The Service Of Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page A

resources. Life had dealt its blows. She thought that she had defences and to spare now, against those that would come.

Six
     
    Molloy did not go home yet. To leave would mean one more bead told, of the last few.
    He turned, out of the cubicle in which he had left the body of the dead woman, Annie Hare, out of the ward.
    The girl, running back up the dark stone steps from the stores below, saw his back and stopped to watch him go away.
    ‘Why would he go down into the old part, Sister? Why would anyone have business there, that’s all shut up and empty? What interest is there left in it?’ She would not have gone, not for anyone, and besides, could see no reason. The building was dying, wasn’t it, and almost dead? It would be bulldozers and then rubble, within the year, and good riddance.
    She quickened her own step, going past the abandoned blocks and doors leading to wings that had been cleared, hollow stairwells.
    ‘He’s like a spirit. He’ll haunt the place. He can’t leave it, can he?’
    ‘He cannot.’
    ‘Funny that. Doesn’t it seem funny to you? Don’t you think?’
    ‘It is not my business or yours to think anything about it at all.’ The Sister pinched her lips and would not say anything more, out of some slight sense of loyalty to the doctor, the natural respectshe had been trained up to, as well as wanting to put the younger woman down.
    Molloy walked. Away from the occupied wards and from the pools of quiet light, away from people to whom he could not have spoken about any of it.
    Molloy walked.
    It was as if a tide had turned and run out, leaving what bit of life remained in the old buildings washed up in one corner, and the people huddled together in the last of the light and warmth. They talked, and went about their vestiges of business; occasionally there was crying or laughter and the smell of meat stewing. Beyond, emptiness and darkness. Long high wards, curtainless windows. Echoes. Cold, dead air, stirred by no one in their breathing of it, any more.
    Only tonight, the wind blew in through the cracks and shifted it about, and, when the clouds parted, moonlight shone down the abandoned rooms and through the dirty window glass at the end of the tiled corridor, lighting his way (though he did not need it, knowing every step).
    No one followed him. He had walked through the empty buildings often enough in the last months, recording everything, touching his hand to the flaking walls, running it along the cold tiles, standing to stare ahead into the empty spaces, as if he wanted to imprint his own presence here, while it existed at all. Remembering.
    Since childhood, he had been haunted by places. He dreamed not of people but of rooms, of hallways, porches, attics, of the curve of a pillar, the moulding of a ceiling, the grain of a wooden beam. Of banisters, steps, window-frames. By day, some part of a building he had known would be thrown upon the inner screen of his mind, and he would gaze at it. Time and again he would find himself walking, in his imagination, up some particular staircase and through a once-familiar door. He carried imprinted within him a plan of every house in which he had lived or worked, and of others too. There had been a convent, set up adark path behind trees, not far from his secondary school. He had hung about there, looking through the bars of the gates. Now, he could recall every detail, of the chimneys and the roofs, the pattern of the bricks, the lie of the tiles. He never wanted to go inside, but preferred to guess how it was, to walk about the rooms in his imagination only.
    When he was six, from the bus windows he had seen a small castle beyond a dry moat and, later, a black hovel in a field with smoke coming from a hole in the roof. The cottage of a witch, his mother had said. ‘Look. Go on. Look.’ And he had looked. For it had come from her, this fascination with mysterious buildings. She had told him about the empty school, one night before he went to