Alexander is surprised and pleased at Banner’s introduction. He reaches out his sweaty palm and shakes hands with the Taoiseach, who nods to him respectfully.
‘Very nice to meet you, Taoiseach,’ he says sincerely, momentarily star struck.
‘Compliments on the report, Alexander,’ says the Taoiseach. ‘I hear it’s very good. Of course, I don’t actually read these things myself. They just give me the Ladybird version, and I can barely manage that.’
Alexander thinks: You didn’t read it, mate; and I didn’t write it. Probably even the consultants didn’t write it. They subcontracted it out for a meagre fee to some intense solitary bespectacled grunt, who in turn cogged most of it off the internet.
‘If anyone quotes me on the Ladybird book, I’ll have his bollocks,’ the Taoiseach declares more loudly to the general assembly, yielding a big collective guffaw. ‘Excuse my language, ladies. I’m a man under pressure. . . . Let’s get this show on the road. And by the way, when we come to the questions afterward, I’m not fucking answering anything on Northern Ireland. I have a pain in my bollocks with Northern Ireland. Excuse my language, ladies. So, if you came looking for quotes on the interminable fucking peace process, forget it. We’re here to talk about broadband.’
He has such ravenous steely eyes, Alexander thinks. He’s a steelie. Alexander doesn’t remember ever before having applied such a description to a human being. The term comes from his days of playing marbles in the cul-de-sac when he was six or seven. There were standard glass marbles, beautiful objects in themselves, but worth only one point; gulliers, which were the larger glass marbles, worth three points; and steelies, which were really just ball bearings, whose point value varied depending on size, but which typically was also three. Alexander had always felt that steelies were overvalued, but they were undeniably hard.
As the celebrities are seating themselves, Banner takes up position at the lectern to deliver the presentation that Alexander spent most of the previous week working on, through various iterations. Alexander presses the return button on the laptop in front of him and the screen jolts into action, reflected electronically on the large display screen mounted on the wall behind: Regional Broadband Initiative – Stephen Banner – Chairman – National Economic Advisory Council.
Grace meanwhile has lightly inserted herself in the seat next to Alexander, at the far end of the table from the lectern. This appears to be a matter of circumstance rather than choice, since the remaining seats at the table have been occupied by the Taoiseach and his senior people.
‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ Alexander whispers to her.
‘Stay focused,’ she responds, also in a whisper. ‘I wouldn’t want you to mess it up now.’
‘There’s not much scope for that. All I have to do is press the arrow button. If I faint from the pressure, you can do it for me.’
‘Welcome everyone,’ says Terry Martin. ‘Thank you all for coming. I’m going to hand over in a moment to Stephen Banner to take us through his presentation on the Regional Broadband Initiative, which this morning was considered and approved by the Cabinet Subcommittee on Infrastructure. The Taoiseach will then give a short address about the Initiative, and finally we’ll have a little time for some questions.’
‘Can I get in a question at this end, Terry?’ calls Dermot O’Hara.
‘Why, Dermot? Can you not wait until the end like everybody else? Have you a more pressing engagement elsewhere?’
‘That guy really gets on my tits,’ Alexander whispers to Grace, indicating O’Hara. ‘And by the way, you never sent me the paperwork for the car.’
Grace is oddly forthcoming in her response. She generously shifts toward him to address him more directly, leans forward intimately, causing him to imagine for a panicky moment that she is going to kiss him.
‘It’s a sort of procedural point,’ Dermot O’Hara clarifies.
‘He’s going to be on your tits a whole lot more in the next few seconds,’ she hisses hotly. ‘And by the way, I’ll be reporting my car stolen. I parked it outside a friend’s house at a party. Somebody robbed my key card.’
‘Go on, Dermot,’ says Terry Martin. ‘We’re all intrigued.’
‘I’d like to ask the Council Chairman if he can confirm that a senior member of the Council’s staff has just been suspended pending inquiry into an alleged indecent assault of a younger and more junior member of staff.’
