by Paul Murray
‘Ooh, that must be my taxi.’ Laura swung her little bag over her shoulder and scampered over to the door, forcing me to lunge after her and grab her by the arm.
‘If everyone could just listen. The fact is, the house is under attack, by the cunt and his friends –’
‘That fella’s a glutton for punishment,’ Frank remarked.
‘Yes, well, be that as it may, I don’t care for the girls to get mixed up in this, so Bel, if you take Laura and Mrs P down to the cellar, then Frank and MacGillycuddy and I can try and – where is MacGillycuddy?’
‘He was here a minute ago.’
‘Oh, hell… All right, Frank, it looks like –’
‘Charles,’ Bel’s cheeks blazed every time she looked at me, ‘if you think I’m going down to that horrible smelly cellar just because of an odious little man –’
‘It’s not one odious little man, there’s about twenty of them.’
‘Well still, and anyway, what about Mrs P?’ By her left side her fist clenched and unclenched repeatedly. ‘Do you really think she’s in any condition to be sitting in a cold, dingy –’
‘She’s not really fit for a punch-up either, though, Bel –’ I broke off and listened. The ringing had stopped and an ominous thudding had taken its place, beating against the front door like a jungle drum, making the cupboards and fixtures buzz in sympathy.
‘Maybe they don’t want a fight,’ Laura said. ‘Maybe they just want to use the phone, or like borrow something.’
The candle guttered violently in the bottle, pitching our shadows this way and that.
‘Blast it, Frank, they’re your enemies, can’t you go and reason with them?’
‘I s’pose I’d better, you wouldn’t happen to have a few lengths of plywood knockin around, would you Charlie? Or one of them nailguns?’
Bel stood up. ‘This is ridiculous. I’m calling the police.’
‘No, Bel –’ following her into the hall, where down the stairs the front door could be seen to pulse, heart-like, with each blow, the frame beginning to splinter and the hinges to give. Outside the malevolent voices bubbled up; Bel stopped, swallowed, then, affecting not to notice, continued her progress towards the wicker table where the phone rested, a few steps up from the convulsing door: ‘Hello? That’s odd – hello?’
And then – just as I sprang to stand quivering between her and the door, and Frank lurched out of the kitchen bearing Mrs P’s heaviest waffle iron – the noise ceased, and there was a silence like a vacuum, in which we stood and blinked at each other like awakened sleepers. There came a squeal from outside; and then another; and then a groan and a painful-sounding crunch. We raced to the drawing-room window. On the lawn five men in polyester tracksuits were being tossed about in the air by the same two huge shadowy forms that MacGillycuddy and I had been pursuing moments ago.
‘Wow…’
It was mesmerizing to watch, balletic even. With perhaps fifteen feet of grass between them, they threw the cunts effortlessly from one to the other – the exchange perfectly synchronized so that at all times somebody was in mid-air – caught them, and set them gently on the ground. The cunts swore and yowled; in flight their faces became cartoonish, divested of threat. (‘They’re not really hurtin them,’ Frank said, forlornly raising his waffle iron.) Every so often one of the cunts would pick himself up and hurl himself at a shadow: every time – though we couldn’t quite make out how – he would be repulsed without making so much as a dent. For five minutes the colossal figures passed the invaders back and forth, voices ringing sonorously together – ‘they’re singing’ – like jugglers swapping skittles in the Russian Circus.
‘Who are they?’ Bel breathed.
‘Beings,’ I said huskily.
‘What do you mean, beings?’
‘Well, you know, supernatural beings.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Charles.’
‘I know it sounds crazy, but Bel if you’d seen them earlier on, running about with the piano – running, mark you –’ I was about to tell her about my visions too, how I’d glimpse them from my bedroom window at the dead of night, when Laura cried sadly, ‘They’re going!’
Sure enough, the cunts – who to be fair had struggled pluckily, if vainly, against the two behemoths – were turning tail and scrambling down the driveway. Our rescuers, their work concluded, dusted themselves off and loped away in the opposite direction, to an enthusiastic round of applause from the contingent at the window, with the exception of Frank, who was mumbling that it wasn’t that hard to throw someone if you just knew how to hold them.
