by David Park
‘Hello, John.’ Her accent and her face tell him that she is probably of Eastern European origin and as he stands to greet her he realises that she is about an inch taller than him. As she sits down opposite him he summons a waiter with the raise of a hand and asks her if she would like a drink. She orders vodka and Coke and smiles at him. He is glad she is from somewhere far away. He is glad about everything he sees – the blueness of her eyes, the pale unblemished skin, the light skim of pink lipstick and the blondeness of her shoulder-length hair that has an expensive cut. She is about thirty, perhaps a few years older, and when he looks at her he thinks of snow – cold and beautiful snow bereft of footprints, seemingly untrammelled or untainted.
‘Hello,’ he says, and then in the second of silence, ‘You look good.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, moving her head slightly but in a way that seems to set her hair in temporary motion.
‘It’s cold tonight,’ he says, still thinking of snow and then embarrassed by the banality of what he’s just said.
She nods but says nothing as the waiter arrives with her drink and he is disappointed to see her thank him with the same smile she gave him a few moments earlier but he tells himself it’s the currency she uses and that she will grant him exclusive trading rights in exchange for his. Before she can sip the drink her phone rings and she apologises before answering it and the conversation lasts no longer than the time it takes her to say ‘yes’ and ‘everything’s OK’. He looks at her clothes and they, too, please him. Nothing vulgar or loud, just a simple well-cut black suit that shows her skin and hair to advantage. At her neck is a single string of pearls one of the few things he has never mastered the skill of evaluating. She turns off the phone and apologises again, saying, ‘Just checking everything’s OK. No more disturbance.’
‘And everything’s OK?’ he asks.
‘I think so,’ she says, smiling at him and moving her hair again. It looks like a little flurry of snow. Everything about her is calm and confident and as she sips her drink she never takes her eyes from his and he knows that whatever disappointment or indifference she might feel he will be shown no trace of it.
‘And what do I call you?’ He knows immediately that it’s a question that invites the stock response, ‘Anything you like,’ but she apologises again and formally offers her hand and tells him her name is Kristal. It feels slight and cold to the touch, the nails painted the same colour as her lips. He would like to put it to his lips but after holding it slightly longer than a normal handshake he lets it go. It slips slowly away, her fingers lingering against his. He wants to ask where she comes from, runs possible origins across his brain, but he knows it would be impolite and that the answer would be no more truthful than her name. What he is sure of is that she is in the country illegally, part of the economic diaspora that has started to play the Irish at their age-old game. Now some call them an economic necessity – ‘they do the jobs that no one wants’ - so here she is this young woman from somewhere far away who drifts across his senses like the first snow of winter. He hopes they take good care of her, that they treat her well, that she makes her money quickly and gets out. And as he drinks in the cold beauty of her he tells himself that it’s not about economics but a spiritual necessity. That he will treat her well. That he will pay her well. And that will make it all right for both of them.
One of the businessmen is looking at her, looking at him. He starts to feel uncomfortable. The place is too public. She glances to where his gaze strayed and reads his thoughts immediately. ‘We should go,’ she says. ‘I’ll go first.’ Then she pushes a small square of paper towards him with a room number on it. ‘Give me ten minutes. Third floor. Take the number. Sometimes someone forgets, spends whole night looking for the right room.’
He watches her leave and then tries to turn casually to his drink. It’s the first thing that she’s said or done wrong in reminding him that there have been others. Better to have allowed him to console himself with the illusion that he was the only one.
