by Paul Murray
That didn’t matter; there were other things to talk about. Around that time Halley found out about the severance package from the brokerage. It was three times Howard’s salary as a teacher; he had left it sitting in the bank.
She didn’t push him into buying a house. She just told him it was dumb to leave so much money lying dormant. ‘That’s simple economics,’ she said. Howard was the one person in Ireland who wasn’t obsessed with property. The rest of the country talked of nothing else – house prices, stamp duty, tracker mortgages, throwing around the terminology like realtors at a convention – but the concept of actually owning a place had evidently never occurred to him. He needed someone to force him to pay attention to his own life, she told him. ‘Otherwise you’re going to drift right off the face of the Earth.’
And so a few months later they’d moved into a house on the outskirts of the suburbs, looking across a shallow valley onto spinneys of wayward, Seussian trees. Though the neighbourhood was not fancy – she doubted anyone around here was sending their kids to Seabrook – the house was well beyond their means. But the sheer profligacy of it became for her part of the point, the quixotic bravado of the two of them actually taking on life, going up to its doors and yelling, ‘Let us in!’ though they had neither invitation nor evening attire; it made her smile to herself as she dried her first dish, in their first evening in the new house. And the absurdity of compounding the debt by some day – not right away of course, but some day – filling the empty bedrooms, this made her smile too. She hadn’t written so much as a word of a story, but for the first time in a long time she felt she was inside a story of her own, and surely that was better yet.
Only a year and a half has passed since then; still it feels like someone else’s life. Through the window the pretty spinneys of trees have been uprooted, and the estate teeters on the brink of a vast tract of mud. Some day, they are promised, it will be a Science Park; right now there are only great weals and gashes, each one pinned with dozens of tiny stakes, as if some kind of acupuncture, or torture maybe, is being performed on the flayed skin of the earth; all day long you can hear the bulldozers claw, the circular saws slice into concrete, the last of the tree roots being wrenched up and dismembered.
‘I guess we should have read the fine print,’ is all Howard will say on the subject: he doesn’t have to spend every day here, listening to it. In recent weeks the racket has been augmented by a nightly apocalypse of fireworks, attended by car alarms and barking dogs, as well as regular power cuts, as the diggers in the nascent Science Park accidentally cut through cables.
She lights a cigarette and stares at the cursor blinking implacably at her from the screen. Then, as if in retaliation, she leans in and hammers:
If memory technology continues to expand at the current rate, data equivalent to the collected experience of an entire human life will soon be storable on a single chip.
Slumping back she gazes at what she’s written, streels of smoke spreading lazily over her shoulder.
What with the phony war going on in Iraq, it’s not a great time to be an American abroad. Hearing her accent, people, strangers, have actually stopped Halley in the street – or the supermarket, or the cinema box-office – to upbraid her on her country’s latest outrage. When it came to looking for a job though, she found that her ethnicity wasn’t a problem. Quite the opposite: to the business and technology community here, an American accent was literally the Voice of Authority, and anything it said treated as dispatches from the mother ship. Another surprise: Irish people are crazy for technology. She’d thought that a country with such a weight of history might be prone to looking backward. In fact, the opposite is true. The past is considered dead weight – at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die. The Irish are all about the future – had not their own premier even said he lived in the future? – and every new gadget that emerges is written up as further evidence of the country’s vertiginous modernity, seized upon as a stick to beat the past and the yokels of yesteryear barely recognizable as themselves.
There was a time when Halley too had thrilled at the unstoppable march of science. As a cub reporter in New York, seduced away from her ‘real’ stories by the energy of the Internet boom, she’d had the sense of standing right at the heart of a Big Bang – of a new universe exploding into being, transfiguring all that it touched. The things they could do! The great leaps into the unthinkable that were happening every single day! Now in the face of these relentless, self-advertising wonders she feels more and more of an interloper – clumsy, incompatible, obsolete, like a parent whose kids don’t include her in their games any more. And sitting at her desk in her house in the suburbs, it strikes her that in spite of all the changes she has dutifully transcribed there is really very little difference between her life and her mother’s, twenty-five years before – except that her mother spent the day looking after her children, while Halley’s is passed in the company of little silver machines, in the service of an insatiable mortgage. So this anger she finds boiling up in her, the irrational, unfair anger she feels when Howard comes home, for all the hours he spent away from her, is that then the same anger her mother was always so full of?
