by John Kelly
He comes from Senegal / He plays for Arsenal.
– Redemption, says Paddy. You will not find it in the place where you look.
Schroeder nods as if in profound agreement and is released. He walks towards the door, upright and breathing hard through his nose. He doesn’t turn around when Paddy shouts after him.
– Your friend is a wicked man!
– I know he is, says Schroeder. Somebody should shoot the fucker.
– He is a very wicked man!
– Then you shoot him!
I carefully log the time as Schroeder stumbles back out onto Nassau Street. The traffic is moving again and everything seems reasonably normal, even to Schroeder who is now seeing things in twos and threes. For all the people felled earlier on Kildare Street, every illusion of city life has now been regenerated with every social contract and system newly intact. And so when Schroeder reaches for a taxi as if to swat one, a blurred yellowness stops in front of him almost immediately. It stinks of urine and heat but he gets in anyway and wrestles with the belt.
– Make like a bird for Trinity College.
The driver unplugs an earpiece.
– Say again.
– Dún Laoghaire. Hibernia Road.
– Do I know your face?
– I don’t know.
– Are you on the telly?
– Not at this precise moment, no.
Somewhere around Irishtown Schroeder is finally overwhelmed. He feels stressed and nauseous – as if he’s losing blood. Carcharodon carcharias. He winds down the window, rests his head against the buffeting air and talks frantically to himself, trying to stay conscious, willing the rolling freeway to end and the world to get back on its proper axis, on its proper trajectory around the spinning vault.
– You alright there? asks the driver, nervous of puke.
– No problemo, says Schroeder, his eyelids hanging, his eyebrows at full ascent. No problemo.
Military manoeuvres are taking place on Sandymount Strand and the poisoned sea is lit up like a football pitch. Schroeder conjures Paula Viola to straddle him, all velvety, in the backseat but all he sees is the Taoiseach’s wink. And Roark’s teeth. And he hears the sound of gunfire. And the screaming on Kildare Street. And then the silence and the blood. And Paddy the bartender and God and the Devil and a great white shark. And after that nothing.
SIX
THE LIGHTS are out again – another in a recent string of power cuts which always results in looting, carjacking and public fornication – and I’m at the barricade, inhaling the smell of Schroeder’s king prawn madras laced with garlic and chilli plus an enormous damp naan sweating in a brown paper bag. A 10.50 delivery charge, which Schroeder resents, but is always prepared to pay to avoid that grim trek as far as the Indian and back. He hates that stretch – the fox-proof wheelie bins, the skips, the trolleys and the skeletal bicycles chained to lamp posts, their wheels already plundered by local ratboys all blackheads and bones. I can’t say I blame him. Dún Laoghaire’s general vapour of heroin and chips is hardly salubrious.
I’m out here because the best thing about the power cuts is that the stars and planets suddenly reappear in the skies. Or at least some of them do, for only the brightest, for all their nuclear incandescence, can twinkle through the dense layers of poisons that float above us now. In fact, with the full glare of the city these days, nobody ever gets to savour even the white light of Venus. When I was a boy I saw its crescent with the naked eye. The morning star. And with binoculars I saw the moons of Jupiter and its Great Red Spot. And then with a telescope I saw the deserts and the polar caps of Mars. I was as good as Galileo in those days, picking out Ganymede, Io, Europa and the other one. Can’t think. And tonight, thanks to the outages, I can still spot Venus and Jupiter at the front of the house. Callista! Although Mars has long faded at the back, its orange glow much too perfect a match for the reflected glory of Dublin’s grid. And no loss really. What a fucking disappointment that one turned out be. Sitting up there teasing us for centuries. Giovanni Schiaparelli. The canali. Percival Lowell in Flagstaff, AZ, Mars as the Abode of Life, H. G. Wells and David Bowie. So much hope and so much talk of water and veg and then, in the year I was born, they sent up the Mariner 4. Nix Olympica. The Tharsis Bulge. And the Vikings. And nothing. And now nobody even mentions it anymore. Nobody even bothers to look up.
