‘He was helping me with my inquiries into the phone calls.’
‘Ah yes, the obscene phone calls. It doesn’t surprise me.’
‘They weren’t obscene phone calls. It’s an astrology service.’
‘Astrology?’ George raises his bushy golden eyebrows in puzzlement. Alexander suspects that he doesn’t know what astrology means, that he thinks it’s astrophysics. ‘Then what’s all the fuss about?’
‘It’s a waste of public money.’
‘Oh yes, public money. Actually I wanted to speak to you about public money. But listen, I’m glad you’re making progress on the phone call business. These things have a habit of biting you on the arse if you’re not careful. We should nail somebody for it.’
George Lucey is a career civil servant who was transferred from the Department of Finance to the National Economic Advisory Council, probably to limit the amount of damage he could do. He is in his mid-fifties and will never be promoted again because he is a buffoon.
George must have been very good-looking in his youth, with his golden hair and blue eyes, his broad-shouldered physical assurance and swaggering gait. Even now he retains a definite leonine magnificence. He dresses well, in the sense that his suits, shirts, and shoes are well made, well chosen, and this adds to the impression of substance; but he is also messy and neglectful about his appearance. This morning he is tie-less and unshaven, and wearing the same shirt that he wore yesterday, an expensive-looking double-cuffed bright pink article that is now marked down the front with a bird-shit-shaped coffee stain. Since the Council is meeting this afternoon, Alexander presumes that George will be freshening up later, but this cannot be taken for granted.
There are a number of things that Alexander likes about George. The main one is that he leaves Alexander alone to run the Council’s business. Alexander works directly with the Council Chairman, Stephen Banner, on all matters of policy. George takes no interest in anything other than what he terms housekeeping matters, which include protocol and procedure, personnel issues, finance, et cetera.
‘Spending is very slow on the consultancy budget,’ George explains. ‘Is there anything that needs to be done – something the Council wants to look into for around two hundred k?
‘There’s broadband,’ Alexander says to him. ‘They’re very keen on it; some of them at least. Grace Sharkey rang me earlier this morning to check on the outcome of the survey. You remember that I’m giving a presentation on it at this afternoon’s meeting. We could—’
George has narrowed his sky-blue eyes in slow reaction.
‘That’s a bit pushy of her. Would it not be more appropriate for her to route any queries through the Chairman? And why couldn’t it wait till the meeting? I don’t trust that one, I tell you. She’s trouble.’
Grace is young and smart and ignores George because he talks shit and has no influence in the Council. George doesn’t like people to ignore him. He wants to talk shit all day long but still be regarded as a man of consequence.
Grace is by far the youngest Council member. Alexander reckons that she is thirty-five or thirty-six, while most of the others are in their fifties. He thinks her appointment last year was a good one. Back in 2000, at the height of the madness, she made a fortune on the IPO of an internet company providing online training facilities for employers who do not want to spend money on human instructors. She now retains only a small holding in this company, New Paradigm e-Training Solutions, but is known as an important mover in a number of other hi-tech e-society initiatives. Alexander finds that she brings to the Council important perspectives on things the rest of them don’t understand. Plus, she is cool and sexy.
‘Well, her point was that it is not enough for us simply to diagnose the problem; we should recommend a solution. If broadband connectivity is bad, what should the state do about it?’
George is unconvinced.
‘If you’re looking for something to spend a couple of hundred grand on, this would be ideal,’ Alexander says.
‘I had in mind a review of entrepreneurial capability.’
‘We did one of those last year.’
‘Yes,’ says George, smiling expansively, revealing the golden dental work in his large teeth, ‘but I’m proposing to focus on attitudes to entrepreneurial capability. It’s an entirely new field.’
George is deeply pleased with this idea, as though it were akin to a major scientific breakthrough. He sees that Alexander is not impressed.
‘Talk it over with Banner,’ George says, quickly ceding the point. ‘The important thing is to get moving on the budget.’
Before lunch, Alexander summons Innocent Imelda to his office.
‘You know that I’m conducting an investigation into the misuse of our phone lines over a period of months,’ he tells her pompously. ‘Multiple calls have been made to astrology services, including from your phone.’
Imelda titters like a donkey trying to cough up a morsel of grass that has gone down the wrong way: Hee-hee.
‘You sound like a cop on the telly,’ she says, clearly amused rather than anxious.
‘This is a serious matter, Imelda.’ Imelda dutifully drops the grin from her mouth. ‘Have you been making these calls?’ Alexander asks in a deeper voice, leaning forward over the desk, his forehead concentrated into a frown, his eyes fixed on her in what is supposed to be an unavoidable piercing challenge.
‘Heee, hee-hee,’ giggles Imelda, which pushes Alexander right back into his seat, mission aborted. ‘It wasn’t me. Sure, I wouldn’t know anything about that sort of carry-on. Who would I ring? And anyway, I don’t believe in horoscopes. Sure, that’s all rubbish.’
‘So who is making the calls?’
‘Neville,’ she says with authority, serious now.
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw him.’
