An Evening of Long Goodbyes

7

‘This really is awfully good of you.’

‘No bother, Charlie, no bother.’

‘I mean, it’ll only be for a week or so, until I get myself sorted out…’

‘This is us here, Charlie.’

‘Aha, yes.’ We stopped outside a plain white wooden door. I hummed nervously to myself as Frank rummaged for the key.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Age before beauty.’

‘Ha ha, thank you,’ edging into the gloom. ‘Oh. Well. Isn’t this…?’

‘It’s a bit of a mess. I didn’t get much chance to tidy up.’

‘Not at all, not at all, it’s quite — oh dear, I seem to have stepped in someone’s, ah, someone’s dinner…’

‘Don’t worry about it, Charlie, I wasn’t goin to eat any more of it.’

‘Oh good, good. More of an atelier, really, isn’t it? I say, is it always this dim?’

‘Hang on, I’ll turn on the box.’ He pushed past me and pressed a button on an ancient television that squatted in a corner. After a moment two women in bikinis appeared, taking swipes at each other with large foam clubs. ‘Don’t worry, your eyes get used to it after a while.’

‘Yes, yes, of course…’

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘Thanks.’ I lowered myself gingerly on to the edge of an armchair. Its guts spilled out of a rent in its side. I sat with my legs pressed tight together and tried not to touch anything. The floor was conspicuously sticky and when you looked at it out of the corner of your eye appeared to be moving.

‘How do you like it?’ Frank’s voice called from somewhere within a teetering wilderness of junk.

‘Just milk, please,’ I replied faintly. There was an overpowering smell in the air, a kind of vastly amplified version of the one that followed Frank around. A magazine entitled Tit Parade rested on the coffee table, the young lady on the cover entirely naked save for some carefully positioned citrus fruits. ‘Grocer Greta’s Grabulous Melons’, it said.

Frank re-emerged with a couple of mugs. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing one to me and depositing himself upon a dysmorphic sofa opposite. ‘So,’ holding his arms outstretched, like Kubla Khan welcoming Marco Polo to Xanadu, ‘what do you think?’

‘Nice,’ I croaked. ‘Very nice.’

‘Home sweet home,’ he said fondly, and slurped his tea.

‘Although…’ I began.

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, I have to say,’ I said, in a careless, jokey sort of way to show there were no hard feelings, ‘I don’t think much of your doorman.’

‘Doorman?’ Frank repeated.

‘Yes, the doorman,’ I said, trying to maintain my smile. ‘You know, he was really quite slovenly.’

‘That wasn’t a doorman, Charlie, he’s homeless.’

‘Homeless?’

‘Yeah, he lives in that cardboard box on the steps.’

‘Oh,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I wondered why he wasn’t wearing a cap.’

There was a pause. ‘Doorman,’ Frank chuckled to himself.

Light struggled in through the ungenerous window, weak grey light that was more like the residue of light. I looked down thoughtfully into my tea, which had bits in it. After a time I said judiciously, ‘I imagine that’s why it’s taking him so long to bring up my cases.’

Frank put his cup down, wincing. ‘Ah, Charlie…’

‘You don’t suppose,’ I ventured, ‘he might have forgotten which room —’

But Frank had already leapt from his seat and was hurtling back down the stairs. I got up and hurried after him, catching up outside the front door, where he stood studying the cardboard box and blanket until a short while ago occupied by the homeless person/doorman. ‘Fuck,’ he said, stroking his chin.

‘He’s gone,’ I said superfluously. The street was empty save for two moon-faced children watching us from the kerb opposite. One was standing in a supermarket trolley, the other gripped the handle; both were entirely motionless.

‘Come on,’ Frank poked me in the ribs and took off down the street. We reached a crossroads dominated by two huge breezeblocks of flats, where we took a left past a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and burned-out cars and came to a long concrete bunker with metal shutters. I padded after Frank to the door, where he stopped.

‘What? Is he in here?’

‘Charlie,’ he said gravely. ‘You must never, ever, ever go in here, all right?’

‘Fine,’ I squeaked. He went inside, and I waited there, whistling tunelessly with my hands in my pockets, attempting to blend in with my surroundings. It was hard to tell which buildings had people in them. The shop windows were covered with heavy grilles. In some of the blocks clothes were hanging out on balcony washing-lines, but the doors were boarded up and covered in graffiti. Others seemed in such a state of disrepair as to be uninhabitable by man or beast — and then one would hear a radio from an upper level, or a child would pop its head out to spit down on to the pavement.

After what seemed a long time, Frank re-emerged. In his hand he held a single suitcase, which he said the patrons of the pub had kindly agreed to sell back to him for only a small profit after he’d told them how I’d mistaken a homeless drug addict for a doorman.

‘Oh,’ I said, and to hide my despair: ‘That place is a pub?’

It was called the Coachman; there had been a sign, but someone had stolen it. ‘You prob’ly seen it on telly,’ Frank said, as we trudged back up the hill. ‘It’s on the news a good bit.’

‘Did anyone say anything about the rest of my things?’ I asked sadly, shaking the lighter-than-it-had-been suitcase.

