An Evening of Long Goodbyes (25 page)

‘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…