by Paul Murray
‘It’s like a strobe light goin off in me brain,’ Frank said through clenched teeth, holding his head with his hands.
‘What?’ I looked over at him. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and his eyes were doing this alarming trick of rolling back in his head. He was definitely behaving more sociopathically than usual. That blow earlier must have dislodged something. ‘Look at all these bastards,’ he said, gazing saturninely up and down the table.
‘Eat your truffles,’ I said hurriedly, pointing to his plate. ‘And maybe you shouldn’t drink any more.’ I poured his glass into mine.
I haven’t mentioned it up to now for fear of sounding immodest, but ever since I sat down Mirela had been staring at me. At first it had been in the form of plaintive, mea culpa-type looks whenever Harry’s head was turned, which I had politely ignored. Yet she persisted: and as the night wore on, they had increased in urgency – flickering constantly from the other side of the table as if she had some message she was attempting to send via a Morse code of blinks and flashes, until they came to resemble the entreaties of one of those silent-movie heroines who has been tied to a train track. But now, as the clock struck for midnight, she seemed suddenly to resign herself. She slumped down in her seat; at the same moment, a wine glass pinged, and Harry got to his feet.
‘Friends… friends.’ He held up his hand for quiet. ‘You’ll forgive me if I detain you with a few brief words of my own.’ His doltish hair looked even more snaky and annoying than usual. An Evening of Long Goodbyes began to growl. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Bad dog. Be quiet,’ slipping him a truffle when Mother had stopped looking.
‘We’ve heard a lot tonight about “new visions”, “rebirths” and “new beginnings” –’
‘Gnnnhhhh,’ Frank ground his fists into his temples.
‘So in keeping with the general theme of the evening,’ Harry continued, ‘and with no further ado, it is my pleasure to inform you that at half past eight this evening, Miss Mirela Pribicevic agreed to give me her hand in marriage –’
Before he had finished the sentence, the female contingent of the table erupted and rushed over to swamp Mirela in squeals and embraces. ‘How wonderful!’ Mother clasped her hands to her cheeks as her eyes welled up with tears. ‘Oh, how wonderful!’
My first thoughts were for Bel, and I swung round with my arms half-outstretched, I suppose in case she might be about to swoon. But she was looking on placidly as if this were happening far, far away, to a group of people she had never met; and I was forced back to face my own emotions.
It was funny: if someone had put this situation to me hypothetically five minutes earlier, I’d probably have replied, quite honestly, that I didn’t think it would bother me in the slightest. Yet as I watched Mirela now, I felt as cold and sick and hollow as if I had been dealt a mortal blow. As I watched her emerge from the scrum of well-wishers, pink and fresh-faced and laughing and looking very much like a girl in love, everything she had said to me in our few contradictory exchanges ran through my mind; and in that moment, I realized with a terrible sense of finality that I had no idea, and I never would have any idea, how this world worked or what went on in the hearts of its inhabitants; that it was and always would be utterly opaque and mysterious to me, and that whatever happened from now on would not make any difference, because it would never come any closer.
‘Charlie,’ Frank confided sweatily, ‘I’m not feelin meself.’
‘Me neither, old chum,’ I said. ‘Me neither.’
Harry, meanwhile, had lied about a few brief words. Instead he was using his announcement as a springboard for more speechifying. ‘On the occasion of this double union,’ he raised his voice over the hubbub, ‘I would like to say a word of thanks. You hear a lot these days about how the notion of “the family” is one that can’t exist any more in our fast-paced modern world. But from the first day I came here, after Bel asked me to join the theatre group she was just starting, a family is exactly what it’s been. And it’s made me realize what a family can be. Coming from a typical middle-class, “petit-bourgeois” background, I suppose I had a fairly low opinion…’
From his position face-down on the empty plate, Frank informed me that he couldn’t take much more of this.
‘… realize that the family can be something political, radically political, can be a force which can be posited against the controlling groups of our time, a “free space” where differing opinions can come together and new unions can be made – like the one I am so fortunate to have made tonight.’
