Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  Paul blanches visibly.

  ‘Which tragedy?’ he asks, panicked into stupidity, looking quickly to Danny to intercede.

  Danny is not engaging. Seeing his father, he has postponed proceeding fully into the room and stands slouched against the wall beside the back door like a teenager in a snooker hall.

  ‘The death of my grandson,’ says Carter solemnly. ‘Isn’t that tragedy enough for you?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Paul. ‘I....’

  ‘Daddy, help me put the cream into the Irish coffees,’ says Cordelia, physically taking her father by the elbow and leading him away from the table.

  ‘Anything good in the paper?’ Karina asks Philippe, who appears not to hear her.

  ‘Alexander was just telling us that he’s coming into an inheritance,’ Ursula says to Danny. ‘Sit down and have some salmon, love.’ She points to the empty chair between herself and Julia.

  ‘So, did your aunt die then?’ Danny says in a whisper. He seems bereft of energy and vitality, advancing to the table one slow step at a time. ‘Do I owe you an apology?’

  ‘She’s still hanging in there,’ Julia says to Danny, though facing Alexander with a mischievous smile. ‘When he gets the farm, Alex is going to chuck in his job and go back to the earth.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘But it’s what you’re planning, right?’

  ‘Obviously, you can still read my subconscious as well as ever.’

  ‘Even though he can barely look after a cactus,’ Julia says to Paul with a titter.

  Danny, laboriously, sits into the chair next to Julia. His mother leans down and kisses him on the top of the head, where his hair is thinning. It is a gesture so perfectly natural that it goes almost unnoticed.

  Ursula cuts more bread.

  ‘Come on, Philippe,’ coaxes Karina. ‘Stop hiding behind that newspaper. Or at least tell us what’s going on. There must be a morsel of gossip or scandal in there somewhere. It can’t all be stocks and shares.’

  Philippe lifts his face to her with an amused pout, and this time speaks:

  ‘You’d be surprised how racy stocks and shares can be.’

  ‘Don’t get him started,’ calls his wife, as she carefully pours the whipped cream into the first of the coffees, over the back of a hot silver spoon, held diligently in place by her ageing father.

  Alexander encounters Aoife sitting on the steps in front of the main door of Knockboy, staring out over the dreary field that runs in a gently sloping hill down toward the public road. Above the field, above and beyond the rough border of dark gnarled trees at the bottom of the hill, the sky is filled with grey blanket cloud at medium altitude. Only a few patches of clear blue transcendent space remain. The afternoon has descended into joylessness.

  ‘Hey there,’ he says, sitting down beside her on the step.

  ‘Hi,’ she responds in a hoarse, zombified voice.

  Aoife is heavily drugged, on prescription pills obtained by Alexander from the local pharmacy on the morning the baby died. The doctor who finally told her formally that her baby was dead also immediately scribbled out a prescription, so that she was not returning home entirely empty-handed. It was not Alexander who went with Aoife to the hospital. He caught up with her when she bolted, walked her home, called an ambulance, which came quickly. The two paramedics gently prised the baby from her grasp. The little bundle was held tightly to her breast, but she wasn’t focused on it any more, nor screaming, just rocking gently, perched on the doorstep. She let them take it. Danny helped her up and walked her into the back of the ambulance, followed by one of the paramedics, who, perhaps out of consideration for the mother, held the wrapped-up dead baby as though it were living. Alexander stayed in the house and started to make phone calls. At that stage, there was still no sign of Jasper rising, and Alexander had no desire to wake him.

  It occurs to him now, easily, darkly, dramatically, that Jasper in fact may have killed the baby, in the middle of the night, when everyone was sleeping; may have crept into his parents’ room, just for the fun of creeping, then decided on a whim to smother the baby with a pillow. There is no evidence for this speculation, apart from Jasper’s curious behaviour that morning, in not stirring from his bed despite the howling and commotion of the drama, and in his perplexed understated response to the news when he did finally surface.

  ‘Jasper, I’ve got something terrible to tell you. The baby died in the night.’