And if Schroeder was to enter his garden now, even in this power cut he would see only Arcturus in Boötes and Sirius, the Dog Star. But not The Pup. And never the Pleiades. These I can only trace from memory, these constellations I mapped when I was twelve. Just like and the rest of them. Coma Berenices, Cassiopea, Vulpecula. None of this means anything to anyone anymore. Including Schroeder, which disappoints me. He’s a man more interested in his naan and only when a text lands from Francesca does he desist from eagerly shining his plate with it. She says she’ll be home in a week.
I immediately abandon what stars there are and go inside. I head upstairs (my knee playing up slightly) and I check with the airport. When I see that she’s not on any passenger list for the next seven days I get suspicious and, sure enough, when I look into it further I discover that she landed in Dublin two hours ago. She’s already back in town and, for whatever reason, she seems to be reserving this starry evening for herself. Not that any of this surprises me. I have always been uneasy about Francesca Maldini. And with good reason too. Firstly she works in PR, secondly she works for the government and thirdly, and most importantly, she reminds me of someone with whom I once had a rash and rather consequential affair. And so for me, this is one of those situations where both observation and instinct come into play.
From what I was able to ascertain from Schroeder’s notes, their relationship began when they literally collided with each other outside Holland Park Tube Station in London. Schroeder was then a man afloat and Francesca was an Irish girl with eyes like dark, expensive chocolate who wasn’t looking where she was going. Schroeder’s throat had tightened instantly and before he had even realised what he was saying, he was suggesting they go for a coffee. She politely declined but when Schroeder persisted, on a very giddy roll in his London bubble, she took a step back and looked at him with the classic flirt face. As he put it, “that omniscient tease of confident availability.”
– I’ve got a boyfriend, she said.
– I’m not surprised, he replied.
And so they met as arranged outside a coffee shop on Kensington High Street. But when Francesca immediately suggested skipping the coffee and going for Thai, it was fairly clear what was in store, something which made the dinner conversation all the more charged. The candles burned in her molten eyes, her knees pressed against his thighs and the talk was all tingling with options. Before long, the Dim Sum bolted and the main course abandoned altogether, they were feasting on each others’ mouths in the back of a rattling London cab. Her place was a small flat with a big view somewhere between Holland Park and Portobello and it was there, after several ceremonial shots of vodka, that Schroeder first slept with Francesca Maldini. Next morning, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a traffic sign near his hotel made him laugh out loud. Humps for 800 m.
They next met in Dublin at Christmas time. In the chaos of Grafton Street, all lights, frenzy and cheer, it was, once more, a literal collision. Few words were spoken and they went straight to the new Sofitel and got started in the elevator. Francesca the voracious exhibitionist with the chocolate eyes and Schroeder the connoisseur savouring the pre-kiss silence – that prelude which he then believed to be the most intense moment available to a human being. The split-second preparation, the offer and acceptance, the soft collision and the spinning taste of darkness.
Three weeks later they met once more, this time in an Italian place in Blackrock. And again it was an accident. She was now the laid-back waitress, her hair banded high with velvet, and he was the chippy complainant pointing quizzically at a breast of chicken which was far from cooked. Pretending n
ot to know him, she smiled a professional smile and neatly defined the chef as a “prime asshole,” suggesting that Schroeder was lucky the chicken had even been defrosted. She swept his plate away, disappeared through a swinging door and Schroeder could hear voices raised in several languages. Moments later she emerged with such grace and speed that she seemed to be on roller blades. She wore a t-shirt now. Red and yellow, with the words Santa Monica Boxing undulating across her breasts.
