Jarleth picks up after one ring. He must be in bed, flanking some class of twat Gael doesn’t care to hear named. She’s changed her mind about the student fees, she tells him. She’s finally realized his generosity and that she’s been ungrateful to turn down his support. (Art raises his formidable eyebrows at this and at the letter.) As she accepts her father’s munificence, she wants him to redirect the fees for her education to his own account to pay for the rent he’s now demanding of his children’s mother.
However she tries to swipe them from her memory, there are details besides Jarleth’s MasterCard number Gael knows by heart. Holidays, for example. Lents he made them go without sugar for their betterment. Evenings spent in spare meeting rooms of his office, doing a fortnight’s worth of homework, swallowing fusty air and saliva for sustenance. Car journeys. Thursdays.
One Thursday in October, 2001, Guthrie’s fourth ever fit played out in the Accident & Emergency clinic for half a day. Sive was in Cork, so the comforting was left to Jarleth. This was six months before Gael and her father’s shower conversation.
Whoever had flushed the contents of Guthrie’s schoolbag down the toilet had fled when they noticed his gaunt body seizing, so it was without witness that Guthrie saw light flood the boys’ toilet cubicle at St Enda’s. His cheekbone cracked against the bowl and broke the eye socket, as cleanly as an egg. The eyeball had slipped out of its recess. For weeks, the celestial glow he saw would be as real as the bite of bleach.
There’s always some kind of trauma preceding it, Jarleth claimed. It was a studied kind of victimhood. He wasn’t following his father’s or the doctor’s instructions on how to manage his condition, Jarleth edified no one in particular, as they sat on the yellow plastic chairs of Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children; Gael pat-drying her brother’s nine-year-old version of Van Gogh’s sunflowers that sagged and trickled yellow watercolour piss.
That night, when Guthrie was deep in painkiller sleep, Gael heard a voice answer her father’s in the living room. She stretched her eyelids open with her fingers to be sure she was awake; then, pyjama-clad, tiptoed down the stairs and perched on the bottom step. Ice clicked in crystal tumblers beneath the men’s low, heavy-duty voices. Work talk. Gael couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, but she could understand the urgency of getting Coleman’s to sign before ‘end of day tomorrow.’ Eavesdropping had never felt good, especially with such disappointments as ‘end of day.’ Why not the end of the day? Everything he said was beginning to vex her. Though still a child, she already felt that straining to hear was not a position to be in, so she got up and, with an air of grievance, proceeded into the living room. She viewed her father wordlessly. The visitor (who Gael didn’t lay eyes on) laughed a foghorn laugh at her bunched expression. Who have we here then? he said. Are you the little entrepreneur, or the other one? Guthrie? Gael answered, without turning to address him: ‘Do I look like I just broke my eye socket?’ Jarleth would punish her later for Answering Back. The man loomed almost to the ceiling, it seemed to her peripheral vision, and he rattled ice cubes in his glass like dice. Gael remembers the look that crossed her father’s face as he told her to get back to bed. If anyone could embarrass him in front of a colleague, it was his prepubescent daughter. Your daddy told me about your little head-lice enterprise at school, the man said. You’d buy lice from the plagued kids, was it? Sell the nits on to them wanted to skip tests and go home early. That’s a fine little business model. Do you want to grow up to be like Daddy?
‘I want to be like my mother,’ Gael said.
‘Is that so?’
‘She directs a hundred people at a time, not including the audience.’
‘Power hungry, is it?’ the man said. ‘Little tyrant like?’
‘You say the word little a lot,’ Gael said. She finally looked at him and forced herself to hang tough, even though his enormous lower jaw jutted out in a highly entertained sort of way, which made Gael feel like setting fire to him. She became newly aware of her pyjama set covered in a starry night sky. (That week, an imbecilic hairdresser had cut her hair into a bob with a thick black fringe and had complimented her handiwork as ‘so cute,’ so Gael had bit her dirty nail off and dropped it in the hairdresser’s cappuccino.) When she felt her cheeks flush, she went to the liquor cabinet, where a plastic sheet of ice lay thawing. She doled a cube into her palm and placed it on her tongue with the significance of a Eucharist. ‘Off to bed with you,’ Jarleth repeated, but the man was not done being entertained. She likes staying up with the men, he said. He ground ice cubes with his molars. She knows where the real deals get done and it’s not in school, is it, little girl? Gael spat the too-large ice cube into her palm to say, ‘I’m not a little girl.’ What are you then? The man leaned down so she could see his mealy tongue. A mini woman?
