The Mark and the Void (15 page)

‘You said that the last time.’

‘Yeah, but last time we should have said we needed fourteen billion. I don’t know where we got seven, frankly. Some trainee probably just made it up.’

‘But you see’ – I am struggling to keep my patience – ‘that’s exactly why they’ve asked me to write this report. They don’t trust the figures you’re giving them.’

‘Right, right,’ he says, his attention wandering across the plaza again; then, as I open a folder and pass a spreadsheet over to him,
‘Ah, here, don’t be dumping this stuff on me, not on a bloody Friday afternoon.’

‘I just wanted to know if you can clarify some things.’

He rolls his eyes, presses his lips, as if I had brought him to lunch and then tried to sell him a watch.

‘This figure here, do you know what it relates to?’

‘What, off the top of my head?’

‘It’s fifty million euro.’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Gandon.’

‘Gandon is here. Whitcroft is here. Dreyer’s, Gane International, all those are accounted for. But this money here, there’s no indication where it’s going. Instead someone’s tried to bury it by hiding it inside another transaction.’

Bruce Gaffney flicks his teeth with his fingers to produce the first two bars of ‘La Marseillaise’. ‘Must be one of those things, then, mustn’t it?’

‘What things?’

‘The things they have on aeroplanes. That they dig up when it crashes. What do you call it? A black box.’

‘A black box?’

‘Yeah, a black box.’

‘You are telling me nobody knows what this fifty million might relate to.’

He shrugs, looks me full on. The plaza passes translucent in his glasses, veiling his eyes.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ I say.

‘Oh Jesus!’ He throws up an exasperated hand. ‘Maybe Miles took a few quid out to invest or something. It’s a bank, Claude, it’s a highly complicated fucking, you know, operation. I mean, are you going to put every single rubber fucking band into this bloody report?’

‘With so many irregularities it will be hard to find a buyer.’

‘Fine, fuck the buyers. It’ll sort itself out. Like I’ve told you for the last two fucking years, what Royal has is a minor cash-flow
problem. The real issue is that we’re being made the scapegoats. We’re carrying the can for the whole country turning to shit. Well, fuck that, Claude. Fuck that. It’s not like we went around putting a gun to people’s heads and telling them to take out a second mortgage. Everybody partied. Now they’re blaming us for their hangover.’ The flare of temper is quickly damped down; he becomes affable again, solicitous. He leans in closer to the table. ‘Look, I know the books are a bit of a mess. It’s fucking Royal, what do you expect? But the fact of the matter is the place is
sound.
I’m in there every day. I can tell you with my hand on my heart, it’s sound. Now I know you’re a straight shooter, I’m not going to tell you what to put in your report. But I would ask, as a colleague, that you give the full story. Don’t just be banging on exclusively about anomalies or black boxes or whatever the fucking secretary dropped behind the radiator.’

As he gets up I ask him about Dublex.

‘What about Dublex?’ he says.

‘Do they have a holding in Royal?’

This time his ignorance seems genuine. ‘First I’ve heard of it. Walter crawls out of his gravel pit the odd time for a round of golf with the board, but that’s about the size of it.’ Now a smile crosses his face. ‘Here, have you seen these lads dressed as zombies outside the new HQ? It’s fucking classic, there’s a zombie Miles and everything, this little lad with a silver wig and this suit covered in shit? Hilarious.’ He pauses judiciously at the door. ‘See, that’s the kind of protest they should have in Greece instead of chucking petrol bombs. They’re making their point but at the same time giving everyone a bit of a laugh. Fuck knows we could use one. Good to see you, Claude. If there’s anything else I can do for you, you know where to ask.’ He points at his bottom, then hurries (‘Fuck’s sake!’) back into the rain.

I gather the documents spread over the table, tap them straight, set them down again. There is nothing I can do that will make them make sense; they are not a black box, but a black hole, into
which time, trust, meaning, other people’s money, disappear endlessly.

‘Another coffee?’ Ariadne has reappeared at my shoulder.

I smile stiffly. ‘I should go back to work.’

