The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  For me this has always been a lie too far: at these events I usually limit myself to making sure the glasses stay full. Looking for a waitress, I see that a fresh dancer has come onstage. She has long dark hair and a tawny complexion and looks enough like Ariadne that I experience a pang; as she cavorts naked around the pole, I clothe her in a black Airtex T-shirt and jeans, give her a tray, and a smile, and a smudge of cinnamon on her apron …

  Then something else catches my eye: a silhouette at one of the tables girdling the stage. I stare at it without knowing why; then I realize who it belongs to. ‘Excuse me one moment,’ I say to our guests.

  He is alone, gazing up at the stage, so fixed on the dancer’s performance he doesn’t notice me until I tap his shoulder. He turns; I see the drowsy swim and swoon of his pupils as his eyes attempt to focus, then recognition dawns at last and an expression of horror crosses his face. He springs or rather staggers to his feet, staying upright for only a moment before falling backwards over his stool, from which position he warns me not to try anything.

  ‘I’m not going to try anything,’ I say.

  ‘That’s good,’ Paul says, pulling himself back onto his stool. ‘For you.’ He lifts a shot glass from the table and brings it to his lips, not seeming to notice that it is empty. The dancer smacks her buttock, leaving a bright pink handprint glowing on her skin.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he retorts, eyes trained on the dancer, who has stalked over to the end of the stage so that another solitary spectator can tuck a note into her G-string, which has evidently remained on for that purpose. ‘If you’re looking for an apology, you’re wasting your time.’

  ‘I’m not looking for an apology.’

  ‘Oh, you want to have me arrested, is that it? Well, go right ahead. There’s not a judge in the land who’d convict me. They’d probably give me a medal.’

  ‘I don’t want to have you arrested.’

  ‘Well, what do you want, so?’

  I am at a loss. I came over on impulse, without thinking why; only now does it occur to me that we have nothing to say to one another. Onstage, the dancer shucks down her knickers to reveal a finger of carefully trimmed pubic hair, then reaches between her legs to spread her labia. To a rising chorus of hoots, wolf whistles, catcalls, she slowly begins to arch her torso backwards.

  ‘Was it always a scam?’ I hear myself say.

  ‘What?’ he says irritably.

  ‘The book. Your book. Did you ever intend to write it?’ Even as I speak the words I know the question is futile, irrelevant, like asking the person breaking up with you whether they ever really loved you.

  Paul looks up at me, suitably disgusted. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I thought maybe in the beginning…’

  He waves a hand, cutting me off. ‘I don’t do that shit anymore,’ he says.

  ‘What shit?’ I say. ‘You mean writing?’

  Paul shrugs, returns his attention to the floor show. Inch by inch, thighs quivering, the dancer has bent back so that her dark hair sweeps the floor and the spotlight shines directly athwart the sad little heart she holds between her fingers; from behind, the noise of the unseen crowd breaks over us, cheers and applause as if the vagina were a famous diva hitting a high C.

  ‘You don’t write at all?’

  Paul casts about him and signals to a passing girl, pale with a mane of chestnut hair.

  ‘Private dance?’ she says, coming over.

  ‘I have to go,’ he says to me.

  ‘Wait.’ I reach out, grab his arm. ‘Why me?’ I say.

  Paul looks back at me with a mixture of pity and guilt and exhaustion. ‘I have to go,’ he says again.

  I release him; the chestnut-haired girl takes his hand; I watch him follow her away towards the honeycomb of rooms at the back. Onstage, the dancer takes a bow; a moment later, a dolorous attendant trudges out with a spray and a flannel, with which he wipes down the pole and the dance floor.

  ‘There ’e is!’ One of the hobbits grabs me in a loose headlock as I slide back into our table. ‘You ’orny little fucker, I fough’ you was goin’ to crawl righ’ up that bird’s minge!’