‘No.’

‘I wonder where they are.’

‘Dunno,’ Frank said equably. ‘Gone.’

It started to rain again.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any point contacting the authorities…’

‘They don’t really come out here any more, Charlie.’

‘Oh.’ The water was soaking into my bandages, making my head feel tight and cold.

‘Well,’ I reflected — I was trying to keep a stiff upper lip about this as long as he was watching — ‘I daresay that homeless chap needs the money a lot more than I do.’

‘I’d say he’s just goin to buy smack with it.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘He’s not a bad bloke, like, once you don’t ask him to mind stuff for you.’

‘Right.’ We turned back down his street. The moon-faced children were standing where we had left them. Frank unlocked the door and I looked ruefully down at the box and grubby blanket. On the door-jamb someone had written, in small defiant black letters, ARM THE HOMELESS.

‘Home sweet home,’ Frank said, and went inside.

Something struck me on the back of the head. I turned to see a small grey pebble at my feet. The moon-faced children grinned at me mockingly from their trolley. I followed Frank inside.

And so it was that I arrived at Apt C, Sands Villas, Bonetown.

My first port of call after walking out of Amaurot that night had been the Radisson in Mount Merrion, where I had taken a suite. The hotel boasted a sauna and a pool and did an excellent Dover sole, all of which went some way to comforting me in those traumatic first days away from home. I found out that an old pal of mine, Boyd Snooks, happened to have a room going in his house as of next week; I called him up, and he promised to reserve it for me. Boyd was a jovial, freewheeling sort of fellow, who in school had been famous for his ability to turn his eyelids inside out; and now, although I was under a cloud rather about leaving Amaurot, he persuaded me there were high times to be had chez lui. The lower floor of his house was shared by three young air hostesses, also jovial and freewheeling and, according to Boyd, partial, moreover, to the odd game of strip poker in their free time.

‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘It’s just that I hate leaving Bel…’

‘Air hostesses, Charles,’ he said huskily. ‘SAS. Know what that is? It’s the Swedish national airline. They’re Swedish, Charles. And they’re all terrible poker players, they get drunk and forget the rules…’

In short, everything had seemed to be going terribly well, and I even began to wonder if I had been mistaken about the rigours of life in the real world. That said, I still spent the best part of my stay sitting in my room in case Mother should call wanting to apologize and begging me, her only son, to forget all that nonsense about getting a job and come back home. But she didn’t, and by the end of the week I was looking forward to the move just so I could be shed of the hotel. Pool and Dover sole notwithstanding, it was deathly dull there; also I was getting rather concerned about the inroads it must be making on my finances. I hadn’t bothered to ask how much the suite cost when I checked in, but I suspected it was a lot, especially for a man with a discontinued allowance. I hadn’t seen my bank balance in quite a while, but every time I thought about it I got a queer, cold feeling, as if someone had walked over my grave.

I ought to mention as well that there had been a minor unpleasantness with some of the other guests after I frightened a small girl one evening in the bar, and I was beginning to feel my presence was no longer quite so welcome. It had all been perfectly innocent — I’d had a drink or two and, momentarily forgetting my hideous disfigurement, thought it might be funny to surprise her by popping out from behind a pillar. But she hadn’t seen the funny side, in fact the hotel doctor had had to give her a sedative, and then on top of everything she turned out to belong to Americans, who are always so dreary when it comes to a chap frightening their children. The long and the short of it was that they’d complained to the concierge, and he’d decided I was a Bad Element and wanted me out ASAP. I got this from the chambermaid, after I cornered her one morning to find out why she’d stopped leaving those little complimentary mints on my pillow.

The upshot of all this was that by eight o’clock the evening before I was due to depart, I had my suitcases, which Mrs P had sent over from Amaurot, packed, and Frank enlisted to pick me up in his van next day at ten and help me with the move. I was lying on the bed drinking a miniature bottle of crème de menthe when the telephone rang. ‘Mr Snooks for you,’ the receptionist said.

There was a problem with the room. ‘The chap leaving’s come down with a cold,’ Boyd said. ‘He’s had to postpone his move.’

‘Oh damnation,’ I said.

‘Beastly thing,’ he said adenoidally. ‘We’ve all got it. Still, he should be better and buggered off in a week or two. Hope it doesn’t put you out too much.’

‘I suppose it can’’t be helped,’ I said; and as he didn’t sound too well himself, I told him not to worry and that I would make other arrangements.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Boyd said, stifling a sneeze. ‘Think of the air hostesses.’

I set down the receiver and bit my lip. The denuded minibar gazed at me accusatorily from the other side of the room. This was a blow, all right. I went and retrieved my address book, and spent the next half-hour calling up acquaintances to see if they could help me out. I had no success. Those that hadn’t, like Pongo, decamped to London, were living in Dublin in mortal terror of their landlords — tyrannical, Victorian fiends who wouldn’t let them so much as hang a picture-frame, let alone entertain house guests. ‘Sorry, Charles,’ they’d mutter down the line, then, urgently, ‘I have to go.’

