Where the Rain Gets In (19 page)

“Here he is now.”

The waiter placed down the drinks and
handed Mike the receipt. Mike paid for the drinks.

“I thought of you,” he said to Katie,
“when I was paying for the taxi fare on the way in to town. The driver was friendly
enough; no racism though, and I thought maybe you’d been exaggerating the case
in your articles.”

“And then?”

“Well, the fare was over nineteen euro,
which I thought was a bit steep, to tell you the truth. I gave your man a
twenty and he started taking an age to find the change, obviously waiting for
me to say forget it, twenty’s fine. But I didn’t think twenty was fine, so I
waited to see how long he’d play the change game, and it went on until he
became so pissed he just gave me the money. No more friendly taxi driver – he
drove off without a word of goodbye before I’d even shut the door.”

“Welcome to Dublin,” said Katie.

They clinked glasses.

“I enjoy reading your pieces in the
paper,” said Mike.

“Hmm,” said Katie. “I think it’s got a
little out of hand.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mike.

“I enjoyed it at first,” said Katie,
“and, you know, it made me feel important, but now I’m not so sure.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mike again.

“Well, the early stuff was very much aimed
at the government and how they’re running the economy. Like, I’ve lived through
Thatcherism once; I don’t need to live through it again.”

“But Ireland’s done well, surely?”

“From a distance, maybe – just like the
Eighties were great in Britain if you didn’t have to live there.”

“But is it really Thatcherism that
they’re doing here?” asked Mike.

“No,” said Katie, “they don’t even have
the balls for that. At least you knew where you were with Maggie – she’d send
in the troops to get what she wanted, or seize your funds in the courts, or
whatever.”

“And here?”

“Here they’re still stuck into gombeen
politics. They talk of things like zero tolerance, but then they don’t enforce
it.”

“Would you want them to?”

“No,” said Katie, “but anything would be
better than these incompetents; all they’re good at is looking after their own
and staying in power.”

“So,” said Mike, “maybe that’s why your
editor keeps asking you to write for the paper?”

“I’m tired, Mike,” said Katie, “really
tired. I feel like all I do now is bellyache about the shit things I see.
They’ve got used to me and put me in a box and sure, they let me have my say,
but I’m becoming a caricature of myself.”

“I think you’re better than that,” said
Mike.

“Have you read that Nick Hornby book,
How
to be Good
?”

“I’ve seen it, but not read it,” said
Mike.

“Yes, well, there’s a character in it –
he writes a newspaper column, and calls himself the Angriest Man in Holloway. I
feel like that; once I start off on my rant, I can’t seem to get off it.”

“But you obviously do it well.”

“I know,” said Katie, “but I think it’s
time to call it a day. It’s all people have come to expect off me, and their
reaction always comes back to the fact that I’m English. No matter what I talk
about, it’s my Englishness – or my non-Irishness – that they’re interested in,
and not the issues.”

“But it’s very entertaining,” said Mike,
and smiled.

“It doesn’t get anything changed though.
Jesus, they’ll talk about something for years and not feel the need to do
anything about it.”

“Ah, there, now you are sounding
English. You can’t expect people to just go ahead and do things, to actually
achieve or change anything.”

“But I’m sick of all that Modern Life is
Rubbish stuff,” said Katie. “I mean, it is rubbish but once you start noticing
things, it becomes a compulsion – it’s impossible to stop. You walk into a
public lavatory and there’s no room to stand as you try to close the door. The
toilet roll dispenser that can’t dispense the toilet roll; the washbasin tap
that soaks the front of your dress; the hand dryer that doesn’t dry your hands
– they’re all clichés of modern life, but that doesn’t stop them being repeated
over and over again. Why would someone go to the trouble of manufacturing a
hand-dryer that doesn’t actually dry hands?”

“You see,” said Mike, “you’re good at
it.”

“But it’s all so shit,” said Katie, “and
I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like there’s not enough in my life that I
can ignore the shit I see all around me.”

“Time for a change, then?”

“I guess so,” said Katie, “but I don’t
know what.”

“The world is full of crappy things,
it’s true, but if you think too much about them it’ll drive you crazy. And
don’t think for one moment that things are any different in England, because
they’re not.”

“Oh I know all about England,” said
Katie, “with their tunnel vision barmen who can only cope with one customer at
a time, and the lottery of who they might choose to serve next – waiting for
that special moment when they turn from the till and you hope to God you catch
their eye. And calling time exactly on eleven, with ten minutes’ drinking-up
time – they’re so fucking anal. I’m not sure I could stand all that again.
Maybe I just need a holiday, or a break at least – South America might be a
little drastic.”

“You could come and visit us in
Manchester,” said Mike.

“I don’t think so,” said Katie.

Katie was aware that she’d reduced her
life to such an extent that it was bound to result in a narrowing of her
stimuli. You can only pick up a certain amount through the reading of a newspaper.
She wasn’t exactly hiding in Ireland, but it was easier to control how she
encountered the outside world. Her colleagues thought her excessively private;
her position didn’t exactly encourage familiarity, and a lot of them were happy
not to be chummy with the boss. Of course, her sexuality was a constant source
of fascination, but even this was preferable to knowing every gory detail of
your boss’s private life. But Katie knew that, really, this was no way to live
her life.

She also knew that, without even trying,
Mike had got more information out of her than she was comfortable with.

“What about you Mike?” she asked. “Did
you stay in banking or not?”

