This Plague of Souls E-Book

Mike McCormack

• Herausgeber: Tramp Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Someone out there believes Nealon has a plan, a global blueprint for nothing less than a whole new beginning. But Nealon has other things on his mind. Returning home after the collapse of his trial he finds himself alone in a cold empty house. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. Barely in the door, Nealon's phone rings. The caller claims to know what's happened to Nealon's family. The man will tell him all that he needs to know in return for a conversation – that's all the caller wants, an exchange of views. It's an offer Nealon can't refuse. This Plague of Souls is at once a charged thriller of crime and absolution and a metaphysical enquiry into fractured society, fatherhood and the lengths a man might go to in order to save what he loves.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGECOUNTRY FEEDBACKNO TRAFFIC AND A DRY ROADTHIS PLAGUE OF SOULSALSO BY MIKE McCORMACKCOPYRIGHT

COUNTRY FEEDBACK

Opening the door and crossing the threshold in the dark triggers the phone in Nealon’s pocket. He lowers his bag to the floor and looks at the screen; it’s not a number he recognises. For the space of one airless heartbeat he has a sense of things drifting sideways, draining over an edge.

The side of his head is bathed in the forensic glow of the screen light.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re back.’

‘Hello?’

‘Welcome home, Nealon.’

‘Who am I talking to?’

‘Only a friend would call at this hour.’

The voice at the other end is male and downbeat, not the sort you would choose to listen to in the dark. Nealon is aware of himself in two minds – the voice on the phone drawing against his immediate instinct to orient himself in the dark hallway. He turns to stand with his back to the wall.

‘You know who I am?’

‘That’s the least of what I know.’

‘What do you want?’

Two paces to his left, Nealon spots a light switch. He reaches out with his spare hand and throws it, throws it back, then throws it again. Nothing. Half his face remains shrouded in blue light. He takes five steps to open a door and passes into what he senses is an open room. A swipe of his hand over a low shadow finds a table; he draws out a chair and takes the rest of the phone call sitting in the dark.

‘I thought I’d give you a shout,’ the voice says.

‘You have the wrong number.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m going to hang up.’

‘There’s no rush.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘We should meet up.’

‘No.’

‘Not tonight, you’re just in the door, you need some rest.’

‘We don’t have anything to talk about.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’

‘I am.’

‘In a day or so when you’re settled.’

‘Not then, not ever.’

‘We’ll talk again. One last thing.’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t be sitting there in the dark, the mains switch is over the back door.’

And with that the phone goes dead in Nealon’s hand.

Nealon pushes aside his immediate wish to dwell on the phone call: who is it from; what is it about? He needs to orient himself in the house so that is what he sets himself to. After a quick scan through his phone, he finds the torch app and sweeps the room with the light at arm’s length.

To his right is another small room barely six feet wide, with a fridge and cooker, shelves along one wall. There’s also a solid door over which sits a junction box with a complex array of meters and fuses. The mains switch is at the end but it’s too high to reach so he drags a chair from the table.

He steps up and throws the switch; light floods from the hallway into the kitchenette and living room. The table sits beneath a large curtained window and beyond it is a sink and worktop with white cupboards overhead. Everything is flat-pack melamine, all the units date from sometime in the eighties. Against the left-hand wall sits a three-seater couch over which hangs a picture of the Sacred Heart with its orange votive light now glowing beneath.

He reaches out and flicks the switch. The walls come up in a cool green glow against which the pine table seems warm and homely.

There are five doors off the L-shaped hallway. The first is a bathroom with a shower cubicle tucked behind the door and a toilet beneath a small window which looks out from the back of the house. Behind each of the other doors are three bedrooms of equal size with a double bed and built-in wardrobes. Pillows and duvets are stacked on the beds, but all the wardrobes are empty.

Back into the hall.

There is something coercive in the flow of the house, the way it draws him through it. These are doors that have to be opened, rooms that have to be entered and stood in. He catches himself looking up and examining the ceiling. What does he expect to find there?

Inside the front door is a sitting room where a laminate floor runs to a marble fireplace with a low mantelpiece. To the left and right of the chimney breast, empty bookshelves reach to the ceiling. In the middle of the floor is a single armchair, angled towards a large television. Its shape and plain covering make it an obvious partner to the couch in the living room.

