by Paul Murray
‘That’s all right,’ I’d say, as the stories alone were enough to make me feel quite unwell.
I suppose I was too caught up in my brooding ever to ask myself what Frank might have hoped to gain from having me stay. I didn’t know how things stood between him and Bel. Whatever had happened, her name was never spoken in the apartment; but sometimes I would catch him looking at me in a peculiar, wishful sort of a way, for all the world as if he expected me to pull her out of a hat; and I would wonder shudderingly if he planned to use me to take revenge on her, or keep me as some manner of Love Hostage.
By and large, though, he came and went without disturbing me; I could sit and watch television uninterrupted. Having been abandoned by the world, I’d decided that now was the perfect time to complete my Gene Tierney project, or, if one wanted to split hairs, to begin my Gene Tierney project. Every afternoon after breakfast, when Frank was at work, I would close the curtains (a formality, given the permanent darkness of the room), sit in the armchair with a notepad and a glass of the gruesome Riesling and watch a film, beginning at the very start with The Return of Frank James – a diabolical performance for which the Harvard Lampoon named Tierney Worst Female Discovery of 1940 and more than one critic compared her unfavourably to Minnie Mouse. To me in my woebegone state, however, her films were like dispatches from some kinder upper realm – flashes of a faraway lighthouse to a becalmed and fog-bound ship. I needed them; I watched compulsively, and soon I had got all the way to The Razor’s Edge (1946).
This was one of my favourites. The hero, played by Tyrone Power, is a pilot who has returned from World War One totally disaffected by the horrors he has seen there and unwilling to take any part in the postwar boom, even though Gene, his fiancée, refuses to marry him unless he gets a job. The movie opens at a fabulous country-club ball under the stars, where in a little moonlit arbour she takes him aside and tries to convince him of the merits of the soaring economy. She tells him America will soon be so rich that it will dwarf anything in history; she tells him that it’s a unique opportunity for a young man like him and he ought to leap at the chance to be a part of it. But Tyrone Power, gazing lugubriously into the middle distance, tells her that it is, in his eyes, utterly meaningless. He then informs her that he is removing to Paris, to be a bum.
She follows him to France, and there’s a famous scene later on when she brings him back to her apartment and, in a remarkable black dress that resembles the tenebrous sheath of a dagger, makes one last effort to seduce him into the mercantile world. The dress was designed by Oleg Cassini, the brilliant Russian exile whom Tierney had married in 1941, and in it she proves too much for even the saintly former pilot to resist, at least for the duration of a kiss.
I confess to feeling a certain affinity with Tyrone Power in this movie, in terms of our defiant stands against the emptiness of modern society; and I might have considered following his lead and relocating my stand from Bonetown to the more sympathetic environs of Paris, had I thought there was even the slightest chance of a beautiful woman in a black or any other colour dress pursuing me there. As time went by, however, it became increasingly clear that this would not be the case.
Since I had come here no one from Amaurot had so much as called me, not even Mirela, in spite of our promising conversation in the ballroom that time. Burnin Up had opened in a small theatre behind Tara Street station the same night I’d been excluded from the Radisson. There was a short review of it in the newspaper I’d lifted from the hotel lobby, not wildly enthusiastic, but certainly approving of what it called the ‘unflinching debut’ of the Amaurot Players. It might have been on another planet for all I heard from them. So much for Mirela’s gratitude, I thought miserably; now I was no longer lord of the manor – now that I was homeless, just as she had been! – it seemed that everything was forgotten.
