by Paul Murray
‘But you know all this,’ she said. ‘I know you know. Maybe not all of the details, necessarily. But enough. That’s why you’ve been falling over yourself trying to get out of the place, first that half-witted plan to go to Chile, and then when that didn’t work you storm out after some tiff with Mother? Because she told you to get a job, you leave your ancestral home and move in with Frank?’
She sat down next to me on the chaise longue. ‘Don’t you see, though, that’s why I get angry with you, because you pretend not to know, because you act like you think everything in the world’s just a digression from the grand noble lives Father had mapped out for us, and that if you ever did anything or became part of anything, you’d be betraying him. But there is no map, Charles. There are no values. All Amaurot ever was was somewhere to fill up with his delusions and walk around with his head in the clouds, pretending the world outside didn’t exist. I’m not judging him for it. But none of this means anything at all. Except maybe money.’
The balls of my fingers were sweating, and the glass kept wanting to slip away from them. The mad skirl of the storm came rushing down the chimney. It felt rather as if we had arrived at the end of the world; and all that was left now was this drawing room, this chaise longue, her body beside mine. Summoning all my energies I heaved myself forward, like some old dinosaur struggling out of the swamp, so that my forearms leaned on my thighs; then, clearing the dust from my throat, I said in a slurred voice: ‘Poppycock.’
I might have gone on. I might have told her that I’d never in my life heard such vile trash; I might have gone through her points and refuted them one by one. But I found that the effort of sitting up had exhausted me; so I set my glass down by the suitcase and sat staring sourly at the floor, ignoring her gaze on my cheek.
‘Geoffrey’s been arraigned,’ Bel said: her voice had regained its parsed, melodious distance. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard. One of Father’s companies turned up in this offshore thing the government’s investigating. They haven’t traced it as far as us yet. But it’ll hardly take them long. It’s pretty obvious once you start looking at the books. Front companies, holding companies, dummy accounts, leading here, there, into the ether. Donations to these mysterious charities, trust funds – you must have wondered what happened to your trust, Charles, you must have realized even you couldn’t have drunk it all.’
I said nothing; eventually she sighed and got up and went to the curtain again, as she had been when I came in.
‘I mean it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The place’ll go on regardless, and get stronger and stronger. They’ll create synergies and put up statues. How could you ever stop something as big as that?’ She looked round at me over her shoulder. ‘So you can wake Mother now, if you want. Tell her I’ve gone crazy again.’
I still did not reply; I was thinking of something else now.
‘But Charles, promise me one thing. When I’m gone, promise you won’t come back here. Even if Mother offers you a room. There isn’t going to be any more face-painting, do you understand that?’ She crossed the floor, frowning to herself. I suppressed a giggle. She hadn’t noticed, but there were two of her now, pacing along side by side. The room was beginning to wheel slowly, in a cosy, rockabying sort of a way. ‘And you have to stop falling in love with beautiful girls you don’t know anything about…’ A chorus-line of Bels lifted their hands and pushed the bangs out of their eyes. ‘Because what you have to remember, if there’s one thing, it’s that everybody’s human, that’s the first thing they are, whether they’re beautiful or not, or rich or poor, or actresses from the 1940s or Frank… they’re all humans, the first thing they are is human, do you see? Do you see, Charles?’
I was only dimly aware of the kaleidoscope-Bel that shimmered up and waited expectantly at my foot. I was thinking of that time when she was seven, when she’d watched the documentary about the famine in Ethiopia and decided she was going to make a cake to send over to them: ‘Do you remember, Bel? Everyone was out and the kitchen went on fire, and Father said, when the firemen had gone, Father said –’ hooting with laughter now, ‘he had a good mind to ask the blasted Ethiopians to send some of their food to us, seeing as we’d have to eat takeaways for the next month…’
The shimmer paused, then said quietly that she remembered. The clock struck something-or-other, and she said she really did have some things to do.