He finishes his drink with what he believes is appropriate nonchalance, then glances at his watch. The group of businessmen are refocused on the computer screen – one of them points things out to the others with the tip of his pen – so he stands up slowly and buttons his overcoat. Perhaps it is the drink, perhaps the heat of the building, but he has started to feel too warm and he reopens the buttons, takes off his coat and drapes it casually over his arm. Once again he finds himself in a lift but this time is glad there is no mirror. Things are slipping away from him. Something has been lost. He understands now that it was a mistake to take this job and come to this city. He doesn’t believe in ghosts but there is something spectral about the thoughts that have started to haunt his consciousness. He tries to fasten on the memory of how blue her eyes were but the growing awareness of a deepening desperation begins to blunt the edge of his desire. How would he look if he were to see himself now? What did he look like in her eyes? He smiles as he remembers the light-washed greyness of the sharks then shivers a little. Does she see beyond his money and his expensive suit to something predatory? For a second he slips into the self-pity he abhors so much but then he remembers the apartment’s spreading net of emptiness that threatened to trap him in its mesh, the black sheen of the river below, and when the lift door pings open, he steps into the corridor with a renewed conviction of his need and his entitlement to have it met.
She opens the door almost immediately, takes his coat from his arm and hangs it on the rail inside the door. He sees her hand instinctively brush away a little speck of fluff from the lapel – she is obviously a woman for whom detail is important. She has softened the lighting and on a bedside table sit two drinks. Everything is ready. But he needs to talk and he wants to hear her talk, wants to show her something more than she expects. He knows it is a vanity but he hopes to make her understand that he is different from what has gone before and that despite the exchange of money that she quickly and discreetly slipped into her handbag, despite the anonymity of the room, he has the capacity to give as much as take. So when she sits on the edge of the bed and starts to remove the jacket of her suit he stops her and taking her hand presses its white coldness to his cheek. More than anything he wants to give her tenderness, to have the same from her. If he can only have that, he will pay all the money in the world. Something is breaking in him and he drops to his knees at her feet and places his head in her lap. He doesn’t care about dignity, doesn’t care about anything, and for a second there is nothing and then he feels her hand gently stroking his hair and she’s telling him that everything is all right.
Afterwards she talks a little but always carefully about herself. She’s Polish and she hopes to earn enough money to pay her way through university. He smiles involuntarily when she tells him she wants to be a lawyer. He tries to ask if he can contact her independently of her employers but she shakes her head, continuing to say it isn’t possible even when he tries to persuade her and is forced to use the vulgarity of the word ‘arrangement’. Her hair is splayed across the whiteness of the pillow, the blueness of her eyes the only strength of colour, and when they close in sleep he knows he has lost her. He has paid for the night but as he lies perfectly still beside her listening to her breathing, he knows, too, that he wants to leave her now and not in the harsh and awkward light of the morning, so he quietly gets out of bed and going to the bathroom closes the door behind him. He showers as quickly as he can but doesn’t allow himself to catch his reflection, then going back into the room he dresses, watching her all the time. The room is lit only by the city’s neon and he goes to the window and stares out at the streets below. Of course there should be snow but instead there is only the fading wail of a far-off siren and occasional voices that fritter skywards in sharp-edged fragments. He looks at her one last time and then leaves.
Outside as he waits for the taxi he turns up his collar against the bitterness of the night. The cold and damp seep into the marrow of his bone
s. He imagines himself as the spilt file, his secret pages caught and scattered by the wind, then shivers as he thinks again of snow and how already the silent fall is covering the print he tried to tenderly lay down and feels the sadness of knowing that by morning it will have vanished without trace.
Matteo is adamant. The file has been doctored. His face is animated and for a moment he reminds Stanfield of a bloodhound straining at the leash, desperate to sniff out the renegade.
‘It’s an amateur job. A pathetically amateur job!’ he says and it’s obvious his anger is laced with excitement. He drops the file theatrically on Stanfield’s desk then pushes his hand through his hair awaiting his master’s approval for his perceptive diligence. Stanfield looks at Laura who has stood up and come closer to the desk to stare at the file as if it is some alien creature. He is suddenly conscious that they both know that he has perused the file without apparently detecting what supposedly is an amateurish job. Connor Walshe. He wonders why the file doesn’t have a photograph of the boy.
‘The whole thing is a sloppy mess,’ he says neutrally. ‘It’s just like a drain that they’ve poured everything in.’
