An Evening of Long Goodbyes

9

Taking my chance meeting with Hoyland to be nothing less than a warning from the gods, I did not attempt any other agencies that day. The rain had become a deluge and by the time I got back to Bonetown I was in a foul mood. It didn’t help that from the bus stop I had to run a gauntlet of local youths, who appeared to have gone on some sort of rampage. The sky was lit up by explosions, and the streets were filled with urchins calling to each other as they hauled timber, car tyres and any other flammable business to the pyre that had materialized before the block of flats.

‘Hallowe’en,’ Droyd explained, when I pointed this out.

‘It’s weeks to Hallowe’en,’ I said sourly, taking off my scarf as, outside, a series of metallic creaks and groans was succeeded by cheers and an expensive-sounding crash. ‘They’re not going to keep this up all night, are they? I mean presumably some of them have parents, who might eventually begin to wonder —’

‘Ah yeah,’ Droyd said happily, looking down at the mayhem. ‘There’s always a bit of crack round here on Hallowe’en, am I right, Frankie?’

‘Ah yeah,’ Frank concurred lugubriously.

‘Look out, neighbourhood cats,’ Droyd said.

‘I don’t mind crack,’ I said. ‘I like crack as much as the next man. But it’s not doing a thing for my nerves, and I already have a splitting headache — I say, I don’t suppose those heroin dealers carry Anadin or paracetamol or anything like that, do they?’

‘I think they just have heroin, Charlie.’

‘Here, Frankie, remember that time the fire engine came out and we all threw rocks at them and I hit this one bollocks with a plank, remember that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You assaulted the fire brigade?’ I said incredulously.

‘We were just tryin to have a laugh,’ Droyd’s face crossing swiftly silver then pink as a brace of rockets went up. ‘Is that too much to ask? If they’d just let us enjoy ourselves one fuckin day a year then no one’d have to get hurt, would they?’

‘A laugh,’ I repeated sardonically. ‘It looks like Bosnia out there.’ As I said it I felt a pang of homesickness for Mrs P and the cups of cocoa she made for one on rainy days like this…

‘I wonder if they’ll come out this year,’ Droyd said, rubbing his hands.

With a heavy sigh, Frank got up, went to the refrigerator, took out a six-pack of Hobson’s and left the room.

‘What’s eating him?’ I asked.

‘That bird was here,’ Droyd said disapprovingly.

‘What bird?’

‘That bird with no tits,’ he elaborated. ‘Your sister.’

‘She was? Well, damn it, why didn’t he — I say!’ I stormed out into the living room just in time to see Frank vanish into the bathroom and slide the lock shut. I went up and hammered indignantly on the door. ‘I say!’

‘Occupied,’ came the small voice from inside.

‘You didn’t tell me that Bel was here.’

‘Oh yeah,’ the voice said, with an air of cloudy recollection. ‘That’s right, she asked if you’d give her a ring.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? What was she doing here?’

‘Eh… I don’t know,’ the voice said meekly. ‘Just droppin off a few things I gave her a loan of for the play. Oh yeah, and she wanted to make sure I knew we were broken up.’

‘She… oh.’ I thought he’d seemed a little quiet.

‘I already had a fair idea. But it was nice of her all the same, just so I know where I stand, like.’

‘Ah,’ I said. A few moments elapsed; I stared somewhat helplessly at the flaky white paint of the door. ‘And you’re not… that is, you’re not…’

‘Me, Charlie? Ah, no. Right as rain.’ I heard the sound of a can being opened on the other side of the door, followed by a distinctive glugging. Reluctant to press him further, I stole away.

Bel came to the phone in a state of such high doh that I was sure something had happened, and when she said she was just excited because I had finally called I was downright alarmed. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said. ‘You haven’t had a blow to the head or anything?’

‘Of course not, I wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Oh Charles, something wonderful has happened, I’ve been dying to tell you —’

‘Oh?’ I had learned to be on my guard whenever Bel announced something wonderful.

‘Yes, it’s about Harry. You remember Harry, don’t you?’

‘Of course. How could I forget old Harry? Hasn’t fallen off a cliff, I hope, or been snatched away by an eagle —’

‘Don’t be silly, no, he’s —’ she took a deep breath, ‘he’s giving me the lead in his new play.’

‘Is he now? Well, well. Congratulations.’

‘I only found out last night, isn’t it amazing?’

‘Definitely,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure it merited actual paroxysms, such as were filtering down now from the other end of the line. ‘Though didn’t you have the lead in the last one too?’

‘That was different, that was an ensemble piece. This is — I mean he’s been working on it for ages, obviously, but last night we had this amazing conversation and afterwards he told me he’d just realized that he’d written it for me, like it was about me almost and he’d only just realized —’

‘Well, bravo,’ I said, trying to get in the spirit a little. ‘And what about old Mirela, is she going to be in this thing too?’

‘Oh, Mirela,’ Bel said impatiently. ‘Let’s not talk about Mirela.’

‘She is going to be in it, though?’ I persisted hopefully.

‘Yes, but that’s not the point, the point is I’m trying to tell you about this amazing conversation I had with Harry last night…’ A chain of squibs spat fractiously outside and somewhere a curtain of glass tinkled to the ground. I lowered myself to a sitting position. ‘Go on, then,’ I said reluctantly.

