An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

  For a moment, I was sure he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead his face seemed to sort of crumple; and covering it with his hands, he sank back down to the ground.

  A small voice piped up: the rain had woken Droyd. ‘I’m sorry, Frankie,’ he said in slurred, slow-motion words, tugging Frank’s elbow. ‘It’s all about the music now, I swear.’

  ‘That’s what you said the last time, you geebag,’ Frank said, grinding his teeth.

  ‘This time I mean it,’ Droyd pronounced. Rain spilled down his lolling forehead. ‘I swear. Don’t worry, Frankie, we’ll get out of this fuckin kip. We’ll go to Ibiza, an’ we’ll sit on the beach all day drinkin cans… an’ all the birds’1l be after us, cos we’re the men…’

  ‘Just shut up, you cunt. Can’t you see I’ve fuckin had it with you, you fuckin juvenile delinquent.’ Frank sank his head in his hands and buried it between his knees. ‘We’re fucked,’ he sobbed. ‘We’re fucked.’

  I put my hands in my pockets and shuffled uncomfortably. Away to the east, somewhere beyond the power lines, the first guests would be arriving for dinner. If I left now I could still make the starters. Tomorrow, perhaps Frank and I could sit down together and figure out a plan; there was no point dallying any longer, getting into Mother’s bad books on top of everything else. I was just turning to say pip-pip and set off across the waste ground when suddenly I had a premonition. Suddenly, vividly, I could see myself, sitting at the dinner table and relating today’s adventures to Bel. I was presenting it as a kind of a picaresque yarn about the difficulties I had had getting here tonight. But she didn’t appear to be seeing the funny side; instead she was getting angry and launching into me as I tried to enjoy my duck terrine. Frank puts a roof over your head, she was saying, and this is what do you do for him in return? You let Amaurot slip through your fingers, and now you’re going to let them take Apt C Sands Villas as well?

  I glanced down. Droyd had fallen back asleep with his head on Frank’s shoulder. Look, I told the premonition-Bel, Mother said eight sharp. She had been very clear on that point, and Lord knows she was close enough to disinheriting me as it was. And furthermore, what about you? I said, pointing to the premonitory suitcases waiting in the hallway beneath the glass frieze. I don’t see what you’re getting so high and mighty about, when you’re traipsing off to Yalta. When do you think Frank and Droyd will get to go somewhere like Yalta? Never, that’s when. They’ll probably never get out of this godforsaken place.

  But none of this seemed to matter. She just looked at me in that way she had, and I looked down guiltily at my imaginary duck terrine.

  And then I had an idea.

  Admittedly it didn’t seem like much of an idea at first, particularly when we turned out our pockets and found we had only four pounds seventy-eight in change (Frank’s) and one unusually coloured pebble from Killiney Beach (mine) by way of collateral. But after we had taken Droyd back to the flat and put him to bed in Frank’s room and barricaded the door with the sofa and the tallboy and a set of dumbbells that kept falling off the bar and told Laura not to let him out no matter what, I brought Frank outside to the van to discuss it. He was understandably shaken by events and before he’d listen to anything he insisted on smoking some of his hashish to calm him down; and as I was feeling rather in need of calming down myself, and I hadn’t any baccy, I took some of it too and put it in my pipe. Then, when we were both calmer, I outlined my plan.

  ‘The best way to look at it,’ I said, ‘is that basically we have nothing left to lose. In a way that’s a sort of an advantage, do you see? It means we can take bigger risks, because, I mean, how much worse can things possibly get?’

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘I’m good at it,’ I said. ‘Honestly. It’s probably the one thing in the world I’m actually good at.’

  Frank shook his head, sending scurrying little puffs of redolent smoke.

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me,’ I said; and, with a small but expressive moan, he handed over his last four pounds seventy-eight.

  And even as we approached in the van, it was apparent that this was a fated night. The rain was falling vertically and bouncing off the glass roof, and the floodlights shining through it gave the dog-track, as we neared it, a kind of a halo, so that it seemed to glow, like a magical city, as if everything that had happened in our lives were no more than a yellow-brick road bringing us here. Drawing up in the van in a humble and trepidatious silence, I had the most curious sense that things had come loose from their everyday fixtures. Colours seemed brighter, sounds deeper, starker; thoughts and memories, past and future, bled out of their confines into the air. The Roma women with gold teeth selling magazines in the car park, the inhuman voice announcing the next race over the tannoy – everything seemed to carry a secret marker; everything took on the glaze of destiny.

