The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  So we stayed where we were, my father in his smithy, waging his covert war against progress. Perhaps to a blacksmith, this seemed like a war you could win; after all, he spent the day bending things to his intention, taking obdurate, resistant matter and making it obey him; why couldn’t he take on the world in the same way, plunge reality itself into the white heat of his will and reform it? And if he couldn’t, if the bills mounted up and the bailiffs came, this was just more evidence that the world was biased against us; our poverty was proof of our rectitude, a sign that we were the good guys that those in control wanted to crush.

  I, too, regularly found myself subjected to the blast of his will. He didn’t want me to be a blacksmith; he wanted me to go to college. This struck me, even as a boy, as a contradiction. Wouldn’t I just be lining up with the phonies and the fakes? Why couldn’t I stay here with him, learn the family trade? When he heard this he’d laugh, and say the family could only afford one piss artist. But when it came to school reports and parent–teacher meetings, he would not be laughing. There was no question that I would not go to college. By the time I was sixteen, if I so much as showed my face in the backyard he would bellow at me to get back to my studies. And I would dutifully return upstairs to my logarithms or supplementary English, though I wouldn’t read; instead I’d watch as he worked or read or played cards and talked about football with Yannick, the boy he hired on the rare occasions he had a backlog.

  I knew we were headed for some kind of rupture – in the pictures it seems I can see it, an invisible crack behind the smiles. But I’d thought it would be philosophy that did it. I’d chosen to study it largely in a spirit of revenge: I was too cowardly to defy his wishes outright by refusing to take my college place, and philosophy – demonstrably impractical, infamously unemployable, the polar opposite of my father’s own materialist world – seemed the next best thing. As it turned out, though, my father was so proud of me for getting into university that he approved of anything and everything I did there. He dug up an ancient newspaper photograph that showed Texier, Deleuze et al. marching with union leaders in his beloved événements of 1968, and stuck it on the wall of his forge; I heard him tell the neighbours that philosophy was France’s greatest export.

  Instead the rupture came when I took the job in the bank. Having spent a literal lifetime witnessing his anger, I don’t think I ever saw him as angry as he was that night. Even though the firm was prestigious, even though the position I’d been offered was lucrative, my father was mortally against the whole financial industry. He was old enough to remember the scandals that emerged after Liberation, the bankers who had collaborated with the Nazis in order to enrich themselves. He accused me of taking the job out of malice; he said I was sticking it to an old man by choosing a career that flew in the face of everything he believed.

  I told him he didn’t believe in anything, so I didn’t see how that could be an issue. ‘Oh, you’re very clever,’ he said. ‘There are names for people like you.’

  I was very clever. He had made me very clever. Now he was annoyed because his gingerbread boy had come to life and run off down the road – tant pis, I wasn’t coming back. Anyway, the world had changed, hadn’t I listened to him proclaim it for years? The money men were taking over, men for whom nothing was real except profits, who sourced their ironwork from China or just used knock-offs made of plastic. In college I could see it all around me: street by street, Paris the working city was being replaced by ‘Paris’ the stage-set, familiar from the movies, where everyone was perpetually in love and/or carrying a baguette. Hardware stores and laundromats were vanishing, expensive tea shops, sushi restaurants and boutiques of tiny baby clothes arriving to take their place. The Arabs, the Africans, were disappearing too, out past the city limits to the dreaded banlieues. Not even our dowdy town was left untouched: the building sites, which for as long as I could remember had been stagnant, began to show signs of activity; developers were throwing up hoardings within sight of the great monument to decay that was the magasin général.

  Empires fall, that was what he had taught me; the world turns, and people, whole cultures, become obsolete. Progress might be a lie, but it was a lie that swept all before it and so the best tactic was to find high ground.

  I took the job, sure that he would come around in time. Why did I think that? This was a man who had chosen, in the 1980s, to pursue the trade of blacksmith. Pig-headed defiance was his métier. He loved difficulty, loved it more than he loved me.

