The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  I frown. Mostly the clown is travelling around in a caravan, or pitched up in a field with the rest of the circus, though there is a memorable scene near the end, when the clown comes to Stacy’s house and honks his nose outside her window –

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Ish says, opening the book up again to the very first pages. ‘Of course there’s a clue in it. Look, the publisher’s address is right here. Asterisk Press, Cromwell Road, London. They’ll know where he is.’

  Genius! I seize the phone there and then, but Ish reminds me that it’s the middle of the night. ‘Right, right,’ I agree, setting it down again but remaining on my feet, full of nervous energy. I look at Ish, swivelling gently in her chair. ‘Well. I suppose we should go home.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ish agrees.

  ‘Thank you for helping,’ I say.

  ‘I’m in the book too, don’t forget,’ she says. ‘I want to find out what happens.’

  That night sees the worst riots yet in Athens. While the new Greek government huddles inside the Old Royal Palace, Zegna Square is alight. Cars burn like pagan fires, gunshots streak through the black sky; masked protestors and masked police come together with a thunderclap that can be felt in the chest even thousands of miles away. Next morning, I have nervous clients on the line as soon as I turn on my phone, and at 10 a.m. I see Walter’s limousine pull up outside. Nobody from his office calls me; they just assume I will know he is there, which, to my embarrassment, I do.

  In the back seat, Walter is livid. What are those gobshites doing over there? Will their fucking shambles of a government last the week? If it falls, and Greece tells its creditors to go to fuck, what then? I tell him that his investments have been spread across a wide portfolio precisely to protect them from this kind of shock, and that in fact Dublex will most likely benefit from the increased volatility in terms of security contracts. It’s the same speech I gave him a few weeks ago when the Spanish banks teetered, and a few weeks before that when it was Portugal on the brink. Every time his fears are harder to dislodge, as if he can see the flaming torches massed outside his house.

  ‘I don’t see what he’s so worried about,’ Kevin comments when I return. ‘It’s not like he’s going to run out of money, whatever happens.’

  ‘The more you have, the greater your fears of losing it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Classic human psychology.’

  ‘In Somalia, you worry about an empty rice bowl,’ Gary McCrum concurs. ‘In the suburbs, you worry about burglars running off with your flat-screen TV. But if you’re a billionaire – what would it take for a billionaire to lose everything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kevin says.

  ‘Well, Walter fucking knows. I guarantee you, Walter lies awake every night, conjuring up whatever kind of Boschian nightmare you’d need to make any serious dent in his fortune. Defaulting Greeks are just one pixel of the fucking IMAX screen of unrelenting carnage that’s the inside of that man’s head.’

  ‘That’s why serious players never quit while they’re ahead,’ Jocelyn says. ‘They’re always rushing off to make more billions to protect the billions they have already. Looking for that little bit more that’ll make them bulletproof. But then that’s just more for them to worry about. It’s a vicious circle, see?’

  ‘So…’ Kevin looks deeply troubled by this information. ‘Are you saying … they shouldn’t bother? They’d be better off not being rich?’

  ‘No, I’m saying they need to tighten their focus,’ Jocelyn says. ‘If you’re worried about the apocalypse, you want to be investing in two things and two things only: weapons and gold. And by gold I mean actual bullion you can hold in your hand, not some certificate. Then, when it all goes tits up, you’re ready. Fortress in the Swiss Alps with an underground generator and its own water supply, maybe three hundred mercenaries to take out any fammos who come looking to get in – sorted.’

  ‘“Fammos”?’

  ‘Yeah, from the famine, you know.’

  ‘An island would be better,’ Gary McCrum asserts. ‘With a self-sustaining farm.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, an island’s the ideal,’ Jocelyn says. ‘Though you’re probably going to have to cut back on your mercenaries a bit.’

  ‘Or get robot mercenaries?’ Kevin says.

  ‘Nice,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You should say that to Walter. He’d be well impressed.’

  ‘You think?’ Kevin says.

  ‘Might even sign you up for a place in the fortress,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You could look out the window and watch us all burn.’

  Kevin beams, as though he would like this very much indeed.

  * * *

  At last a quiet moment presents itself. I use my mobile so the bank won’t record the call; the line is poor, and the girl who answers doesn’t seem to know anything about Paul. ‘You published his novel,’ I tell her. ‘For Love of a Clown, surely you know it?’

  The girl tells me, rather peevishly, that it must have been before her time, then puts me on hold. A moment later a second voice, a man’s, comes on the line. He introduces himself as Paul’s editor. Warily, as if he suspects some kind of scam, he tells me that while Asterisk Press did indeed publish Paul’s first novel, they have had no contact with him for some time.

  ‘Really?’ This strikes me as strange. ‘He has not been in touch regarding his new book, the story of an Everyman working in a mid-tier investment bank?’

  ‘No,’ the editor replies. ‘We haven’t heard anything from him at all.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say, and then, ‘perhaps you have an address where I can contact him?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘We can’t give that information out to strangers.’

