by Paul Murray
‘Right.’ We turned back down his street. The moon-faced children were standing where we had left them. Frank unlocked the door and I looked ruefully down at the box and grubby blanket. On the door-jamb someone had written, in small defiant black letters, ARM THE HOMELESS.
‘Home sweet home,’ Frank said, and went inside.
Something struck me on the back of the head. I turned to see a small grey pebble at my feet. The moon-faced children grinned at me mockingly from their trolley. I followed Frank inside.
And so it was that I arrived at Apt C, Sands Villas, Bonetown.
My first port of call after walking out of Amaurot that night had been the Radisson in Mount Merrion, where I had taken a suite. The hotel boasted a sauna and a pool and did an excellent Dover sole, all of which went some way to comforting me in those traumatic first days away from home. I found out that an old pal of mine, Boyd Snooks, happened to have a room going in his house as of next week; I called him up, and he promised to reserve it for me. Boyd was a jovial, freewheeling sort of fellow, who in school had been famous for his ability to turn his eyelids inside out; and now, although I was under a cloud rather about leaving Amaurot, he persuaded me there were high times to be had chez lui. The lower floor of his house was shared by three young air hostesses, also jovial and freewheeling and, according to Boyd, partial, moreover, to the odd game of strip poker in their free time.
‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘It’s just that I hate leaving Bel…’
‘Air hostesses, Charles,’ he said huskily. ‘SAS. Know what that is? It’s the Swedish national airline. They’re Swedish, Charles. And they’re all terrible poker players, they get drunk and forget the rules…’
In short, everything had seemed to be going terribly well, and I even began to wonder if I had been mistaken about the rigours of life in the real world. That said, I still spent the best part of my stay sitting in my room in case Mother should call wanting to apologize and begging me, her only son, to forget all that nonsense about getting a job and come back home. But she didn’t, and by the end of the week I was looking forward to the move just so I could be shed of the hotel. Pool and Dover sole notwithstanding, it was deathly dull there; also I was getting rather concerned about the inroads it must be making on my finances. I hadn’t bothered to ask how much the suite cost when I checked in, but I suspected it was a lot, especially for a man with a discontinued allowance. I hadn’t seen my bank balance in quite a while, but every time I thought about it I got a queer, cold feeling, as if someone had walked over my grave.
I ought to mention as well that there had been a minor unpleasantness with some of the other guests after I frightened a small girl one evening in the bar, and I was beginning to feel my presence was no longer quite so welcome. It had all been perfectly innocent – I’d had a drink or two and, momentarily forgetting my hideous disfigurement, thought it might be funny to surprise her by popping out from behind a pillar. But she hadn’t seen the funny side, in fact the hotel doctor had had to give her a sedative, and then on top of everything she turned out to belong to Americans, who are always so dreary when it comes to a chap frightening their children. The long and the short of it was that they’d complained to the concierge, and he’d decided I was a Bad Element and wanted me out ASAP. I got this from the chambermaid, after I cornered her one morning to find out why she’d stopped leaving those little complimentary mints on my pillow.
The upshot of all this was that by eight o’clock the evening before I was due to depart, I had my suitcases, which Mrs P had sent over from Amaurot, packed, and Frank enlisted to pick me up in his van next day at ten and help me with the move. I was lying on the bed drinking a miniature bottle of crème de menthe when the telephone rang. ‘Mr Snooks for you,’ the receptionist said.
There was a problem with the room. ‘The chap leaving’s come down with a cold,’ Boyd said. ‘He’s had to postpone his move.’
‘Oh damnation,’ I said.
‘Beastly thing,’ he said adenoidally. ‘We’ve all got it. Still, he should be better and buggered off in a week or two. Hope it doesn’t put you out too much.’
‘I suppose it can’’t be helped,’ I said; and as he didn’t sound too well himself, I told him not to worry and that I would make other arrangements.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Boyd said, stifling a sneeze. ‘Think of the air hostesses.’