  I managed to persuade Frank to stay up in the bar this time. A little table with two chairs waited for us right beside the window. Outside, the stands were full and the atmosphere electric – literally, as over the stadium thunderclouds swirled and massed. I ordered a Tom Collins and set to work.

  2003 Masterpiece Ivor Biggun Trouble in Paradise 5/1

  2018 Twink’s Mother Dunroamin The Great Pretender 8/3 on

  2040 Flashdance My Other Dog’ s A Mercedes Liberty Bell evens

  Picking the winners did not require much divination on my part. If there were, as seemed increasingly to be the case, unearthly forces at work that night, they were making little effort to disguise themselves. Instead they seemed to be using the dog meet to single me out and pillory me for my recent errors in judgement. Oh Brother!; Good-time Charlie; I’m Off – in every race there was a barely concealed indictment, meant solely for me; and every indictment cruised infallibly into victory. The money poured in thick and fast, and after an hour and a quarter of it my nerves were in shreds. Needless to say, this was completely lost on Frank.

  ‘All right, this next one,’ he scanned the racing-sheet. ‘Looks like a straight fight between Brits Out and… You Tore Me Down.’ And he looked up. ‘What’d you think, Charlie, is it Brits Out or –?’

  ‘You Tore Me Down, damn it!’ I exclaimed miserably. ‘You Tore Me Down, what else could it possibly be? This whole programme has been nothing but a, but a witch hunt…’ rubbing my fists in my eyes.

  ‘You all right, Charlie?’

  ‘Of course I’m not all right, I mean a fellow makes one mistake and instead of letting him make amends everybody just wants to gloat and point the finger. What about Harry, why does he get off scot-free? Why don’t they name a few dogs after him?’

  ‘Charlie, I think all that ganja’s makin you a bit paranoid.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ I tugged at my collar. ‘Damn it, why is it so hot in here? Don’t you find it oppressively hot? I say, get me a Manhattan, will you?’

  ‘You prob’ly shouldn’t be drinkin so much on top of it either, Charlie.’

  ‘Don’t touch that, I’m perfectly fine, anyway it’s helping me concentrate, I said don’t touch it –’

  Frank shrugged and put his pencil in his mouth and looked through the next race as I snapped my fingers for the lounge girl. ‘Right… How’s Your Billabong eight to one… McGurks Mutual Finance Limited five to one… Oh wait, Shit Creek nine to two on favourite. Shit Creek, ha ha…’

  You Tore Me Down thundered home, and so did Shit Creek. Frank whooped and went to collect our winnings. I watched the clock over the bar. They would be finishing their soup by now. Would Bel be wondering where I was? Or would she be glad I wasn’t there?

  ‘’Member the last time we were here, Charlie?’ Frank sat down cheerfully with another wad of bills. ‘With Bel, that was a good laugh, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘It was that time she was tryin to get into that play,’ he reminisced. ‘’Member? Fuck’s sake. Mad about that fuckin play she was. I thought she’d top herself
when they told her she couldn’t be in it, she was that into it.’ He piled the money into a little stack and sat back in his chair with his arms flung expansively over the back.

  ‘Damn Chekhov,’ I muttered.

  ‘Dunno why, like. All it is is these Russians goin on about their fuckin orchard and tryin to ride each other. Beats me why she’d be so mad into it. Do you know why she was so mad into it, Charlie?’

  ‘She was in it in school,’ I mumbled into my Manhattan. ‘She forgot her lines.’

  ‘Ah yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. Cos like, maybe in the olden days it was good, like before they had special effects and stuff. But now, I mean, it’s just fuckin borin. Like you don’t even see the fuckin Cherry Orchard. No, wasn’t my type of thing at all…’

  I tuned him out, watched the lightning play along the rooftop. The family of aristocrats returning to their old house… it was coming back to me, it’s about to be sold off, but they don’t do anything about it. I remember becoming quite fond of them; they were a lazy, amiable bunch, quite gay in spite of everything – that’s the spirit, I remember thinking, sunny side up…

  ‘All she ever talked about was that play,’ Frank recalled. ‘She even made me learn this speech to help her, that was like a whole fuckin page long. What was it it went like?’

