The silence was swelling like a tumour at my back.
Hurriedly I fetched my plate with the fried egg and greying rashers from the kitchen, taking the stairs three at a time, and came back and opened the window and clambered on to the narrow, wrought-iron balcony outside. A strong, warm wind was blowing, it startled me, and left me breathless for a moment. I picked up the pieces of food and flung them into the air, and watched the gulls swooping after the rich tidbits, crying harshly in surprise and greed. From behind the headland a white ship glided soundlessly into view, shimmering in the haze. When the food was gone I threw the plate away too, I don't know why, skimmed it like a discus out over the road and the harbour wall. It slid into the water with hardly a splash. There were strings of lukewarm fat between my fingers and egg-yolk under my nails. I climbed back into the room and wiped my hands on the bedclothes, my heart pounding in excitement and disgust. I did not know what I was doing, or what I would do next. I did not know myself. I had become a stranger, unpredictable and dangerous.
I explored the house. I had never been here before. It was a great, gaunt, shadowy place with dark drapes and big brown furniture and bald spots in the carpets. It was not exactly dirty, but there was a sense of staleness, of things left standing for too long in the same spot, and the air had a grey, dull feel to it, as if a vital essence in it had been used up long ago. There was a smell of must and stewed tea and old newspapers, and, everywhere, a flattish, faintly sweet something which I took to be the afterglow of Mammy French. I suppose there will be guffaws if I say I am a fastidious man, but it's true. I was already in some distress before I started poking among Charlie's things, and I feared what I might find. His sad little secrets were no nastier than mine, or anyone else's, yet when here and there I turned over a stone and they came scuttling out, I shivered, and was ashamed for him and for myself. I steeled myself, though, and persevered, and was rewarded in the end. There was a rolltop desk in his bedroom, which took me ten minutes of hard work with a kitchen knife to unlock, squatting on my heels and sweating beads of pure alcohol. Inside I found some banknotes and a plastic wallet of credit cards. There were letters, too – from my mother, of all people, written thirty, forty years before. I did not read them, I don't know why, but put them back reverently, along with the credit cards, and even the cash, and locked the desk again. As I was going out I exchanged a shamefaced little grin with ray reflection in the wardrobe mirror. That German, what's his name, was right: money is abstract happiness.
The bathroom was on the first-floor return, a sort of wooden lean-to with a gas geyser and a gigantic, claw-footed bath. I crouched over the hand-basin and scraped off two days' growth of stubble with Charlie's soap-encrusted razor. I had thought of growing a beard, for disguise, but I had lost enough of myself already, I did not want my face to disappear as well. The shaving-glass had a concave, silvery surface in which my magnified features – a broad, pitted jaw, one black nose-hole with hairs, a single, rolling eyeball – bobbed and swayed alarmingly, like things looming in the window of a bathysphere. When I had finished I got into the tub and lay with my eyes shut while the water cascaded down on me from the geyser. It was good, at once a solace and a scalding chastisement, if the gas had not eventually gone out I might have stayed there all day, lost to myself and everything else in that roaring, tombal darkness. When I opened my eyes tiny stars were whizzing and popping in front of me. I padded, dripping, into Charlie's room, and spent a long time deciding what to wear. In the end I chose a dark-blue silk shirt and a somewhat louche, flowered bow-tie to go with it. Black socks, of course – silk again: Charlie is not one to stint himself – and a pair of dark trousers, baggy but well cut, of a style which was antique enough to have come back into fashion. For the present I would do without underwear: even a killer on the run has his principles, and mine precluded getting into another man's drawers. My own clothes – how odd they looked, thrown on the bedroom floor, as if waiting to be outlined in chalk – I gathered in a bundle, and with my face averted carried them to the kitchen and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. Then I washed and dried the breakfast things, and was standing in the middle of the floor with a soiled tea-towel in my hand when the image of her bloodied face shot up in front of me like something in a fairground stall, and I had to sit down, winded and shaking. For I kept forgetting, you see, forgetting all about it, for quite long periods. I suppose my mind needed respite, in order to cope. Wearily I looked about the big dank kitchen. I wondered if Charlie would notice there was a plate missing. Why did I throw it into the sea, why did I do that? It was not yet noon. Time opened its black maw in my face. I went into one of the front rooms – net curtains, vast dining-table, a stuffed owl under glass – and stood at the window looking out at the sea. All that blue out there was daunting. I paced the floor, stopped, stood listening, my heart in my mouth. What did I expect to hear? There was nothing, only the distant noise of other lives, a tiny ticking and plinking, like the noise of an engine cooling down. I remembered days like this in my childhood, strange, empty days when I would wander softly about the silent house and seem to myself a kind of ghost, hardly there at all, a memory, a shadow of some more solid version of myself living, oh, living marvellously, elsewhere.
I must stop. I'm sick of myself, all this.
Time. The days.
Go on, go on.
Disgust, now, that is something I know about. Let me say a word or two about disgust. Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move. Mites live on me, they lap my sweat, stick their snouts into my pores and gobble up the glop they find there. Then the split skin, the cracks, the crevices. Hair: just think of hair. And this is only the surface. Imagine what is going on inside, the purple pump shuddering and squelching, lungs fluttering, and, down in the dark, the glue factory at its ceaseless work. Animate carrion, slick with gleet, not ripe enough yet for the worms. Ach, I should – Calm, Frederick. Calm.