‘You know that last night the play finished its run — well it did, anyway, and we were having the wrap party in the theatre in town, except I didn’t really feel like being there, because it was sort of sad, you know, the end of our first play and the first thing we had done together. Anyway I said it to Harry and he said it was weird because he’d just been thinking the same thing, so he said why don’t we just leave? So we left. He knew how to get up to the theatre roof from the fire escape. It was so lovely, Charles, you could see the whole city spread out, it was so peaceful, and all these stars were out, and I just knew that something was going to happen…’

‘What sort of thing?’ I interjected warily.

‘Well that’s when we had the amazing conversation.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘It was just…’ she said dreamily, ‘it was so… have you ever had one of those conversations where you’re so connected with the other person that you stop being sure which of you is talking, because when they speak it’s like they’re articulating all these thoughts you’ve had that you’ve never been able to put into words before? He was telling me these things, like — like for instance about The Cherry Orchard when I didn’t get the part that time, Harry was saying you know Stanislavsky’s thing you can’t act Chekhov you have to live him, well that in Amaurot I’ve basically been living Chekhov for three years only I didn’t realize, and I was trying to be someone else when I was already exactly what they needed — God, he’s so insightful, it was like — like hearing my own heart speak up and tell me exactly what it was thinking, and you know it’s so weird because he and I have known each other for years, and now suddenly we find out we’re so alike, little things even like we both like Doris Day and Mozart and Hart Crane, and the way the wind when it blows through the pylons it sounds like it’s singing…’ She stopped and repeated to herself, as if in disbelief, ‘God.’

‘At the same time, it’s not as if your heart’s been especially quiet up until now,’ I felt compelled to point out.

‘Yes, but Charles you know what it’s been like since college ended,’ she said, ‘stuck out here in the house, feeling like I wasn’t alive, even, like I was in this little closed-off area that was contiguous to life, and sort of along the same lines as life, but not actually life — and now suddenly in a single moment everything just opens up I mean it’s so exciting, don’t you think it’s exciting?’

‘What about Frank?’

‘What?’ she broke off mid-gush. ‘What do you mean, what about Frank?’

I hesitated. I didn’t know what I meant. It had just come out.

‘Since when do you care what happens to Frank?’ she said.

Suddenly I felt very confused. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just seems like an offhand way to treat somebody, that’s all.’

She groaned. ‘Charles, you’re not going to start, are you?’

‘I’m not starting anything,’ I said. ‘But a few weeks ago I seem to recall you being all set to move in with him. And while we’re on the subject, you don’t even like Doris Day.’

‘What?’

‘Doris Day, as long as I can remember any time “Que Sera Sera” has come on the radio you’ve made juvenile vomiting noises, and then last year when I was watching Pillow Talk you said she looked like an Aryan sex doll —’

‘Well, so what? What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Yes, but Mozart too, I distinctly remember you telling me that people who liked Mozart ought to be made to ride around in elevators for the rest of their lives. And those ghastly pylons, in fact all of those things you just said you have in common —’

‘People change, don’t they?’ she broke in. ‘Why are you being like this? Can’t you for once just be happy for me, instead of trying to pick holes? I mean, for months you did nothing but complain about Frank, and I know you’ve developed one of your stupid crushes on Mirela. So isn’t this what you wanted? I mean, what is it exactly that you want?’

Once again I found myself stuck for an answer. A Roman candle came to my rescue: it detonated right outside the window, throwing a hellish red up on the bedroom wall; the rumble took several seconds to die away. ‘What’s going on there anyway?’ her voice crackled from far away. ‘It sounds like the peasants are storming the battlements.’

‘They’ve stormed the battlements,’ I said glumly. ‘They’re having their wrap party.’

She laughed. ‘Poor old Charles,’ she said. ‘And here’s me shouting at you on top of everything. You know I promised myself that I wasn’t going to shout at you this time. I haven’t even asked you how you are. How are you?’

‘Well —’ I began.

‘Charles,’ her voice cut across me, ‘sorry to interrupt, but I have to go to a meeting now so before I forget the reason I wanted to see you — I wanted to tell you that I know everything’s going to work out, for both of us. I mean that’s what all this stuff I’ve been going on about has made me realize, that things do change, and… and just when it seems everything’s against you, that’s exactly when something’ll appear out of nowhere and suddenly it’ll all be different. I just wanted you to know.’

‘Thank you,’ I said stiffly.

‘And the other thing was, will you tell Frank we need a wheelchair for the play, if he comes across one?’

‘All right.’

‘I’d better go. Remember what I said.’

Deep in thought, I mooched back into the living room. Frank had emerged from the bathroom, and was silently watching television with Droyd. On the street, fireworks continued to crack like enemy artillery; huddled in the shifting light, the two of them had the look of soldiers caught in a foxhole. ‘Bel wants a wheelchair,’ I said.

‘Right,’ Frank said, without looking round.

I sat down on the sofa. I felt like I’d been walking through a hurricane. I wasn’t used to hearing Bel so happy. It made me nervous. It was like a car driving in a gear that it didn’t actually have. I wondered what that bounder had said to her, up on the roof.

‘ — forces allege that this is just one of dozens of similar sites scattered across the region,’ the television said, showing a soldier kicking dirt away from the ground to reveal what looked like a pile of washed-out rags.