  To which Jasper said nothing, standing in the kitchen in a T-shirt, underpants and socks, looking really exhausted, as though he hadn’t slept at all, scratching the side of his head.

  ‘I have to have some cornflakes,’ he finally said, turning away to look for a bowl.

  ‘Did Cordelia send you out?’ Aoife asks, pausing to clear her throat, coughing weakly into a loosely clenched fist, then laughing oddly. Her eyes gleam darkly of chemicals. Her face is covered with thickly applied make-up. Her lips are shrunken and dry. ‘She thinks I’m going to top myself. The truth is: I’m too stoned to top myself. Anyhow, I’m not the type. I’m more of a murderer if anything. . . . Murderess.’

  He is fascinated in this moment by how shrivelled her lips are, how pale and waxy. He imagines inflating them with a bicycle pump, smoothing out the wrinkles. You would need a really tiny pump connection, not quite nanotechnology, but something seriously minia­ture.

  ‘I reckon murderer is like actor,’ he observes. ‘It can apply to both sexes.’

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  In searching for his cigarettes, he takes out his mobile (in silent mode) and sees that he has three missed calls from his mother and two new text messages, one indicating voice mail, the other from Luke at work. He clicks open the text from Luke. Neville gone mad. Distributing slanderous leaflets at front door. Personnel stopped him. Know you’re at funeral. But thought should know. He quits the message, opens it again, reads it again, quits, puts the phone back in his pocket, finds his cigarettes and lighter. He takes a cigarette from the pack and instinctively puts it first into his own lips to light for her. The smoke tastes harsh to him. He doesn’t want it.

  ‘Will I tell you a funny story?’ he offers as he passes the cigarette across.

  ‘Go on,’ she responds indifferently.

  ‘You have to conceive of a really remote corner of Siberia, an ugly snowbound village, where the people are big and beefy, thick-skulled inbred peasants, uneducated, as coarse as you can imagine humans to be. The only real employment is in servicing the local nuclear power plant, which is probably poisoning the water supply.’

  ‘This is a funny story?’

  ‘Well, you have to have a broad understanding of funny. It’s a true story by the way. I read it in a magazine at the barber’s at the weekend. Actually, it’s probably a load of bollocks. Plus I’m embellishing enormously. But I tell you: it really moved me. Two Russian guys get drunk. In the morning they are found with a chainsaw. One of them is missing a leg. The other appears to have cut his own head off.’

  ‘It really moved you,’ she says with interest, as a statement rather than a question.

  Down at the bottom of the field, where the driveway runs, a red van has emerged from the trees and is on its way up.

  ‘So here’s the interpretation,’ he continues enthusiastically. ‘They skive off from their perimeter-fence security job. It’s minus thirty-two degrees Celsius. They’re hiding in a hut, smoking tea leaves or yak shit. They come across a few cans of paint thinner and can scarcely believe their luck. They knock back several litres, and then they get into this ridiculous dialogue about who is the toughest. Igor says: I can bang my head off the wall. Dimitri says: I can eat this rusty nail. It escalates to the point where Igor cuts off his finger with a petrol chainsaw that was lying around in the shed. Beat that, you schmuck, he says, whereupon Dimitri cuts off his own leg. Ha, shit-for-brains,
I’m the toughest sonofabitch for a thousand miles. Remember they’re completely deranged on industrial alcohol. Finally, Igor revs up

  and slices off his own head. . . .’ Alexander breaks into a self-feeding snigger, which quickly becomes a self-loathing snigger. He knows he is being a prick, but cannot find the right pieties for the occasion, and surely Aoife would rather him just be a prick. ‘What a hangover, huh.’

  Aoife has not joined him in his laughter.

  She draws on her cigarette, inhales deeply, holds the smoke in her lungs, exhales; and seems to derive strength from this.

  ‘Julia is worried that you’re deteriorating rapidly since she left you.’

  ‘She’s not the only one.’

  They watch the continuing approach of the red van. It’s quite a long route because the driveway loops around the bottom of the hill, cuts back in a long arc, then snakes around again to reach the forecourt, defining what Alexander believes must approximate to an S-shape.