  ‘Yes, but I am not really a stranger,’ I explain. ‘You see, I am the Everyman whose adventures will appear in his next novel.’

  He apologizes again, invites me to leave a message which he can pass on, though he adds that Paul has not replied to any correspondence for several years, so they don’t know even if the address they have is the right one.

  A series of phone calls to literary magazines and institutions in Dublin proves scarcely more informative; of the few people who remember him, one insists that he is dead, and refuses to be persuaded otherwise even when I tell him I recently had lunch with him. Nevertheless, a picture begins to emerge. One acquaintance makes reference to the writer’s disappointment over the reception of Clown; several speak about a hostile review in the national press.

  Once I retrieve this review, which is hidden behind a paywall, his retreat from the literary world becomes considerably less of a mystery.

  ‘“How can something so trivial feel so exhausting? Reading this deeply unfunny, unintentionally depressing book, one might be tempted to conclude that the novel, like the circus, has simply had its day, and that novelists have come to inhabit the same territory as the clown chosen here as protagonist – once-beloved figures so outmoded that they now inspire only pity and incomprehension.”’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Ish says.

  ‘“Yet this book comes on the heels of Bimal Banerjee’s masterful The Clowns of Sorrow, in which the obsolescence of these forgotten jokers gives them a tragic grandeur, confronting us with the unbreachable gulf between ourselves and the past…”’

  I fall silent, skimming down the page. Ish nudges me. ‘What else?’

  ‘There is a lot of stuff here about Banerjee continuing Joyce’s great hermeneutic project.’

  ‘What about Paul?’

  Frowning, I read down to the last paragraph. ‘She thinks he should not write any more novels.’

  ‘Right, I got that.’

  And it seems that, for many years, he took her advice. I think back to that first conversation, the ‘wall’ he said he’d hit with his work; now it appears in quite a different light. Yet these discoveries have brought him no closer, and we must resort to desperate measures.

  ‘What the fuck is that thing?’ Kevin says.

  ‘Telephone directory,’ I say.

 
‘Landlines?’ Kevin says. ‘Who still has a landline?’

  ‘I keep a landline for when I need to find my mobile,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘We’ve got a maid to do that,’ Gary says.

  There are ten men listed who have the same name as the writer. Whenever Jurgen isn’t within earshot, I go through them one by one. Over the course of the evening, I manage to make contact with a butcher, an upholsterer, a sound engineer, a data miner, and a retired army captain who served with the United Nations in the Biafran War. They know nothing about my Paul, yet I can’t shake the sense of them as facets of a crystal, different aspects of the same entity – the men he might have become in different circumstances, at a different time, with different choices.

  As I put down the phone for the last time, I have one of those dizzy moments, the vertigo that comes when just for an instant you get an inkling of how vast the world is, how populous and unknowable … Then it recedes again and is gone.

  ‘What about that number there?’ Ish points to an uncrossed name at the top of the list.

  ‘It’s disconnected.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean there’s no one there. Think about it. If this was a book, where would the person you were looking for turn out to be? It’s always the place with the disconnected phone, right?’

  She keeps prodding me until I look the address up. It turns out that 323 Superbia is only ten minutes’ walk from the Centre, and so, mostly to mollify her, I agree to pay it a visit.

  ‘When?’ she says.

  ‘Soon,’ I promise.

  ‘I can’t wait that long! The suspense is killing me!’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  Taking the lift down to the plaza, I follow the tram tracks in the direction of the train station until I pass out of the Centre. And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smartphones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the International Financial Services Centre can offer to compare – then I remember that this was his very point, that the storyless, faceless banks are the underwriters of all this humanity, that we are the Fates who weave the fabric of the day …

  Coming from the Centre, with its clean lines and ubiquitous dress code, the chaos of detail is almost overwhelming; I take refuge in the map on my phone. It takes me off the thoroughfare and into a warren of flats and terraced houses. There are no cars, no people, just boarded-up windows, incoherent graffiti, detritus so random it seems deliberate. The further I go, the worse it gets, till the very molecules of the air and brickwork seem on the point of fraying, drifting apart to leave yawning rents of pure nothingness. And then, in the midst of this desolation, I come upon a large, glittering tower.

  To say it appears out of place would be an understatement. It looks like a five-star hotel that has been stolen from some exclusive neighbourhood of Shanghai or Los Angeles and then dumped here. Gilt filigree gleams from the railings of the balconies; mosaics twinkle on the dark stone of the façade; a majestic eagle peers down from the distant rooftop. From one side of the building hangs an enormous hoarding. Beneath the marks of rain and dust, it shows in black and white two willowy girls with kohl-ringed eyes, gazing hungrily over basketball-sized wine glasses at a smirking young man in very tight jeans who has hoisted himself up to sit on the kitchen counter, car keys flung in some obscure invitation onto the table in front of him. All three figures balance sunglasses in their hair, as if life could, at any moment, become too radiant to behold. The strapline below them reads, SUPERBIA: ENTER BEAUTY.