  It was the spring: Father hadn’t been around, so Mother had dragged me along instead; we sat on stiff-backed chairs in the freezing auditorium, a dozen expensive perfumes intermingling over deeper, older school smells of Christmas tests, double gym, morning assembly and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Giddy children whispered, parents clutched mimeographed programmes; Mother sat erect on my left, mouthing the words with Bel whenever she came on – she played an old maid, always fretting and nagging and waiting to be romanced by another girl in a hairnet with a false moustache on –

  ‘Think Ania!’ Frank bellowed, making me jump in my seat. ‘Your grandfather your great-grandfather and all your forebears were serf owners that owned livin souls! Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every leaf and tree trunk, don’t you hear voices –’

  And then she forgot her lines. How had she forgotten them? When for the last two weeks she’d been doing nothing but wandering around the house with a towel over her head, mumbling away incessantly to herself like Franny Glass? And she had breezed through the first half with no trouble at all. Yet here she was centre-stage, with her mouth half-open and her arms held out like a men’s room attendant waiting for someone to hand them a towel and clearly no idea how to proceed –

  ‘Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every cherry tree in your orchard?’

  It didn’t take long for the audience to cotton on, and for giggles and snickers to begin to escape the smaller members; I squirmed in my seat and felt my face go hot and wished I had the courage to just run up on stage and deus ex machina pull her out of their wretched play and disappear with her into the night. Someone, a teacher presumably, hissed the line from the wings, but she didn’t seem to hear; she stayed frozen to the spot, like a deer caught in headlights. The actors tried to continue the scene around her, but it was impossible, ludicrous – and people were enjoying the spectacle now, they guffawed heartily as the teacher hissed out the line again, and the room filled with derisory applause as the curtain hastened down, and Mother’s hands rested perfectly still and white on her purse –

  ‘Yet it’s perfectly clear that, to live in the present,’ Frank went on, ‘we must first at – atone for our past and be finished with it –’

  ‘Give it a rest,’ I murmured, ‘there’s a good fellow.’

  She had been furious afterwards, Mother, I mean, even though the play had restarted five minutes later and Bel, though jittery, had managed to get to the end without any further hiccups, which I thought was a credit to her, and anyway surely these things were just an occupational hazard – there was no reason for Mother to say what she’d said, and if you asked me it was no coincidence that it was the very next day that Bel had got sick and the doctor had had to come –

  ‘ – and we can only atone for it by suffering –’

  Because that trouble before the play, the shouting and the broken crockery, that had been enough to put anybody off, and when Father didn’t come home we had driven to the school in a hissing white-hot silence: but that’s how it had all started, the sickness and the doctors and then Father too, then two years of white coats and not sleeping and drugs with unintelligible names and one’s jaw hurting from clenching one’s teeth all the time – that’s when it all began, at that infernal play, why did she have to keep circling back to it, why couldn’t she just forget it?

  ‘ – by suffering by extraordinary unceasing exer –, exertion –’

  ‘Damn it –’

  ‘Forward, friends! Don’t fall behind!’

  ‘That’s enough –’ my hand coming down so hard that the ashtray skipped right off the table and exploded on the floor.

  ‘Janey, Charlie, I was only havin a laugh.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said curtly, knocking back my drink.

  ‘Seriously, you feelin okay, Charlie?’

  ‘No,’ I said. How could they just let her go, without saying anything? How could they pretend nothing was wrong, let it all happen again, just so they could get her out of the way?

  ‘You prob’ly just need a bit of food,’ Frank said. He turned to the girl knelt sweeping up the shards of the ashtray and asked her to bring over ten packs of peanuts.

  I exhaled jaggedly. I felt small and spent; I didn’t want to think about it any more. ‘How much money does this fellow want anyway?’ I said, gesturing at the heap of notes. Frank did some mental calculations, then started scribbling on a beermat. It would take us all night at this rate, I thought with a sinking heart; and by then she would be gone, gone into the snowy wastes.