She was right about one thing, though. For months I had prayed for the day when Frank would be given the heave-ho. There was nothing I wanted more than for her to be rid of him, his rusty white van, his mutilated gerunds. Now that the day had come, surely I was due a moment of jubilation or triumph or at least a cold sense of closure and the transience of all things. Yet as I sat on the dysmorphic sofa, waiting for the flush of victory to sweep through me, all there seemed to be was an annoying hollow feeling.

This was absurd! Hadn’t I been paying attention? Had my life really grown so complicated that its most fundamental notions of right and wrong no longer held? Good God, now that one tiny success had presented itself, was my own soul going to step in and turn it to defeat?

‘Good God,’ I uttered involuntarily.

‘What’s that, Charlie?’

‘Nothing, nothing, bit of a twinge is all,’ patting my bandages; he returned to the television and I to grapple with the mounting evidence of inner mutiny.

I tried to counter it. I pointed to the facts. I recalled his odious groping sessions with Bel. I remembered how he’d blown up my Folly. I took in the mournful cherubim on the shelves around me, the lonesome garden ornaments, the inconsolable tallboy, all torn from people’s houses. From the corner of my eye, I considered Frank himself, staring at the television, the can of Hobson’s propped on his exposed belly moving, with a noxious quiver, slowly up and down. None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away.

The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt: it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in — which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it. Instead I threw myself into my Gene Tierney project: I wrapped myself in her movies, lost myself in them, just as she had tried to lose herself years before. I watched each one avidly, meticulously cross-referencing it with her biography, charting the trajectory that emerged.

If you looked at her life from start to finish, it seemed clear that her marriage to Oleg Cassini was the event that set loose all the other catastrophes that befell her — the initial transgression that woke the Furies until then lying dormant at the edges of her life. Marrying him, in fact, was about the only rebellious thing she ever did. She had been reared to be a nice girl, and she had always done exactly what she was told — living frugally with her mother in Hollywood, sending her pay cheques back to the company her father had set up, catching hell from him for any extravagance: and then Cassini came along.

Oleg Cassini was Russian, the son of a Countess who had fled to America after the defeat of the White Army; he was also a designer and a playboy and had not been to Yale, and as such could not have been further away from what Gene’s parents thought of as a suitable match if they had sat down and planned it. They would not countenance the romance. Gene’s father said that if she married Cassini he would have her declared mentally instable. The studios concurred: and whatever about her parents, in those days no one defied the studios. They had made you, and they could destroy you just as easily. But Gene was in love.

She thought that once they were married, and there was no longer anything anyone could do about it, things might die down; so, travelling in disguise, she and Cassini eloped to Las Vegas. On the night of their wedding Gene came back to Los Angeles, having agreed with Oleg, in the interests of diplomacy, to spend it apart: only to find that her mother had already fired the servants and flown home to New York City. And worse was to come.

Parents and studio now joined forces. Paramount fired Cassini and Gene’s studio, Fox, refused to take him on. Her parents, meanwhile, complained to the press that Cassini had taken advantage of their daughter, and tried to have the marriage annulled. Suddenly the newlyweds found themselves blacklisted by Hollywood society, deserted by their friends. Cassini was still out of work; Gene, on the other hand, was working constantly, and they saw each other increasingly rarely. As the pressure began to tell, her father and mother started calling her up at all hours, trying to persuade her to leave him. In the midst of all this, during the shooting of Heaven Can Wait, Gene discovered she was pregnant; and America entered the Second World War.

After so much personal turmoil, the war must have seemed something of a reprieve. Old differences were set aside; the nation busied itself ‘pitching in’. Gallant Cassini joined the cavalry; Gene, like most of the stars, took part in bond drives to raise money for the war effort. She toured around the country, speaking at factories and outdoor rallies. A week before she went down to Kansas, where Cassini’s division was stationed, she appeared at the Hollywood Canteen to entertain the marines. A few days later she was diagnosed with German measles.

She had kept quiet about her condition — the studio would suspend an actress’s salary if she became pregnant on their time. In 1943, the connection had not yet been made between German measles in early pregnancy and brain damage in very young children. Gene gave birth prematurely in October to a baby girl, weighing two and a half pounds. She named her child Daria.

It was a year later that the newspapers picked up on the story of the rubella epidemic in Australia that had apparently produced a generation of severely retarded infants, and Gene began to admit that her baby might not just be a late developer, but was having serious problems. Specialists were called out at great expense (paid for by Gene’s old flame Howard Hughes, then beginning his own retreat from the world after his disfiguring plane crash). They all said the same thing. The damage had already been done, while the baby was still in the womb, and it could not be undone. The best thing for everyone now would be for the child to be put in an institution.

Gene was tormented by guilt and confusion. Hadn’t she always tried to be good? Hadn’t she always done what people asked? What had she done to bring this catastrophe down on top of her and those she loved? She resisted as long as she could; but she was twenty-four years old and after everything that had happened the pressure was too much. Daria was put in a home, where she would remain for the rest of her life with the mind of a nineteen-month-old infant.

One quiet Sunday years later, at a tennis party in LA, Gene happened to be approached by a fan. This young woman was an ex-marine; she said she had met Gene before, at a show in the Hollywood Canteen during the war. ‘Did you happen to catch German measles that night?’ the woman asked. Gene said that she did, as a matter of fact. The woman laughed and said the whole camp had come down with German measles, but that she had broken quarantine, to sneak out and meet her favourite star.

