This produces half a laugh from Paul.
‘You don’t believe in God,’ Vlad states aggressively.
‘Ah Jesus, don’t start that crack,’ says Hugo. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to believe in God to be a good Catholic.’
This gets a better laugh than it’s worth. Not that the laughing on the part of Alexander and the others is forced. Hugo is naturally funnier than average because he is imposing, successful and rich.
‘Hey, Fitzer,’ Hugo calls across the room to another rugby-type from college, who has just entered. ‘What hole did you crawl from? I haven’t seen you in two centuries.’
‘I’m down in the salt mines, working for a living like an ordinary mortal,’ Fitzer responds, although in fact he is a lawyer in one of the city’s big firms. ‘Did they get you yet for insider trading?’
‘Shush now, don’t be using bad language. I’m squeaky clean. Listen, I want to talk to you about something.’
Hugo excuses himself, sets down his unfinished curry on the nearby counter-top, and moves purposefully toward his target through the crowded room, surprisingly nimble for a man of his ego size. He even finds time to ruffle the blonde hair of a little boy he passes.
The boy is Danny’s sister’s son. He is seven or eight. Danny’s sister Cordelia is married to an aristocratic Swiss investment banker, but her eldest child nevertheless has a long liquid snot hanging from one of his nostrils. He snuffles it up, but not with enough force to stop it from dropping down again a moment later. He is standing with Cordelia and Aoife, singing a pop song for them, shyly but competently, in a light squeaky voice. As the song proceeds, he wins the attention of one or two innocent bystanders, including Karina, and all hang on his performance, willing him on, cheering him, so that his confidence grows and he sings more loudly.
‘ . . . I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. . . .’
Alexander experiences a fleeting image of smashing the boy’s head open with a hammer; not that he wants to do this, but he senses the possibility of the deed. It wouldn’t require many blows. It wouldn’t even have to be bloody. One well-placed hit to the temple and it’s beddy-bye-bye for ever.
‘I have to go for a leak,’ Paul says and he too moves away.
Alexander feels certain that he has broken up the group by emanating negative energy. He half expects Vlad to vanish as well, leaving him stranded, but Vlad seems relatively settled, still shovelling chicken curry and rice into his mouth.
‘Do you want to get stoned?’ Vlad asks, again through the food.
Alexander’s reflex reaction is to look around to see where Julia is. When they were together, she didn’t like him to smoke dope, because – so she said – it made him all weird and paranoid. He spots her in the same moment that he remembers he is free of her, that he can smoke his head off if he wants without fear of reproach. She is coming into the kitchen, exchanging words with Paul on his way out. As ever, Paul is a lot taller than she is. There is something odd about them, the way they are standing there, she facing upward, he looking down.
When Paul leaves, Julia turns fully into the room, and immediately her eyes meet Alexander’s. They lock into each other. Julia looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles a sweet crooked smile.
In the previous second, if he had asked himself how he was doing – in general, not in this particular instant – he would have said: Fine. But now that she has smiled at him, he feels he has been desolate for months, so much so that he has forgotten the possibility of alternative conditions. She breaks the eye contact, which requires an effort, creating a moment of clumsiness, and moves toward Aoife. Cordelia’s son has finished singing. The women are finished praising him. He looks exhausted, overheated. The stringy snot is down again, glued now to his upper lip, well beyond recall. His mother pops down onto her hunkers beside him and lovingly cleans it away with a fresh paper tissue.
Alexander knows what he wants. He wants to escape with Julia. He will have to engineer a moment with her. They will dip into a groove, a happy funny mood. He’ll convince her that they should run away together. They could rent a room. There must be hotels along the coast here, if they drove south past Dún Laoghaire. They could spend an hour by the sea, then go indoors, order champagne and salmon from room service, make love, fall asleep together. He would spend long silent hours with her asleep at his side.