Finally it appeared there was no alternative but to swallow my pride and call home. Mother answered the phone, needless to say. ‘Charles, how sweet of you to call, I was just saying this very second to Mrs P how must you be doing. You know I still can’t quite believe you’ve flown the nest, we all miss you terribly —’

‘Really?’ I said. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so humiliating after all. ‘Because actually…’ and I explained about Boyd and my predicament.

There was an uneasy silence when I had finished. When she spoke again Mother’s voice had taken on the quasi-tragic, overcompensatory tone she used when someone had thoughtlessly left her in a difficult position. ‘Oh dear… that is a pickle,’ she said. ‘But don’t you know we’re rather swamped at the moment, darling. You know the play starts in town tonight and then… well, we thought that seeing as you’re not here —’

‘You haven’t put the Disadvantaged in my room, I hope,’ I cut in abrasively. ‘I don’t want my bed infested with nits and what have you.’

‘Why, no, not the Disadvantaged,’ she said silkily. ‘We thought we’d give your room to Harry, actually.’

She waited a moment, and then when I hadn’t said anything added brightly, ‘There’s the couch, of course, you can always sleep there, if you’re stuck… Or perhaps one of your friends has a spare bed?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said through clenched teeth, as if it had just occurred to me. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll ring around.’

‘Do call, darling, if you’re still stuck.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘This is your time, Charles. You’ve spread your wings, and now you must fly high, you know we’re all terribly proud —’

I put the phone down. Harry! I felt my blood bubble with rage. That jackanapes, with his Trojan horses and his offbeat hairstyle, he was the golden boy now, was he? I picked the phone up again, and dialled reception to tell them I wanted to extend my stay.

‘Certainly, sir,’ the girl said. ‘Room number, please.’

I gave her my room number. She put me on hold.

‘Mr Hythloday?’ she said, returning.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re booked up.’

‘Just a single? For one night even?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

The concierge had got there first! I was beginning to get the unpleasant sense of being caught up in some sort of mechanism over which I had no control: as if, in leaving Amaurot, I had submitted myself entirely to the whims of Fate, and I could do nothing but follow on docilely until it had brought me where it wanted. I took the last Baileys from the refrigerator under the mirror, poured it into a plastic glass and went to the window. The Radisson had a couple of acres of park around it; the land had used to belong to a convent. Perhaps this was where the nuns would play rounders and tip-the-can on sunny days.

There was nothing for it: I would have to find another hotel, preferably a cheap one. I still had a couple of credit cards left I could use. I returned to the locker side of the bed, picked up the phone again and dialled Frank’s number to tell him the move was off.

‘What’s the story?’ Frank said. His mouth was full of something.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said irritably. ‘The point is I’ll have to stay somewhere else for a few weeks first.’

‘Must be costin you,’ the voice said. ‘I’d say them places set you back a good bit.’

‘I’ll survive,’ I replied curtly.

‘Yeah, but,’ he continued, then paused to swallow his — chicken balls, suddenly I found I knew it with the unshakeable certainty of an epiphany — ‘but here, why don’t you just kip in my gaff for a while?’

I was caught off guard. ‘What?’ I stammered. ‘What?’

He repeated his offer. I cast about for an excuse not to take it; but after all the twists and turns the evening had taken I found I was unable to think straight. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ I said feebly.

‘I don’t give a monkey’s,’ he assured me.

In the distance I seemed to hear singing, as of ghostly nuns. ‘Well, that’s very kind,’ I tried to sound grateful, ‘that’s really very kind.’

‘Nice one,’ Frank said.

And so the next morning I left my room and took my suitcases down in the elevator to the lobby, where I handed in the key. Every movement, every tiny social transaction seemed backlit, consecrated somehow, like the footsteps a prisoner counts off in his head as he is marched to the scaffold. Frank was waiting outside, leaning with his arms crossed against his rusty white van. Someone had drawn a penis in the dust on its side. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Capital,’ I said. ‘Capital.’

Frank’s apartment was part of a tall redbrick building — Georgian, by the looks of the fanlight over the door — that must once have been a respectable, even a dignified townhouse. Here and there were traces of a more illlustrious past: delicate flourishes to the mouldings, fragments of the original plasterwork. But they were no more than traces, like shards of pottery in the dirt. The façade had been blackened and corroded by decades of grime, and most of the original fixtures torn out in the course of splitting the interior into ever-shrinking tenements. The present landlord was a former Garda who owned several properties in the area and was, Frank said, ‘a gobshite even for a Garda’.

Apt C was composed almost entirely of corners, as if whoever built the house had cobbled together an extra room from the nooks and recesses that were left over at the end. The rooms wobbled in a way that one was not accustomed to in architecture, and certain walls could not be leaned on because they were, I quote, ‘holding the ceiling up’. Even the daylight seemed to have trouble negotiating the flat’s eccentricities: it came through the window and then stopped short, with its finger on its lip, so to speak. Consequently it was always rather dark — or dank, perhaps dank was a better word. It was easily the dankest apartment I had ever stayed in.

