The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Advert to it?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, mention it in passing.’

  ‘While I am explaining to her that I am bipolar, but in a good way.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly.’

  I end the call. The lift eases to a halt and the doors glide open.

  ‘I didn’t know you were bipolar,’ Ish says as we step out.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Claude. My Uncle Nick’s bipolar. For a while there he was convinced he was a koala bear. Used to hang off the satellite dish all day, thought it was a eucalyptus.’

  ‘I’m not bipolar,’ I insist, and then, because I am too flustered and irritated to think of a plausible lie, ‘That was Paul,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Ish keeps a commendably straight face. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Ariadne’s going away. He wants me to go and talk to her before she leaves.’ I groan, scrub my face with my hands. ‘Aaargh, it is all so ridiculous and embarrassing!’

  ‘You must really like her, to put in this much effort,’ Ish says neutrally.

  ‘I do like her,’ I say, staring at my shoes. ‘I don’t know why it is so hard to tell her. I am not twelve years old.’

  Ish looks at me for a moment. ‘It just is, Claude,’ she says. ‘It just is.’ Then she glances at her watch. ‘Tell you what, though, if you want to see her at the café you’d better get your skates on.’

  I look up at the clock on the wall of the Research Department. She’s right, the Ark will be closing in a few minutes. ‘Maybe I should just wait till she comes back from her holidays.’

  ‘No way, Claude, you’ve got to seize the day with these things,’ Ish says firmly. ‘Otherwise they drag on and on and on.’

  ‘But I have so much work –’

  ‘You’ve been mooning over this girl for weeks, just go and talk to her!’

  ‘All right, all right.’ With a swiftly deepening sense of unreality – as if it were water pouring into a leaking boat – I pull my coat back on and smooth down my hair. ‘Wish me luck.’

  ‘You don’t need luck!’ she says. But as I am waiting by the lifts I hear her calling my name. I turn and see her hurrying towards me, in her hand a small porcelain jar.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I was going through a crate of old stuff last night and I found it,’ she says, opening the jar and pouring into her palm a hillock of white powder. ‘It’s from Kokomoko. They call it bila. If you inhale it it’s supposed to work as an aphrodisiac.’

  ‘I thought you said I didn’t need luck.’

  ‘Go on, give it a go, just for the laugh. What you do is, you blow it in her face like this – oh cripes! Sorry, Claude!’

  ‘Aaargh!’ My eyes blaze.

  ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ Through tears I see a vaguely Ish-shaped blur bounce fretfully around me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I gasp, feeling my throat begin to reopen. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she says. ‘Strewth, I must have blown half the jar at you. Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I think so…’

  ‘Like you don’t feel … different or anything?’ Slowly her face comes back into focus, peering concernedly into mine.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I admit. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Look into my eyes a second, Claude … look into my eyes…’

  ‘I think I am feeling better now.’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know, you look a bit weird. Maybe you should leave Ariadne till tomorrow.’

  ‘She’s going away tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Ish says, still holding my gaze.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I decide and, turning, stumble for the lift.

  In the mirrored wall of the lift I examine myself. Bila clings to my lapels and shoulders, glowing faintly like magical dandruff. I brush it away as best I can, though I can do nothing about my eyes, which are red and streaming, and instead of a sophisticated gallery owner make me look authentically deranged. Nevertheless, as I descend, I feel exhilarated, transfigured, as if I have found my way at last into Paul’s unwritten book, waiting here all along at an invisible angle to the truth …

  The café is empty of customers, and in one corner the chairs have been lifted onto the tables. ‘We’re just about to close,’ the blonde waitress tells me.

  ‘I have a message for Ariadne,’ I say.

  The girl goes to fetch her. A moment later Ariadne emerges from the kitchen, carrot peelings stuck to her hands; what a thing, to envy a carrot peeling. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says, in what strikes me as a slightly louder voice than is necessary. Behind me I sense her golden-haired colleague stop what she is doing in order to monitor the situation.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, trying to maintain my composure over my pounding heartbeat, the bila chattering in my veins. ‘I just wanted to…’ But my attempt at an apology is exploded by a violent sneeze, and my apology for this first sneeze is overwhelmed by a second, even more violent, which ushers in a fit of minor sneezes and sneezelets. With a tsk of concern, Ariadne hurries over with a bouquet of paper tissues.

