Quiet City

by Philip Davison

  An original dramatisation of Quiet City was commissioned and produced by RTÉ Radio 1 – Drama on One.

  praise for philip davison’s work

  ‘part le Carré, part Graham Greene’

  —Independent

  ‘Ireland’s best-kept secret: Philip Davison is one of our great contemporary writers.’

  —Bob Geldof

  ‘Davison never fails to surprise, compel and intrigue with dry philosophy and grim wit … [He] shares Beckett’s knack for making the down-at-heel appear surreal.’

  ―Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Chilly, elegant and disconcertingly comic. Rather like a collaboration between two notable Green(e)s – Graham and Henry – and quite safely described as original.’

  ―Literary Review

  ‘Davison writes with the intelligence and intent of a James Lee Burke, flecked with the mordant wit of a Kinky Friedman.’

  ―Arena

  ‘Sharp. Funny. Hip. Learned. Surprising… Ireland’s equivalent of Graham Greene with a dash of Le Carré and the readability of Len Deighton.’

  ―Evening Herald

  ‘a gem of a writer … Davison’s lean and ultra-minimalist style evokes an atmosphere that is quite surreal … He has a sparse and strangely matter-of-fact style of writing that gives full value to every word and act.’

  ―Irish Times

  ‘As flawed heroes go, Harry Fielding must rank among the best of them.’

  ―Irish Independent

  ‘Sparse but gripping prose … Fielding’s reluctant emergence as a flawed and vulnerable latter-day Robin Hood [is] as engrossing as the labyrinthine plot.’

  —Sunday Express

  ‘Davison has created a character in the grand tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Columbo.’

  —Irish Echo

  ‘a hero who smacks of early Beckett’

  ―Evening Herald

  ‘Harry Fielding … is a gem: world-weary and clueless, knowing and blind.’

  —Roddy Doyle

  ‘a wicked ear for conversational quirks and the minutiae of life’

  ―Sunday Press

  ‘a deceptively glib tone of wry, cool detachment’

  ―Publishers Weekly

  ‘Pre-eminently human … funny in the way that The Catcher in the Rye was funny’

  ―Books Ireland

  Quiet City

  Philip Davison

  Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,

  And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

  from To Sleep, by John Keats

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1 Richard Meadows

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part 2 John Miller

  11

  12

  13

  Part 3 Gloria Meadows

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Copyright

  Part 1

  Richard Meadows

  1

  When Richard Meadows’ wife told him he was showering too noisily he knew he had entered a new phase in his life. It wasn’t his singing, because he didn’t sing in the shower. There was the odd hum, but nothing that could be heard above the sound of water falling from the showerhead.

  He shut off the water, stepped out onto the tiles, and put his head around the door. ‘What?’

  ‘You didn’t hear?’ said Gloria. Her eyes were wide and perfectly round.

  ‘I heard,’ said Richard. He looked at his wife with blank amazement. It was the actual business of showering that was too loud for Gloria’s ears. She no longer admired him. That much he knew. However, Richard had come to believe that admiration might separate from love and be a more fickle thing.

  On Monday morning last, Gloria had discovered the puny remains of one bar of soap her husband had melded with a new bar of soap to form something that closely resembled a fried egg, and she had flown into a rage. Richard had been able to deal with the soap incident. He could see how soap-melding might annoy a person, whatever the degree of familiarity. This complaint concerning his late-afternoon shower was of a different order. Richard could shower any time of the day now that he was doing just the occasional piece of consultancy work. This was a searing afternoon attack. It was significant that Gloria had delivered the same round-eyed look of contempt when she spoke on the topic of his strategy for ageing – which, admittedly, was to have no strategy at all.

  The rebuke was delivered from the fan-ribbed Deco armchair that was positioned by the bedroom window. Gloria had taken to sitting on this chair in her pyjamas. She would rise early from their bed, then sit and gaze vacantly at the street below. She had bought this chair in an antique shop in Francis Street a year after the couple had married. It was an anniversary present from her husband. She chose it, and paid for it, and he reimbursed her. This he later regretted, as it made the chair something less than a present.

  Richard dried himself in a stupor. Gloria changed into her clothes with a series of angry jerks, and left the apartment. In challenging times Richard issued audible warnings and kindness, but in a whisper. Recently, these whispers came with a soothing coda. He would address himself by name and counsel patience and kindness to himself. However, on this occasion there was no such warning, and no soothing words. In his state of undress he stood and stared at the empty chair. A cold, burning sensation travelled up his spine and across his shoulder blades. He shivered under the acid mantle Gloria had thrown on him. There was the vague expectation of a heart attack.

  Richard turned the chair on its side to get it out through the bedroom door. He waltzed it down the hall, out onto the landing and into the lift. It was strangely empowering to sit in it for the descent to the basement car park. He felt he was occupying a dark and fabulous three-dimensional metaphor that saw him, a modest under-achiever, properly damned. He splayed his fingers and rubbed his palms on the arm-rests. He thought he might laugh like a madman, but the journey was short and the gong sounded. The door slid back, and the voice announced that he and the chair had arrived at ‘Parking’.

