by Paul Murray
Now and then people found themselves in my corner by mistake – gaunt couturiers with shaven heads, or creepy sensuous-looking men with crushed-velvet suits and brilliantined hair, who smoked spicy cigarettes and who may, in retrospect, have been women. ‘Oh,’ they’d say, confronted by my ten-year-old stare, ‘hello’; then tugging at their ivory cigarette-holders or making anxious goldfish-mouths they’d hurry back the way they came.
But where were they going, I began to wonder, what were they making their way to? When, in short, was the thing going to start? It took a long time before it dawned on me that this walking around talking was the whole point of the evening. I was bitterly disappointed. Now when the jewel-strewn old ladies came over to pat my head I no longer bothered to give them my best cub-scout smile, because I knew that none of them was going to say, ‘Charles, now it is time for the trampoline, and we would like you to have the first bounce,’ or ‘Charles, we have set up this boring party to try and trap a spy, now we need someone inconspicuous, for example a small boy, to discover him, or her.’
And the things I overheard people talking about weren’t even interesting. The men went on about percentiles, or how so-and-so wouldn’t do, or about rugby games they had seen recently. The women meanwhile were all of a flutter about Yves St Laurent’s new concealer pen, a miraculous trompe l’oeil affair that reflected light away from wrinkles, or something. ‘Your father’s a genius,’ they told me. ‘How is Yves anyway?’ they asked Father.
‘Usual. Moping,’ Father said with a little sigh; and then from the French windows at the far end a voice cried, ‘The Beaujolais’s arrived!’ and everyone bubbled forwards, leaving Father and me standing there watching their backs.
‘Well?’ he said to me. ‘Learned your lesson?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I mean, pardon?’
‘You don’t look like you’re having much fun.’
‘Well,’ I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I tried to pick my words, ‘it doesn’t seem like a very good party.’
‘It doesn’t, does it?’
‘There’s no cake,’ I observed. ‘There’s no chairs, even. And no one brought presents.’
‘Better off in bed, if you ask me.’
‘Dad… what do they all want?’
Father laughed his big braying laugh that Mother was always complaining about. ‘That’s a good question, old chap. Very good question. What do they want?’ He took a swig of his wine. ‘What you have here, see, is a room full of very important people. And what very important people like more than anything else in the world is being made to feel important. So what they do is, they come to parties like this one where they can meet other important people and have important conversations about important things and they can all feel important together, see? Are they having fun? I don’t know. I don’t think they know any more, either. They get a bit like those peacocks out on the lawn, do you think they’re having fun?’
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled.
‘Course they aren’t, parading around, showing each other their feathers, what kind of fun is that?’ Father tilted his head back and drained his glass; then stood and frowned, collecting his thoughts. ‘See, the thing is, Charles, the thing is, old sport, that although they tell you in school – and it’s very important to pay attention in school, and apply yourself, and learn as much as you can, do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Dad. Except it’s the holidays now.’
‘Well of course, yes, good fellow… where was I? Oh yes – the thing is that the world isn’t like a swimming pool, you know, where everybody’s splashing around in the same water, you know, in their togs. It might look that way, but in fact – in fact,’ he brought up his finger for emphasis, the abruptness of the motion almost unbalancing him, ‘there’s another swimming pool, a tiny little one, and the people in it are the ones who make the…’ He blinked deliberately. ‘It’s like – what’s the name of that fellow in Flash Gordon, the baddie?’
‘Ming the Merciless?’
‘Yes, him. Well, take the folks in this room. They mightn’t look like much more than a bunch of old fogies, but if you add them together, they run the show just like Ming does in… whatever his place is called.’
‘Mongo.’
