The Likeness: A Novel (55 page)

He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man—what’s his name? the prime minister—comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”
“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”
Daniel considered this—not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me—in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I
didn’t
want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal—a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort—wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the—what are those things?—the iPod.”
I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society—reaches critical mass, so to speak—no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and . . . well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”
“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”
Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left—Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it—there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup—but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be—Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”
It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.
Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”
“Not on a regular basis,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the thread of this conversation, but I knew Daniel well enough to know that he was going somewhere with this and he would get there in his own sweet time. We had maybe forty-five minutes before Fauré ran out, and I’ve always been good at letting the suspect run the show. No matter how strong you are or how controlled, keeping a secret—I should know—gets heavy after a while, heavy and tiring and so lonely it feels lethal. If you let them talk, all you need to do is nudge them now and then, keep them pointing in the right direction; they’ll do the rest.
He shook water droplets off the glass and pulled out his handkerchief again, to dry it. “Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.”
He poured himself three fingers of whiskey. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a hero,” he said, “and I don’t consider myself to be insane. I don’t think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom.” He put the bottle down and glanced across at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”
The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me. “It doesn’t seem like very much to ask,” I said.
“Oh, but it was,” Daniel said, and took a swallow of his drink. There was a rough edge to his voice. “It was a lot to ask. It followed, you see, that what we needed was safety—permanent safety. Which brings us back to your last question. My parents left investments that provide me with a small income—ample in the 1980s, now hardly enough for that bedsit. Rafe’s trust fund gives him roughly the same amount. Justin’s allowance will end as soon as he finishes his PhD; so will Abby’s student grants, and Lexie’s would have too. How many jobs do you think are available, in Dublin, for people who want only to study literature and to be together? In a few months, we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority in this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid.”
He looked out through the ivy, up the grass to the patio, tilting his wrist slowly so that the whiskey slid circles round the glass. “All we needed,” he said, “was a home.”
“That’s enough safety?” I asked. “A house?”
“Well, of course,” he said, a little surprised. “Psychologically, the difference it makes is almost inexpressible. Once you own your home, free and clear, what is there left for anyone—landlords, employers, banks—to threaten you with? What hold does anyone have over you? One can do without practically anything else, if necessary. We would always be able to scrape together enough money for food, between us, and there is no other material fear as primal or as paralyzing as the thought of losing one’s home. With that fear eliminated, we would be free. I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”
He must have read the look on my face. “We’re in Ireland, for heaven’s sake,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “If you know any history at all, what could possibly be clearer? The one crucial thing the British did was to claim the land as their own, to turn the Irish from owners into tenants. Once that was done, then everything else followed naturally: confiscation of crops, abuse of tenants, eviction, emigration, famine, the whole litany of wretchedness and serfdom, all inflicted casually and unstoppably because the dispossessed had no solid ground on which to stand and fight. I’m sure my own family was as guilty as any. There may well be an element of poetic justice in the fact that I found myself looking at the other side of the coin. But I didn’t feel the need simply to accept it as my just deserts.”
“I rent,” I said. “I’m probably two paychecks from the street. It doesn’t bother me.”
Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “Possibly you’re braver than I am,” he said. “Or possibly—forgive me—you simply haven’t decided what you want from life yet; you haven’t found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you’re playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you.”
The adrenaline, or the strange trembling light through the ivy, or the spirals of Daniel’s mind, or just the sheer bizarreness of the situation, was making me feel as if I actually had been drinking. I thought of Lexie speeding through the night in poor Chad’s stolen car, of Sam’s face wearing that look of terrible patience, of the squad room in evening light with some other team’s paperwork scattered across our desks; of my flat, empty and silent, dust starting to build up on the bookshelves and the standby light on the CD player glowing green in the darkness. I like my flat a lot, but it hit me that in all these weeks I hadn’t missed it for a second, and that felt somehow horribly, horribly sad.
“I would venture to guess,” Daniel said, “that you still have that first freedom—that you haven’t yet found anything or anyone that you want for keeps.”
Steady gray eyes and the hypnotic gold shimmer of the whiskey, sound of water, leaf shadows swaying like a darker wreath on his dark hair. “I used to have a partner,” I said, “at work. Nobody you’ve met; he’s not working this case. We were like you guys: we matched. People talked about us the way you do about twins, like we were one person—‘That’s MaddoxandRyan’s case, get MaddoxandRyan to do it . . .’ If anyone had asked me, I’d have said this was it: the two of us, for the rest of our careers, we’d retire on the same day so neither of us would ever have to work with anyone else and the squad would give us one gold watch between us. I didn’t think about any of that at the time, mind. I just took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”
I had never said this to anyone. Sam and I had never mentioned Rob, not once since he was transferred out, and when people asked how he was doing I gave them my sweetest smile and my best vague answers. Daniel and I were strangers and we were on opposite sides, under the civilized chitchat we were fighting each other tooth and nail and both of us knew it, but I said it to him. Now I think that should have been my first warning.
Daniel nodded. “But that was in another country,” he said, “and besides, that wench is dead.”
“That about sums it up,” I said, “yeah.” He was looking at me with something in his eyes that went beyond kindness, beyond compassion: understanding. I think in that moment I loved him. If I could have dropped the whole case and stayed, I would have done it then.
“I see,” Daniel said. He held out the glass to me. I started to shake my head automatically, but then I changed my mind and took it: what the hell. The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.
“Then you understand the difference it made to me,” he said, “meeting the others. The world transformed itself around me: the stakes shot up, colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It’s so fragile, you know; things are so easily broken. I suppose this may be what it’s like to fall in love, or to have a child, and to know that this could be taken from you at any moment. We were racing at breakneck speed towards the day when everything we had would be at the mercy of a merciless world, and every second was so beautiful and so precarious, it took my breath away.”
He held out his hand for the glass and took a sip. “And then,” he said, raising a palm towards the house, “this came along.”
“Like a miracle,” I said. I wasn’t being snide; I meant it. For a second I felt the old wood of the banister under my palm, warm and sinuous as a muscle, as a living thing.
Daniel nodded. “Improbably,” he said, “I believe in miracles, in the possibility of the impossible. Certainly the house has always felt like a miracle to me, materializing just at the moment when we needed it most. I saw straight away, the second my uncle’s lawyer rang me with the news, what this could mean to us. The others had doubts, plenty of them; we argued for months. Lexie was—I suppose there’s a kind of tragic irony in this—the only one who seemed perfectly happy with the idea. Abby was the hardest to convince—in spite of the fact that she was the one who most craved a home, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know—but even she came round at last. I suppose, in the end, it came down to the fact that, if you are absolutely sure of something, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually persuade people who aren’t sure one way or the other. And I was sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
“Is that why you made the others co-owners?”
Daniel glanced sharply across at me, but I kept my face blandly interested and after a moment he went back to looking out through the ivy. “Well, not to win them over, or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Hardly. It was absolutely essential to what I had in mind. It wasn’t the house itself I wanted—much as I love it. It was security, for all of us; a safe haven. If I had been the sole owner, then the crude truth of it is that I would have been the others’ landlord, and they would have had no more safety than before. They would have been dependent on my whims, always waiting for me to decide to move or get married or sell up. This way it was all of our home, forever.”