I set down the receiver and bit my lip. The denuded minibar gazed at me accusatorily from the other side of the room. This was a blow, all right. I went and retrieved my address book, and spent the next half-hour calling up acquaintances to see if they could help me out. I had no success. Those that hadn’t, like Pongo, decamped to London, were living in Dublin in mortal terror of their landlords – tyrannical, Victorian fiends who wouldn’t let them so much as hang a picture-frame, let alone entertain house guests. ‘Sorry, Charles,’ they’d mutter down the line, then, urgently, ‘I have to go.’
Finally it appeared there was no alternative but to swallow my pride and call home. Mother answered the phone, needless to say. ‘Charles, how sweet of you to call, I was just saying this very second to Mrs P how must you be doing. You know I still can’t quite believe you’ve flown the nest, we all miss you terribly –’
‘Really?’ I said. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so humiliating after all. ‘Because actually…’ and I explained about Boyd and my predicament.
There was an uneasy silence when I had finished. When she spoke again Mother’s voice had taken on the quasi-tragic, overcompensatory tone she used when someone had thoughtlessly left her in a difficult position. ‘Oh dear… that is a pickle,’ she said. ‘But don’t you know we’re rather swamped at the moment, darling. You know the play starts in town tonight and then… well, we thought that seeing as you’re not here –’
‘You haven’t put the Disadvantaged in my room, I hope,’ I cut in abrasively. ‘I don’t want my bed infested with nits and what have you.’
‘Why, no, not the Disadvantaged,’ she said silkily. ‘We thought we’d give your room to Harry, actually.’
She waited a moment, and then when I hadn’t said anything added brightly, ‘There’s the couch, of course, you can always sleep there, if you’re stuck… Or perhaps one of your friends has a spare bed?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said through clenched teeth, as if it had just occurred to me. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll ring around.’
‘Do call, darling, if you’re still stuck.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘This is your time, Charles. You’ve spread your wings, and now you must fly high, you know we’re all terribly proud –’
I put the phone down. Harry! I felt my blood bubble with rage. That jackanapes, with his Trojan horses and his offbeat hairstyle, he was the golden boy now, was he? I picked the phone up again, and dialled reception to tell them I wanted to extend my stay.
‘Certainly, sir,’ the girl said. ‘Room number, please.’
I gave her my room number. She put me on hold.
‘Mr Hythloday?’ she said, returning.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re booked up.’
‘Just a single? For one night even?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
The concierge had got there first! I was beginning to get the unpleasant sense of being caught up in some sort of mechanism over which I had no control: as if, in leaving Amaurot, I had submitted myself entirely to the whims of Fate, and I could do nothing but follow on docilely until it had brought me where it wanted. I took the last Baileys from the refrigerator under the mirror, poured it into a plastic glass and went to the window. The Radisson had a couple of acres of park around it; the land had used to belong to a convent. Perhaps this was where the nuns would play rounders and tip-the-can on sunny days.
There was nothing for it: I would have to find another hotel, preferably a cheap one. I still had a couple of credit cards left I could use. I returned to the locker side of the bed, pi
cked up the phone again and dialled Frank’s number to tell him the move was off.
‘What’s the story?’ Frank said. His mouth was full of something.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said irritably. ‘The point is I’ll have to stay somewhere else for a few weeks first.’
‘Must be costin you,’ the voice said. ‘I’d say them places set you back a good bit.’
‘I’ll survive,’ I replied curtly.
‘Yeah, but,’ he continued, then paused to swallow his – chicken balls, suddenly I found I knew it with the unshakeable certainty of an epiphany – ‘but here, why don’t you just kip in my gaff for a while?’
I was caught off guard. ‘What?’ I stammered. ‘What?’
He repeated his offer. I cast about for an excuse not to take it; but after all the twists and turns the evening had taken I found I was unable to think straight. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ I said feebly.
‘I don’t give a monkey’s,’ he assured me.
In the distance I seemed to hear singing, as of ghostly nuns. ‘Well, that’s very kind,’ I tried to sound grateful, ‘that’s really very kind.’