‘You can wait till rain stops,’ she says, and then, ‘Hey – you want to try something?’ Before I can reply she has whisked away, and then whisked back again with a plate. ‘Baklava. It’s my grandmother’s recipe.’

She hovers as I lift a forkful to my mouth. The cake is sweet and sticky, with crunches of almond and cinnamon. It’s hard to eat with her watching me, and also hard to swallow, and speak. Nevertheless, I am able to declare, mostly honestly, that I like it.

‘My grandmother makes it much better. I think it’s maybe the honey she use.’

‘No, it’s good,’ I say, taking another bite. ‘
Savoureux
, as we say in France.’

‘In Greek, we say
nostimo.
Which means, hmm, something you want to come back to. You know, like nostalgia, the pain to want to return home.’ She laughs. ‘That’s Greece, you cannot even eat a cake without the past come looking for you.’

I smile. How green her eyes are, and bright; looking into them is like walking through an enchanted forest. It strikes me that I am alone with her; I feel an odd sense of unburdenment, as if we are two characters in a play meeting in the wings while the scenery is changed.

‘So, you are from Greece?’ I say, wincing internally at my accent, the dinosaur-clomp of the words. ‘What has made you come to Ireland?’

‘Ha ha, you watch the news?’

‘It has not always been like this.’

‘No, until this year we cover it up. And you, you’re from France?’

‘Yes,’ I say. There is a pause; I realize in horror that I have exhausted my entire conversational repertoire.

‘And your friend too?’ She nods at the empty seat.

‘He is not my friend.’

‘Not the man, today. The other one. Doesn’t wear a suit, always in black.’

‘Oh, him. No, he is Irish.’

‘Why doesn’t he come here any more?’

‘He, ah … well, he lost his job.’

‘Ah, that’s a shame.’ She appears genuinely dismayed. ‘I always liked to see you two talking. It look like you are coming up with a secret plan. I thought someday maybe you’d call me over, make me a part of it. “Okay, Ariadne, here’s what we’re gonna do.” ’

‘We almost did,’ I say.

‘Well, if you ever make another, let me tell you I am a very good person to be included.’

‘Is that right,’ I say levelly, though I feel like I’m in a car that is spinning out of control.

‘Yes, because, for a beginning, I can make special cake with magical powers of returning the past. I can paint the abstract paintings with magical powers of not selling. And, hmm, I can use my Greekness to give the etymologies of many words, very useful quality.’

‘Give me an example.’

She draws herself up straight, knits her brows, takes a moment. ‘So,’ she says. ‘This word
psyche
, that means your mind or your soul or your spirit. In Greece, in ancient times,
psyche
was the word for a butterfly. And in those times they think, when you are nervous about something, or you feel something intensely, you have inside you a
psyche
. And then slowly the meaning changed, and this
psyche
becomes something immortal that is essential to you.’

‘But that’s how the idea of the soul began? From butterflies in the stomach?’

‘Or you can look at it the other way round,’ she says, fixing me in her green gaze. ‘You can say these moments when inside you
is jumping – like when you’re talking to somebody you like – that’s how you know you have a soul.’

And she smiles, and I smile, and her eyes glow at me, and with a flurry of heartbeats I have the indescribable but irrefutable sense that I am back in the story again, or that life and story have somehow come together in one impossibly fragile moment, like a
psyche
, a butterfly lighting on my palm …

Raised voices can be heard as I approach the door, but this time I resist the urge to eavesdrop. I knock stoutly; after a series of rattles and chunks it opens a fraction. Paul’s beleaguered face falls further when he sees me.

‘Oh God, you again? I told you I was sorry, can’t you just leave me alone?’

‘Wait!’ I jam my foot in the door. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about!’

‘Just for a minute. Please. You owe me that much.’

He begins to speak, then relents. ‘Okay, come on.’

Clizia is by the refrigerator, brandishing, for reasons I do not inquire into, a frying pan. The air is decidedly fraught, and a repetitive croaking issues from the next room.