I slept on a mattress of uncertain lineage in a room about the size of one of the smaller broom closets at Amaurot, with those possessions that the patrons of the Coachman had been kind enough not to steal — improving book, shaving kit, second-best dinner jacket, socks, Gene Tierney memorabilia, journal of thoughts largely as yet unthought — arranged in a little heap beside me. The bulk of the apartment was taken up by Frank’s junk. Every day he’d come home with more, carrying it in from his van in crates and dumping it where he could. Cigarette cases, ballet slippers, window sashes, hymnals, cornerstones, cash registers, rocking horses, picture rails, things with parts missing, parts separated from their things — everywhere you looked you were confronted with uprooted elements of other people’s lives.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, examining a stringless Dunlop tennis racket that had just arrived. ‘How do you tell what’s valuable, and what’s, you know, garbage?’

He thought for a moment. ‘The stuff people won’t buy is garbage,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Most of the stuff they bought: evidently it was a good time to be in architectural salvage. Half the city was being demolished and built over; things could be picked up for a song, and then sold on at a premium to all the people with new pubs and new hotels and new houses who wanted to give their property a touch of authenticity. ‘All this old shit,’ Frank waved his hand over the latest plunder spread over the floor, ‘like horseshoes, signposts, firemen’s helmets and that — pubs go mad for it. They’re gag-gin for old gear to put on the walls to make it look more old-lookin, like. Same with the new flats. People don’t like things just bein new. They want to be reminded of bygone days and that.’

‘Why don’t they just stop knocking down the old buildings, then?’ I said. ‘If everyone’s so wild about bygone days.’

‘Cos then we’d all be out of a job.’

Piled up like that, in no particular order, the junk seemed to take on a kind of generic identity — a musty, melancholy pastness that filled the room like an old perfume. During the day, when Frank was out, it made me feel a little like a relic myself. I had nothing to do, other than fidget with the tassels of my dressing gown — which may not sound unusual in itself, but this was a different kind of nothing than before, a fluttery, restive, unsatisfying nothing. I rarely went outside, other than brief forays to the petrol station, where one could buy the essentials at trumped-up prices; most of my time was passed at the window, gazing down at the grim slums below.

The streets of Bonetown were grey and dismal, without trees or decoration, and the greyness, the dismalness had etched themselves into the faces of the inhabitants. I discerned two distinct strata to Bonetown society. Firstly, the natives. These, to speak plainly, were as villainous a bunch of ruffians as one would find anywhere in the world. They were uncouth and badly dressed, and they spent their days lurching from the pub to the bookies to the petrol station, toting seemingly infinite numbers of children — many of whom, I noticed, bore a strong physical resemblance to Frank. I mentioned this to him, but he only smacked his lips and made some arcane remark about how looking like someone didn’t actually prove anything in a court-type situation.

The second grouping, which had little interaction with the first, was the foreigners. These came in all shapes and sizes, and, the way Frank told it at least, had appeared more or less overnight; though no one seemed to know where from, or how exactly they had ended up here. ‘Maybe they came out of that hoo-ha in Bosnia,’ I surmised. ‘Like Mrs P and her lot.’

‘That one or another one,’ Frank said with a shrug. ‘Never any shortage of wars.’

None of them seemed to be employed, and it struck me that this situation could work to our advantage in terms of getting someone in to do the cleaning at relatively little expense. Frank, however, put the kibosh on this straight away. ‘Me ma was a cleanin lady, Charlie,’ he said. ‘It’d be weird, like.’

At night the estate was taken over by the local Youth, and everybody who didn’t have an interest in marauding or terrorizing the elderly was expected to go indoors or suffer the consequences. The Youth amused themselves in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’d set fire to things, or spray-paint swastikas on the doors of asylum-seekers; occasionally someone would arrive in a stolen car, providing a few hours of merriment as they raced it up and down. Mostly, however, they simply stood in bristling gangs on street corners, selling each other heroin. The buildings rang out with cries; inevitably a baby would start wailing, and through the wall I would hear the neighbours argue. A couple of times gunshots echoed from the direction of the Coachman: Frank told me how men from the flats would go down with shotguns and balaclavas to rob it, and then return the next day to buy drinks with the takings.

Sometimes, as I languished at the windows, I would see a pair of eyes peeping back at me from the tower block opposite, and I would think of Mirela waving angel-like at me from the Folly; and then I would see the moon-faced children with their supermarket trolley, always the one pushing and the other standing up looking over the side, little fingers wrapped around the metal rim — rumbling by like dusty pilgrims who had forgotten their purpose and their destination and now made only endless circles around these same dead-end streets.

It hardly needs to be said that I was far from comfortable cohabiting with Frank. In the early days especially, I felt much as Jack must have, living at the top of the Beanstalk with that Englishman-eating giant. One effect of the Hobbesian nightmare around me, however, was to make Frank, by comparison, seem that bit less frightening; and I had so many other things to brood over that before long I had almost grown accustomed to his small acts of kindness, his microwaved dinners, his bad jokes –

‘Here, Charlie, d’you hear about the midget that walked into the ladies’ jacks?’

