An Evening of Long Goodbyes (8 page)

Almost as soon as it was in the door, Bel diagnosed the anonymous dog, unsuspectingly brought home as a gift for us by Father, as suffering from a dizzying array of existential terrors. It was, in retrospect, a clear case of transference: as if the appearance of the dog had allowed her to open the floodgates, so that all the dread that had accumulated inexplicably within her small soul could come pouring out. For the two weeks it lasted in Amaurot, she devoted herself to acting as mouthpiece for the anguished dog. She stayed up night after night, not sleeping, pacing around the house with the dog trotting amiably at her heel, relating its woes to anyone who would listen. She worried that it was lonely. She worried that it was hungry. She worried that it was being over-exercised, or not exercised enough. She worried that its collar itched. She worried that it might start thinking it was a human but feel bad because it had fur instead of skin. She worried that it was unfulfilled. She worried that it felt naked, missed its parents, was afraid of the dark, fretted about only being able to speak in barks, was ashamed of its fleas, didn’t understand why it had to sleep in the pantry. At school, she continued to voice her fears, which separation from the dog only made worse. Before long, the other children in the class were so upset that the teacher was spending the whole day just trying to reassure them as to the welfare of our pet. Finally, one afternoon, the school principal rang Mother up and suggested in a weary voice that something really ought to be done; before Mother could reply the phone had been passed over to a tearful Bel who asked Mother to put her on to the dog, please – and that’s when Mother snapped. When we came home that day the dog was gone. Mother wouldn’t say where; only that it had been ‘relocated’. She refused to discuss the matter any further.

Strangely enough, Bel received this news quite calmly, and soon she seemed to forget about the dog entirely. Maybe it had served its purpose. Her anxiety had miraculously disappeared; she started attending Speech and Drama classes after school, and immediately that was all she could talk about; she grew, romantic turbulences aside, into a happy teenager. I suppose that for all of us that was a sort of Golden Age. The family prospered, everything seemed secure; I shocked Father by gaining captaincy of the school cricket team, and thanks to the unpopularity of that sport in Ireland we even won a few matches.

Bel was in her late teens when she started acting up again, just as I began my short career in university. The doctor called them Hysterical Episodes. For a period of about seven months she suffered these Episodes almost every other week. They were quite terrifying to witness: shaking and tears and vomiting and voices; she would lie on the bed sobbing and begging us to help her without being able to tell us how, what was the matter, what these forces were that were attacking her. The doctor hadn’t been overly concerned; by now he was more interested in Father, whom he had sent into the hospital for tests. Bel’s kind of instability was quite common in girls of her age, he told us. It was little more than a rather extreme manifestation of adolescent confusion – a natural side-effect of growing up, complicated by her propensity to doubt and over-analyse, by her volatile relationship with Mother, and Father’s waning health. The best way to look at it was as a period of adjustment; some people adjust to the real world more easily than others. He tried her on different dosages and different medications, he gave her time off school. Eventually she was back to normal, and everyone was pretending it had never happened. Father’s condition had spiralled downwards, the house was full of white coats and strange machinery – there simply wasn’t space to keep worrying about Bel too.

But I couldn’t forget. Sometimes, if we were having a fight, or if something had upset her, I would think I saw it – the hysteria, the terror – shivering, eclipse-like, at the edges of her, waiting for its moment. It seemed to me that wherever it came from, it was too fundamental a part of her now ever to truly go away. That was why I badgered her about her boyfriends, that was why the unsettled, mercurial mood she’d been in lately bothered me, like that curious gathering of electricity an epileptic feels before an attack. She might have put it all behind her – I knew she hated being thought of as delicate, or precarious – but to me the memory was still fresh. The fear, that was what I remembered primarily: those horrible mornings of convulsions and terrorized, unfocused weeping, and in her eyes the fear so huge and formless that it robbed us both of speech.

The bank was situated about a mile and a half away, in the middle of a shopping centre. I set out to see the manager that very afternoon. I was sure Bel was making more out of this business than she needed to, but I knew I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until it was sorted out; also, it provided a useful cover for another matter I needed to take care of. Pact or no pact, furniture was still disappearing; I wanted to see if I could find some background information on our Golem friend.