  ‘Thank you.’ I dab at my eyes, which are streaming again.

  ‘You have a cold,’ she chides, going behind the counter then returning a moment later with a mug of herbal tea. ‘You boys are all the same, you don’ take care of yourselves.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I sniff again, taking the mug. It seems Ish’s aphrodisiac has played its part after all: my copious sneezing rules me out as any kind of threat, except as a disseminator of germs. I drink my tea, surreptitiously take in her dark beauty, shimmering against the backdrop of the rain-teeming window. Everything is just as it should be; my line presents itself as if I have the page right in front of me. ‘About the other day.’

  ‘Don’ worry,’ Ariadne says. ‘Your Dr Cyrano has come in and explained everything.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dr Cyrano – the psychiatrist?’

  I roll my eyes, then realize this makes me look more bipolar. ‘Oh yes, of course.’

  ‘He told me about this experimental drug you’re taking that makes you act weird around women?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, the experimental drug. However, I have stopped taking it now. In fact, I am completely cured.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great!’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to let you know. And also to apologize if I alarmed you.’ I pause, looking down at my knees mysteriously. ‘There was something else I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It relates to your paintings.’

  She lights up. ‘You want to buy one?’

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that. If you have a few minutes, maybe we could…?’

  She looks intrigued, but the noisy approach of a floor-polishing machine, piloted by her blonde colleague, restores her to reality. ‘Ah, but we are closing,’ she laments.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, then, innocently, ‘Maybe tomorrow would be better?’

  ‘Tomorrow I am going away,’ she says.

  ‘I see.’ I frown, then look at my watch. ‘Perhaps a quick drink? Before you go home?’

  I can’t help being impressed by my own suaveness here; it’s as if Ariadne is acting as a kind of catalyst, in whose presence I am transforming into someone half-worthy of her.

  Ariadne tocks her tongue thoughtfully against her palate. ‘I have somethink to do,’ she says. ‘But you can come with me, if you want? Is not so far?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I say. The scene is unfolding just as I intended – although it is a surprise when she thrusts a large black garbage bag into my hands.

  ‘Buns,’ she says enigmatically. She whisks away into the kitchen, then reappears behind a trolley, on top of which sits a large steel vat. ‘There’s a couple of places we bring what we have left at the end of the day,’ she says.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, and then, suavely, ‘They are fortunate to get such excellent food.’

  ‘I think leftovers is always tasting of leftovers, whatever
they are. You coming?’

  I jump up and hold the door for her, then thrust open my umbrella and raise it over her head; in this manner, like some strange new creature of feet and wheels and umbrella spokes, we pass over the threshold of the Ark and outside. Outside! Where we are no longer waitress and customer, simply woman and man; where as far as the world is concerned, we could be on a date, or lovers, or ecstatic newlyweds …

  We make our way over the plaza in the direction of the river. Ariadne is saying something, but I am too giddy to hear. This is happening! This is my life now! As we approach the quays, the rain dies away and we see, shattering the clouds, a glorious sunset strung across the water. ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ croons Ariadne, coming to a halt. I just smile, as if I had arranged it myself. Ariadne gazes happily at the sky’s deep blush, then raises her finger and traces a kind of a benediction in the air. ‘You know the artist Yves Klein?’ she says. ‘When he is young, he lies on the beach and signs the sky with his finger. He says it was his first artwork.’

  ‘A nice idea,’ I say. ‘Though hard to fit in a gallery.’

  She laughs.

  I seize my moment. ‘Speaking of galleries,’ I begin, and then stop. Ariadne has crossed the road and stepped onto the bridge. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, but she doesn’t hear me over the rattling of the trolley. She couldn’t be taking me to – we’re not going to – are we?