Blup-blop chimes Alexander’s mobile phone from where it is lying on the desk, plugged into the charger cable. He picks it up and examines the screen: a text from Danny, which he opens with a click. Meet me stags head at 1. Need ur help. Alexander’s heart stops. His stomach drops. A flash of heat passes to the surface of his skin. Danny looking for help can mean only one thing: money.
‘And why did he start off making the calls from your phone?’
Imelda reflects on this question. She examines Alexander’s countenance first, then looks over his shoulder and out the window, as though the answer is hanging there in the fresh air like a magical fruit.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says in an honest tone. ‘I think he did it to get me into trouble.’
‘Here’s the thing,’ Danny says. However, before proceeding to present the thing, he raises to his lips his newly settled creamy pint of Guinness and takes a first slurp. Alexander finds this a bit ostentatious, since he, having the drive to Wicklow and the Council meeting ahead of him, has nothing for comfort but a fizzy orange juice that is too sweet.
Drinking Guinness in The Stag’s Head is one of the great perennial pleasures in their common life. Through all the turns and crashes of friendship, family and career, through the acrobatics of sexual relations, through the relentless rapid expenditure of time, from New Year to Paddy’s Day, from Easter to summer, from October to Christmas, knocking back pints at the round marble tables in this Edwardian pub has remained a splendid refuge.
‘Things have been pretty chaotic this last while,’ Danny says.
‘You mean these last fifteen years.’
‘Well, yes, but I’m thinking of the last six months or so. Aoife and I have really been kicking the shit out of each other. It’s not good. So we decided to split up. It was a fairly amicable thing. But then along comes this business with . . . eh . . . .’ Danny clicks his fingers to indicate what he is talking about. He is looking studiously at the floor. He always avoids eye contact when asking for money. On the last occasion, when he touch
ed Alexander for a fifty, he waited till they were having a parallel piss in the urinals before broaching the subject.
‘We’re going to London for an abortion. I have to borrow a couple of grand.’ Finally now he faces Alexander, his eyes displaying vulnerability. He is uncertain how Alexander will respond.
There is a story here.
In their first and second years in college, Alexander was as penniless as he was socially talentless. It is fine to be socially talentless if you are resigned to hanging out with others who are similarly challenged. Once you know your place in the world, it is possible to have fun, to have friends. But Alexander had ambitions. He wanted to be cool and beautiful, popular. He wanted to hang out with cool, beautiful, popular people.
Danny was a prince in those days of their late teens, lean and good-looking, with remarkable reserves of experience and confidence, and buckets of disposable cash. For some reason that Alexander never understood, Danny had adopted him by Christmas in first year; and piggy-backing on Danny’s promiscuous sociability and reckless spending, Alexander gained entry into networks that would otherwise have been denied to him. He faked cool. He found that popularity was more circumstantial than ingrained and could be arrived at approximately without great difficulty, although it was frighteningly superficial.
One night in the Buttery bar toward the end of first year, they and many of their friends were tripping on acid. It was everyone’s first trip. Danny was being hassled by an English girl with marvellous straight long hair, freshly washed, the kind of hair that features in shampoo ads. She was one of the few who weren’t tripping. She had missed her period (following a lacklustre tryst with Danny, so the bitchy gossip went) and was shrieking at him outside one of the toilets, trying to get him involved in her crisis. Danny’s focus was elsewhere, a dim-witted smile on his lips. She pushed and tugged at his unresponsive, unbalanced figure.
Alexander, meanwhile, was seeing sparks. The walls were breathing. He was filled with child-like playfulness. He concocted a plan to rescue his friend. He saw it as Escape from Colditz. They talked it through in a moment of respite: they would wait for another lull; they would leave the bar by different exits, depart the campus by separate gates; they would meet in The Stag’s Head for pints and cigarettes, and maybe they could get some hash to see them through the night while they were coming down.
Danny’s money funded the evening: the acid, the pints, the cigarettes, the sandwiches. After their acid trajectory had peaked, when they were on the downward slope back to everyday ordinary, starting to feel a little disappointed, a shift occurred in their relationship. Alexander remembers the moment exactly: after the pubs had closed, walking back along a particular part of the perimeter of Trinity College, the tall railing-topped wall, how it curves at that point in the street, the direction they were headed, his being on the inside, the degree of darkness in the city sky.
‘I’ll get you back for the money sometime,’ he said awkwardly, looking at the pavement ahead.
The communication came to fill the emptiness that was opening up in the wake of their high. Innocuous though the words seemed, he had uttered them against his own deeper judgement, knowing as he spoke that this was somehow wrong, a sin against their trip and their friendship.
‘I can’t believe you said that, man. You’ve killed my buzz.’
Danny exuded subdued resentment for the remainder of the night. He always had money, but never discussed the ownership of it, never openly calculated.
In the long time since, Alexander has paid and repaid a dozen times the debts he felt himself to have incurred in those first years. Not that he enjoys splashing out money or giving loans that he knows will never be returned. Quite the reverse. But whatever he has paid has never been enough to quash his own demon. Until now. After this – so he tells himself – the beast is slain.
