by Paul Murray
‘I don’t see why you’re always defending her,’ I said, swiping irritably at a moth that fluttered around the lantern. ‘It’s all very well talking about masks and the triumph of failure and so forth, but the fact is that she led you on while it suited her, and then dropped you when it didn’t. You have to watch out for girls like that, Yeats. Especially when they’re actresses, I mean really you’re asking for trouble there.’
He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, spread it out on his lap, carefully folded it again and returned it to his pocket. ‘Perhaps every woman is an actress when love is the stage,’ he mused; and before I could puzzle out what he meant, he went on, ‘But what about that actress you’re so obsessed with? The girl with the man’s name?’
Did he mean Gene? Because that was totally different: because what captured me about Gene was that – although she may have dated princes, danced with Picasso, attended lavish parties in the Hollywood of the 1940s – she only seemed to truly exist when she was up there on the screen; where she appeared, no matter what role they cast her in, only as herself, shimmering through every scene like a double-exposure, like some panicky spirit-creature they had trapped between lights and glass –
‘Aha!’ Yeats leaned back in his chair beaming delightedly, like the teacher whose recalcitrant pupil has blundered into iterating a truth. ‘So it’s her bad acting you love her for! And your sister, she’s not a real actor either, I take it?’
I didn’t quite see what he was getting at, and I felt my cheeks crimsoning. ‘Well, she isn’t,’ I said defensively. ‘I know she thinks she is. But it seems to me that Bel’s far too preoccupied with her own life to actually do it. I mean she’s always too busy fighting with Mother or haranguing me or swanning about with some oaf. That’s her true calling, if you ask me. Though obviously I’d be far too frightened of her to actually say it.’
‘Do you know, Charles, I think all this time we’ve secretly been in agreement…’ and with a dry chuckle he rose to trim the wick.
On some evenings, after we’d been talking, he’d fall into deep silences, and I’d know that he was brooding over Maud and thinking of what might have been. At times like these I would remind him of his Nobel Prize, which was usually enough to cheer him up; or else we’d go to the dog-track and watch the greyhounds.
The races were nothing like the one I’d seen with Frank: the track was marked out in complicated chalk divisions, with flags at certain points around it, and the dogs had unearthly sounding, occultish names like Hecate and Isis. The sun could still be quite hot and Yeats insisted on wearing his absurd sombrero with the enormous brim that obscured most of his face. This wasn’t to say that he didn’t take the whole business very seriously. He always brought along a sort of almanac, into which he scrawled feverishly for the duration of the race. He was very mysterious about it, guarding it jealously with his arm. I presumed it was some kind of racing form; but on the couple of occasions I managed to peek over his shoulder, all I could see were strange runes and astrological diagrams. He refused to explain what they meant; nor would he disclose why he seemed far more interested in the patterns made by the various dogs during the race than who actually won it. Instead he limited himself to arcane remarks about connectedness.
‘What does connectedness have to do with anything? It’s a race, isn’t it? I mean, the only question is will this Shiva win and we can buy that fancy samovar you liked, or won’t she, in which case we’ll have to stick with the regular teapot –’
‘The shape of things, Charles,’ he replied, a hermetic smile flashing beneath the brim of the sombrero. ‘Isn’t that rather the more interesting question? How can we know the dancer from the dance?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Look, there’s one of those snack vendors. Run over and buy us some hot dogs, why don’t you.’ When he returned, as I chewed down the warm spicy meat, I wondered what extra information he could be searching for, when we had everything anyone could possibly want right here in front of us. Tan-skinned natives cheered around me, raising their hands as the dogs approached the finish-line; I looked away to the sun setting over the ocean, and wished for an instant that Father could be here to see it. He would have liked it here, up on this little corral east of the mountains with Yeats and me: old hunters, talking with gods.