Gael looked at Jarleth, who was watching her, not with amusement or interest but with disgust at her sex. It would be most despicable in its adolescence, he must have feared. The parting of his black and grey hair looked wide as a spoon so close to the ceiling light. The oval ladle, the shining line of the handle. The man continued to await her deliciously righteous retorts, but Jarleth waved her away. ‘Auch,’ he said. ‘She still wears pink knickers.’
‘Pink knickers?’ the man said. ‘Is that right?’ He was asking Gael.
Gael dropped the ice cube to the wooden floor, whose preservation was one of the major hassles of Jarleth’s household. She saw his eyes go to it.
‘I am not wearing pink knickers.’ Gael began to tremble, blood rushing to her face. Could something that sounded like a curse and felt like a curse not be one?
‘Less you buy your own clothes with the head-lice fund,’ the man said, ‘then your daddy’d know what knickers you’ve on, wouldn’t he now? Sure, your daddy foots the bill for your frilly pink knickers.’
‘I’m NOT wearing pink knickers,’ Gael said and then said it again and again, until the image of the man – failing to control his laughter – blurred with the dream she’d been having and the pain in her head. Don’t worry, little woman. All sorts of business can be carried out in pink knickers. You could be a pinko president, he said. Isn’t that so, Daddy?
‘SEE.’ She was almost screaming. The pyjama trousers were deposited at her ankles. ‘I TOLD you I SAID I’m NOT WEARING PINK KNICKERS.’ She leaned towards the man to advance upon him, to make him take it back, but the trousers held her in place and there was the ice cube to contend with. She thought she heard the words spider’s legs but she didn’t know what that could have referred to and she didn’t know how anything could be better proven. Half-blind, she pulled her trousers up. Jarleth had ordered her to ‘before I get the wooden spoon to pinken that bottom.’ Gael kicked the ice cube across the floor and ran out of the room and up the stairs. Guthrie would be awake. Getting in beside him would remind him of his favourite thing: that he could help. That his presence was a consolation. It would remind her of something too – something she needed to know more than how far she could get with no money or coat. And, if she slept there, he wouldn’t come to get her. He’d wait till the next day, till they were out of anyone’s earshot. The next day, before school, he’d turn her by the shoulders and smack her through her pinafore with his hand. Two shrill disgraces. ‘Now you’ll have a pink rear end. And you won’t have to lift your skirt to prove otherwise.’
I didn’t lift my skirt, Gael would think. There was no skirt.
Her father’s eyelashes – pale and straight as a heifer’s – cut through his gaze. He was always pulling at them, as if some dust or crud was clotted there, but then he’d determine it was only whatever nuisance fence lay before him. He would blink and get on with it.
Not one gesture could she forget. There are fifty-two Thursdays in a non-leap year.
Art doesn’t drink. He doesn’t drive, he doesn’t drink. He has a son a bit older than Gael, but they don’t see one another. He lives in Cape Town with his wife. Stuart and Matilda, married at nineteen i
n the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. Small affair. European relatives weren’t asked. Anyway. ‘Most days I think it’s best Stu in’t near, ghosting me with his mum’s looks. And his scars from being abandoned.’
Gael looks at Art’s fingers for signs of a white stripe. Too much hair. (Too much time, is what she doesn’t comprehend. Enough time for moss to grow over the markings of a tombstone.) ‘Will you get a job?’ she asks. Art doesn’t know yet what will happen. ‘Well, if you decide not to,’ Gael says, ‘could you tell Mum? Soon? So she doesn’t have to quit. You can help look after the twins. Isn’t that why you came? You moved in so fast.’
Art checks the score on the TV. ‘I daren’t try coaxing your mum’s choices. Them’s hers to make. Besides, the film were two men and a baby. Not two men and two babies.’