Anyone else would have screamed, or punched her; but Gene, who had been reared to be nice, merely smiled and turned away.

It seemed to me that after that her films became a kind of refuge for her. Not the work, nor the scripts, but the movies themselves: as the betrayals mounted up, as the birth of their child achieved what the combined forces of parents and studio could not and her marriage to Cassini slowly fell apart, it seemed to me that the movies became places where she could hide herself, where she could disappear. Take, for example, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, in which she plays a widow who falls for the ghost that haunts the cottage she has moved into. The ghost, played by Rex Harrison, first catches her eye in the form of a portrait in the living room — which seems a neat flip of what happens in Laura, where the cop falls in love with the painting of Gene, who has been murdered. People falling for ghosts, people falling for paintings, in more and more of her movies I found this secret tendency elaborated: a tendency for the movies to create spaces for her within them, interstitial spaces of one kind or another — as if, although she couldn’t make the movies hers, she had elicited a secret pact whereby she could escape into them and exist away from life, untouchably, as an image; as if in here, after all, she found her true domain — the illusory, the shadowy, the in-between –

‘Charlie, this is like the fuckin most borin film I’ve ever seen in me life.’

— although much of this was lost on others –

‘Yeah, Charlie, and it’s time for Hollyoaks.’

‘Charlie, can you not just let us watch Hollyoaks and then you can watch the rest of this thing?’

‘Charlie, we know you can hear us so like why aren’t you sayin anything? Charlie?’

‘Blast it — because I know that once Hollyoaks is over you’ll want to watch Streetmate, and then Robot Wars and then that unconscionable Dawson’s Creek…’

‘I don’t watch Dawson’s Creek, Charlie.’

‘Well, you were certainly doing a good impression of it the other night. Confound it, can’t you just sit still for half an hour and then I’ll quite happily —’

‘I’d give her one, wouldn’t you, Frankie? Charlie, would you give her —’

‘Look, you scoundrels,’ rising apoplectically to my feet with the rolled-up television guide as though shooing a pack of mangy street dogs, ‘hang it, can’t you just leave me in peace for a few minutes more and then I swear to you I will return your deuced television!’

‘All right, all right… fuck’s sake…’ The pair of them slunk away to the kitchen, only to strike up from there a few moments later:

‘Hang it, Droyd, I wish to the devil you’d roll up an oul joint there.’

‘Confound it, Frankie, where’s me deuced Rizlas?’

And then five minutes after that:

‘Frankie?’

‘Yeah?’

‘D’you ever see your reflection in a spoon, like, and just for a second you think, “Ah fuck, I’m upside-down?”’

‘Yeah, o’course.’

‘Fuckin scary, isn’t it?’

There was only so much insulation any film could give one, and tonight was the night I reached the end of my tether; I almost heard the snap. As if in a trance I rose from the couch and headed for the kitchen, and it’s quite possible that something terrible might have happened if I hadn’t been diverted by the telephone.

‘Yes, what? Oh…’

It was Gemma Coffey from Sirius Recruitment. She had called to offer me a job.

For a moment I was paralysed. Could it really be true? Out of the blue like this? Had the time come at last for me to step up to bat, to play my part in –

‘Charles?’ she said.

‘I’m here,’ I said faintly.

‘Well, can you do it?’

I assured her that I could; I added how grateful I was to her for remembering me out of the millions that came to her door, and that I wanted her to know I believed in this job, whatever it was, and would do my level best to help make the dream come true –

She said Good, but all that wasn’t so important with this particular job. ‘It’s only a temporary position, and it’s not quite as glamorous as the ones we discussed. It’s factory work, basically. You don’t have a problem with factory work, do you, Charles?’

‘It’s not a jar factory, is it?’ I said, there being only so many ironical twists I was willing to put up with in my life.

Gemma said that it wasn’t, it was a bread factory in Cherry Orchard. I said that in that case, I didn’t have a problem, and that I was just happy to be a part of the Sirius Recruitment team. Gemma sounded pleased, though she pointed out that technically I would be employed not by Sirius Recruitment but by its sister company, Pobolny Arbitwo Recruitment. ‘But that’s not important,’ she said. ‘The important thing is that I’m not going to forget about you out there, Charles. Come through for me and I’m going to find something really special for you.’

I told her she could count on me. She said she knew. She asked if by any chance I spoke Latvian. I said I didn’t. She said it didn’t matter. She gave me an address, the bus route to take, and a name to report to — Mr Appleseed — then we thanked each other and said goodbye.

To think that only a moment ago I had been close to throwing in the towel! Now, as if someone had waved a magic wand, my problems had disappeared; I had been lifted out of the doldrums and my sails filled with wind again.

I forgot all about having it out with Frank and Droyd. Instead, I stood in the living room, stroking my chin and smiling to myself as the good news sank in. Well I’ll be, I thought, the system works; and Gene’s eye twinkled at me from across the room where she waited, frozen mid-scold, with the ghost.

The following morning, while it was still dark, I set off for my first day of work. I travelled on a bus full of surly men who looked disdainfully at my pristine blue dungarees — a gift from Mother’s poisonous maiden aunt — to Cherry Orchard, a dismal slum which did a passable impression of the middle of nowhere. At first I thought it rather a lark that an industrial park should share the name of Bel’s favourite Chekhov play: however, as with most aspects of my job at Mr Dough, it stopped being funny almost immediately.