Then one day, quite out of the blue, Yeats asked me to turn on my side as he had to administer something anally, and when I looked around to make sure I’d heard him correctly he had changed into a hatchet-faced nurse and Chile into a dimly lit room with green paint on the walls and perforated ceiling tiles. There was a strange tight clinging about my skull and shadowy figures standing around me. I resisted as best I could; I shut my eyes, I begged them to leave me in peace. But it was like being underwater: no matter how I wriggled, every second impelled me closer to the surface; and already Chile, our little house, the lime trees, were far, far away…
6
‘You! You! You!’ Bel pounded across the floorboards, gold bangles rattling down her forearm. ‘It was you what got me addicted to smack!
‘Me?’ Mirela said incredulously, rising from the table. ‘But how could it be me?’
‘Don’t you see?’ Bel implored. ‘My addiction was a cry for help. Heroin was replacing the love that you, and at a larger level society, weren’t giving me.’
Mirela reached for the back of the chair to support herself, her long dress brushing the floor. ‘How can you say I didn’t love you?’ she said haltingly. ‘Wasn’t it me what clothed and fed you all these years? Wasn’t it me who scraped together the few shillings so you’d always have your books for school?’
‘Ma, you still don’t understand,’ Bel said. ‘You’re just like the government, in terms of not understanding the younger generation. We need more than just methadone clinics and back-to-work schemes. We need to respect ourselves as real people, just as good as anyone else. Yes, you done all them things for me. But you never got round to telling us the three little words what are the most important thing to any child.’
Mirela seemed to wilt, right there in front of us; as she lowered herself painfully back down into the chair, you could have heard a pin drop in the old ballroom, scuppering my hopes of making a quick trip out to the bar for a revivative short.
‘It’s a vicious cycle, Ma,’ Bel went on. ‘Cos then, see, we never learned to love ourselves. That’s what pushed Dougie into joyriding – the buzz he got from robbin cars, like the temporary release of taking drugs, took the place of the self-worth that society would not give him and let him escape the monotony of long-term unemployment.’
‘If only I’d known this earlier…’ Mirela shook her head sadly, sending a cloud of talc puffing from her wig. ‘He might not have died so senselessly.’
Bel placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not too late to save the others. If we all work together, and remember the lessons we learned tonight.’
‘I’m proud of you for coming through this,’ Mirela said, ‘and becoming a stronger woman for it. It gives me hope for the future.’
I too was given hope for the future and started reaching for my jacket; but the curtain did not fall, because Bel was saying to Mirela that speaking of the future she was pregnant. Every time you thought it was over somebody got pregnant or run over by joyriders. My head was pounding. Couldn’t they tell we were being pushed too far? I ground my teeth; I tore little strips off the programme Burnin Up a Play by the RH Workshop and rolled them into balls and threw them at Frank in the front row; I knitted my brows and willed the plot to come to a close, which only made my head hurt more and drops of sweat collect beneath my bandages.
The hospital had discharged me only that afternoon; if anyone had bothered to ask me, I might have told them that all things considered I’d prefer to spend my first night home without the company of a hundred gawping strangers. But no one had asked me, and well into the first act a few anxious faces were still turning around to check on me in the back row, perhaps su
rmising I was one of the endless string of long-lost joyriding half-brothers, or worrying that I might pull some kind of a Phantom of the Opera stunt and go swinging from the gantry, which I confess was by this point not a million miles from my thoughts. But there, now, the lights went down, and up, and the audience was on its feet clapping. Bel and Mirela stepped forward, beaming, to take their bows; I paused briefly to applaud then hurried out ahead of the crowd to the recital room, where Mrs P was polishing glasses behind the bar. ‘Soda, please,’ I said.
‘Is finish?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually, you know, maybe I’ll have some Scotch in there too.’
Mrs P reached for the bottle. I licked my lips, watching as it tipped the rim of the glass. ‘In fact, maybe forget the soda and make it a double Scotch,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering.
Mrs P stopped, and looked at me suspiciously.
‘Master Charles, I think you are not allowed to drink.’