  But we are.

  The squalid tents – fewer in number than the last time I looked – are drenched with rain; rainwater puddles in every available surface. On the improvised fence, rain-bleached posters blare grim statistics of government and bank collusion, with crudely rendered images of pigs in top hats smoking cigars, and fists squashing euro signs. A whiteboard importunes passers-by for ‘Things We Need!’, followed by a list: tea bags, soap, batteries, and so on. Over the camp a banner hangs, declaring damply, FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU, THEN THEY FIGHT YOU, THEN YOU WIN. I feel some of my new-found suaveness escape into the cooling air.

  Ariadne opens a makeshift gate and wheels the trolley into the compound. ‘Hello!’ she shouts, and again, until a dreadlocked head pokes out from one of the tents. His face, painted corpse-grey and decorated with an array of sutures, breaks into a smile when he sees her. He scrambles out and to his feet.

  ‘Ah you’re a saint,’ he says.

  ‘Just a few bits an’ pieces,’ Ariadne says to him, handing over a bulging bag. ‘Mostly food from today, but there’s a jar of coffee too, and some washing-up liquid and other stuff.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ the zombie says, beaming down into his trove, then nods at me. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘This is Claude,’ Ariadne says, adding, to my mind unnecessarily, ‘he works in a bank.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The zombie draws back and examines me with a new attention.

  ‘We are not part of this…’ I wave my hand at the protest signs, the skeletal ruin of Royal Irish. ‘My bank is an investment bank, not a retail bank. And we haven’t been given any government money. In fact, we have been punching above our weight.’

  ‘Right,’ the zombie says.

  ‘Listen, I’m not here the next couple of weeks,’ Ariadne says to him, ‘but I tell Riika to keep bringing down something, okay?’

  ‘You’re going back to see your parents?’

  ‘Ay, they tell me they are fine, but I can’ help to worry. All this craziness, riots, petrol bombs, young people fighting the police every night? No trains, no food in the supermarkets, these lunatics who march around with swastikas – and meanwhile from Europe all they hear is, where’s our money?’

  As she says this her face quite changes, almost cracks open, revealing a dark, fretful interior I never knew existed. I feel a pang of guilt, having advised many clients over the last year of the dangers of the Greek contagion, not to mention counselling Howie to short Greek bonds for all they were worth, which by the time he was finished was a lot less.

  ‘Europe won’t abandon Greece,’ I say, as much to reassure myself as Ariadne. ‘There are mechanisms in place. People won’t be allowed to starve.’

  ‘The mechanisms are only there to make sure the fat cats get their money back,’ the zombie interjects. ‘All this has happened before. The bankers lose the run of themselves, they bring the whole system crashing down, and then the people who have to pay to get it back on the rails are the ones on the very bottom. Then the CEOs give themselves a big fat raise for a job well done.’

  ‘That’s not strictly accurate,’ I say.

  ‘Latin America in the 1970s,’ he says. ‘The banks lend a ton of money to a bunch of gangster dictators, thinking they’ll make a packet. Then when all the loans turn bad and the US and Euro banks are on the point of tanking, the IMF steps in with emergency credit so these unfortunate countries can pay them back. But who pays back the IMF? The peasants, the farmers, the factory workers and the shoe-shine boy. That’s what happened in Tunisia, Russia, East Asia. That’s just what’s happening here. It’s like this great big circle of debt, with the only result that the people with the very least get poorer and poorer and poorer.’

  The heat in his cheeks is visible through the corpse paint. Ariadne gazes at him pityingly, as if he had personally been chased up and down Patagonia by neoliberal economists.

  ‘Look,’ I say, feeling my own cheeks turn red. ‘It’s not a conspiracy. The fact is –’

  ‘In Indonesia they got rid of food supports for the poor,’ the zombie interrupts. ‘In Madagascar they cut the mosquito eradication programme, and ten thousand people died of malaria.’

