by Paul Murray
Don’t get him wrong, Titch is a huge fan of Ruprecht’s French-horn playing. But after everything that’s happened, you have to wonder about the wisdom of letting him just waltz back in like that. Not to get on his high horse or anything, but in Titch’s opinion Ruprecht hasn’t displayed the kind of attitude that this 140th Anniversary Concert is all about. More importantly, how can the Quartet possibly be ready in time? The concert is on tomorrow! Tomorrow!
No point mentioning these reservations to Connie, he’s skipping around the place like he’s fallen in love. That’s why Titch has taken it upon himself, in his capacity as Master of Ceremonies, to have a little sneak preview of the Quartet’s performance. And guess what, the noise coming from behind that rehearsal room door does not sound like classical music. Or, some of it does? But those parts keep getting drowned out by other parts that sound like the Death Star exploding. And even as he watches, concealed within an alcove, Mario and Niall stagger by, hefting a) a computer and b) some sort of satellite dish…?
The whole thing is fishier than a mermaid’s twat. Titch decides to take the matter directly to the top, i.e. Mr Costigan.
‘Actually quite busy here, Fitzpatrick –’
‘Yes, sir, but it’s important.’ He explains his misgivings about the Quartet’s readmittance, and the strange noises he heard outside the rehearsal room –
‘Death Star? Fitzpatrick, what in God’s name are you –’ Then the phone goes. ‘Costigan – well, well, Jack Flaherty, you old son of a gun! How are ya, big guy? How’s everything in petrochemicals? A little bird told me you guys were running out… ha ha, of course not, listen here, we’re throwing a little shindig over here Saturday…’ The chair swivels away. Titch stands there jilted a moment before becoming aware that Brother Jonas is staring at him from the other side of the room.
‘What is troubling you, my child?’ he says, in his soft muggy African voice.
Titch takes one look at the little black man, and another at the Acting Principal, gabbing away with his feet on the desk. He smiles. ‘Nothing, Brother, it’s not important.’ Then he leaves the office. If they want to ignore their own Master of Ceremonies, they deserve everything they get.
It was Jeekers, not Dennis, whom Geoff thought they would have the hardest time getting back on board; privately he wondered if Ruprecht might be better off not mentioning the whole seance-experiment end of things, Jeekers generally being quite straitlaced and not such a seance-experiment sort of fellow, especially with his parents looking on. But to Geoff’s surprise, Jeekers agreed straight away, to all of it – actually he even seemed glad about the clandestine element, as if he had been waiting for just such a secret enterprise to burrow himself away in. That doesn’t mean the rehearsals are plain sailing.
‘It just doesn’t sound right.’
The three subordinate members of the Van Doren Quartet lower their instruments for the nth time with pained expressions. ‘It sounds like it’s always sounded. What do you want it to sound like?’
That’s just it: Ruprecht doesn’t know. He stares blearily at his notes. Symbols mathematical and musical chitter back at him meaninglessly, like glyphic fleas hopping about the page. They have been in here for what seems like years, playing Pachelbel over and over and over, until they can hear it even when they have stopped; so that when Geoff starts in again about how he wishes he could work out what the hell it reminded him of, Dennis gives him short shrift: ‘You idiot, it reminds you of itself. It reminds you of the nine squillion times you’ve heard it before.’
‘I don’t think that’s it.’
‘Trust me.’
‘All right.’ Ruprecht taps his baton on the Oscillator. ‘Let’s try it again.’
They try it again. In Geoff’s opinion – which he will accept as triangle-player is not worth all that much, certainly not as much as Jeekers’s or Dennis’s – they sound pretty good, especially considering their fortnight-long hiatus, and that Ruprecht’s French horn looks like it was run over by a truck. The sweet-sad notes slide circling slowly around them, derr… derr… derr… derr… bom… bom – darn it, Dennis is wrong, it’s not itself it reminds him of! But what the hell is it? It’s driving him mad – oh wait, here’s his triangle part – (ping).
‘Stop, stop –’ Ruprecht, who has been playing with an ear cocked and his brow so parodically furrowed his forehead resembles a concertina, holds up his hand.