‘Can’t say I have, old man…’

‘Yeah, he got a box in the face!’

‘Ha ha, yes, very good, well, better turn in, I suppose —’

‘It’s only eight o’clock, Charlie.’

‘Yes, busy day tomorrow, though,’ hauling myself up from the couch.

‘Busy?’

‘Well, not really busy, I mean thought I might watch a film or two… I say, old chap, that reminds me — lend me another fifty pounds, would you? We have to get some decent wine in. I can’t drink any more of that wretched petrol-station Riesling, it’s giving me an ulcer.’

‘Eh, yeah, Charlie, no problem,’ and he’d peel the notes from the fat wad in his pocket.

‘Thanks. Well, good night then.’

‘Night, Charlie.’

Most evenings he went out drinking with his mates, regaling me next day with the stories of their exploits — how such-and-such a fellow ‘Ste’ had bought ‘whizz’ from such-and-such a fellow ‘Mick the Bollocks’, except when he inhaled it it turned out it wasn’t ‘whizz’, it was stuff for killing ants, and Ste had gone berserk and started eating plates and trying to pull out his eyeballs. ‘You should come out with us some night, Charlie,’ he’d say from time to time. ‘They’re great crack, the lads are.’

‘That’s all right,’ I’d say, as the stories alone were enough to make me feel quite unwell.

I suppose I was too caught up in my brooding ever to ask myself what Frank might have hoped to gain from having me stay. I didn’t know how things stood between him and Bel. Whatever had happened, her name was never spoken in the apartment; but sometimes I would catch him looking at me in a peculiar, wishful sort of a way, for all the world as if he expected me to pull her out of a hat; and I would wonder shudderingly if he planned to use me to take revenge on her, or keep me as some manner of Love Hostage.

By and large, though, he came and went without disturbing me; I could sit and watch television uninterrupted. Having been abandoned by the world, I’d decided that now was the perfect time to complete my Gene Tierney project, or, if one wanted to split hairs, to begin my Gene Tierney project. Every afternoon after breakfast, when Frank was at work, I would close the curtains (a formality, given the permanent darkness of the room), sit in the armchair with a notepad and a glass of the gruesome Riesling and watch a film, beginning at the very start with The Return of Frank James — a diabolical performance for which the Harvard Lampoon named Tierney Worst Female Discovery of 1940 and more than one critic compared her unfavourably to Minnie Mouse. To me in my woebegone state, however, her films were like dispatches from some kinder upper realm — flashes of a faraway lighthouse to a becalmed and fog-bound ship. I needed them; I watched compulsively, and soon I had got all the way to The Razor’s Edge (1946).

This was one of my favourites. The hero, played by Tyrone Power, is a pilot who has returned from World War One totally disaffected by the horrors he has seen there and unwilling to take any part in the postwar boom, even though Gene, his fiancée, refuses to marry him unless he gets a job. The movie opens at a fabulous country-club ball under the stars, where in a little moonlit arbour she takes him aside and tries to convince him of the merits of the soaring economy. She tells him America will soon be so rich that it will dwarf anything in history; she tells him that it’s a unique opportunity for a young man like him and he ought to leap at the chance to be a part of it. But Tyrone Power, gazing lugubriously into the middle distance, tells her that it is, in his eyes, utterly meaningless. He then informs her that he is removing to Paris, to be a bum.

She follows him to France, and there’s a famous scene later on when she brings him back to her apartment and, in a remarkable black dress that resembles the tenebrous sheath of a dagger, makes one last effort to seduce him into the mercantile world. The dress was designed by Oleg Cassini, the brilliant Russian exile whom Tierney had married in 1941, and in it she proves too much for even the saintly former pilot to resist, at least for the duration of a kiss.

I confess to feeling a certain affinity with Tyrone Power in this movie, in terms of our defiant stands against the emptiness of modern society; and I might have considered following his lead and relocating my stand from Bonetown to the more sympathetic environs of Paris, had I thought there was even the slightest chance of a beautiful woman in a black or any other colour dress pursuing me there. As time went by, however, it became increasingly clear that this would not be the case.

Since I had come here no one from Amaurot had so much as called me, not even Mirela, in spite of our promising conversation in the ballroom that time. Burnin Up had opened in a small theatre behind Tara Street station the same night I’d been excluded from the Radisson. There was a short review of it in the newspaper I’d lifted from the hotel lobby, not wildly enthusiastic, but certainly approving of what it called the ‘unflinching debut’ of the Amaurot Players. It might have been on another planet for all I heard from them. So much for Mirela’s gratitude, I thought miserably; now I was no longer lord of the manor — now that I was homeless, just as she had been! — it seemed that everything was forgotten.