‘Nice one,’ Frank said.
And so the next morning I left my room and took my suitcases down in the elevator to the lobby, where I handed in the key. Every movement, every tiny social transaction seemed backlit, consecrated somehow, like the footsteps a prisoner counts off in his head as he is marched to the scaffold. Frank was waiting outside, leaning with his arms crossed against his rusty white van. Someone had drawn a penis in the dust on its side. ‘All right?’ he said.
‘Capital,’ I said. ‘Capital.’
Frank’s apartment was part of a tall redbrick building – Georgian, by the looks of the fanlight over the door – that must once have been a respectable, even a dignified townhouse. Here and there were traces of a more illlustrious past: delicate flourishes to the mouldings, fragments of the original plasterwork. But they were no more than traces, like shards of pottery in the dirt. The façade had been blackened and corroded by decades of grime, and most of the original fixtures torn out in the course of splitting the interior into ever-shrinking tenements. The present landlord was a former Garda who owned several properties in the area and was, Frank said, ‘a gobshite even for a Garda’.
Apt C was composed almost entirely of corners, as if whoever built the house had cobbled together an extra room from the nooks and recesses that were left over at the end. The rooms wobbled in a way that one was not accustomed to in architecture, and certain walls could not be leaned on because they were, I quote, ‘holding the ceiling up’. Even the daylight seemed to have trouble negotiating the flat’s eccentricities: it came through the window and then stopped short, with its finger on its lip, so to speak. Consequently it was always rather dark – or dank, perhaps dank was a better word. It was easily the dankest apartment I had ever stayed in.
I slept on a mattress of uncertain lineage in a room about the size of one of the smaller broom closets at Amaurot, with those possessions that the patrons of the Coachman had been kind enough not to steal – improving book, shaving kit, second-best dinner jacket, socks, Gene Tierney memorabilia, journal of thoughts largely as yet unthought – arranged in a little heap beside me. The bulk of the apartment was taken up by Frank’s junk. Every day he’d come home with more, carrying it in from his van in crates and dumping it where he could. Cigarette cases, ballet slippers, window sashes, hymnals, cornerstones, cash registers, rocking horses, picture rails, things with parts missing, parts separated from their things – everywhere you looked you were confronted with uprooted elements of other people’s lives.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said, examining a stringless Dunlop tennis racket that had just arrived. ‘How do you tell what’s valuable, and what’s, you know, garbage?’
He thought for a moment. ‘The stuff people won’t buy is garbage,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
Most of the stuff they bought: evidently it was a good time to be in architectural salvage. Half the city was being demolished and built over; things could be picked up for a song, and then sold on at a premium to all the people with new pubs and new hotels and new houses who wanted to give their property a touch of authenticity. ‘All this old shit,’ Frank waved his hand over the latest plunder spread over the floor, ‘like horseshoes, signposts, firemen’s helmets and that – pubs go mad for it. They’re gag-gin for old gear to put on the walls to make it look more old-lookin, like. Same with the new flats. People don’t like things just bein new. They want to be reminded of bygone days and that.’
‘Why don’t they just stop knocking down the old buildings, then?’ I said. ‘If everyone’s so wild about bygone days.’
‘Cos then we’d all be out of a job.’
Piled up like that, in no particular order, the junk seemed to take on a kind of generic identity – a musty, melancholy pastness that filled the room like an old perfume. During the day, when Frank was out, it made me feel a little like a relic myself. I had nothing to do, other than fidget with the tassels of my dressing gown – which may not sound unusual in itself, but this was a different kind of nothing than before, a fluttery, restive, unsatisfying nothing. I rarely went outside, other than brief forays to the petrol station, where one could buy the essentials at trumped-up prices; most of my time was passed at the window, gazing down at the grim slums below.
