by Paul Murray
The newsagent’s, however, was where I was headed now: debouching from the cab on to newly laid faux cobblestone and gingerly edging my way through a Walpurgisnacht of middle-aged women with bleached hair, mock-leather jackets and yodelling children. Across the road, a huge billboard dominated the skyline. ‘IRELANDBANK: WE PLEDGE UNTO YOU,’ it said. ‘100 WAYS IN WHICH WE ARE MAKING LIFE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS BETTER AND BETTER.’ Which seemed to augur well for me and my predicament, but then beneath the letters was a picture of the amassed Irelandbank staff, waving mirthlessly up at the camera. There were thousands of them, a silent army clad in uniform blue jackets, the appalling tailoring of which made them all the more menacing.
The window of the newsagent’s was cluttered with dayglo flashcards; I scanned down through advertisements for nannies, lawnmowing, kittens, maths grinds, until I found what I was looking for.
The All-Seeing Eye.
Marital Infidelity? Extortion?
Conspiracies against you in the Office?
The All-Seeing Eye Sees All.
Have your suspicions confirmed
and your mind set at ease.
Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.
I took down the number and went in search of an unvandalized callbox.
‘Hello?’ a cautious voice answered, low and mumbly as if unwilling to divulge the slightest hint of identity.
‘Is that the All-Seeing Eye?’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ the voice said.
‘My name is Charl—’
‘No names!’ the voice interrupted urgently.
‘Fine then, my name is… is C, and I need your help.’
‘Marital infidelity? Extortion? Conspi—’
‘No, no, none of those. There’s a chap in my house stealing my furniture.’
‘Oh,’ the All-Seeing Eye said. ‘Are you sure it’s not marital infidelity?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my sister’s boyfriend.’
‘Ah,’ it said salaciously. ‘Want a few pictures, do you?’
‘No, look here, Eye, are you going to help me or not?’
‘Come to my office,’ the Eye said. ‘118, The Savannah. Come alone. The All-Seeing Eye takes cash and all major credit cards.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Photo development is extra, though, and the All-Seeing Eye reserves the right to hang on to negatives it likes…’
He gave me directions to his office, which was in fact more of a small semi-detached house in an estate of identical semi-detached houses not far away. I rang the doorbell, and after a series of unlocking noises, the door was opened by a familiar figure: none other than our dilatory postman, the one who smelled of gin and only delivered post when he felt like it.
‘What!’ I said.
‘C?’ he said.
‘But you’re the –’
‘No names,’ he said, and after a furtive look around motioned me inside. The hallway was filled with great billows of steam, into which he quickly disappeared. I followed as best I could and arrived in an even steamier room, where after stumbling around blindly for a moment I bumped into something. It emerged presently as a table, with a postbag of mail sitting on it. On either side of the bag was a pile: one of opened envelopes, the other presumably their former contents – hundreds of sheets of handwritten and printed correspondence.
Gradually, through breaks in the vapour clouds, I was able to piece together the rest of my surroundings. We were in a kitchen. The windows were fogged with condensation: on the cooker and counter, several kettles and saucepans were on the go at once, with sealed envelopes resting over each on makeshift tripods of Blu-Tak and cocktail sticks.
‘Tea?’ he said from somewhere.
‘What’s going on here? Is this people’s post?’
‘I’ll put on a kettle,’ the postman said, abruptly appearing and disappearing again into the fog. I sat down at the table and looked through the damp pages. How is Uncle Harold’s new leg?… We regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful… These girls are beautiful and discreet… Dear Bazzer, Mother died today…
‘I mean, what are you doing?’ I asked in disbelief.
‘Well, I suppose it started as a hobby,’ the postman said over his shoulder, ‘and then it grew into something more. I like finding solutions to problems. Answers. Life is full of questions. Only the privileged few have access to the answers.’
‘But you can’t –’
‘It’s really amazing what people will say in their letters,’ he mused.
‘And this… this heinous intrusion into people’s privacy is what you call detection, is it?’
‘You may not like it,’ he replied, setting a cup in front of me and sitting down, ‘but it means that I can give you a Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.’
‘Hmm,’ I said.
‘Let’s talk business,’ he said. ‘Actually, when I saw you at the door there I thought you must have come about your mortgage difficulties.’
‘Did you,’ I said.
‘Yes, thought you might have been wanting to fake your own death or something. Not unusual, people in your position.’
‘Not that it’s any of your concern,’ I told him haughtily, ‘but the mortgage is a minor matter, a simple crossed wire. As a matter of fact, I’m just on my way to see my bank manager and sort it out.’
He smiled at me indulgently. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. I suppose the repo men won’t be needing this, then.’ He plucked from the pile a single sheet headed with the Irelandbank logo, a sort of euro-sign-meets-swastika affair, and passed it to me. It was addressed to a debt-collection agency, stating that the bank now had legal authorization to take ‘the next step’ and that the collectors could begin shortly with their ‘recovery’.
‘Quite so,’ I swallowed. ‘A trifle.’
