Maisie stayed on the farm all her life. She married a local man, whom Alexander knew as Uncle Johnny. They remained childless. Of that generation, everyone is dead now except Maisie; and she being without natural heirs, the state of her health and the condition of her will are matters of keen interest to the Gradys and the Murphys. Forty acres of good land in Ballyryan were always valuable. Back in previous decades, when nearly everyone was still poor, the relatives would have bloodily murdered each other for that land. Nowadays, the need is less urgent, but the appetite is whetted. Greed is up. In monetary terms, the value of the land has surely multiplied in the boom, but it would be difficult to guess a figure, so much being dependent on the right planning permission.
Alexander rings his mother, Brigid. Given the circumstances, he expects her to have her mobile phone switched on, which is not always the case. She answers immediately.
‘I’m on the train,’ she says, her voice loud and the intonation already sliding back into the Galway accent.
‘Helena told me about Maisie’s fall.’
‘Did she fall or was she pushed?’ Brigid asks rashly, before switching to a quieter tone. ‘I’d better watch what I’m saying. You never know who might be listening. Did I ever tell you the story about the two girls speaking Irish in the lift in the Empire State Building?’
‘Why would anybody push her down the stairs?’
‘Why do you think? And who do you think? Sure, they’ve been waiting for that woman to die for twenty years. I always thought it was very suspicious the way Tommy Óg Grady was there the time she fell and broke her leg.’
‘He drove her to the hospital!’
‘Yes, he did, but maybe he assisted her in falling as well.’
‘But wouldn’t he know that she would hold such a thing against him?’
‘If she knew what happened. There are ways to trip a person.’
‘I bow to your greater knowledge of these matters. . . . How long will you stay in Galway?’
‘Two or three days anyway, till I see how she is. Are you going to come down?’
‘Not straight away . . . if she’s stable. I’m busy tonight and tomorrow, and I’ve a lot on in work over the next few days. I might go down next weekend. I’d like to see her.’
‘Why are you so busy at work?’
He can hear the gear shift in his mother’s voice. She doesn’t really have any interest in his work, or in the other details of his life, but makes inquiries as a matter of course. Sometimes she compensates for her lack of interest by conducting an exaggerated interrogation, question after question, with a minimum of attention to the answers sandwiched in between.
‘The Council is meeting next week.’
‘What Council?’
‘The National Economic Advisory Council. Remember: that’s who I work for.’
‘I always forget. My children have such complicated jobs. Remind me again what you do. I’m sure somebody will ask me in Galway. They’ll think I’m an eejit if I don’t know.’
‘I do economics. I advise the government on economic policy.’
‘But surely the government would have experts for that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, I’m one of the experts.’
‘But, sure, what would you know about it?’
‘About what?’
‘About running the country.’
‘Very little.’
‘That’s my point.’
‘I’m agreeing with your point. . . . Listen, I’d better go. Call me if anything happens.’
Alexander and Julia live in a large dingy basement flat in Rathmines. When they first moved in, which – astonishingly – is eight years ago now, Julia thought it was cool and alternative. She had just broken up with her playwright boyfriend – an interim affair – and it was important to her to maintain some artistic credibility. She baulked at the idea of the small modern apartment that Alexander suggested at the time. In the years that followed, her views have gradually changed. Recently she has professed a hatred for the flat.
‘We live in a hole,’ she declared a few months ago when they were out with friends of hers.
At the time, Alexander winced at this observation because it made a hole of their home. Later he was angry, believing that she was criticising him for not being able to provide them with better accommodation. In truth, he is fairly sick of the place himself. What before was a den of spaciousness, a lovers’ private palace, has become simply ugly.
The house itself is a fine Victorian redbrick on a quiet tree-lined road. The entrance to the basement is through a creaky wrought-iron gate and down a set of steps into a little yard that he and Julia populated with a few potted plants in the early days of their domestic enthusiasm. Most of the plants are unkempt and thirsty-looking now, competing with weeds for whatever is available in the dry cracked soil. It is a cheerless assembly, apart from the resilient gorse bush, which is still in good bloom, though past its peak.
He opens the door, enters the dark low-ceilinged hallway and performs his routine of taking off his shoes and dropping them into the cupboard, along with his briefcase, from which he first removes the newspaper. Having switched to summer mode, he is wearing no overcoat. He takes off his suit jacket and carries it with him into the main room of the flat, where Julia is sitting on the sofa under the front window, flicking through a fashion magazine.
He hates her magazines, thinks they are akin to pornography, and has never been able to get used to them.
The overhead light is on. The front of the house faces north, so this room always requires artificial illumination, although there is a point on a clear summer afternoon when dazzling sunlight bounces in from an upper-storey window of a house across the road.
He flings the newspaper onto the table and sits into the armchair, provisionally – because he still has his suit trousers on and his jacket over his arm.
‘What’s up?’ he asks.
‘Nothing is up,’ she answers, without diverting attention from her magazine.
