by Paul Murray
She got up and went back over to the array of salvage, standing at it with her head bowed, touching its surface. ‘But what you have to remember is,’ she continued, keeping her back to me, her voice dipping and fragmenting as if unwilling to go on, ‘I’ve done all this before. I’ve had a whole life that no one here even knows. I had friends. I had someone I loved. How come no one ever asks me about that, Charles? How come if everybody’s so concerned about me they never ask about that? Because I loved him and he loved me, we took walks by the river and put daisies in our hair and all the things that people do when they’re in love, except that we were in a war, except that meanwhile everyone else was trying to kill each other for things that happened before any of them were even born… Still, what did any of that have to do with us? We didn’t want to kill anybody. We thought they’d leave us alone. We thought being in love made us different. We told each other how we’d run away from it and start everything again.’ The fingers of her left hand passed again one by one through those of her right.
‘How can a person, how can your person, just disappear, Charles? How can someone go for food one night and just never come back? It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. But everyone had stopped caring about making sense. And then it was time to run away again, and when I tried to go back to look for him I found out about the mines – they put mines down in our street in case we tried to come back. Where is he now? A grave somewhere in Krajina? The same one as my father? Nobody knows. How can nobody know? I don’t understand it. But that’s what our love amounted to. That’s what my love could do for him.’ A faint wobble ran through her chin; the hobbyhorse head looked at me mournfully from the mausoleum darkness at the back of the room.
‘And so I come here, where no one knows or cares what happened over there, no one’s even sure what language I speak, and I forget. I forget my father, who went back to the village because his friends had left their dog in the basement. I forget that my mother came here hidden in trucks full of meat and computer parts. I forget the brothers I grew up with so it doesn’t hurt to see the boredom on their faces. I pretend I don’t see the news when it shows the same thing happening all over again. I forget, like everyone wants me to forget. I make myself think only of my new life – the plays, the boys, the opportunities. Every night when she says good night to me Mama asks when we will go back. She doesn’t understand that everything is gone now. All the people we knew are gone. Different people live in our houses, strangers. I explain it to her every night and then the next night she comes in again and looks the way she thinks is east and asks the same question. She doesn’t understand. But I understand. And I’m never going back, whatever I have to do.’
There was a long, subdued silence. I frowned at my glass, which needed a top-up. Mirela wrapped an arm around her waist and gently swayed her dark cowl of hair. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me,’ she said more quietly. ‘I just don’t want you to think of me as a thief, who came in and stole your life away without even thinking. I didn’t want it to be like this. I would have made it different, if I could. I would have made us friends. You with your face and me with my leg. Maybe if they added us together we might make a whole person.’
She laughed: in the penitent atmosphere the sound was startling, like the report of a gun. Perhaps because I started, I laughed too. The tension dissipated somewhat and she turned away from the wall; and as she did I caught her perfume for the first time, and I was put in mind suddenly of home: the smells on Father’s hands when he came back from the lab, the fragrances the models trailed after them as they skipped down the staircase that would stay behind long after they had gone, haunting the house like warm sweet ghosts: slinking up to you unexpectedly in a corridor, or springing out Boo! from the corner of a hardly used room, then with a wink disappearing as if they had never been there at all…
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d be making any more speeches tonight.’
‘That’s perfectly all right.’
She had come back towards the centre of the room, but under the lantern she stopped, and her smile receded into something more pensive; reaching up, she made a tink with her fingernail against the glass. ‘We had one of these in the Folly,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was ours.’
‘It seems like so long ago,’ she said. The lantern canted away from her fingertips, sending light swirling in the hollows of her collarbone like the dregs of some opalescent drink. ‘You know I never told you…’
‘Told me what?’
‘Nothing.’ She lowered her head, coming back up to the table and leaning her hip on its edge. ‘Just something stupid I used to do.’
I moved out to the table and filled up our glasses. ‘Tell me,’ I said, glad to be on to a less morbid line of conversation.