The noise level drops off entirely. There is keen interest all around.
‘That strikes me as a somewhat irregular question,’ the press secretary observes. ‘Perhaps you would care to raise it at a different forum.’
‘It’s a highly irregular situation,’ O’Hara presses more warmly. ‘Will the Chairman confirm it or not? I’m not asking for a debate.’
Terry Martin looks to the Chairman with a shrug, indicating that it’s his call. The Chairman looks to George for guidance, giving Alexander further cause for fear, since the Chairman has never in Alexander’s experience sought guidance from George on any point, at any time. There has obviously been some prior exchange between them on this issue. The back of Alexander’s scalp throbs furiously, hotly. George nods to the Chairman. He glances quickly at Alexander with an expression of pain on his face, then leans in too close for a confidential huddle.
‘The Neville Lewis situation has gotten out of control,’ he explains in a low mutter. ‘I was going to tell you later.’
George leaves the huddle. He straightens himself, coughs to clear his throat for speaking, and addresses the room.
‘Perhaps I might say a few words on this. A senior official has been suspended, but on full pay—’
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ intervenes the Taoiseach grandly. ‘Enough already. If I had a euro for every time I’ve been accused of sexual harassment, I wouldn’t have to take any bribes.’ The Taoiseach slaps the table on issuing this witticism and throws back his head, directing a big uproarious laugh to the ceiling. The assembled are divided in their reaction, some joining him for a bit of a giggle, or laughing at him, others stony faced, unamused. ‘Here’s the thing that gets me though,’ he continues. ‘What do you have to do in the public sector to be suspended without pay?’ And he is off laughing again.
Alexander drives slowly up the badly potholed private road that leads from the entrance to the Thorny Valley farm buildings, far more cautious in the BMW than he ever was in the Honda, proceeding at no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, scrupulously steering around the major cavities, which were washed out rapidly by heavy rains in the first months of winter. The car handles so satisfyingly, he finds himself preferring – on this particular surface – to drive more slowly rather than more quickly. Perhaps he is wishing also to prolong his time with the car, believing as he now does that it will not be with him much longer.
Around twenty cars are parked in rows facing the main outside wall of the stable courtyard. This is more than usual, because of the show-jumping competition. Alexander parks in the first sizeable gap.
He chooses to change into his riding gear in the car. He used to perform this operation in one of the several half-used rooms in the so-called ‘office’ part of the complex of linked farm buildings, but has recently been scared off by a couple of incidents. The first involved his walking in on Ben and Dodger, the cranky owner and his collie respectively, as they were eating deep-fried chicken and chips. Ben was feeding from a greasy red-and-white snackbox on the table, while Dodger engaged with another on the floor. Alexander stooped to greet Dodger with a friendly tug of the pelt at the back of his neck. The dog barked once, then bit him quickly on the finger with his dirty yellow teeth.
‘Dodger is having his tea,’ Ben explained flatly, without a hint of apology or defensiveness, all the while gnawing meditatively on a chicken wing.
In the same room, a few weeks later, not long before Christmas, Alexander w
as putting on his jockstrap, intended to prevent crushing of the rider’s testicles between saddle and body, when two or three giggling girlies drifted around the door, one staying on a few seconds longer than politeness allowed, to get in a good peep, though there wasn’t really any exposure to speak of, the way he managed it.
The girls – aged about ten or eleven – belong to the lesson before Alexander’s. The mother of the peeper, a tall attractive woman, who rides in Alexander’s hour, later commented jokingly that he should have made sure to close the door properly when he was changing. Alexander found this comment faintly threatening, and worried that she had been told an unfair account. It was true that the door had not been fully closed, but this had to do with the fact that he didn’t feel he had the authority to close it, rather than that he was encouraging visitors. It was the little girl who had lingered in the room. In that sense, she was the one who had behaved inappropriately; but he felt that a repetition of the episode would further implicate him in dubious behaviour.