I rarely ventured that far from home. Bel took this as another instance of my ‘feudal outlook’. ‘You see yourself as Lord of the Manor,’ she’d say, ‘and these people are your vassals, and you don’t want to rub shoulders with them in case you catch something.’ But that wasn’t it at all. Watching from the back seat of the cab as lofty sea-roads and shady avenues gave way to the encircling suburbs, I was gripped – as I always was – by a sense of claustrophobia and threat. The shopping centre frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent’s whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression: seeming to be skipping whole rungs of the evolutionary ladder, so that pleases and thank-yous had gone south long ago, and I expected to go in some day soon and find them gnawing bones and worshipping fire. As vassals I doubt they’d have been much good to me.

The newsagent’s, however, was where I was headed now: debouching from the cab on to newly laid
faux
cobblestone and gingerly edging my way through a Walpurgisnacht of middle-aged women with bleached hair, mock-leather jackets and yodelling children. Across the road, a huge billboard dominated the skyline. ‘
IRELANDBANK: WE PLEDGE UNTO YOU
,’ it said. ‘
100 WAYS IN WHICH WE ARE MAKING LIFE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS BETTER AND BETTER
.’ Which seemed to augur well for me and my predicament, but then beneath the letters was a picture of the amassed Irelandbank staff, waving mirthlessly up at the camera. There were thousands of them, a silent army clad in uniform blue jackets, the appalling tailoring of which made them all the more menacing.

The window of the newsagent’s was cluttered with dayglo flashcards; I scanned down through advertisements for nannies, lawnmowing, kittens, maths grinds, until I found what I was looking for.

The All-Seeing Eye.

Marital Infidelity? Extortion?

Conspiracies against you in the Office?

The All-Seeing Eye Sees All.

Have your suspicions confirmed

and your mind set at ease.

Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.

I took down the number and went in search of an unvandalized callbox.

‘Hello?’ a cautious voice answered, low and mumbly as if unwilling to divulge the slightest hint of identity.

‘Is that the All-Seeing Eye?’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ the voice said.

‘My name is Charl—’

‘No names!’ the voice interrupted urgently.

‘Fine then, my name is… is C, and I need your help.’

‘Marital infidelity? Extortion? Conspi—’

‘No, no, none of those. There’s a chap in my house stealing my furniture.’

‘Oh,’ the All-Seeing Eye said. ‘Are you sure it’s not marital infidelity?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my sister’s boyfriend.’

‘
Ah
,’ it said salaciously. ‘Want a few pictures, do you?’

‘
No
, look here, Eye, are you going to help me or not?’

‘Come to my office,’ the Eye said. ‘118, The Savannah. Come alone. The All-Seeing Eye takes cash and all major credit cards.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Photo development is extra, though, and the All-Seeing Eye reserves the right to hang on to negatives it likes…’

He gave me directions to his office, which was in fact more of a small semi-detached house in an estate of identical semi-detached houses not far away. I rang the doorbell, and after a series of unlocking noises, the door was opened by a familiar figure: none other than our dilatory postman, the one who smelled of gin and only delivered post when he felt like it.

‘What!’ I said.

‘C?’ he said.

‘But you’re the –’

‘No names,’ he said, and after a furtive look around motioned me inside. The hallway was filled with great billows of steam, into which he quickly disappeared. I followed as best I could and arrived in an even steamier room, where after stumbling around blindly for a moment I bumped into something. It emerged presently as a table, with a postbag of mail sitting on it. On either side of the bag was a pile: one of opened envelopes, the other presumably their former contents – hundreds of sheets of handwritten and printed correspondence.

Gradually, through breaks in the vapour clouds, I was able to piece together the rest of my surroundings. We were in a kitchen. The windows were fogged with condensation: on the cooker and counter, several kettles and saucepans were on the go at once, with sealed envelopes resting over each on makeshift tripods of Blu-Tak and cocktail sticks.