  And so we played out that first conversation over and over again. Sometimes he would lure me into it, pretending to have a question about the nature of, for example, derivatives, in order to harangue me about the inequities of the global financial system – ‘… so if you wanted to cover yourself, you could then buy what’s called an option –’ ‘Which is nothing, am I right? You are trying to sell me thin air?’ ‘It’s not nothing, I am selling you the choice to buy something for a specific price at a specific point in the –’ ‘Why do I need you to sell me the choice? Don’t I have the choice myself?’ ‘Well, not in terms of –’ ‘I’m a free man, last time I looked! Your crowd hasn’t managed to sell us all down the river yet!’ ‘No, but I’m saying, if you wait, the price could –’ ‘Down with the collabos! Vive la France! Vive la France!’ – and so on, until Maman came in, and told him he must take his medicine.

  More usually, though, he launched straight into his jeremiad, calling me a criminal, a parasite, taking me to task for the sins not only of my own profession but those of countless others – of the developers uprooting the city, of the American neoconservative movement, of ‘Rat Man’, as he termed our president, and of Rat Man’s brother Olivier (who was, in fact, a banker). He seemed to enjoy making himself angry – that was the only pleasure either of us found in my visits.

  ‘What does he want me to do?’ I said to Maman in the kitchen. ‘Become an anarchist and live in a squat?’

  ‘He is old, Claude,’ she would sigh. ‘He is old and he cannot bear it.’

  Eventually I stopped visiting. I told myself I blamed my father for coming between my mother and me; in truth, it suited me rather well. I was busy at work, and there were more enjoyable ways to spend my few hours of leisure. I’d started seeing a girl, a model with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne. I didn’t go home for six months. As a result, I didn’t find out my mother was sick until she’d been admitted to hospital.

  I found my father at her bedside; all the fury I felt at him disappeared in an instant. He sat there, waxy hand on hers; his eyes, blinking uncomprehendingly at me across the white wastes of the hospital sheets, reminded me of the horses that would be brought into his shop to be re-shod, the ones the cabbies drove around and around the Bois de Boulogne for the benefit of tourists – expressive of both resignation and a kind of glacial panic, one that unfolded slowly, over years.

  After she died I thought things might be different. I made an effort to see him; for a time I even considered asking him to move into my apartment in Auteuil. But as the shock of her death wore off and bitterness took over, he became more and more impossible. He complained constantly about petty or imaginary things: the postman was opening his mail, the greengrocer overcharged him. He would not eat what I cooked for him; he made racist remarks about the proprietor of the tabac; whenever we went for a walk he would light on some new act of gentrification, some cutesy new patisserie or macaron shop festooned with love-hearts, and start on a tirade. He discovered plans were afoot to turn the beautiful, collapsing magasin général into a hotel. In the artist’s rendering online, it had gondolas floating in front of it on the canal. ‘Gondolas!’ my father spluttered hoarsely. ‘Gondolas!’ When the headhunter called me with the offer of a position in Dublin, I didn’t have to consider it for long.

  I palliated my guilt about leaving by hiring an expensive live-in nurse; and surprisingly quickly, guilt ceased to be an issue. Ariadne was right: Dublin during the boom was custom-made for forgetting. Th
e past, the present, the sins of individuals and multinationals alike, everything dissolved in money and cocaethylene and was borne away by the river. When the crash came, that was better still: the streets were deserted, it was easier than ever to imagine that only the market existed, the numbers that concatenated night and day, and always, always, good times and bad, held within them some means of making money.

  I didn’t speak to my father often; most of my contact with him came in the form of Skyped complaints from the nurses about his behaviour, or Skyped interviews with their replacements when they quit. It was nurse no. 5, a sweet girl from Martinique, who called me that morning to say he’d passed away overnight; ‘like switching off a light’, she said approvingly, a good death. Beside me the radio was babbling the market news; through the window I could hear the tram-bell ring. It was six in the morning, I was dressed for the gym. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. It was all I could think of.