I gulped back a fresh glass of Rioja and felt a cold sweat break over me like a kind of necrosis. You can’t stop life from happening, that’s what Mirela said, that night in Frank’s apartment. It would carry you further and further away from yourself; it would make its way into your past and transform that too…
‘… learn that the market, like a gun, isn’t anything intrinsically good or bad, that we can use it for good, we can join forces with it. And just as we have grown, so Amaurot has grown with us…’
And meanwhile all anyone did was make speeches! It felt like he was dancing up and down on our grave, he and market forces, he and the asset strippers, he and the Golems of progress, and yet no one did anything, no one gainsaid or challenged him or said, It isn’t right, these things you’re saying aren’t right…
‘… a house weighed down by, or rather trapped in, its own history, to recontextualize it, realign it with modernity, and basically haul the place into the twenty-first century –’
I was reaching the point where I didn’t think I could physically stand any more; and evidently someone else in the room felt the same way, because suddenly a loud, exasperated voice called out, ‘Oh, balls!’
Everyone went quiet. Harry adjusted his bow tie, and said ‘Excuse me?’ as if to offer the perpetrator a chance to exculpate himself. But this protester was not to be silenced. ‘Balls!’ the voice cried again, even louder than before. I tittered to myself; and I was so enjoying seeing Harry squirm that it took a moment to realize that I was standing up, and that furthermore the entire table was staring at me.
Bother.
‘Charles, leave the table, please,’ Mother said.
‘No,’ Harry interjected. ‘If you don’t mind – let’s hear what Charles has to say.’
I wiped my palms on my trousers, unexpectedly finding myself addressing the room at large. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ I stuttered. ‘I mean… well, a house is a house isn’t it? It’s a place people live in. I don’t see what the twenty-first century’s got to do with it. I don’t see why, just because you’ve put up some new wallpaper, you should be allowed to claim the place in the name of the future, like some sort of… you know… time-travelling… pirate.’
‘That’s Harry for you,’ chuckled Niall O’Boyle. ‘I like a man who’s got his eye on the future. Because that’s where it’s all going to happen, mark my words. The past is one thing, but the future, that’s where the money is.’
‘I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just saying you have to move with the times. It’s in everybody’s interests. You have to admit this place was falling to pieces before we came.’
I thought back to that golden age when it was just Bel and me and the drinks cabinet. ‘It wasn’t,’ I said.
‘It was,’ he reiterated. ‘The paint was peeling, the floors were rotten–your mother told us that while she was in hospital the bank was practically calling in the sheriffs to repossess the place…’
‘That was all a misunderstanding,’ I claimed.
‘But you blew up the Folly for the insurance,’ Harry pursued, fingering the buttons of his lawyer’s waistcoat. ‘I mean – you tried to fake your own death. How can you say the house was better off then?’
I blinked stuporously, and cast about me for support. Bel continued to gaze dreamily into space like a patient under ether in the dentist’s chair. Frank was lying inert on the table like a giant rag-doll, as he had been for t
he last five minutes. All the others waited for my response, their eyes holding me pinned like so many skewers. ‘We knew what we were doing,’ I mumbled.
There was a momentary delay; then, as one, the guests around the table burst into laughter. It was warm and full; everyone joined in, even people I had never met before, like Niall O’Boyle’s PA; even Mother, her anger dissipating in the general gaiety.
Harry threw his hands up humorously as if to say, I rest my case; I slunk down in my seat and thought that maybe I was just a dope – in all likelihood I was, I wasn’t debating the matter: but still it didn’t seem right that a man should be made to feel like this, not in the dining room of his own childhood home.
And then, abruptly, mechanically, Frank lifted his head from his plate. With a glazed yet curiously purposeful expression, like a man acting with orders from on high, he rose and tucked in his chair; then he crossed the floor and began strangling Harry.
For a couple of seconds we sat watching dumbly as plates flew, glasses smashed, chairs tumbled. Then the girls began to scream. At the same time, the bit-part actors at the end of the table hurrahed and stood on their seats to get a better view; the dog barked; Mirela turned grey; the businessmen puffed themselves up and waved their hands about –
‘Do something, Charles!’ Mother shrieked. ‘Do something!’