  The mechanical voice announced the next race. I went to the bar and ordered a Guinness for Frank and a dry martini for myself, with a shot of Calvados while I was waiting. Outside the sky had cleared enough to make room for a brace of stars, which swam about in a comforting way. I returned to the table to find Frank wearing an odd expression. ‘Look,’ he whispered.

  His arithmetic had carried him off the beermat and on to a left-behind newspaper, and he was pointing to a line in one corner: something about An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which sounded vaguely familiar.

  ‘It’s that dog what Bel bet on the last time,’ he said. ‘Remember the one that bit that young lad?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So it is. I thought I recognized the name.’

  ‘Look at the odds, Charlie,’ he whispered. ‘They’re astromonomical.’

  ‘Hardly surprising, after that last farrago. I’m amazed they’re still letting it race.’

  ‘But think, right, if we put everything we have on it, we’d have enough for the rent, and the ESB, and the gas, and…’

  ‘Yes, but you’re forgetting, it wouldn’t win, you see, that’s why the odds are –’

  ‘But if we put down say two hundred blips, then –’

  ‘But it wouldn’t win, damn it. If it were the only dog running it wouldn’t win. That dog’s a born loser, can’t you understand that?’

  With a hurt look, Frank retreated to his beermats. I sat back splenetically with the form. An Evening of Long Goodbyes, indeed. Put all our money on that? After what happened last time? Funny I hadn’t noticed it earlier, though… With a diversionary cough, I reached for the left-behind newspaper. Now this really was queer. Unless it was a misprint, it appeared that the bookmakers were giving outlandishly long odds not just against proven reprobates like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, but against all of the dogs running in the 2130, bar one. This dog, one Celtic Tiger, was favourite by such a distance that a return on his victory would be minuscule: but his previous times seemed unusually slow.

  The prudent thing would be to treat it as a low-risk investment: bet on Celtic Tiger and take the minimal return. And yet – I looked
over my shoulder around the bar: business appeared to be proceeding as usual – and yet what if we had stumbled across some kind of gambling anomaly? What if there really were something in the air tonight? What if that something – or someone – were trying to reach us, help us, via the unconventional vehicle of An Evening of Long Goodbyes?

  ‘What are you thinking, Charlie?’

  I ran my eyes over and over the tiny text. But suddenly my gambler’s intuition had deserted me. I had no idea what to do.

  I took a deep breath. The prudent thing: generally – although it might at times seem otherwise – I had always done what was prudent. I had clung to things – to people, beliefs, certain modes of living. I had tried to hold them still, I had tried to shore them up against the vicissitudes of fate. Where had it got me? Everything I had tried to hold had escaped me. Perhaps the secret was to do the opposite: perhaps to keep the things one loved one had to gamble them; one had to give all the heart, live in the aleatory moment… I reached for the pencil and filled out the betting slip.

  It was obvious as soon as the dogs were led out on to the field that we had made a terrible mistake.

  Immediately the stadium erupted. Chants rose up, flags were waved, ne’er-do-wells linked arms and jigged, all for the benefit of Celtic Tiger, aka, we soon learned, The Bookie’s Despair.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Frank.

  It took two men to squeeze Celtic Tiger into its trap. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, consisting primarily of haunches and gnashing fangs; whatever biological connection it had to the greyhound family, it must have been pretty tenuous. The other dogs, who had evidently encountered it before, looked singularly depressed – apart from An Evening of Long Goodbyes, that is, who was gazing off hopefully at the concession stand. What really struck one was its air of unchecked malevolence. I had never experienced evil of such magnitude at such close proximity, apart from lunches with Mr Appleseed. Yet in spite of this, Celtic Tiger seemed to inspire an almost religious fervour. The punters looked to it with the worshipful, desperate love of a parched country for the annual rains. ‘God bless you, Celtic Tiger,’ said a worn man next to us at the window, his weathered cheeks wet with tears. I realized that for these people, Celtic Tiger must be one of the few certainties in life: aside from death, of course, and nurses. The starter’s gun sounded and the rabbit scooted away.