She leafs quickly through the glossy pages, eyeing the pictures. This is nearly always how she reads, as if she were searching for some particular article, although in fact she is not. Beside her lies a pile of magazines, along with a tin ashtray in which a neglected cigarette is burning away, smoke streaming up toward the yellowed ceiling. Nearby, on the brown-carpet floor, stands a glass of white wine, its belly shining with condensation. In the very first moment in which he apprehends it, Alexander finds in this thin-stemmed object, this container enclosing pale liquid, a certain beauty, a vividness – the fact of being, and of being perfectly still. And then it is gone, disappearing into the fabric of ordinariness.
Julia’s best feature is her hair. She has a thick long flood of it, in tight little curls, dark brown with a natural undertone of auburn, which glistens when freshly washed. Apart from her hair, Julia is not especially pretty. Her lips and nose are nicely formed, but her brown eyes are too big for her pale, round face. Nevertheless, she has always been an attractive woman, quick witted, confident in her own sexiness, which resides in her small curved body rather than her face. She is slow and graceful in movement. She enjoys the shapes of herself.
Seeing her now, sitting on the sofa in a cream blouse and white knickers, her pale naked legs folded beneath her, emphasising her thighs, her hair tied loosely behind her head, Alexander feels the possibility of arousal.
‘You do realise that we haven’t had sex for a couple of months,’ he says.
Julia pauses in her flicking through the pages. She reaches down to pick up her cigarette, takes a drag, makes a round with her lips and blows out the smoke.
‘Is this a new seduction technique, or are you just making conversation?’
Alexander shrugs. They both know that he has never had any seduction technique. If their bodies gravitate to each other – naturally, fo
rtuitously, deliberately – he knows what to do. But if he is coming at it cold, he has only two standard gambits. If they are not in bed, he says: ‘Do you want to go to bed?’ If they are already in bed, he says, jokily: ‘Will we have some kissing?’ In this respect, he has gotten worse over time, rather than better.
When they first got together in college, they had sex all the time, as often as possible, automatically, urgently. They never wondered whether or not to have sex, because both of them always wanted to. Even after college, when they got back together following the break-up and moved into the flat, they had sex every night, until the point when Julia said: ‘You know, we don’t have to have sex every night.’
That was the beginning of their domesticity, of their drifting away from each other physically.
‘There’s a bottle of wine open in the fridge, if you want a glass,’ she says, returning to her magazine.
‘Maisie fell down the stairs.’
‘Is she alright?’
‘She’s in a coma. I might have to go down to Galway . . . if she dies . . . or if she comes out of it.’
‘That’s a pity,’ she says, clearly indifferent.
Alexander gets up with a sigh and walks through to the bedroom. This is the one room in the flat that he likes, because it has the bed in it (his favourite zone), because it looks out onto the back garden and gets great light (if the curtains are open), and because their books are kept here in a tall stack of wooden shelves that take up most of one wall. These shelves, purchased in Habitat shortly after they moved in, are the only piece of furniture they actually own. Everything else belongs to the landlord and reeks of bedsit. For instance, the wardrobe, which Alexander now opens, is a big dark square-shouldered thing that no one has ever loved.
Alexander slips off his trousers and folds them onto a hanger, careful to ensure that the creases are perfectly parallel. He fits his jacket onto the same hanger and slips it onto the crowded wardrobe rail. When he first started work, he ignored such matters, but now he is fully programmed to office life and is careful to hang up the suit of the day every evening when he comes home, keeping it neat, stretching out the time between visits to the dry-cleaner.
He unbuttons his shirt, removes it in two practised movements, gathers it into a ball and fires it toward the waiting wicker basket at the end of the bed, where it disappears successfully into the round dark aperture. The accuracy of the throw gives him a moment of satisfaction.
Down to his socks and jocks, Alexander closes the wardrobe door and turns to face himself in the mirror on the opposite wall. Certain features attract his immediate attention: the signs of flab and sag around his belly and nipples, the sun-damage redness of his lower neck, the blurring chin line, the sad-bastard green eyes that remind him increasingly of his father.
‘Fuck you,’ he says to his reflection and turns away in anger and disgust.
He wanders back out into the hall and sticks his head into the living room.
‘Do you want to go to bed?’ he asks, trying to maintain a casual tone.
She looks up.
‘Oh, so you were seducing me,’ she says, lightly enough, watching him, pausing for thought, or for effect. ‘I have to wash my hair.’
‘There’s loads of time to wash your hair.’
‘Off out for a few beers?’ asks the taxi driver, glancing at Alexander in the rear-view mirror.
‘We’re going to a dinner party,’ Julia interjects complacently before Alexander can respond.
‘It amounts to the same thing,’ Alexander says. The term dinner party is not one he would use. ‘We’ll all be well plastered before midnight.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Julia says.
‘Well, why didn’t you volunteer to drive then?’
‘Because I’m not your chauffeur.’
The trip to Sandymount, where Paul and Karina live, is a short one, fifteen minutes, although there is enough time for a moderately diverting monologue from the taxi driver about how Britain will have to join the euro because they are losing too much revenue from Irish Manchester United fans, who are no longer prepared to journey across to Old Trafford because of (a) the hassle of changing money, and (b) the crap exchange rate.