‘Right,’ I responded, getting to my feet. ‘Who’s for brandy? And I believe we have some cigars…’
‘Charlie?’
‘Yes, Frank?’
‘You awake?’
‘Yes, Frank, I’m awake.’
‘Where are we, Charlie?’
‘We’re in Father’s study. You had a sort of a funny turn.’
‘Oh right. I gave your man a box.’ There was a pause: the darkness recomposed itself over the shelves, the vials and periodicals and thick portfolios of photographs. ‘I’d say he wasn’t expectin that.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he was.’
‘Your ma was awful angry, wasn’t she? Like sayin she was goin to get us arrested and stuff.’
‘Oh, Mother says these things, you know…’
‘Sorry, Charlie. I dunno what happened. It was like I wasn’t in control of me own mind.’
I charitably let this pass.
‘He kept goin on and on with all that shite. It was drivin me mad. And I couldn’t just let him make a laugh of you.’
I coughed. ‘Well, I don’t know that he was making a laugh of me –’
‘Like I wasn’t just goin to let him make you look like some geebag that didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’
‘Well… well, thanks, old man.’
Silence.
‘Charlie?’
‘Go to sleep.’
‘Fuckin cold in here, isn’t it?’
‘…’
‘Charlie… d’you ever see a ghost here? I bet there’d be loads of ghosts in an old gaff like this… fuck –’ the camp bed creaked painfully, ‘just like that bit in Bel’s play, like all these faces like starin at you from the fuckin trees and shit –’
‘Look, there aren’t any ghosts, all right?’ I said irritably. ‘If there were, Harry would have roped them into serving dinner, or helping in his wretched play. Lord knows if I was a ghost I’d have fled the minute he walked in the door.’
‘Ah yeah, I s’pose…’ He laid himself gingerly back down. I turned back to the window. I was at my old vantage point behind Father’s desk, where I’d used to look out at the Folly and occasionally see an angel, or an actress. There weren’t any angels tonight; we had used up our quota, probably, or else they had hitched a ride with the ghosts.
We had ruined the dinner party so thoroughly, so unequivocally, that even after the furore had died down and the paramedics had gone, the wisest course of action had still seemed to be one of ignominious retreat. I wasn’t at all sure that Mother had been joking about pressing charges, so with Mrs P’s help I had smuggled Frank up here, and here the two of us had stayed. Only now, as I sat at the windowsill, did it occur to me that this was the end: that our parts were, at last, played out. Tomorrow was already today. Bel would leave for Yalta and Amaurot would be reborn as the Telsinor Hythloday Centre for the Arts. Our contributions had made, when it came to it, not the slightest bit of difference.
I had been utterly defeated on every front; I should, at that moment of all moments, have been steeped in despair. And yet, as I sat at the window, I did not find myself despairing. For out of the gloom, the hopelessness, the humiliation of the day, certain images kept defiantly floating up: Frank with Droyd in his arms, lurching out of the stinking basement; Frank thumping the Plexiglas, cheering on the dogs; the glorious moment of Frank, tongue tucked between his teeth, crisply punching Harry on the nose. I didn’t ask for them; they didn’t appear to change anything; yet there they were, floating up out of the darkness before my eyes, over and over again, and with them now something Yeats had said once: ‘Friendship is all the house I have.’
I frowned out through my ghostly reflection at the swaying trees, the rain. Friendship is all the house I have. It wasn’t a line I’d given much thought to before. Still, you could see what he meant, given all the problems one encountered with actual houses – heating bills and mortgages and wayward domestics, rack-renting landlords, actors moving in, all that. What kind of house would my friendship make? The day’s events paraded palely by again, like the tapestry of a long-ago battle. On the evidence it seemed that, for all my aspirations to the courtly life, I hadn’t provided much protection from the elements. Bel, Amaurot, Droyd and the Latvians… the closer you looked the more it appeared that, in terms of houses, it was your Charles Hythlodays who were the seedy overpriced flats with wobbling walls and dubious plumbing; while it was the Franks of this world – even if they thought a French press was some sort of ungentlemanly wrestling move, even if they were under the impression that Stockhausen was a Swedish furniture shop, even if one had heard them with one’s own ears telling Droyd when he asked that Donatella Versace was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – it was the Franks who were the grand old mansions overlooking the sea. And it struck me that the last time we all of us had been happy – really happy, even if we hadn’t been aware of it – was when Frank and Bel were still together.