Seconds later, a man fitting the exact description of a prime asshole came lumbering out with the plate of fluorescent chicken still in his hand and offered Schroeder a complimentary tea or coffee. Schroeder was enjoying himself now and, delivering his lines with skill, he suddenly got up in a wild, exasperated dust-devil of shites and fucksakes and left. It was getting fucking impossible, he shouted, to get a bite to eat anywhere in Dublin – a sure sign of any city’s collapse.
Out on the street, Francesca was sitting on a bollard with her back to the traffic. Her hair was loosed and Schroeder noted bootcut jeans, sandals, a sly Mediterranean smile and once again, the Californian top. He apologized for getting her the sack but she said it didn’t matter, that she hated the place anyway and that he could buy her a drink by way of compensation. And so they drank Brooklyn Lager all afternoon in a Blackrock dive which had an oldfashioned CD jukebox playing Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age. They talked energetically about Schroeder’s preoccupations at the time – celebrity, America, television news, crime, death, himself – all topics which, he believed, seemed to fascinate her. In his mind she was engrossed, seeming to buckle with sheer weakness at his sudden takes, elaborations and slants.
Later that evening they made full use of the bare stairs of no. 28, and even before their shuddering, blasted bodies had finally made it to the bedroom itself, Schroeder had already suggested that she stay the night. He had recognised, even as he lay on the stairs in the stained glass glow of his Dún Laoghaire fanlight, the bruises spreading on his hips and back, that he had not felt this good in a very long time. Some ease had come. Some deep warm excitement had landed.
It seemed that Francesca was feeling something similar for she claimed to be looking for exactly the same thing in life as he was – no more than some manageable blend of comfort and kicks. She had recognised a fellow in this pursuit simply because of the few suggestive jokes he had attempted to tell over their little city of bottles in Blackrock. Plus the fact that she could almost smell the lust coming out of his pores. Sex and laughs were exactly what she needed at the time and Schroeder, not a bad-looking young man in the right light, seemed as good a candidate as any.
I was up all that night running checks on her. And while I allowed them their privacy, neither listening nor recording, it was almost as if I was keeping them company – busy at my work while they were busy at theirs. By morning I had gathered enough intelligence on Francesca Maldini to be seriously concerned for Schroeder’s happiness in the days ahead. She was the daughter of the late Bert Maldini of Toledo, Ohio, a former functionary in the American Embassy in Dublin. As a teenager, she had baptised her father The Rattler and had once tried to shoot him with his own personal protection weapon. According to her version of events, he was asleep at the time and snoring like a hog, but nevertheless she missed, hitting the pillow right beside his ear and barely waking him up, leaving the disappointed cells of murder to settle themselves somewhere quiet in the blind cool of her blood. At least we must assume so.
It was shortly after they met that she started work with a PR company called Gandon, Truelock & Bogue, engaged mostly in government work, which is the reason she has since been away so much – three times to China this year alone. Her function, as I have discovered, is to soften up hardboiled industrialists with an advance posse of poets and traditional musicians while, at the same time, escorting a rowdy school trip of journalists to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall and doing her best to keep them away from hookers and drugs and, therefore, alive.
But for the most part, her job was to tell blatant lies about both guest and host and pretend to believe, on behalf of the Irish people, that China, for example, gave two shits about anything, not least lung cancer and climate change. She told Schroeder that she had no real difficulty with it. It was no different, she argued, from the way Dublin accepted Washington’s view on everything from breast size to who the bad guys were among the murderous ranks of world leaders. Not to take the Americans at their word, she said, would create complications beyond our comprehension. Not only were we allies, she said, we were blood relatives. The Yanks, she said, were our descendants – an evolved version of ourselves and so the relationship – military, political and cultural – was based on power, weakness and awkward kinship. It must all be considered, she said, by way of the two folk philosophies to which she claimed to be especially devoted – “anything for a quiet life” and “better the devil you know.”