‘I hope I am not interrupting …’

‘Haven’t interrupted anything, Claude. Just enjoying a peaceful, non-violent breakfast here with my totally functional family. Can I get you something? A coffee, maybe? Clizia, would you mind fixing our guest a coffee?’

‘We don’t have coffee,’ she says.

‘Well, how about tea then? Tea all right with you, Claude?’

‘Whatever is convenient,’ I say.

‘No tea either,’ Clizia says. Her accent makes everything she says sound contemptuous, as if every statement were preceded by a long pull on a cigarette and a defiant billow of smoke. Paul half-turns in his chair. ‘We don’t have tea or coffee?’

‘You vant me to steal some?’ she says.

‘A glass of water would be perfect,’ I say.

Remington wanders through the bedroom door, burping.
Paul pours a glass of brownish water and plonks it down in front of me. ‘It tastes a bit strange, but we think it’s basically okay,’ he says. ‘Okay, so what do you want to talk to me about? Remington, for God’s sake, stop burping.’

‘It’s my
burp-
day.’

‘It’s incredibly annoying,’ Paul says. ‘Sorry, Claude, go on.’

‘I want to ask you about Ariadne.’

‘The waitress? What about her?’

I tell him about our conversation in the café yesterday, its strangely pregnant undertone.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But what’s that got to do with me?’

‘That time in the Ark you said she would be the perfect love interest for the Everyman.’

‘Yes.’

‘So I want to know – what happens next?’

‘Next?’

‘In the story.’

Paul looks mystified. ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ he says.

‘What I’m getting at is, I have somehow found myself in the plot of your novel. And I want to know what I should do.’

‘You’re asking me for love advice, is that it?’

‘I’m asking what you think will happen next in the novel of the Everyman.’

‘There is no novel,’ he says, with a touch of desperation. ‘We’ve been through this.’

‘What if I asked you to write it,’ I say.

There is a long silence; even Remington stops his burping. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Paul says.

‘No joke. When we spoke in the café you told me my life lacked a story. Obviously you had your own agenda. Nevertheless you were right. What I am asking you now is to write that story.’

He glances back at his wife, as if to assure himself he isn’t dreaming. Leaned against the fridge, Clizia stares down at me
impassively. In the morning light, the apartment’s veneer of opulence is thinner, and I can see signs of decay all around: drawers off their runners, nails poking jaggedly from floorboards, a long silver split in the obsidian countertop.

Paul gets up, backs away to the sink, looks at the floor. ‘I’m very flattered that you should ask me,’ he says slowly. ‘But I don’t write books any more. I told you that.’

‘I’m not talking about a book.’ I take a sip of brackish water, lean forward on my chair. ‘You said that what the Everyman needed was a love story. Now I want you to help me plot that story.’

‘In real life?’

‘In real life. Move the narrative forward, create scenes, maybe some dialogue. Essentially, nothing different from what you have done before, only that, instead of putting my life into your book, you would, so to speak, put your book into my life.’

Remington burps thoughtfully. Paul pulls his hands through his hair and down his face, as if I have set him some fiendish mathematical problem. ‘Claude – look – I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that is a really fucking weird idea.’

‘It’s unusual,’ I agree. ‘But it is quite rational. When we want medical advice, we go to our doctor. When we want financial advice, we speak to our broker. We are happy to delegate many areas of our lives to people better qualified. Why should relationships be any different? When we fall in love, why not have a specialist to advise us? Someone who understands human nature, who can help us to express the right feelings?’

‘Pff, is crazy talk,’ Clizia says.

‘Of course, I would be willing to pay whatever you feel such a service merited,’ I add.

‘Not interested,’ Clizia says.

‘Hold on,’ Paul intervenes. ‘Didn’t you hear him? He says he’s going to pay!’

‘It will never work,’ she says. ‘No one falls in love with a disguise.’

‘On the contrary,’ I say, ‘people fall in love with disguises all the time.’

‘And what happens when this woman finds out truth? You want this man make you scripts for the rest of your life? He is not even any longer writer!’