‘So you’ve come about your sister,’ he said, grinning.
‘Yes – listen here, Eye, kindly remove that lascivious expression when discussing my sister, if you please.’
‘All right,’ he said amiably. ‘Fine-looking girl, though. Shame that company didn’t take her on. I’d have thought she was a shoo-in.’ He exhaled ruminatively, crossed an ankle over his thigh, fiddled about with the hem of his trouser-leg. ‘Takes the wind out of your sails, a knockback like that,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His omniscience was starting to irk me; it was like meeting the Wizard of Oz or something. ‘And I don’t want to know. I’m not especially pleased about taking this course of action, and I’d appreciate it, Eye, if we could keep to the matter at hand and you would at least pretend not to know all there is to know about my family.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And another thing, don’t you have a name? I can’t keep calling you “Eye”, it’s confusing.’
‘Okay.’ His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his jaw. ‘Call me… MacGillycuddy.’
‘All right then.’ Carving a niche of air for myself from the steam, I told MacGillycuddy the whole story of Frank’s sudden and mysterious appearance in my house: his murky past and equally murky present, his baffling success with Bel, the disappearance of various household items, the sinister rusty white van.
‘I don’t quite get why the van bothers you so much,’ MacGillycuddy said.
‘Because no one knows what’s in it, that’s why.’ I told him about the time Frank was driving us to the greyhound race, when I had surreptitiously managed to peek into the back and seen dimly, through the smeared grille, what looked like mounds and mounds of garbage.
‘That’s unusual, right enough,’ MacGillycuddy admitted.
‘It’s more than unusual. The man’s a sociopath. I mean I don’t know if you’re familiar with Yiddish folklore at all, but – well, perhaps we shouldn’t get into that now. The sad fact is that my sister has a thing for sociopaths and if I don’t keep an eye on him he’ll run off with the whole house and her to boot.’
‘So y
ou want me to…’
I told him that I wanted him to find out everything he could about Frank: who he was, what he did, what had happened to my chair. ‘Basically, anything incriminating,’ I said.
‘No bother,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘Child’s play. Give me twenty-four hours.’ Having scribbled out my number and a cheque for his retainer, I rose to leave.
‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ he winked. ‘Good to have her back.’
I was tempted to pursue this, but the sight of his eagerly rubbing hands was enough to warn me away from opening any more Pandora’s boxes. I wished him good day, and opened the door.
‘And the repo men!’ he called after me.
I made my way back to the shopping centre sunk in thought. So they’d already called in the repossessors: that seemed rather unsporting of them. This interview might not be the formality I’d expected. I took a deep breath, and stepped through the doors of the bank.
It was a long, windowless chamber, with a rather elegant fan depending lifelessly from the low ceiling. A painted wooden counter ran down the left-hand side, bearing pens on chains, transaction dockets, leaflets about car loans, tracker bonds, inscrutable investment schemes. To the right, beside a small row of uncomfortable chairs, a louvred door led off to another room to which one went for cash, lodgements and so on. Two pictures hung side by side on a prominent area of the wall. One was an anaemic landscape of a soothing sun glinting through trees. ‘RELIABILITY,’ it said underneath in big, sincere letters. The other was somewhat more fanciful, depicting a tropical island with dolphins frolicking soothingly just offshore. ‘QUALITY SERVICE,’ this one said.
At the back of the room, a man in a badly-tailored blue jacket was smiling at me from behind a desk. His arms were folded and he was sitting at the exact midpoint between his computer and a fake-looking potted plant. He looked rather as if he had been sitting like that all day, smiling placidly; a sign saying ‘Information’ hung above him, with an arrow pointing down at his head.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said pleasantly, when he saw I had finished my examination of the dolphin picture.
‘Ah, hello,’ I replied with a whimsical brightness, as if I were just passing a few idle minutes on my way somewhere else.
‘How can I help you today?’ he inquired. He was a nondescript-looking fellow, with a kindly, roundish face and a little hyphen of a mouth.
‘Oh, just a small thing,’ I said breezily, waving a couple of red-stamped envelopes at him. ‘Just a few final-notice things we seem to have got by mistake.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mind if I have a quick look at them?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Why not take a seat,’ he said, ‘Mr…?’
‘Hythloday – Charles,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He scanned through the pages expressionlessly while I whistled something in keeping with the relaxed but respectful mood we had established, and tried to imagine what he might look like away from his desk – cheering on a boat race, or frowning thoughtfully over a jar of pickles in the supermarket. He slid his chair over to the computer and began to tap at it. He tapped for a good three minutes. ‘Oh,’ he said at one point, briefly pulling back from the screen. I leaned casually over to one side but I couldn’t make out what was on it. I continued uneasily with my whistling.
‘Well, Charles,’ he said eventually, ‘it says here that we haven’t received any mortgage payments from you in over six months.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said in a businesslike manner that might make this sound like an explanation.
‘It looks like we’ve been trying to contact you about it for some time,’ he continued, still gazing into the computer screen. ‘Didn’t you get our letters about legal action?’
