by Chris Binchy
‘All right. Better than the last fellow.’
‘And you?’
‘Fine. Yeah. Seems okay.’
‘Do we take him?’
‘Give him a shot. If he’s any good we may as well.’
‘If he’s really good we can get rid of the other one,’ Ray said.
‘Is he that bad?’
‘Too smart,’ said Ray. ‘He’ll get into trouble.’
‘And isn’t this guy some friend of his?’ the front-of-house manager asked.
‘He said he’d heard about the job from him. He didn’t say they were friends.’
They looked at each other.
‘He was solid enough, I thought,’ the manager said.
‘Are you happy, Ray?’
‘I liked him.’
‘So we’ll give him a trial of a week, say, then all going well take him on and look at letting the other fellow go. What’s his name?’
‘Who? This one or the last one?’
‘The last one.’
‘Artur.’
‘Right,’ he said, standing. ‘I’ll sort that out with Lisa. You boys can head off to the pub or whatever it is you do now. I’ve got to get back to work.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ the night manager said.
Ray said nothing, just stood and stretched.
‘Ray?’
‘I might go for one,’ he said, a low, happy chuckle ready to roll in his throat.
‘I wish I was going.’
‘You wouldn’t like it. Dirty place. Full of dirty drunks. Not for the likes of you.’
‘In my day,’ the night manager said, ‘I, too, was a dirty drunk.’
18
They’d sat beside each other at a meeting. That was how they’d met. Dessie had seen him on the street afterwards trying to get a taxi and stopped.
‘Which way are you going?’
‘Into town.’
‘Hop in so.’
There was comfort there from the start. Sylvester was smart enough to keep quiet because Dessie was not someone who said more than he needed to.
‘You don’t drive,’ Dessie said.
‘I can’t. I can but I can’t, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Dessie said.
‘They took it from me,’ Sylvester said.
‘I understand,’ Dessie said, smiling now.
‘That’s why I’m out at these meetings,’ Sylvester said.
‘We’ve all got our reasons.’
‘Are you off it?’
‘Three years,’ Dessie said. ‘You?’
‘Nearly six months.’
Silence. They flashed through the streets.
‘Where will I drop you?’ Dessie asked.
‘Anywhere near the river.’
‘And where are you going after?’
‘Home,’ Sylvester said.
‘Where’s that?’
Sylvester told him. Dessie had no desire to head home himself. The days were long enough. Anything to stay out. He could say the meeting ran on. Half an hour extra out to the north-side would be nothing.
When they arrived Sylvester made a move to his wallet. ‘Can I give you something?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Thanks for your time.’
‘My time is my own. Time I have plenty of.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Not much. I was in hospitality before. As they call it. I got out of it. Just couldn’t handle it.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Sylvester said. ‘I’m spending five hundred quid a month on taxis and couriers. Is your licence all right?’
‘It is, yeah.’
‘Would you be interested in doing a bit of driving here and there? A few nixers?’
‘I might be.’
‘Have you got five minutes?’ They walked across the lawn to a garage door. ‘Wait until you see this.’
The door lifted up automatically, slowly shaking as it went.
‘That’s it,’ Sylvester said. It was a maroon Mercedes, some mid-eighties model, sleek and wide and shining.
‘Very nice.’
‘Would you be interested?’
‘No,’ Dessie said. ‘I can’t afford that.’
‘I mean would you drive it for me? Just the odd meeting and that?’
‘I could,’ he said. ‘What would we be talking?’
‘We should be able to work that out so we’re both happy.’
‘All right,’ Dessie said. ‘We can give it a shot.’
‘And if it works, great,’ Sylvester said. ‘If not, you’re up a few quid.’
That had been three years ago. Dessie was still being paid by the hour. There were extras: the tips, the cash given and the change not looked for. For a businessman Sylvester was easy with money. Generosity, Dessie thought at first, but then, as the years passed, he saw that it was something else.
Anne had never liked any of it. The days and nights that he was gone, trips abroad. The unpredictable income that made it impossible to plan. Dessie calmed her, assured her, promised her. This was better for him. Always moving, always busy, no time to think about what was lost, what had been done. No time sitting around waiting for the boredom to drive him out the door and down the street to Walshe’s. His drinking was an affliction that had got him into trouble. His face would for ever bear the marks of his love for it. But one day, he thought, he might go back. If Anne couldn’t handle him any more and Yvonne finished college and got a job, then maybe there would be the space to go back and do it right. Sink back into the life he’d had before that seemed to fit him better than this one. Some day, he thought, he would sit again in an armchair on his own and stick at it until he could feel nothing again.
In the early days he had thought it would be better once Anne had met Sylvester. Once she saw the cut of him, heard the smooth voice. He would be charming and funny and would try to establish a bond with her, an alliance to rib Dessie.
It hadn’t worked out like that. They’d met at a christening. Sylvester arrived over, friendly but presuming nothing. She was polite at first, but the more Sylvester tried to find a way in, the higher the barrier went. After a minute Sylvester said it was very nice to have met her and off he went.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dessie asked her.
‘Empty,’ she said.
‘What’s empty?’