‘Yes,’ I said, rising unsteadily and sinking again. ‘I might just need a – a small hand, however…’
She took my wrist and hauled me up. When I had found my feet, she draped my right arm over her shoulders and linked her own arms tightly around my waist, and in this fashion we made our way down the hall, with her slight frame braced against mine, adjusting itself forwards, backwards to counter my errant centre of gravity. It seemed, as we began our ascent of the stairs, that I could hear the sound of chopping wood somewhere; but Bel was already huffing under my weight, so I didn’t mention it. Probably just some left-behind spook, I thought, as she hefted me onward; probably just some Golem, dragging its sad, sleepless feet of clay through the darkened grounds.
The next thing I knew, we were standing outside Father’s study door. ‘Well,’ I said to the place where I thought she was standing.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Give my regards to old Chekhov.’
‘Of course.’
There was an awkward lacuna: suddenly I was aware of something having been brought up that had been left unresolved – or was it something left unsaid that should have been said? I couldn’t remember, so hazarding a guess I said, ‘You know, that business we were talking about before. You and I finding a place to live, so forth. We should have a talk about it when you get back, thrash out something definite.’
‘Of course,’ she said again: no more than a smudge now, a thumbprint on the photograph of the night. She planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘Goodbye, Charles.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said. But she had already vanished down the stairs.
I tripped into the study and took my share of the blankets back from Frank and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep; as Bel returned downstairs, went out to the garage, climbed into Father’s Mercedes, and drove it at full speed into the garden wall.
‘Why should people be trapped with just one face?’ Father liked to say. ‘Or stuck in just one life?’
The mask, he’d say, was something that you wore but was opposite to you; because it was not wholly real, it could withstand pain that you could not; because it was not wholly human, its beauty was not diminished by age or feeling. Father’s hands never smelled of the same thing twice; and fragrances hung in the house like sweet invaders, like opulent chains of memories that no longer belonged to anyone.
We’d encounter his models on their way up or down the stairs, in the ordinary prettiness of their unmade-up daytime faces; it was always a shock to find them in the magazines a few months later, and see what Father had made from them. Louche, tomboy, prissy, gauche; Cleopatran, Regency, Berlin decadent; flappers and hippies and Arabian princesses – he mined their faces for stories and myths and desires old as history, or older, like seams of rare ore that lay buried in the earth of their youth.
In the magazines, the faces of these transient girls had a power, a power that my father could summon and balance, like those old music-hall acts that spun plates on sticks. They could call into being any age or emotion or state of mind; and everything around them would be transformed too, turned from diffuse, unwieldy life into a story, something with direction and significance. Looking out from the glossy pages, their faces seemed to promise everything; they promised that you could become anything; they promised that they would take you with them, that you could leave yourself behind.
She had probably gone right through the windscreen, the forensics man said; through the windscreen and over the wall into the sea. An old car like that wouldn’t give you much protection in the event of a collision. Examining the wreck, he hadn’t found any reaso
n why it should have taken off like that – but then again it was so badly damaged it was hard to tell; and anyway these old cars always had their own idiosyncrasies. They were museum pieces, really, they weren’t meant to be driven.
Mother thrived in certain kinds of adversity. For the following week, as the rest of us stumbled around in a daze, she handled the policemen and detectives who swarmed about the house – answering their questions, providing copies of old medical reports, making sure they got lunch. When the crash was placed at roughly half past four, it was she who remembered that the taxi had been supposed to come on the hour; it was she who put forward the idea that Bel, realizing it wasn’t going to arrive in time, had in a panic decided to take the antediluvian Mercedes to the airport, only for it to spin immediately out of control on the wet grass. The police agreed subsequently that this was by far the most likely explanation.
They took statements from all of us, but most of the time stayed out in the garden, taking photographs of the garage, measuring the doorway with tape, making plastercasts of the tyre tracks that led over the lawn through splintered wood and split branches to where the car sat in a spray of ground glass and broken stonework, salt air blowing through the smashed windscreen, by the low wall that bounded the bluff from the steep drop down to the sea: only a few feet, coincidentally, from the spot where Father would take Bel and me on long-ago evenings, to look down at the waves and recite to us: Come away, O human child, To the waters and the wild.