‘D’you really think they’re like supernatural?’
‘There’s no question. No human being could possibly be that large.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Bel snapped. ‘Don’t listen to him, Laura.’
‘Look, have you ever tried to lift a Steinway?’
‘Hey!’ Laura pressed her nose to the glass. ‘Isn’t that your housekeeper?’
Mrs P, clearly discernible in her white shift, was bustling across the lawn to the spot to which our helpmeets had retreated. At first I thought she must be sleepwalking again, but she appeared quite awake; in fact she seemed to be scolding them, wagging her finger and addressing them sharply in words I could not quite make out.
‘This is preposterous,’ Bel said, turning on her heel and marching out the door. ‘I’m going to find out what’s going on.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Laura said to me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Like, about the house being interesting.’
‘Never a dull moment,’ Frank clapped me heartily on the shoulder, ‘with me and Charlie on the piss, isn’t that right Charlie?’
‘Ah, yes, quite, quite right…’ distracted by a scuffling noise overhead and remembering that MacGillycuddy was still at large somewhere in the house; then realizing that I’d forgotten about the bomb, which would be going off shortly. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d engineer my exit in the midst of all this activity. The surfeit of events was making me groggy and a little nauseous; I felt like I had eaten too much cake. But there was still more to come. Feet were clattering on the steps and now, with a rather triumphal flush, Bel re-entered the room with the two shadows behind her.
‘Everyone,’ she announced, ‘I would like you to meet Vuk and… what did you say he was called?’
‘Zoran.’ Mrs P brought up the rear, shaking her head.
‘Hello,’ one of them said experimentally, as Bel guided him to an armchair. His cohort propped himself on the armrest. ‘We speak no English,’ he declared after a moment’s deliberation.
‘As you can see, there’s nothing remotely supernatural about them.’
It was true: close-up the new arrivals did appear to be human, and on top of that quite amiable, although they were disturbingly tall. Both were muscular with swarthy complexions and thick, arching eyebrows. One of them (Vuk?) was conspicuously handsome, with tousled hair and long, very white teeth; the other (possibly Zoran) had a round head and a mild, uncomplaining demeanour. They sat looking quite at their ease, glancing round disinterestedly at their surroundings. Mrs P, on the other hand, was staring abjectly at her feet, like a schoolgirl caught cheating on a maths test.
‘Well, this is very nice,’ I said after a moment, ‘but I’m still somewhat fuzzy as to who, ah, exactly they are…’
‘They are my sons,’ Mrs P said, fumbling despondently with the cuffs of her shift.
‘Your sons?’
‘Wow…’
‘Yes. For three months now, they have been living hidden in the Folly.’
‘The Folly?’
‘Charles, stop repeating everything she says.’
‘Sorry.’ I sat back heavily on the window-ledge; I dimly heard Laura asking if anyone wanted tea. Then, for some moments, the room withdrew from me. Mrs P’s sons! Living in the Folly! A lot of things were suddenly making sense – the apparitions, the mysterious breakfasts, the underpants and t
he phenomenal grocery bills, the pilgrimages, the letters under the sink, the disappearing household items and now several thousand pounds’ worth of missing gemstones and artworks. ‘Mrs P,’ I returned to the fray, adopting a severe tone, ‘I’d like to know what you mean by having your children living in the Folly.’
Mrs P trudged over to the fireplace, where she stirred up a couple of embers among the ashes of the fire she’d stoked that afternoon.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Don’t bully her, Charles.’
‘Master Charles is right,’ she said fatalistically. ‘My sons are foolish, they want to help, so you find out and now I must tell you.’
‘Let’s start with what exactly they were doing with my piano.’
‘Please, Master Charles. Now you find out, perhaps I lose my job and you send me away. This is your choice. Still I am happy, that the four of us are together. But please, you must listen to the story from the very beginning.’ She sighed, as if she had come to the end of a long and difficult journey and knew that she would never embark on another.