Her sister tells her she’s depressed. ‘Worrying that you’re turning into Mom is like the textbook definition of depression. The depression textbooks all have pictures of our mom in them. Quit that fucking job, already. I don’t understand why you don’t.’
‘I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s this visa thing. I can’t just quit and find something else. No one’s going to sponsor me for a job I have no experience in. It’s this or wait tables.’
‘Waiting tables isn’t so bad.’
‘It’s bad when you have a mortgage. You’ll see when you’re older. Things get complicated.’
‘Right,’ Zephyr says. There is a combative silence of a kind that keeps breaking into their conversations these days. Zephyr is five years younger, and has just begun studying art in Providence, R.I. Every day over there seems richer with ideas, fun, adventure than the one before; every day Halley seems to have less to tell in response. Pretending to herself that she doesn’t notice costs her no little effort, and often she’ll find herself spinning off mid-conversation into private fugues of jealousy –
‘What?’ realizing Zephyr has asked her a question. ‘Sorry, it’s a bad line.’
‘I just wondered if you’d been writing anything.’
‘Oh… no. Not at the moment.’
‘Oh,’ Zephyr says sympathetically.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ Halley tells her. ‘When something inspires me, then I’ll do it.’
‘Of course you will!’ Zephyr’s voice crackles enthusiastically; Halley winces, hearing echoes of her own past efforts at sisterly bucking-up.
She goes to the window to let the smoke out. Across the street she sees her neighbour’s two golden retrievers bounce anticipatorily about their front garden; a moment later her neighbour’s car pulls up. He unlatches the gate, bends to bury his face in their blond flyaway fur; his wife opens the door to greet him, new baby in her arms, pretty daughter peeping out from behind her. The dogs leap around like this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Everyone looks so happy.
Standing there unseen, Halley thinks of the way that Howard braces himself when he comes through the door these days, the cloaked expression of weariness as he asks about her day. He is bored: he is in the grip of some massive boredom. Does it emanate from her? Is she leaking boredom into his life, like a radiating atom, the dull, decaying isotope of a lover? She recalls her parents, how they’d morphed with the decades of recession from the hippie fellow-travellers who’d given her and Zephyr their absurd names into dyspeptic fiftysomethings, walling themselves in with investments as they waited for the sky to fall. She wonders if that’s all that lies ahead, an incremental process of distancing, from the world and from each other. Ma
ybe that was why her parents fought; maybe the fights were misguided attempts to find a way back, to recover the why of things that they had lost.
She waits for the sound of Howard’s car and resolves that tonight she will make herself airy, lightsome, that tonight they will not fight. But already she can feel the anger surge upward through her, bubbling out of her core, because already she can see him coming in, asking her how she is, trying not to be bored as she tells him; trying to keep himself interested, as if this is a project he’s set for his class – trying to be good, trying to make himself love her.
‘Howard? You busy, Howard?’
‘Well, actually, I was just about to –’
‘I won’t keep you. Just walk with me a moment, little matter I want to discuss with you. How is everything, Howard? How’s… is it Sally?’
‘Halley,’ Howard glances forlornly at the exit as the Automator leads him away in the opposite direction.
‘Halley, of course. You made an honest woman of her yet? I’m joking, obviously. No pressure from this end. It’s the twenty-first century, school’s not going to judge you for your personal living arrangements. How about work, Howard, how’s that end of things? Into your third year of it now, probably got it pretty well taped at this stage, am I right?’
‘Well –’
‘Fascinating subject, History. Know what I like about it? It’s all written down right there in front of you. Not like Science, where they turn everything on its head every two years. Up is now down. Black is now white. Bananas, that we’ve been saying are good for you, actually give you cancer. History won’t do that. All done and dusted. Case closed. Might not be quite what it used to be, in terms of kids moving to Media Studies, Computer Studies, subjects with more obvious relevance to today. And what is it they say, history teaches us that history teaches us nothing? Makes you wonder what the point of history teachers is, doesn’t it? Ha ha! That’s not my view, though, Howard, don’t look so alarmed. No, as far as I’m concerned, only a fool would write history off, and history teachers like yourself, barring some really major unforeseen circumstances, will always be key members of our faculty here at Seabrook.’
