Standing now at the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, talking to Vlad and Mary-Lou about drug tests, he is trying to communicate telepathically with Julia, who is farther into the room, sitting on the kitchen table (which has been pushed against the wall), swinging her legs like a little girl.
She is together with Paul, Karina, Danny and smug Dermot O’Hara, who must be a new arrival, since Alexander didn’t notice him before. O’Hara is mid-flow in some sardonic patter, the others encouraging him with their approving laughter. It seems a better conversation than the one Alexander is currently in.
‘I couldn’t believe that,’ says Mary-Lou. ‘You can’t forget that kind of thing. He must have been sniffing coke at the weekend, and needed another couple of days for it to get through his system.’
‘How long does it take for coke to get through your system?’ Vlad asks.
‘Look it up on the internet,’ says Mary-Lou smartly.
Bimbo, Alexander thinks. High on dope, his physical desire to fuck her is greatly diminished, though he maintains a scientific interest in exploring her body and is still particularly intrigued by her gleaming cleavage.
But she is not the mission. The mission is to speak to Julia. He focuses again on shooting thoughts through the air, from his brain to Julia’s: Look around. See me. Know now that I want to speak to you. He notices – to his surprise – that the thought packages appear to travel with just the same trajectory as physical items. He sends them in an arc to a landing point on the crown of her head, where, unfortunately, they bounce off and tumble – lost – down the sheer slopes of her body.
Finally, in an instant of great good-fortune, or because he is genuinely telepathic, one of his carefully flighted thought-bombs penetrates her skull. It assumes at the moment of impact precisely the physical properties and direction of momentum required to slip through the bone. She looks around and sees him. He beckons her urgently, his lips silently telling her that he needs to talk to her. Please, he mouths.
She deliberates, grimacing with irritation in the same moment that she decides to comply. She excuses herself from the group as she slips off the table, and walks across the floor to him in a carefully measured gait, eyeing him with self-assurance.
‘What do you want?’ she asks with affected gruffness.
‘Not in front of the children,’ he says, nodding at Vlad and Mary-Lou. ‘Can we go out front for a minute? There’s something I want to ask you.’
‘He wants you to marry him,’ Vlad explains conversationally.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ says Mary-Lou.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of it.’
‘I’d like to get your opinion on something that is important to me,’ Alexander explains with what he hopes is disarming genuineness.
‘Lead the way,’ Julia says and the tip of her tongue darts out from her mouth to touch her upper lip, which gesture expresses her feeling of superiority and her willingness, just in this second, to indulge him.
Out on the front driveway, on this cold early-dark December evening, removed from everybody, she is more defensive. She refuses to go for a stroll with him.
‘This is far enough,’ she says, a few feet beyond the front door, her arms folded across her chest, her lips quivering a little from the cold.
Alexander staggers, laughs, straightens himself.
‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit drunk.’
‘You should be sorry for wasting my time.’
‘Vlad was speaking the truth. I thought maybe you might want to marry me.’
He smiles modestly, wobbling again, though this time under the weight of the words, which for him are earth quaking. Unfortunately, they appear to leave her untouched.
‘What could possibly have given you that impression?’
‘You were so angry with me last week in the hospital.’
‘And from that you deduced that I might want to marry you? Is that it? Are we finished? Can I go inside again?’
‘Please don’t be in such a hurry,’ he says, stepping closer to her, his arms stretched out slightly in appeal, his voice taking on its most tender aspect. ‘Give me a few minutes. Sit down with me . . . take a cigarette. I won’t trouble you again after this, I promise.’
‘It’s icy,’ she says, relenting, shivering.
They sit on the low window ledge, which is comfortable enough, though the concrete isn’t welcoming at first touch. From behind them, through the window, they can hear the party noise from the sitting-room: laughter, chat, the blended sounds of drunken people enjoying themselves. Alexander lights two cigarettes, giving the first to Julia. They blow their smoke into the evening air.
The road beyond the garden is narrow, tree-lined, jammed with parked cars, lit in this section by a street light, which is surrounded – from their angle – by the bare branches of one of the trees growing up through the pavement. Abstracted in this way from its supporting post, the orange light – amidst the branches – appears like a fruit, an urban winter strain.
A fat black BMW 5 Series rolls slowly and quietly into view: a fine animal, poised, powerful, immaculately finished, lit like a piece of theatre. He can see the female driver checking out the house, looking around the street. There is something familiar about her.
‘She must be here for the party,’ he says to Julia. ‘She’ll have to go well down the road to find a parking place.’
Julia does not respond.
The woman in the BMW makes a decision, and the machine shoots off at a speed that could be dangerous on such a narrow street, clogged as it is with cars, where a cat or a child might wander naïvely onto the road, coming unseen from between bumpers, offering to get knocked down.
There are many things he might speak of to Julia.
He could tell her about his problems at work: that Personnel has launched an investigation into Neville’s accusations of bullying and sexual harassment; that a fat fuck from Special Projects who doesn’t like Alexander is chairing the investigation; that Neville and Alexander are to continue working together in the meantime, but are to communicate only by email, which makes things in the office rather awkward.
