom of his empty whiskey
glass and had realized with unaccountable certitude that he
had just taken his last drink. Since then he had been
sober. He was as amazed by this as was anyone who knew him.
He felt that it was not he who had made the decision, but
that somehow it had been made for him. Despite all his
training and his years in the dissecting room he had a
secret conviction that the body has a consciousness of its
own, and knows itself and its needs as well as or better
than the mind imagines that it does. The decree delivered
to him that night by his gut and his swollen liver and the
ventricles of his heart was absolute and incontestable. For
nearly two years he had been falling steadily into the
abyss of drink, falling almost as far as he had in the
time, two decades before, after his wife had died, and now
the fall was broken--

Squinting at the scrap of paper on the corner of the desk,
he lifted the telephone receiver and dialed. The bell
jangled afar down the line.

--Afterwards, out of curiosity, he had upended another
whiskey glass, this time one he had not emptied, to find if
it was really possible to see himself in the bottom of it,
but no reflection had appeared there.

The sound of Billy Hunt's voice was no help; he did not
recognize it any more readily than he had the name. The
accent was at once flat and singsong, with broad vowels and
dulled consonants. A countryman. There was a slight flutter
in the tone, a slight wobble, as if the speaker might be
about to burst into laughter, or into something else. Some
words he slurred, hurrying over them. Maybe he was tipsy?

"Ah, you don't remember me," he said. "Do you?"

"Of course I do," Quirke lied.

"Billy Hunt. You used to say it sounded like rhyming slang.
We were in college together. I was in first year when you
were in your last. I didn't really expect you to remember
me. We went with different crowds. I was mad into the
sports--hurling, football, all that--while you were with the
arty lot, with your nose stuck in a book or over at the
Abbey or the Gate every night of the week. I dropped out of
the medicine--didn't have the stomach for it."

Quirke let a beat of silence pass, then asked: "What are
you doing now?"

Billy Hunt gave a heavy, unsteady sigh. "Never mind that,"
he said, sounding more weary than impatient. "It's your job
that's the point here."

At last a face began to assemble itself in Quirke's
laboring memory. Big broad forehead, definitively broken
nose, a thatch of wiry red hair, freckles. Grocer's son
from somewhere down south, Wicklow, Wexford, Waterford, one
of the W counties. Easygoing but prone to scrap when
provoked, hence the smashed septum. Billy Hunt. Yes.

"My job?" Quirke said. "How's that?"

There was another pause.

"It's the wife," Billy Hunt said. Quirke heard a sharply
indrawn breath whistling in those crushed nasal cavities.
"She's after doing away with herself."

Copyright © 2008 by Benjamin Black. All rights reserved.