The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  Strange bestial noises can be heard as I come up the corridor.

  ‘Daddy’s writing his book,’ Remington tells me as he lets me in.

  ‘Is that right.’

  A loud crash issues from somewhere behind him.

  ‘I’m writing a book too. Look.’ He hands me a sheet of paper, on which he has scrawled REMINGTIM REMNINGTONTON REMEMINSON and other variants in crayon.

  ‘Very good! Is your mother … ah.’

  Clizia, in a dressing gown, comes out of the nursery with a phone to her ear. ‘Because I can’t,’ she is saying. Her expression is anguished and there are tears in her eyes. ‘I just can’t. Maybe next week. I have to go.’ She rings off, looks up at me exhaustedly.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know who else I can call.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  A bellowing comes from the bedroom, followed by a series of thuds.

  ‘When did he see the review?’

  ‘An hour ago. But this whole week, he is acting strange. Not sleep, not eat, walking around talking to himself – then he sees this Internet, and…’

  ‘All right. Don’t worry.’

  I knock on the bedroom door, then enter. A Louis Quatorze chair lies on its side; many of the towers of books are now scattered over the floor.

  ‘What’s the point, Claude?’ Paul cries on seeing me. ‘You work and you slave for years, you make sacrifices and put your family through hell, just to get it in the neck from some guy calling himself Wombat Willy?’

  Clizia is right: he looks quite disturbed. His hair, clothes, even eyebrows, are askew, as in some allegorical figure of Frazzlement.

  ‘Why should you care what Wombat Willy thinks?’ I cajole. ‘This is just one person, who we know nothing about. He could be a fanatical racist, or a chronic masturbator – or maybe he is a she, and enormously fat, and for years she has not left her house, which she shares with her eight cats, also enormously fat.’

  ‘Pretty sure it’s a he,’ Paul says morosely. ‘I looked up his other reviews. He gave a lightning bolt and a Buckingham Palace to the Phillips For Him BodyShave. He called it the gold standard of ball-hair removal.’

  ‘That just proves my point,’ I say. ‘You’re an artist. You can’t be dictated to by the market. Do you think, if he were writing today, Shakespeare would care if he got only one and a half pineapples for Hamlet, or three smiley faces for Romeo and Juliet? Do you think James Joyce would rewrite Ulysses because some Internet wombat said there’s not enough story? All of these books’ – gesturing at the volumes that now litter the floor – ‘how many do you think would never have been written if the authors gave up because of one man who spends his time writing anonymous essays about ball hair?’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. I need readers, Claude. I need those scumballs to feed my wife and child. Now everybody who comes to the website to look at my book is going to end up buying a stupid multi-head razor instead!’ He rights the chair and flumps down in it. Behind him, in the half-light cast by a fallen lamp, I can see a long dagger of damp blackening the flowery wallpaper.

  ‘How is the proposal going?’

  ‘Terribly,’ he says.

  I feel a surge of frustration. ‘I thought we worked everything out. We have a hero, a heroine, a good idea of the plot. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is writing, Claude. The problem is writing, and writing is the problem. Coming up with an idea is just like the entrance ticket into this enormous fucking labyrinth of – oh, what now?’

  The door opens and Remington marches in, holding out his sheet, to which he has added ERMIINGTREM in blue crayon. ‘Dad, my story has a new bit.’

  ‘That’s great, buddy, I’ll read it later.’

  ‘Read it now.’

  ‘I’ll read it when it’s finished.’

  ‘Now!’ Remington says.

  ‘Fuck!’ his father exclaims. He jumps up, goes to the door. ‘Clizia!’

  ‘I’m on the phone!’ the voice comes back.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Paul says, stamping out to find her.

  ‘I’d like to hear your story,’ I say to Remington.

  The boy turns to me seriously. ‘It’s about a boy called Remington,’ he says.

  ‘And what happens to him?’

  ‘He goes away with his mama.’

  I start. ‘Where does he go?’ I say – but before the boy can answer, Clizia comes into the room. She appears shaken, as though after some tumultuous passage.