He was trying to keep up his friendly tone but I could tell that he was hurt, as though I had deliberately misled him. I explained that the letters had been misfiled in the String Drawer but this didn’t cut much ice.
‘The String Drawer,’ he repeated to himself, labouring to understand.
‘It’s not just string,’ I expanded, ‘there’s other stuff in there as well: thumb-tacks, Sellotape, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes,’ he said, placing his hands on the top of his head and leaning back his chair. I felt like a heel. ‘Well, Charles, that could happen to anyone. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the fact that we have a bit of a problem here.’
‘Do we?’
‘Yes – unless, of course, you’re going to tell me that you have in your wallet the sum of –’ He named the sum with a jocular laugh – ‘in cash, ha ha’ – but his eyes implored me to give him something, not to let a dreary, mundane old debt scuttle the friendship that was budding so beautifully between us. My heart sank a little more. Coincidentally, the figure he’d named bore some resemblance to the amount I’d lost playing baccarat that spring, on somebody’s yacht one day with Pongo and Patsy and Hoyland Maffey. How insubstantial it had seemed then, in the simmering below-deck; after too many Kahluas and with Patsy pressed against my arm, when she wasn’t outside playing some juvenile hide-and-seek game with Hoyland, that is – it hadn’t seemed to matter whether I won or lost; she’d clutched my elbow and laughed and cheered me on, little pearl earrings shining out of her ebony bob; and the cards all looked the same anyway, smiling in the light that washed in through the picture-window, as the croupier swept up another pile of chips…
‘There must be something we can do,’ I said.
The bank official chewed his ballpoint pen pessimistically. ‘Charles, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘The family has assets, though – I mean it’s not as if we’re down to our last few pennies. This is just a temporary thing. Couldn’t we sort out a… a loan, or a moratorium or something? At least until I can talk to Father’s accountant, and he can… he can divert funds from our dividends…’
The bank official looked up at me with a weary little smile; he knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘that would be all well and good. I would love to do that for you, Charles, and if it were personally up to me, you’re right, arrange a moratorium, that’s exactly what I’d do. But you see, I have to look after the bank’s interests too.’ His eyes looked earnestly into mine, hoping that I would understand. ‘It’s so far behind, and the sum is so large, and – though I personally believe you do – on paper I can’t see that you have the collateral to pay this off. I want to take care of this for you, Charles, but I have to make sure that the bank gets a square deal.’
I swallowed, looking helplessly back at him. Didn’t he think he could trust me? Did he think we were some crowd of snaky conmen, trying to take advantage of the bank’s good-heartedness? In a fatuous slip of mirror beside the fake-looking potted plant I caught a glimpse of my hands wringing, and wondered curiously whose, what they were.
‘The thing is, Charles – you see, the mortgage as it stands seems somewhat irregular. That’s what really bothers me.’ The pen went back in his mouth.
‘Oh yes?’ distractedly mopping my brow.
‘Yes. You see, normally, Charles, how a mortgage works is that when the first party passes away – Mr Ralph Hythloday, that’s – that was your father, I assume?’
I nodded.
‘I’m sorry,’ the bank official said quietly.
‘Thank you,’ I said. For a moment we reflected in silence.
‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘what usually happens is that, on the occasion of the borrower’s death, the life insurance is put towards outstanding debts. For some reason, that hasn’t happened in your father’s case.’
‘No?’ The atmosphere in the room was unbearably close; I glanced hopefully up at the fan.
‘No… and then when I go back further, I find that the original structure of the loan was… well, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The payments are totally irregular. And they come in from somewhere new practically every tim
e. Look,’ turning the screen round to me, ‘this is just in the last four years. Instead of us simply debiting your father’s account, the money’s paid in by this company on this date, and a different company here, and then there’s nothing for months, and then this lump sum from this bank which I have to say I’m not familiar with – do you know who any of these people are?’
‘Assets?’ I croaked weakly. My head was spinning and I could make no sense of the numbers dancing up and down on the screen. Why wouldn’t he let me go?
‘I don’t know who set this up,’ he was saying, ‘but it’s most irregular, most irregular.’
‘So what should I do?’ I said feverishly, simply to bring this to an end. ‘You can’t give me a loan, you say, and you can’t give me any more time.’
He looked at me with a sorrowful, stoical expression. ‘Charles, my hands are tied,’ he said. ‘If you can find your family’s accountant, and if he can make head or tail of this – well, then, maybe we can work something out. But as it stands… the debt will have to be called in.’
‘Meaning the house will be repossessed?’
‘That’s the standard operating procedure, yes.’ He brooded behind a steeple of fingers.
‘I see.’ That was the bottom line. I reached behind me for my jacket and got to my feet. ‘Well,’ I said, reverting to the breezy style I had begun with, as if none of this were really important anyway.
‘Yes,’ the bank official followed suit, ‘thanks for dropping by.’ He stretched over the desk to shake my hand.
‘Thank you,’ I said without quite knowing why, and made my way to the door.