As for Bel, I was quite sure she had thrown herself into her belle époque, no pun intended, without so much as a thought for the purgatory to which her bleeding heart had inadvertently condemned me: though that didn’t mean I didn’t think about her, didn’t wonder at any given moment what she might be doing as I sat counting dust motes in the eviscerated armchair; it didn’t mean I wasn’t dreaming every night of home, the squeaking trolley wheels outside my window becoming Old Man Thompson’s rusty weathervane, the susurration of faraway traffic the sound of waves on Killiney beach, the fraught cheerless urban night becoming a July evening where Bel and I threw a party on the lawn, with Manhattans and lobster bisque laid out under an advancing sunset that stretched flamingo-pink across the whole sky; until ‘Come on,’ she’d whisper, and we’d steal away hand in hand, through the trees, to that spot on the clifftop where Father had looked out and recited his poems; where the sky had turned that eternal-seeming blue of twilight and we watched the sea fetched up and dashed again by a teasing moon, and the lights on the far-off shore like tiny blazing shipwrecks…

And then one night I was roused from my sleep by a calamitous thumping. The noise reverberated through ceiling, walls and floor alike: the whole apartment was juddering unmercifully as if we were having a minor, very localized earthquake.

My first thought was that someone was trying to demolish the building. This had happened before, Frank had told me: apparently when the developers couldn’t shift someone from a house they wanted to knock down, they would arrive in the middle of the night and accidentally-on-purpose drive a lorry into it. I rubbed my eyes and put on my dressing gown, intending to go out and tell them that they had the wrong house. But as I stepped into the living room I realized that the noise was coming from right here. An enormous stereo-machine had materialized atop the television; and beside it, wagging its head in time to the noise, was what appeared to be a large, shiny ferret that had learned to walk on two legs. Or that was the impression I got in the split-second before the ferret launched itself at me; then, to my infinite surprise, I found myself on the floor being throttled.

This fellow had obviously throttled before; he cleverly defused my resistance by banging my head on the ground as he was strangling me. After a minute he was clearly getting the best of it and it’s fair to say that had I not managed to cry out before he got a good grip on my windpipe things might have come to a sticky end then and there. But just as I was about to black out, a hand appeared at his shoulder and pulled him away, and the din stopped abruptly. After I’d rolled around coughing for a while, I was recovered enough to drag myself halfway up the armchair — and see Frank, not beating my assailant to a bloody pulp but shaking his hand and clapping him on the back!

‘All right, Droyd!’ he was saying. ‘How’s your fanny?’

‘Not three bad, Frankie,’ the ferret thing chuckled, ‘not three bad.’ He was small and wore a sort of two-piece tracksuit with a satin finish, the same kind the actors had worn in Burnin Up. Around his neck there was a heavy gold chain, and on his hands clunky gold rings as well as clumsy tattoos in blue ink that looked like he had done them himself.

‘Would someone mind explaining to me what is going on?’ I rasped. ‘Who is this fellow? What the devil does he think he’s doing, coming in here unannounced in the middle of the night?’

‘This is Droyd, Charlie,’ Frank said, then turned to him. ‘What are you doin here?’

‘I just got out,’ the ferret said.

‘Out of where?’ I pursued.

‘Out of prison. Frankie, who’s this shirtlifter anyway?’

‘That’s Charlie. Are you all right, Charlie?’

I waved an arm stoically from my position on the floor, on to which I had collapsed again to hyperventilate.

‘You shouldn’t’ve strangled him like that, he’s a bit sensitive like.’

‘Wasn’t my fuckin fault,’ the other voice returned somewhere over my head, ‘I wasn’t expectin some fuckin Egyptian mummy burstin in like that.’

‘Ha!’ I rejoined hoarsely. ‘That’s funny, because, you know, I wasn’t expecting some total stranger to break into my home and wake me up at an ungodly hour —’

‘It’s not ungodly, Charlie, I haven’t even had me dinner yet.’

‘That’s funny, neither have I,’ I heard the ferrety chap say, whereupon Frank of course invited him to dine with us. I tried to sneak away, back to my room, but Frank grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Come and have a bite to eat with us. Soon we’ll all be the best of friends.’ And so, only half an hour after being dragged from my bed and beaten, I found myself sitting at the table with the two of them, listening to Frank inquire of the interloper how he’d enjoyed his time ‘away’ — as if he’d been off taking the waters at Carlsbad! — and numbly wondering how I had managed to bring my life to this terrible pass.

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Droyd was saying. ‘It was like anythin, there were good days and bad days. And you’d meet some right characters in there. Like you know that bit in Lethal Weapon where Riggs is in the straitjacket and he like fuckin pops out his shoulder so he can escape?’

‘That bit’s fuckin disgustin,’ Frank recalled pleasurably.

‘Well, I had a mate in the Joy could do that. Well, he could pop it out but he couldn’t pop it back in. Actually it wasn’t him what popped it out so much as this other bloke done it to him called Johnny No-Fingers. Now he was a real character…’

It seemed that Droyd had been imprisoned for his activities as henchman to a local drug peddler called Cousin Benny. This Cousin Benny lived in a tower block over to the west, and he wasn’t anyone’s actual cousin: I would hear his name again during my sojourn in Bonetown, always accompanied by a lowering of the voice and a furtive glance over the shoulder. Even Frank appeared somewhat daunted by him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘How’d’you get mixed up with that scumbag?’