As he slips out of his clothes, he sees that he is governed by fear, fears.
He does as much as he can in the car seat, then steps out into the cold night and pulls up his dirty cream jodhpurs, shielding himself with the car door. Helena will give out to him for not having made an effort to look clean for the big event. She’ll come with her hair all neatly plaited, riding gear immaculate. It’s not a fashion show, he will say.
Next come the boots, the green polyester lining of which is ripped in both cases and has to be carefully repositioned before the foot is inserted in order to avoid tedious entanglements. T-shirt. Fleece. Back protector. Stick. He slips the stick into his boot, which makes him feel stylish, and reaches back to the passenger seat to get his black felt-covered hat, the inside rim of which is still damp with the previous week’s sweat. Where are his gloves? He smiles when he remembers that he put them into the glove compartment for a joke after the last lesson. He retrieves them. He pulls them on. They didn’t have the right size in the shop when he bought them and now his fingers have burst through everywhere, but there is something cool about this, making him feel like an anarchist in winter, plotting to write pamphlets. An anarchist in winter in a stolen BMW. A rare tulip.
Helena rings him on the mobile.
‘You’re on Comet.’
‘That’s my night over. I knew they’d put me on Comet, just to round off a beautiful week.’
‘You’re making it sound like you had a bad week. How could it be a bad week when you came into a big inheritance?’
‘Might have come into a big inheritance. Might have lost my job also.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Who are you on?’
‘Liath.’
‘I don’t believe that that is the luck of the draw. You must have schmoozed someone.’
‘Moi?’
‘Toi.’
‘C’est ne pas possible.’
‘C’est eminently fucking possible.’
He complains about his week, but inwardly he is feeling fine, strangely at peace with the current configuration of the universe, however it may unfold. He seems to have given up smoking, without trying, and he senses that this is meaningful, that it may prefigure some important shift, though he has no idea what that shift might be. He feels himself on the verge of potentiality.
Around the yard, the mood is electric. The night sky above is luminous blue, imbued with silver tones by a prominent full moon, which affects the animals. In their boxes, the horses are doubly excited, rising above themselves. They understand that something out of the ordinary is occurring: their routine altered; more people around, in high form. Many have their noses poked out over the stable half-doors. They toss their heads to observe with their lateral vision the different proceedings, alert always to the chance of a carrot or an apple, a handful of oats, the possibility of love.
As Alexander enters this space, this atmosphere, his feet close to the ground in the thin-soled, low-heeled riding boots, he experiences a surge of exhilaration. He is enlivened by the smells: the warm body odour of the animals, the sweetness of fresh horseshit, the thin high-pitched fragrance of hay, the nuttiness of oats in water. He is wrapped around and comforted in the tapestry of sound: people calling, horses neighing, doors and bolts clattering as the animals press forward, the restless scraping of shod hooves off stone.
He meets Helena at Comet’s box. She is patting his long smooth muscular neck, chatting to him.
‘I’m sweet-talking him for you.’
And true enough, the ageing gelding appears to be in relatively mellow form, angling his head forward for a bit of a scratch.
Stiff and generally cranky, Comet is not a horse one would choose to ride. Alexander had him in a lesson before Christmas and became so frustrated by the horse’s mute obstinacy that he overused the stick, which is uncharacteristic of him.
‘Stop hitting him,’ the instructor shouted helpfully from the centre of the indoor arena, which is really just a large barn with a few terraces of benches for spectators at one end. ‘You’re making him worse. Sit up properly. Go around again in trot, canter at the turn, then earlier into the jump.’
In the next stall along, McGyver is kicking the door, his head high in anger, ears back, lips flared to show his teeth and gums, his smoky eyes wild and frightened. He hammers the door so hard, Alexander himself is scared, thinking that the hinges must give or else that McGyver will injure himself.
‘I told you he’s psychotic,’ he says to Helena.