  I smile, take a sip from my repulsive fluorescent drink and put the encounter out of my mind. Glancing around the table, I gauge our progress. The smallest and most earnest hobbit is speaking animatedly to Chris Kane, whose face exhibits the mixture of fascination and panic characteristic of one whose efforts to feign interest are undermined by his inability to hear what’s being said. The burly boy who put me in a headlock rambles to Jurgen and Kevin about football; his curly-haired colleague, now wearing his tie wrapped around his head Rambo-style, is talking to Ish in a low intense voice that requires her to lean ever closer. Of Howie and James Harper there is no sign, but I spot Howie’s Bulgarian friend from earlier moving through the crowd in the direction of the toilets. That is where the deal will happen, if there is one; our job now is to run interference, keep the others happy so Howie can work uninterrupted.

  I order a fresh round of drinks, take a surreptitious look at my watch. The next dancer has come on, a synthetic blonde with breasts like warheads who humps the pole slowly and then, as if at the flick of a switch, at double speed. Her siliconized body and its clumsy imitations of love put me in mind of an early iteration of a new technology, those first, oxymoronic mobile phones the size and weight of breeze blocks.

  ‘So’ – with a suddenly businesslike air, the burly boy now places his elbows on the table and leans in – ‘BOT’s based in Dublin a good while now?’

  ‘Almost ten years,’ Jurgen says. ‘The regulatory climate here gives our clients many options not available to London banks.’

  ‘Ten years,’ the burly boy considers. ‘And in that time’ – he looks around at each of us in turn – ‘’ave you ever seen … a leprechaun?’

  Hilarity engulfs the visiting party. Their faces are rubicund and sloppy with drink, and looking at them I have the incontrovertible certainty – as if it were inscribed over the scene, like the motto of a Hogarth print – that we are being taken for a ride …

  And then a shadow falls across the table.

  A girl is standing there: a black girl, easily six foot tall, lithe and muscular and making no pretence at affability. ‘Private dance,’ she says. She pronounces it like a death sentence. The visitors look at each other; we look at them looking at each other. Chris Kane readies the credit card.

  ‘You ge’ off wiv ’er,’ the curly-haired boy says.

  It takes a moment for Ish to realize he is talking to her. ‘Excuse me?’

  He nods up at the lap dancer. ‘Go on, give her a snog,’ he says.

  Ish, for once, is speechless; she stares back at him agape.

  ‘Why not, she’s gorgeous,’ he persists. ‘You been givin’ me the brush-off all night, maybe this bird’s more your flavour. Come on, I’ll pay.’ He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his wallet. From the fold he removes a wad of bills and counts them out onto the table. Ish turns to Jurgen, but he sits there as if frozen, grinning glassily at thin air.

  ‘Go on! Go on!’ the boy’s comrades urge Ish, laughing. The lap dancer waits motionlessly at the tableside, her face utterly blank.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Ish says. The other two make mock-appalled Oo! sounds, but the curly-haired boy is undaunted. ‘I’m not saying you have to lick her out, just give her a kiss. ‘’Ow much to kiss ’er, wiv tongues?’ This latter is directed at the lap dancer.

  ‘Come on, don’t be an old biddy,’ the burly boy joshes Ish. ‘Walter told us you lads knew how to have a laugh!’

  I get to my feet. ‘I am afraid we have another appointment.’

  Jurgen’s eyes flash at me from the banquette; I ignore them, reach for Ish’s hand, which she gives me dazedly, though she remains in her seat.

  ‘Wait,’ the curly-haired boy says. He has stopped laughing. The others stop too and look at him. He licks his lips
and says slowly to Ish, ‘If you get off wiv her, we’ll sign wiv BOT.’

  Over our table, in the midst of the thudding music and the barracking laughter, a dome of silence falls. Ish hunches miserably in her chair; Jurgen carefully examines his cufflinks; Kevin gawps as if he’s watching the Wimbledon final; and the lap dancer continues to look on, impassive as a Japanese mask. Then some kind of fracas starts up at the top of the room, a man and a woman shouting. Everyone turns to look; I take advantage of the distraction to tug Ish to her feet and drag her away. She appears conflicted: at the door, she turns to me. ‘Maybe –’

  ‘Go,’ I say, hustling her up the stairs.