‘It’s what’s been taken out,’ he hears Matteo say and he’s conscious that Laura is looking at Matteo and not him. She puts her fingers on the file.
‘Perhaps it got spilt like the file the other day,’ he says, attempting a joke. She has small, thin fingers. The ring is vulgarly ostentatious and out of scale with the size of her hand. As Matteo suddenly lifts the file she pulls her hand away as if shocked by the energy of his movement.
‘The index has been altered and some of the pages have been added afterwards. It’s not even the same bloody paper. What do they think we are – complete fools?’ He splays pages across the desk then jabs his finger in relevant places. ‘You see?’ he asks and Laura nods her head. ‘You see?’ he asks again, looking at Stanfield. But Stanfield has already seen and has already understood. He thinks of the envelope Maria Harper handed to him but chooses to say nothing of its contents because already he is conscious of standing at the edge of a brackenish bog, a shifting swamp of a landscape where an ill-judged step might see him sucked into the morass. He has to be careful, perhaps more self-protective than he has ever had to be, as he increasingly glimpses a bottomless mire that waits for the foolhardy. So to think he shuts his ears to Matteo’s self-righteous screech of the idealist and the simpering support he gets from Laura and stares at the grubby manila folder with its finger bruises and scribble where it looks as if someone tried to get their pen to work. He wonders with what other prints this soiled and sullen coloured folder are indelibly and invisibly marked. But his thoughts are called back to the moment as he looks up again to register the burn of anger in Matteo’s eyes and hear him ask, ‘So what are we going to do about it?’
In time, Stanfield thinks, when Matteo sits on his side of the desk, as he surely will, he will come to understand the recklessness of such a question, that by then to have got where he is, he will understand that only the young believe that management is about doing things and that in maturity the greatest skill of all is the ability to do nothing. So with the greatest show of conviction he can muster he states solemnly, ‘This is a serious and despicable attempt to thwart the work of the Commission and is clearly intended to undermine the credibility of the process. I suspect it won’t be the last example of this we’re going to encounter so we’ve got to stand up strong. I want you both to prepare a detailed analysis of where you think the file’s been tampered with – consult independent experts if you have to – and after you’ve done that I’m going to contact all the other commissioners. I’ll go to the highest office with this if we don’t get the right answers.’
He’s rewarded by the belief and respect that their faces register and by the end of their discussion he sees the elation in their faces, the sense of a moral stand having been righteously taken. For a little while he bathes in the communal warm glow and then, as he watches them leave his office with a lightness of heart and step, for a second feels a tiny frisson of sympathy for them and what the world still has to teach them.
That night he attends one of the seemingly interminable functions designed to celebrate the new process and honour the commissioners and even if this black-tie do at Hillsborough Castle is the most prestigious so far, Stanfield finds the level of boredom commensurate with his previous experiences. There’s a lot of standing around exchanging small talk while black-dress waitresses serve slightly ridiculous canapes and then afterwards the inevitable speeches. He finds his fellow commissioners a stolid bunch; all are slightly older than him and have the cardigan and slipper whiff of the recently retired. He particularly avoids the South African judge who endlessly drones on about their experience and persists in holding it up as a shining template to the backwardness of the present imitation. It feels like colonialism in reverse. Only twro things prevent Stanfield slipping quietly away because already he is thinking of Kristal and the pale perfection of her skin seems even more perfect when imagined against this sea of jowelled greyness and faces flushed by the wine – the curiosity of hearing one of the new Prime Minister’s first public speeches and the prettiness of the waitresses.
But if the latter continues to please him the former is a source of much disappointment and he chides his naive anticipation, belatedly realising that the mouth delivering the words may have changed but not the hands of the writers. It’s a soft-centred meringue of a speech that leaves Stanfield feeling he has overdosed on sugar as he endures the endless references to healing and closure. He hears the word healing so often that he wants to stand up and shout that perhaps they should have employed doctors instead of representatives of the law. Thankfully there is no attempted knock-out punchline such as the hand of history but only a whimpering petering out with tautological references to momentous moments and rather tired images of building the future. The applause afterwards is polite but restrained. Stanfield looks at his watch and slips away before the subsequent speakers have a chance to take the podium and inflict further tedium on him.