Empty and all as the house is, it still has the residual hum and bustle of family life. It feels clean and it has been carefully maintained. Not the raw cleanness of a last-minute blitz before visitors arrive but that ongoing effort which keeps it presentable to any sudden need.

Nealon becomes aware of a low vibration throughout the room and stands listening for a moment. He lowers his hand to the radiator and finds that the heat has come on. The house is beginning to warm up.

Over the front door, a globe light illumines a stretch of gravel frontage closed in by a pair of black gates. Outside lies the main road, the small village to the right, less than half a mile distant and the coast road running to the left. Lights are visible in the distance but all is quiet. No cars at this hour.

An uneven grassed area flows into the night, darkening at a tall hedge that leans towards the gable of the house. A cement walk takes him around to the back door where the rear garden runs about thirty yards to a sod fence at the end of the site. He passes by the garage, locked and lightless, and moves deeper into the darkness where the shadowed outline of a small car sits hunched beneath overhanging trees. It has the shape and sheen of a giant armoured insect sheltering for the night. Beyond the trees the looming outlines of the hayshed and the cow barn are visible. Light from the living-room window reveals the central-heating pump on the far gable and he returns once more to the front door through which he re-enters the house.

A glance at his Nokia confirms that he has been here twelve minutes. He punches in a ten-digit number and listens. After several moments the call goes through to voicemail. Nealon speaks.

‘Hello Olwyn. If you get this, I’m home. Give me a ring. Love to you and Cuan.’

He is tempted to sit for a while and gather his thoughts, but he knows that if he does he could be up for hours. The phone call still nags at him but he had better get some rest. He goes into the first bedroom and kicks his boots off, strips down to his t-shirt and pulls the duvet over him.

He is asleep before his eyes close, drifting off like a man with a long, hard day behind him.

And if the circumstances of his being here alone in this bed at this hour rest within the arc of those grand constructs that turn in the night – politics, finance, trade – it is not clear how his loneliness resolves in the indifference with which such constructs regard him across the length and breadth of his sleep.

He makes breakfast the following morning.

Scrambled eggs on toast is a simple task, but having his meals handed to him on a tray for so long has thrown him completely from the flow of these things. And even though the cupboards are well stocked, his efforts involve much opening and closing of doors and return trips to and from the kitchenette before the food eventually sits on the plate at the end of the table.

In all, the ten-minute task has taken closer to twenty.

He listens to the radio as he eats. A mid-morning talk show is developing the news stories of the day. There is no mention of his name and he is thankful for that. Has the world forgotten him already? That would be a mercy. Voices and stories unfold across the room and Nealon is happy to feel no part of them. There is a war on terror and a financial crisis enveloping the globe. Nationally, there are employment and health-policy issues. At one time, these stories and themes would have interested him greatly – he took seriously the obligation to say abreast of such things. But he does not relate to them now, they do not affect him in any way whatsoever. He does not belong to them, nor they to him. They are birds of a different sky, tracing different arcs through this blue day. The engaged tone of the speakers now baffles him. How can you be so involved, he wonders, as a correspondent quotes figures on hospital overcrowding and underfunding. Does this really affect you? The voices drone on as he eats and while his detachment is total he is not inclined to turn them down or off.

From the head of the table he has a clear view out over the back garden. In the darkness of the previous night he missed a few details. Off to one side, a galvanised shed butts up against the sod fence at its end. From this distance he sees that the padlock on the door is hanging loose. Running from the corner of the house is a clothesline which is fastened at the end of the garden to the crooked limb of a hawthorn bush. This is Olwyn’s work, he remembers – one of her improvisations on a task he never got around to doing properly himself. Beyond the hawthorn bush looms the hayshed.

The day outside is wet, this weather given to sudden gusts of rain that drift by and swallow the distance. This is one of those days, the light saturated, time itself congealed in its bleak hold. Looking out the window, Nealon feels like a child, kneeling on a chair with his nose pressed to the glass; whatever plans he might have had are now on hold as long as this rain comes down. He has to be careful of this mood. If it deepens in him he knows that he is fully capable of sitting here for hours, content to stay looking out the window at nothing at all.

