This is an effective contribution. She is passionate, but controlled. She appeals both rhetorically and intellectually. Alexander senses that the Council is moved.
He finds Grace Sharkey gorgeous. She has small brown eyes like pennies, a snubbed nose, full lips. Her jaws are ape-like: large, widely positioned, dominating her face. He realises suddenly that she is in fact an ape. He looks around the U-shaped table and everywhere sees apes: self-important, clothed, some of them with glasses perched on their noses, some hairier than others, some prettier than others, all more or less intelligent, in their high foreheads, blathering on seriously, comically, in some unknown gibberish. Except that he too speaks the gibberish, and his knowledge of it draws him inexorably into their meaning, away from his momentary insight into the nature of the gathering and the proceedings.
‘I think we should inform ourselves further before we can make any policy recommendation on this matter,’ says Banner in presidential style. ‘Alexander, I believe there are some research options you can tell the Council about.’
Alexander sits forward in his chair to give himself some leverage on the question.
‘We could employ consultants, Chairman, to examine the forms of action government might take, what the costs and benefits would be, how to fund it, et cetera. We could look for policy recommendations also, based on the analysis. It’s a big job. The tender procedure alone would take a couple of months, the work itself a further two to three months—’
‘Meanwhile Rome is burning,’ interjects Grace.
‘—I would estimate having a final output by December, not before.’
‘And what would it cost?’
‘It’s difficult to quantify at this stage. In the region of two hundred thousand. However, we can accommodate that from the consultancy budget.’
At the mention of the consultancy budget, George Lucey, nicely shaven, dressed in fresh shirt and tie, sitting at the Chairman’s right hand, perks up from the glazed stupor which has characterised his demeanour up to this point.
‘I can agree with that, Chairman. I’m quite concerned at the under-spend to date. Something like this is ideal. We need to burn a lot more cash.’
There are one or two titters among the members.
‘Well that settles it then,’ concludes the Chairman. ‘If George wants us to spend the money, we had better spend the money. . . . The waiters should be coming around now with your pre-dinner drinks. Those of you who arrived late and missed the list will have to fend for yourselves at the free bar. . . . Meeting adjourned. See you all at eight for dinner.’
Dinner takes place in a small sumptuous dining room overlooking the hotel’s eighteen-hole golf course. On the far side of the fairway rises a linear range of sand dunes, covered sparsely with long, coarse grass. An old wooden fence is visible, running up the contour of one of the dunes, standing tall at the crest, then suddenly interrupted: mangled, dangling wires, fallen stakes.
Alexander has the opportunity to stand gazing out the window because he is the first into the room. There are no place-names and he is reluctant to commit himself for fear that no one will choose to sit beside him until all the other places are taken. He prefers to arrive late to these things so he can slip discreetly into an appropriate slot, away from the Council’s stars, whose company is too taxing, if possible next to someone with whom he can have an enjoyable conversation.
Conor Burke enters. Burke is not one of the Council’s bright lights. Neither does he fall into the category of people with whom Alexander would wish to share dinner. He is a boorish man with a large nose and red face, who works hard to grind out a profit in a low-margin business with increasing overseas competition.
‘I see you’re admiring the golf course,’ he says to Alexander in a gruff friendly tone. ‘We should be so lucky, huh.’
Alexander is not a golfer. Whenever he has to confess to this, inwardly he feels wholly inadequate, ashamed even, which is certainly an overreaction, but one he is apparently unable to control. Golf is totemic for him, representing something bigger than the game itself, something from which he is excluded as a consequence of his fundamental flaw, whatever that may be. He has actually considered taking up the game, in order not to be excluded, but he has no desire to play it. In fact, he finds it repugnant. Nevertheless, it is out of the question for him to intimate to Burke that he is watching the long grass in the sand dunes, rather than contemplating a round. The breeze blows and the grass runs with it. Enter there, says the miniature Zen master inside his head; but Alexander pulls away from that too.
‘Yeah,’ he answers lamely. ‘No rest for the wicked.’
