Shroud by John Banville

into the street, and something from outside kept flashing through the window into my eyes, some reflection from glass or metal. I was well on the way to being drunk. Without thinking to do it I reached out and took one of Cass Cleave’s hands in both of mine and smiled my compelling smile again, showing my teeth. What a spectacle we must have been for the other lunchers in the place, the rank old roué pawing this pale girl and grinning like a horse. “Come with me,” I said, gallant and jocular, “I want to show you the place where an old friend used to live.” She was looking at her hand resting in mine, her head tilted to one side, with an expression of puzzlement, as if no one had ever held her hand before. I brushed my fingertips along her palm; it was warm and unexpectedly hard. When she lowered her eyes the lids, mauve-tinted, slightly glossy, were so rounded and taut they seemed almost transparent.
    I looked about and the waiter came, a spry cadaver nearly as old as myself, bringing the bill, his moist fish-eye not quite looking at the girl’s hand and mine where they lay together on the wine-stained tablecloth amid the empty coffee cups and the greasy glasses and the bristling ashtray. Cass Cleave had turned aside again to gaze at nothing, expressionless now. What was she thinking, what could she be thinking? Her hard hand, bird-warm, beat softly in mine, as if it contained a tiny heart of its own. Its serious weight was a sudden, shocking reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, taking my breath away. So many of the things were blunted now that in my youth would have pierced me like . . . like what? I did not know, I had lost the thread of the thought. I let go of the girl’s hand and stood up quickly, knocking over my chair, and this time she did reach out to help me, and it was as well she did, for otherwise I am sure I would have fallen down. I leaned on her arm, swearing, and beat at my dead leg furiously with my fist. The ancient waiter shuffled forward to assist me, clucking as at a misbehaving child. I shoved past him and staggered to the door. Outside, in the sun, I walked a few steps and had to halt and lean with my back against a wall. I looked up at the sky; it seemed to be throbbing, slowly, hugely. I felt dizzy, and had again that sense of displacement, of shifting and separation, that I had experienced the previous day before the mirror in the hotel bathroom, but more strongly now. I wondered without alarm if I were undergoing a heart attack, or suffering a stroke. Cass Cleave was trying to take my arm again. “It’s nothing!” I cried. I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt. I was laughing, laughing and coughing, in a euphoria of drunkenness and dizziness and rage. There sleeps in me another self who at moments such as this will start awake in amazement at all that is happening, all this life, the unlikeliness of it. The girl stood before me, frowning on my disarray. I swore at her. Another flash of light struck my eyes—was it coming from inside the doorway of that church?
Ave, Deus caecans!
I fumbled and let fall my walking stick, it made a rattling as of bones. She crouched to pick it up and I would have kicked her had I not been afraid that if I did so I would lose my balance and fall headlong on the pavement. My heart was clenching like a fist. I snatched the stick from her hand and turned and poled myself off along the pavement, cursing.
    Fury, fury and fear, these are the fuels that drive me, mixed in equal measure: fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am. If one day one or other of these forces should run out the violent equilibrium sustaining me will fail and I shall collapse, or fly off helplessly with farts and whistles, like a slipped balloon. Even when I was young . . . but no, no, I do not want to start remembering