  ‘Who keeps calling you?’ Paul demands, following after her.

  ‘The captain of the volleyball team,’ she says.

  ‘Can’t she take no for an answer?’

  Clizia affixes a bleached, perfunctory smile. ‘Now, little one,’ she says to Remington, and she picks him up and carries him out of the room.

  Paul sinks back in his chair, drapes his wrist over his eyes. ‘God, I’m so tired,’ he says.

  ‘Let’s get moving with this,’ I say, rousing him. Clearly there is more riding on this proposal than money, even if he can’t see it. ‘Where exactly are you stuck?’

  ‘I’m stuck where I’ve always been stuck, with this damn unintelligible banker! I can’t make sense of a single thing he does!’

  ‘Forget about his job for now. You were right, it’s too complicated and will only bore people. Stick with the love story. The girl who rescues him from the bank.’

  ‘But that’s just it!’ Paul pounds his palm on the armchair. ‘Why does he get the girl? What does she see in him?’

  She sees the person he could be, I begin to say – but that notion, so perfect on the sixth floor of Transaction House, here seems hollow, pallid, woefully naïve.

  ‘It’s one thing trying to get you a date with a waitress in real life.’ Paul is pacing back and forth now over the shoals of books. ‘But in a novel there needs to be some kind of logic. There needs to be some kind of justice. He can’t just buy her.’

  ‘He is not buying her. He is in love with her.’

  ‘So what? There could be umpteen people in love with her. There could be some sweet, idealistic, totally broke young painter that completely adores her. Why should the banker get her?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ I say, feeling a glow of anger rise from my stomach. ‘She redeems him.’

  ‘How is he redeemed? What does he sacrifice?’

  ‘Maybe he quits his job.’

  ‘That’s it? He waltzes off into the sunset with his pockets full of money and we’re all supposed to cheer? That’s fucking lame, Claude. He’s never done a good thing for anyone, give me one reason why he should get the girl too.’

  ‘Because that’s how life is,’ I snap.

  ‘Well, no one wants to read that story, believe me.’

  ‘You’re the expert on what people don’t want to read,’ I return, but he doesn’t hear. He’s storming back and forth, berating himself in the same deranged manner I heard when I came in.

  ‘Banerjee was right,’ he is saying. ‘It just can’t be done. It just doesn’t work anymore.’

  My anger fades, and I feel a pang of guilt: have I done this to him? Have I infected him, and his wife, with my own misplaced hopes? Or is there some way forward?

  ‘Didn’t you tell me once’ – I am embarrassed at the desperation evident in my voice – ‘that at some point in his life everyone finds himself at a crossroads? Where the clock strikes thirteen, and he must make a choice who he will be, good or bad? Can’t we find that moment for the banker?’

  Paul looks down at his hands; I have a strange sense of impending dissolution, like an actor at an audition who has delivered his lines and now stares into the darkness, waiting for his invisible judges to dismiss him.

  ‘What were you saying a minute ago, about listening to the market,’ he says, with his head bowed.

  ‘I said you shouldn’t do it.’

  ‘No, I think you were on to something. Maybe that’s the angle we need to
take. Work out what people want, and go from there.’

  ‘Work out what Wombat Willy wants?’

  ‘He buys books, doesn’t he? I’ve got to make some money from this, Claude. I’m on the fucking ropes here. The whole industry’s on the ropes. It isn’t the time to be precious.’ He kneads his scalp distractedly. ‘So what is it they want? Strong narratives, right? Exciting stories, characters you remember. Drama, violence, murdered prostitutes. A serial killer is on the loose, that kind of thing.’

  ‘That sounds like the kind of stupid scénario the world is already full of.’

  ‘Well, we can spin it, right? Tweak the formula. The murderer’s the detective, the murderer’s the narrator, something like that. The first thing we need to do is think of a fresh angle.’ He brings his fingertips to his temple, as if he were trying to tune in a radio. ‘You said something interesting there about Ulysses not having enough plot. So how about … how about we give it a plot? We use the characters and the basic set-up – but with a high-octane, twenty-first-century story!’