‘Well… it was when we were hiding in the Folly, my brothers and me. Every day they used to go into the city, trying to register. But I wasn’t allowed outside. They said it was too dangerous, because of my leg. I can’t move very quickly on it, obviously. And anyway I was ashamed of it. When I got to Ireland, and I saw all these people who weren’t running away from anybody, who were living normal lives, I felt ashamed. I felt – what’s the word? – absurd. So every day and every night I stayed up there in that tiny little room. Eventually of course I started going crazy. I had to get out. I didn’t care who saw me. So at night when the boys were asleep I started sneaking out. Not going anywhere, just around the garden, just to taste the air.’ Absently she peeled off her gloves and laid them neatly on the back of the armchair. ‘Then one night I saw a light in the drawing-room window, and that night I must have been particularly bored and particularly lonely because I went up and peeped through the crack in the curtains. And it was you.’
‘Was it?’ I said cautiously, it having been my occasional habit to watch television in the drawing room without the encumbrance of trousers.
‘You were watching an old film, I could tell by the light on the walls. And it reminded me of when I was a little girl, and they would put on old films late at night, and Mama would let me stay up because I told her it was to help me learn English. But really I liked them because everything looked so beautiful in black and white.’ She smiled bashfully. ‘I even used to get angry when Dorothy went to Oz, because I didn’t like the world being coloured in, and I just wanted her to go home to Kansas.’
I said nothing to this, but inside my heart was clapping its hands, exclaiming, ‘Me too! Me too!’
‘Anyway, there I was in the flowerbed looking at you, and it was – it was like I could tell exactly what was happening just by looking at your face. Like when you frowned, I knew the murderer was comforting the widow, and when you put your hands over your face I knew the pistol had been kicked across the floor, and when you smiled I knew the hero had kissed the girl –’ She laughed again, and drew breath. ‘Or that’s what it looked like to me. After that I used to check through the TV guide and mark out all the movies you might watch, and at night when I would steal out of the Folly I would always go to the window, just for a few minutes, and imagine I was in there beside you, and it was my home, with the fire in the fireplace and a glass of red wine.’ She rocked herself still and pulled in a little closer to the table. ‘What do you think, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do you think that’s de trop?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’
She stood up and came around to my side of the table. She brushed her hair back with one hand and looked at me seriously; and the universe seemed to pull up, like a horse at a high fence. ‘What would it take for you to kiss me, Charles?’ she said.
I gave it some thought. I thought about everything that had happened tonight. By rights I oughtn’t even to be in the same room as her: and yet, although it made little sense, it felt as if the girl in front of me now had nothing to do with those other things. It was as if somehow she predated the awful events of this evening – as if she were a different Mirela, an essen
tial Mirela: the girl I had found that night in the Folly, and unreeled in my mind’s eye every night since.
‘I think you would have to put down your drink,’ I said.
In one smooth unhurried motion she set down her glass and snuffed out the lantern; then taking my hand, she led me away into the darkness.
Imagine a fade-out here, if you please, or one of those discreet rows of asterisks, to indicate the passage of time – not very much time, admittedly, as one of us was out of practice and perhaps a little over-excited – anyway, we return to the scene with the two participants lying back on their pillows, bedsheets now chastely drawn up to their chins, watched silently through the doorway by a stuffed otter and the head of a china basset hound, half-hidden under a frayed gingham tablecloth. Everything was perfectly still; it felt like no one in the whole wide world was awake but us – like we had stolen a march on time, and although our problems waited for us on the other side, these moments were ours to let float by as we pleased. How sweet it was, after so much turbulence, not even to have to talk, or think.
In between long drifts of nothingness I was wondering idly what I could give her for breakfast next morning – I had brought home a cheesecake the day before yesterday and I thought there was some left in the fridge – when her bare arm stretched over me to retrieve the brassiere adorning the lampshade. ‘What are you doing?’ I murmured, through a mouthful of sleep.