‘What?’ Dennis beginning to fray at the edges. ‘What is it this time?’
‘It’s like there’s something missing,’ Ruprecht says wretchedly, seizing at his hair.
The room is a latticework of sidelong glances. Time is running out.
Derr… derr… derr… derr… Geoff thinks.
‘Maybe,’ Jeekers says slowly, ‘we should just play it the old way.’
Bom… bom… bom… BOM…
‘Because we’ll still know it’s for Skippy, and, you know, there’s going to be a presentation –’
‘It’s BETHani!’ Geoff exclaims. Everyone turns to look at him. ‘Oh, sorry. I just realized what Pachelthing reminds me of. That BETHani song? You know, the one Skippy used to play? After he went to see the girl? If you listen to it, it’s actually the same tune. Sorry,’ he says again, as from every direction stares bore into him, and then, ‘what?’
Friday night in the Residence. The Residence is what everyone calls it, they act like it’s this exclusive hotel? But inside it’s like being trapped in the world’s most boring horror movie, a house full of zombies with grey faces and huge hollow eyes that track you as you come down the stairs and stare at you as you search through the magazine rack for a magazine you haven’t read yet, and when they move they move like people who aren’t really alive, shuffling over the flowery carpet at like zero miles per hour with their arms hanging like old string at their sides and their Prada jeans flapping around their stick-waists and worst of all their horrible disgusting breath like something is rotting inside them. That’s why most of the time Lori stays in her room, except when she has to go to You-time or Group. She lies on her bed, holding Lala to her chest. The tears just come by themselves, she is not sad.
Her room actually is a bit like a hotel room, there are fresh-cut flowers and flounces on the bedspread, and though there is no TV you can write in the journal they give you to record your thoughts or sit by the window and look through the bars at the garden. Some girls – it is all girls – have been here for months or even longer. Most of them are sicker than Lori, still they laugh when Lori tells them she won’t be staying. Some are from the years above or below her at school, some she recognizes from the mall or mass, or they will turn out to be someone’s sister or ex-best friend. There’s one girl who Lori was in ballet class with years ago, she used to be so beautiful, like a beautiful dancing flower. Now she looks like some vampire drank all her blood and threw her away. For a little while Lori felt sorry for her and made an effort to talk to her, then she found out the girl was telling everyone that Lori came into her room at night and tried to touch her.
The Residence you see is basically exactly the same as school, bitchiness and cliques, all the girls in a secret race to be the thinnest. In Group they fight with each other to get Dr Pollard’s attention, sucking their fingers, swinging their legs back and forth, weighing each other up (ha ha) out of the corner of their eye while he shites on about esteem, it’s pathetic, it’s freaky, like watching skeletons trying to be erotic, you can practically hear their bodies rattle, in her journal she writes macarbra. Dr Pollard is a total dweeb, he wears lame Christmas-type jumpers every single day and you can tell the only reason he knows about self-esteem is because he learned it out of a book, still they drool over him like he’s the last piece of chocolate cake which they will vomit up afterwards anyway. Group is really the only time Lori misses being beautiful. She would love to show these skanks how it’s done, wrap Dr Pollard around her finger and then get up and walk right out of there, at the door she’d turn and blow him a kiss
, Dream on, loser!
Yesterday the woman from the modelling agency called Mom and told her not to worry, they could reschedule the interview for when Lori was feeling better. This kind of thing happens all the time, she said, the important thing is to intervene before any lasting damage is done to the complexion. Mom told her this then she threw her arms around her. Oh Lori, get better! Don’t throw away the chances I never had! Lori hates to upset her, she would almost get better just to go to the interview and make Mom happy again. But the weird thing is, she doesn’t care any more if she doesn’t become a model. She doesn’t even remember wanting to be a model! So many things seem like they happened to another person, someone almost too fuzzy to see.