She arrives half an hour after Beckett drops him off. He has decided for better or worse that he will bring her to the apartment rather than meet her in the city-centre hotel, trying to convince himself that it is more prudent to avoid such public spaces but knowing why he wants her here is that he hopes to exorcise the cavernous emptiness of his temporary home. Before she arrives he changes into casual clothes and does a sweep of the rooms removing anything that identifies him, or is too personally revealing, but in truth there is little to do because the residence has never assumed anything other than an austere functionalism.
He is pleased by her punctuality – it allows him to dream that she is keen to see him, a fantasy preserved by the smile with which she greets him and the seemingly affectionate kiss on his cheek. As he brings her into the main living area he keeps a little distance so that he can survey her more easily and once again admire the elegant choice of clothes – this time she wears a woollen three-quarter-length coat with a pale green silk scarf at the neck and when he stands behind her to help her take off the coat, he closes his eyes for a second as he breathes her in, lets his lips linger briefly on the fall of her hair. Underneath she wears a cashmere sweater, dark trousers and the same string of pearls as the first time. He offers her a drink and watches as she walks around the room taking everything in, sometimes lightly touching things with the tips of her fingers. Like a child in a toyshop, he thinks, and then for some unwanted reason remembers the Saturday morning when driven by some temporary surge of guilt for a particular period of neglect he took his daughter to Hamley’s. How long the moment of choice took when faced with the magnitude of possibilities, how, too, she touched things with her fingertips as if that light brush might intimately gauge their potential desirability.
‘Very nice,’ she says, sweeping her arm in a slow half circle.
‘It’s OK but it’s only temporary – it’s not my main home,�
� he answers, embarrassed by his desire to convey the extent of his wealth.
She goes to the window and looks out on the river. He stands behind her as if he, too, wants to share the view.
‘Pretty view,’ she says.
‘Yes, but not the most beautiful river in the world.’ And suddenly he has the impulse to take her away from here, take her to Paris and walk along the Seine, and the thought rejuvenates and excites him like champagne bubbling open. He feels the delicious lightness in the recklessness of the thought, drinks from it as deeply as possible before he lets it be subsumed slowly by the leaden weight of reality. He puts his hand lightly on her shoulder and she lays her hand across his without turning round. It is a simple gesture but whatever money she costs he thinks that he has been paid in full in that moment.
Part of him doesn’t want to sleep with her because part of him wants to talk to her and hear her talk in return. He sits opposite her and enjoys the burnish of her hair, the blueness of her eyes, the clean ring of her voice. He looks at the way her hand holds the glass, the slight tilt of her head as she drinks. He looks at the paleness of her neck when she removes the scarf. He wants her to feel the way a model feels as she shows herself to a great artist so he’s desperate to avoid any crude hint of physical necessity or the selfishness of greed. But perhaps he waits too long because once as they sit listening to some of his favourite music he catches her eyes glancing at her watch and the gesture scatters the consoling weave of his illusion. So in an instinctive defence he assumes a greater sense of detachment, the more formal air of a business transaction. She knows that he is disappointed about something and tries a little too hard to compensate but after a while he is happy to be pampered out of his sulk.
In the morning while she is still sleeping he starts some coffee in the kitchen and in his dressing gown goes to the window. On the river a rowing crew sculls by, the rhythmic pull on the oars slicing the boat through the still grey-coloured water and spurting up little flurries of white. On the other side a jogger moves in a less elegant way with as much up and down movement as forward. Stanfield slightly opens the sliding door to the balcony and lets the morning air hit his face. Already he hears the thock thock of tennis being played out on the courts. Unlit by the sun the water below looks cold and skimmed with a misty gauze.
