An Evening of Long Goodbyes (48 page)

I tuned him out, watched the lightning play along the rooftop. The family of aristocrats returning to their old house… it was coming back to me, it’s about to be sold off, but they don’t do anything about it. I remember becoming quite fond of them; they were a lazy, amiable bunch, quite gay in spite of everything – that’s the spirit, I remember thinking, sunny side up…

‘All she ever talked about was that play,’ Frank recalled. ‘She even made me learn this speech to help her, that was like a whole fuckin page long. What was it it went like?’

It was the spring: Father hadn’t been around, so Mother had dragged me along instead; we sat on stiff-backed chairs in the freezing auditorium, a dozen expensive perfumes intermingling over deeper, older school smells of Christmas tests, double gym, morning assembly and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Giddy children whispered, parents clutched mimeographed programmes; Mother sat erect on my left, mouthing the words with Bel whenever she came on – she played an old maid, always fretting and nagging and waiting to be romanced by another girl in a hairnet with a false moustache on –

‘Think Ania!’ Frank bellowed, making me jump in my seat. ‘Your grandfather your great-grandfather and all your forebears were serf owners that owned livin souls! Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every leaf and tree trunk, don’t you hear voices –’

And then she forgot her lines. How had she forgotten them? When for the last two weeks she’d been doing nothing but wandering around the house with a towel over her head, mumbling away incessantly to herself like Franny Glass? And she had breezed through the first half with no trouble at all. Yet here she was centre-stage, with her mouth half-open and her arms held out like a men’s room attendant waiting for someone to hand them a towel and clearly no idea how to proceed –

‘Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every cherry tree in your orchard?’

It didn’t take long for the audience to cotton on, and for giggles and snickers to begin to escape the smaller members; I squirmed in my seat and felt my face go hot and wished I had the courage to just run up on stage and
deus ex machina
pull her out of their wretched play and disappear with her into the night. Someone, a teacher presumably, hissed the line from the wings, but she didn’t seem to hear; she stayed frozen to the spot, like a deer caught in headlights. The actors tried to continue the scene around her, but it was impossible, ludicrous – and people were enjoying the spectacle now, they guffawed heartily as the teacher hissed out the line again, and the room filled with derisory applause as the curtain hastened down, and Mother’s hands rested perfectly still and white on her purse –

‘Yet it’s perfectly clear that, to live in the present,’ Frank went on, ‘we must first at – atone for our past and be finished with it –’

‘Give it a rest,’ I murmured, ‘there’s a good fellow.’

She had been furious afterwards, Mother, I mean, even though the play had restarted five minutes later and Bel, though jittery, had managed to get to the end without any further hiccups, which I thought was a credit to her, and anyway surely these things were just an occupational hazard – there was no reason for Mother to say what she’d said, and if you asked me it was no coincidence that it was the very next day that Bel had got sick and the doctor had had to come –

‘ – and we can only atone for it by suffering –’

Because that trouble before the play, the shouting and the broken crockery, that had been enough to put anybody off, and when Father didn’t come home we had driven to the school in a hissing white-hot silence: but that’s how it had all started, the sickness and the doctors and then Father too, then two years of white coats and not sleeping and drugs with unintelligible names and one’s jaw hurting from clenching one’s teeth all the time – that’s when it all began, at that infernal play, why did she have to keep circling back to it, why couldn’t she just forget it?

‘ – by suffering by extraordinary unceasing exer –, exertion –’

‘Damn it –’

‘Forward, friends! Don’t fall behind!’

‘That’s
enough
–’ my hand coming down so hard that the ashtray skipped right off the table and exploded on the floor.

‘Janey, Charlie, I was only havin a laugh.’

‘Sorry,’ I said curtly, knocking back my drink.

‘Seriously, you feelin okay, Charlie?’

‘No,’ I said. How could they just let her go, without saying anything? How could they pretend nothing was wrong, let it all happen again, just so they could get her out of the way?

‘You prob’ly just need a bit of food,’ Frank said. He turned to the girl knelt sweeping up the shards of the ashtray and asked her to bring over ten packs of peanuts.