“There were three business types,” said
Mike, by way of an answer, “sat over there on the next table, an hour or so
before you arrived. You know, suits and talking too loud and laughing. And I
thought, is that really what I look like when I’m doing my stuff?”

“Only you don’t notice so much when it’s
you?”

“Yeah, something like that – all three
of them talking and not one of them listening to what the others were saying.
One guy was the know-it-all – ”

“That’d be you, then?”

“Very funny. One was the know-it-all and
you could tell the other two couldn’t stand him – ”

“Definitely you,” said Katie.

“But then, they couldn’t stand each
other either. They all thought they were the one – the one most likely – and it
was all about refrigeration, or some such shit.”

“Or banking – is that what you mean?”
asked Katie. “It’s all shit, Mike; I thought you knew that better than all of
us?”

Mike continued.

“The know-it-all – the big man – he
didn’t wash his hands after using the toilet.”

“He what?” asked Katie.

“He used the toilet and didn’t wash his
hands – I saw him.”

“You followed him to the toilet?”

“I didn’t follow him,” said Mike. “We
happened to be there at the same time.”

“And he didn’t wash his hands – are you
sure?”

“Most men don’t bother to wash their
hands.”

“Some maybe, but not most?” asked Katie.

“Believe me,” said Mike; “most men don’t
wash their hands after using the toilet. You notice your things and put them in
your newspaper – well, I notice my things and that’s one of the things I’ve
noticed.”

“That’s gross,” said Katie.

“At least two out of every three, I’d
say. So two out of those three business types – two out of the three
refrigerator men – go straight from the toilet and back into the bar for their
drink.”

“I’m not sure I’d want them to be
looking in my refrigerator, not with habits like that,” said Katie.

“Think about that the next time some
bloke is chatting you up and offers to buy you a drink.”

Katie smiled. They sat quietly for a
moment or two.

“So, Mike,” she said, “are you going to
tell me what you’ve done for the past twenty years, or do I have to beat it out
of you? Did your early banking fraud ever catch up with you?”

“You mean all those accounts I used to
run when I first went to college? No, they must have been on too small a scale
for them to care; I guess they were written off in the end. I bet you’ve
written off millions in your time, haven’t you?”

“The larger the amount,” said Katie,
“the easier it is to right off. But the little guys – we normally stick to them
like shit. I’d have hounded you into the ground if it was my bank’s money.”

“Some of it probably was,” said Mike. “I
don’t think there was a bank in Manchester that I didn’t open some form of an
account in.”

“What did you do after college then?”
asked Katie. “Did you ever follow up on your scholarship?”

“No,” said Mike, “I’d had enough of
banking and investments for one lifetime. I didn’t really do much for a while –
I went back to Belfast, but I couldn’t stick that for much longer than a
summer. Even when I moved over to Manchester again, I wasn’t really sure what I
was going to do.”

Mike hesitated for a moment.

“I was getting over you, actually,” he
said. “I knew where you were working, or where I guessed you were working, and
I was very tempted to try to find you.”

“What were you using for money?”

“I had a bit of money but not that much
and I knew I couldn’t go on like that for ever. I just couldn’t seem to get
going again; anything I thought of doing never really amounted to much. You
know, I was even beginning to doubt myself.”

“No,” said Katie, and smiled, “not the
great Mike Maguire?”

“It’s true, it’s true,” said Mike. “It
was a new experience for me and I didn’t like it, not one bit. Every week
there’d be more factories closing, industries being shut down, and another
million on the dole. I was beginning to think I didn’t have the luxury of
turning down jobs from investment bankers who had paid my way through college.”

Of course, Mike didn’t mention that he
might well have been prosecuted if he’d tried to work for an investment bank,
but Katie let this pass.

“So what happened?” she asked. “What did
you do in the end?”

“It was Eugene actually,” said Mike,
“who helped me out eventually. Do you remember Eugene, from college?”

“Of course I do,” said Katie. There were
so few people who had actually featured in Katie’s life; it wasn’t hard to
remember them all.

“Well, we went into business together,
and we’ve been partners more or less ever since.”

“You and Eugene in business together –
now that I’d like to see. What do you do?”

“Don’t laugh,” said Mike. “We’ve done
well together. We started off designing computer systems for businesses – you
know, helping them get set up – and then moved into training for their staff
and maintenance for the systems we installed.”

“Please tell me Eugene does the
technical stuff,” said Katie.

“Of course,” said Mike, “although there’s
not so much of that these days, and what there is we have more than enough
people to cover it.”

“So what did you bring to this wonderful
business you have together?”

“Well, in the early days Eugene would
tell me about all these fantastic things his processors could do, but he had no
idea what possible use they could be. You can imagine him, can’t you? He was so
out there – every day he’d be coming to me with some incredible development
he’d read about, but without a clue as to what it might actually mean.”

“And that’s where you came in?”

“More or less,” said Mike. “Eugene was
often bitterly disappointed by the mundane things I’d ask him to produce. You
just had to look at any business, whether it was retail, or transport, or
manufacturing, or banking even – they were all so desperate for new systems to
help do the simplest of tasks. It’s difficult to think back now just how
hopeless people felt when it came to computers.”

“And you were there to put their minds
at rest? God help them!”

“No, that’s not fair. I’d look at their
business and suggest ways in which we could help. Eugene gave them the
confidence to hire us, because they could see he was a whiz, and I was able to
explain what Eugene could do in a language they could understand. I had to
laugh when Eugene and I were implementing systems to allow real-time banking –
you know, put your money in the account in London and withdraw it two seconds
later in Manchester. Talk about poacher turned gamekeeper.”