‘When you say a couple of grand, I take it you mean two grand,’ he says.
‘Two grand would be good. Two and a half would be better,’ says Danny with a smile. He has jumped over his own embarrassment, and is negotiating now.
Danny’s face is red and puffy from years of excessive boozing. His dark hair is thinning rapidly. Physically, he is in poor shape, overweight, easily breathless, but he can still – with an effort – switch on the winning charm.
‘Remind me again why you have no money,’ Alexander says. ‘With all your radio gigs and newspaper columns. Don’t they pay you at all?’
‘I hardly need to explain it. As you well know, I’m an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. I never pretend otherwise.’
‘And why should I fund your habits? I’m the wage slave with the dull job, scrimping and saving to make a deposit on a house. Why don’t you ask Paul or hero-of-our-time Hugo Strongboy?’
‘You know I can’t. . . . I didn’t know you were saving up for a house. That’ll be a long save, though I suppose I’m not helping my cause by saying that.’
Danny allows himself a snigger.
Alexander drinks some of his fizzy orange and glances at the bar, wondering if his steak-burger-and-chips is on the way. Danny has declined to eat, saying he is not hungry.
‘From an economic point of view,’ Alexander begins in a different vein, ‘there’s a distributional failure here. I don’t mean money. Look at Paul and Karina. They need a baby; or she does. You’ve got one you don’t want. Doesn’t that point to a solution? Now that I think of it, even Julia wants a baby. Or at least she did last year. She hasn’t mentioned it recently.’
Danny bears this digression with good-humoured if obvious patience.
‘You guys should have a baby,’ he says, causing Alexander to jerk sharply on his stool.
‘Why the hell would you say that?’
‘Why not? What else are you doing? It’s not like you go out that much.’
‘I go out plenty,’ Alexander lies. ‘But going out doesn’t have anything to do with it. Even if I stay at home every night for the rest of my life, that doesn’t mean I have nothing better to do than have children. Maybe I’ll want to split to Argentina for a few years.’
‘You won’t,’ says Danny with a knowing expression.
‘Anyhow, it’s all bullshit,’ continues Alexander. ‘Why should I inflict life on some poor additional soul just to . . . assuage my own loneliness.’
‘Which is exactly why I want to borrow two and a half grand.’
‘Did I just say “loneliness”? I meant “existential isolation”. If I confessed to loneliness, I’d have to kill myself, or you, or both of us. Fifteen hundred. I can’t do more than that, and even that much pains me greatly.’
‘Eighteen hundred and we have a deal. It’s for a good cause.’
‘Last time I checked, abortions weren’t that expensive.’
‘You’d be surprised, when you take flights and everything into account.’
‘Well, you should fly Ryanair.’
‘What do you want? A detailed fucking itinerary? I’ll give you a refund if there’s any change.’
‘Fifteen hundred.’
‘Seventeen.’
‘No,’ says Alexander, shaking his head.
‘You won’t get much house for the difference between fifteen and seventeen,’ says Danny, in pique.
‘Well, since Dublin is out of the question, I’m focusing my efforts on Bangladesh. You’d be surprised what you can get in Bangladesh for a couple of hundred euro.’ Alexander changes tack. He sips from his drink, wincing at the sickly taste of it. He really ought to have had a beer, just the one. ‘OK. We can hit the bank after lunch. When do you want to go to London?’
‘In the next few days.’
‘What about Jasper? I suppose he’s old enough now not to need a minder.’
‘Jasper will be delighted to get a few days to himself. He’ll mitch from school and spend the time gaming and jerking off.’
‘Look,’ Jasper said, shaking Alexander to wake him, ‘somebody broke your new glasses.’
Alexander drives down to Ashdale House in his white 1990 Honda Concerto saloon. In many ways he likes this car. It has performed honestly for him and Julia over the previous five years. Although the body is large, the 1.6 engine gives reasonable acceleration, relative to what he has experienced. The interior is spacious. He enjoys driving the car. It feels safe. He has never had any complaints about the steering, road-holding, cornering, braking. Not that he is a connoisseur of these things. He knows the difference between an exhaust pipe and a battery, but would never be able to point to a carburettor, for example, or explain what it does. On the one hand, then, he is privately satisfied, even pleased, with this car and has no requirement for a different car. On the other hand, the Honda is a source of shame, in particular the 90 D reg.
Recently, out in Malahide, parked near the seaside, a guy he was at school with drove by, a perfectly likeable type with two kids in the back seat of his 02 BMW 3 Series. The guy gave him a friendly nod from behind the wheel of his car, and his very next glance was low to the front of Alexander’s car to read the reg. number, which, together with the marque and model, provided him with an instant reading of Alexander’s status in life.
Alexander is a loser, he read. He was one of the cleverest in our year at school, but now I drive a 02 BMW 3 Series and he only has a 1990 Honda, the sad fuck. It goes to show that I was always a more worthy human being, a better man. Vespucci was a jumped-up prick, a cocky nerd, and now he’s had his comeuppance.
Being Alexander Page 4