  The shouting voices get louder. Craning my neck as I make my way through the crowd, I can see the chestnut-haired girl from earlier berating a punter. His back is turned, but there is no doubt who it is. A bouncer storms past me to intervene; I find myself hurrying after him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the bouncer demands.

  ‘He take my money!’ the dancer says accusingly.

  ‘I didn’t!’ Paul protests.

  ‘You take!’

  ‘It was a simple misunderstanding,’ Paul says to the bouncer.

  ‘I no misunderstand!’ the dancer counters, in a voice like a circular saw. ‘I understand very well! This man is thief!’

  ‘Would you just let me explain? What happened was, I wanted to tip her, but I only had a twenty, so I put the twenty in her G-string, and then I took out a ten as change –’

  ‘He take my money!’

  ‘As change – what, I can’t take change?’

  ‘Right, mate, you’re out,’ the bouncer says.

  ‘But I’m a regular!’ Paul cries. ‘I have a loyalty card!’ This does not sway the bouncer, who twists his arm behind his back and shoves him down a gauntlet of jeering drinkers towards the exit. I give chase, reaching street level just in time to see Paul propelled over the asphalt to land in a heap on the kerb opposite.

  ‘You’re barred!’ the bouncer shouts after him.

  Crossing the road, I help him sit up. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ He examines his front teeth with a finger and thumb. ‘They say you’re barred, but then in a week they’ve forgotten all about it.’

  By the stairwell, the bouncer is laughing with his cronies; now they step aside to allow in a stag party.

  ‘So this is what you do instead of writing,’ I say.

  ‘When I can afford it,’ Paul replies tersely. He drags himself to his feet and spits.

  ‘I think that is a great shame,’ I say.

  ‘You’re one of a very small number.’ He takes his wallet from his pocket, peers into it fatalistically, then replaces it.

  ‘You never answered my question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Why did you pick me? For your … plan?’

  He shrugs, looks away. ‘I told you before. You were different. You had qualities.’

  ‘What qualities?’

  ‘Loneliness. Desperation.’

  This stings; to cover it up I spit out another question. ‘And the book? Did you ever intend to write it?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Claude, what does it matter?’ he exclaims, jumping to his feet. ‘Okay, I never intended to write a book. Happy?’

  I don’t reply, look down at the cracked asphalt instead.

  ‘And I’ll tell you what else, if I did through some calamity start a new book, I wouldn’t write about you and your friends in a hundred years. A bunch of people with one character attribute between them, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy and Mr Greedy, like something out of Roger Hargreaves’ nightmares? Who’s going to want to read about that?’

  He stares at me with blazing eyes, as if expecting an answer. I say nothing; I feel a huge rent has been slashed in the canvas of my soul, and blackness is billowing out.

  ‘Look,’ he says, maybe regretting his candour. ‘You’re not the worst of them. I’m sorry I did this to you. But my God, man. You don’t even live in the world. You don’t breathe the air, you don’t eat the food. You’re up in your strange little satellite, placing bets on all of us down below like kids racing beetles. How could you think, how did you ever possibly think that you were an Everyman?’

  I can’t speak; what can I possibly say? Paul waits a moment, with his hand on my shoulder; and then he turns and walks away, leaving me in the shadow of the club, from which the music booms so loud that even out on the street I experience it not in my ears but in my chest – pounding between my ribs, like someone else’s heart.

  I meet Chris Kane in the gym the next morning; he tells me that he stayed out with the Tordale team till three. He appears aglow with health, in spite of his long, debauched night and minimal sleep; this is often the way with my banking colleagues, even the older men, as though they had a picture of themselves mouldering in the attic, or, more likely these days, had outsourced the disintegration of their bodies to some proxy in the Third World, some Manuel or Cho or Pradeep who wakes up one day with shattered capillaries, clogged lungs, a fissiparous liver that are none of his doing. ‘Great bunch of lads,’ Chris Kane says, and then, ‘I just hope Ish didn’t damage our chances.’

  ‘That guy was out of line.’

