Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black

like, being an orphan?”
    “Smashing,” he said.
    “Did they beat you in that place you were in, in Connemara—what was the name of it?”
    “Carricklea Industrial School, so-called. Yes, they beat us. Why wouldn’t they?”
    Dull smack of leather on flesh in the gray light of morning, the huge, bare windows above him like indifferent witnesses looking down upon one more scene of hurt and humiliation. He had been big enough to defend himself against the other boys in the place, but the Brothers were another matter: there was no defending against them.
    “Until Granddad rescued you?” Quirke said nothing. She joggled his arm. “Come on. Tell me.”
    He shrugged.
    “The Judge was on the board of visitors,” he said. “He took an interest in me, God knows why, and got me away from Carricklea and sent me to a proper school. Adopted me, as good as, him and Nana Griffin.”
    Phoebe kept a thoughtful silence for the space of a dozen steps. Then she said: “You and Daddy must have been like brothers.”
    Quirke fairly cackled. “He wouldn’t care to hear you say it now.”
    They stopped on a corner, under the grainy light of a lamp standard. The night was hushed, the big houses behind their hedges shut fast, the windows dark in all but a few of them.
    “Have you any idea who your parents were, the real ones?” Phoebe asked.
    He shrugged again, and after a moment said: “There are worse things than being an orphan.”
    A light was flickering through the leaves above them. It was the moon. He shivered; he was cold. Such distances, such deeps! Then there was a blur of movement and suddenly Phoebe had thrown her arms around him and was kissing him full on the mouth, avidly, clumsily. Her breath tasted of gin, and something that he thought might be caramel. He could feel her breasts against his chest, and the springy struts of her underwear. He pushed her away. “What are you doing!” he cried, and wiped a hand violently across his mouth. She stood before him staring in shock, her body seeming to vibrate, as if she had been struck. She tried to say something but her mouth slid askew, and with tears welling in her eyes she turned and ran back towards the house. He turned, too, and strode off drunkenly in the opposite direction, stiff-legged and snorting, his hurrying footsteps those of a man in flight.

3

    QUIRKE LIKED M c GONAGLE’S BEST IN THE EARLY EVENING, WHEN there was no one in but a few of the regulars, that skinny type at the end of the bar poring over the racing pages and ruminatively scratching his crotch, or that slightly famous dipso poet, in cloth cap and hobnailed boots, glaring at a spark of tawny light in the bottom of his whiskey glass. There was the memorials page in the Evening Mail to read— O Mammy dear we miss you still, We did not know you were so ill —and Davy the barman’s awful, raspily murmured jokes to listen to. It was peaceful, sitting there on the stained, red-velvet banquette that smelled like a railway carriage, browsing and drowsing, soothed by whiskey and cigarette smoke and the prospect of the long, lazy hours until closing time. And so, when that particular evening he heard someone approach his table and stop, and looked up and saw that it was Mal, he did not know which he felt more strongly, surprise or irritation.
    “Christ! Mal! What are you doing here?”
    Mal sat down on a low stool without being invited and gestured at Quirke’s glass. “What’s that?”
    “Whiskey,” Quirke said. “It’s called whiskey, Mal. Distilled from grain. Makes you drunk.”
    Mal lifted a hand and Davy approached, stooping mournfully and snuffling a silver droplet back up his nose. “I’ll have one of those,” Mal said, pointing again at Quirke’s drink. “A whiskey.” It might have been a bowl of sacrificial blood he was asking for.
    “Right, boss,” Davy said, and padded away.
    Quirke watched Mal looking about the place and pretending to be interested in what he saw. He was ill