The Salesman

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Someone to see you, Billy.’

  ‘In there?’

  ‘Yeah. Fuck-head’s gone out. I showed your visitor into his lair. He said it was personal.’

  A wave of shock rippled through my stomach as I opened the door. Inside the office, Superintendent Duignan was standing at the window and staring down at the street with one finger on the venetian blinds.

  ‘Duignan,’ I said. ‘Something up?’

  He turned. I saw him clocking my face. ‘Not at all,’ he smiled. ‘Just passing. Thought I’d look in on you.’

  I came in and closed the door. He sat down on the edge of the desk, offered me a cigarette, lit one himself. He smiled like a man who had learned to smile from a textbook. ‘You look like you’re after been in the wars there, Mr Sweeney.’

  ‘I hopped my head off a door at home. And then cut myself shaving.’

  He clicked his tongue and nodded. ‘So tellus, how was your trip to Lourdes?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t make it in the end. Came down with some bug.’

  He glanced around the room as though looking for an ashtray. ‘God, I don’t believe you. After it was booked and everything?’ He tapped his ash into his cupped palm.

  ‘Yes.’

  He clicked his tongue again. ‘That’s unfortunate, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ it is.’

  ‘You look a bit under the weather all right, now you mention it.’

  ‘Yes. I haven’t been the best.’

  He pulled a wincing face. ‘Well, I’d a touch of that bad auld thing myself there recently. Sweats and shakes. Nasty. Touch of the runs.’ The dead smile appeared again. ‘After a few days I could have shat through the eye of a needle, if you pardon me.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And the doctors are an awful waste of time and money, aren’t they? Mine keeps telling me I’m to give up work and go live in the country.’

  ‘That’d be good right enough.’

  ‘The country,’ he scoffed. ‘Sure that’d finish me off for good, Mr Sweeney. I’m a city boy. Like yourself. Pure Liffey water flowing in the veins.’

  A mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket. Without taking his eyes off me for even a moment, he took it out and switched it off. I felt my heart thud.

  ‘And you’ve no news for me yourself, Mr Sweeney?’

  ‘No. No news.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Funny. I heard you did have a bit of news.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  He took a long drag on his cigarette and started blowing smoke-rings through the air. His jaw made a soft cracking sound as he did this. ‘Come on now, Mr Sweeney. Are you not going to confess?’

  ‘To what?’

  He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Just I heard you were keeping certain company these days. That correct?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘A little bird told me there was someone new in your life. A love interest.’

  ‘Oh that. Well. I’ve met someone, yes.’

  ‘Congrats,’ he said. ‘That’s what I heard. Anyone I’d know?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘Ah well. That’s great for you anyway. But sure, don’t look so nervous about it.’

  He went back to the window and stared down again into the street, craning his neck this time. ‘And of course our mutual friend hasn’t been seen around for a few weeks now. But sure you knew that already I think.’

  I was not sure whether this was a statement or a question. I felt the muscles in my throat tighten.

  ‘No, I didn’t actually.’

  He cocked his head. ‘You haven’t heard from him at all?’

  ‘From Quinn? No. Why would I hear from him?’

  He turned and stared at me. His face creased into a laugh.

  ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean Quinn. I meant Father Seán. I heard he was out of town.’

  ‘You meant Seán?’

  He nodded. ‘Who else? That’s gas you thinking I meant Quinn, isn’t it? That’s a good one now.’ Yet again he turned to the window and peered out, chuckling gently to himself. ‘No, no, Father asked me a while back if I’d drop down to the school and have a chat with the youngsters about drugs or some damn thing. But sure then when I phoned him about it, hadn’t he bolted off to Lourdes. I was relieved, between you and me and the wall. I wouldn’t be much use at public speaking.’ He hummed a few notes of a tune that I half-recognised. ‘You’d be good at that, I’d say.’

  I tried to laugh. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d say you would. You seem very good with words. Very au fait. Your training of course.’

  ‘My training?’

  ‘Well, your line of work I mean. I’d love to have that’ – he paused and rubbed his middle finger against his thumb – ‘I don’t know, that confidence you have. I’d say now, you could sell snow to the eskimos, Mr Sweeney.’

  He nodded a few times, his eyes still on the street.

  ‘My problem is I get confused,’ he shrugged. ‘Sometimes I don’t say exactly what I intend to say, you know? But then I suppose even you must get confused sometimes.’

  ‘I’m sure I do. Though a good salesman tries to keep a clear mind.’

  ‘Of course he does. Like a good policeman. But still, it’s gas you getting confused when I said our friend hadn’t been seen around for a few weeks. When I put it like that, I mean.’

  ‘Well, it’s as you said. Seánie went off to Lourdes a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Yes. But the bould Quinn didn’t go missing a few weeks ago though, did he, Mr Sweeney? He went missing last October, isn’t that right? That’s why I was surprised.’

  Suddenly I began to have the definite sensation that he was watching my reflection in the window. I felt his eyes on me. My palms moistened. I plucked one of the knobs of toilet paper from my chin and threw it into the bin. ‘Well, I don’t know what I was thinking. I got mixed up.’

