Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  ‘Good,’ says Alexander. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He decides that he will not move from behind his desk to join Neville at the table. He wants to keep distance and authority. ‘I hate Christmas myself, although it sounds very Scrooge to say so.’

  This is true. Alexander experiences Christmas like a difficult obstacle in a show-jumping round. It’s a big effort. There is no avoiding it. All you can do is line it up, try to get into a decent canter, a good rhythm, and give it plenty of leg at take-off.

  Neville isn’t interested.

  ‘I have checked with Personnel,’ Alexander continues. ‘It is as you described. Sally says there is no entitlement to have your fees refunded. She also denies that she made any commitments during your interview.’

  ‘But you told her she was wrong in that,’ Neville states with a level of assertiveness that is threatening.

  ‘I didn’t say she was right or wrong. I told her what I recalled, just as I related it to you.’

  Alexander’s legs feel uncomfortable, jittery from too much coffee. He pushes back his chair and lifts his feet onto the corner of the desk, crossing them. As he is doing so, he takes a peek through the window over his left shoulder, down into the courtyard, where the terracotta-coloured paving stones are washed with rain. There is a bronze statue in the courtyard which he likes: a naked man walking on a beam, as in gymnastics, although the image is melancholy rather than sporty. Alexander glances at the man’s bare buttocks, always in movement, never making progress.

  ‘Do you remember we had that problem earlier in the year with the premium-line calls?’ he asks Neville.

  ‘Oh yeah – whatever happened to those?’

  ‘You stopped making them.’

  Neville coughs into his fist with apparent nervousness, then looks up and smiles, his small eyes shining poisonously.

  ‘You can’t say that. You don’t have any evidence. I’ll sue your arse for saying that. I’ll sue you at the same time that I’m suing the Council for breach of promise over the fees.’

  Alexander emits an oafish snort of embarrassment and amusement, accompanied by a spray of spittle, some of which flies as far as one of his shoes, a black brogue that could do with a decent polish. Both shoes could do with a decent polish. He often notices that other guys in suits have much shinier shoes than he. Where do they find the time for shining their shoes? Or where do they get the money to buy new shoes so often? It’s a mystery. The only certainty is that this is one of the many aspects of his life where he could do better. Must concentrate, he thinks.

  ‘You don’t have to take such an uncompromising stance on everything,’ he says. ‘What’s your goal here? Are you looking to get offered a permanent contract? Are you looking for advancement within the Council?’

  ‘Pah.’

  ‘Threatening to sue everybody isn’t necessarily the best route to get you what you want.’

  ‘It is if what you want is to sue everybody.’

  Alexander pulls his feet down. He sits forward, leaning his elbows on the desk.

  ‘But that isn’t what you want. You want the Council to pay your fees. Let’s get back to talking about that.’

  ‘What about Fat Barry? What does he say?’

  ‘He doesn’t recall any discussion about funding for your master’s.’

  ‘He’s lying. Or else he wasn’t listening. Or he has the hots for Sally because she has big tits.’

  ‘Let’s not interpret people’s motivations,’ Alexander suggests calmly. ‘Let’s stick to the surface of things.’

  ‘The surface of things is that she said they would pay my fees. That’s one of the reasons I took the job. It’s why I shelled out three grand to do the course. I thought I was going to get it back.’

  ‘And that’s why I have a certain sympathy with you in this. On the other hand, you’re a nasty little fuck who wasted a load of money ringing sex lines and tried to incriminate an innocent colleague.’

  Neville jolts angrily into a standing position, the chair tumbling onto the floor behind him.

  ‘So let’s call it quits,’ Alexander concludes sweetly.

  ‘Fuck you. . . . You’ve no evidence. Plus. . . .’ Neville searches for content. ‘I object to your lewd suggestions.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Alexander asks, already alarmed.

  ‘That’s a disgusting proposition,’ Neville continues quietly with a growing smile.

  ‘Are you mad? What are you talking about?’

  Neville picks up the fallen chair, neatly tucks it under the meeting table.

  ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ he says with theatrical dignity, all the while grinning to himself, and leaves the room, gently closing the door behind him.

  Alexander’s next appointment of the morning is with Bernard Blackmore.

  For a change of scenery, to avoid interruption, and to lend himself a bit of gravitas, Alexander takes the meeting in the formal conference room, which is expensively furnished with an oval wooden table and large chairs upholstered in black leather.

  Blackmore is a big man, well over six feet tall and wide at the shoulders. He is in his fifties now, and has recently suffered a minor heart attack. His doctors have advised him to cut down on sugar and fatty foods and to go walking every day. He undertakes this programme fearfully rather than enthusiastically. This is all supposedly to be kept secret from his clients, but Alexander knows the story because he was at college with one of the economists on Blackmore’s team and they meet for lunch occasionally.

  Blackmore has a wave of oiled grey hair across the top of his skull. His skin is sallow and taut, like a face mask. He always behaves affably, but seems tense to Alexander.

  ‘Remarkably well,’ Blackmore says in response to Alexander’s inquiry as to his well-being. ‘No doubt in the next life the gods will arrange that I get my just desserts, but for the time being I am keeping several steps ahead of the devil.’

