BEING ALEXANDER
BEING
ALEXANDER
Diarmuid Ó Conghaile
BEING ALEXANDER
First published 2013
by New Island
2 Brookside
Dundrum Road
Dublin 14
www.newisland.ie
Copyright © Diarmuid Ó Conghaile, 2013
Diarmuid Ó Conghaile has asserted his moral rights.
PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-281-2
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-282-9
MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-283-6
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright
law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be
reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any
form or by any means; adapted; or rented or lent without the written
permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
New Island received financial assistance from
The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.
Do mo mháthair
Dublin 2003/2004
I
May
Alexander Vespucci notices the texture of being.
He first had this sensation when he was three or so, in wellies and short pants, standing in the oil-stained driveway of their housing-estate house, picking peeling paint off the fence. Peeling paint was a point of entry. And what the boy experienced – but could not then articulate – was that the surface of reality was curved.
The woman next door didn’t like him to peel paint off the fence. In fact, she didn’t like him at all. You’re a gawker, she told him, and she was right. He stared at people, fascinated by their strangeness, inquiring into it; until life taught him that people do not wish to be penetrated in this way, and he learned to tone himself down.
He had this same perception of existence on the morning his father was disfigured by death. A phone call at dawn summoned them: Jim was struggling. Alexander – aged eleven – and his mother and sister were driven to the cancer hospital by a kind neighbour. Travelling across town in that man’s Citroën, buoyed up by the synthetic spongy upholstery and the space-age plastics, all in beige, Alexander knew already from the heaviness of the atmosphere, from the immanence of the fact in the beige interior itself, that his diseased dad had finally expired, killed gradually over many years through lack of love.
Later, as a disturbed teenager, Alexander struggled to reconcile the reality of infinity with the mousetrap quality of his life. At this stage, he was beginning – in verbal thought – to grope his way toward a description of his despair. Smoking upstairs on the 42 bus from Malahide into Dublin city centre, he pondered the improbability of his ill fortune. Of all the possibilities in time and space, how and why had he ended up in this specific body, this thick-boned skull, this particular configuration of identity and circumstance?
Even now, as a practised adult, an office creature, sitting at the weekly team meeting – which mercifully takes place only every couple of months – being affects his concentration. He finds it difficult to listen to the proceedings. People talk and the words shoot past him, their meaning lost. Worse, he sometimes cannot even maintain forms. The humans disappear. He registers arms and torsos, woven fabrics, hair, teeth, chatterings, wheezings, ha ha ha, glinting eyes, heat, grease, scent, the shedding of dead skin cells.
The smooth tabletop narrows as it flees from him, surfing over the assembly of lower limbs, some still, others agitated – jigging, crossing and uncrossing – each pair guarding the contained energy at the associated crotch.
He registers sexual identity, and this brings him back: the exuberance of Luke’s zipper; the heavy under-curve of Imelda’s breast – so close he could cup it in his palm without having to stretch.
‘Is broadband on the agenda?’ asks Evil Neville.
Alexander thinks of him as evil because Neville rhymes with devil.
‘Could somebody please tell me what broadband means?’ asks Imelda, in her thick Mayo accent, following the question with two shots of laughter like a donkey’s bray.
Alexander nods to Neville, and Neville does the explaining. Neville likes to talk. He is a small, thin man, well proportioned, with pointy hair and diamond eyes. He was recently recruited as a Graduate Trainee. Imelda is also a Graduate Trainee, but from the previous year. Though she has been longer in the job than Neville, she knows less than he does on every given subject. Imelda is dim. She came in at the height of the labour shortages, the only candidate for the job, and even then she failed the interview, but was hired through an administrative error.
‘We’ve just completed a survey on broadband availability for small businesses,’ Alexander adds wearily when Neville has completed his exposition. ‘Myself, Neville and Luke worked on it.’
‘It stretches it a bit to suggest there was any effort on our part,’ says Luke with a chuckle. ‘The consultants designed the survey and carried it out. We just wrote a letter telling them what to do.’
Luke is one of two Analysts.
‘It took three of you to write a letter?’ asks Dympna, the other Analyst.
This then is the full team: Alexander; two Analysts; two Graduate Trainees.
Before he was promoted to his current lofty position, Alexander imagined it would be a fine thing to be the boss. Now that he actually has staff, he realises that being the boss is just as tedious as not being the boss, but in different ways. In the end, the people he manages mostly just want stuff from him: attention; approval; meaningful work, but not too much of it; development opportunities; days off; tolerance of their mood swings. In return, he is responsible for the shit they turn out and the deadlines they don’t care about; plus they constitute an extra set of people he has to avoid if he is late, or hung over, or wishes to disappear early.
‘You have to get your letters spot on,’ Luke answers Dympna. ‘You know yourself how much value-added can be got in five or six rewrites.’