But for all the fakery of diplomacy, she had her principles too. She once vomited after meeting a European Foreign Minister she knew for a fact to be a war criminal. Right into a ceramic pot and all over a desert plant in the shape of a succulent hand. But even then, on behalf of the nation, she was a consummate professional. She cleaned herself up and returned to the function with a smile and a mouthful of mints. It’s a parallel universe, she keeps telling Schroeder, with either different rules or no rules at all. She can, she tells him, manage to just about hold her own. But then by all accounts, including the official ones, she can do much more than that. She speaks Italian, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and French and has now mastered basic Mandarin. She’s cool, adaptable and in charge of herself. And she can lie through her teeth. Her bosses are well pleased.
Charged now with anticipation by Francesca’s text, Schroeder wipes the curry from his fingers and texts a message of urgent desire. Even the architecture of her name arouses him. Italianate. Francesca Maria Maldini back from Beijing via Amsterdam with yet more roots and herbs that’ll have him in a permanent state. At the thought of it he stretches out on the sofa with a beer, a comfortable smile spreading on his face. She’ll be back soon and reinstated utterly. Showered. In her dressing gown. Reading her dictionary and shaving her shins.
– Tarboosh? she will ask him without looking up.
– A type of hat, he will say.
– What kind of a hat?
– Like a fez.
– Correct!
– Autoassassinophiliac?
– Someone who gets sexually aroused by danger.
– Correct!
And then she’ll insert a slip of paper between the wafery pages and close the book.
– Did you miss me? she will ask.
– You look amazing, he will say.
And she will put her arms around his neck and he will press his cheek into her breasts. The red silk and the perfumed heat beneath it. And dampened by his breath, it will slip and slub against her skin and she will move away.
– Don’t go Fran, he will say.
But she’ll already be up and stretching.
– I’ve so much to do. Unpack. Put on a wash.
And then she’ll breathe in, grit her teeth and dig her nails into his flesh. Then, letting go again, she will ease herself away and open her dressing gown. Out of the blue she will be open-robed and spectacular. Legs and hipbones all carved and smooth. Classic pose. Art nouveau. Breasts like fresh air on the ocean.
– What was that for? he will ask.
– Cheer you up. The oldest trick in the book.
– It’s a good book.
And then she will announce that she needs a very long sleep. She will take a 24 hr pill and say that she would be grateful beyond words if he doesn’t waken her.
– Not even spoons? he will say.
– I know what you’re like. I’ll make it up to you I promise. I did some shopping.
And Schroeder will writhe like an eel in her grip and promise to behave.
When she awakes she will find him
naked as Narcissus in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. He will be enacting that ape to human line-up which tracks the ascent of man from knuckle-crawling to upright and ambulatory and, by that chart, he will seem just about bi-pedal – grunting, slack-jawed and tugging at the greening copper bracelet he wears as some unconvincing defence against science, logic and pain. (Magazine article I think it was. Or just some guff spread in the mush of last year’s pub-talk.)
And as he acts out every stage between monkey and man, she will feel a powerful mixture of affection and contempt which, she figures, is the most profound compound in any human relationship. Because in those moments when contempt yields once more to affection, things can still be rather thrilling in their own way. And what could be more like love, she once wrote on a coaster, than to feel such tenderness towards someone you despise more than a little?
– Nice ass, she will say.
And afterwards Schroeder will resume his breathless ape-man pose and there really will be something obscene about him then. Something corrupted entirely. And even though his lower lip will swallow the upper in some pitiable defiance of fact, he will see what looks like a dead thing – spectral, skeletal and reeking of bed, curry and death. There will be something particular and newly wasted about him now, something which seems to indicate nothing other than dull collapse and decline. His stomach will be like some pale dessert. Blancmange, if such a thing still exists. And he will suck himself inwards as best as he can but to little effect. Once he could have sucked back that stomach with such violence that it would have disappeared altogether into a deep and shocking cave; a scaresome darkness which burrowed deep beneath the dark overhang of his birdcage of ribs. But not any more. He is a flabby man. His best days are over. Behind him. If they were ever in front of him that is.
– Was that nice? Francesca will ask.