  ‘The fact is,’ I persist, ‘that Greece is deeply in debt. It can’t afford to pay its workers. It can’t afford to keep its electricity on. This is why the IMF is there, to stop the country from completely disintegrating.’

  ‘If they wanted to stop it disintegrating, they’d just cancel the debt,’ the zombie says.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Write it off. It’s all imaginary anyway. Numbers on a piece of paper. So erase them.’

  ‘You have to pay what you owe,’ I snap. ‘That is the cornerstone of our civilization.’

  ‘Unless you’re a bank, right?’ the zombie returns. ‘Look at this place right here!’ He sweeps his hand at Royal Irish’s grey façade. ‘My grandchildren are going to be paying off the money they blew. My grandchildren are going to be born into debt because of them and their incompetence. And still the government’s pumping them with more cash!’

  Aha: here I have the advantage of him. I feel my anger recede, my suaveness return. ‘Not for much longer,’ I say. ‘The bank will be wound down very shortly. And you and your friends can go home.’

  ‘That’s not what I hear.’

  ‘What do you hear?’ I say sardonically.

  ‘They’re going to keep it open,’ the zombie says, throwing back a dreadlock. ‘They’re going to bring in new taxes so they can dredge up another few billion. They won’t stop till we’re in administration.’

  ‘The people won’t let that happen,’ Ariadne comes in. ‘They can’t.’

  ‘This is Ireland. There’s a lot of things people are willing to let happen.’ He seems to deflate, gestures gloomily at the rain-sodden tents. ‘Half of our lot have given up in the last week. They think there’s no point. Nobody’s paying any attention.’

  ‘Ay, these guys are paying attention,’ Ariadne says, nodding across the street to where, outside the defunct bank, two enormous security guards have appeared, staring at the encampment with arms folded.

  ‘They’re there all the time,’ the zombie says. ‘I think they work for the Centre. So far they haven’t crossed the road. Although someone turned a water hose on us last night. All our stuff got soaked, the sleeping bags, the generator. Here, maybe you should head off,’ he says quickly, as one of the guards starts speaking into a walkie-talkie. Leaning forward, he kisses her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

  We are on our wa
y at last, though Ariadne keeps looking back fretfully: news of the sleeping-bag soaking has given a gloss of martyrdom to the zombie sit-in.

  ‘He’s wrong about Royal Irish,’ I tell her. ‘I just wrote a report for the government, advising them to wind it down. It will probably be announced in the next few days.’

  ‘How will they get their clothes and things dry in this rain?’ Ariadne says.

  The beautiful sunset has gone, leaving a brooding gunmetal sky from which rain descends in fusillades. As we rattle back over the bridge, I review the situation. The zombie has taken the chapter in completely the wrong direction. I should never have let him speechify like that! I should never have let Ariadne go off-piste with the trolley! How can I get the story back on track? If only I had more bila!

  We come back onto the IFSC side of the river, rumble northwards past boarded-up doors, broken windows, lowered shutters, roofless houses. We are probably only a couple of minutes from Transaction House as the crow flies, but my surroundings are quite unfamiliar.

  ‘This is where there used to be all the whores,’ Ariadne says, seemingly untroubled by the menacing ambience. ‘When is call Monto. You know the song?’

  ‘Song?’

  ‘Dave taught it to me. Now when the Tsar of Russia, and the King of Prussia, landed in the Phoenix Park in a big balloon…’

  A fresh wave of paranoia rises up within me. Who is Dave? Is it the zombie? Or some other interloper?

  ‘In the nineteenth century, after the Famine, there was no work and no food,’ she is saying, ‘so all these women come here and sold their bodies to the British soldiers. They don’ have another choice, either they do it here, or they get on the ship’ – she gestures back in the direction of the river – ‘and sell it in America. Is funny, eh?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Once is the biggest whorehouse in Europe, now is mostly turned into banks.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see.’

  She bows her head, then says in a lower voice, ‘My mum told me that since the IMF came, there are all these girls every night at the end of our street. Getting into cars with strangers. Girls I went to school with, some of them.’