‘I was on the gear,’ Droyd said matter-of-factly. ‘You know how it is. You never have enough money. I started off just robbin old ladies. But soon that wasn’t enough, so I started robbin cars. But then that wasn’t enough either. So I started workin for Benny. It makes sense if you think about it. He used to give me an employee discount.’ He chewed and swallowed and laid down his fork. ‘Ah yeah, it’s all a laugh in the beginnin,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But it’s a mug’s game, a mug’s game. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. I’m a changed man, yes sir.’

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and cracked his knuckles, the subterranean light of the television playing over his bony face; for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, and I was about to ask whether he’d taken heroin to replace the self-worth that society hadn’t given him when, turning his attention to the plate in front of him, he said, ‘Here, d’you ever notice how pasta when it’s wet sounds just like when you’re givin a bird the finger?’

‘What?’ Frank said.

‘Listen.’ Droyd had taken his fork and was prodding the pasta with it to produce a series of slaps and slurps and squelches. ‘See? It sounds exactly like when you’ve got your fingers up a bird’s growler.’

I set down my plate and inhaled deeply. ‘I say,’ I appealed.

‘You’re right,’ Frank said. ‘That’s fuckin amazin.’

‘Look, stop that, will you?’

But now Frank had joined in with his pasta, and the air was filled with lubricious noises. ‘Give it a go, Charlie. It’s fuckin amazin.’

I could bear no more. Holding my handkerchief to my mouth, I staggered away from the table, grabbing the telephone when they weren’t looking and bringing it into my room. There, kneeling in the darkness, I brushed a tear from my eye and dialled Boyd’s number. The phone seemed to ring for a long time before it was answered; and then all there was at the other end was a sort of a low croaking noise.

‘Boyd?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’

‘Charles…’ the pitiful croak responded.

He was unrecognizable — indeed, he barely sounded human. A chill wave of dread surged up through me. ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said. ‘Is it that awful cold?’

‘Not a cold,’ he whispered.

‘It’s not? Well what on earth is it?’

‘Lassa fever,’ he said dolefully.

‘Lassa fever?’

‘Looks like it,’ he said, breaking off for an extended fit of coughing.

‘But that’s absurd,’ I said querulously, picking up the phone and carrying it across the room. ‘How could it be? Where would you possibly get Lassa fever?’

‘Air hostesses,’ he said bitterly.

‘Oh,’ feeling my knees give way and lowering myself on to the mattress. ‘Oh, hell.’

One of them had brought it back from Africa, and now the whole house had come down with it; they were all in quarantine, Boyd said. ‘There’s a policeman at the door, even,’ he said glumly. ‘In case we try to break out and rub ourselves up against the local shopkeepers. No one’s allowed in except doctors.’

I slumped back against the wall. I was getting that hideous sensation of inevitability I’d had before in the hotel: as if I was not master of my own destiny, as if someone or something were out to teach me a lesson. Bawdy laughter rang out from the kitchen.

‘Sorry, old man,’ Boyd mumbled.

I rubbed my jaw bluely. There was nothing to be done, and Boyd sounded like he was getting worse by the minute; I told him to go to bed before he keeled over.

‘Yes,’ the voice slurred at the other end of the line. ‘Better do that. The rhinoceros’ll be coming in soon, y’know.’

‘That’s right, so go to bed.’

‘’S a damn… a damn pest, Charles… keeps waking me up… wanting to play strip poker…’

‘Yes, yes. Look, be a good fellow and —’

‘I tell it, how c’n you play strip poker? M’n t’say, y’re a bloody rh’nos’rus, so (a) in the first instance you’ve no hands, and (b) you’ve no… bloody… clothes, thing’s a foregone, a foregone c’nclusion…’

Droyd did not go home that night, nor the next morning, and for most of the following afternoon I was subjected to what he referred to, seemingly without irony, as his ‘music’. Sometimes it sounded like a huge metal something — a tank, maybe, or an enormous set of cutlery — falling down an infinite staircase; sometimes it sounded like a hundred thousand Nazis, goose-stepping through the Place de la République; the general idea seemed to be to capture the sound of civilization collapsing, so loudly that while it was on one could do little more than lie on one’s mattress and vibrate.

Obviously one didn’t want to be inhospitable, but the next day when he was still there I began to feel that our good nature was being taken advantage of. During an especially loud passage in his racket-making, I took Frank to one side in the kitchen for a quick word.

‘What’s that, Charlie?’ he shouted, taking a can of beer from the fridge.

‘I said, obviously one doesn’t want to be inhospitable,’ I bellowed back with my fingers in my ears, ‘but I mean, isn’t he planning to go home at some stage?’

‘Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I don’t want to ask —’ I broke off. This was hopeless. With every thump the mugs on the draining board danced a little closer to the edge, a tendency with which I could thoroughly identify.

‘Y’see, the thing about Droyd is — here, want a can?’

‘No,’ I said, but he didn’t hear and handed me an opened can of Hobson’s Choice, the cheapest beer on offer at the petrol station.