  The entrance door to the lobby is flanked by two stone effigies, one of which holds an intercom. There is no response from 323, or indeed anything to indicate the intercom is working. Impulsively, I try the door – and it gives way.

  The lobby is full of silence and dust. Nymphs bathe in dust in an ornate fountain; dust cloaks the tall mirrors along the walls. Gaps have appeared in the Moorish tiling, and the nameplates of the metal letterboxes are empty.

  The lift is not working so I mount the stairs in intermittent light. No sounds can be heard anywhere. Reaching the third floor, I make a left, but after a short distance run into a thick plastic sheet that hangs like a filthy veil from ceiling to floor. Pushing it aside, I can just make out a lightless corridor studded by pockets of deeper darkness, doorways to rooms, or the shells of rooms. From somewhere a sharp, scurrying noise issues. I hurry back the way I came, turn a corner, then another, then stop and try to orient myself – and realize I am standing outside apartment no. 323. Mostly as a formality, I lift my hand to knock, and then I hear a voice.

  ‘You pawned it?’ it says. And then again, ‘You pawned it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ says another voice, a woman’s.

  ‘Jesus, Clizia!’ The man sounds very like Paul, though his tone is different from any I have heard him use. ‘What am I supposed to work on?’

  ‘Work!’ the woman’s voice, fierce and heavily accented, crows. ‘You tell me the day you want to work, I go out and buy you brand-new one. Work, this is the big joke! Ha ha, I am laughing!’

  His tone hardens. ‘Well, where’s the money, so?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The money from my damn writing desk, that’s what money.’

  ‘Is gone.’

  ‘Gone? You spent it? All of it?’ Heavy footsteps pound the floor. ‘On what? Lottery tickets?’

  ‘I bought food, idiot! I bought food, so we don’t starve!’

  ‘That’s great! And what are we going to do tomorrow? What are we going to do tomorrow, when the food’s gone and my desk is gone?’

  ‘Oh yes, tomorrow is when you were going to make the big moneys, I forgot.’

  ‘Well, what’s your plan, exactly? Pawn the floorboards? Pawn the, the damn oxygen in the air?’

  ‘I leave you, that’s what! I leave you!’

  ‘I wish you would leave me,’ the man roars back. ‘I wish you would leave me, then I could get some peace and quiet! I wish one of us had the courage to bring this nightmare to an end, so I could at least look forward to dying al— oh, hello, Claude.’

  Somewhere around ‘nightmare’, the storming footsteps rapidly increased in volume, and now the door has been flung open and Paul and I find ourselves looking at each other. I don’t know which of us is more surprised, although he works quickly to compose his features, transforming swiftly from conjugal fury to boggling horror to mild bemusement. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he says, in a tone of strained jollity.

  ‘I was just in the neighbourhood,’ I say, in a similar tone. For a moment we stare at each other through the masks of our untruths: then, realizing he has no choice, Paul makes an ushering gesture. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

  ‘Don’t be silly – please!’

  He ushers me into a lavishly appointed room, something like Tutankhamen’s tomb might have looked like if they had decided to bury him in a modern kitchen. Every inch abounds with design features – spotlights, LED displays, gold-plated k
nobs and rails and switches – that so bedazzle me it takes me a moment to register the young woman who stands behind the island. She has platinum-blonde hair and a simmering expression; her left hand is curled around a mug, in the manner of one about to lob a grenade. From the wall, the silenced television throws violently jumping light over her face.

  ‘Claude, this is my wife, Clizia,’ Paul says. ‘Darling, this is Claude, the man who’s been very kindly helping me out with my project these last few weeks.’

  ‘Charmed,’ the woman says sullenly.

  ‘You never told me you had a wife,’ I say to Paul in the joshing, avuncular tone we established a moment ago, though in the claustrophobic atmosphere it is fighting for its life.

  ‘And you,’ Paul says, wagging his finger at me humorously, ‘are not supposed to be here! I thought we’d agreed you didn’t need to know anything about my life.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but for the last couple of weeks you have not come to work –’

  ‘Ha,’ the woman says.

  Paul turns to her. ‘Darling, do you mind?’

  She shrugs, tosses her platinum locks, and then, with deliberate slowness, slouches over to the sink, where she pours herself a glass of water and, raising her chin over her long white neck, slowly drinks it, continuing to gaze at me as she does so. She is almost extremely beautiful. Her features, from a formal point of view, are perfect – large, oceanic eyes, exquisite cheekbones, a mouth that, though I have never seen a pomegranate, irresistibly recalls pomegranates, or some epic, perfect work of pornography. Yet there is a hardness to them, as though they had been carved from some material whose first allegiance was not to beauty – adamantine, titanium, industrial diamond. The same might be said for the aggressive curves of her body, today squeezed into an old-fashioned floral dress whose pastoral innocence they mock so relentlessly it seems almost cruel.

  ‘You did not come to work,’ I repeat, ‘and so I started to worry that … that – I’m sorry, something is watching me from under the table.’