The next morning, a Monday, I rose at seven. I bundled myself into my drab olive overcoat, loaded a double handful of council-issued road salt into my pockets and crunched down to the front gates, scattering the salt ahead of me as I went. I felt good, despite the familiar tightening in the midsection of my face that would bloom into a full-blown headache as the day wore on. I unlocked the gates, though the first of the kids would not show up for another hour. I went across the road, onto the riverside path. The sky was lavender, and there was a bank of high white clouds moving in off the Atlantic as stately as glaciers. I decided to walk up the town for a coffee and paper.
Passing the station I saw a bus about to depart. I asked the driver where to. It wasn’t far, a little farther on down the west coast, but I hadn’t been to that particular city in years. I had enough cash on me for a ticket and clambered on. In the city I ransacked my ATM card and checked into a small hotel off the high street. They asked for a name and I gave them a name, reversing the natural slant of my cursive as I wrote it out. I drank at the hotel bar, and in the afternoon did a circuit of the high street pubs. I did the same thing the following day. In the seclusion of the bars I felt like a ghost becoming slowly corporeal again.
I considered the lay of the land. It was easy to pick out the chronic soak-heads from the tourists, the amateur drinkers. It had something to do with the way they conformed themselves to the planes of the bar, the way they aggressively propped an elbow and periodically lifted a haunch from their stool to get the blood flowing back into that leg. It had something to do with the way they every so often softly exclaimed or sighed or rebukingly clicked their tongue at nothing and no one. The way they stared down into the weathered grain of the counter, mulling their special soak-head grievances and depletions. The way they were invariably alone.
The city was right up on the Atlantic. I walked the quays, the convoluted knot of cobbled alleys that wound narrowly back and forth through the tight parcel of buildings that constituted the city centre. There were strings of festive lights everywhere, council employees in high-viz jackets and wool caps scrubbing sleet into the drains with cartoonishly large black-bristled brooms. There were swarms of shitfaced stags and hysterical hens, and masked artists draped in tinfoil smocks impersonating statues in the street—even the cold could not disturb their poised inertia. My mobile filled up with voicemails, several from the Sentimental Authoritarian’s secretary, and finally one from the man himself. His voice was mild and measured, shot through with a gorgeous note of presidential weariness. He was sure this was all some simple misunderstanding. He told me to ring just to let everyone know how long I’d be gone. He said to take care. At some point the battery of my phone died.
On the second or third or eleventh day I met a blond woman with a black tooth—a cap that hadn’t taken and become infected. In lieu of small talk she immediately embarked on a lengthy diatribe against a man she referred to only as The Spider. She said he was a coward and selfish and probably a sociopath; a spiteful, petty bully congenitally incapable of empathy for others, though he was a charmer of course. He collected women this Spider and left his brand upon them—she pushed back her hair and angled her head. A perfectly lifelike blue arachnid was tattooed just under her ear.
‘He made me get that,’ she said, and she insisted there were over a hundred women in this wretched city bearing such a mark.
In my hotel room she scooped out her left tit and told me to say goodbye to it. She said it was riddled with tumours and was going to have to go. She said she almost certainly only had months to live. She saw me looking at her hair—it was bleached nearly white, and looked crispy in a dead way, like straw, but it was her real hair. She touched it self-consciously and said the doctors had assured her chemotherapy was pointless at this stage. I told her I was sorry, and she said that was okay; that she was putting everything that was the past, all the years of useless shit, behind her, and living only for now, for the moment, and that I was a part of the moment, and I should feel good about that.
And then she wanted to know my story.
It was dusk. There were crushed cans, empty miniatures and bottles littering the floor, stains soaked into the carpet, tangles of clothes. She was lying on the bed wearing nothing but my rumpled shirt. I was sitting in my underwear on the large wooden sill of the window. The radiators were on full blast and I had the window inched open.
I told her I was in town for just a few days, to check in on my ex-wife and kid, that I didn’t get to see all that much of them anymore because I worked overseas as a diamond miner. She perked up at that.