Other members are starting to drift in.
The chief executive of the IBA (Irish Business Association) takes a seat near the window, nodding to Burke, who opts for the place beside him. Alexander would rather be looking out the window than have his back to it, but he feels that politeness now requires that he sit next to Burke.
Having sat with them, Alexander finds that Burke and the IBA guy will engage in a huddled conversation that is closed to him. He wants to bolt, to leave the room for a pretend visit to the toilet and then return to take up another option. He denies the impulse: he has committed himself and will stay put. Soon the table will be fully populated, the dinner will begin, he’ll have some wine, his uneasiness will pass, or at least he’ll be anaesthetised sufficiently not to feel the pain too keenly. In the meantime, he adjusts the positioning of his napkin, which is arranged like a fan at the centre of the array of heavy silver cutlery in front of him. He wishes that he had not already finished his pint, or that he had ordered a second one from the bar to bring in with him.
A civil servant from the Department of Industry smiles at him sympathetically across the table as she takes her seat. He returns the compliment.
Banner arrives, talking as he enters with the after-dinner guest speaker, a white-haired former scientist, now a proselytiser for science in education. They take seats at the far end of the table.
Alexander jolts in shock: from a strong squeeze on his left upper arm. He turns to see Grace Sharkey seat herself beside him. She has changed for dinner into a figure-hugging, shiny emerald dress with spaghetti shoulder straps. Her copper hair, which was up in a hair-slide at the meeting, hangs freshly brushed around her neck, just touching her slim shoulders. She is dazzling, over-dressed. There is nothing immodest in the cut of what she is wearing, but he finds her explicitly sexual now. He feels a natural impetus to reach across and kiss her, to take possession of her lips and mouth, to find her hot wet tongue with his.
He straightens himself primly in the chair.
‘I didn’t see you come in,’ he says.
‘You don’t mind my sitting here?’
‘No, of course not.’
Big Joe Walsh sits on her left and immediately draws her in. Alexander finds himself alone between two happily chatting couples. He is unduly uncomfortable in this isolation, doesn’t know what to do with himself. In case his distress is being witnessed, he tries to avoid catching anyone’s eye. To have his social discomfort observed is a hundred times worse than the simple discomfort in itself. So if anyone is watching, he would rather not know. He removes his napkin from the table, opens it cautiously and places it on his lap. As he cuts into his bread roll, he regrets that the nearest plate of butter will have to be handed to him by Burke.
Thirty-five minutes later, Alexander is still the only one at the table uninvolved in any of the many conversations that are taking place.
He presses on manfully with dinner, fortifying himself with fine wine. As he wades through the gourmet mashed potato (having quickly finished the small fillet of monkfish and the associated five green beans), he imagines himself to be crossing Antarctica, marching solo through a blizzard on his way to the South Pole. Only fifty miles to go, through dessert and coffee, but once again he is running low on wine,
with no sign of the waitress this far south of Scott’s last camp.
‘Oh dear, we’re getting drunk here,’ he murmurs sub-audibly to himself.
From his newly drunken perspective, the universe is altered. The planet is his oyster. It is not inevitable that he marry into domestic drudgery in Outer Tallaght. There must be some place in Indonesia or the Philippines where he can hide away for a decade on five dollars a day, living on a beach, smoking dope. One balmy evening in a village tea-hut, he will meet a beautiful young upper-class English girl with natural blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She will be on a gap year, recovering from acne, going up to Oxford to study philosophy in the autumn, though she may postpone for a couple of semesters to stay with him and explore herself. They will dress in cheap cotton from the local market and do things very slowly.
Alexander raises his wine glass to his lips to drain what remains. There is so little left that the outer rim of the glass is touching his nose before he has created sufficient downward slope for the remaining nectar to roll slowly over the inner surface and drop onto his waiting tongue.
‘Ah,’ he says.
On his right side he can overhear Burke and the IBA man discussing the national pay talks that will be commencing in the coming winter.