The streets of Bonetown were grey and dismal, without trees or decoration, and the greyness, the dismalness had etched themselves into the faces of the inhabitants. I discerned two distinct strata to Bonetown society. Firstly, the natives. These, to speak plainly, were as villainous a bunch of ruffians as one would find anywhere in the world. They were uncouth and badly dressed, and they spent their days lurching from the pub to the bookies to the petrol station, toting seemingly infinite numbers of children – many of whom, I noticed, bore a strong physical resemblance to Frank. I mentioned this to him, but he only smacked his lips and made some arcane remark about how looking like someone didn’t actually prove anything in a court-type situation.
The second grouping, which had little interaction with the first, was the foreigners. These came in all shapes and sizes, and, the way Frank told it at least, had appeared more or less overnight; though no one seemed to know where from, or how exactly they had ended up here. ‘Maybe they came out of that hoo-ha in Bosnia,’ I surmised. ‘Like Mrs P and her lot.’
‘That one or another one,’ Frank said with a shrug. ‘Never any shortage of wars.’
None of them seemed to be employed, and it struck me that this situation could work to our advantage in terms of getting someone in to do the cleaning at relatively little expense. Frank, however, put the kibosh on this straight away. ‘Me ma was a cleanin lady, Charlie,’ he said. ‘It’d be weird, like.’
At night the estate was taken over by the local Youth, and everybody who didn’t have an interest in marauding or terrorizing the elderly was expected to go indoors or suffer the consequences. The Youth amused themselves in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’d set fire to things, or spray-paint swastikas on the doors of asylum-seekers; occasionally someone would arrive in a stolen car, providing a few hours of merriment as they raced it up and down. Mostly, however, they simply stood in bristling gangs on street corners, selling each other heroin. The buildings rang out with cries; inevitably a baby would start wailing, and through the wall I would hear the neighbours argue. A couple of times gunshots echoed from the direction of the Coachman: Frank told me how men from the flats would go down with shotguns and balaclavas to rob it, and then return the next day to buy drinks with the takings.
Sometimes, as I languished at the windows, I would see a pair of eyes peeping back at me from the tower block opposite, and I would think of Mirela waving angel-like at me from the Folly; and then I would see the moon-faced children with their supermarket trolley, always the one pushing and the other standing up looking over the side, little fingers wrap
ped around the metal rim – rumbling by like dusty pilgrims who had forgotten their purpose and their destination and now made only endless circles around these same dead-end streets.
It hardly needs to be said that I was far from comfortable cohabiting with Frank. In the early days especially, I felt much as Jack must have, living at the top of the Beanstalk with that Englishman-eating giant. One effect of the Hobbesian nightmare around me, however, was to make Frank, by comparison, seem that bit less frightening; and I had so many other things to brood over that before long I had almost grown accustomed to his small acts of kindness, his microwaved dinners, his bad jokes –
‘Here, Charlie, d’you hear about the midget that walked into the ladies’ jacks?’
‘Can’t say I have, old man…’
‘Yeah, he got a box in the face!’
‘Ha ha, yes, very good, well, better turn in, I suppose –’
‘It’s only eight o’clock, Charlie.’
‘Yes, busy day tomorrow, though,’ hauling myself up from the couch.
‘Busy?’
‘Well, not really busy, I mean thought I might watch a film or two… I say, old chap, that reminds me – lend me another fifty pounds, would you? We have to get some decent wine in. I can’t drink any more of that wretched petrol-station Riesling, it’s giving me an ulcer.’
‘Eh, yeah, Charlie, no problem,’ and he’d peel the notes from the fat wad in his pocket.
‘Thanks. Well, good night then.’
‘Night, Charlie.’
Most evenings he went out drinking with his mates, regaling me next day with the stories of their exploits – how such-and-such a fellow ‘Ste’ had bought ‘whizz’ from such-and-such a fellow ‘Mick the Bollocks’, except when he inhaled it it turned out it wasn’t ‘whizz’, it was stuff for killing ants, and Ste had gone berserk and started eating plates and trying to pull out his eyeballs. ‘You should come out with us some night, Charlie,’ he’d say from time to time. ‘They’re great crack, the lads are.’