Open-handed

by Chris Binchy

  The work took its toll. Staying up all night waiting for something to go wrong, hoping it wouldn’t. He enjoyed being on the doors, meeting people, flirting with girls, but he’d enjoy it more if he knew that nobody was going to hit him with a bottle. Here, all was knowable, calm, relaxed.

  He had a nice smile, or so people said. It seemed gormless to him when he looked at himself in the mirror, like a child’s, his face splitting, little dimples, tidy white teeth showing. But people responded and found themselves smiling back. It came as a surprise when the bouncer held the door for them and beamed, throwing out encouraging messages to send them in upbeat. Have a good night. Enjoy yourselves, lads. Be good girls.

  There were other bouncers who didn’t get it. Not just the psychos drawn to a job where they could kick heads, break noses or stamp on necks. But the guys who saw themselves as gatekeepers, suspicious of every group that wandered up to the door. The ones who let that suspicion show in their faces, enjoying the moment when they put up their hand blocking the way. Hold on there a moment. Where do you think you’re going? What was the point? Talk to people, check them out, but hope for the best and it would happen most of the time.

  The punters you had to worry about didn’t just explode into violence from nowhere. You could feel it coming. Hear the change in the voices, see the body language. Victor could tell when it was going to happen. When his smiles and his gentle, mildly lisping voice didn’t do the trick, when everything he said seemed to aggravate the situation, when they talked themselves into a rage – ‘Who the fuck are you? Who are you to tell me where I can go? In my own fucking country! What are you smiling at? You’ve a face like a prick’ – Victor would tense and prepare himself.

  ‘That’s a nice trick,’ Gareth had said to him, one time early on, after he’d stared down two guys who had seemed ready to start something but instead walked off in silence. ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘I think about bad things,’ Victor said.

  There was a toughness in him and he could access it. When he’d been in school it had been a wave of rage that would overwhelm him and carry him places he didn’t expect. But when he got bigger he’d hurt a fellow one time and scared himself. He learned to control it, talking himself down when the adrenalin kicked in. Steadying himself. Breathing slowly. Now he could turn it on and off, letting out just enough for the situation. It took a lot for him to lose his cool and it was something he was always aware of. Without self-control he could kill someone. The gym helped to keep him focused with its order and counting and routine, and the promise, posted on the walls, that you could become the person you wanted to be.

  9

  Dessie looked up from the paper and saw them coming. The two men walked slowly, leaning in slightly towards each other as they came. Campbell, a Northern businessman, taller and bulkier than Sylvester and wearing a suit that might have appeared expensive on someone else, was talking, emphasizing his point with a finger he wagged close to Sylvester’s chest. It seemed that he was cautioning him, warning him off. His words were slow, clear, deliberate. If he had wanted, Dessie could have read his lips. But he didn’t want to know. At the point where Dessie thought Sylvester was going to have to do something, to stand his ground or put him back in his place, the two men suddenly laughed. Heads turned around in the lobby at the sudden explosive sound. Har har har. Dessie relaxed. A big joke. Some of these men were just clowns. They came to do business and acted like it was all a game to them, spending other people’s money. Sylvester could buy or sell these guys. Dessie knew that. People underestimated him, with his clean, obvious good looks, his accent that could have been from anywhere, his bland generalizations that people took to be schoolboy philosophy rather than appropriate careful sounds. They dropped their guard. Said too much and thought too little around him. This big dope looked to have done the same. Dessie smiled as they approached. Sylvester nodded at him.

  ‘All done?’ Dessie asked.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘So, that was very useful,’ Campbell said, as they walked out on to the steps in front of the hotel. ‘We’ll be in touch with you. I think we’ve made some good progress.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Marek and get him to send that information on to you.’

  ‘Absolutely, yes. Excellent. Excellent.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Are you going into town?’ Sylvester asked him. ‘Can my driver bring you anywhere?’

  ‘No, I’ve a car here. I’m heading on to a meeting in Waterford. Bit of a drive ahead of me. Thanks anyway.’

  ‘No problem. Good to see you. Take care of yourself.’

  ‘And you. Good luck. Goodbye to you.’ They walked off in different directions, Sylvester lifting a hand in a salute as they went.

  ‘Our car’s that way,’ Dessie said to him.

  ‘We’ll let him go.’ They walked together loosely across the car-park.

  Dessie took out a cigarette and lit it. He inhaled deeply, blew out and spoke: ‘Your driver?’ he said. ‘Is that what it is now?’

  ‘They love that kind of thing,’ Sylvester said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Dessie said. ‘I’ve told you before.’

  ‘What would you prefer? Secretary?’