When Gemma had told me that I would be working in a bread factory, I had taken it for a slip of the tongue: for everyone knew that bread was made not in factories but in bakeries, by red-cheeked men in tall hats. But I quickly learned that the mistake was mine, because a factory it undeniably was. Everywhere one looked men toiled like pygmies in the mighty shadows of the choppers and slicers, or stood on stepladders, as in some industrialized Hieronymus Bosch painting, stirring with oversized ladles at huge smoking vats. Machinery clanked and moaned; the air churned with bread-dust that mixed with sweat to form a sticky film on one’s skin and collected about the eye-sockets in prickling crescents. From the unseen ovens, the heat rolled in unrelenting waves, turning the floor into a furnace.

I worked in Processing Zone B, as a lowly bread straightener in the Yule Log Division. Yule Log was a Christmas delicacy made from marzipan with a shelf life something like plutonium’s; they enjoyed it on the Continent, or so we were told. There were five of us working in the room, not including Mr Appleseed, and except for Mr Appleseed’s abusive comments no one spoke; we laboured in silence like so many flour-covered Golems, performing the same mechanical motions over and over and over again. My role was to monitor the Yule Logs as they came in from the ovens through the hatch in the wall, removing any defective ones and ensuring that each loaf was sitting correctly on the belt, in a perpendicular relation to the rim, as it entered the sugar-frosting machine. Mr Appleseed had warned of the catastrophic consequences of a loaf entering the sugar-frosting machine in any position other than this one, and Mr Appleseed wasn’t the type of man you liked to cross.

As talking was discouraged in Processing Zone B, it wasn’t for a couple of days that I discovered why Gemma had asked about my Latvian — namely that, apart from Mr Appleseed and myself, the entire complement of Yule Log Division hailed from the town of Liepaja, having been rounded up at a recruitment fair held there by Pobolny Arbitwo, Sirius’s sister company, some months ago. It sounded like a rum sort of arrangement to me, but the Latvians said that many of their kinsmen had come to Ireland to work digging potatoes or cleaning hotel swimming pools, explaining that the pitiful wage they earned here was worth many times more when you sent it back to Latvia, and that as such they were coming out the real winners from the deal. Certainly they were homesick, they said; and their wives wrote letters to say how strange it was in their sorely missed city of Liepaja, with so few men to be seen. But the money they made at Mr Dough was enough to provide for their loved ones, and even set aside a little for their future; and for a modest sum, Pobolny Arbitwo rented them barracks-style accommodation with a microwave oven and comfortable bunk beds.

‘And you don’t mind it? You don’t mind the boredom, or this ungodly heat?’ We were in the canteen, a small cramped room with a table and vending machine and walls painted bilious green to discourage procrastination.

‘Not heat compared to some places,’ Bobo, who operated the bagging machine, said soberly. ‘For instance, last summer we worked in a marmalade factory in Aachen. Very, very hot. Many wasps.’ This provoked rueful murmurs of assent from the men around the table. ‘We are very lucky, to be here at Mr Dough,’ Bobo added.

‘Huh,’ I said. Frankly I didn’t know how lucky I would call myself to be dragged halfway round the world in order to spend all day processing Yule Logs. That said, compared to box-making, packing, or stacking the pallet, I suppose I had it relatively easy up here in Straightening. For the most part, the logs behaved themselves, and most of the adjustments I made were more or less cosmetic — although every half an hour or so, one bold specimen would appear, sneaking along the belt in a perilous diagonal position. It was then that I would swoop in, with one hand deftly twisting it a little to the left or a little to the right as the situation required, before sending it safely on its way to the frosting-machine, having averted disaster.

The rest of the time I merely supervised the hundreds of identical logs going by, the hundreds and hundreds of identical logs… I was quite alarmed the first time I began to hallucinate: but the Latvians told me that it was quite a common phenomenon at conveyor belts, and something not to be feared but enjoyed. Soon much of the day came to be frolicked away in happy illusions, plucking multi-coloured apples from Old Man Thompson’s orchard, sporting with my imaginary dog on the lawn, sipping a gimlet with Mirela as we looked out from the pristine Folly, as she caressed my cheek and whispered sweet nothings…

Mr Appleseed kept watch on us at all times, patrolling tirelessly through the unbearable heat of Processing Zone B, or peering down from his perspex foreman’s box like a monstrous dungareed spider. Standing up straight, he would have been about nine feet tall, but he never stood up straight: he stooped with his shoulders gathered around his neck, muttering constantly in a gravelly maledictive rasp. He was impossibly thin, with thick glasses and a downturned mouth, and we were all afraid of him. In the early days, when I still held hopes of somehow rebelling or escaping or breaking free, it was always the thought of Mr Appleseed that stopped me.

I suppose it was because I spoke the best English that he singled me out as his confidant. It wasn’t that he cared anything for me personally; he told me so in as many words.

‘I hate bastards like you, know that, Fuckface?’ he’d say.

‘Yes, Mr Appleseed.’

‘I’ve seen your file. I know your type, all right. Think the world owes you a living, and Yule Log just drops out of the skies.’

‘Yes, Mr Appleseed.’

‘“Yes, Mr Appleseed,”’ he mimicked, his malign yellow stare boring into me through a mask of congealing sugar.