There was a time, early in the second phase of their relationship, after they had first moved into the flat, when his desire for closeness was astonishingly intense. One winter’s night, he experienced a presentiment of a physical wish to climb into her womb, to exist there, enveloped within her, curled up, wrapped closely in the amniotic caul. It was a remarkable never-repeated urge, which mostly extinguished itself in becoming observable to his conscious mind. It was certainly not something that could survive being enworded.
‘That is really fucked up,’ Julia said, when he tried to articulate to her what he had almost felt. But even if she was right about many things, she was not right about that. It was not fucked up. It was a moment of truth.
‘What did you say?’ he asks Vlad.
‘Do you want to get stoned? I’ve got an eighth of golden Moroccan hash in my pocket. It’s my Christmas stock.’
Alexander knows what he wants. It would not be wise to get stoned now, because he wouldn’t be able to talk to Julia properly then, wouldn’t be able to win her.
‘That sounds like a great idea,’ he finds himself saying. ‘Where’ll we go?’
‘We could go for a walk,’ Vlad says, ‘but I’m feeling a bit lazy. There must be somewhere upstairs.’
Forty minutes later, stoned out of his head, Alexander walks down the stairs, trying to keep his face straight.
Because he has been throwing back the wine, he is drunk as well as stoned – a good balance. The dope has him buzzing, while the drink gives him sufficient relief from himself to be able to function socially, approximately. Nevertheless, the prospect of returning to the party is formidable. He resolves to secure more alcohol.
He peeks into the sitting-room where the old folks – the grandparents’ generation – have clotted together. The air is thick with cigarette smoke. They’re a boozy lot, drinking whiskey and gin rather than wine. They’re putting a lot of energy into the conversation: tall anecdotes, generous affirmative listening. They seem to be enjoying themselves.
He moves toward the kitchen.
‘Make way for a man bearing drink,’ he hears Danny call from behind in a cheerful I’m-lifting-something-heavy voice.
Alexander steps aside. Danny passes quickly with three large trays of beer cans, still shrink-wrapped in polythene. Behind him is his mother, Ursula, carrying crinkly plastic shopping bags full of fizzy drinks and other colourful goodies.
She pauses to greet her son’s friend. She is small and sallow-skinned, more deeply wrinkled than the last time Alexander met her.
‘Hi, Alexander. I didn’t get a chance to say hello to you outside the church.’ She puckers her lips and reaches up to kiss him. It is clearly implied in the gesture that he should meet these lips with his, which is somewhat shocking, but he manfully complies. Her lips are more moist than he would freely have chosen. ‘Thanks so much for standing in at the last minute.’
This puzzles him. His brain whirrs, searching for material: recent incidents of standing in at the last minute. But alarmingly, comically, he can find no such reference.
‘As godfather,’ she reminds him bluntly.
‘Ah yes. No problem. Any time you want a grandchild dipped, just give me a call.’
Ursula frowns at this irreverent tone, which he meant as a joke.
Meanwhile, three screeching children have appeared, crowding around Ursula to get a look into her shopping bags.
‘Did you buy any ice-cream?’ one of them asks.
‘But didn’t you love the way Hugo
came storming into the church?’ Ursula continues, ignoring the children. ‘If Clint Eastwood drops dead in the morning, they’ll have the man to replace him.’
Doped-up Alexander experiences some difficulty at this point. A glimpse is revealed to him of the dark gleaming underside of things. On the surface, Ursula is friendly, humorous, but something dangerous has flashed briefly in her eyes, which nudges his perception infinitesimally, revealing her as a gloating hag, the skin hanging off her bones, her neck emaciated, liver-spotted, her thinning hair a perversely purple shade of brown. The faded tawny irises – which even now remind him of both Danny and Cordelia – appear as lids that might be flipped off with a single movement of the right surgical instrument. And what would two such flicks of the wrist uncover? Black bottomless straw-like cavities? Maggots emerging happily into the fresh air? Or an ooze of blood and pus?
‘You’re looking well,’ he says, inspiration dropping down on him from heaven, bringing salvation at a number of levels. ‘In fact, I have rarely seen you look so well.’