What time of year is it? The question flummoxes him for a moment. One end or the other? God knows, it is not something he will have to answer to.

A quick glance at his phone tells him that no one has called, but he decides against phoning Olwyn. Not at this early hour. Wherever she is, she’s likely to be busy with Cuan and Nealon knows how difficult he can be in the mornings. So, he sits there with his hands flat on the table and allows himself to drift off in a vacant reverie that might lead anywhere. At that very moment the phone on the table rings.

‘So, how does it feel to be a free man?’

The voice from the night before, the same unmodulated croak.

‘What do you want?’

‘Good man, straight down to business. I forgot that you have a lot of time to make up. Have you given any thought to my proposal?’

‘Meeting you?’

‘Yes?’

‘I did, it won’t be happening.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘You’ll get over it, goodbye.’

‘Before you go …’

‘I’m gone. Goodbye.’

Nealon ends the call and turns off the phone. A bite of adrenaline clasps his veins, a sudden rush of pins and needles to the back of his hands.

Home so soon and a small victory already, he says to himself.

He fills another mug of coffee and goes outside.

At the gable of the house, he stands and looks out over the garden that runs down a shallow incline to the sod fence at the bottom – the property’s boundary between the fields and sheds beyond. In the middle distance, the Sheeffry hills throw down pale light over the lower ground and the white homesteads scattered along the roadside. To the right, Mweelrea thrusts up its blunt head, darker and drawing all distance towards itself.

There’s more rain on it, Nealon says to himself; there’s always more rain on it.

The house looks shabby in daylight. Two hard winters and a hot summer have taken their toll since it was last painted. A shadow of moss has begun to bleed down the wall from under the soffit. Paint has begun to blister, lifting away in dry flakes, showing all the layers that have gone on over the years. Nealon runs his hand up and down the wall. It would be no use putting more paint on top of that, he reflects. Better to take a power hose to the whole thing and clean it down to the cement. But that would be a job for the summer, let the walls dry out properly before putting on an undercoat.

He remembers a recent summer when Olwyn went through a sudden mania for refurbishing. It followed Nealon’s casual mention that she was the first woman to have crossed the threshold since his mother’s death.

‘Your whole life together,’ she exclaimed, ‘just yourself and your father.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘The two of you all alone?’

‘We didn’t think about it like that, it was just the way things were.’

‘Your father must have felt alone.’

The thought had never crossed Nealon’s mind. The intimacy of shared feeling was not how they lived.

‘A man returns home without his young wife but with a babe in arms. How lonely that must have been. He must have talked about your mother’s death?’

‘No, that’s not how we lived our lives together.’

Olwyn drew back from further questioning. Whether it was to spare Nealon’s feelings, or her own bafflement, he could not say. Either way, he realised for the first time just how much of his life he had taken for granted and how much more of himself Olwyn appeared to see than he did.

The conversation sparked in her a vivid need for change.

He woke the following morning to find her at work with a cordless drill, having already removed two of the flush doors from the other bedrooms. He stood in the hall watching her but knew better than to question her too deeply, because in those days Olwyn frequently operated to an energy and impulse all her own. More often than not, her purpose and designs went over his head, sometimes taking considerable time to resolve into any recognisable form. That’s how it was with this. He stood back and let her at it, and she did not stop till all the doors and carpets from every room were piled in a heap at the sod fence, and she was standing over them with a can of petrol which had been set aside for the lawnmower.

Nealon watched the whole lot go up in a blaze from the kitchen window.

The house sounded hollow now, and with all its separate spaces flowing into each other there was a lawlessness to the place he could not abide. He found it impossible to sit in any of its doorless rooms with their echoing concrete floors.

But she did not stop with carpets and doors.

Now that she’d started, she was going to change everything. She moved all the tables and chairs into the garage, sweeping everything ahead of her in a tidal wave through the house up against the farthest wall. Then she took off to buy new stuff. Nealon stood in the garage looking at all the stacked furniture. Something about chairs tipped upside down and standing on tables filled him with unease. The fact that he had grown up with these pieces – and that most of them had been in this house since his parents’ marriage – filled him with a sense of betrayal he would never have expected to feel.