‘Tea?’ he said from somewhere.

‘What’s going on here? Is this people’s
post?
’

‘I’ll put on a kettle,’ the postman said, abruptly appearing and disappearing again into the fog. I sat down at the table and looked through the damp pages.
How is Uncle Harold’s new leg?… We regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful… These girls are beautiful and discreet… Dear Bazzer, Mother died today
…

‘I mean, what are you doing?’ I asked in disbelief.

‘Well, I suppose it started as a hobby,’ the postman said over his shoulder, ‘and then it grew into something more. I like finding solutions to problems. Answers. Life is full of questions. Only the privileged few have access to the answers.’

‘But you can’t –’

‘It’s really amazing what people will say in their letters,’ he mused.

‘And this… this heinous intrusion into people’s privacy is what you call detection, is it?’

‘You may not like it,’ he replied, setting a cup in front of me and sitting down, ‘but it means that I can give you a Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.’

‘Hmm,’ I said.

‘Let’s talk business,’ he said. ‘Actually, when I saw you at the door there I thought you must have come about your mortgage difficulties.’

‘Did you,’ I said.

‘Yes, thought you might have been wanting to fake your own death or something. Not unusual, people in your position.’

‘Not that it’s any of your concern,’ I told him haughtily, ‘but the mortgage is a minor matter, a simple crossed wire. As a matter of fact, I’m just on my way to see my bank manager and sort it out.’

He smiled at me indulgently. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. I suppose the repo men won’t be needing this, then.’ He plucked from the pile a single sheet headed with the Irelandbank logo, a sort of euro-sign-meets-swastika affair, and passed it to me. It was addressed to a debt-collection agency, stating that the bank now had legal authorization to take ‘the next step’ and that the collectors could begin shortly with their ‘recovery’.

‘Quite so,’ I swallowed. ‘A trifle.’

‘So you’ve come about your sister,’ he said, grinning.

‘Yes – listen here, Eye, kindly remove that lascivious expression when discussing my sister, if you please.’

‘All right,’ he said amiably. ‘Fine-looking girl, though. Shame that company didn’t take her on. I’d have thought she was a shoo-in.’ He exhaled ruminatively, crossed an ankle over his thigh, fiddled about with the hem of his trouser-leg. ‘Takes the wind out of your sails, a knockback like that,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His omniscience was starting to irk me; it was like meeting the Wizard of Oz or something. ‘And I don’t want to know. I’m not especially pleased about taking this course of action, and I’d appreciate it, Eye, if we could keep to the matter at hand and you would at least pretend not to know all there is to know about my family.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And another thing, don’t you have a name? I can’t keep calling you “Eye”, it’s confusing.’

‘Okay.’ His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his jaw. ‘Call me… MacGillycuddy.’

‘All right then.’ Carving a niche of air for myself from the steam, I told MacGillycuddy the whole story of Frank’s sudden and mysterious appearance in my house: his murky past and equally murky present, his baffling success with Bel, the disappearance of various household items, the sinister rusty white van.

‘I don’t quite get why the van bothers you so much,’ MacGillycuddy said.

‘Because no one knows what’s
in
it, that’s why.’ I told him about the time Frank was driving us to the greyhound race, when I had surreptitiously managed to peek into the back and seen dimly, through the smeared grille, what looked like mounds and mounds of
garbage
.

‘That’s unusual, right enough,’ MacGillycuddy admitted.

‘It’s more than unusual. The man’s a
sociopath
. I mean I don’t know if you’re familiar with Yiddish folklore at all, but – well, perhaps we shouldn’t get into that now. The sad fact is that my sister has a
thing
for sociopaths and if I don’t keep an eye on him he’ll run off with the whole house and her to boot.’

‘So you want me to…’

I told him that I wanted him to find out everything he could about Frank: who he was, what he did, what had happened to my chair. ‘Basically, anything incriminating,’ I said.

‘No bother,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘Child’s play. Give me twenty-four hours.’ Having scribbled out my number and a cheque for his retainer, I rose to leave.