‘Eh?’ I said, feigning incomprehension; but all the bad acting must have rubbed off on me. Mrs P put the bottle back down with a reproachful look. ‘Yes, the doctor has say to you, no booze.’
‘He said no such thing, Mrs P, you must be thinking of someone else, Mother perhaps…’ This got me nowhere. ‘Look, would I lie to you?’ I squeezed her arm cajolingly. ‘For God’s sake, woman!’
‘Master Charles, you are hurting me!’
‘Special occasion, eh?’ I begged her feverishly. ‘Momentous, celebrate?’
Audience members were beginning to shuffle in from across the hall. Shaking her head, Mrs P poured the whiskey and pushed it across the bar, and I retired gratefully with it to a secluded corner. But just as I was about to send it down the old hatch, the glass was snatched from my lips – by Bel, no less, with a gaggle of her noxious actor friends in tow.
‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Give that back.’
‘He’s not allowed to drink while he’s on his medication,’ Bel told the actors. ‘He’s crawling up the walls. The world has lost all meaning to him.’
‘What happened to him?’ a fellow with foolish plaited hair inquired.
‘Mind your own business,’ I offered.
‘It’s a long story,’ Bel said, sipping at my drink. She was still wearing her make-up from the play; offstage it looked gaudy and incongruous, as if she’d just wandered in from a Victorian gin palace. ‘Basically he tried to blow up the Folly for the insurance and got clocked on the head by one of his own specially commissioned gargoyles. He was in a coma for six weeks.’
‘The poor thing,’ clucked a not unappealing blonde, bestowing on me a Concerned Glance.
‘Not to worry,’ I assured her, ‘life in the old dog yet, what?’
‘He’s quite all right now,’ Bel said. ‘You should have seen him the night it happened though, his head looked like a pumpkin.’
‘How awful,’ the blonde crooned, glancing at me concernedly again.
‘And you are…?’ I pressed, but again she had returned to Bel for further details, as if I were a chipped hatstand, or a beagle with a bandaged paw!
‘It was actually sort of funny,’ Bel said, ‘because for a couple of minutes after he was hit he was still running around the lawn, picking up bits of exploded silverware and putting them into Frank’s van –’
‘Into the van?’ the fellow with the hair said.
‘Yes, so I went over, you know, to try and get him to lie down until the ambulance arrived, and he holds up his hand like this –’ her face was quite pink and she took a moment for her giggles to subside, ‘– and tells me to please remain calm, that he’s not sure which way South America is, but that we can probably ask directions–’
‘Well, of course, the reason for that was –’ I began: but they were all guffawing too much to hear me. I was starting to have some inkling of what that Phantom of the Opera must have gone through. These theatrical types could be quite unfeeling. Try as I might to give my side of the story, the conversation rolled right over me like so much motorway traffic; and as there didn’t seem to be any hope of getting my drink back from Bel, I eventually gave up and stalked off.
I almost stalked straight into Mother, who was standing behind us regaling a group of dull-looking elderly people with one of her theatrical anecdotes, the one about the charity production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the children from the Polio School, when she’d first met Father. ‘I was playing Titania and he was Oberon, terribly handsome I thought, and then these children were to be the fairies, and we were quite at a loss because they were so eager to take part and yet most of them couldn’t walk, let alone dance…’
‘There’s a rum-looking fellow,’ a florid-faced gent beside her remarked.
‘That’s Charles.’ Mother’s tone altered abruptly. ‘I want a word with him, as a matter of fact – Charles! Charles!’
I was already quite aware that Mother wanted a word: that was why I had been very carefully avoiding her all afternoon, and why I now pretended not to hear and disappeared into the crowd, inasmuch as one can disappear when one’s entire head is wrapped in bandages. Eyes fell on me and slid off again like water; people made comments without even bothering to lower their voices, as though, because they couldn’t really see me, they assumed that in some way I wasn’t actually there. It was indescribably unnerving; and then to make matters worse, every so often I would catch sight of myself in the mirror, and flinch, and wish I really was invisible.