‘Diamonds,’ she said.
She said I must make a mint and the next round of drinks was surely on me, so.
I nodded my head in a way that suggested that just might happen. She wanted to know about the mine and I told her it was basically just a huge hole in the ground, so big you could pick up this entire city and throw it down there in one piece. I told her it was mostly done by machines now, the actual mining, with the men only required to operate the machines at a relatively safe remove, but that it was still sapping and inhospitable work. I told her that with all the drilling and pounding, enormous quantities of dust and grit and dirt were churned up into the atmosphere, so much that sometimes the sun was almost blotted out, and that no matter how many filters or masks we wore, we were still breathing in a certain amount of that poisonous shit. And there were of course the periodic on-site accidents, men getting injured, maimed, even killed. I told her how a good friend of mine, a tough old codger of a Ruski venerated as a legend by the other men, had lost three fingers on his right hand in an incident a few years back, and how now he had to make do with just a thumb and forefinger.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘But then every line of living has its hazards,’ I said kindly.
‘Don’t I know it,’ she said, and yawned and stretched and settled herself again amid the pillows.
Then neither of us said anything and through the window I listened to the noise of another city, growing already familiar. I slid from the sill, put on my trousers and belt. I checked my wallet. I picked up my dead mobile, consulted its blank screen, and told her it was time to go.
KINDLY FORGET MY EXISTENCE
Owen Doran was sitting at the bar of The Boatman Tavern when his friend and former bandmate Eli Cassidy came through the door. By then Doran was the Boatman’s sole visible occupant; shortly prior to Eli’s entrance, Doran had witnessed the Tavern’s barman, a monosyllabic Eastern European with a sharp-planed face, extravagantly scarred Adam’s apple and skin-coloured crewcut, step into a trapdoor in the floor of the bar. The barman, hitherto a clipped, evasive presence, had raised a brow, established an instant of ferociously lucid eye contact, and dropped wordlessly out of sight.
Consigned so abruptly to his own company, Doran had felt exposed, on display. To stem his self-consciousness, he’d futzed with the extremities of his suit—pinching plumb his shirt cuffs and tamping securely under his chin the inexpertly folded knot of his tie. He had nipped restrainedly at his beer and tried his best to ignore the ticking of the clock above the bar.
When the Boatman’s door thrummed on its hinges, Doran turned to the source of the disturbance bearing an instinctive scowl; seeing that the intruder was Eli, his scowl deepened out of sheer surprise. But then it occurred to Doran why Eli was there. Wiping at his face with his fingers Doran permitted himself a glance at the bar clock—it was, finally, gone eleven, and it was a relief to know it was gone eleven. He turned back to Eli and modified his craggy, pug-dog lineaments into an expression someone who did not know Owen Doran might mistake for benign.
‘Welcome, fellow coward,’ he drawled.
Eli Cassidy blinked and frowned in his dark coat. A residue of the rained-through morning had trailed him in and now it was diffusing from his hatless head and thin, sloping shoulders like a contagion.
‘You
on your own?’ Eli said, shaking off his coat. Underneath, a black suit.
‘The man will be back, he’s just belowground a spell,’ Doran announced. ‘Drink?’
‘Redundant question,’ Eli replied, stalking forward.
Eli’s rinsed brogues squeaked on the Tavern’s floorboards. He transferred his overcoat from one arm to the other. Limply piled and dripping, it resembled the lustreless corpse of a drowned animal. Eli heaped the coat on the stool adjacent to Doran’s, but remained standing himself. Eli looked good, a trim man in his forties in a well-cut suit, though Doran could detect the reek of tobacco beneath the crisp ozone scent of his wetness. And the suit, on second look, was not quite pristine; there were streaks and gobbets of something slick adhering to the trouser legs.
‘Is that shit on your knees?’ Doran asked.
Eli looked down.
‘Just mud.’
‘Did you fall?’