‘He’s just jealous of Comet getting the attention,’ she remarks, still whispering into the horse’s ear, and now gently stroking the narrow surface that runs from the nose up between the horse’s eyes. Alexander guesses that horses don’t really enjoy being touched on this thin-skinned bony strip, but he says nothing.
A few boxes down, stunted Toby whinnies attractively. He has spotted his pal, the mare Stroller, being led across the yard and is greeting her. Stroller turns her head toward him and grunts crankily, pulling on her rein, but not for a moment believing she will be allowed to go across. A second later, prematurely almost, as though at the flick of a switch, she drops again into her typical groove, continuing reluctantly across the yard, unnoticing, a little depressed.
‘Where’s Liath?’ Alexander asks.
‘Someone has her in the outdoor arena. She’s on first.’
This is how it works: for fifteen minutes before your allotted time in the competition you take your horse to the outdoor arena to warm up, trotting on different legs, changing into canter, popping over a few unchallenging jumps. Rhythm thus more or less established, you dismount and lead your horse back through the yard to the indoor arena, where you wait nervously at the gate, watching the rider who is before you finish his round.
In the semi-darkness of the cold wooden terraces, the spectators ooh and aah, clapping and cheering appreciatively at the action in the floodlit arena, which is transformed for the night into something that seems almost magical: the introduction of each rider and horse over the tannoy system; the formal course of a dozen or more numbered jumps – singles, combinations, some formidably high, others challengingly positioned, all in some small way individually characterised, all made pretty, the barrels and poles freshly painted, foliage added in decoration. Ben himself would be too tight and too lazy to go to this trouble, but he suffers the efforts of his more enthusiastic employees, and he knows the punters like it.
Each rider is allowed three practice jumps, then the bell goes and he must begin his round.
Comet is always heavy on his feet, a bit arthritic, but this evening feels more responsive than usual. They circle in a rising trot with Alexander tall in the seat, back straight, shoulders square. He has a nice contact with the horse’s mouth.
Hitting the seat, he squeezes inward with his calves, rises earlier, pushes Comet
forward into a quicker trot. Alexander’s heart beats rapidly. His body is working. He is intensely focused on the first jump now, his head already turned to face it so that the animal knows early where they are headed. The spectators are invisible. There is nothing in the universe but Alexander and the horse and the first jump. At the turn, with the rider’s inside heel pressing briefly behind the girth, Comet makes a perfect transition into canter. They move in unison. They spring in unison a perfect stride from the jump. They are over cleanly, easily, and focus immediately on the double ahead.
‘Good lad,’ Alexander says, leaning forward to slap Comet’s neck.
Three strides into the double. Over the first. Bounce. Over the second. Back to trot, a little clumsily. Curve into the corner. Into canter again. A long approach into the triple, the first of which is the highest jump of the course.
‘Good lad,’ he whispers again into the horse’s ear. ‘You’re doin’ great.’ In his own head, a small clear voice is saying to him: Wooooe na beithígh, wooooe na beithígh. And what it means in this instance is that he should hold it all together, not become over excited, not let the animal get carried away. But he takes this advice too far and almost falters, losing a little momentum in the run-up to the big jump. He can feel the animal hesitate in the second last stride. He squeezes with his lower legs, pushes forward with his seat.
‘C’mon,’ he calls in a loud grunt at the point of take-off, which is poor horsemanship, but effective. Comet gives extra effort, rises well, clears the jump.
A big cheer from the spectators.
They proceed through the course without incident. Comet is loosening up, his confidence rising. At the final transition into canter, he gives a little skip and a snort, saying: I can do this.
Alexander is the one who loses it. Coming into the last jump, he begins to smile inwardly, thinking forward to the clear round they are going to have. It’s a tight turn. He goes in, with Comet not knowing how they are coming out. They turn late. Alexander tries to correct it, but too abruptly, too coarsely. Comet is confused and comes to a stop. Three faults for a refusal.
Being Alexander Page 24