‘Don’t be such a liar,’ she says, but she cannot fully resist the flattery.
He offers to help her with her bags.
‘Let’s see if we can find Hugo,’ he suggests unctuously. ‘We’ll tell him what a beacon he is to us all. I bet he doesn’t get told often enough just how marvellous he is.’
A little boy has his hand down the throat of one of Ursula’s plastic bags and is rooting for something he wants. Alexander decisively pushes him back, lifts the bags from Ursula’s hands, and masterfully leads the way to the kitchen.
He works through the crowd to the open fridge where Danny is down on his knees looking for places to stash the cans. Alexander leaves the bags on the floor beside him and moves to the adjacent space, where Julia, Kitty and Hugo are now standing. Alexander’s glass of wine is exactly where he left it on the windowsill, and this gives him an excuse to join the group.
‘It’s ridiculous that that guy was able to get a job in a school,’ Kitty is saying. ‘I mean he had past convictions.’
‘Hmm,’ says Hugo as he winks at Alexander in greeting. The wink could be perfectly neutral, but Alexander also reads into it that Hugo doesn’t give a shit about the guy in question and is slightly amused by Kitty’s earnestness, while at the same time he doesn’t wish to suffer her for very long.
‘Paedophiles are people too,’ Alexander offers, as he raises his wine to his lips.
Julia splutters her drink in shock. Hugo laughs, though more at the outrageousness than at the witticism itself.
‘I don’t think that’s very funny,’ Kitty says.
‘I just think paedophiles get a bit of a hard time,’ Alexander goes on. ‘I mean you can kick somebody to death on O’Connell Street and nobody minds very much. You were drunk. It was high jinks that went wrong. The guy was a loser anyway. You’ll get off with a two-year suspended sentence. But paedophilia is up there with genocide. You can get two years for just looking at pictures of it.’
‘This is a bit of a concern for you, is it?’ Hugo asks. ‘I can see now why you ditched him,’ he adds to Julia.
‘That was the least of it,’ she says drily.
‘That’s all over now,’ Alexander tells her. ‘I threw the PC into a skip last week.’
‘Did you wipe it for fingerprints?’ Hugo asks.
‘I transferred your fingerprints onto it. I have a special kit that you can do that with. I bought it from Mission Impossible.’
‘Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom to puke,’ says Kitty, peeling away.
‘I know how you feel, honey,’ says Julia. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Did I do that?’ Alexander asks Hugo as they watch the two women cross the room, confiding in each other, presumably about what an idiot he is.
‘You shouldn’t have let her get away,’ Hugo says seriously. ‘Why didn’t you marry her years ago?’
In a straight state, Alexander might have made some quick response to this, but now he pauses and genuinely searches for the answer. With his awareness distanced from his ego by drugs, he scans the landscape for explanatory features. He was too lazy to make the effort. He was too vain to make the statement. It wasn’t necessary, since they were already living together.
‘I couldn’t rise to it,’ he confesses.
Hugo says nothing, which is the right response.
‘How about you and Emma?’
‘Never better,’ Hugo says, but without much emphasis in his voice, as a matter of politeness perhaps. ‘She couldn’t come across for this today, but we’ll be over again next week for the Christmas.’
They are both leaning against the window now, their backs to the sill, facing into the room, watching the people as they speak, their heads tilted almost together to facilitate the conversation.
‘From the outside, it seems like you have had a charmed life,’ Alexander says. ‘College to bank, bank to business, business to glory, smart beautiful Emma by your side, both of you so at ease with yourselves.’
‘I know.’
‘I bet you get on well with your father.’
‘Never better,’ says Hugo.
‘I bet you go fishing with him.’
‘We play golf.’
‘Naturally. . . . When I think about you, which, to be honest, isn’t often, I see that you were on a higher path from the outset. And I’m on a lower path. I don’t know why. I wonder was there a point at which I could have taken a different trajectory? I suppose there must be those points of inflection.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up. We all have problems.’