‘Right, Mongo. So as I say, although this might look like a party, where you might have a bit of fun, it’s actually more like work, because this is where all the people from the small swimming pool make their deals and decisions. So it’s very important that we’re nice to them, nice and polite, and we let them eat all our food. Second nature to a woman like your mother, of course. Grew up in a place like this, all the great and good, all splashing around…’
I had never heard Father speak this way before. It was a bit like when the babysitter lets you stay up and watch a horror film – too strange and scary to actually enjoy, but at the same time unquestionably a unique opportunity, so you stay quiet and don’t draw attention to yourself. His voice was loud and puffing, but his speech was somehow becoming dimmer now, and his face was starting to sag. ‘Splashing around… pluck ideas from a dreamland of Beaujolais and that revolting cheese and dump it on the unsuspecting… Wives at me for free cosmetics, should call the next line bloody Lazarus, ha ha…’
‘Dad?’ pulling on his hand.
He looked down, the white collar of his shirt too tight beneath his surprised red face.
‘How’s that brioche?’ he said.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, quickly chewing off a piece because I was discovering at that very moment that I wanted to cry.
‘Caterers ought to be shot.’ He laughed again, and his brow unfurrowed. ‘See the tennis today? That Lendl? He’s something, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, but Boris Becker’s going to beat him.’
‘Boris Becker, listen, my boy, the day a red-haired German – a red-haired German, that’s all wrong for a start – the day a red-haired German teenager wins Wimbledon, I will personally eat my hat. Germans can’t play grass-court. They’re too analytical. For grass you need an artist. Pancho Gonzales, ever see him play? Now there was a man. Beautiful to watch. That’s what it’s all about. Or take cricket. Who’s the greatest bowler of all time?’
‘I don’t know. Underwood?’
‘To the untrained eye, perhaps, but if you want a true craftsman you need to go right back to Rhodes. Took over four thousand wickets, he had this funny sort of a spin, he – well, I’ll show you, come on.’ Taking me by the hand, he led me out of the room and down the hall. ‘“The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told”, know who said that?’
‘Yeats?’
‘Goodlad.’ He was impressed. Opening the front door, ‘Bugger, it’s raining – well, we’ll just go out for a minute, you’re wearing shoes aren’t you?’
I followed him, disorientated, down the steps to the front lawn and stood shivering in a late-night drizzle while he ran about assembling a wicket from two wine bottles and a frisbee. Then he bounded back into the house to fetch the bat and ball. ‘Here’s the line, all right?’ He dug his heel into the grass and scraped out a muddy mark. ‘You bat first. Now here’s how they say old Rhodes used to do it –’
He hung his jacket on somebody’s wing mirror, and began a long, lolloping run. His shirtsleeve shuttled up his wrist as his arm came round in an arc and the ball flew from his hand; I shook the tiredness and the strangeness of it from my eyes and drew the bat protectively to my shins as the ball materialized before me –
‘Bravo!’ Father clapped, jogging up to me. ‘Not bad at all. Now you have a turn.’
I’d rescued the ball from the undergrowth and was just about to start my run-up when a silhouette appeared in the doorway and inquired as to what, exactly, we thought we were doing.
‘We’re having a very important philosophical debate,’ Father said, touching his bat off the ground. ‘We’re righting wrongs.’
‘Would it be too much to ask for you to do it inside?’ Mother said icily.
>
‘In a minute.’
Mother’s arm dropped from the lintel to fold tightly across her chest. ‘People are wondering where you are,’ she said, and then, ‘your guest will be getting lonely.’
‘Come on, Charles, let’s see what you have.’ He motioned me to deliver the ball; obediently I started to run.
‘We wouldn’t want her to start frowning, and jeopardize her lucrative career,’ Mother said from the doorway in a wicked singsong voice. ‘What would your insurance think of that?’
‘Christ!’ he turned and roared, his bow tie askew, ‘I said in a minute, didn’t I, can’t you see I’m with the bloody boy –’
Mother brought her right foot down on to the next step and screamed, ‘You can’t even get that right, can you? You don’t speak to him for weeks on end and then you keep him up half the night because you suddenly feel paternal –’ She flinched back as he hurled the bat in her direction. It clattered on to the gravel and slid under a car. Mother span on her heel and stamped back inside, slamming the door behind her. I retrieved the bat and waited. Father was standing under a tree, rubbing his temples.