As for Bel, I was quite sure she had thrown herself into her belle époque, no pun intended, without so much as a thought for the purgatory to which her bleeding heart had inadvertently condemned me: though that didn’t mean I didn’t think about her, didn’t wonder at any given moment what she might be doing as I sat counting dust motes in the eviscerated armchair; it didn’t mean I wasn’t dreaming every night of home, the squeaking trolley wheels outside my window becoming Old Man Thompson’s rusty weathervane, the susurration of faraway traffic the sound of waves on Killiney beach, the fraught cheerless urban night becoming a July evening where Bel and I threw a party on the lawn, with Manhattans and lobster bisque laid out under an advancing sunset that stretched flamingo-pink across the whole sky; until ‘Come on,’ she’d whisper, and we’d steal away hand in hand, through the trees, to that spot on the clifftop where Father had looked out and recited his poems; where the sky had turned that eternal-seeming blue of twilight and we watched the sea fetched up and dashed again by a teasing moon, and the lights on the far-off shore like tiny blazing shipwrecks…
And then one night I was roused from my sleep by a calamitous thumping. The noise reverberated through ceiling, walls and floor alike: the whole apartment was juddering unmercifully as if we were having a minor, very localized earthquake.
My first thought was that someone was trying to demolish the building. This had happened before, Frank had told me: apparently when the developers couldn’t shift someone from a house they wanted to knock down, they would arrive in the middle of the night and accidentally-on-purpose drive a lorry into it. I rubbed my eyes and put on my dressing gown, intending to go out and tell them that they had the wrong house. But as I stepped into the living room I realized that the noise was coming from right here. An enormous stereo-machine had materialized atop the television; and beside it, wagging its head in time to the noise, was what appeared to be a large, shiny ferret that had learned to walk on two legs. Or that was the impression I got in the split-second before the ferret launched itself at me; then, to my infinite surprise, I found myself on the floor being throttled.
This fellow had obviously throttled before; he cleverly defused my resistance by banging my head on the ground as he was strangling me. After a minute he was clearly getting the best of it and it’s fair to say that had I not managed to cry out before he got a good grip on my windpipe things might have come to a sticky end then and there. But just as I was about to black out, a hand appeared at his shoulder and pulled him away, and the din stopped abruptly. After I’d rolled around coughing for a while, I was recovered enough to drag myself halfway up the armchair – and see Frank, not beating my assailant to a bloody pulp but shaking his hand and clapping him on the back!
‘All right, Droyd!’ he was saying. ‘How’s your fanny?’
‘Not three bad, Frankie,’ the ferret thing chuckled, ‘not three bad.’ He was small and wore a sort of two-piece tracksuit with a satin finish, the same kind the actors had worn in Burnin Up. Around his neck there was a heavy gold chain, and on his hands clunky gold rings as well as clumsy tattoos in blue ink that looked like he had done them himself.
‘Would someone mind explaining to me what is going on?’ I rasped. ‘Who is this fellow? What the devil does he think he’s doing, coming in here unannounced in the middle of the night?’
‘This is Droyd, Charlie,’ Frank said, then turned to him. ‘What are you doin here?’
‘I just got out,’ the ferret said.
‘Out of where?’ I pursued.
‘Out of prison. Frankie, who’s this shirtlifter anyway?’
‘That’s Charlie. Are you all right, Charlie?’
I waved an arm stoically from my position on the floor, on to which I had collapsed again to hyperventilate.
‘You shouldn’t’ve strangled him like that, he’s a bit sensitive like.’
‘Wasn’t my fuckin fault,’ the other voice returned somewhere over my head, ‘I wasn’t expectin some fuckin Egyptian mummy burstin in like that.’
‘Ha!’ I rejoined hoarsely. ‘That’s funny, because, you know, I wasn’t expecting some total stranger to break into my ho
me and wake me up at an ungodly hour –’
‘It’s not ungodly, Charlie, I haven’t even had me dinner yet.’
‘That’s funny, neither have I,’ I heard the ferrety chap say, whereupon Frank of course invited him to dine with us. I tried to sneak away, back to my room, but Frank grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Come and have a bite to eat with us. Soon we’ll all be the best of friends.’ And so, only half an hour after being dragged from my bed and beaten, I found myself sitting at the table with the two of them, listening to Frank inquire of the interloper how he’d enjoyed his time ‘away’ – as if he’d been off taking the waters at Carlsbad! – and numbly wondering how I had managed to bring my life to this terrible pass.
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Droyd was saying. ‘It was like anythin, there were good days and bad days. And you’d meet some right characters in there. Like you know that bit in Lethal Weapon where Riggs is in the straitjacket and he like fuckin pops out his shoulder so he can escape?’