‘When the war begins,’ she said, as Laura came in with a tray and made a circuit of the room, offering ‘Tea?’ in a deafening stage whisper, ‘my family is already separated. The boys in Belgrade, we are in Krajina. Then, with the war –’ She opened her hands to show something let fall to the floor. ‘Everything is the chaos. Friends, families, everyone is split up in a thousand different places. The men our leaders run away. It becomes very dangerous and we must run away too. My children I don’t know where they are. Alive or dead, I don’t know.’ In one motion her hands rose and then fell to her sides.
‘Why didn’t you tell us any of this?’ Bel said, stroking her arm. ‘We might have been able to help you, Mother knows people…’
‘Because it doesn’t end.’ Mrs P passed an agonized hand over her eyes. ‘It was not over. Not to know becomes like the hard knot inside me, it is something I must hold tight to. I come here, I find a job, I wait. Only if I stay quiet do I keep the connection to that time. If I speak I think I let go, I am saying, now, that was then, that life is over. But in silence, only praying to myself so I know, something may still change. I wait, write letters, I hear things from people who were lost and then like miracles appear, but with nothing but stories, terrible stories.’
She fell into a pensive silence. Vuk and Zoran grinned uncomprehendingly from their armchair. Frank swore as his Jaffa Cake fell into his tea.
‘At last,’ she resumed, ‘we find each other, scattered in different countries. I send money so they can come here. Everything is secret, if they are found they will be sent back. But we are lucky. The builders are kind men, they help us with food and papers, they make the Folly warm, they don’t tell you of what we do. I am not proud, to steal from you, to lie to you. But I am thinking, can they understand? Other things are not like this, they begin, they end. But when a home is gone, and they rub it from the map, then –’
‘Hang on –’ obviously this was an emotional moment, and I didn’t like to interrupt, but I had done the arithmetic on my fingers several times now and it still wasn’t coming out right, ‘how many of you did you say there were?’
‘Mirela, my daughter, is asleep. She is sick, she needs rest.’
‘Oh.’ I rose slowly to my feet. ‘Asleep in the, ah…?’
‘The Folly,’ Mrs P nodded.
‘Right, right…’
‘What were you saying, Mrs P?’ Bel encouraged her. ‘About when your home is gone?’
‘Yes, that there is no end, because the ground is taken away that you walk on, so you must fall and fall –’
‘Excuse me a moment, would you…?’ No one paid any attention to me as I sidled out the door. Once out of their sight, I galloped down the steps and on to the wet grass. A livid roiling in the east signalled a storm coming in from the sea. The Folly emerged, stern and tenebrous, out of the night.
The bomb was just where MacGillycuddy had said, a deceptively homemade-looking bundle of wadding and tape wedged between two of the foundation stones. Thirteen minutes remained on the clock face: time enough if I hurried to get this blasted daughter out of the building and make myself scarce before it went up.
The doorway was a hole in the wall, braced by poles in plastic wrapping that whipped and rattled in the wind. Sweating feverishly, jabbed by iron prongs protruding from the stonework, I climbed the narrow stairs. Here and there little squares of yellow paper were pasted to the wooden skeleton, bearing inscrutable messages – builders’ reminders to themselves, I imagined, of tasks that now would never be completed. Halfway up the tower I came upon the piano, jammed immovably between stairs and ceiling. I squeezed past it, pushed up on the trapdoor at the top and poked my head into the room.
A solitary flame bounced about in the wind that stole in under the tarpaulin ceiling. In this gothic light, the belongings that confronted me on every side had a displaced, almost uncanny look about them; it was like walking into a fairground tent and discovering the museum of your own life. The ottoman, the teapot, the menorah; countless things I hadn’t even missed: a paperweight, beach towel, radio. Near the hatch was a foot-massager that Bel and I had gone dutch on as a Christmas present for Mother years ago, which I don’t think she’d ever even taken out of the box; beside it, a familiar table with familiar chairs, then familiar sleeping bags with familiar blankets and an old teddy bear that had fallen out of favour with me as I reached my teens. On the other side of the trapdoor, which was just off-centre of the circular room, were the valuables, piled up indiscriminately into a great mound like a dragon’s hoard. The coins, the pistols, the crystalware and silver, the gold and agate and ermine – all of it shored up in a corner with a literalism I found rather disarming: someone’s idea of a fortune, and what a fortune was able to do.