  ‘How’s work? Are you busy?’

  ‘To be honest with you, I’m turning work away. We’re like a small restaurant that the connoisseurs love. We’re booked out every night of the week.’

  ‘So if I had some more work in the pipeline, you mightn’t be able to take it on,’ Alexander says, smiling playfully.

  ‘We always try to accommodate our best customers,’ Blackmore replies, allowing no trace of humour to enter his expression. ‘What have you got in mind?’

  The catering people have, as requested, left a tray of coffee and biscuits. Alexander pours two coffees. He removes the cellophane cover from the plate of biscuits.

  ‘Pretty good selection,’ he says in genuine admiration, observing the high concentration of quality, including Hobnobs, Jaffa Cakes and Mikado. ‘We usually get a lot of Nice, but I can’t see a single one here. You’re getting the celebrity treatment, Bernard.’

  He pushes the plate across. Blackmore declines with a small wave of the hand.

  ‘It’s a piece of work on entrepreneurship,’ Alexander explains. ‘But the Council wouldn’t move on to it until the current work on broadband is completed.’

  ‘I understand,’ says Blackmore, with just a hint of a glint.

  ‘A European benchmarking study on levels of entrepreneurship has recently come to the Council’s attention. It suggests that the level of entrepreneurship in Ireland is only medium. The Council wants to know why we’re not best-in-class. Some of the members suspect there is negative sentiment toward entrepreneurs in our national psyche. So the idea is to explore attitudes in new and innovative ways.’

  Blackmore nods intelligently.

  ‘Interesting project,’ he says, though they both know it’s a piece of horseshit.

  ‘Let’s come back to it. Tell me about broadband.’

  ‘ . . . The big towns are catered for, the small ones are not. That’s the basic story. If
I’m a big user setting up in or near a town that’s unconnected, one of the telecom players will lay a cable for me at a fairly competitive rate. If I’m a small company or a small residential user in the same town, it’s completely uneconomical for broadband to be made available to me. I couldn’t pay for the line myself and there isn’t enough immediate demand to justify the investment by the telecom company.’

  ‘So what should we do?’

  ‘Well . . . ,’ says Blackmore with a cautious smile, ‘as we discussed on the phone, it is possible to take different views on this matter. I understood that you would be speaking to the Chairman and some Council members to get a sense of where they are coming from. It’s useful to consider the context for the recommendations.’

  ‘Do you mind if I dunk?’ Alexander asks, and proceeds, without waiting for a response, to submerge a Hobnob in his coffee. ‘Since my girlfriend left me, I’m regressing,’ he adds, almost involuntarily. On a different day he would never stray into such territory in a meeting like this, but the encounter with Neville has wearied him into honesty.

  ‘From the Chairman’s point of view,’ Alexander continues, ‘indeed from the point of view of a majority of the Council, this exercise will have been a waste of time if you conclude against state intervention.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be concluding against state intervention.’

  ‘There is market failure here. We have to spend money. It’s up to you to tell us how much. And let’s not think small here. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly. Anyhow, it’s easier these days to get large sums of money out of cabinet. Go for ten million and they’ll quibble over the details. Go for two hundred million, and they’ll ask if it’s enough.’

  ‘It won’t be ten million.’

  ‘The next question is: how will the money be dispensed? I think the Council will welcome a view that the money should be funnelled through the local authorities.’

  ‘The local authorities haven’t got a clue,’ Blackmore says, but flatly, as a statement of fact rather than as an objection. ‘They can barely tie their shoelaces. In fact, they can’t tie their shoelaces. You’d be better off having one national institute for funding and decision-making. That would give you consistency of standards and economies of scale. You could do the whole thing in one contract.’

  ‘I’d give two sides of the argument,’ Alexander agrees in a balanced and open tone, ‘but I wouldn’t make the centralised option my recommendation. We want to empower the local authorities. We want them to learn. It’s dangerous to assume that the centre knows local requirements better than the locals themselves. Anyhow, suggesting a national institute would be politically naïve. It sounds too much like a national telecom company, when it’s not long since we sold our national telecom company. But by all means let’s say that the local authorities should be resourced properly to . . . develop adequate expertise. It costs money to spend money. Everybody loves additional resources; and the state has got so much wonga now, it doesn’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘And who is going to run the infrastructure? Would you make every local authority into a telecom company?’

  ‘No. You’ll have to advise us on that. I’m sure they could award contracts covering the design, build and operation of the infrastructure, in which case the local authorities would just have to pass over the cash.’

  ‘Which the Department of Finance would provide.’

  ‘I think that’s the sort of guidance the Council would welcome,’ Alexander concludes with a nod. ‘You know, the Council is developing a very good working relationship with Blackmore and Associates. I would even say that they may come to rely on your judgement.’

  Alexander meets Dympna in the corridor. She is so dynamic that one sometimes misses how neat and handsome she is. Her large brown eyes seek him out with serious intent. Her dry hair is brushed straight. She is wearing her bright orange jacket-and-skirt suit, white blouse, black tights, simple black shoes with a low heel.