  The van speeds noisily onto the forecourt, bits of gravel flying from the wheels, slows, parks in front of the house, within a few yards of where they are sitting. It’s a Toyota Hiace, 97 G reg., filthy dirty, with a screechy-looking scrape injury in the panel above the rear wheel nearest them. The driver is a short, stout man in his sixties. The comb-over component of his grey hair has been blown out of place, but he flattens it back with a practised hand as he walks around to the back of the van. He is wearing a white cotton coat, heavily stained with blood around the belly and chest.

  ‘It’s the butcher,’ Aoife explains. ‘They get their meat delivered here. They’re too important to go to the shops like everybody else.’

  Alexander recognises the man. In fact, he is very familiar. It’s Tommy Óg Grady, whom he met yesterday, in passing, as he, Brigid and Mick were on the way out of the hospital morgue and Tommy Óg was on his way in.

  This was the first time he was introduced to him, man to man. Previously, as a child, he had encountered Tommy Óg only at funerals, but was briefed in detail on Tommy’s supposed villainy, indoctrinated with stories such as the one about how Tommy Óg had cheated poor Maisie into buying a second-hand black-and-white TV for an outrageous price, then later – repeatedly – charged more for repairs on it; or the one about how Tommy Óg stole a fifty pence piece from the mantelpiece in Uncle Mick’s house in Dublin.

  ‘You’re the very spit of your father,’ Tommy Óg gruffly said to him yesterday, crushing Alexander’s hand in a ridiculously powerful handshake.

  For the morgue visit, to pay his respects to the dead, Tommy Óg was dressed in a tight-fitting blue suit, which emphasised his barrel physique. Today he looks more like the Tommy Óg Alexander knows from family gossip.

  It embarrasses Alexander to meet him here in this completely different terrain, and he deals with this embarrassment by jumping to his feet and jogging down the couple of steps to greet Tommy, who has opened the double door at the back of the van and is checking through a plastic crate filled with cuts of meat wrapped in white butcher’s paper.

  ‘Tommy Óg, how’s it going?’

  ‘What crack did you crawl from?’

  This is certainly a different Tommy from the one yesterday in the hospital, who was suitably solemn and reasonably civil. He is ticking off the cuts of meat against a list on a clipboard and does not look up.

  ‘I’m a friend of the family. There’s. . . . A child died. Its funeral was this morning.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you in court,’ Tommy Óg says with a hiss, throwing down the clipboard with surprising violence. It clatters off the dirty metal floor of the van. He turns now to face Alexander for the first time, his eyes yellow with age and bloodshot red.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Alexander says.

  ‘And let me tell you about this family. These cunts were the landlords. They owned Ballyryan and everything around it for miles. Your great-great-grandmother peeled turnips in the back-kitchen here in the Great Hunger. And what did she get for her pay? The fucking turnip peels.’

  Tommy Óg pokes Alexander in the chest with his finger, hard enough for it to hurt considerably without quite constituting physical assault. Alexander staggers backward, straightens himself. He glances up to the steps. Aoife has risen and is entering the house through the front door. Regretting her departure, he observes her back for a moment, her long full red hair stark against her green coat. He doubts she has heard anything.

  Tommy Óg has stepped forward after Alexander and is under his nose again.

  ‘In 1915, Billy Carter’s uncle – Daniel Carter – knocked up a young girl from Ballyryan by the name of Mary Donovan, who was a maid here, and who happened also to be promised to your Great-uncle Martin. She threw herself off the roof of this very house, split her skull right open in the courtyard out the back, spilled her brains on the flagstones and the dogs came to lap them up. Martin confronted Carter, hit the man a few punches before they restrained him. They beat him like a savage, threw him in jail, gave him the choice of a prison sentence or the Western Front, and he died at the Somme in 1916, fighting for King and Country.’

  ‘So what’s your point, Tommy?’

  Alexander is angry. The adrenaline has kicked in, and has decided him for fight rather than flight.