  Dessie smiled. ‘Associate.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Helen. Get some cards made up. “Dessie. Associate.” ’

  ‘You do that.’ The two smirked at each other, then turned it into a smile to wave again as Campbell drove by.

  10

  If she hadn’t forgotten to turn off her phone and his call had gone straight to message, what would he have done then? She wondered about this later on when she was in the shower. On her day off she normally slept until the afternoon but his call woke her at ten and she answered before she was awake enough to check who it was.

  ‘Is that Agnieszka?’ A male voice, very clear and clean. A low conversational hum in the background.

  ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

  ‘Agnieszka, it’s Luke White.’

  ‘Who? Sorry?’

  ‘This is Luke White. I’m one of the owners of Symposium. I spoke to you last night.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ Her stomach gurgled lightly. It distracted her for a moment from whatever he was saying. ‘Sorry. I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was just saying, the reason I was calling was to apologize for my behaviour towards you last night.’

  Was he still out? Was the hangover beginning to kick in? Was he atoning for the sins of his night before it ended? He didn’t sound drunk. His voice was lower and more measured than before.

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said.

  ‘No, really, I’m sorry. I was out of line and I shouldn’t have put you in that position.’

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  ‘Well, you’re very kind,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again. It was inappropriate.’

  ‘All right.’ There was a moment of silence. The noise in the background rose for a second, a heightened murmur and then what sounded like quiet applause. ‘Okay, so thanks for calling,’ she said, thinking that when she woke again later, this would seem very much like a dream.

  ‘I’d like to put it right,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’

  ‘Maybe you’d join us next week for a drink? We want you to understand that you’re a very valued part of the operation.’

  Who was ‘we’? What operation? She worked in a bar. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to do that.’

  ‘There’ll be a few of us going. We’re taking the managers and a couple of the supervisors out. As a thank-you for their work since we reopened. We’d like you to come along too.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s great. Gavin will tell you about it anyway. I hope you can make it. And I’m sorry again for last night.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and was gone.

  There would be no sleep now. She lay in the bed for a couple of minutes trying
to think of a way out that she had missed. Her stupid sleeping brain.

  11

  It was dark when he woke again. He lay there blinking, trying to remember where he was, and when it came to him he felt a surge of happiness. He sat up and fumbled for the light. He found his phone and saw he had no missed calls. He dialled Artur’s number and this time it rang, but there was no answer.

  Outside, he passed along a dark street, apartments facing open ground across which wild-looking children called and whistled. He turned into another street and saw a pub ahead of him, lit up. It was glass-fronted, old wood, painted lettering, the kind of place he’d seen in pictures. He went into a room with a line of old men drinking on their own at the bar. He sat on a stool and ordered a beer. When he turned he saw that everyone was staring straight ahead, each maintaining the sovereignty of his own territory. He was glad. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to sit at the counter in an Irish bar and have a drink and know for sure that he was away. His clothes still smelled of home, and the half-remembered flight of this morning felt like a dream, as if he’d experienced some sort of flashback or mild epileptic event. When he nodded to get the barman’s attention, the barman nodded back. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Same again.’

  ‘Good man.’

  He was a good man. It was true. A glow of happiness washed over him, one drink in and another on the way. He need not have worried. There was no problem. He could handle this.

  That night when he got back to the guesthouse he tried Artur’s number one more time. It rang and then, finally, he heard Artur’s voice on the other end.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked Marcin straight away, as if that was the issue.

  ‘Where am I? Where am I? I’m in a hotel in Dublin, that’s where I am.’

  ‘That’s strange. So am I.’

  ‘What hotel?’

  ‘The one I’m working in. It’s a five-star.’

  ‘Yeah, well, mine’s not. What happened? Why didn’t you answer your phone?’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, but I’m working nights. I tried to get in touch…’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I rang you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. A couple of days ago. Anyway, I’m sorry. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. But this room cost me sixty euro and it stinks.’

  ‘You should have haggled.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well, come and meet me in the morning at my work and we’ll head out to the house together.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I finish at eight. I’ll give you the address. You can get a train.’

  After five minutes on the train the city thinned out into back gardens and apartment blocks, trees and grass. The walk from the station to the hotel was through a suburb of red-brick houses, most of which had been turned into offices that had plaques with words he thought he should remember but didn’t. He came to a corner and saw the sign first, just the two words spelled out in green plastic letters that might have signified quality when they were put up thirty years before but to Marcin just looked cheap. Trees and hedging hid the building from the road, but as he got closer he could see parts of it through breaks in the shrubbery: odd unexpected wings that jutted out, stuck on as afterthoughts. Then, through a gap cleared for some sort of pipe maintenance, he saw the main building, modern and enormous with no obvious shape, like a child’s vision conceived and executed in Lego, then blown up on the whim of an architect, a bizarre mix of brown and red and cream bricks, spectacular in its loose awfulness.