I exhaled jaggedly. I felt small and spent; I didn’t want to think about it any more. ‘How much money does this fellow want anyway?’ I said, gesturing at the heap of notes. Frank did some mental calculations, then started scribbling on a beermat. It would take us all night at this rate, I thought with a sinking heart; and by then she would be gone, gone into the snowy wastes.

The mechanical voice announced the next race. I went to the bar and ordered a Guinness for Frank and a dry martini for myself, with a shot of Calvados while I was waiting. Outside the sky had cleared enough to make room for a brace of stars, which swam about in a comforting way. I returned to the table to find Frank wearing an odd expression. ‘Look,’ he whispered.

His arithmetic had carried him off the beermat and on to a left-behind newspaper, and he was pointing to a line in one corner: something about An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which sounded vaguely familiar.

‘It’s that dog what Bel bet on the last time,’ he said. ‘Remember the one that bit that young lad?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So it is. I thought I recognized the name.’

‘Look at the odds, Charlie,’ he whispered. ‘They’re astromonomical.’

‘Hardly surprising, after that last farrago. I’m amazed they’re still letting it race.’

‘But think, right, if we put everything we have on it, we’d have enough for the rent, and the ESB, and the gas, and…’

‘Yes, but you’re forgetting, it wouldn’t win, you see, that’s why the odds are –’

‘But if we put down say two hundred blips, then –’

‘But it
wouldn’t win
, damn it. If it were the only dog
running
it wouldn’t win. That dog’s a
born loser
, can’t you understand that?’

With a hurt look, Frank retreated to his beermats. I sat back splenetically with the form. An Evening of Long Goodbyes, indeed. Put all our money on that? After what happened last time? Funny I hadn’t noticed it earlier, though… With a diversionary cough, I reached for the left-behind newspaper. Now this really was queer. Unless it was a misprint, it appeared that the bookmakers were giving outlandishly long odds not just against proven reprobates like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, but against
all
of the dogs running in the 2130, bar one. This dog, one Celtic Tiger, was favourite by such a distance that a return on his victory would be minuscule: but his previous times seemed unusually slow.

The prudent thing would be to treat it as a low-risk investment: bet on Celtic Tiger and take the minimal return. And yet – I looked over my shoulder around the bar: business appeared to be proceeding as usual – and yet what if we
had
stumbled across some kind of gambling anomaly? What if there really
were
something in the air tonight? What if that something – or someone – were trying to reach us, help us, via the unconventional vehicle of An Evening of Long Goodbyes?

‘What are you thinking, Charlie?’

I ran my eyes over and over the tiny text. But suddenly my gambler’s intuition had deserted me. I had no idea what to do.

I took a deep breath. The prudent thing: generally – although it might at times seem otherwise – I had always done what was prudent. I had clung to things – to people, beliefs, certain modes of living. I had tried to hold them still, I had tried to shore them up against the vicissitudes of fate. Where had it got me? Everything I had tried to hold had escaped me. Perhaps the secret was to do the opposite: perhaps to keep the things one loved one had to gamble them; one had to give all the heart, live in the aleatory moment… I reached for the pencil and filled out the betting slip.

It was obvious as soon as the dogs were led out on to the field that we had made a terrible mistake.

Immediately the stadium erupted. Chants rose up, flags were waved, ne’er-do-wells linked arms and jigged, all for the benefit of Celtic Tiger, aka, we soon learned, The Bookie’s Despair.

‘Bollocks,’ said Frank.

It took two men to squeeze Celtic Tiger into its trap. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, consisting primarily of haunches and gnashing fangs; whatever biological connection it had to the greyhound family, it must have been pretty tenuous. The other dogs, who had evidently encountered it before, looked singularly depressed – apart from An Evening of Long Goodbyes, that is, who was gazing off hopefully at the concession stand. What really struck one was its air of unchecked malevolence. I had never experienced evil of such magnitude at such close proximity, apart from lunches with Mr Appleseed. Yet in spite of this, Celtic Tiger seemed to inspire an almost religious fervour. The punters looked to it with the worshipful, desperate love of a parched country for the annual rains. ‘God bless you, Celtic Tiger,’ said a worn man next to us at the window, his weathered cheeks wet with tears. I realized that for these people, Celtic Tiger must be one of the few certainties in life: aside from death, of course, and nurses. The starter’s gun sounded and the rabbit scooted away.