‘That bit’s fuckin disgustin,’ Frank recalled pleasurably.
‘Well, I had a mate in the Joy could do that. Well, he could pop it out but he couldn’t pop it back in. Actually it wasn’t him what popped it out so much as this other bloke done it to him called Johnny No-Fingers. Now he was a real character…’
It seemed that Droyd had been imprisoned for his activities as henchman to a local drug peddler called Cousin Benny. This Cousin Benny lived in a tower block over to the west, and he wasn’t anyone’s actual cousin: I would hear his name again during my sojourn in Bonetown, always accompanied by a lowering of the voice and a furtive glance over the shoulder. Even Frank appeared somewhat daunted by him.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘How’d’you get mixed up with that scumbag?’
‘I was on the gear,’ Droyd said matter-of-factly. ‘You know how it is. You never have enough money. I started off just robbin old ladies. But soon that wasn’t enough, so I started robbin cars. But then that wasn’t enough either. So I started workin for Benny. It makes sense if you think about it. He used to give me an employee discount.’ He chewed and swallowed and laid down his fork. ‘Ah yeah, it’s all a laugh in the beginnin,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But it’s a mug’s game, a mug’s game. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. I’m a changed man, yes sir.’
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and cracked his knuckles, the subterranean light of the television playing over his bony face; for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, and I was about to ask whether he’d taken heroin to replace the self-worth that society hadn’t given him when, turning his attention to the plate in front of him, he said, ‘Here, d’you ever notice how pasta when it’s wet sounds just like when you’re givin a bird the finger?’
‘What?’ Frank said.
‘Listen.’ Droyd had taken his fork and was prodding the pasta with it to produce a series of slaps and slurps and squelches. ‘See? It sounds exactly like when you’ve got your fingers up a bird’s growler.’
I set down my plate and inhaled deeply. ‘I say,’ I appealed.
‘You’re right,’ Frank said. ‘That’s fuckin amazin.’
‘Look, stop that, will you?’
But now Frank had joined in with his pasta, and the air was filled with lubricious noises. ‘Give it a go, Charlie. It’s fuckin amazin.’
I could bear no more. Holding my handkerchief to my mouth, I staggered away from the table, grabbing the telephone when they weren’t looking and bringing it into my room. There, kneeling in the darkness, I brushed a tear from my eye and dialled Boyd’s number. The phone seemed to ring for a long time before it was answered; and then all there was at the other end was a sort of a low croaking noise.
‘Boyd?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’
‘Charles…’ the pitiful croak responded.
He was unrecognizable – indeed, he barely sounded human. A chill wave of dread surged up through me. ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said. ‘Is it that awful cold?’
‘Not a cold,’ he whispered.
‘It’s not? Well what on earth is it?’
‘Lassa fever,’ he said dolefully.
‘Lassa fever?’
‘Looks like it,’ he said, breaking off for an extended fit of coughing.
‘But that’s absurd,’ I said querulously, picking up the phone and carrying it across the room. ‘How could it be? Where would you possibly get Lassa fever?’
‘Air hostesses,’ he said bitterly.
‘Oh,’ feeling my knees give way and lowering myself on to the mattress. ‘Oh, hell.’
One of them had brought it back from Africa, and now the whole house had come down with it; they were all in quarantine, Boyd said. ‘There’s a policeman at the door, even,’ he said glumly. ‘In case we try to break out and rub ourselves up against the local shopkeepers. No one’s allowed in except doctors.’
I slumped back against the wall. I was getting that hideous sensation of inevitability I’d had before in the hotel: as if I was not master of my own destiny, as if someone or something were out to teach me a lesson. Bawdy laughter rang out from the kitchen.
‘Sorry, old man,’ Boyd mumbled.
I rubbed my jaw bluely. There was nothing to be done, and Boyd sounded like he was getting worse by the minute; I told him to go to bed before he keeled over.
‘Yes,’ the voice slurred at the other end of the line. ‘Better do that. The rhinoceros’ll be coming in soon, y’know.’
‘That’s right, so go to bed.’