‘Great,’ Howard says. Talking with the Automator has been likened to trying to read a ticker-tape parade; the margin for confusion is not helped by the high velocity at which the Acting Principal is presently moving, forcing Howard into an ignominious trot.
‘History, Howard, that’s what this school was built on, as well as your more obvious foundations, of course – clay, rock, what have you.’ He stops abruptly, so that Howard very nearly crashes into him. ‘Howard, take a look around you. What do you see?’
Dazedly, Howard does as he is told. They are standing in Our Lady’s Hall. There is the Virgin with the starry halo; there are the rugby photographs, the noticeboards, the fluorescent lights. Try as he might, he can perceive nothing out of the ordinary, and at last is forced to answer feebly, ‘Our Lady’s… Hall?’
‘Exactly,’ the Automator says approvingly.
Howard is ashamed to feel a glow of pride.
‘Know when this hall was built? Silly question, you’re the history man, of course you do. Eighteen sixty-five, two years after the school was founded. Another question, Howard. Does this corridor say excellence to you? Does it say, Ireland’s top secondary school for boys?’
Howard takes another look at the hall. The blue-and-white tiles are scuffed and dull, the grubby walls pocked and crumbling, the window-sashes rotted and knotted with generations of cobwebs. On a winter’s day, it could double for a Victorian orphanage. ‘Well…’ he begins, then realizes the Automator has turned on his heel and is power-walking back the way they came. He scurries after him; as he strides, the Automator continues his address, interspersing it with loud directives for the benefit of passing students – ‘Haircut! No running! Are those white socks?’ – more or less indiscriminately, like a Tannoy in some totalitarian state.
‘Once upon a time, Howard, that building was state of the art. Envy of every school in the country. Nowadays it’s an anachronism. Damp classrooms, inadequate light, poor heating. As for the Tower, to call it a death-trap would be paying it a compliment. Times change, that’s the overall point I’m trying to make here. Times change, and you can’t rest on your laurels. Teaching’s a premium service these days. Parents don’t just hand over their children and let you do what you like. They’re looking over your shoulder all the time, and if they suspect they’re not getting full value for money, they’ll whip little Johnny out of here and plonk him into Clongowes before you can say Brian O’Driscoll.’ They have come back through the Annexe, the modern wing of the school, and up the stairs, and are paused now at the open door of the Principal’s office, occupied until recently by Father Furlong. ‘Come on in for a minute, Howard.’ The Automator waves him through. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess, we’re just doing a little rearranging.’
‘So I see…’ Cardboard boxes cover the floor of the old priest’s sanctum sanctorum, some filled with Father Furlong’s possessions, late of these shelves, others with the Automator’s, transported up from his Dean’s office in the old building. ‘Does this mean…?’
‘’Fraid so, Howard, ‘fraid so,’ the Automator sighs. ‘Try to keep it under your hat for now, but the prognosis isn’t good.’
Desmond Furlong’s heart attack in September had taken everyone by surprise. A diminutive, parchment-yellow man, he had cultivated an air of rarefaction that teetered on the brink of actual incorporeality, as if at any moment he might evaporate into a cloud of pure knowledge; physical ailments had always seemed decidedly beneath him. But now he lies in hospital, mortally ill; and while his orrery still rests on the grand cherrywood desk, his photograph still hangs on the office wall (smiling mirthlessly, like a king who has wearied of his crown) and his iridescent fish still shimmer through the gloom of the aquarium on the dresser, his many bookcases today are empty, save for dust and a single stress-busting executive toy like a hastily planted flag.
‘It’s tough,’ the Automator says, placing a consolatory hand on Howard’s shoulder and gazing meditatively into a crate full of Post-its, then stepping aside as a woman staggers in bearing a fresh batch of boxes, which she deposits heavily by the wastepaper basket.