  He came to the gate and looked past an empty security hut up a driveway that led to the entrance and saw that from here, at ground level and hemmed in by willows and landscaping, the view was quite different. The canopied arrival area, revolving doors and liveried porters waiting, the bell trolleys and Mercedes that were dropping off and collecting and the tinkle of a water-feature from somewhere unseen suggested some sort of luxury. This was the first impression he would have had if he’d arrived in a taxi or a limo or by horse and carriage. Not many guests, he supposed, arrived on foot.

  It was ten to eight. Artur hadn’t said where they should meet. Marcin stood at the gate for a moment, cars passing him on the way in and out, and he began to feel like a beggar watching the rich folks, hoping that one might throw him a handful of change or a sandwich. It was a hotel, he thought, open to the public, and he was a member of the public, even if he was Artur’s friend. He walked up the drive, the air smelling of flowers from the beds beside him and a distant gassiness from a hole in the ground a little way off. He had thought he would ask the porters where he’d find Artur but as he got closer they watched him arrive with a low-grade, curious hostility that they didn’t let interrupt their chat. He kept going, through a revolving door that seemed to take twice as long as it should have to deliver him into the lobby.

  And then he knew he was in a five-star hotel. There was a tiny but perceptible hiccup in the background hum as he came in, a moment when the population of this vast open space saw the same thing and shared a thought. Something unexpected had happened that seemed unpleasant but would surely be resolved quickly. Nobody looked at him, not the businessmen standing in a group drinking coffee around a trestle-table, or the German tourists checking out en masse. Not the three perky waitresses who crossed Reception with trays of pastries for a meeting somewhere else, or the manager type in a grey morning suit standing alone at a small mahogany table in the middle of the floor talking into a phone. And yet he had been seen and noticed, and when he caught his reflection in a mirrored pillar he realized that the only thing to do was to leave. Turn right around and get out before they could put him out. Already somebody was walking towards him with purpose, a scowling, aggressive-looking uniformed man, whose face suddenly broke into a smile.

  ‘The international traveller has arrived. Can I take your bag? Are you checking in?’

  ‘Yeah. The penthouse.’

  ‘You don’t look great.’

  ‘Well, if you’d slept where I slept…’

  ‘I can show you where I slept. Right over there,’ Artur said, pointing to a couch where two women in suits were hunched over a laptop. ‘Oh, look. They’ve got dressed.’

  ‘When do you get out?’

  ‘I have to herd these Germans on to buses. That should be it. We’ll go to the house and have a drink.’

  ‘A drink?’

  ‘It’s my evening.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s definitely my morning.’

  ‘You can sleep all day. We’re celebrating.’

  ‘I had a premonition that this was going to happen.’

  ‘You must be psychic.’

  Standing behind Artur now was the manager Marcin had seen talking on the phone. Thin, balding, a fun-looking half smile on his face as he spoke. ‘Good morning, Artur,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Doyle.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘No, I do that and finish now.’

  ‘And who is this?’

  ‘He is my friend. He is just arrived.’

  ‘And are you another of our Polish brethren?’ Mr Doyle said to Marcin.

  The word ‘brethren’ meant nothing to him. ‘I am Polish, yes.’

  ‘And are you staying with us? Are you checking in?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, in that case would you mind letting Artur get on with his work? You can continue your reunion when he’s finished. Somewhere else, I would suggest. Thank you.’ He smiled, nodded at them both and waited as they said goodbye.

  ‘I’ll see you outside,’ Artur said. ‘Five minutes.’ The manager took him by the arm as they walked back across the lobby and spoke close to his ear.

  When Artur emerged from the hotel half an hour later, Marcin thought of a day maybe ten years before, coming out of school at the start of the summer holidays. Now he was underslept and hung-over but these waves came to him when he needed them. ‘What did the
manager say to you?’

  ‘He said that my homeless friends should keep their begging off the premises,’ Artur said, taking a bottle of beer from his backpack and handing it to Marcin.

  ‘It wasn’t really a problem, was it?’

  ‘No. He’s a daytime manager. Nothing to do with me.’ He produced another bottle, took a key-ring from his pocket and opened both. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘Sláinte,’ Marcin said. ‘Is that how you say it?’

  ‘Probably. You’re welcome anyway.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They sat on the upstairs deck of a bus that took them back through the centre, along the river into a valley filled with trees and new apartment blocks, then into a rougher place. Artur kept falling asleep and Marcin kept waking him again to be sure they wouldn’t miss their stop. He would lift his head and look out across a landscape of garages and bus-stops and scruffy bursts of shops at traffic-lights, rows of the same houses over and over, off into the distance.