‘The thing about Droyd is he doesn’t really have a home. So he’s prob’ly better off stayin here for a bit, till he sorts himself out. I mean we don’t want him goin back to that fuckin Cousin Benny, like.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, ideally we —’

‘Anyway, there’s plenty of room for the three of us. And it’s nice to have a bit of music, it sort of cheers the place up a bit, doesn’t it?’

I was about to make a sarcastic reply, but realized at that moment that the music had dislodged a filling, so instead I returned to my room and cocooned myself as best I could in my threadbare duvet.

In a way, I suppose I am indebted to Droyd. Left to my own devices, I might have drifted along for ever in my post-Amaurot fugue. Thanks to him, the situation became untenable almost immediately.

The simple fact of it was that sharing a room with him was totally unbearable. He made Frank look like Noel Coward. He thoroughly spoiled the Test Match I was trying to watch by shouting ‘Howzat!’ at inappropriate times, even after I’d explained at length to him precisely what the term meant. He insisted on referring to the Pakistani team as ‘the wogs’ and to England as ‘the shirtlifters’. The air was constantly choked with the fumes from his cannabis cigarettes, which he smoked more or less nonstop, with the result that I kept nodding off; then every five minutes or so, out of the blue, as it were, his stereo would produce an almighty thump that made me jump out of my seat. When I asked if he wouldn’t like to switch it off for a while and perhaps catch up on his reading, he told me he’d ‘rather iron his sack’. It was after this last exchange, as I recall, that I went to fetch the newspaper I’d stolen from the Radisson to see if I could find somewhere else to live.

There were several classifieds regarding apartments for rent; I circled half a dozen, taking note of the viewing times. They were all rather on the pricey side, as Droyd pointed out when he came to see what I was doing.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ he exclaimed, reading over my shoulder. ‘Where are you going to get that kind of money?’

‘That’s my business,’ I said unkindly, pulling the newspaper away from him.

‘You need to be a fuckin millionaire to live in this city these days,’ he reflected.

‘Yes, well,’ I grunted. But there, after all, was the rub. I didn’t need to open the credit-card statements that Mother had very kindly forwarded to me to know that my days of being a millionaire were long gone. And yet I simply couldn’t go on living like this. It looked like there was nothing for it but to borrow more money from Frank. However, when I took him to one side for a quick word about it that night, he told me he didn’t have that kind of money.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘I thought business was booming.’

‘It’s not booming that much,’ he said. ‘And there’s rent to pay, and food and stuff for you lads…’

‘All right, all right,’ I snapped. Was it that he enjoyed seeing me brought low? Was that it? I wiped my brow with the back of my hand.

‘You could always get a job, Charlie. I’ve a mate’s got a warehouse, if you want I could give him a call. He’s a good bloke, and the money’s —’

‘A job, oh yes,’ I ejaculated. ‘Why don’t I just get a job, and sell off my soul to the highest bidder, and then everybody’s happy. If you ask me it’s a damned poor reflection on so-called society that in this day and age the only way a man can survive is to sacrifice his ideals and his dreams and his whole identity —’

‘That’s it,’ Frank agreed. ‘As me oul lad used to say, there’s nothin comes easy in this life…’

‘Wait a second,’ suddenly something in the newspaper on the table caught my eye. ‘Look at this —’ I folded the page over and raised it up. ‘“Sick of the employment rat race? Still waiting for your slice of the pie?”’

‘Where is it?’

‘Here, see? With the picture of the pie, and the rat looking sad?’

‘Oh right.’

‘“Tired of watching your friends get ahead while you’re stuck doing the same old thing? Dublin is booming, and there’s enough to go around for everybody. If you want your slice of the pie, contact Sirius Recruitment, Ireland’s leading premium specialist in IT, multimedia and e-business solutions NOW. Why waste any more time? Call now and JOIN THE PARTY!”’ I laid the paper back down with an air of vindication. ‘Well, there it is, old man. There’s your answer. Give my regards to Broadway, if you get a chance.’

‘Eh, isn’t that all computer stuff though, Charlie?’

‘What is?’

‘Like, IT and multimedia and that.’

‘Well, what if it is? I’m not an idiot, am I? I went to college, I can learn how to multimedia-ize and so forth. Anyway, that’s just industry jargon. All it means is that they want people with a can-do spirit, such as myself. I’m going to go and see them.’

‘Yeah, and I s’pose if it doesn’t pan out I can always ring me mate…’

‘Yes, well, thanks, but much as I’d like to be stuck in some dingy old rat-race of a warehouse while, you know, my friends get ahead and Bel swans around in her fancy theatrical space,’ reaching into the fridge for a can, ‘I have to start thinking of myself. I’m not spending the best years of my life sleeping on people’s floors.’

‘You need your own place all right,’ Frank agreed.

‘Well of course I’d like to move into my old place,’ I plunked the can emphatically on the table. ‘Obviously in an ideal world there wouldn’t be any question about it. But this preposterous theatre is what Bel wanted and I can’t be expected to put my life on hold just in case it all goes wrong. I have to put the house behind me and, you know, claim my slice of the pie. I’m my own man now. Give my regards to Broadway.’

‘Yeah, you said that already Charlie.’

‘Well, I mean it.’