She has been here nearly two weeks now. Most of the time it’s okay, but sometimes in the middle of the night there are sirens, the sound so loud and swooping it makes her sit up cold in her bed, and then next morning when you wake up someone is gone. You hear the nurses say, Poor thing she’s at death’s door, and you imagine the Door black as black. But it’s all about how you think of things, like okay the Door is scary but the word siren makes her think of singing girls, so when she gets scared about her Plan and going through the Door she imagines that’s what they are, singing girls who come and take you by the hand and bring you away from here. And that makes her happy again, because she knows soon they will come for her (it could even be tonight!).
Tell me about Daniel, Lori. Dr Pollard sits on a revolving chair, she sits on a beanbag. There are no bars on his window. Outside it’s raining, how come the rain doesn’t rise up and turn into a sea and smash through the glass? Some kind of spray is in Dr Pollard’s hair to puff it out and make it look like he’s not going bald.
It was shortly after his death that you began to experience these self-destructive urges? And you became addicted to diet pills?
She rolls her eyes because of how boring it is to have to explain this all over again. She has explained like a million times already, it didn’t have anything to do with Daniel, she started taking the pills because she thought she might be pregnant. But then she’d found out she wasn’t pregnant, and everything was getting back to normal – better than normal, she was going to be a top model, she went dancing with Janine in LA Nites and kissed a boy, a sixth year, he was on the Terenure S! She was looking to the future, she would have stopped taking the pills if she’d even thought about it for a second –
So why didn’t you?
Why didn’t I what?
Why didn’t you stop taking the pills?
She sighs, she wriggles in her seat, rolls her eyes again, how are you supposed to explain this stuff? It wasn’t anything. It was just she started noticing things.
Like what?
Annoying things. Stupid stuff. It’s totally stupid, there’s no point even talking about it.
Give me an example.
Oh whatever, like the way Mom kept buying her clothes for the interview with the modelling agency, like every day practically she’d go out and buy a new outfit, even though they’d both decided the one she had was perfect. Or if it wasn’t an outfit it was something else, pumps eyeshadow clutch purse mules, try these on Lori, try them with that, then try that with this, oh how about these with those? She wanted Lori to make an impression, that was all, it just started getting a bit annoying, and meanwhile Dad had ordered new separates for his den and also new gym equipment for the gym, except the extension was still being done so they were all heaped up in the hallway in cardboard boxes, great big piles that bulged like Dad’s new muscles, and as well though she knew it was starting to bother her Lori kept buying things too, in the mall on Saturdays with the money Mom gave her to cheer herself up, make-up and magazines and bangles and knickers and tops and these things that just appeared in bags in her hands and suddenly it was like the house was filling up with stuff, more and more every day, more and more and more, moreandmoreandmoreandmore, moremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremore like millions of teeming sperms, heaping and piling and crowding until she began to imagine one day it would come bursting through her door and pin her against the wall! and the only thing she could do was keep taking the pills because they could make little spaces for her, open up new spaces that she could slip into to breathe? it was like she had to keep shrinking herself just so there’d be enough space for her?
That’s good, Lori, that’s very good.
It’s why Lori’s room here is practically empty, she made them take out a lot of the furniture, and most of the flowers and presents she gets from people she asks the nurses to keep downstairs. From home there is only Lala on her pillow and her BETHani scrapbook, and when Dad comes to visit she often pretends she’s asleep, turning her face to the window while he sits there flicking through a men’s health magazine, unconsciously flexing and bulging.
You know, Lori – Dr Pollard revolves his chair – the feelings you describe are far from unusual. When a person is in a vulnerable state of mind, the simple facts of day-to-day life can indeed seem overwhelming. And not eating is a common reaction to that sensation of being overwhelmed. We may think of food as the physical link tying us to the world. By refusing it, we attempt to disengage ourselves and our bodies from what we feel are the destructive intrusions of that world. But paradoxically, that act of self-assertion can be deeply harmful.
He crosses his legs so she can see his disgusting hairy white shins. She wishes Mr Scott the French teacher was counselling her. She imagines him by her bedside reading French poetry to her, explaining the vocab and the imagery – elle est debout sur mes paupières, et ses cheveux sont dans les miens…
The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must learn to live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.