Hugo drinks his wine. His tone and pace of delivery had dipped, but now the pitch is higher again, and the body language a little restless. He wants to depart from the soul-searching.
‘Any good business projects?’ Alexander asks, sounding upbeat, and turning to face Hugo to punctuate a change in mood.
Hugo’s eyes brighten with enthusiasm.
‘I shouldn’t tell you,’ he says in a whisper, ‘but I have this sweet thing going. It has to do with the roll-out of broadband for small users here in Ireland. Any day now the government is going to set up a bucket of cash for local authorities to invest in a broadband network. We’re going to help them spend it.’
‘Maybe somebody else will help them spend it,’ Alexander suggests. He finds himself surprisingly calm in gaining this new, dark intelligence. It assimilates quickly into his understanding, creating a sense of internal spaciousness.
‘Maybe,’ Hugo concedes, ‘but we have a head start. We have a few people on the ground who’ve been driving around for a year, giving free advice about options, possibilities, how to get funding. We’ve been getting to know the local players, making some donations to good causes.’ Hugo smirks on this point. ‘It’s small beer really, but I can’t help myself. It’s so easy to suck up government money. You have to do it, just for the sport.’
‘So, let me see if I’ve got this,’ Alexander says, as if puzzling over something very complicated. ‘The local authorities will invite tenders and you’ll win the contracts. Is that it? Won’t somebody smell a rat if the same company wins all the contracts?’
Hugo’s head jerks in surprise.
‘Well, there is no rat,’ he says pompously, and Alexander doesn’t know if he is joking or not. ‘Anyhow, it’s not the same company. We can have a dozen companies, or two dozen, however many you want: Optimal Broadband, Alpha Telecoms, Bugs Bunny Networks – you name it. In fact, why don’t you name one right now?’
‘I’ll think about it. How can you be so sure the government will put up the money?’
‘Because we influence these things,’ Hugo says, serious and definite.
‘What? Have you got photographs of the Minister for Finance with his trousers down?’
Hugo laughs, as though he might have.
> ‘It’s the other way around. I’m a supporter.’
‘But you have to get the issue onto his desk?’
‘Yes, you’re right. That makes it easier. But there are vehicles for that kind of thing. Watch out in the papers after Christmas. See if the National Economic Advisory Council makes recommendations on the issue. You probably keep an eye out for that kind of stuff, right? You still work in that consultancy firm, don’t you?’
‘Yes, something like that,’ Alexander says. ‘I have a name for one of your broadband companies: Amazing Grace.’
Hugo blinks slowly.
‘What did you say?’
‘I mentioned the name Grace.’
Hugo’s patience is cracking. Beneath, his countenance is hard.
‘You always were an odd fucker,’ he says. ‘And you haven’t improved with age. . . . Excuse me, I have to go talk to somebody about something.’
These last words are enunciated carefully, coldly. Hugo sets down on the sill his unfinished glass of wine, nods to Alexander, and moves off toward the centre of the room.
‘Hey, baby, how come you’re such a big hit with the girls?’ Alexander asks himself.
The party is humming, the different generations now intermingling easily.
In the sitting room a sing-song is underway. A few moments ago they were on Galway Bay. A tall fifty-something with fat hands and a forced tenor voice belted out some fragments of verse, filled in with la-la-la and plenty of smiling, his supporters coming in with the chorus at every opportunity.
In the kitchen, the temperature is high and the laughter increasingly raucous. Alexander has been knocking back the wine without interruption, and is rapidly passing through the threshold of restraint. On his last trip to the upstairs bathroom, he pissed into the sink for variety, leaning his forehead onto the mirrored surface of the bathroom cabinet.
‘I’m drunk, I’m drunk, I’m a silly old skunk,’ he said as he happily relieved himself. This is the rhyme that usually pops out at some point on his way to getting seriously wasted.
Being Alexander Page 17