‘I have to go,’ she whispered.
‘You have to go?’ I sat up, blinking. Sure enough she was hooking herself up. ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’
‘Exactly. Harry’s going to be wondering what’s happened to me.’
Even hearing his name was like a taking a shiv between the ribs: I gasped slightly and clutched at my chest. But this was no time for theatrics. Suddenly she was all brisk efficiency, arranging her hair, searching the bedclothes for a stocking, making it impossible even to remonstrate properly.
‘But how will you possibly get home, there’s no –’
‘Sorry, Charles, could you just pass me that –’
‘I mean, there’s no way you’ll get a taxi round here, and anyway you can’t go out dressed like that –’
‘I’m resourceful – zip me up, will you?’
‘No,’ I said. This at least had the effect of stalling her temporarily. She turned and looked at me.
‘Stay,’ I pleaded. ‘I mean it’s practically tomorrow anyway. Why don’t you stay?’
‘I can’t, Charles,’ she said, with just a trace of exasperation. ‘We’re meeting the Telsinor people at nine to start working out our strategy. It’s a big day and I need to be ready.’ She cocked her head, scrutinizing me almost playfully. Then she sat down at the end of the bed and placed a hand on my forearm. Frostily I shook it away. She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I thought we’d been through all this,’ she said. ‘I thought we understood each other.’
I pursed my lips. ‘Well maybe I didn’t,’ I said. I felt horribly like a hoodwinked schoolgirl. ‘Understand, I mean.’
Mirela sighed and stroked her hand and looked down at the cold shaft of the prosthesis. ‘We had a nice time, didn’t we? But now we have to go back to our lives. You know that.’
I got up and began storming about the room. ‘But you don’t –’ I said agitatedly, ‘I mean to say you don’t love him –’
She could not have turned cooler if I had poured iced water over her; I could feel the temperature in the room drop. ‘I never said it had anything to do with love,’ she said impersonally, like a piano teacher correcting a child who keeps fudging his scales. ‘Who or what I love is my business. I said I needed him. Charles, sit down for a minute.’
‘Needed him, there’s a word for that sort of thing, you know…’ as now outside, as if to complement our little scene, as if to make it so that everything was finally and perfectly hellish, a drunken battering set up at the front door, Droyd must have forgotten his keys again…
Mirela reached behind her and pulled up the zip of her dress, then got up and drew me over on to the mattress beside her. ‘I thought I explained it to you,’ she said. ‘I had a life before. But it’s gone. My memories are of things that don’t exist any more. The world stood by and let it happen and now all that I have left of home is this – look, Charles –’ lifting her dress over the rough splint of metal and bitten, singed wood. I gazed at it dumbly, and then back up at her. Outwardly at least she appeared quite composed. ‘Don’t you understand, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? None of this matters to me. Not you, not your sister, not the house you grew up in. I’ll act in the theatre. I’ll go on the billboards if they want me to. I’ll try hard to be a success. But none of it means anything to me. I look at the people around me and all I see are the little cardboard counters in a board game.’
She patted my hand; I stared paralytically into the mild gaze of those alien blue eyes. Somewhere far, far away, the pounding recommenced. ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ she said.
I rose numbly, threw on a dressing gown and went out to the living room, where the door juddered on its hinges. ‘All right, all right, for God’s sake…’ Cursing, I pulled it open. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Can I come in?’ Bel said.
‘Hmm,’ I said with a finger to my lip, ‘you know now might not actually be the best time…’
But she had already tottered past me, pulling a suitcase behind her. ‘It’s pitch dark in here,’ she declared. ‘I mean how are you supposed to see anything?’