  The line manager arranged for two weeks’ compassionate leave. I stayed at the old apartment; I spent most of my time tidying, as if he and she were about to arrive home after a trip away even though I knew that everything would very soon have to be boxed up and taken from the building. I put fresh flowers in the vase on the table; I topped up the bird feeder on the balcony, stood at the door, listening to the whirr of the tiny sparrows’ wings, like the riffling of the pages of a book. I kept being surprised by my reflection, the way you might by some minor self-portrait in a neglected corner of the Louvre, having lost your way between masterpieces: tie half-done around my neck, shirt a spectral white that gave my skin a greenish tinge, eyes like those islands of discarded plastic found floating in the middle of the ocean, opaque, polymerized, indestructible.

  My father had lost the lease on the yard ten years ago; more apartments had been built on the site of his forge. In a cupboard, I found a trunk filled with old equipment – a heat-mask, various lengths of rubber tubing; at the back of this trunk, thrown there with an appearance of carelessness, I discovered the cache of photographs. It was funny, I couldn’t remember him taking them; yet here I was beginning school, here was Maman in a new dress, here were the three of us, visiting my aunt in her little house in Normandy, Maman and me again, at my college graduation; our lives, our family, bound up together in a way that I had never recognized the first time around. I sat on the ancient couch they had never replaced, and went through the pictures over and over. I laid them out in patterns on the coffee table, little coloured squares of time, as if I were playing solitaire, as if there were some perfect configuration that would win the game, retrieve the past in its totality.

  Yet the more I tried to retrieve it, the more it shimmered, like a tesseract, into being, the lonelier I felt – as if I were viewing some marvellous planet from a bleak satellite suspended above it. At his funeral, I’d read a line of poetry: No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved; it was from Théophile Gautier, a writer my mother had adored, and initially I found the thought consoling. Now, however, I began to wonder if the reverse also held. If nobody loved you, could you still say you were alive? The few relatives were long gone; I sat there turning over pictures that I didn’t even see; I felt a freezing cold, of an order I had never experienced before, as if I were somehow locked outside of the very moment I inhabited, a derivative of something that had ceased to be, and therefore about to disappear too – ‘triple witching hour’, they call it in banking, when stock index futures, stock index options, options on futures all expire together in a hiss of unbeing …

  It was the bank that came to my rescue. They called one day, on my parents’ phone (I’d kept my mobile switched off) – someone from management whose name I didn’t recognize, wanting to know where I was. I was shocked: how long had I been here? Yet when I checked the calendar, everything was in order. I’m on compassionate leave, I told the caller; I still have five days left.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he knew this already, and then, rather cursorily, ‘I’m sorry.’ The line was silent for what seemed a long time. I wondered if I’d been cut off, or put on hold. Then he said, ‘Claude, we would like to offer you a 50 per cent raise in your salary.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said, confused.

  ‘I can also offer you a guaranteed bonus,’ he said. He named the amount; it was significant.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. It took me a moment to realize he was waiting for a reply. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, mostly so I could get off the line.

  ‘I’ll courier you over the paperwork right now,’ he said.

  It wasn’t until I was on the return flight that I realized what had happened: that BOT believed or feared that I was using my compassionate leave to speak to banks in Paris with a mind to finding a new and better-paid position. I was surprised, but I didn’t suppose it mattered. The plane began its descent; I saw the black river snaking through the city. Liffey or Lethe? That didn’t matter either. I found I was relieved to get back to Dublin, where even if I wore black every day for a year no one would ask why, where I was free – free to be a persona ficta, free to lose myself in the labyrinth of the present. Or maybe I was imprisoned in the present, in the persona; either way I got paid, and the difference seemed of little consequence.

  The zombie was right. The next morning the government announces a further bailout for Royal Irish.