There were divers too, with a boat, but the water at the base of the cliffs was so choppy that it was impossible to conduct a proper search. We would have to wait, they said meaningfully, and we nodded comprehension. All this time I was expecting her to walk in the door, laughing, and explain that it had all been a prank, a set-up, a misunderstanding. But she didn’t; nor did she wash up on the shore; and after a week the coroner filed a verdict of death by misadventure.
At the service at the tiny church, her absence only added to the already sharp air of unreality. There was a curious sense of rehearsal to the proceedings (but for whom? for what?); people were wary with their grief. Mother worked hard to counter this and give the occasion the appropriate gravitas. The actors in their orgy of lamentation; the college-friends from Trinity; the girls I knew from her school yearbooks, already marked a little by time; the countless oafs, oiks, nitwits and pettifoggers she had dallied with against my advice; the litany of bumptious uncles and dreary second cousins, headed by that poisonous maiden aunt of Mother’s, who only seemed to come alive at times like this; friends of the Family, with a capital F: society types one had met only once or twice, the shiny-headed fellow with all the supermarkets, a couple of the lesser Smorfetts, the Earl of somewhere-or-other, who at a do many years ago had been sick down Mother’s décolletage – she greeted every one of them with a smile and a heartfelt word of thanks; she was so good at these things.
That night she assembled the theatre people and told them that the family would prefer to be left alone for a while; and it was only when they had gone that I realized that ‘the family’ now meant just the two of us, and our slight retinue.
The house seemed to grow bigger in the silence of the succeeding afternoons, bigger and colder, no matter how many fires were lit; one felt, as one rattled purposelessly through it, a little like an Arctic explorer trekking through some icy wasteland, where the only sources of warmth were endless cups of tea, and the convalescent dog licking one’s hand. Vuk and Zoran had retired to the garden shed, where they could be heard very quietly rehearsing ‘You Are My Sunshine’; Mirela stayed in her room and did not come out. It became possible to spend the whole day without speaking to anyone.
Occasionally I’d meet Mother in her dressing gown, on the stairs or in the hall with a whiskey glass in her hand, and we’d exchange a few desultory lines about the cobwebs, or the dust. Mrs P cooked meals that nobody ate, that sat all night long on the dining-room table; she cleaned and dusted and hoovered from dawn till dusk, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Every day more of the house was given over to shadows. Older forces were reasserting themselves now; we did little to resist.
Most of the time I’d sit up in Bel’s bedroom and flick through her yearbooks, or old photographs predating her ban. In one of them she sat with her arms thrown around the anonymous dog, as if pleading, on its behalf, for mercy; and I wondered if she’d never let go of that childhood idea of the world as a place where nothing could be held on to, where every step was on thin ice, where every sunset might be the last; if we’d never managed to convince her otherwise. Sitting there in an aureole of pale November sunshine, I’d look around the room as if seeing it for the first time, as every surface – the rosewood doors of the wardrobe, the ruched velvet of the curtains, the satin sheen of a half-dozen formal dresses – became a tableau on which her image appeared and fled from just as my eye lit on it, dancing capriciously from point to point until I was too dizzy and tired to chase it any more and I laid my head down on the pillow, with the sunshine like a friendly palm on my cheek, and the smell of her so close; and then I would smile, for how silly it seemed, here among her warm sheets, that she could be gone, how like a storybook with the wrong ending, here on the mattress that was the raft that we had sailed on so many Sunday afternoons, down tumbling rapids and shady meanders, to St Petersburg and Timbuktu, to Narnia and Never-Never Land…
Until one day I went in, and the things had gone back to being merely things. It was as if overnight some spirit had left them; I found myself in a roomful of anonymous objects, a rabble of wood and plastic that no longer had anything to do with anything, waiting to be gone through and put in boxes, or thrown away. That was when I realized I had to go.
By chance, the day I chose to return to Bonetown was the day the builders came in bulldozers to demolish Old Man Thompson’s house, and found Olivier’s body hanging from the remotest end of the verandah. He had been there for some time; the auction-house people must have missed him when they were clearing out the interior.