I had never met anyone who was quite so enthusiastically devoted to hatred. He hated everyone working at Mr Dough. He hated the countries they came from. He kept a sort of league table of his most hated races, on which they could move up or down.

‘Did you ever see anyone as bone-stupid as those Latvians?’ He’d lurch over, munching on a dry cracker, and lean against the rim of my conveyor belt. ‘No wonder their country’s such a shitheap. They must have driven poor Stalin to drink. If you’d said to me ten years ago, Fuckface, high up in your ivory tower, that some day I’d be in charge of a team of Latvians, I’d have told you where to go. But there it is. These days it seems that working in an international bread concern isn’t good enough for the Irish.’ He’d gaze mistily over Processing Zone B a moment, perhaps thinking of better times. ‘In fairness, though, I suppose these Latvians have their advantages. Cheap. No fuss with unions or anything like that. Hit them over the head enough and they usually understand what I tell them. And they work hard.’ He chuckled. ‘Bastards have their hearts set on winning that Productivity Hamper of Luxury Goods. Think they get many hampers where they come from, Fuckface? In Latvia? Think they’re already overrun with luxury goods over there?’

‘No, Mr Appleseed.’

‘No, sir,’ chortled Mr Appleseed. And then he’d catch sight of me, staring glumly at the logs going by and wishing he would let me go back to my hallucination, and his countenance would blacken. ‘Oh, you can call me a racist, Fuckface. You can think you’re better than me. But let me tell you one thing, Mr Theology Course, Mr Trinity College, all it takes is one phone call from me and they’ll be flying your replacement in from Latvia faster than you can say Abner Applese — actually, two things, the second being that I went to university too, except it was a university called the University of Life. And I may not have a lot of airs and graces, but there’s a blue Lexus out there in the car park with my name on it that’s fully paid up and no one can take away from me. Remind me again, Fuckface, how many Lexuses was it you said you had out in the car park? How many was that again?’

‘None,’ I’d mumble.

‘That’s right, Fuckface, because for all your fancy ways you own precisely — what was it exactly?’

‘Nothing,’ I’d confirm, and he’d slap me on the back and say that I had a sense of humour at least, which was an important quality in a worker, and that he saw good things happening for me at the company, or rather he would have were I not on a temporary contract, which meant I would remain a straightener for the rest of my days, which by the way were numbered.

It quickly became apparent that I would not be learning values or realizing my potential or anything of that nature while at Mr Dough. It seemed clear as well that I would not be getting out of the rat race and joining the party for the time being. No sooner did I lodge a cheque than Frank would be after me, hounding me for his due. If it wasn’t groceries, it was central heating, and if it wasn’t central heating, it was rent –

‘Rent? What do you mean, rent? I gave you money for the rent last week, what have you done with it?’

‘Yeah, but see there’s more rent this week, and anyway you only gave me twenty quid and then the next day you borrowed fifty so you could buy that big fish…’

‘That “big fish” happens to be a wild salmon from County Donegal, and if you knew anything at all you’d know that fifty pounds is practically giving it away. I’m trying to make some sort of stab at civilized living here, I mean my God man, we’re not wild beasts, are we?’

‘Yeah, but see we’re a bit behind, though, Charlie…’

‘Huh,’ I said. To anyone who had witnessed Frank’s attempts at a household budget this hardly came as a surprise. Every few weeks he would sit down at the kitchen table with a six-pack of Hobson’s Choice and a plastic bag full of bills, receipts, scraps of paper and beer mats with numbers doodled on them, which he would empty out into a pile at the centre of the table. Then, slowly and carefully, he would drink the cans. Then, when all the cans were gone, some hours after he had originally sat down, he would with a little sigh sweep the pile of bills back into the plastic bag, which he then placed carefully in the dustbin.

Rarely had I seen someone in such dire need of an accountant; but Frank didn’t have so much as a bank account. ‘They’re only robbers, Charlie,’ he’d say. ‘If I wanted to give me money to robbers, I’d give it to robbers I knew, not some bunch of prats.’ Instead he kept it in his ‘secret hiding place’, namely a Celtic FC sock under his bed.

It seemed to me that he had plenty of it, too, and he was only haranguing me out of spite. Ever since Bel’s visit the two of us seemed to be bickering constantly — usually about money, though anything could set it off. It was plainly obvious that, although he pretended otherwise, Frank was also deep in ennui. Oh, he larked about with Droyd as if nothing was wrong; he drank countless cans and smoked countless joints; but he left his chicken balls untouched on his plate, and on more than one occasion I found architecturally salvaged items hidden behind the couch, crushed and twisted beyond recognition. He was oafish and unbearable even by his standards, and I was grateful that he was going out even more than he had before, and not returning until late.

With winter coming in, and me and now Frank both plunged in ennui, it was small wonder that Droyd too was down in the dumps. Frank never invited him along on his sprees, and apart from trips to the methadone clinic and to see his parole officer, he didn’t leave the house. He’d taken to spending whole evenings just sitting at the window, gazing out at the rain-swept street. He didn’t play his music as much as he used to, either, though I can’t pretend this troubled me overly. One night, however, he asked me if I could check something he’d written for spelling, and he handed me a grubby serviette on which, I saw, wedge-like forms had been inscribed.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Press release,’ Droyd said. ‘For me music.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have to get word to my people that the Droyd is back,’ he clarified.

‘I didn’t know you composed,’ I said.

‘Wha?’