‘Well, hold on a second,’ Paul objects. ‘I can write if I want. If someone’s going to pay me, then I’ll write.’

‘Ha, you have not written word in seven years!’

‘Look, would you please just – Jesus, Remington, what are you doing to that rug?’

‘I want to see if the grey bits taste different from the blue bits.’

With a gurgle of exasperation, his father picks him up and carries him to the sink, where he begins wiping fluff from his tongue.

‘If you want to become close to this woman, you bring her a nice bunch of flowers,’ Clizia says to me. ‘Not idiot conspiracy.’

‘It’s his money, isn’t it? He can do what he wants with it,’ Paul says, over his shoulder. ‘Look, this is impossible. Come on, Claude, let’s go somewhere we can talk about this in peace.’

‘Wait!’ With a swift sidestep, Clizia blocks his passage. ‘Bring the boy!’

‘But we’re trying to have a meeting!’

‘He needs fresh air.’

‘Clizia, the whole reason we’re going somewhere else is that neither of you will be there!’

Clizia folds her arms.

‘Can we go to the park, Dad?’ Remington tugs his sleeve. ‘Can we feed the ducks?’

‘Oh Christ,’ Paul says. ‘Sorry about this, Claude.’

‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘The park is a perfectly good place for a meeting.’

Remington runs to the fridge and comes back with a bag which he presents to his father. Paul looks displeased.

‘We have no tea or coffee, but we’ve got a whole loaf of stale
bread?’ he says. ‘We’ve nothing for the humans, but a fridge full of food for the ducks?’

Clizia chooses not to hear this.

Scowling, Paul puts Remington’s coat on and leads us out to the hall. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Claude,’ he says, pulling the door closed. ‘Never marry a lap dancer.’

‘Right,’ I say uncertainly, and follow them down the dimly lit corridor.

The lift is still broken, and on the landing the plastic sheeting that covers the portal to the unfinished wing whispers and sways. ‘Are there other people living here?’ I ask.

‘That depends what you mean by
living
,’ he says, starting down the stairs. ‘And by
people
.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘Ours is the only apartment they actually managed to sell. We bought it off the plans.’ He laughs. ‘That was the boom for you. A first-time novelist and an ex-stripper could get half a million from the bank for an apartment that didn’t exist yet. Now we’re in so much negative equity we’ll probably be stuck here for the rest of our lives.’

‘It’s a nice apartment.’

‘It’s a classic Celtic Tiger piece of shit. There’s a Jacuzzi, but the water’s brown. There’s a heated towel-rail in every room, but the radiators don’t work. That’s not the worst of it, either.’ He pushes through a heavy metal door, to a vast, inky space; at first I have the bizarre notion that we are underwater, then in the distance I spy a car. ‘Look at that.’ He points to the wall. A long, ragged crack stretches all the way from the ground to the ceiling. ‘And there’s another one, on that side. And another one there.’

‘What happened?’ It looks as if there has been an earthquake.

‘Pyrite. In the walls, in the foundations. It expands when it gets wet. They might as well have built the place with icing sugar.’

‘So …’ I frown, not wanting to draw the obvious conclusion.

‘The whole building’s worthless. Totally worthless. Ten years
or so it’ll probably fall down with us in it. Until then, of course, the bank still wants its mortgage repayments.’

‘Dad, can I have the keys?’

Remington runs off to a point right in the centre of the grey morass, where he raises his arm stiffly, like an orchestra conductor; in its corner, the car bleeps and flashes obediently. He scurries over to it and opens the door.

‘There’s nothing you can do?’

‘Not much. The builder’s gone bust. The insurance say they’re not liable. We don’t have the money to bring it to court.’ He climbs into the car. Remington has already belted himself in at the back. ‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘As a former novelist, I do get some enjoyment out of living in a giant metaphor. Pyrite. Fool’s fucking gold. If you put it in a book, no one would believe it.’

He starts the engine; we pull out into the wan sunshine. The neighbourhood doesn’t look much better by day. A new selection of garbage lines the footpath; the street is deserted, but in the heavily graffitied playground a succession of cadaverous figures shuffles up to a man in a leather jacket, while a solitary child amuses itself on the broken merry-go-round.