‘He is,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing there. He’s just raw ambition in a suit with a handshake and a smile.’
‘What else could he do?’ Dessie said. ‘He was just being polite. You could at least have been the same.’
‘I was polite.’
‘He looks after me. After us. Think back a year. Think where we were then. He’s made a big difference.’
‘We were okay.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were coming through.’
‘He got me out of a hole.’
‘There was never any charity with that fellow, I can tell you.’
‘I didn’t need charity. I needed work. And I’m still working. I’m working hard.’
‘Too hard.’
‘I don’t hear you complain about the money.’
‘Just don’t believe anything he tells you,’ she said. ‘This guy is a messer. A man like that would drop you tomorrow and have forgotten your name by Monday.’
‘Where are you getting this?’ Dessie asked, laughing. ‘He says hello and twenty seconds later you know him better than I do?’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘I think you know him well enough.’
19
He had been sized for the uniform and it was waiting for him in the porters’ office when he arrived. He shook hands with Ray and was taken across the expanse of the lobby, plinking Muzak audible on a slow night, through the doors into the kitchen. The sudden roar of extractors and the hot steam of the dishwashers, the smell of food on the turn and the sweet average sickness of the bins full of a day’s scrapings. The threat of slip underfoot and t
he one-second future of landing on your arse if you were to forget.
They went down to the changing rooms, male side, which smelled of feet and sweat, and damp, blocked toilets. Finished paper rolls, bits of food and wet shoes lay in puddles of something on the floor.
‘If you get yourself dressed there,’ Ray said, ‘and come back to me upstairs like a good lad.’
Marcin picked his way through the space in shock, touching nothing but feeling already that if he stayed in this job too long he would eventually get all it had to give him – athlete’s foot, scabies, crabs, nits, food poisoning.
They had him stocking shelves, carrying trays of glasses from the bar with its rat-faced manager across the floor to the porters’ office, where Ray was in charge. Filling buckets with ice, checking that the kitchen fridges had food for sandwiches through the night. It was quiet, he was told. Ray introduced him to Tommy.
‘There’s nothing hard in this job,’ Ray told him. ‘It’s just a lot of things to do. Tommy will keep you busy. He’ll show you everything.’
‘Okay,’ Marcin said. ‘No problem.’
Tommy took off through swinging doors into an empty dark ballroom. The two of them walked together across the dance-floor, Marcin keeping up because he could tell already that that would be important.
‘What did Ray say your name was?’
‘Marcin.’
‘Mar- What?’
‘Marcin. It’s Polish for Martin. It’s pronounced the same as Máirtín.’
‘What?’ Tommy said again. He had slowed down and was concentrating on Marcin’s face.
‘The Irish for Martin? A guy told me this in Poland.’
‘I don’t know what you heard. The Irish for Martin is Martin.’
‘No, I mean the Gaelic. The Irish language.’
‘Oh, that,’ Tommy said. ‘I don’t care about that. I’ll call you Bob. I can’t spend my life arsing around trying to work out what your fucking name is.’ They went through a set of doors into a long corridor of function rooms. Marcin fell behind. ‘I’m only messing with you,’ Tommy said, turning back to him.
‘Oh, right,’ Marcin said.
‘I’ll call you Marty. How’s that?’
‘Fine,’ Marcin said.
Hoovering. Hours and hours of hoovering. Function rooms the size of football pitches that looked the same after as they had before. He was always too slow.
‘Are you still at this?’ Tommy said, every time he came back to check. It wasn’t clear what Tommy was doing in between. Marcin moved from one function room to the next. Tiredness came in waves, sometimes just a heaviness in the eyes, sometimes enough to make him want to lie on the ground with the Hoover still running so that no one would hear a difference. At four o’clock they ate.
‘How is he getting on?’ Ray asked Tommy.
‘He’s been teaching me Irish. Do you know what the Irish for Martin is?’
‘Máirtín,’ the night manager said.
‘A smart cunt like you would know that,’ Tommy said.
‘A fool like you wouldn’t,’ the manager said.
After they’d eaten, Tommy took Marcin in the lift to the top floor, a small space with steps up to an elaborate door.
‘Penthouse,’ Tommy said. ‘Five grand a night. Usually empty but you have to check because if there’s someone in here and they don’t get their kippers or whatever, it’ll probably be the President of Israel and he’ll have a Mossad guy out looking for you with a gun by eight o’clock.’
Down one floor. Along the corridors taking the breakfast cards off the door handles. The two worked in silence along silent pathways, ghosts in a hundred guests’ dreams. Then back to the lift and down one floor. This time Tommy stayed put.
‘Now you do the same the whole way down. It’s the same plan for every floor. Check every room and gather the cards. Okay? Think you can do that?’
‘I think so.’
‘No problem to you. Five minutes. I’ll see you down there.’ With a swish and a faint ping, the doors closed and Marcin was alone.
20
Sylvester had never looked forward to the evenings going door to door. Even when he’d been a councillor and his visits were clearly meant to be helpful – seeing what people needed, listening to their problems, trying to resolve their issues – he’d always felt like an intruder, unwelcome, wasting people’s time, getting attacked by dogs and, once, a cat.