‘Music, I mean.’

‘Ah yeah.’ He scrutinized one of his chunky gold rings. ‘Well like I haven’t done any yet, cos I was banged up in the nick and that. But I’m goin to, as soon as I get meself sorted out. Play all the big clubs. Rotterdam. Ibiza. You ever been to Ibiza?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘It’s deadly there,’ he sniffed. ‘There’s these foam clubs where they pour in all this foam on to the dancefloor and birds just come up to you and start ridin you. It’s magic.’

‘Yes, that does sound jolly…’ I had been examining the serviette from different angles, but the wedges were stubbornly holding on to their secret. ‘This looks all right to me,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you read it out, and we can hear what it sounds like.’

‘Right.’ He took back the serviette and, tracing his finger along it, read in a halting monotone: ‘For DJ Droyd it is all about the music. He is like a machine cos like nothing can stop him. Also cos nothing matters to him except the beats, which they are the only hope for the future. He is known as the Droyd to represent what he is sayin like in his music. He is sayin that we are livin in a future war zone and it is goin to get worse. When the war comes against the robots and the computers they will easily win probably because they don’t get tired or hungry like humans and they never give up not like humans. The only hope is to be more like a robot yourself and not go mopin around havin feelins and that like a sap. This is what he is sayin.’ He looked up. ‘That’s all I done so far.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘Thought it possibly strayed off the point a little towards the end, that whole part about the war against the robots. Over all, though, very impressive.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Droyd said in a low voice, pulling down the peak of his cap.

‘What is?’

‘All this stuff, right,’ waving his hand at the prevailing clutter, ‘it’s all an illusion. We seen a film about it in the Joy. It’s just created by the computers so we won’t realize what’s really happenin, which is we’re in these energy pods and they’re harvestin our energy,’

‘Cripes,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

In spite of his occasionally erratic metaphysics, we did reach a kind of détente over those weeks. He told me how Frank and he had first met, when Frank had gone to salvage a bathtub from a condemned building and found Droyd sleeping in it. He’d taken him back to the flat in his van with the rest of the junk, and then let him stay on the couch until he sorted himself out, which turned out to be the best part of a year.

‘Then what happened?’ I enquired.

‘That’s when I started taking the gear,’ he said, wiping his nose matter-of-factly. ‘You know yourself, you start off just smokin a bit to come down after you’ve had a few yokes, next thing you know you’re knockin off the chip shop.’

‘And working for Cousin Benny…?’

‘Yeah, but that’s all behind me now,’ he said. ‘Here, what’s the most yokes you’ve ever had?’

‘Hmm, let me see…’

‘Once I had seventeen, right, me and Frankie were at this rave in this car park down the country. It was fuckin mad, me heart stopped for five minutes. They had to take me to hospital in a helicopter and then I was in a wheelchair for two weeks and this doctor told me if I ever took a yoke again I’d die.’ His eyes misted over nostalgically. ‘I just told him to fuck off.’

As far as I could work out, these ‘yokes’ were some manner of energy-boosting pill, with similar effects to a multi-vitamin supplement. According to Droyd, malcontents and dropouts gathered to consume them at ‘raves’, open-air dances staged in the middle of the night under motorways or in muddy fields.

‘Fields!’ I said. ‘But what if it’s raining?’

Droyd shrugged. ‘You have to have a laugh, don’t you?’ Jogging his knee, he turned back to the empty black square of the window. ‘Cos otherwise, y’know, what’s the bleedin point?’

As the days went by at Mr Dough, each one identical to the one before, this was a question I frequently put to myself. Far from stepping up to bat, and fulfilling my long-cherished dreams of becoming a productive member of society, I felt I was embarked on a vast and inconsequential digression from my own life; and just as the logs on their way to the sugar-frosting machine merged, under my gaze, into one, so the hours and days blended into a single unbounded expanse, and life itself took on the trappings of the conveyor belt. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t go on in the same way forever: then one night Frank happened to stay home.

We were all sitting together watching the television. Frank liked to watch the twenty-four-hour news channel, which usually had footage of things exploding from one war or another. My theory was that this enthusiasm harked back to his days in the Lebanon with the Peace Corps, though to hear him speak about it you would think that all they had done out there was lie around and play practical jokes on the US Marines, sneaking up behind them and bursting balloons in their ears, shouting ‘Incoming! Incoming!’

Footage of a tank rolling over the rubble of a woman’s house gave way to a commercial break. A cartoon sun with spirally psychedelic eyes rose to repetitive thumping music over what appeared to be some sort of skinhead prison-island.

‘Ibiza,’ Droyd said authoritatively. ‘One of these days Frankie and me are goin to Ibiza, aren’t we Frankie?’

‘Ah yeah,’ Frank said.

‘One of these days,’ Droyd yawned, stretching his arms wide, ‘we’re just goin to say fuck this, we’re off, see yiz later yiz bollockses… On the beach all day drinkin cans, down the clubs at night ridin all the birds, am I right Frankie?’

‘Ah yeah,’ Frank repeated plaintively, scrunching his can and dropping it to the floor.

Droyd turned around and gave him a long, withering look. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said.

‘What?’ Frank said.

‘She’s only a bird, Frank.’

Frank maintained his expression of witless innocence.

‘You know what I’m talkin about,’ Droyd said, getting exercised. ‘Mopin around the place like a muppet.’ He rose to his feet. ‘The Three Fs, Frankie, who was it told me about them? Find ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em, who told me that?’