Alexander’s attention attaches itself to the stubble on Luke’s neck. There is remarkable uniformity in the length and blackness of the emergent bristles, but they change direction where the corner of his jaw meets the slopes of his neck, like a turn in a flock of birds. Alexander has observed that Luke washes and shaves only every second day, which isn’t enough.
‘We had to conduct a tender procedure,’ Alexander says formally, trying to talk up the work. ‘Anyhow, yes, broadband is on the Council agenda. The Chairman will take it as the first item on Thursday.’
‘Am I ever going to get to a Council meeting?’ Neville asks plaintively.
‘Not in this life,’ Luke snorts.
‘I bet they don’t even know I exist. It’s not very motivating.’
The Council in question is the National Economic Advisory Council, their employer. Its members are eminences from business, government, public life, appointed by the Taoiseach on the basis of the sectional interests they represent, as well as easy cronyism. Alexander and his team are not members of the Council. They form the Council Secretariat. Alexander’s boss, George Lucey, is the Secretary to the Council. Alexander is the Senior Economist. They are the only two of the staff who attend the Council meetings. The others are considered too junior. The Chairman doesn’t like to have too many minions at the table, because they lower the tone.
‘As part of your training, it might be appropriate at some stage in the future for you
to have some exposure to a Council meeting,’ Alexander says automatically, emptily. ‘There would have to be a suitable opportunity. The Chairman is cautious about who attends.’
‘You see,’ Luke says to Neville. ‘I told you so. It’s never going to happen.’
‘That’s not what I said,’ Alexander insists. ‘Please don’t interpret what I say.’
‘Somebody has to.’
‘I think the point is a valid one,’ says Dympna. ‘None of us has ever been to a Council meeting.’
‘I met the Chairman once,’ Imelda says. ‘In the lift. Maybe at the next meeting we could all hide under a table and have a peek.’
‘OK, that’s enough,’ Alexander intervenes. ‘I know it’s Friday afternoon, but let’s keep it together for another few minutes. There’s one more thing to discuss before we finish. The Accommodation Unit has been on to me to say that we’re running up extremely high phone bills. Someone is using the phones – our phones – to call astrology lines.’
‘Sex lines?’ asks Neville, perking up.
‘No. Astrology lines. You ring up and they tell you your horoscope. Or so I’m told. The calls are made mostly at lunchtime, and the cost has now run into hundreds of euro.’
‘It could be anybody in the building,’ says Dympna, defensively. Alexander thinks she is blushing slightly.
Dympna is in the same age range as Alexander and Luke, which is ten years or so older than Imelda and Neville. She has a baby son at home, whom she adores loudly, and an unemployed husband, whom she likes to boss, in so far as can be discerned from overheard phone calls.
‘It’s a free-for-all out there, Alexander,’ Dympna continues defiantly. ‘Anybody can come along and use one of the phones, particularly if there is no one here at lunchtime.’
What Dympna says is true. Although the Council Secretariat is a little world unto itself, the Department of Finance accommodates the team in a large open-plan area. The Department also provides all their support requirements, such as IT and personnel services.
‘Well, I’m not making any allegations,’ Alexander says. He avoids looking at Dympna, whom he now suspects. ‘Let’s just keep our eyes open for any unusual behaviour. It’s only our phones that are being used, which seems a bit odd.’
After the meeting, Alexander repairs to the long glass window in the corner of his office. It opens like a book, floor to ceiling, swinging inward on vertical hinges on the left-hand side. A cold breeze pushes into the room, sweeping with it the outside wildness of the space beyond. A couple of steps forward and he would drop like a stone to the courtyard five storeys below. A quick death. But how would he feel as he accelerated downward through the air? He is sometimes slightly tempted to jump, but knows that he won’t.
Generally these windows cannot be opened. A few weeks ago, the last time the window cleaners came around, a cheerful guy in white overalls forgot to relock it when he had finished wiping the outside pane. Since then, in the late afternoons mostly, Alexander has used this new availability of openness to sneak a smoke, which is otherwise impossible in the smoke-free building. This delicious pleasure reminds him of his youth. He and his elder sister, Helena, his only sibling and his partner in crime, used to smoke out of the windows of her bedroom late at night, looking out onto their suburban rear garden and the backs of the boxy houses opposite, gossiping, joking, slagging off all the things they didn’t like, proclaiming the coolness of whatever they admired.
Helena was a rebel then, always getting into fixes. Now she is a lawyer, with a golf-playing husband, two loathsome children, and a house-with-mortgage in Malahide, where she and Alexander grew up. He, by his comparison, is a loser: unmarried, renting, stuck in a job that doesn’t pay particularly well and that offers no ready path for advancement.
For years, he thought houses and mortgages were boring, irrelevant; then at some point the subject became very interesting indeed, but by that time he was priced out of the market. Taking together his and his girlfriend’s salaries, they could probably just about afford a hovel in some part of the city they would ordinarily find repellent, or a badly built semi-d in a housing estate in a field somewhere, thirty or forty miles from Dublin, with a deadening commute into work, and probably a car-trip even to the nearest village. This is his Housing Problem.