… and he wouldn’t ask her questions, and because he didn’t ask she would tell him, what it’s like to be a person who is a ruin, who has done the worst thing she can ever imagine doing, whose life has become a series of lies that she lives trapped in between like a ghost, and all she wants is to be gone gone gone –
Shh shh, he would say, and he’d put his arms around her. And just hold her? And he would not have gross hairy shins.
She knows Dr Pollard only wants to help but it would be so much easier if he left her alone! She wishes she could explain that she doesn’t feel bad? Like she knows what she’s doing, it sounds weird she knows but it’s like the thinner she gets, the better she feels – like she’s on a mountain that’s growing out of the ground, carrying her higher and higher into the clouds, away from all the hands that might try and grab hold of her. She doesn’t mind when the girls come to visit her and can’t hide their disgust or their satisfaction at the way she looks now, and when Janine arrives for her big confession scene to tell Lori about her and Carl, Lori is not even angry. She watches Janine bawl and rub her fists in her eyes, sobbing, We couldn’t help it, Lori, we’re in love, like you would watch like an insect or something gross like that flipped over on its back or caught in a drain. She doesn’t get angry, she doesn’t tell Janine Carl still texts her even though she can imagine herself saying it and enjoying how much it hurts Janine. Because Carl feels like a long long time ago, she can’t understand now how she ever wanted him or anyone to touch her. And Janine too, these are all things that she’s leaving behind. Every day she is more free, free of herself or what people thought she was. And soon she will be totally free, as free as the air.
Inside Lala are the pills she bought from Carl with her kisses. Now they will be kisses to herself, kisses to say, I love you, Lori. Who else would kiss her, with the taste of death on her breath all the time? The real taste underneath everything and now she can taste it all the time. But soon she will never have to taste anything again. The Plan is ready – the new Plan, her Plan – the singing girls on their way. They will come singing, Lori, Lori on the wind, and she will dance away, gr
aceful as a ballerina – hey, can she hear them now? Is there someone calling her name? Someone right under her window? But when she pulls back the curtain, the figure she sees below is not a girl. And he is definitely not thin.
Howard is amazed how quickly he loses track of things without the clanging school bell to chop his day into forty-minute portions. Darkness seems to fall shortly after he’s got out of bed; he finds himself increasingly dependent on the TV for any sense of reality, and whenever there is a power cut he experiences, in that first second of darkness before his eyesight adjusts, a terror that it is he, in fact, who has been switched off.
Yesterday Finian Ó Dálaigh had appeared at his door with a card signed by the whole Seabrook faculty. At first Howard thought it was for him, a gesture of support. It wasn’t, of course; it was for Tom Roche. There was going to be a presentation during the concert, an award for his years of dedicated service to Seabrook. ‘I didn’t think you should be left out,’ Ó Dálaigh said considerately. ‘Thank you,’ Howard said. He wrote his name on a blank space in the interior; after some deliberation, he left it at that.
A presentation for his years of dedicated service to Seabrook. Today, on the way home from the supermarket with a bootful of discount beer, Howard stopped his car outside the police station. He sat there for five full minutes, in the cold. Then he pulled out again and drove home.
He starts drinking early, and as the fatal hour of the concert approaches, combines it with a half-hearted sally against the creeping entropy that has been taking over the house. He doesn’t get far; before long, he’s hunkered on the floor with a boxful of Halley-memorabilia – photographs, cinema stubs, museum plans from foreign cities, all spread out in front of him. This has been happening a lot lately. The feebler his grip on the present, the more vivid the past – which for so long he has let disappear behind him, a frothing wake swallowed in the cold endless ocean of a world’s lived lives – seems to become; this sense is only amplified when the power goes and he has to light a candle to supplement the waning daylight. He doesn’t mind – on the contrary, he feels like he could happily spend the rest of his life here, revisiting city-breaks, holidays, friends’ parties. He only wishes he had Halley with him, so he could say, Hey, look at this one, do you remember such and such? And hear her reply, Yes, yes, that’s how it was.