‘I say!’ I protested. ‘That’s my sister you’re talking about!’

‘I don’t give a monkey’s!’ Droyd responded hotly. ‘Look what she’s done to this cunt! He won’t come out with me for a fight. He won’t go out to Ziggy’s and take yokes. Do you know what he’s been doin every night? Do you?’

Frank froze.

‘Yeah,’ Droyd rounded on him, voice trembling, ‘you didn’t think I knew, did you, you bollocks. Lyin to me, your own mate. Sayin to me you was goin out drinkin with Niallser and Micker and Ste and Bignose Rogan. They said they haven’t seen you in months.’ He turned back to me, his acne livid on his pasty white face. ‘So last night I hide in his van to find out where he’s really been goin, which is he drives out to Killiney, and he sits there, lookin at the sea.’

Frank cast his eyes shamefully at the ground.

Droyd was now stamping around the room waving his arms in the air. ‘The sea!’ he shouted. ‘The fuckin sea!’

Frank did not reply: he made a pitiful sight, shrivelled up in his armchair. Droyd grabbed his jacket from the floor and pulled on his cap, then came back round to stand between Frank and the television. ‘I can’t take it!’ he bellowed. ‘I don’t know who ye are any more!’ And with that he blazed out of the apartment, slamming the door after him, and leaving Frank and me to a long and uncomfortable silence. ‘… legations of financial and political misdealing that quote boggled the mind,’ the television said, depicting a corpulent man in a grey suit battling his way through reporters outside Dublin Castle.

Frank made a minute burbling noise and pretended to wipe something out of his eye.

Let me take a moment here to concede that I am not, in the general run of things, a man noted for his sensitivity to others. Bel was forever reminding me of this — indeed, when we were younger she had turned it into a kind of party piece: whenever she had schoolfriends over, at some stage of the evening she would turn to me and ask, in a loud voice, ‘Charles, what’s empathy?’ and I, who was always meaning to look it up in the dictionary but had never quite got round to it, yet felt pressed to give some sort of reply, would say that wasn’t it when somebody yawned and it made everyone else yawn too; and her friends would all cackle maliciously, and Bel would say to them, ‘You see? It’s like living with some kind of sentient beanbag.’

So it was with intense surprise and discomfort — of the sort one experiences when, for example, one accidentally sits on a pudding — that I discovered I had, at that moment, a very good inkling of what was going through Frank’s mind; because I realized that for the last few weeks it had been going through my mind too. And so I turned to him and asked him if he was all right.

‘Ah, Charlie…’ he said brokenly, his piggy eyes shining. ‘Ah, Charlie…’

‘There, there,’ I said, patting his wrist. ‘I know.’

Smacking himself on the head, he exclaimed, ‘I’m such a thick bollocks! Thinkin we’d get back together, when I never — I never even knew why she went out with me in the first place…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘She had lots of reasons. You’re, you know, you’re Frank. You’ve got a van. And a successful business. And you beat up those other people, the cunt and that lot.’

He shook his head mournfully. ‘If you’d seen her that last time, Charlie, the way she looked at me — like she was ashamed of me, like I was just some fuckin scumbag…’ A large, gloopy tear trickled down his nose.

‘Oh, Bel’s ashamed of everybody,’ I said. ‘She used to tell people I’d been put in the house as a government experiment — here, take this…’ I handed him a tissue, which I realized only too late was Droyd’s press release. ‘I know everything seems, you know, kiboshed. But you can’t let yourself get downhearted. Plenty of fish in the sea, and all that.’

He nodded unconvincingly, and we fell into a troubled silence, one of us now covered in inscrutable wedge-like forms. Plenty of fish in the sea: it wasn’t much consolation. But what else could I tell him? He wasn’t the first to come bumbling along and have his unthinking heart snagged on her spare angles and complexities; he wasn’t the first to imagine he had found his grand love story, only to discover that all this time he had just been reading for the part — that this was merely an audition, that he was just something she had encountered on the way to wherever it was that Bel was going.

Blast it, I thought with a sudden rush of feeling, why couldn’t she ever do things properly? It wasn’t supposed to end like this, the triangle we had built so carefully, with its delicate tensions, its vertices and oppositions. There were supposed to have been trembling lips, tears, recriminations; there were to have been stern words, dashed hopes, dramatic sweepings out of rooms. And then, as it slowly dawned on her who she was, and what grand tradition she came out of, and she understood at last that this love simply could not be — then she was supposed to be sad, and mope about the house for months on end; until the day when her kindly if frequently misunderstood brother succeeded in coaxing a smile, and she realized that the skies were still blue, and she was restored to us. She wasn’t supposed just to get bored, and walk away from the triangle altogether; she wasn’t supposed then to throw in her lot with the blighter who’d usurped the kindly brother’s room and basically seen him thrown out in the cold.

But that was exactly what she had done; and I found myself, after everything, in the same boat as the smudged figure sobbing beside me. Now, I reflected gloomily, I would have to begin all over again: I would have to find a place for myself in the life of this new character — this new Bel who remembered her lines and sang Doris Day songs and who wished in her heart of hearts to be away on a stage in London! Broadway! Already, impossible seas rolled up between us, as night lengthened and darkness percolated through the nooks and crannies of the misshapen apartment.