  ‘There you are,’ she says urgently. ‘I’m really glad to catch up with you before you slip out to lunch.’

  She is remarkably slim. The bulge below the waistline of her skirt could belong to a nineteen-year-old virgin, rather than a woman who has given birth within the last couple of years. Alexander finds that he would like to slip his hand inside her jacket and gently cup in it this slight bulge.

  ‘What makes you think I’m slipping out for lunch?’ he asks.

  ‘Listen, I just want to warn you that something ridiculous is happening. Neville Lewis seems to be going mad. He has rung three different people in Personnel in the last half hour, very audibly . . . complaining about you.’

  She frowns when uttering her final words, indicating regret, sympathy.

  ‘What is he complaining about?’ Alexander asks with a sigh.

  They are standing by the stainless-steel double doors of the lift. He automatically presses the down arrow on the button panel, but the intention is a vague one at this stage.

  Dympna looks over her shoulders, like a driver changing lanes on a motorway, to check if anyone is coming up on her. They are perfectly alone in the square-shaped lift lobby, sealed off from the rest of the world by the fire doors at either end, but she nevertheless addresses him in a dramatic stage whisper, flinching a little on some of the crucial words.

  ‘He is saying that you offered Council funding for his fees in return for oral sex. . . . I’m sorry, but I thought you would rather know.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Dympna looks at him queerly.

  ‘Should I say any more?’

  ‘Please do.’

  Dympna swallows loudly to steady herself.

  ‘He said to Personnel that you wanted him to perform fellatio on you there and then.’

  Alexander nods.

  ‘And the rest of you heard this?’

  ‘Most of the floor heard it. It’s probably around the whole building by now.’

  ‘Good. That’s very good.’ It occurs to Alexander that he should probably reject the allegation, but he finds it impossible to muster the right tone of voice. ‘I don’t even control funding for fees,’ he manages to say after a longish pause.

  Dympna leans forward to encourage greater revelation on his part.

  ‘Sally Barnes would be the person,’ he adds.

  ‘He didn’t mention Sally.’ Dympna seems disappointed in Alexander’s attitude. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m meeting my sister for lunch. . . . I suppose life must go on, fellatio or no fellatio.’

  Dympna scowls. ‘You must take this seriously,’ she says with maternal concern and warmth. ‘You must defend yourself.’

  Alexander is moved by this implicit expression of trust. He doesn’t even trust himself that much, and experiences Dympna’s faith as an act of friendship.

  ‘Thanks, Dympna,’ he says and presses the lift button again. This time the bell goes bing-bing and the steel doors clunkily slide open to admit him to the smooth chamber within. ‘Let’s talk again after lunch. Where’s Neville now?’

  ‘I don’t know. He disappeared.’

  Once safely enclosed in the lift, Alexander lets out a long, medium-volume, nicely moist fart that has been pressing on him. There is some pleasure in this until he quickly recalls, with mounting alarm, that it’s a serious mistake to fart in an empty lift, that anyone getting on at the next stop will instantly sniff him out. There will be no hiding place. He resolves to rush out of the lift – face down – as soon as it stops, wherever it stops, which turns out to be the very next floor, where his boss, George Lucey, is waiting to embark.

  ‘Ah, Alexander,’ George says, transfixing him on the spot before the doors are even fully open. ‘I’m glad I bumped into you. There’s something I want to talk to you about.’ George marches forward, right into Alexander’s face, then je
rks his nose in different directions, with absurdly flared nostrils, to discern the source of the odour he is now picking up. ‘That’s a very soupy smell. Somebody must have been transporting soup in this lift. Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe Catering are doing a lunch somewhere,’ Alexander suggests.

  ‘Did you have soup for lunch?’ George demands in an interrogating, militaristic tone, staring straight into Alexander’s eyes from no more than a few inches away.

  ‘Not yet,’ Alexander tells him, continuing immediately to a different subject. ‘You know this business with Neville Lewis and the fees. He’s insisting that Sally – in the interview – offered to pay his fees. I have to confess that I had some sympathy—’

  ‘He’s a little pup,’ George says. ‘In my day we were happy enough to have a job; now it’s all me-me-me. He can go whistle for it.’

  ‘I never mentioned it to you, but he was the one who was making the astrology calls on the phone that time.’

  ‘The obscene phone calls, eh? I always knew he was a deviant.’

  Alexander feels George’s hot breath on his face as the lift drops slowly through the dark narrow shaft. He resists the muscular impulse to laugh by contorting his face into a grimace.

  ‘It was Imelda who saw him,’ Alexander continues for want of something better to say. ‘She came back late one evening to get something she had forgotten—’

  ‘What had she forgotten?’ George asks piercingly, as though this were an important detail.

  ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say.’

  ‘I see,’ says George, still in his investigative vein.

  ‘The point is that she saw Neville making a call from her desk, and we were able to identify it as one of the calls in question: I got a log of them from Personnel.’

  George is losing interest.

  ‘This lift is taking a long time,’ he observes suspiciously, stepping away from Alexander and turning around to examine the controls.

  They are stopped now at 1, though the doors have not opened. George presses G and the lift jolts into action.