A sullen impulse goaded him to pull the two-seater couch out to the grass slope behind the house, where he faced it towards the fields and the distant mountains beyond. He pushed the cushions in and then threw himself into it and this was his station for the rest of the summer. On weekends he would spend hours sitting there, gazing out over the small fields beneath blue skies and letting the sweep of rolling space clear everything from his mind. By rights it should have been time spent planning his next move – there had to be a next move – but all that summer, under its blue sky, Nealon was pleased to discover his mind was an empty space in which nothing of any worth or importance took root.

‘Thank Christ,’ he breathed, ‘a bit of peace at last.’ And he settled back to enjoy his rest.

Even when the carpenter came to replace the doors and put down those laminate floors Olwyn wanted throughout the house, Nealon had stayed on the couch, gazing into the distance at some vanishing point visible only to himself.

And if Olwyn had thought the presence of this burly tradesman who went about his work whistling through his teeth would provoke some sort of jealous reaction from him, she was mistaken. For two full weeks, while the house vibrated with the sound of saws and hammers, Nealon grasped the opportunity to vacate the house almost completely – going so far as to take all his meals on the couch, balanced on his lap, and drinking bottles of beer while staring out over the hills. Come evening, when the sun went around the front and spread its shadow over the couch, Nealon pulled a blanket over himself and closed his eyes to put up a silent barrier between himself and Olwyn. He maintained the same blunt silence when the removal van came to take away the stacked furniture in the garage. Nealon had opened his eyes to find Olwyn standing over him with her arms folded.

‘No,’ he’d said, ‘the couch stays.’

And then he closed his eyes again and imagined her turning on her heel to stalk back into the house.

But that was then.

Different times under different skies.

Out in the middle distance now a huge, bruised cloud moves across the sky, with leaden sheets of rain peeling from its underbelly. Dull light glances off the galvanised shed which gables onto the sod fence. This shed houses the lawnmower, the shears, the strimmer and all the other garden tools Olwyn had bought when she had tried to put some shape on all the overreaching growth that was encroaching on the house. This was a side to her Nealon had found unexpectedly attractive – Olwyn the gardener, the tiller of the earth. Several times he had come upon her in unguarded but focused moments, standing with a trowel or shears in hand, streaked with dirt but wholly attentive to the work at hand. Where the passion came from, she could not say. Her upbringing in a tower block with nothing around it but concrete and waste ground may well have been the very thing that nurtured a wish within her to make things grow. Olwyn had an instinct for it, and if all her efforts expressed themselves in a chaotic blaze of colour around the margins of the house, it was more than Nealon had expected. And judging by her own delight, more than Olwyn herself had hoped for also.

He had marvelled at how quickly she had taken to country life. It heartened him at the time to see her put down such sudden roots. Standing there looking at her among her shrubs and flowers was one of the few moments in his life Nealon had allowed himself to feel good about something he had done. And if he could take no credit for her new passion, he could at least congratulate himself on bringing her to this place where she had discovered it herself, this small, west of Ireland village with its distant hills and clear skies. Nealon dared to think she had come into herself properly, grabbed the opportunity to become the person she might fully be. Sometimes he thought he could explain it to himself. Something about her being at peace with herself at last. Her having found her authentic self, and that self stepping forth to find her own willing imagination. Something like that. He was not inclined to worry about it too much.

But that was then also.

Different times under different skies.

The beds and borders around the house are layered over now with a dense mat of dead vegetation and exposed roots. The lush grass of last year’s growth has turned onto the concrete walks in thick skeins. All this wildness comes as a shock to Nealon. Apparently, some part of him believed that such growth might have ceased in his absence, the normal rhythms of decay and renewal suspended themselves with respect to his plight.

Time itself should have stood still or moved to a slower measure in his absence.

The idea embarrasses him. It comes from a part of him that is ever prone to such nonsense; a soft place in which he has often lost his footing. He flings the dregs from his mug onto the grass and turns into the house.

It is coming up to one o’clock and there is now a steady fall of rain spreading from the west.

So where is Olwyn? Where is she?