‘We’re getting crucified already,’ says Burke. ‘Never mind India and China. Never mind the Eastern Europeans copying our low corporate tax rate. If the euro strengthens, I get hammered by UK competition. That’s the reality of it. These guys are living in cloud cuckoo land if they think they can get a five per cent pay deal with no consequences. We have to tighten our belts. Otherwise, we’ll have priced ourselves out of it. And that’ll mean lost business, lost jobs.’
To Alexander’s left, Grace and Joe Walsh are gabbing away. By reputation, Walsh is one of the toughest and most effective union negotiators in the country, but to Grace he is revealing his soft side.
‘I’m not kidding,’ he says. ‘I do. I write poetry, particularly when I’ve had a few beers. In the right company, beer brings out my . . . lyrical nature.’
‘You amaze me,’ Grace responds drily. ‘You’re obviously a man of hidden talents.’
‘You’d be surprised, I’m telling you.’
Joe Walsh is obese, at least seven or eight stone overweight, with a vast belly that achieves its full magnificence at his trouser line. Standing, he is shaped like two cones glued together at their big ends, with little feet attached to the inverted bottom cone, and a basketball of a head – plus several chins – at the tip of the top cone. When he first met Walsh, Alexander was sure that the man was facing imminent death. He is constantly breathless, even when he is sitting down, wheezing, sweating profusely. He eats like a combine harvester, shovelling the food into his open churning mouth, loudly guzzling wine, spitting and dribbling, staining and spilling, scattering debris across acres of wide-open tablecloth.
‘I’d better go to the jacks,’ Joe says, as he rises with astonishing deftness, and rounds the table to leave the room.
‘I have some fascinating statistics about poetry,’ Alexander blurts out rashly after too short a pause. Grace looks up from her dinner and forces a smile. ‘A remarkably high proportion of the population—’
‘I have no interest in poetry,’ she interjects sharply, then softens her tone: ‘But I thought your broadband presentation was good. What do you think will emerge from the study you’re proposing?’
While Alexander begins to think about this, she carefully places her cutlery on the table and swivels 45 degrees in her chair to have a more frontal view of him, to present a more frontal view of herself. She produces a closed-lip smile, which surprises him. He knows it means something, but he doesn’t know what.
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘I know how these things work,’ she says in a low voice. ‘Surely the consultants will write whatever you tell them to write.’
Her right hand has strayed from her lap. The edges of her long nails and the tips of her fingers touch the outside of his thigh, and remain in contact. This might be accidental, but he doesn’t think so. He doesn’t retract his leg, nor does he move it any closer. With the fingers of her other hand – elbow propped on the table – she tugs searchingly at the sliver of gold dangling from her earlobe.
Alexander feels his penis thickening, just enough for him to sense its current shape and position. He briefly clenches his sphincter muscle in reflexive response to this sensation. He has sobered up considerably, and pauses now to assess what is going on in their immediate environment. Everyone is occupied as before. No one is paying them any attention.
‘You flatter me,’ he says, and his leg pushes outward in what might be a small involuntary jerk, but one that has the effect of making her hand slide onto the top of his thigh, which she allows.
‘Consultants recommend as is required of them,’ Grace says. ‘I think it’s important that the Council doesn’t make a balls of this one. I supposed it would be you who would instruct the consultants, but perhaps I’m wrong in that.’
Her hand squeezes his thigh, and inches forward toward more interesting territory. He can feel the sharpness of her nails through his trouser leg. He blows out slowly, from the sensual rush.
‘No, you’re right. I’m the one who will select and steer the consultants.’
‘And how will you steer them?’
Her fingers inch farther up his thigh. His penis is increasingly engorged. He looks around again, but is cocky now. They remain unobserved.
‘The terms of reference will specify that we want an independent assessment,’ he says, smirking.
‘That’s sweet; like there’s such a thing. What sort of steering is that?’
Her hand is climbing up his thigh again. Her fingers search out his penis, probing briefly, a little clumsily, to assure themselves that he is concentrating. Then the hand is gone, all contact withdrawn. She returns to her dinner, takes up the cutlery, prods the monkfish with her knife, as though to see what it will do.