  He sniffed and rubbed his nostrils. ‘You see, I was right. Even you get confused. Ah well, that could happen to a bishop, I suppose. Or a young pope on his holidays, as they say.’

  ‘Superintendent Duignan,’ I said. ‘Do you mind me asking why you’re looking out that window?’

  He turned to me and smiled again. ‘Can you keep a secret, Mr Sweeney?’

  ‘I don’t know. It depends.’

  ‘I’d say you can. I’d say you’re very discreet. Are you?’

  ‘What should I be discreet about?’

  He said nothing for a moment, just regarded me closely with a sad, baggy expression. ‘Well, y’see, I’m a fugitive from justice, Mr Sweeney.’

  His eyebrows went up and down. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his car keys and dangled them.

  ‘Double yellows,’ he said. ‘I’m illegally parked.’

  After he had gone, and I had spent ten minutes calming down in the bathroom, Hopper and Liam gleefully showed me the mountain of paperwork in my mail tray, also the exciting new screen saver which Hopper had put on my computer without my asking – a slightly nauseating illusion of moving at high speed through a cluster of stars. I did not like it much, but I sat down to the desk and managed to get through a surprising amount of work before O’Keeffe swanned in like the Prince of Darkness around half-past eleven and announced that it was good to have me back. I could not believe the new groovy hairstyle. For one awful moment I was certain he was wearing some kind of Afro wig. He took a long look at my face.

  ‘So this new mott of yours is into a bit of S and M, Billy, is she?’

  ‘You’ve a great sense of humour, Hugh,’ I said. ‘Anyone ever tell you that?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘And so does your fuckin’ hairdresser,’ added Hopper, under his breath.

  I spent the rest of the day doing the shops in town and taking orders. I sold well enough – we were doing special prices for the pre-Christmas buy-in – but the afternoon passed very slowly. I could not stop
thinking about Duignan’s visit to the office. What did it mean? What did he know? Around lunchtime, I went into Stephen’s Green and sat for a while by the fountain. The fresh air helped me to think more clearly, my fear quickly faded. From then on, for the rest of the afternoon, whenever anyone in a shop asked how I had been lately, I kept getting this strange and strong compulsion to own up to exactly what had been going on. It occurred to me just how exquisitely pleasurable it would have been to see their amazed expressions, their startled, disbelieving gawps. No doubt they would all think that I was joking. But I did not tell them, of course, I just nodded like a fool and said everything was fine and couldn’t be better and how’s tricks with yourself. Like I could care.

  I got home around six and found him in the living-room again. He had his feet up on the coffee-table and was watching some sitcom, a squat pyramid of empty beer cans on the floor beside him. The ashtray was so full of butts it looked like some terrible spiny creature from under the sea. He did not even raise his head when I came in.

  ‘My husband mean?’ exclaimed the middle-aged woman on the screen. ‘He made me breastfeed the kids to save money.’

  Quinn chortled lazily through his teeth.

  ‘Make us a cup of tea there, Homer,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, Homer. Make us a cup of fuckin’ tea.’

  I put down my briefcase and looked at him. ‘You could at least use the little word, couldn’t you?’

  ‘The little word?’

  ‘Yes, Quinn. The little word.’

  ‘Oh right. Make us a cup of tea, Homer. Now.’

  I was not at all sure just how much longer this could go on.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the middle of August, Lizzie, Franklin and the twins arrived from Australia, but the way things worked out, apart from one or two quick lunches in town, I think a day out at the zoo, we did not spend much time together. For a while they stayed with their friends down in Wicklow, and then they were busy, finding a place to live in Dublin, arranging schools, looking for work. Whenever I did see Lizzie she would have pocketfuls of notes and scrawled reminders, immigration forms, passport applications. She got one or two portrait commissions. Franklin quickly found a part-time job writing computer programmes while he searched around for a band to join. There was one tense enough moment, when Conal and Erin asked if they could come out to the house some day soon. I told them yes, in a little while. This worried me greatly for a short time, but then, on reflection, I knew that Lizzie would not really want to visit the house; she had not been there for several years before she left for Australia; the night before going she had got drunk and told me she hoped never to see it again, it held nothing but painful memories for her. They rented one of those new small apartments in the tax-incentive zone on the south quays, with a good view of the river and the roofscape of the north city. In small ways it was made clear that they had a life which did not include me. I left them to it. I was happy enough to stay at home.

  Now that he was here and haunting the place I found that I was spending most of my spare time in this room. I mean the small room downstairs at the front, looking out on to the drive, where we used to have the piano and the sideboard when you were kids. He did not come in here much, he seemed to prefer the living-room, I suppose because that had the television and the video machine. When the builders left last year I did not bother moving anything much back into the small room: I have scarcely anything but books in here now, also a stack of reclaimed oak planks the builders did not use, a box of leftover floorboards intended for the stairs, a few sacks of cement, a roll of fibreglass insulation. Sometimes it feels like living inside the ark.