Gael watches a dart being knocked off bull’s-eye by another that’s already taken claim. It’s not enough to be exceptionally good, she recalls, then cuts off that stubborn chain of thought which is in fact a manacle. If Sive hasn’t completely abandoned herself, she’ll find her way back to the podium. It’s only a matter of when. It’s that symbol in her score that looks like an eye – fermata – a grand pause, where the note is prolonged beyond its value, for dramatic effect. How long it’s sustained is up to the conductor. How long she can hold her arms aloft, making the blood pump so far away from herself as to contradict the heart.
‘If Jarleth ever comes round,’ Gael says on her way out, ‘do me a favour. Flash him your tat. And keep him the fuck away from those kids. Three men and two babies sounds dire.’
4
The Gates of Horn & Ivory
April 2011
I
‘If I pose the salient question, I fear the answer will render all others as redundant as your Irish civil service. So let me first ask this: why, after having arrived an inefficient half hour early, did you ignore the Admissions Officer’s direction to mingle with the other candidates over luncheon, unapologetically and assiduously use your phone, and refuse the clerk’s instruction to take a seat in the lobby alongside your peers, while the portfolio our administrative staff courteously prepared for you – which includes the biography of your interviewer; that is, me – remained unstudied in the crook of your arm?’
Being watched as she descended the august amphitheatre to the echo of her own footfalls – towards the pit and its chair of judgment – had been a masterclass in diminution. It had felt like sliding down the eyepiece of a microscope onto a petri dish to be assessed for viable cell density or choicest genome sequencing. Is CEO intrinsic to your DNA? Gael hears her brother’s verdict and wonders why the projector screen doesn’t present some riddle or demand in spidery font: ‘To READ THIS is to be disqualified.’ Games. She disassembles the question that’s been put to her and answers, simply:
‘Risk mitigation.’
Gael lets a silence follow that suggests she will elaborate upon invitation. Professor Sutton makes a hurrying gesture reminiscent of the time Sive had a guest soloist for Camille Saint Saëns’s A Minor Cello Concerto who preferred to let his bow set the pace rather than the presiding baton. ‘Of the forty per cent of interviewees admitted to this MBA,’ Gael says, ‘less than a quarter are female. The odds are one in ten, against me. But I figure I’m in the tail of the distribution, of candidates’ abilities.’
‘Which tail?’
Gael checks a smile and tells herself not to get drawn into any pissing match. It’s all part of the process. ‘I assume that the entrepreneurship taught at London Business School is reflected by the institution’s practices. In which case, you’ll not shy away from an atypical candidate. With respect to my arrival time: if you’re half an hour early, when you’re fifteen minutes late, you’re fifteen minutes early. I always use that half hour for client management. It’s Friday at two p.m. Moscow’s three hours ahead – some emails needed to be seen to before TGIF, some after. Hence the risk mitigation. To me, strategic expertise and prioritization are one and the same. I didn’t read the bio in the orientation folder because I’m already familiar with all the faculty members’ profiles. At some point, I’d love the opportunity to ask about your time as consultant for Citigroup – what your thoughts are on the LIBOR manipulation’s global repercussions and whether you expect to be part of the legal proceedings. If I’d gotten a sector consultant for an interviewer, then, sure, it might’ve slanted the questions asked and, if I’d read the bio, I’d have had an extra few minutes to prepare for that. But an interview is an opportunity to present myself and my potential. That needs no half-hour head start. Whoever the interviewer turned out to be, they’d likely decide if I’m a suitable candidate based on my conduct. As to my standing up in the lobby, my interviewer might have come to the corridor in person: I didn’t want to be looked down upon, or to have had to haul myself up from those low chairs. The dynamics of the first encounter are critical.’
The skin protrusions where Professor Sutton’s eyebrows should be are arched. ‘Apposite that you mention evidence,’ she says, ‘since yours is the lightest portfolio I’ve been handed by the admissions committee in the history of my tenure here. No résumé. No transcripts. GMAT scores. References. Amazingly, no application form. If there weren’t twenty-eight double-sided pages of single-spaced ten-point font dissertation, I should expect you are trying to save the planet, one rejection slip at a time. Instead, I expect worse. You’re the niece of a distinguished alum or a colleague’s daughter in-law who has far too much faith in nepotism. Ms Foess: how did you get this interview?’
