‘Ibiza,’ Droyd said authoritatively. ‘One of these days Frankie and me are goin to Ibiza, aren’t we Frankie?’
‘Ah yeah,’ Frank said.
‘One of these days,’ Droyd yawned, stretching his arms wide, ‘we’re just goin to say fuck this, we’re off, see yiz later yiz bollockses… On the beach all day drinkin cans, down the clubs at night ridin all the birds, am I right Frankie?’
‘Ah yeah,’ Frank repeated plaintively, scrunching his can and dropping it to the floor.
Droyd turned around and gave him a long, withering look. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said.
‘What?’ Frank said.
‘She’s only a bird, Frank.’
Frank maintained his expression of witless innocence.
‘You know what I’m talkin about,’ Droyd said, getting exercised. ‘Mopin around the place like a muppet.’ He rose to his feet. ‘The Three Fs, Frankie, who was it told me about them? Find ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em, who told me that?’
‘I say!’ I protested. ‘That’s my sister you’re talking about!’
‘I don’t give a monkey’s!’ Droyd responded hotly. ‘Look what she’s done to this cunt! He won’t come out with me for a fight. He won’t go out to Ziggy’s and take yokes. Do you know what he’s been
doin
every night? Do you?’
Frank froze.
‘Yeah,’ Droyd rounded on him, voice trembling, ‘you didn’t think I knew, did you, you bollocks. Lyin to me, your own mate. Sayin to me you was goin out drinkin with Niallser and Micker and Ste and Bignose Rogan. They said they haven’t seen you in months.’ He turned back to me, his acne livid on his pasty white face. ‘So last night I hide in his van to find out where he’s really been goin, which is he drives out to Killiney, and he
sits
there,
lookin
at the
sea
.’
Frank cast his eyes shamefully at the ground.
Droyd was now stamping around the room waving his arms in the air. ‘The
sea
!’ he shouted. ‘The
fuckin sea
!’
Frank did not reply: he made a pitiful sight, shrivelled up in his armchair. Droyd grabbed his jacket from the floor and pulled on his cap, then came back round to stand between Frank and the television. ‘I can’t
take
it!’ he bellowed. ‘I don’t know who ye
are
any more!’ And with that he blazed out of the apartment, slamming the door after him, and leaving Frank and me to a long and uncomfortable silence. ‘… legations of financial and political misdealing that quote boggled the mind,’ the television said, depicting a corpulent man in a grey suit battling his way through reporters outside Dublin Castle.
Frank made a minute burbling noise and pretended to wipe something out of his eye.
Let me take a moment here to concede that I am not, in the general run of things, a man noted for his sensitivity to others. Bel was forever reminding me of this – indeed, when we were younger she had turned it into a kind of party piece: whenever she had schoolfriends over, at some stage of the evening she would turn to me and ask, in a loud voice, ‘Charles, what’s empathy?’ and I, who was always meaning to look it up in the dictionary but had never quite got round to it, yet felt pressed to give some sort of reply, would say that wasn’t it when somebody yawned and it made everyone else yawn too; and her friends would all cackle maliciously, and Bel would say to them, ‘You see? It’s like living with some kind of sentient beanbag.’
So it was with intense surprise and discomfort – of the sort one experiences when, for example, one accidentally sits on a pudding – that I discovered I had, at that moment, a very good inkling of what was going through Frank’s mind; because I realized that for the last few weeks it had been going through my mind too. And so I turned to him and asked him if he was all right.
‘Ah, Charlie…’ he said brokenly, his piggy eyes shining. ‘Ah, Charlie…’
‘There, there,’ I said, patting his wrist. ‘I know.’
Smacking himself on the head, he exclaimed, ‘I’m such a thick bollocks! Thinkin we’d get back together, when I never – I never even knew why she went out with me in the first place…’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘She had lots of reasons. You’re, you know, you’re Frank. You’ve got a van. And a successful business. And you beat up those other people, the cunt and that lot.’
He shook his head mournfully. ‘If you’d seen her that last time, Charlie, the way she looked at me – like she was ashamed of me, like I was just some fuckin scumbag…’ A large, gloopy tear trickled down his nose.