  I have always liked this room, love, although God knows it has seen a few things. It has a history. The day we moved into the house the old rector told me that it had been his meditation room, though little enough meditation ever got done in here by your mother or me. There on the ceiling you can still see the stains from thrown cups of coffee and glasses of beer. The window-sill is chipped from the time she flung a half-full bottle of gin at me. There are even a few drops of blood on the carpet over by the fireplace. A person with an eye for a story could learn a lot from looking around this room.

  This is the room your mother and I were in when she finally told me she was leaving, and for good this time. The sun was shining hard through the blinds that afternoon. Your mother was wearing a smartly cut black dress that made her look very slim, and she had around her slender neck a small silver crucifix which I had bought for her on our first trip to Spain. When she moved as she spoke the sunlight seemed to catch the cross, or perhaps the chain, and it sent spangles of whiteness dancing across her breasts and face. And because of the glow of the sun behind her, there was a filigree-thin line of golden light all around her body, like a distended halo, or a mysterious force field in a science-fiction film. It was the strangest thing. Her dark eyes were shining also and her lips moved with ease as she told me in a calm and measured voice that she did not love me any more and that when she thought about it she was not completely sure if she had ever loved me. Certainly, she did not now. She had no feelings at all for me now. Our marriage was over.

  She looked magnificent as she told me all this. I do not think I had never seen her so alive, so sure or self-possessed. There was an elegance about the way she spoke and moved; I kept thinking how appropriate her name was. It was over between us, she told me; she would not live like this any more. She actually offered me a cigarette.

  I could hardly hold my fingers steady as I took it. I felt so scared by what she was saying that the feeling was almost pleasurable; so this is what happens, I found myself thinking. This is what happens when you finally drive away the person you love, this is what loss feels like. We were here now, we had arrived, as I suppose we must have known for a long time we would. It was not as actors often perform it. This was no punch in the lungs, no sudden inner scream. It came in rivulets or gentle cascades, this sensation, and as I smoked the cigarette I tried to let the feeling come to some kind of conclusion, but every time it did seem to bubble to an end, there was something else behind it.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Grace,’ I said to her, brilliantly, and I think I took her hand. She gazed up at the ceiling as though she was expecting to read something written there.

  ‘I swear we’ll work things out, Grace. Just give me one more chance. Please.’

  But she had already made up her mind. I could not believe it. I mean this literally, by the way. I could not – or did not – believe what she was saying to me. I thought that any minute she would change her mind and I would persuade her to stay, as I had succeeded in doing so many times before. I am a salesman, I remember thinking, even as she was carefully explaining the fact that she had at last decided to go. I am a salesman. I should be able to sell this.

  But then she was suddenly talking about arrangements, what would happen about the cars, what she had in mind about money for you and Lizzie, having an agreement drawn up for a legal separation. She had been to a solicitor in town; he had recommended a number of barristers. She had found a flat in Dun Laoghaire and intended to move in when the tenants left in a month. She would need me to help with the deposit. She wanted nothing from the house, she told me, nothing at all. In the meantime she would be at her father’s. She would need some money for Lizzie and you immediately. I could send it on to Harrington Street, or she would ask her father to drive out and collect it some night. I felt the anger boil up inside me until I puked it out.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you think I’m paying for Lizzie, do you? You’d like that all right. You must think I’m some prize eejit, Grace.’

  ‘Thanks, Billy,’ she said. ‘If I had any last doubts, you just took them away.’

  She walked out and closed the door. I heard her going up the stairs and then coming back down with you two, who were laughing lightly as I recall, as she led you outside. I do not know whether you realised what was happening. I
was expecting the front door to slam closed, but it did not. I kept waiting for that thunderous slam, the sound which more than any other had punctuated our marriage, but it never came. I heard her car start up and then the noise of the tyres on the gravel.

  The clock ticked on the wall. The pipes under the floor made that soft coughing sound as the central heating sputtered on. A few minutes later I went into the hall. The front door was open wide. The wind had whipped up; dry leaves and dust were blowing through the air. There was a black ragged dog I had never seen before in the driveway, lying on its side and wagging its tail. Three rooks were singing on the bird table. And Grace and you two were gone.

  I closed the front door and came back into this room. I suppose that I thought she would be back before too long. I imagined her in the car – for some reason I had a sharp mental flash of her hands on the wheel – and I remember now, all this time later, that in my mind I saw the car as though from very far above, in miniature, moving further and further away from me across a crested and hilly landscape. I put on a record and then another. I thought about how I would behave when she got back. I began to plan out all the cutting things I would say.

  A good salesman always plans out the things he will say. He can rarely afford the risk of spontaneity.

  After a while I switched on the television. It must have been a Friday night, because The Late Late Show was on. I recall Gay Byrne moving around the studio with a hand-held microphone and a basket of giant jigsaw pieces, everybody laughing, the cameras gliding like graceful ships across the glossy-looking white floor, a soldier singing a romantic song to a blushing woman in the audience. When it was over I kept watching, until all the programmes had ended and the national anthem had been played and there was nothing on the screen except a grey matrix of lines and dots and no sound but for a high sibilant hiss which reminded me of the sea. Still I waited for her.