Alexander is generally happy enough to engage with taxi drivers, once the driver is of the friendly cheerful know-it-all variety, rather than the odious foul-mouthed know-it-all variety. When Julia is with him, he plays up his man-of-the-people aspect just to annoy her. Julia doesn’t like her taxi drivers to be too familiar. She prefers the silent morose strain, newly released from Mountjoy Jail.
‘I’d be surprised if Irish Man U fans were the decisive factor in a decision by Britain to join the euro,’ says Alexander, unable to remove entirely the note of condescension in his voice. ‘But who knows? You could be right. Gordon Brown has these five tests that have to be passed. Maybe he should add another one based on Ryanair traffic volumes between Manchester and Dublin.’
‘I’m telling you. They’d be mad to ignore it. The Irish punters are staying away in droves.’
Tall Paul opens the door and greets them with a big smile.
Paul played basketball in school (though not in college, owing to a back problem). That was how he met his wife, Karina, who is also tall. They were together for their final years in school, but then broke up when Paul went to Trinity and Karina to catering college. In the year after college, when Paul, Danny and Alexander set off for London, Paul was already planning to get back together with her. ‘I need someone now who’ll shift my arse into gear. She has the measure of me.’
This was said on one or more of the many boozy nights they had that first year in London. It was a doss year. The following summer, Paul returned to Dublin to do a round of interviews for investment banks. He landed a job with Citibank and was posted immediately back to London, moving into a (relatively) swanky flat with another Citibank recruit and drastically reducing his consumption of drink and drugs. The paths of the three college friends diverged at this point. Alexander came home and got a job as a researcher with an economic consultancy firm. His career never recovered. Danny stayed on drinking in London for another year, getting annoyed with Paul for not coming out to play any more, then returned to Dublin to take up a post as a trainee journalist with Irish Investor magazine, and seriously stepped up his alcohol intake. Karina joined Paul in London after her final hotel placement ended.
‘You guys are late,’ Paul says, cheerfully, ushering them into the ample hall. ‘But you’re not as late as the other two.’
‘Julia had to wash her hair.’
‘We’re still putting the finishing touches to the first course. Go ahead into the dining room. I’ll bring you gins and tonic. Or would you prefer something else? Julia? . . . I don’t care about this muppet. He’ll drink what he’s given.’
Paul slaps Alexander on the back and thinks he’s being funny. Unable to generate a quick riposte, Alexander wants to say, ‘Fuck you, asshole,’ but he lets it pass.
‘A gin and tonic would be perfect,’ Julia says. She slips off her silk wrap with an almost-twirl as she greedily takes in the expensive decor, also glancing up the stairs to the first landing, to spy out further riches.
‘Do you want me to hang that up for you?’ Paul asks. ‘You look great, by the way. I forgot to kiss you.’
He reaches down (it’s quite a distance), his hands encompassing her bare shoulders, and places his lips on her cheek. Alexander is discomfited by the audible mechanics of the kiss.
‘Roy Keane is the hero of our time,’ Alexander asserts as he swallows another prawn, washing it down with a good gulp of the tasty white wine. He is already enjoying himself. ‘So what if he’s a bit of a prima donna? Just manage it. McCarthy’s job as a manager was to make sure that his best team was out on the field.’
‘I’m outraged at that attitude,’ says Paul. ‘Keane was petulan
t. How many people would give their right arm to play for their country?’
‘Not so loud,’ says Karina. ‘You’ll wake the neighbours’ children.’
‘He betrayed his country,’ Paul continues at a slightly lower volume.
‘No. His country betrayed him.’
This has been one of their favourite conversations since the World Cup the previous year. Now that the heat has gone out of the Northern Ireland situation, it is the only thing to get worked up about. Their positions are always the same: Alexander is pro-Roy; Paul is anti-Roy; and Danny is too philosophical to have a straightforward opinion. Julia and Aoife don’t care. Karina, still an active sportswoman herself, falls into the Roy camp, though she feels there was wrong on both sides.
Alexander likes Karina. He met her first on a night out in The Stag’s Head, a favoured watering hole in their Trinity years. It was a big Christmas reunion: the place was packed with their pals from college. Paul and Karina were back from London. Alexander knew her only through Paul having mentioned her. When introduced, he felt something pass between them for an instant: a quickening of the air; a light punch to his belly. Inside his mouth, his tongue pushed forward infinitesimally, involuntarily, and with a very specific and (in the circumstances) unusual intention: to lick her nipples. Not that her nipples were on view. He was struck at the time by her height, her obvious fit-and-healthy condition, her short-cut, ash-blonde hair, and her natural modesty, which was rare in their Trinity circles. She is a bit heavier now, bigger in her breasts, and has started to look tired or strained around the eyes.
‘Roy is a cartoon character,’ says Danny mildly. Danny and Aoife have been subdued since their arrival. Danny looks psychologically bashed, which probably means one of two things, or both: he’s been on a bender; or he and Aoife have been knocking each other around the place. ‘He’s a media invention. . . . I’ll tell you who’s a real hero of our times: Hugo Strongboy.’
Being Alexander Page 2