  It was difficult to get the chair into the dumpster. Gloria would have been impressed to see the effort he put in. In an earlier life she had been mightily taken with Richard and had fallen in love a little when, from a standing position, he had leapt over a college tennis net to be at her side. He was attentive and intelligent. This she expected from an engineering student, but she had, in particular, been attracted to his athleticism, and to his embarrassment at his good health and cleanliness.

  Richard lifted the armchair high in the air and hoiked it over the lip of the dumpster with a great guttural groan. He stepped back and saw that the lumpish thing protruded and sat cockeyed on its bed of rubbish. He had always liked the chair, but the service it provided had to end. A line in the sand had to be drawn. A signal had to be sent.

  He had an overwhelming urge to jump into the dumpster himself. It made no sense, but he did it anyway. He ran at the big bin in a most athletic manner, attempted a back-flip, but instead twisted clumsily over the lip and fell into the chair at a bad angle. He injured his shoulder on impact and the bed of rubbish collapsed. He was tipped face down with a violent jolt, but Richard was already intoxicated by his own irrational behaviour. He sprang to his feet, tumbled out of the bin, military fashion, and nearly fainted with the pain Gloria’s chair had inflic
ted. Regardless, he set about covering his handiwork with scraps of cardboard.

  He got into his car to watch. Soon the bin-men appeared at the electric gate. When they pulled away in their lorry he decided to follow. His injury had him listing at the steering wheel, but he wasn’t bitter. This whole business was about change. In particular, it was about ageing. General physical decline had to be faced with noble contempt. Gloria wasn’t attuned to the concept. She wasn’t signalling that together they might be ennobled – which was why her beloved chair was on its way to the city dump.

  Richard followed the lorry because he felt he had made a mistake – in ditching the chair, that is, not in jumping in after it. He wanted it back. He wanted the chair there in the bedroom with Gloria.

  The bin-men had one last collection before going to the dump. The heavy loads that went in on top of the armchair were a torture for Richard, and now he realised that the sour, fishy stink was coming from his person as much as from the mother-ship. He wanted to go to some dark corner and quickly drink a bottle of wine, but that was most un-engineering of him. He determined he should stick to the task of retrieving the chair. How easily he had succumbed to a better view of things, he noted.

  The lorry flew through the tip-gates with Richard’s car close on its tail. The man in the hut showed no interest. The bin party went directly to the tip-head. Richard parked by a cluster of empty oil drums, got out and made his way to the action. It was near closing time. A bulldozer with porcupine wheels was idle, high on the refuse slope above. Scraps of paper and plastic sheeting caught in the netting trembled in a light evening breeze. The gulls were undisturbed by the heavy chugging of the lorry’s engine and the surge of hydraulics. Richard took a moment to acknowledge the appropriateness of this latest three-dimensional metaphor, only to find he had misjudged the speed at which the dumping would be done. It was all over by the time his presence registered with the crew.

  ‘Are you all right there, boss?’ the bin captain asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘Thank you. I was just looking for something.’

  ‘In there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘You see that chair … ?’

  ‘You want that chair?’

  ‘I do. It’s mine. My wife’s, that is. It went in by mistake.’

  ‘By mistake?’

  ‘It shouldn’t have gone in.’

  ‘Something wrong with you?’ the captain asked. Richard took offence, but then realised the man was indicating his hunched shoulder.

  ‘Ah. Yes. Banged it. Stupid really.’

  ‘You want us to get the chair?’

  ‘Would you?’

  They didn’t seem to mind that he stank of fish. Didn’t seem to care. When the job was done Richard hooked a twenty out of his pocket and offered it.

  ‘Good man,’ cried the captain. The crew got in their lorry and drove off with a crunch of gears.

  With the chair sticking out of the boot, Richard drove to the site entrance, where he found the gates locked and the security cabin deserted. He turned back. He had seen another gate that led to the adjacent recycling yard.

  This gate was also locked. He switched off the engine, got out, scaled the fence and dropped into the recycling compound, more hunched then ever. There was a series of concrete trenches that housed long roller skips for public use. There was just one station wagon backed up to the furthest trough. A woman was unloading small, heavy goods. It was late in the day, but evidently she wasn’t in a rush. Richard approached. Her appearance suggested she was thirty-nine or forty, but he was sure she was older. He was immediately attracted to her.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. Her tone exactly matched his.

  ‘You didn’t happen to notice if there is a security man on the gate you came in?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘There is.’

  ‘Oh good. It’s just I got locked in next door.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked at him without seeming to judge – which, under the circumstances, set Richard rocking on his heels. He thought he recognised her. Was she one of Gloria’s friends? No. The face came out of his distant past. Was this Virginia Coates? Virginia Coates was his childhood love. Could it really be her? What were the chances? He blamed his inability to definitively identify her on his psychological and physical trauma. If it was her, she didn’t recognise him.