A few days previously, I had woken quite innocently from my coma to find my entire world turned upside-down – not by the bank, as had been expected, but by Bel, who had in my absence hatched a plan of her own to save Amaurot. ‘We’re going to turn it into a theatre,’ she’d told me. This was in hospital, the day I finally came to; I’d been groggy with painkillers, and the idea had seemed so conspicuously unhinged that although she explained at some length I hadn’t been quite been able to believe it. Tonight, confronted with the scheme’s first fruits – the house full of actors and wealthy patrons of the arts, the ballroom thrown open and fitted out with stage and lights and plastic seats – I still could not believe it. All I knew was that it was very, very important I find a drink.
Before I had got within twenty feet of the bar, however, Mrs P had made it clear by her expression that there was no chance of wheedling anything more out of her. I raised my hands, appealing for mercy; she merely stared, arms folded impassively. And so I had no alternative but to go about the room, lifting half-empty glasses from unsuspecting guests. I didn’t like it, needless to say. No one should ever have to steal drinks in his own house. But I did find I was rather good at it. I discovered that on some subliminal level people preferred to sacrifice their drinks than have to confront the grim reality of my appearance, and I exploited this principle ruthlessly. After a martini, two cosmopolitans and a brandy Alexander, I was feeling a little more like myself, sufficiently so to approach Mirela.
She was standing at the bar, wincing slightly under a frontal assault from Frank and Laura. She hadn’t taken off her greasepaint either, but it didn’t have the disorientating effect on her that it did on Bel: instead she looked enhanced, the colours of her face deeper and brighter – like a restored painting, I thought. I hadn’t realized in the Folly quite how beautiful she was; and – although it could just have been me mixing my drinks – she seemed with every second to be gaining in radiance, leaving the pale, spookish girl I had encountered that night further behind.
‘It was just so… so…’ Laura was saying, her hands making slow, squeezing motions, as if groping at the huge, spongy mass of truth that the play had communicated to her.
‘Yeah,’ Frank corroborated.
‘Like it was like EastEnders and Coronation Street and Brookside all rolled into one,’ Laura said, ‘except like in Dublin with real people in it.’
‘I could really relate to it,’ Frank said, pronouncing the words slowly as if he were trying them out for the first time.
>
‘Well, that’s good,’ Mirela said.
‘I cried,’ Laura said matter-of-factly.
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. He did too.’
‘I did not!’
‘You did, you liar.’
‘No, I told you, my eyes were watering cos there was talc kept gettin in them.’
‘That’s not what you told oh my God –’
‘It’s just Charlie, relax. All right, Charlie, how’s the noggin?’
‘Well, obviously it’s been a big hit with the ladies…’ I nursed the spot where Laura’s elbow had caught me as she soared into the air.
‘Maybe we should get you a bell,’ Mirela laughed.
‘Maybe… here, try putting some tonic on it, Laura.’
‘I can do it myself,’ she muttered, snatching the napkin from my hand and dabbing at the dark stain spreading across her breast. ‘This was the last one Top Shop had in my size – bollocks, I’ll have to take it off –’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Frank said, winking at me as he steered her, still rubbing fractiously at her blouse, towards the bathroom: though just as they reached the door I caught him floating an oddly yearning glance over at Bel, who was gabbing away merrily at the centre of her cadre. The chap with the annoying hair and the peasant jacket was doing an inordinate amount of laughing. The more I saw of him, the surer I was that our paths had crossed before, but I couldn’t place where…
‘Such a crowd,’ Mirela said to me. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘Mother does know a lot of people,’ I concurred feebly.
‘And all the right people, from newspapers and theatres and Arts Council and businesses they are talking about giving us money…’ Her smile was as simple and transfixing as a butterfly alighting on one’s hand.
‘Mmm.’ I noticed at that moment that as well as all the right people, MacGillycuddy was here, sitting by the trestle table with a tall glass.