  ‘He wasn’t serious! Fuck’s sake, you have to show you’re able to take a joke!’

  Upstairs, Ish is already at her desk. I can feel the resentment directed at her from around the room – as can she, to judge by her posture, crouched behind her terminal.

  ‘Thanks, Claude,’ she says in a low voice when she sees me.

  ‘Thanks for what?’

  ‘For sticking up for me.’

  I blush, as our pusillanimous show comes back to me; if Tordale were testing our moral fibre – though they almost definitely weren’t – we failed with flying colours.

  ‘What a night,’ Ish says.

  ‘Just business.’

  ‘I bet Rachael’s bulling.’

  ‘They never intended to take us on.’

  ‘Howie said they did. Howie said that when we were having our argument he was in the jacks doing rails with the main guy, and the main guy started telling him he was thinking of leaving his wife.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He said it showed we’d got to the next level.’

  ‘It didn’t show anything. They’re not going to take us on. They won’t take on Danske either. They came here to drink, that’s all.’

  I find Jurgen standing at the window, peering out at the zombies with his binoculars. They are just beginning to stir: one heats a saucepan of water on a gas burner, another eats a bowl of cereal in the opening of his tent. They are not wearing their costumes yet: you can see how young they are.

  ‘Have we heard anything?’ I say, keeping my tone neutral.

  ‘They will revert to us by the end of the week,’ he replies in the same clipped, mechanical tone. A pretty girl with a heap of tousled brown hair emerges from a tent and turns on a string of fairy lights; adjusting his focus wheel, Jurgen says, ‘You have completed your report on Royal?’

  ‘It’s not due for two more weeks.’

  ‘That is not what I asked you.’

  ‘No, it’s not finished,’ I say, and then, feeling rebellious, ‘but I can tell you now that I would not recommend Royal Irish to any client.’ Jurgen says nothing to this, just continues to stare out. I am about to step away, then I stop. ‘What happened last night,’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We are supposed to be a team.’

  ‘Yes, we are supposed to be a team,’ he returns.

  ‘A team looks after its members.’

  He remains silent, stares out at the zombies. Then he says, ‘A team exists to achieve goals. If there were no goals, there would be no team. Therefore goals take priority over members. And members who do not achieve the team’s goals will be replaced.’

  * * *

  The report is going slowly, very slowly. Financial institutions are chimerical creatures at th
e best of times, but Royal’s books are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Every figure is a door into a world of illusion – of shapeshifting, duplication, disappearing acts. Deals are buried or recorded more than once; borrowers are split into two or lumped together; mysterious sums arrive and depart without explanation, like ships full of toxic waste that pull into a harbour in the middle of the night and the next day are gone again.

  Royal Irish: the name sounds like a bad poker hand, one that looks unbeatable until it capsizes and you lose your shirt. After everything that’s happened, it’s sometimes hard to remember that until quite recently it did look unbeatable. When I first arrived at BOT, only a couple of years ago, Royal was being described as ‘the best bank in the world’.

  Across the ocean, the subprime market was just beginning to turn, but Ireland was still booming. Coming from Paris, which for several years had been in the doldrums, I felt like I had stepped through the looking glass. Every day was like Christmas Eve: the shops, the pubs, the restaurants were all full, all of the time. In the beginning, the boom was fuelled by IT and pharmaceuticals. Now it was construction. Dublin was undergoing its very own Haussmannization. Cranes cluttered the skyline, new builds were everywhere; the old architecture, meanwhile, was being transformed, hospitals becoming shopping malls, churches becoming superpubs, Ascendancy manors becoming five-star golf resorts.

  And at the heart of it all was Royal. They were the developers’ bank of choice, spinning out the credit from which the new city would be built. In the fevered boomtown climate, the value of property could double every six months; already several of these developers had become billionaires. But they didn’t rest on their laurels. Instead, they used what they’d made on their last project to borrow more for their next one. Royal were happy to pay out: they had a steady stream of cheap credit from European investors, eager to gain exposure to the turbocharged Irish economy.