The builders had to cut him down. They were rattled and they left off work for the day to come in and sit in our kitchen. They hadn’t heard about Thompson’s death, or the rival claim for the estate that Olivier had refused to challenge. I explained it to them and they shook their heads. ‘It would have had to’ve been knocked down whether your man had sold it or not, Mr H. That place is only waitin for a stray spark to go up like a matchbox. You know the way with these old places. Just to put in new wiring you’d have to rip up so much of it it’s hardly worth it. Cheaper in the long run to knock it all down and start again. No point gettin upset about it.’
The new development was being called Romanov Arbour: five luxury residences with gym and sauna, each one named after a different Russian writer: the Pushkin, the Tolstoy, the Gogol and so on. They had already been pre-sold for record sums.
‘Computer money, Mr H,’ the builders said. ‘Give these people a place with an electric fence and a foreign-sounding name and the sky’s the limit.’ They didn’t like it, but as they said, you couldn’t get too upset about these things: especially being a builder, especially in Dublin. Anyway, this was their last job. They had saved enough money to get out of the rat race.
‘Out?’ I said.
‘Mexico,’ they said. In the New Year they were taking their equipment and moving out to join some crowd who had set up their own state in the jungle of the Chiapas Mountains. The leader wore a black balaclava that he never took off. ‘He says it’s a mirror,’ the builders told me, ‘for the faces of the dispossessed.’
‘Must get awfully stuffy, though,’ I said. ‘You know, it being the jungle and everything.’
‘Someone’s got to do it,’ they said, climbing into their bulldozers. ‘So long, Mr H! Vive la révolution!’
I never thought of Bonetown as anything more than a temporary solution. Yet the longer I stayed, the more the idea of living away from Frank came to trouble me. It wasn’t that he said anything, nor
indeed that he did anything; it was more the basic fact of him that was reassuring. He seemed to prop things up, somehow: he was like a buttress, holding up a very important wall.
It seemed to make a kind of sense, moreover, being back amid the junk, the discarded pieces of failed lives. So I brought over the piano from home in his van, and squeezed it into the living room, and in the evenings after work – as Droyd, to whom Frank was teaching the rudiments of Panel Beating, hammered away at the kennel he was making for An Evening of Long Goodbyes, and Laura hung pictures of flowers in wooden frames from Habitat, or combed the day’s salvage for treasures that might fit the colour scheme she was devising for the apartment, and beneath the window the pushers pushed and the addicts grovelld, and Frank snored gently, patriarchally in front of the muted television news – I tinkered with fragments of melodies that had come to me, or that perhaps I had heard somewhere before: on Bel’s record player, maybe, the Dylan fellow, or the woman with the grace notes who sang the song about the dishwasher and the coffee percolator. And one day I stopped at the front door and, with the lipstick I had never given back to her, added to the graffiti a bright-red C.
‘Charm the Homeless,’ read a reedy voice behind me. I turned to see a scruffy boy in a sweater. It took me a moment to recognize him without his trolley and his accomplice: and before I could ask him where they had gone, he had scurried away.
I had taken that job, in Frank’s friend’s warehouse: I worked the late shift, from two o’clock till half past ten, readying everything for pick-up the next day. The warehouse was the distribution centre for a company that manufactured uniforms. They made them in Africa then shipped them here to be delivered to various points about the country. My job was to separate them into individual orders: with my billhook plucking each item from rails that went all the way up to the ceiling, packing the goods into boxes I had assembled earlier, checking off names and addresses against triplicate order forms. The only other worker was a deaf-mute called Rosco who generally left me alone. It was peaceful there, among the aisles of empty pants and jackets – like a museum, I thought, a museum of the present. Usually by nine o’clock or so, everything was done; and when I had swept the floor and assembled a few dozen boxes for tomorrow, I would retire to a chair and a rickety writing desk I had stowed away at the end of the nurses’ aisle; and hidden by their crisp white hospital skirts and tunics, begin to write.