‘Hello, Trudy,’ Howard says.
‘Hello, Howard,’ Trudy replies. Trudy Costigan is the Automator’s wife, a compact blonde who in her St Brigid’s days was voted Best-Looking Girl and Girl Most Likely To, and who shows traces still of her former splendour amid the ravages incurred by the demands of her husband and the five children he has fathered by her (all boys, one a year, as though there is no time to spare – as though, his more paranoid observers whisper, he is raising some sort of army). Since his appointment to Acting Principal, she has also served as the Automator’s unofficial PA, organizing his diary, arranging meetings, answering the phone. She drops things a lot and blushes when he speaks to her, like a secretary fostering a secret crush on her boss; he in turn treats her like a well-meaning but cerebrally ungifted pupil, hustling her, harrying, snapping his fingers.
‘It’s tough,’ he repeats now, directing Howard into a high-backed African chair, another of the sparse group of survivors from the ancien régime, then sitting down on the other side of the desk and making a steeple of his fingers, as Trudy briskly removes from a box and arranges around him a bonsai tree, a pen-set and a framed photograph of their boys in rugby strip. ‘But we can’t let it get us down. That’s not what the Old Man’d want. Got to keep moving forward.’ He leans back in his chair, nodding to himself rhythmically.
A strangely solicitous silence fills the room, which Howard has the growing impression he is expected to fill. ‘Any word on who might take over?’ he obliges.
‘Well, it hasn’t been discussed in any kind of detail yet. Naturally what we’re hoping is that he’ll make a full recovery and get right back in the driving seat. But if he doesn’t…’ The Automator sighs. ‘If he doe
sn’t, the fear is there simply may not be a Paraclete to fill the position. Numbers are down. The order is ageing. There just aren’t enough priests to go around.’ He lifts the photograph of his children and studies it intently. ‘Lay principal would be a sea change, no question about it. Divisive. Paracletes are going to want one of their own in charge, even if they have to ship him in from Timbuktu. Some of the faculty too, the old guard. But they may not have that option.’ His glance slips sidelong from the photograph to Howard. ‘What about you, Howard? How would you feel about a principal drawn from the ranks? Is that something you could see yourself supporting? Hypothetically?’
Behind him Howard can sense Trudy holding her breath; it dawns on him that the Automator’s esoteric remarks regarding the teaching of History earlier were blandishments, or possibly threats, intended to win Howard’s backing in some upcoming, non-hypothetical clash. ‘I’d be in favour of it,’ he returns, in a strained voice.
‘Thought you would,’ says the Automator with satisfaction, replacing the photograph. ‘Said to myself, Howard’s part of the new generation. He wants what’s best for the school. That’s the attitude I like to see in my staff, my fellow staff I mean.’ He swivels round in his chair, addressing the mournful picture of the Old Man. ‘Yes, it’ll be a sad day when the Holy Paraclete Fathers hand over the reins. At the same time, it’s not totally impossible there could be benefits. Country’s not what it used to be, Howard. We’re not just some little Third World backwater any more. These kids coming through now have the confidence to get up there on the world stage and duke it out with the best of them. Our role is to give them the best possible training to do that. And we must ask ourselves, is a clergyman in his sixties or seventies absolutely the right man for that job?’ Emerging from behind the desk and manoeuvring round his wife as if she were another of the cardboard boxes, he begins to pace militaristically about the room, so that Howard has to jog his chair round to face him. ‘Don’t get me wrong. The Paraclete Fathers are extraordinary men, great educators. But they’re spiritual men, first and foremost. Their minds are on loftier matters than the here and now. In a competitive market economy – to be perfectly frank, Howard, you’ve got to wonder whether some of our older priests are even aware what that is. And that puts us in a dangerous position, because we’re competing with Blackrock, Gonzaga, King’s Hospital, any number of top secondary schools. We’ve got to have a strategy. We’ve got to be ready to move with the times. Change is not a dirty word. Neither for that matter is profit. Profit is what enables change, positive change that helps everyone, such as for example demolishing the 1865 building and constructing an entirely new twenty-first-century wing in its place.’