  ‘Want a hand with that stuff?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Nearly done.’

  It was mostly scrap metal she was dumping. Small engine parts – all of which Richard was able to name. There were also coils of old electric cable and crusted tins of paint.

  ‘He’s dead,’ the woman declared robustly, but with a mischievous glance. ‘I’m clearing out the garage.’

  Virginia Coates was mischievous and disarmingly direct. It was odd how young she looked. He was, however, measuring against how old and clapped-out he felt. Richard insisted on helping with discarding the engine parts, and named them aloud as each went into the long skip.

  ‘How did you get locked in?’ she asked.

  ‘Wrong turn,’ he told her. She wasn’t convinced, but didn’t care to probe. He liked that. ‘Sorry for your trouble,’ he added belatedly.

  She acknowledged with a self-conscious shrug. ‘Cancer,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he repeated. It was Virginia. Didn’t she recognise him? If she did, she was concealing it expertly. ‘Have you children?’ he asked.

  ‘A daughter. Do you have any?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks for the help,’ she said. ‘What did you do to your shoulder?’

  ‘I fell.’

  ‘You’re having a bad day?’

  ‘As long as I can get out of here ….’

  She smiled and he looked at her blankly. Life was mysterious. There were moments of daring and improbable symmetry, like this one in a rubbish tip. Richard wanted to embrace her, but his shoulder was throbbing, he stank of fish, and she was now anxious to move on.

  ‘Virginia,’ he shouted impulsively, as the station wagon pulled away. There was a flicker of response, but it might well have been nothing more than the guarded reflex to any human call. In any case, she didn’t stop, and the car quickly disappeared behind a line of steel shipping containers.

  Richard lumbered to this other security hut, where he explained his predicament.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the man in the hut, ‘can’t do anything for you. I don’t lock that gate. I lock this gate.’

  ‘I had to get something back,’ Richard insisted.

  ‘You didn’t check in, did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t check in. I was trying to catch up with the lorry.’

  ‘You should have checked in at the gate.’

  ‘You must have keys for both gates.’

  ‘The tip-head is not my department,’ the man said, with a sudden vagueness. It was clear he didn’t like Richard. It may have had something to do with his impatience, and with the way he nursed his arm.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to get out of here. Right now. You can open that other gate for me. Please open that gate.’

  ‘Can’t. Come back tomorrow.’

  ‘There’s nobody you can ring?’

  ‘Nobody. And I’m closing up here in ten minutes.’

  Richard raised the one hand he could raise, to indicate that the exchange was at an end. He walked out onto the road, looked left and right. Incredible, wasn’t it, what life could dish out? He reminded himself of the steps that had led him to this place. That mental act seemed to bring on the rain. Flabby, acidic, lukewarm drops.

  He looked for a taxi, but in vain. He decided to walk the long distance home. Then he decided to jog. He raised his face to the splattering rain, then lowered it again, made chicken’s wings of his arms and began his jogging. Carefully, at first, on the broken concrete pavement, then more recklessly. He was still strong. Still healthy. He could accomplish this ta
sk. He found his rhythm.

  He thought about Virginia. Decided that the woman he had just met at the dump wasn’t Virginia Coates. Nonetheless, this resolute and winsome widow had provided a valuable service. She had made him think again about his mortality.

  Richard wanted to say to Gloria that when he was dead there would be no ghost, no spiritual connection. No part of him would be lurking behind the hedge at their favourite park bench, nor floating in the ether as she walked their favourite cliff-top walk, nor sitting beside her in bed watching their favourite film, nor hovering by their favourite table at any restaurant they frequented. He’d be gone. He’d be nowhere.

  But he also wanted to say there was a lot that could be done with not yet being extinct. They should give and take, and without delay.

  A thousand yards on, he had to stop at a red light. Heavy goods vehicles and fast saloon models driven by short-tempered commuters flew by at dangerous proximity. Already he was tired and lopsided. Jogging on the spot, Richard used the time to work through the logistics of retrieving his car and the chair early the following morning.

  He thought about getting home. Thought he might find Gloria sitting on their bed. He would say a simple hello. He speculated that Gloria might respond in kind. Who knew what might happen next?

  The lights changed to green, but Richard didn’t notice. He didn’t see that the traffic had squealed to a halt. He continued to jog on the spot. When he got home he would take something for the pain. He would have a shower and think about the real Virginia Coates. He’d offer Gloria no explanation for the armchair. He’d talk to her about not being dead.

  Gloria would be back in the apartment now, he was thinking. She’d have noticed that the chair was missing. His absence would be like his vanishing in a department store or in the aisles of a supermarket, but the chair – that would perplex her. She’d be staring at the empty space. He’d be staring into that space, too, when he talked to her in the bedroom; when he was telling her that he was feeling better; when he was asking her if there was any hot water for a shower. He’d have to think of something to ask about her time out. Something good and righteous, and generous in spirit, before he told her about the city dump, his car, the chair. Say nothing about jumping into the dumpster, he was thinking.