  ‘Are you talking about…?’

  ‘A sequel to Ulysses!’ A feverish light dances in his eyes, sickly sweat burnishing his forehead. ‘Think about it! It’s the most literary book there is! And yet it ends on this completely inconclusive note. That’s why for generations readers have been crying out for a follow-up. And now here it is!’ He seizes his pen, writes with such vigour that he tears the page. ‘It’s ten years after the last book ended. Leopold Bloom is divorced from Molly. He’s hit the bottle, he’s bitter, he’s jaded, he’s working as a cop in New York City. A rash of murders has broken out across the city. The killer’s leaving obscure literary references written on their bodies…’

  Pornography, the word pops into my mind. I am still hoping he will break off, crack a grin, tell me Gotcha!; but on the contrary, it only gets worse.

  ‘Jesus, Claude, I think I’ve got it. How about this for a twist. When you get to the last page of the book, Bloom goes, “I can now reveal the murderer was … YOU!”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“YOU!”’ he says again, pointing his finger at my chest, almost beside himself with excitement.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You, like, whoever’s reading the book. Think about it, who’s the very last person the reader will suspect of committing the crime? Herself, right? Imagine how she’s going to feel when the detective says, “It was YOU!” And we could have like a 3D finger pointing out of the page!’

  ‘How can the reader have committed a crime in a fictional world to which she has no access?’

  ‘That’s a minor detail,’ he says. ‘Anyway, why should the reader get off the hook? She’s as guilty as anybody. Don’t you see? This turns the whole crime genre on its head! It’ll be huge!’

  He returns to his scribbling, giggling to himself all the while; he doesn’t notice as I slip out of the room.

  In the kitchen, I find Clizia placing a bucket under a drip. ‘You have a little leak?’ I say, though the leak is more of a stream, descending steadily from a grey mass in the ceiling.

  ‘Oh, this old place!’ Clizia says gaily. Then, glancing at the bedroom, with the same false smile, she says, ‘He’s forgotten about the review?’

  ‘I think it’s given him some interesting new ideas!’ I say. We both laugh, though I am not sure why. ‘And you?’ I inquire. ‘Your ankle, it is better?’

  ‘Vot?’ she says, still smiling.

  ‘When you spoke on the phone earlier, to your coach, I thought…’ Clizia looks at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Never mind,’ I say.

  ‘Bye bye, Claude,’ Remington, now drawing a large multicoloured R, sings from under her feet.

  ‘Goodbye, my friends,’ I say, in the kindly fashion of the family doctor in a nineteenth-century play. ‘I will see you both very soon, I’m sure.’

  I am halfway down the corridor when she catches up with me. ‘Frenchman!’

  I turn. The smile is gone; her fingers are tight around my flesh. ‘He will write the book this time – won’t he?’

  What can I tell her?

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  A dark-skinned boy runs into a crystal-blue sea. A man in a suit hands his passport to a ticket agent. The boy leaps from the water with a shell in his hand, a plane lifts into a powder-blue sky. A young woman sits cross-legged on the sand, boring a hole in the shell. More shells lie in a pile at her feet. She and the boy turn at the sound of a motor. It is the man in the suit, speeding over the waves in a powerboat. The boat runs up on the beach. The boy leads the man to the spot where the woman sits. The man opens his briefcase and takes out a thread. The woman smiles, and begins to string the shells onto it.

  Agron Torabundo, a voiceover says. Not global. Planetary.

  ‘It’s testing really well,’ Skylark Fitzgibbon says, folding closed the screen. ‘In European and American markets.’

  Be careful what you wish for, isn’t that what they say? Ish has got what she wanted: plans are in motion to ‘save’ Kokomoko. Already sea walls are being constructed, sand imported to replace what’s been taken; this Skylark Fitzgibbon, who emerged from the Marketing Department last week like a kind of Barbie-shaped Erinys, sends us regular updates on the golf course, now to be located at the northern end of the island in an area she refers to variously as ‘almost uninhabited’ and ‘effectively uninhabited’.