‘Dad, how many ducks are there in the park?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘Do you think there was ever a boy who had a pet duck and he kept it in his bedroom?’

‘No, I don’t think there was.’ He cranes his head around. ‘Now, Daddy and Claude have important things to talk about, so I want you to play at being quiet, okay?’

‘Okay. Dad?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who would win in a battle between Aslan and a dinosaur?’

‘Aslan would win.’

‘Even if the dinosaur was really big?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even if he was bigger than the universe?’

‘Is this you being quiet?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Remington remembers.

The car noses on to a bridge; the river glints sullenly below us.

‘So your wife,’ I say.

‘What about her?’

I want to ask him about what he said in the hallway about marrying a lap dancer, but can’t quite summon the courage. ‘She is from Eastern Europe?’

‘That’s right. Little place called Ectovia. Used to be part of Makhtovia, then when Transvolga seceded from Makhtovia it became a subdistrict of Transvolga. Then it seceded from Transvolga, to become the Ectovian Free Democratic Republic. Though “Free” is a bit of a stretch, they’ve had the same president for the last fifteen years. He used to be a carpet salesman. In fact, he sold us the rug in the living room, the one Remington was licking, I don’t know if you saw it?’

‘And how did she come to be in Ireland?’

‘Well, the Ectovian economy’s been in a bad way for a long time now. No jobs, no money, young people queuing up to leave. Clizia was one of the lucky ones, she was recruited to come here and work as a waitress. But then when she arrived, she found out she’d actually been contracted to a lap-dancing club. She couldn’t get out of it till she’d paid off the people who brought her over.’

‘And is that … how you met?’

He laughs. ‘I’m afraid so. I was out celebrating my book deal with some friends; Velvet Dream’s is where we ended up. My friends got me a lap dance with Clizia as a joke. You can’t imagine how embarrassed I was, this woman who looked like she’d just come down from Mount Olympus, and she’s stuck in this little cubicle with me, doing this ridiculous … Anyway, I was so nervous I started jabbering away to her about my book, and then
she
, who’s standing there in her underwear, starts telling me about Dostoyevsky and the dialogic imagination. I didn’t even know
what the dialogic imagination was. I still don’t. But by the time I left that cubicle I was head-over-heels in love with her.’

We come off the bridge and nose our way slowly along the quay, in the opposite direction to the river.

‘In Ectovia, they take literature very seriously, that’s what I found out later. They used to have a special firing squad just for novelists.’

‘And does she still work there? In Velvet Dream’s?’ Thinking this might explain my bizarre encounter with him last week.

‘No, she hasn’t done that stuff for a long time. A couple of weeks after I met her I bought her out of her contract. Took half my advance, probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever done.’ He pauses, and then says, ‘I’m not sure she ever forgave me.’

I study his face, but in profile it’s hard to read his expression. ‘She works as a cleaner now,’ he continues. ‘Offices, private residences.’

‘Does she like it?’

‘Like it?’ He turns to me as we pull up at a traffic light. ‘Getting up at 5 a.m. to clean toilets for minimum wage?’

‘Sorry, silly question.’

‘Clizia’s got two degrees, Claude. She’s read more books than anyone I’ve ever met.’

‘Sorry.’

The light turns green. To the left, the tanks and towers and vats of the Guinness factory loom zanily over a high stone wall, like something from an alcoholic fairy tale. ‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘At least as a cleaner she doesn’t have people looking at her. She’s basically paid to be invisible. Although it’s not nearly as much as she got paid for taking her clothes off.’

‘And you?’

‘Me what?’

‘You are working too?’

‘I have a few irons in the fire.’

‘A book?’

He wags his head. ‘That ship has sailed. Maybe in a country like Clizia’s, where they’ve only got three hours of electricity a day, you can still make a living writing books. Here people don’t want them any more. They’ve got other things. Phones. Games. Porn. Horse tranquillizers. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying, these are the market realities.’