‘Dad, do you want me to bowl?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Are you ready, or –?’
‘Tell you what, let’s call it a night, old chap. Your mother’s right, it’s time you were in bed.’ He sighed as he trudged over towards me. He patted my head and turned to look out over the bay. He jingled the keys in his pocket and cleared his throat, and after we had looked at the bay some more he said, ‘The thing is, Charles, that life is a lot like cricket. The wicket is… no, well, listen, anyway, it’s… life’s a nasty business, can be a nasty business…’ His breath nearly knocked me down. ‘What I want is for you and your sister, for you and Christabel… I don’t want you to have to claw through the, the shit, do you understand?’
He never swore in front of us; my heart pounded with alarm. ‘Yes, Dad.’
‘“Unshapely things”, remember that. World’s full of unshapely things. Some of ’em’ll look shapely enough, though. Some’ll be quite alluring. So you can’t listen to anybody. And what you’ve got to do, is… what you’ve got to do…’ He stopped, seeming to lose his thread; turned away from me and shambled back towards the house, pulling at his jaw, lost in his own thoughts. So I never found out what it was I had to do; I could only take my best guess. And closing the door of the recital room gently behind me twenty-odd years later, I had to admit to myself that it was quite conceivable I had got it wrong.
One of Bel’s actor-friends had taken the piano and was tinkling out a melancholy ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ as, with my suitcase in my hand, I proceeded down the hall. Voices fell in for the parts they knew: ‘There’s a land that I dreamed of…’ I walked by the glass frieze of Actaeon down to the door and surveyed my lost kingdom through a fine, sifting rain: the forlorn trees the birds had deserted, the twisted iron lattice where the Folly had been.
Would the Twister that had seized our lives never set us down in Kansas again, in good old black and white? Or couldn’t you ever go back? Was that only for fairy tales, was the real world everybody got so excitable about precisely this gaudy Techni-colour, this relentless, senseless propulsion?
‘Birds fly over the rainbow,’ the voices filtered out from inside, ‘why then, oh why can’t I?’
Numbly I descended from the porch. I passed Frank’s van there among the Saabs and Jaguars, and wondered briefly if I’d ever see him again. Then, retrieving a squashed canapé from my pocket, I took the first dark, rain-laden steps of my life away from Amaurot.
7
‘This really is awfully good of you.’
‘No bother, Charlie, no bother.’
‘I mean, it’ll only be for a week or so, until I get myself sorted out…’
‘This is us here, Charlie.’
‘Aha, yes.’ We stopped outside a plain white wooden door. I hummed nervously to myself as Frank rummaged for the key.
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Age before beauty.’
‘Ha ha, thank you,’ edging into the gloom. ‘Oh. Well. Isn’t this…?’
‘It’s a bit of a mess. I didn’t get much chance to tidy up.’
‘Not at all, not at all, it’s quite – oh dear, I seem to have stepped in someone’s, ah, someone’s dinner…’
‘Don’t worry about it, Charlie, I wasn’t goin to eat any more of it.’
‘Oh good, good. More of an atelier, really, isn’t it? I say, is it always this dim?’
‘Hang on, I’ll turn on the box.’ He pushed past me and pressed a button on an ancient television that squatted in a corner. After a moment two women in bikinis appeared, taking swipes at each other with large foam clubs. ‘Don’t worry, your eyes get used to it after a while.’
‘Yes, yes, of course…’
‘Fancy a cup of tea?’
‘Thanks.’ I lowered myself gingerly on to the edge of an armchair. Its guts spilled out of a rent in its side. I sat with my legs pressed tight together and tried not to touch anything. The floor was conspicuously sticky and when you looked at it out of the corner of your eye appeared to be moving.
‘How do you like it?’ Frank’s voice called from somewhere within a teetering wilderness of junk.
‘Just milk, please,’ I replied faintly. There was an overpowering smell in the air, a kind of vastly amplified version of the one that followed Frank around. A magazine entitled Tit Parade rested on the coffee table, the young lady on the cover entirely naked save for some carefully positioned citrus fruits. ‘Grocer Greta’s Grabulous Melons’, it said.