  ‘One last thing: what do you think those shell necklaces would retail for? I know they’re not for sale, but if they were, does eighty-five dollars sound right? Ballpark?’

  A paranoid mind might suspect that all of this had been put together specifically to torture Ish. Every email, every peppy chat with Skylark, visibly reduces her, as if some verdant last fragment of her own simpler, happier past were being surgically excised. But there is nothing she can do.

  My computer has been returned; getting back to work, I find the world in its customary state of turmoil. The impending investigation of money-laundering by a major British bank is causing havoc on the FTSE. In Greece, a bomb in an Athens bank has killed three tellers, one of them a pregnant woman; investors respond by buying up German bunds. The euro is in crisis, America is in crisis, the market is on the brink of meltdown yet again, like a hysterical ex-lover who keeps calling you up, threatening suicide.

  Ireland, on the other hand, is weirdly calm. Economically, the situation is worse than ever, but the Minister’s death seems to have functioned as a kind of pressure valve. Thousands attend the state funeral, and as the encomiums keep coming, public anger is diverted to other, less disruptive emotions: pity, guilt, a kind of defanged, non-specific regret. The marches peter out; awkward questions about the Royal Irish report dry up; the abusive calls and sinister black faxes, which I had been receiving in a steady stream, dwindle almost to nothing; and one morning I arrive at work to find Jurgen standing at the window with a mug of coffee and a contented air, like a man surveying a pile of freshly chopped logs. At first I can’t see what’s giving him so much satisfaction. Then I realize. The quay is bare; the zombies are gone. It looks as if the pavement has been scoured to ensure not a trace of them remains, though down in the water, fragments of placards, bottles and items of clothing bob forlornly.

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Local people taking matters into their own hands.’ His smile is as sheer and white as a cliff face. ‘The Irish understand what needs to be done.’

  I think about Ariadne’s friend with the dreadlocks, try to summon up some spark of triumph. Nothing comes. Instead I feel as if she’s been banished too, scrubbed away from my world, even though I can see her, just about, through the dawn-dazed glass of the Ark.

  AgroBOT rampages on. The acquisition of clearing house Parsifal is completed, that of TerraNova asset management almost. Kevin points proudly to a Wall Street Journal article calling the bank ‘omnivorous’. An inspirational memo from Porter notes that ‘a stitch in time saves nine’; our subsequent long position in Time Warner, where in a shock move Ba
stian Stich is appointed CEO the following week, pays off handsomely. Our stock rises; people revise their bonus expectations upwards; there is talk of moving into a new premises. Champagne is drunk, cigars are smoked, lap dances enjoyed; the rain-logged sky is a rag soaked in chloroform, pressing relentlessly down on the city.

  Then everything changes.

  ‘What’s this shit?’ Gary McCrum says, staring at his terminal.

  No warning, no explanation; just a small but noticeable decline in our share price.

  Liam English plays it down. ‘Regression to the mean, that’s all. Market valuation’s been increasing for six months straight, there was bound to be an adjustment sooner or later.’

  ‘This isn’t an adjustment, it’s a nosedive.’

  ‘It’s not a nosedive,’ Liam says irritably. He looks off into space, tugs on his tie as though pumping it for information, then concedes, ‘Look, there’s a certain amount of rethinking going on out there about counterintuitiveness. It’s the usual story – you do something new, everyone else piles in, there’re some bad deals, the market panics. As the originators we might be carrying the can for more than is fair. It’ll pass.’

  He huffs back to his office and closes the venetian blind; but through the apertures we detect, or imagine we detect, the blue glow of an electronic cigarette.

  ‘He’s stonewalling us,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.

  ‘You think something’s happening?’

  ‘There’s rumours going around.’

  ‘What sort of rumours?’

  ‘That we over-borrowed to pay for the Agron takeover. That our core assets are overvalued. That we’re broke, essentially.’

  ‘But … it’s not true, is it?’ Kevin says.

  ‘It’s just some hedge fund taking shots in the dark,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Standard trash-and-cash. Liam’s right, it’ll burn itself out.’