‘I say…’
No response.
‘Frank?’
‘Whhnnnhhh?’
‘You know, I’ve been thinking. Bel’s only going for six months. It’s not such a long time really…’
‘…’
‘I was just thinking that if – if you ever wanted to, you know, give it another shot with her…’
‘Yes, Charlie?’
‘Well, I might be able to put in a word, that’s all.’
I had never dreamed I would be saying this; and yet suddenly I could picture it so clearly – me restored to my room, the theatre disassembled and scattered to the four winds, Bel and I laughing gaily as Frank attended to any heavy lifting work that needed to be done around the house, as all the flurrying elements of our lives drifted back down into place, like the flakes in one of those little snow globes…
‘Cheers, Charlie,’ Frank said. ‘You’re a sound man.’
‘Well, it’s the least I could do. I mean I should have mentioned it earlier.’
‘Yeah,’ he scratched his nose thoughtfully. ‘’Member, though, how you were sayin that about plenty of fish in the sea?’
‘Yes?’
‘Yeah, cos like, eh, me and Laura, we’ve been, eh, you know…’
‘You’ve been what?’
‘Well like, you prob’ly noticed she’s been around a good bit lately…’
‘I thought she just liked DIY,’ I said in a small voice.
‘You don’t mind, do you? I wuz worried you might have a bit of a boner for her yourself.’
‘Not at all,’ I said; as the restored Amaurot receded over the horizon into the Land of Might-Have-Been, and with it the bounteous Laura, her grabulous melo
ns… ‘I’m delighted, old chap. Delighted.’
‘Yeah, cheers Charlie. I’ll give her one for you, ha ha.’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly.
Mercifully his breathing deepened into snores; and after I had listened to the snores for an hour or so, I decided that maybe what I really wanted was a drink; so I rose again and went downstairs.
The caterers had gone home hours ago. Everything was tidied away. The long table had been stripped of its trappings, the chairs ordered with geometrical precision around it; the blood-splashes from Harry’s nose had been mopped up, the dishes washed and dried and stacked in the cupboard. Father waited, waited, in his frame in the hallway. Without knowing why, especially, I began to go from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again. In the vague blue darkness, everything seemed to tingle; I felt a little like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty, creeping through the slumbering castle, observing the secret life the objects led while everyone lay in their enchanted sleep. Then I found myself beside the drinks cabinet, and thought that seeing as I was in the neighbourhood, I might as well make myself a gimlet. After a moment’s thought, I decided that it ought really to be a double. Then I took the bottle and put it in my pocket.
Bel was in the drawing room on her own, staring out the window with the lights off.
‘Didn’t think I’d find you still up and about…’ I attempted a jolly avuncular tone.
‘The taxi’s coming at four. There hardly seemed much point going to bed.’
‘Interest you in a…?’ I held up my glass and jingled the ice cubes. She looked round.
‘How can you still be drinking?’ she said affectlessly, returning to her vigil.
‘Years of practice, I suppose…’ I took a seat on the chaise longue. A pink vinyl suitcase rested at one end. Outside thunder groaned and the sky lit up silver. ‘Lord, what an awful night. Don’t know if your plane’ll fly if it keeps up like that.’
‘It’ll fly,’ Bel said.
‘Aha,’ I returned emptily. I shunted myself forward, attempting to balance my drink on my knee. ‘Glad I caught you, as a matter of fact. Didn’t get much of a chance to say goodbye earlier on, what with all the fuss and all those paramedics swarming around. Cripes, you’d think even a haemophiliac would be able to deal with a bloody nose, ha ha…’ She didn’t appear to have an opinion on this. I rubbed my hands together miserably. ‘Wanted to ask you how you felt about the Harry and Mirela thing too. Must have been a bit of a shock for you, after all.’