‘Yes,’ Eli admitted. His face mottling, Eli considered the row of bar taps, their black levers level in the air. A small vein throbbed above his right eye. ‘I’ll just wait for the fucking guy, I guess then,’ he sniffed.
Doran sighed, fitted his feet against the lowest rung of his stool and levered himself halfway over the bar, gut pressing into the counter’s bevelled edge. He eyed the trapdoor in the floor, its rectangular metal door yawning upward, resting at a forty-five degree angle against a shelf of soft drinks and no sign at all of the barman.
With no little dexterity, Doran contorted his right arm in under the bar, extracted a pint glass, and from his side of the counter pressed down a tap and held the glass angled in place as he evenly poured a pint. Doran watched in the bar mirror as the glass filled, as the pint’s head bubbled and bloomed. Pouring from the wrong side of the bar required the same queasy narrowness of concentration as writing with your weaker hand.
‘Well done,’ Eli said as Doran handed him the pint. ‘The staff don’t mind?’
‘What staff?’ Doran said, looking around and snapping two fivers from his wallet. ‘There’s one post, and it’s been abandoned.’ He put the money by the taps.
‘How are you, anyway?’ Eli said.
‘How am I? A tad dismayed to find I’ve as little a pair of balls on me as you.’
Eli took a mouthful of his pint. ‘Psychic of you to have the same notion, alright,’ he said.
‘Cravens think along the same lines. Though I was here first,’ Doran said, ‘which makes me definitively the cowardlier.’
‘You didn’t go up at all then?’ Eli asked, nodding towards the Tavern’s windows.
Doran shook his head. His dirty red hair was gathered and cinched into a small, Samurai-ish pigtail at the crown of his head, and he had tidied up his beard, Eli noted. Doran was a short man with a barrel chest lapsing into a greedy boy’s pot belly. He was wearing a cheap, boxy suit that was deep navy, not black, and his tie, unflatteringly wide and short, was patterned with what Eli now realised were tiny skulls. Such a flourish of gallows impudence was Doran’s style alright.
‘Did you?’ Doran said. ‘Go up?’
‘I had a wander,’ Eli admitted, low-voiced. ‘The cemetery first. To see where they were putting her. It’s on a hill.’
‘Maryanne,’ Doran said.
Eli gave a small shake of his head. The shake was not demonstrative; it was to himself. ‘Maryanne,’ he said. ‘When did you hear?’
‘A couple of days back,’ Doran said. He looked at Eli. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with a formal wince of his brow.
‘Me too,’ Eli said.
‘How’s Laura?’ Doran asked.
‘She’s good.’
‘She know you’re here?’
Eli shrugged.
‘And the baba?’
‘I refrained from sharing my plans with the three- year-old,’ Eli said. ‘You got any creature on the scene yourself?’
Doran grinned. ‘Those days are done, I’m almost sure.’ He splayed a hand on the counter and inspected the digits, as if in a moment of recent inattention a ring might have somehow contrived to snag itself there. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘I’ve entered the era of grand onanistic solitude, and, to be honest, that’s fucking fine by me.’
‘I doubt that,’ Eli said.
‘Well,’ Doran said, raising his brows and trailing diplomatically into silence.
Doran’s eyes went again to the clock. Eleven minutes past eleven. The burial would follow at noon. He himself had arrived at the Tavern just after nine, empty-stomached but full of cringingly honourable intentions. His plan had been to bolster his courage with a quantity of preliminary drinks before heading to the funeral. But the drink had not coaxed forth that kind of courage (as he knew, in his bones, it would not), and so Doran had sat, and not moved, and eleven had come and gone, and he had kept drinking in order to tolerate his ingrained cowardice. Cowards were cowards, Doran considered ruefully, but they required conviction to be so—the brave thing was usually the easier thing.
Doran took a long draught of his pint and smacked his lips with satisfaction.
‘Mortality’s a skull-fuck, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Hm,’ Eli grunted.
‘She wasn’t well,’ Doran said, ‘is what I heard.’
‘Me too,’ Eli said.
‘Did we always know she was not well?’