‘’S a damn… a damn pest, Charles… keeps waking me up… wanting to play strip poker…’
‘Yes, yes. Look, be a good fellow and –’
‘I tell it, how c’n you play strip poker? M’n t’say, y’re a bloody rh’nos’rus, so (a) in the first instance you’ve no hands, and (b) you’ve no… bloody… clothes, thing’s a foregone, a foregone c’nclusion…’
Droyd did not go home that night, nor the next morning, and for most of the following afternoon I was subjected to what he referred to, seemingly without irony, as his ‘music’. Sometimes it sounded like a huge metal something – a tank, maybe, or an enormous set of cutlery – falling down an infinite staircase; sometimes it sounded like a hundred thousand Nazis, goose-stepping through the Place de la République; the general idea seemed to be to capture the sound of civilization collapsing, so loudly that while it was on one could do little more than lie on one’s mattress and vibrate.
Obviously one didn’t want to be inhospitable, but the next day when he was still there I began to feel that our good nature was being taken advantage of. During an especially loud passage in his racket-making, I took Frank to one side in the kitchen for a quick word.
‘What’s that, Charlie?’ he shouted, taking a can of beer from the fridge.
‘I said, obviously one doesn’t want to be inhospitable,’ I bellowed back with my fingers in my ears, ‘but I mean, isn’t he planning to go home at some stage?’
‘Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘I don’t want to ask –’ I broke off. This was hopeless. With every thump the mugs on the draining board danced a little closer to the edge, a tendency with which I could thoroughly identify.
‘Y’see, the thing about Droyd is – here, want a can?’
‘No,’ I said, but he didn’t hear and handed me an opened can of Hobson’s Choice, the cheapest beer on offer at the petrol station.
‘The thing about Droyd is he doesn’t really have a home. So he’s prob’ly better off stayin here for a bit, till he sorts himself out. I mean we don’t want him goin back to that fuckin Cousin Benny, like.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no, ideally we –’
‘Anyway, there’s plenty of room for the three of us. And it’s nice to have a bit of music, it sort of cheers the place up a bit, doesn’t it?’
I was about to make a sarcastic reply, but realized at that moment that the music had dislodged a filling, so instead I returned to my roo
m and cocooned myself as best I could in my threadbare duvet.
In a way, I suppose I am indebted to Droyd. Left to my own devices, I might have drifted along for ever in my post-Amaurot fugue. Thanks to him, the situation became untenable almost immediately.
The simple fact of it was that sharing a room with him was totally unbearable. He made Frank look like Noel Coward. He thoroughly spoiled the Test Match I was trying to watch by shouting ‘Howzat!’ at inappropriate times, even after I’d explained at length to him precisely what the term meant. He insisted on referring to the Pakistani team as ‘the wogs’ and to England as ‘the shirtlifters’. The air was constantly choked with the fumes from his cannabis cigarettes, which he smoked more or less nonstop, with the result that I kept nodding off; then every five minutes or so, out of the blue, as it were, his stereo would produce an almighty thump that made me jump out of my seat. When I asked if he wouldn’t like to switch it off for a while and perhaps catch up on his reading, he told me he’d ‘rather iron his sack’. It was after this last exchange, as I recall, that I went to fetch the newspaper I’d stolen from the Radisson to see if I could find somewhere else to live.
There were several classifieds regarding apartments for rent; I circled half a dozen, taking note of the viewing times. They were all rather on the pricey side, as Droyd pointed out when he came to see what I was doing.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ he exclaimed, reading over my shoulder. ‘Where are you going to get that kind of money?’
‘That’s my business,’ I said unkindly, pulling the newspaper away from him.
‘You need to be a fuckin millionaire to live in this city these days,’ he reflected.
‘Yes, well,’ I grunted. But there, after all, was the rub. I didn’t need to open the credit-card statements that Mother had very kindly forwarded to me to know that my days of being a millionaire were long gone. And yet I simply couldn’t go on living like this. It looked like there was nothing for it but to borrow more money from Frank. However, when I took him to one side for a quick word about it that night, he told me he didn’t have that kind of money.