  The Minister delivers the news from the steps of the Dáil. ‘After a careful study,’ he says, ‘it is clear to us that Royal Irish Bank is of systemic importance. As its failure would have severe consequences for Ireland and Europe, the government commits to meet all of the bank’s present and future capital requirements until liquidity is restored…’

  ‘What the fuck?’ Ish says. ‘He’s digging out those dirtbags again?’

  ‘Systemic importance, baby,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Too big to fail.’

  ‘But the whole point of our report was that it wasn’t important,’ Ish says. ‘It’s like he went through it and did the exact opposite of everything we recommended.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first client to do that,’ Gary says.

  ‘Perhaps he had information that was not made available to us,’ Jurgen says.

  ‘Or he’s being counterintuitive,’ Kevin suggests.

  ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Poor bastard, look at him.’

  Still gabbling meaningless statistics into the morning sunshine, the Minister’s bleached face is lathered with sweat; the heavy three-piece suit bulges unconvincingly, as if it’s filled with straw.

  ‘What’s he even doing there?’ Ish says. ‘Why hasn’t he handed over to someone else?’

  ‘Strategic,’ Gary McCrum says.

  ‘Nobody without a terminal illness would’ve been able to get this bailout through,’ Jocelyn Lockhart agrees. ‘But people feel sorry for him.’

  A journalist asks the Minister about possible IMF intervention if Ireland’s fortunes continue to decline. The Minister appears irritated. ‘I’ve already made it clear that there will be no third parties…’ But as he speaks, the camera pans to his left and reveals, in the scrum of apparatchiks behind him, the little Portuguese man again.

  ‘They’re already here…’ Jocelyn Lockhart sings.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Ish says.

  ‘All over government buildings,’ Jocelyn says. ‘And I heard they’ve booked a whole floor of the Merrion Hotel.’

  ‘There’s no way IMF’d let him chuck more money at Royal Irish,’ Ish objects. ‘It’s economic suicide.’

  The media reaction to the Minister’s announcement is apoplectic, terminal illness notwithstanding. The radio waves are clogged with hard-luck stories deriving from the last wave of cuts: grandmothers and children and chronically ill whose pensions were slashed or whose special-needs assistants were withdrawn or whose care was cancelled overnight by governmental austerity, even as yet more billions flow in decidedly unaustere fashion to the notoriously corrupt bank.

  Market reaction is divided: b
ondholders are glad to hear they will be getting their money, but there is an increasing sense of mystery as to where this money will be coming from. The country’s budget is running at almost a third of GDP, and any appearance of Ireland in the bond market is accompanied by the financial equivalent of an involuntary shudder.

  The market is very, very happy, at the same time, about BOT’s takeover of Agron. The incredibly complicated deal, involving literally hundreds of subsidiaries, has been turned around by the Dublin office in record time (the rumour is that three temps were hired just to sign Porter’s name on the contracts). At a stroke, BOT has acquired six thousand new employees, ranged all over the world, and from the share price it appears the spectacular gamble has paid off.

  ‘Of course it’s paid off,’ Ish says. ‘The market loves spectacular gambles, it’s all bloody men. It’s the deals that make sense they get pissy about.’

  ‘What are we going to call ourselves now?’ Kevin says. ‘We can’t really be AgroBOT, can we? Sounds like some kind of android hooligan.’

  ‘That’s right up the market’s sodding street as well,’ Ish says.

  She, however, appears to be the only person in the world with any misgivings. As the days pass, the financial world’s love for Frankensteinian newcomer AgroBOT only grows, and with it our market capitalization. Message boards fizz with conjecture about Porter Blankly’s next innovation, investors battle each other for expensive slivers of the bank’s stock – and for holders of that stock, such as the BOT staff, the boom times, as the Irish premier said back in the days of the Celtic Tiger, are getting even more boomer. In fact, the atmosphere in our tiny bubble increasingly comes to resemble that of the Tiger; that is to say, a certain amount of irrational exuberance becomes noticeable.