Eli considered the skulls on Doran’s tie, the repeating rows of black eyes.
‘I don’t know. You think on it, you turn things over. But the memories come out of your notions of them, what you thought was happening. And Christ knows we all had our dramatic days, back then. But if you’re asking if I ever thought she’d do this . . .’
‘It would never have occurred to me to ask,’ Doran interjected, looking down into the sudsy, popping surface of his pint. ‘Was it done violently, I wonder? Was there grisly theatre involved? A messy aftermath.’
‘Christ, it hardly matters now,’ Eli said.
‘Or painlessly, hygienically,’ Doran went on. ‘There was a guy back in the day, and when I say day, I mean the forties. A writer. He done himself in and had to leave a note of course, had to attempt a pithy little addendum. “I am going to put myself to sleep for a bit longer than usual. Call it eternity,” is how he signed off this planet.’
‘You want to control it,’ Eli said.
‘Fuck her,’ Doran said. ‘Fuck her for what she did. And we’re not even getting the worst of it, are we? We’re the old guard. We’re from the old way-back days. We’ve already had to get over her, haven’t we?’
‘Fuck her,’ Eli repeated softly, experimentally. He turned composedly to the bar. He kneaded the bridge of his nose, the sockets of his eyes.
‘Sorry,’ Doran said.
‘Why? You’re just Doran being Doran,’ Eli explained.
‘Sorry,’ Doran said again, ‘you know my cuntishness is as congenital as my cravenness. The only cure is no me.’ Doran extended a beefy palm, patted Eli’s shoulder. ‘But I was always glad you and her got together, you know.’
Eli chortled. ‘Now that was a bad idea.’
‘It was a fucking terrible idea,’ Doran grinned. ‘But what wasn’t, back then? After I quit I spent a season licking the windows in the mother’s house in Portlaoise, for instance. You two tried, anyhow.’
‘The marriage was insanity.’
‘The glory days,’ Doran said wistfully. ‘You say we had our moments but not you. You were a good boy for so long. Sensible, abstemious. You were, Eli, sorry, that sounds like an insult but it’s not. Only she could turn you out of your equilibrium. She had a knack for it.’
‘Not that she meant it, I don’t think,’ Eli mused. ‘But she did make you want to lie down in the middle of traffic, alright.’
‘Was that how it felt?’ Doran asked.
‘That’s what it feels li
ke it felt like,’ Eli said. ‘But I don’t know. I don’t know how it was for her. At all.’
Eli took a sip of his beer, Doran a deep quaff. The barman showed no sign of resurfacing; the clock ticked on. Eventually Doran gave a gentle, annunciatory clearing of his throat.
‘She was our girl, a singer in our band, is what she was,’ he said. He raised his glass and kept it aloft until Eli chinked it.
Eli could not deny that, at least. Sunken Figure was the band Eli, Doran, and a third friend, Proinsias Stanton, had founded in college, twenty years ago. Doran had been the original frontman and lyricist, ransacking undergrad poetry anthologies to flesh out the pornographic gibberish he half barked, half crooned. Eli wrote the actual music—clean post-punk lines and agitated percussion—and played bass. Stanton was lead guitar and for a time attempted to manage the band. Maryanne Watt first materialised on Stanton’s arm, a serious girlfriend, in the long post-college epoch Sunken Figure spent toiling upon the capital’s circuit. Stanton himself soon gave up, quitting the band for a job in the national forestry. Maryanne quit him and stuck with the band. Eli convinced Doran to let her on stage. And she did look good, rattling a tambourine and occasionally contributing tremulous backing vocals. Other members—drummers and auxiliary guitarists and keyboardists—came and went and Sunken Figure laboured amiably on, eking out enough of an existence to continually defer extinction, until the turn of the millennium, when something like actual success occurred. There was, finally, a major label deal, a hit single. There was coverage, attention, even money. And then came the grand folly: a marathon triple-figure-date tour that ate up thirteen months of their lives and killed Sunken Figure stone dead.
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