We cheered on An Evening of Long Goodbyes as best we could, but I doubted he could have heard us. Within seconds, Celtic Tiger was out on its own, prancing along taking the salutes of the crowd, while the other dogs remained behind at a respectful distance. It was like some kind of canine Nuremberg rally.

‘This is a fiasco!’ I cried. ‘Those other dogs aren’t even trying! What’s the point having a race if they’re too afraid to overtake him?’

Just as I said it, a ripple of consternation ran through the stands. All of a sudden one of the dogs had broken away from the pack and was quickly making up ground – which wasn’t hard, considering Celtic Tiger had all the zip of a Panzer tank.

‘That’s a brave dog,’ one of the punters next to us said grudgingly.

‘It’s not so much it’s brave,’ his companion said. ‘It’s more like it’s forgotten what it’s supposed to be doing.’

‘It’s him!’ Frank whispered to me.

I quickly apprehended what had happened. A chap in the front row of the far stand had unwrapped a sandwich, and An Evening of Long Goodbyes had caught sight of it. The spectators could boo and curse him all they wanted now. I knew that all he was thinking about was that sandwich, and he would not be diverted, not by them, nor by the finishing line which loomed up ahead, nor by those intimidating looks the larger dog was giving him as he drew up alongside it –

‘That’s it!’ I pounded encouragingly on the glass, attracting glowers from the punters around me. ‘That’s the stuff!’

– and abandoning all pretence of sportsmanship, Celtic Tiger burst its muzzle as if it were paper and fastened its jaws around its rival’s throat.

‘What!’ howled Frank. ‘Referee!’

It was carnage. At first, some of the more bloodthirsty punters cheered it on: but quickly even they turned pale and went quiet, and the whole stadium was silent except for the yelps of An Evening of Long Goodbyes and the murderous snarls, snaps and tearing noises produced by Celtic Tiger. ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ I appealed. But no one did anything. Celtic Tiger wasn’t even running any more, it was being dragged by the smaller dog, who struggled gamely on towards his sandwich even with Celtic Tiger latched around his neck. The other dogs had backed up into a small uncertain huddle some distance down the track; some lay down or rolled over, their dolorous baying segueing into the groans of Frank and the small minority of unwise men who had bet against the favourite – as An Evening of Long Goodbyes, drenched in blood, froth dripping from his mouth, uttered a long-drawn-out moan and toppled over on his side.

The silence seemed to deepen; the punters buried themselves guiltily in their pints. I couldn’t take any more. I staggered away to the bar, squeezed in beside a silver-haired gent, and with the small sum of money that was now all we had left, ordered myself a triple whiskey. So much for destiny, I thought bitterly; so much for giving all the heart. The world had made suckers of us again. Cousin Benny’s words kept circling through my head: we were cunts, we would always be cunts.

A gasp went up at the window for some fresh outrage on the track. I took a slug from the glass without looking round, wincing pleasurably at the sour familiar kick. To hell with the damned race. I had enough whiskey here to get stinking drunk. At least when I was drunk I knew where I stood: and I didn’t need anybody’s directions to get there. To hell with Frank, and the lousy dinner party; to hell with Bel too. Let her leave if she wanted to leave, let her write off the one person who actually cared about her, who didn’t think of her as an eternal outpatient with impossible dreams…

The punters roared in anguish.

‘Sounds like someone’s taking a beating,’ the silver-haired gent beside me remarked.

‘Someone’s always taking a beating,’ I muttered without looking up.

‘I suppose that’s true,’ the gent agreed.

I turned around. The smoke was making it hard to see, and the room kept spinning, but when I squinted I could make out a well-cut if somewhat
vieux jeu
worsted suit and a pair of wire-frame spectacles. I wondered what he was doing here with this rabble. He motioned the bargirl to refill our glasses and, as if in answer to my question, said: ‘Still, one has to take one’s chances, doesn’t one?’

‘I don’t see why,’ I said, clinking my ice cubes.

‘Come on, Charles,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You know why.’

The room seemed to lurch, and a sweltering buzz rose up from my toes to engulf me. At that moment the crowd roared again and the punters at the bar rushed over to the window. I found myself thrown forward: standing on tiptoes, I peered blearily over the mass of heads.