Frank re-emerged with a couple of mugs. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing one to me and depositing himself upon a dysmorphic sofa opposite. ‘So,’ holding his arms outstretched, like Kubla Khan welcoming Marco Polo to Xanadu, ‘what do you think?’
‘Nice,’ I croaked. ‘Very nice.’
‘Home sweet home,’ he said fondly, and slurped his tea.
‘Although…’ I began.
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, I have to say,’ I said, in a careless, jokey sort of way to show there were no hard feelings, ‘I don’t think much of your doorman.’
‘Doorman?’ Frank repeated.
‘Yes, the doorman,’ I said, trying to maintain my smile. ‘You know, he was really quite slovenly.’
‘That wasn’t a doorman, Charlie, he’s homeless.’
‘Homeless?’
‘Yeah, he lives in that cardboard box on the steps.’
‘Oh,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I wondered why he wasn’t wearing a cap.’
There was a pause. ‘Doorman,’ Frank chuckled to himself.
Light struggled in through the ungenerous window, weak grey light that was more like the residue of light. I looked down thoughtfully into my tea, which had bits in it. After a time I said judiciously, ‘I imagine that’s why it’s taking him so long to bring up my cases.’
Frank put his cup down, wincing. ‘Ah, Charlie…’
‘You don’t suppose,’ I ventured, ‘he might have forgotten which room –’
But Frank had already leapt from his seat and was hurtling back down the stairs. I got up and hurried after him, catching up outside the front door, where he stood studying the cardboard box and blanket until a short while ago occupied by the homeless person/doorman. ‘Fuck,’ he said, stroking his chin.
‘He’s gone,’ I said superfluously. The street was empty save for two moon-faced children watching us from the kerb opposite. One was standing in a supermarket trolley, the other gripped the handle; both were entirely motionless.
‘Come on,’ Frank poked me in the ribs and took off down the street. We reached a crossroads dominated by two huge breezeblocks of flats, where we took a left past a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and burned-out cars and came to a long concrete bunker with metal shutters. I padded after Frank to the door, where he stopped.
‘What? Is he in here?’
‘Charlie,’ he
said gravely. ‘You must never, ever, ever go in here, all right?’
‘Fine,’ I squeaked. He went inside, and I waited there, whistling tunelessly with my hands in my pockets, attempting to blend in with my surroundings. It was hard to tell which buildings had people in them. The shop windows were covered with heavy grilles. In some of the blocks clothes were hanging out on balcony washing-lines, but the doors were boarded up and covered in graffiti. Others seemed in such a state of disrepair as to be uninhabitable by man or beast – and then one would hear a radio from an upper level, or a child would pop its head out to spit down on to the pavement.
After what seemed a long time, Frank re-emerged. In his hand he held a single suitcase, which he said the patrons of the pub had kindly agreed to sell back to him for only a small profit after he’d told them how I’d mistaken a homeless drug addict for a doorman.
‘Oh,’ I said, and to hide my despair: ‘That place is a pub?’
It was called the Coachman; there had been a sign, but someone had stolen it. ‘You prob’ly seen it on telly,’ Frank said, as we trudged back up the hill. ‘It’s on the news a good bit.’
‘Did anyone say anything about the rest of my things?’ I asked sadly, shaking the lighter-than-it-had-been suitcase.
‘No.’
‘I wonder where they are.’
‘Dunno,’ Frank said equably. ‘Gone.’
It started to rain again.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point contacting the authorities…’
‘They don’t really come out here any more, Charlie.’
‘Oh.’ The water was soaking into my bandages, making my head feel tight and cold.
‘Well,’ I reflected – I was trying to keep a stiff upper lip about this as long as he was watching – ‘I daresay that homeless chap needs the money a lot more than I do.’
‘I’d say he’s just goin to buy smack with it.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘He’s not a bad bloke, like, once you don’t ask him to mind stuff for you.’