In the first instant, he is relieved, released from tension. In the second instant, he is disappointed, missing her touch, suddenly desperate to restore the physical intercourse. She has turned away from him. He scrambles to continue the conversation.
‘Well, what would you wish for the consultants to recommend?’
‘Now, that’s a good question,’ she responds brightly, once more favouring him with a full view of her fascinating face. ‘I’ll have to think about that one. Why don’t we meet after dinner to discuss it? We could go for a stroll in the garden. Would you be available for that?’
The warm dangerous hand, with which he is now somewhat acquainted, raises her wine glass to her mouth, and she drinks and swallows with slow sensuous movements of the lips, tongue and throat.
Outside, looking west from the main door – beyond the ground lights directed back at the front of the hotel, beyond the clumpy landscape in the middle distance, above the blackness of the humps of hills that fill the near horizon – the sky is an inky blue, with broad brush strokes of grey cloud inching slowly by, coloured orange and violet on their undersides by a sun that has now disappeared.
Alexander lights a cigarette, and suddenly yearns for the West of Ireland with an almost physical pang.
Maisie has rallied. He learned this on Monday. She came out of her
coma, sat up in the bed and demanded breakfast – two soft-boiled
eggs, toast with butter and marmalade, tea with milk and two sugars. The doctors were astonished. Brigid stayed for a few days and was coming back to Dublin this very evening, which means she must be home by now. Alexander will meet her tomorrow when he and Julia go to Helena’s for dinner.
When he went to college, he dropped his previous identity, and with it his childhood connection to the West. Years later, having re-emerged from the indolent student life of overconfidence, drink, drugs, sex, music
, working holidays abroad; reacclimatising to the true nature of the universe, he discovered, to his surprise, that his love for the West had remained buried within him, like bedrock. With the thin cover of soil and weak grass scraped away, there it was: in granite, a bit smeared with muck, but gleaming also from the wetness of the fallen rain.
For the millennium New Year, he dragged Julia to a rented house on Inis Meáin, the smallest in population terms of the three Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. They went with Helena, her husband Derek, and their two little kids. Julia didn’t get it: the sea, the wind, the remoteness, the absolute darkness of the night. For her it was a few days in a damp house on a bleak barely living rock in the ocean, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, no shops, no television.
There was a man there Alexander liked, called Máirtín, who gave them the keys to the house when they arrived. He was a shy, bleary-eyed man in his late thirties who spent ten or twelve hours every day drinking slowly at the bar in the hotel, in almost complete silence, probably drinking the rent money, or his cut of it from his brother on the mainland who owned the house. Alexander encountered him early one afternoon, paused at the corner of the road before the hotel, foot up on a rock, staring out to sea, toward the mainland. He looked to be in a trance, and it seemed to Alexander that this gazing out to sea was his daily prayer, his reorientation, before he passed through the swinging doors into the sleepy hotel and drowned his human imperfections under a weight of alcohol. Alexander saw in his pale ruined eyes a clear, far-away mysticism. The man never uttered much, never more than a few mundane words. But there was no reason that his mystical soul and his speaking personality should be connected, or even know of each other’s existence. On the other hand, perhaps Alexander entirely misread the thing. Maybe Máirtín did not generally stop to gaze at the sea on his way to the pub. On that one occasion he may simply have been waiting for a painful spasm of the bowel to pass.
He sees her before she sees him. She emerges from the front door of the hotel, seeming unsteady on her feet, taking smallish steps, holding one shoulder slightly higher than the other. He is standing at a shrub by one of the windows, at an oblique angle to the entrance. She looks first the other way, thus missing him, and there is something in the tilt of her head as she seeks him out that is suggestive of anxiety. She is worried he won’t show. When she turns and sees him, standing on the grass verge, unusually presented by the ground lights, silently watching her, enjoying a cigarette, a flash of pain or anger appears on her face, which she then quickly replaces with a momentary false smile.
Being Alexander Page 6