His wife of three years, Olwyn the fair. Where is she now in these brittle hours? Nealon senses her. She is out there now, alone and pale-skinned in the middle of some complex circumstance beyond even her own devising.

Nealon has always seen her as someone from the end of days, some pale functionary with a specific role to play in whatever way the darkness will come down. Among his visions of her is one where she is taking the sacrificial lead on some sort of cosmic altarpiece. He has a single sketch of her – charcoal on cardboard – in which he depicts her adrift in some inky void, trailing IV lines and catheter, naked but for the raised bush of her pubic mound. Nealon remembers nothing about the sketch. There was no thematic precedent for such an iconic representation in his work. The cardboard medium suggests something hurried, something reached for on a sudden inspiration.

This is how she presented herself in the early days of their courtship – something sacrificial about her, even if it was never clear to what hungry god she was being offered or by whom. The clarity of her skin hinted that if she had put some illness behind her, it had also scoured her in a way that left her clean and lighted but with a ready inclination towards flight. So pale now that neither weight nor colour could snag her, flight ever latent in her long limbs.

There was something fitting about all that. Being raised in a high tower had given her a light touch on the earth. Her proper element was surely somewhere in the middle light, with the ground always receding from her as she rose higher and higher. To what purpose she would rise like this Nealon could not say, but that is the way he sees her, always ascending.

He looks at his phone again. Nothing. Where the hell is she? Where are they?

Later that evening, another call.

Nealon is standing in the middle of the floor when his phone lights up on the table, turning around itself in vibration mode. A sudden prayer bursts from him.

‘Please Jesus, let it be her.’

He pounces on the phone but sees the private number notification. He is about to hurl it across the room in exasperation, but something in him deflects his intent and before he can check himself, he has the piece already jammed to his ear.

He is beaten to the first word.

‘Don’t hang up,’ the voice says.

‘Fuck you,’ Nealon replies, slamming the phone to the table.

The phone starts to ring again before the sound has died in his ears. Nealon stands for a drawn-out moment, knowing clearly that this hesitation is all part of a desperate waiting game. But, right now, this is all he has – this dangling moment twisting in rage and frustration before he decides one way or another.

He picks up the phone.

‘You’re disappointed,’ the voice says. ‘Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you be? You thought it was herself, but here you are listening to me. How long is it now since you spoke to her?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘It’s nothing to me, but it’s everything to you, I would imagine. You slept well, I hope, the sleep of the innocent?’

Nealon does not rise to the bait. The voice continues with no change of tone.

‘So, you’re fed and rested now, it’s time for some work.’

‘I’m a free man,’ Nealon says, ‘I hadn’t planned on working.’

‘You’re not a man to sit around doing nothing, stop codding yourself.’

Nealon does not respond. He has no wish to push this moment beyond what it already is.

‘So, about this meeting,’ the voice continues.

‘I’m not moving from this house if I don’t know who I’m dealing with or why. A name would be a good start.’

A long silence falls. When the voice resumes it is with the same guarded fatigue as before but this time with the slippery note of something finally moving on.

‘My name is neither here nor there – it won’t make you one bit wiser knowing it. All it will do is add more to your own cluelessness. I’ll put it this way, it’s not a question of who I am but what I know; the breadth and depth of what I can tell you, that’s the important thing here.’ There follows another silence before he resumes. ‘Let’s assume that each of us knows certain things, me and you. Not everything we know is the same, but there are similarities. And sometimes, while we may be talking of the same things, we might have very different telling of them. So, in order to make sure, we need to compare our stories and arrive at a single version we can both agree on. Now, you can make of that what you will, but I have made this call in good faith and all I want is for us to have a meeting.’

‘Why should I go to a meeting with a man I’ve never met or know anything about? More to the point, why would I meet a man who talks in riddles?’ Despite his belligerence Nealon is relieved. Something solid on the table at last, something to focus on. ‘In case you haven’t heard I am innocent, a free man. I want to be left in peace.’

A dry guffaw blurts down the line. ‘You’re a man of habit, Nealon, the plea to innocence doesn’t suit you. You’re too long in the tooth for that.’

‘I was never convicted of anything. Read the papers.’