I should have mentioned earlier that in the sleeping bag nearest the wall was a girl, sitting up reading a dog-eared copy of the collected plays of Tennessee Williams. She was either pretending not to have noticed me, or else thoroughly absorbed in her book; either way, I found myself delivering a prefatory cough: ‘Ahem.’
‘Ah, there you are,’ the girl said.
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling somewhat trumped.
‘Come in, won’t you?’ she said politely, laying her book to one side.
‘Thank you.’ Without moving, she watched me haul myself through the hatch. ‘I knew you’d come sooner or later,’ she said. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, bit of a dispute over at the house. Your, ah, your brothers were kind enough to step in…’
Even in the uncertain light I could appreciate that she was a striking girl, with the same fine black hair as her brothers and bold, imposing features. Her eyes were an intense, electrical blue, and didn’t so much meet as violently earth themselves in one’s own. It was something of a relief when she blinked.
‘It’s probably for the best,’ she pronounced lightly, in the same moderate, ambiguous tone; and then nodded, as if agreeing with herself. Her accent was softer than her mother’s and gave her voice a velvety, hypnotic quality. I suddenly felt in no hurry to leave. In her sleeping bag she began to hum to herself, winding a tress around her finger; then she stopped abruptly, as if something had occurred to her. ‘Do you want a drink? We seem to have acquired a large selection of wine all of a sudden.’
‘No,’ I said reluctantly, scuffing one shoe against the other. ‘Look – this isn’t entirely a social call. I came to tell you that the building’s about to explode.’
‘Plus ça change,’ she said, with a little smile.
‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You have to get out of here.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘I don’t know. Not long.’
She looked about the room as if seeing everything for the first time. ‘Such a shame,’ she said, with a kind of dispassionate regret. ‘Turn around, will you? I’ll have to put on some clothes.’
‘Certainly.’ I gallantly took myself o
ff to the far side of the room and, ignoring a curious tapping noise from behind, looked through Mrs P’s purloined treasure trove. A plastic miniature of the Eiffel Tower had found its way in there: a memento from a childhood trip to France, mostly spent in hotel rooms waiting for Father to return from interminable conferences. He and Mother had fought like cat and dog. I wondered who had kept it. ‘I must say, I admire your sang-froid…’ I called over my shoulder.
‘I guess a girl picks things up on the road,’ she returned. ‘It’s all right, you can look now.’ I turned in time to see a bare arm plunge itself into a burgundy sleeve. She re-emerged and gave me a Lauren Bacall wink. Her skirt was pale and narrow and reached nearly to the floor. ‘Well? Am I presentable?’
‘Eminently.’
‘What about…?’ She gestured generally, taking in the Folly and its contents.
I hesitated. There wasn’t much hope for my plan now. Even if I could still carry off the death-faking part, which was looking increasingly unlikely, there was little chance of getting the insurance to cough up for all these obliterated valuables. Any gains made from my death would therefore be totally cancelled out; I would be exiled to Chile for nothing. My next thought was that the best thing to do at this stage would be to abandon the plan and limit the damage by grabbing what I could of the valuables and bringing them outside to safety. But then I realized that anything I saved would only be put up for auction. None of this was mine any more. It wasn’t anybody’s: at least not anybody with a face and a name, who might have come up here with a martini and a half-bag of truffles of an evening to look out at the people walking their dogs on the strand. Perhaps it was something to do with this girl and the strange spell she cast, but it seemed to me suddenly that I would almost rather have our fortune blown up than see the bank sell it off to the highest bidder. If we were going to be destitute, we might as well do it in style. ‘Forget it,’ I shrugged. ‘We’ll always have Paris.’
She laughed, and took a step towards the hatch. Impulsively I took her arm. ‘This is absurd, I know,’ I said, ‘but in a few minutes this place’ll go up and after that I don’t know that I’ll ever see you again. So if you don’t mind – won’t you tell me why I feel we’ve met before?’