He could let her know about the Maisie developments: that she’s still alive; that there’s talk of her leaving him the farm in her will; that he still hasn’t visited her; that one of the reasons for his reluctance is that she mistook him for his father the last time he saw her, which confused him, left him thinking that he might in fact be his father – essentially.
But he doesn’t want to bore Julia with these things, has himself no desire to talk about the details of his current existence in which she has no living role. He wants to recollect some high point from their shared life, something that has meaning which is relevant to them now, which speaks of the possibility of their having a future together.
Like the time they nearly crashed the car, speeding on the coast road through Monkstown on a heavy summer’s day. They got caught in a sudden deluge of thundery rain. Julia was driving, going too fast on a curve. She over-braked in unfavourable circumstances: the speed, the turn, the camber of the road, the sheets of rainwater already washing over the surface. They tripped into a spin, which happened in the slow motion of acutely heightened perception. The car did a double twirl, as in a dance. It was a beautiful move, which he admired even as it was occurring. Julia darted him a look for help. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel, but she had ceased trying to exert control. And he was reaching across to her, to warn her, to protect her head from the impact with his hands.
When the car stopped spinning, it was positioned in the correct lane, pointing in the right direction, with a few cars of traffic behind, waiting patiently.
They laughed.
‘You look so beautiful,’ he said to her. Let’s go home and make a baby, he thought. But he didn’t trust the impulse.
‘
I was proud of you back in the church,’ Julia says, breaking the long silence just as he himself is nearing speech, and her voice coming from just such a place of sobriety and honesty as he has now arrived at. ‘When you stood up for yourself. You usually let those guys walk all over you.’
He has no response to this, but in parallel has reached a resolution as to what he should say to her.
‘You know that line that gets used,’ he begins. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me?” It’s in a song as well. . . . in our case . . . in my case . . . I would put it differently. . . . You are the only thing that ever happened to me.’
He draws heavily on the cigarette, enjoying it, though his throat is starting to get sore.
A woman, whom he supposes must have come from the BMW, enters the driveway from the pavement outside. She is wrapped in a heavy woollen shawl. Her heels click-clack sexily on the concrete as she proceeds, moving between the parked cars and the lawn, swerving her body to avoid the side-view mirrors. She falters at one point, hitting a seam in the surface of the driveway.
It is Grace Sharkey.
Julia stands. She takes a final drag, tosses the cigarette out onto the lawn, still burning.
‘I have to go,’ she says in a low voice.
‘What are you doing here?’ Grace asks him with marked irritation.
She is paused before the front door, behind which Julia has disappeared only a couple of seconds earlier, inadvertently – or perhaps deliberately – closing it after her. Grace has rung the bell and is waiting.
He finds her diamantine. Her copper hair is slicked back over the top of her skull, gathered behind in a tight ball. The individual parts of her long dangly silver earrings swish in domino concert with the movements of her head, her angular jaws.
‘I’m waiting for you to give me the keys to your car,’ he says.
‘And why would I do that?’
‘In payment for services rendered.’
‘Piss off, you little turd. The report is out. That’s already everything I want from you. And by the way, you don’t get keys with a car like that.’
She presses the bell again, impatiently.
Alexander draws calmly on his cigarette. He feels fluent.
‘Let me guess why you’re here,’ he says. ‘To meet Hugo Strongboy, maybe to give him a lift to wherever he is staying. Maybe he’s staying with you, in fact. You guys might be fuck buddies as well as business partners. And here is why you’re going to give me your . . . let’s just call it a key. If you don’t, tomorrow or the next day I’ll ring the Chairman and tell him that one of the Council members, who was highly influential in forming the Council position on broadband, stands to make a significant personal financial gain if the recommendations are implemented.’
‘I don’t give a shit what you say. Nobody gives a shit what you say.’
‘You’re very right. That has been my experience to date, but I remain hopeful. I’ll explain to the Chairman my role in channelling your influence through to the consultant. I’ll explain also that I’m planning to find a journalist to whom I can spill this story of corruption, if the Chairman allows the recommendations to stand. The Chairman, by the way, was already suspicious of your motives months ago. I deflected him. . . . I’m not suggesting there is any threat to you here. No one has committed any crime. But there is good potential to fuck up the opportunity, now or later on. And why would we take that risk? Instead, just give me the key, and tomorrow get a change-of-ownership form and fill it out, selling me the lovely vehicle for . . . let’s say a euro. How about that?’
‘How about you stick your tongue up my arse?’
III
January
On a dark, windy, rain-splattered evening, Alexander is reclining on the sofa watching LA Confidential, sucking on a bottle of German beer, absent-mindedly fondling his dick.
He hears a board creaking in the hallway on the floor above and recalls that it is Monday, which is the day when the landlord comes on his weekly round of rent collecting. The creak in itself is not a reliable indicator of the author of the creak, even on a Monday, but Alexander’s tenant’s intuition tells him that this is the landlord.