Gael assesses her inquisitor’s hands, which rest palm-down on the huge leather-topped desk beside a cup of steamless milky tea. Her fingers are like Savoiardi biscuits. ‘There’s a Japanese proverb,’ Gael says. ‘‘Beat your wife on your wedding day and your married life will be happy.’ … Let’s just say I’m no traditionalist. I knew I’d never meet the criteria to get this interview, but I felt that if I got one, I’d have as much chance of admittance as if I’d met them, so my priority was to get into this chair. I didn’t get here the traditional way.’
Professor Sutton jolts with a hiccup. ‘There’s an Irish proverb,’ she says, and swallows loudly. ‘A thing gotten badly goes badly.’
That her voice sounds so large in such a bullying space impresses Gael. And yet, it is not without restraint. The demography of fiscal know-how is straight and white and narrow. Her wan skin is that of a Conference pear, ensconced in coarse brown moles. No padding bolsters the wide shoulders of her suit, nor is any needed. Gael is already imagining how this interview might conclude. However sound your justifications for standing up, Ms Foess, I trust – for health and safety reasons – you’ll consent to taking a seat in these stalls come September. ‘A thing gotten badly goes badly? That sounds like post-crash revisionism,’ Gael says. ‘Pre oh-eight, anyone would’ve said a fifty-metre heated pool goes well in your back garden however it got there.’
By Professor’s Sutton’s pushing back from the table, it suddenly, sickeningly occurs to Gael she’s about to be shown the door.
‘I said I’m familiar with faculty members’ profiles,’ Gael says in one breath. ‘That’s because my plan to get here involved homework. First, I scoured the staff’s active research interests. I found a conference that was to be hosted by UL. I spent weeks drafting an abstract that fit the call-for-papers like a glove. Once it was accepted, I contacted the organizers to ask if any future colleagues from LBS were presenting. I was told Dr David Fernley would be. I asked to be on his panel, as they hadn’t finalized the programme. Then I had to write the paper. My first. When I had a draft, I submitted it to the European Journal of Business and Social Sciences, not expecting it to be seriously considered, but to get the readers’ reports, which I used to reshape and strengthen my presentation. I spent the last two months leading up to the conference writing material beyond the personal essays LBS asks of its applicants. At the conference last month, Dr Fernley was impressed with my paper, but when he
found out I was twenty and a liberal arts undergrad at King’s College, he had questions. I used the opportunity to give him my pitch, along with my portfolio, which he mustn’t have taken lightly, despite its weight.’
Gael regrets wearing the outlet-store Versace skirt, which was affordable because it’s a size zero. It cleaves into her hips and waist. She wants to sit forward on the chair’s edge, to uncross her legs, to let her knees go where they will.
‘Why London Business School?’
‘It’s rated second best in the world. The best’s in France, but I don’t have time to learn the language and, sure, they teach in English but most of the value of an MBA’s in the networking. I did consider Oxford, because a brand like that lets you sail on it for the rest of your life. Even if you fail, your having gone there’s enough to alter people’s perceptions of you and your business. And I wouldn’t sail on it. I’d build a port. But in the end, I figured they’d be less likely to read a portfolio by a twenty-year-old Irish girl with an aversion to the Oxford comma, pecking orders and tweed.’
‘Are you accusing Oxford of anti-Irish sentiment?’
Gael allows herself an openly confused expression. ‘No.’
‘Where else have you applied and what is the status of those applications?’
‘Nowhere.’
Professor Sutton lifts her right hand to her mouth, hooking her squat index finger around her philtrum and her thumb under her chin. She narrows her eyes on Gael and doesn’t say anything for a moment. Gael glances at the wastepaper basket to the side of the desk, supposing it to be lined with her peers’ freshly embossed business cards. At length, Professor Sutton says, ‘Not one other application. What will you do if you fail?’
‘Realistically, I’d break something. Not, like, a jaw! A laptop. Crockery. The hourglass my father got me as a metaphor-heavy gift. And then move on. Take especially good care of my clients. Restrategize. I don’t make plans for failing with my personal goals. Pursue success and deal with failure if and as you hit upon it.’
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