Surely this couldn’t be happening – I swallowed and wiped my hands on the dressing gown. ‘Yes, that’s because do you know what time it is?’ rushing in to redirect her as she veered dangerously towards a promontory of junk, then with trembling fingers taking a match to the lantern – ‘what are you doing here anyway – good God…’
She looked an absolute state. Her make-up had run all over the place, giving her smudgy black rings around the eyes and a luridly Cubist appearance. Beneath her red coat, the lovely champagne-coloured dress hung bedraggled around her, like the wings of an affluent moth that had been caught out in the rain: except that it wasn’t raining. She swayed beneath me in the glow of the lamp, emanating not so much a smell as an aura of alcohol so toxic it made my eyes water just standing next to her.
‘You’re all pink,’ she said, squinting at me. ‘What’ve you been doing?’
‘Doing?’ I squeaked, glancing back reflexively at the sliver of darkness at my bedroom door. ‘Nothing at all. Probably just that it’s warm tonight, haven’t you found it unseasonably warm?’ But she had already forgotten her question and continued on her dizzy tour to the couch, where she deposited her suitcase. ‘Now, Bel,’ I skipped past her, hurriedly removing the lipsticked wineglass and secreting it in the pocket of my dressing gown. ‘Now, Bel, I –’
‘There’s a nice smell, I don’t remember there being a nice smell…’
‘Oh yes,’ opening the window and vigorously shooing in fresh air, ‘yes, Laura came by with about half a ton of pot pourri. Now, Bel –’
‘Do you have anything to drink?’
‘I think you’ve probably had enough,’ I said, then, reluctantly, added: ‘I’ll make you some tea, if you want.’
‘You’re prob’ly right,’ she said, crashing on to the sofa. ‘I had to stop the taxi three times on the way over because I thought I was going to be…’ She pored over her purse as though it might contain the key to the whole business, then turned it upside-down and shook it, to no avail. ‘I think he overcharged me,’ she concluded mournfully.
I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle, then stood over the sink racking my brains. What was she doing here? How was I going to get her out? Of all the nights she could possibly have chosen to visit me…
The kettle clicked off. At least Mirela had had the good sense to stay in the bedroom, that was something. And it was just possible that Bel was too drunk to notice anything amiss.
; ‘Oh my God… What’s this?’
Heart pounding, I sprinted out into the living room to see her gazing at a sheaf of dog-eared pages.
‘Put that down,’ I ordered her.
‘“There’s Bosnians In My Attic! A Tragedy in Three Acts by Charles Hythloday –”’
‘Give that to me, please.’ I held out my hand. She dodged it and turned over the page.
‘“Plot”.’ She flipped it over, then back, then through the other pages. ‘Is that all you’ve written?’
‘It takes time,’ I said haughtily. ‘If one is going about it properly.’
‘There’s Bosnians In My Attic.’ She rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Please tell me you’re not writing your autobiography.’
‘There are autobiographical elements, yes,’ I informed her. ‘Though as you can see I changed the Folly to an attic. I thought people might be able to relate to it better.’
‘Relate to it…’ She rolled back, groaning, and folded the pages over her face. ‘Wealthy mother’s boy moons about house, twiddles thumbs, conducts imaginary conversations with his late father… God, Charles, only you could possibly find our stupid lives in any way interesting or, or edifying…’
‘Just because a fellow’s life isn’t set in a kitchen sink doesn’t mean it’s not interesting,’ I said stiffly. ‘That’s a prejudice that belongs to you alone. Anyway, sounds a bit like Hamlet, when you put it like that.’
Bel mumbled something about a tale told by an idiot and didn’t offer any resistance as I bent down and gathered the pages scattered over her face, drifting off instead into dark babblings half-lost to the couch about how some day she’d tell me a thing or two about Father and we’d see how instructive it was. She was fond of making ominous pronouncements at times like this: I didn’t pursue it. I crossed over to my bedroom and, without looking in, thrust the pages through the door. I brought it to and, hearing the snick of the latch, felt my heart begin to slow its pounding. I returned to the kitchen and poured the tea. ‘May I ask to what we owe this very great pleasure?’