  ‘You’re too well educated, Vespucci. That’s your problem, you and the like of you. You don’t know what it means.’

  ‘You’re here selling them meat, so what are you talking about?’

  ‘They pay top dollar. I tax them. I wouldn’t sup with them. I’d sooner break bread with Lucifer himself. And you can forget your fucking will. I have it trumped. My one is the real one—’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘We’ll be back with the solicitor tomorrow morning. This is a sign from hell, meeting you here. I’ll wring your neck before you see a blade of grass from that farm. That is my promise, so help me God.’

  By two fifteen the following afternoon, the briefing room in the palatial Government Buildings on Upper Merrion Street is well filled with journalists, conversing loudly and talking into their mobiles: scruffy press people, among them Dermot O’Hara; business-like radio types with surprisingly cumbersome sound gear; a self-important television crew, busily checking lighting and setting up a camera position.

  The seating is arranged in terraces, as in a lecture theatre. At the bottom of the room, in the area reserved for the presenters, Alexander Vespucci – once again shaved and suited up – sits with his boss George Lucey, jabbering nervously as they wait for the Taoiseach and Council Chairman Stephen Banner to arrive and commence the press conference.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ George says. ‘The day after the poor woman passes away – God between us and all harm – a handful of relatives descend on the solicitor and demand for the will to be read pronto.’

  ‘Exactly. I wasn’t there myself because I was at a different funeral with my phone on silent. I didn’t hear about it till later. Anyhow, first the solicitor reads the formal will, which he himself witnessed five years ago. Then he goes on to explain – however – that a subsequent will was completed in the run-up to Christmas, written on a piece of ordinary paper, witnessed by a couple who live down the road from Maisie’s farm and who seem simply to have been visiting Maisie in the nursing home that day.’

  ‘And that second one leaves everything to you.’

  ‘Pretty much. Apart from the contents of the house. So this does not go down well with the assembled crew. As I hear it, one of them practically leapt across the room to grab the bit of paper out of the solicitor’s hand. He was foaming at the mouth, banging on the table, screaming that it was a forgery, that it was extracted from the old woman under duress, that she wasn’t in her right mind.’

  ‘And was she in her right mind?’

  ‘I have no idea. Anyhow, then, out of the blue, Tomm
y Óg – that’s the guy who was doing the leaping – says he has another will, at home in his attic, which post-dates and therefore supersedes the second one.’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘Well, he hasn’t produced it yet. He says it’s mislaid and he’ll have to find it. I imagine he’s back at the ranch as we speak with a pencil and a copy book, practising his handwriting.’

  ‘And do you think there is anything for you in this third will?’

  George appears to be missing some of the subtleties.

  ‘Somehow I doubt it.’

  ‘So you might be a wealthy man, and then again you might not,’ George concludes sagely, as though expertly summarising a complex situation. It is entirely novel for Alexander to gab so much about his private concerns, but George has adjusted well after an initial expression of surprise. ‘If I might offer some advice,’ he continues. ‘It’s better to have independent means than not. Employment income can be very unreliable.’

  ‘That must be why we work in the public sector,’ Alexander remarks, just as the panelled side door opens and a couple of civil service flunkeys lead a train of eminences into the room: Stephen Banner, in glowing condition; An Taoiseach himself, who is physically bigger than he seems on television; Grace Sharkey, whom Alexander was not expecting and who looks splendid – lean and sharp in a black trouser suit; as well as a number of senior officials, including ferrety Terry Martin, the small angular government press secretary.

  The noise level drops a notch. George and Alexander stand to greet the Taoiseach. Banner performs the introductions.

  ‘This is George Lucey, Taoiseach.’

  ‘Sure, George and I go way back,’ the Taoiseach says, shaking George’s hand, and slapping him on the shoulder at the same time.

  ‘It’s hard to kill a bad thing, Taoiseach,’ George jokes easily, prompting laughter.

  ‘And this is Alexander Vespucci. He’s Senior Economist with the Council, does a huge amount of great work. He has been the engine behind the Council on this one.’