Now, handing out leaflets and talking up this proposed development, it took an effort to steel himself for what the evening might hold. Doors that would open and close before he’d had a chance to speak. Old men who would tell Dessie that, no, they did not want to talk to that absolute bollocks, while Sylvester stood ten feet away, smiling stupidly, pretending not to have heard. Activists who had been waiting for the opportunity to vent their fury about land-grabbing oligarchs moving into their area. People with grievances, engaged in feuds, in dialogue with the voices in their heads. And some people who were just dying to talk to anybody. Yes. Yes. Indeed. Yes. Well, I’m not really a councillor any more but I can check that out for you. The evenings could be very long. If he’d had the option he would have moved into a castle with a moat long ago, pulled up the drawbridge and never talked to any of these people again. And yet.
The truth was that he was good at it. His manner was disarming, even for people who opposed this vision for the future that he was championing. Often he stood in front of some grim-faced local, wrong age, wrong class, and watched them thaw in front of him. Solidity, self-deprecation, seriousness, gentle slagging. Asking the right questions. He had a feel for who he was talking to and what they wanted to hear. It might not make a huge difference but it would count for something, and that was why O’Donnell had asked for his help. ‘He was around here last night,’ they might say, in the canteen at work if his name came up. And? ‘Not the worst,’ they would say, ‘a rogue, you know, but not the worst.’
When he was moving from estate to estate, changing the approach, the accent, the humour, to fit whoever he was talking to, he enjoyed all that. To be out on these streets that he knew so well gave him pleasure. To anybody from outside the area it would look like nothing at all, just another grimy, anonymous suburb, monochrome and traffic-infested. Lorries on the way to where the action was through tunnels and over bridges, throwing up dust and mud as they went. But he knew that you could find comfort behind the grey porridge of the pebbledash, in the shambles of the footpaths, roused and put to sleep again. In the dirty patchwork of the road tattooed with the memories of significant events -the coming of gas, the improvement of the water, the life-expanding event that was cable television. The blackened green areas that were the site of the fun and fear of early Hallowe’ens. The rubbish on the street that meant kids were still around, infuriating and disobedient on a diet of Coke and multi-coloured corn snacks, but here still, another generation that would experience the same dysfunctional love for an unlovely place. Things could be improved, they always could. That was what he was trying to do. But see this place for what it was and what it meant and not just for how it looked. He was of it and he cared for it. He’d lived in the two ends of it. Whatever his failings, real, imagined or rumoured, nobody could ever say that he didn’t understand what it was that made this place itself.
They had put it right. It could have been the end of everything but, between Helen and himself, it had been sorted out quietly and tidily. He’d never drunk around here, always in restaurants in town, hotel bars and pubs in the far suburbs. It hadn’t affected his work as a councillor but his business had suffered. He could see now that it had been inevitable, that it was about pressure and tiredness and having to talk to people for twenty hours a day. That he used it as a way of bonding, doing deals, celebrating. Of relaxing and recovering. It had worked for a while. He was popular and successful but with everything going on, his phone ringing from six in the morning until midnight, he drank too much and stopped paying attention and things began to slide. He m
ade a couple of bad choices and then, in trying to recover, made worse ones. He knew the drink had played a part but still, though he never expressed the opinion, he thought most of it had been down to bad luck and stress.
He could have been made bankrupt. It could all have been humiliating and public, but Helen sold a house she’d inherited from her aunt and paid off the debts. He retired from the council and gave up drinking and O’Donnell, who was the only one who stuck with him through it all, helped get him started again. A new beginning. It seemed to be clean. There were rumours among his fellow councillors, but his story of concentrating on a new business was plausible and, given the alternative, plausible was enough.
There were still times when Dessie found himself impressed by Sylvester. Out on the doorsteps standing three feet behind him, he would watch how naturally it all came to him. The right thing to say. The times when saying nothing was the better option. The way he could adapt himself, bend his personality to fit, sympathize, nod, listen, and all the time do it as if it was real. It was real. You could see that. There was no doubting that the impact he had on people was a solid, tangible thing, but whether or not Sylvester actually believed any of it was something that Dessie didn’t know.
Most of the time, to anyone who would have noticed him, Dessie appeared to be tuned out. His undertaker’s expression never varied in the face of all manner of poison, tedium and general buffoonery. Not getting involved was what he was good at. In this phase of his life, which had begun when his drinking had ended, judgement was not a part of the picture. It was why he and Sylvester got along so well. He saw everything but said nothing. Even if you were to do something in front of him, something awful and shameful that could haunt you for ever, to look at Dessie was to believe that maybe it had never happened, maybe it was all just a nightmare of your own imagination. If he was asked his opinion on any of the topics of the day Dessie would politely refuse to offer a view. But secretly, at his core, he would say that most people were driven by selfishness and greed, and that that knowledge could be used to predict their most likely behaviour in any given situation.
They stood on the doorstep of one of the semi-detached houses that sloped down both sides of a narrow, quiet street to the sea. Sylvester handed the brochure to a woman in her forties, blondish and mumsy. ‘Hello. My name’s Sylvester Kelly.’