The landlord starts at the top of the house and works his way downward, finally arriving at Alexander’s flat. His little treble knock on the inner door irritates Alexander in being almost inaudible, but not so inaudible as to be ignorable. Probably what really irritates Alexander is the indignity of having to pay rent, and of paying it in an anachronistic fashion, with each weekly instalment recorded and initialled in a soft-covered red notebook, nearly all the pages of which, depressingly, are now filled up.
‘We’ll have to get a new book,’ the landlord said recently, in a humorous vein.
He is a perfectly inoffensive man, but Alexander experienced a savage, primitive urge to bite out his throat.
He decides to flee. He’ll leave the money in the book on top of the TV, which is their standing arrangement for the evenings when Alexander is absent.
He rings Danny on the mobile.
‘Do you want to go for a spin in my new car?’ he suggests. ‘We could drive down to Wicklow and have a pint in one of those pubs in the mountains that overlook the city.’
‘You still haven’t satisfactorily explained to me where you got that car from,’ Danny says.
‘I didn’t know I had to explain myself to you.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘I’ve been doing a bit of consultancy work on the side.’
‘That’s what you said the last time. It sounds like bollocks.’
‘I sold my soul to the devil. How about that? How does that sound?’
‘You got a good deal.’
‘So, do you want to come out?’
‘Not really. I’m knackered. But why don’t you come over here? We’ll drink some whiskey . . . if you bring a bottle. You can crash for the night.’
Alexander buys a bottle of whiskey in his local off-licence and drives out to Dún Laoghaire in his new BMW.
He didn’t drive the car home on the night of the christening, being far too drunk. Nor was he well enough the next day to pick it up, but he didn’t want to leave it parked where it was, in case she might reclaim it, so he got a taxi out to Dún Laoghaire, had the taxi man drop him a couple of hundred yards away, and approached the car surreptitiously, like a thief.
He was already feeling queasy from the taxi journey, heart racing, stomach in revolt, body queerly twisted, his pores emitting alcoholic sweat onto his sickly skin. It would have been challenging enough for him to drive his own car, which Julia left him as part of their amicable settlement. The idea of navigating the beastly Beamer through the city was horrifying.
Grace Sharkey had given him the key card, which unlocked the car automatically as he approached. He opened the door, flinching in anticipation of the alarm going off, but it didn’t. The door was heavy, beautifully hung. He sat into the driver’s seat, plushly upholstered in black leather. His stomach rose briefly against him, but settled. Despite the general spaciousness, he was a bit cramped, since she had the driver’s seat right under the steering wheel. He felt in the usual places for likely levers, proceeded then to try the buttons in the door panel, one of which caused the seat to tilt forward. This did not improve the situation. He decided to leave things as they were, on the basis that he already had more than enough to contend with simply in getting the car to move.
He found the ignition switch and successfully pressed it, setting off all sorts of functions, with flashings, clickings, humming, beneath which, just audible, was the low luxurious turning of the engine.
He was not enjoying himself. The night before, when he had gone down to survey his new possession, all cocky, an inner voice had said to him: I deserve this. His mood then had been so ethereal that he didn’t even caress the external body, per
haps also for fear that the thing might disappear under his touch. The following day, suffering from severe poisoning, sitting in the driving seat in a scruffy jumper and tracksuit bottoms, he felt overwhelmingly undeserving. He felt like a tramp. The idea that he could own such a vehicle seemed preposterous.
He shifted into Drive and nosed out into the road.
‘You are going the wrong way,’ a sexy robotic female voice announced. ‘Turn left at the next junction.’
In front of him the dashboard, an in-built monitor was displaying the territory, a big flashing red arrow indicating his next move. His body lurched forward involuntarily, and he vomited a litre of Tropicana orange juice in four painful retches, out onto the dashboard, down onto the steering wheel, his tracksuit, the seat, his runners, the floor mat. And as his stomach was spasmodically emptying itself, the car all the while proceeded gracefully along the road, which was devoid of traffic, miraculously avoiding collision with the many parked cars.
In the weeks that followed, he spent a lot of time driving around the city, and out into the country, gradually internalising into his driver’s consciousness the car’s size and capabilities, but he is still far from the level of intimacy that he enjoys, he now realises, with his old Honda. He is not quick at getting to know a new car. He doesn’t think of it yet as his car, which is probably correct, since no paperwork has been sent to him, either by Grace or by the tax authority, to confirm the change of ownership. But he has possession, and has observed in himself that this has not increased his level of happiness; has in fact reduced it slightly by introducing an additional tone of disappointment.
To begin with, he pretended to himself that he was thrilled: I can take this anywhere; this is the new me. But ultimately he could not conceal from himself that he had very few places to go, almost no one to visit. He understood why someone might drive a car off a pier at high tide; not from desperation, but from emptiness, from a complete lack of other destinations, from a realisation that the limits in life are ingrained, not circumstantial. Winning the lottery does not improve things. In fact, by not improving things, it makes them worse.
Being Alexander Page 18