In his trouser pocket his mobile phone vibrates against his thigh. His hand races to answer it before the ring-tone sounds, and almost succeeds. Paul M M, reads the screen, which stands for Paul Mooney mobile.
‘What are you up to?’ Paul asks.
‘Reflecting on my good fortune.’
‘You’ve had a change of circumstance then?’
‘Not really. I’m just enjoying a cigarette. I’m focusing on the small pleasures.’
‘You can tell me all about it later on. Are you guys still OK for tonight?’
‘Yes, barring any unforeseen obstacles.’
‘See you around eight so. Danny and Aoife are confirmed as well. There’s trouble in the camp there, so we could be in for some entertainment.’
Leaving the office on Friday evening is a release to freedom.
With summer newly arrived, fresh and young, Alexander still feels gratitude for the brightness and the comparative warmth. The grass along the canal banks is lush, growing strongly, and the trees – though not yet in full overflow of foliage – are brimming with life. Even the craggy-barked trunks seem infused with potentiality.
The women of the city have shed their winter coats. Their bodies are discernible again in all their splendour: arms and legs, long necks, cleavage – a startling eruption of breasts at every turn. The Great Breast Giveaway, he sometimes internally labels it. The Amazing Breast Extravaganza. And each woman who passes within the scope of his vision is automatically evaluated. The sexual reptile is primitive, tireless, discriminating in its own essentially binary way: fuck; blank; fuck; fuck; blank. The socialised human is cautious, well-behaved, seeking nothing more as it marches homeward than a second glance, an affirmative look.
The canal banks are a breeding ground and social space for all sorts. Alexander passes a group of winos at their ease: three men and a woman, sitting on the grass, drinking cider from sallow two-litre bottles. He can pick out the lord among them, around whom the others have arranged themselves in conscious and unconscious deference. This one is stretched out, propped up on an elbow, enjoying the sunshine on his worn face as he directs the conversation, languidly, but with much swearing.
A hundred yards further, another of their number, or one nearly like them, is screaming into a mobile phone, his body being pushed through contortions by his rage.
‘Where are ya? Tell me where are ya! I’ll fuckin’ burst ya, ya scumbag shitface! Where are ya? Because of you, my bud was nabbed by the pigs. Now he’s banged up in Pearse Street. Where the fuck are ya?’
Alexander is afraid to get too close to this event. Before he is within ten yards, he steps with outward calmness onto the road and crosses over to the opposite pavement. The screamer has come upon a galvanised steel lamp-post and is smashing the phone against it. Within a few bangs there are pieces of plastic flying in different directions. Moving out of range, knowing that he is safe, unnoticed, Alexander allows himself to gloat a little at this self-harm: That’s not very clever, he thinks.
His own phone rings. It’s his sister.
‘I’m suddenly highly popular,’ he says. ‘You’re my second call this month.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Walking home, reflecting on winos and their mobile phones.’
‘Winos have mobile phones?’
‘So it seems; though not for long. . . . Hey, that’s not very politically correct of you: winos need connectivity just like everybody else.’
‘Listen, I’m ringing about Maisie. She fell down a steep stairs in the nursing home. She has severe concussion. She’s comatose.
It happened this afternoon, and they’ve moved her to the hospital. Mum rang me about ten minutes ago.’
‘Is she going to die?’
‘The doctors say she’s stable, but that they can’t give any assurances, blah, blah, at her age.’
‘We should probably go down.’
‘Mum and Uncle Mick are already on their way by train. But I don’t think it makes sense for me, with the kids and everything. We’ve got a few things happening this weekend. I mean, if she’s not conscious, what’s the point?’
On his mother’s side, Alexander is one hundred per cent Irish peasant. Maisie is his maternal grand-aunt. She was born Maisie Ryan in 1908 on a forty-acre farm in the townland of Ballyryan, County Galway, about twenty miles outside Galway city. Maisie is now ninety-five and has been living in a nursing home in Galway for the last fifteen years, following an accident in which she slipped on ice in the farmyard and broke her leg.
Maisie is the youngest of six children, three boys and three girls, who were born in that order. The eldest boy died from wounds after the battle of the Somme. There is a half-told family story about the circumstances in which he enlisted. Alexander is vaguely aware that he was a hothead who got into trouble. The next brother was shot dead by the Free State army in the Civil War. The youngest brother lived into his seventies in a regional mental institution, having been committed in the 1950s by Maisie – with the assistance of the local doctor and parish priest – on the grounds of his refusing to go to Mass and not wanting to do any work around the farm.
The girls made a more lasting impression on human affairs. The eldest two emigrated to the States in the mid-1920s and returned in the 1930s, married to Galway men whom they had met in Detroit. The children and grandchildren of the eldest girl are collectively – tribally – known to Alexander as the Gradys. The second girl was Alexander’s maternal grandmother, and the clan to which she gave first issue is his own, the Murphys.
Being Alexander Page 1