‘Oh, Bel’s ashamed of everybody,’ I said. ‘She used to tell people I’d been put in the house as a government experiment – here, take this…’ I handed him a tissue, which I realized only too late was Droyd’s press release. ‘I know everything seems, you know, kiboshed. But you can’t let yourself get downhearted. Plenty of fish in the sea, and all that.’
He nodded unconvincingly, and we fell into a troubled silence, one of us now covered in inscrutable wedge-like forms. Plenty of fish in the sea: it wasn’t much consolation. But what else could I tell him? He wasn’t the first to come bumbling along and have his unthinking heart snagged on her spare angles and complexities; he wasn’t the first to imagine he had found his grand love story, only to discover that all this time he had just been reading for the part – that this was merely an audition, that he was just something she had encountered on the way to wherever it was that Bel was going.
Blast it, I thought with a sudden rush of feeling, why couldn’t she ever do things properly? It wasn’t supposed to end like this, the triangle we had built so carefully, with its delicate tensions, its vertices and oppositions. There were supposed to have been trembling lips, tears, recriminations; there were to have been stern words, dashed hopes, dramatic sweepings out of rooms. And then, as it slowly dawned on her who she was, and what grand tradition she came out of, and she understood at last that this love simply could not be – then she was supposed to be sad, and mope about the house for months on end; until the day when her kindly if frequently misunderstood brother succeeded in coaxing a smile, and she realized that the skies were still blue, and she was restored to us. She wasn’t supposed just to get bored, and walk away from the triangle altogether; she wasn’t supposed then to throw in her lot with the blighter who’d usurped the kindly brother’s room and basically seen him thrown out in the cold.
But that was exactly what she had done; and I found myself, after everything, in the same boat as the smudged figure sobbing beside me. Now, I reflected gloomily, I would have to begin all over again: I would have to find a place for myself in the life of this new character – this new Bel who remembered her lines and sang Doris Day songs and who wished in her heart of hearts to be away on a stage in London! Broadway! Already, impossible seas rolled up between us, as night lengthened and darkness percolated through the nooks and crannies of the misshapen apartment.
10
Hallowe’en in Bonetown went on well into November. With every night the destruction seemed to intensify, and scurrying back from my bus stop after work I genuinely feared for my life – although because of my outlandish appearance the revellers tended to view me as a kind of seasonal mascot, and generally received me with cheers and thumbs up.
Finally, around the middle of the month, the violence reached its peak. I remember I had double-locked the doors, and was sitting with Frank trying to watch the news. But it was nearly impossible to make anything out, what with the rioting going on outside our window. Glass was being broken like it was going out of fashion; flats were pelted with eggs, toilet rolls, homemade fertilizer bombs; theoretically unstealable things – telephone poles, skips, a suite of leatherette furniture – were duly stolen and added to the pyre that climbed and blazed ever-higher like a beacon marking the end of the world.
It was the morning after that we found the wheelchair for Bel’s play. It was just sitting there on the kerb, with no one in sight who might have been able to explain where it had come from, or who had been occupying it previous to last night – as though it had been left there especially for us. Although it was surrounded by debris, torn metal, bits of cat, the wheelchair was quite intact: pristine, in fact, in a way that seemed somehow wrong and unsettling even before we realized what was missing from the scene. The box and blankets were no longer on the doorstep. Homeless Kenny, who had remained camped outside the house through the worst of the hostilities, was gone – vanished as mysteriously as the wheelchair had appeared, as if in someone’s idea of a fair swap; with no clue as to what had happened, except that to his small defiant graffito had been added a deathly black H.
‘“Harm the Homeless,”’ Droyd read out.
‘I wonder where he went,’ I said, affecting a nonchalance I did not feel.
‘Maybe he went to the park for the night,’ Frank said.
‘Maybe he went to a hotel,’ Droyd said, ‘or he found somewhere proper to live.’
But we knew that he hadn’t: or why would we have stopped talking, and why would everything have seemed so mortally still as we hoisted the wheelchair on our shoulders and carried it up the stairs.
For days to follow it sat in the corner, gleaming at me in a way I didn’t care for. Finally I asked Frank when he was going to get rid of it. He mumbled something about how he’d been meaning to deliver it only he’d had a very busy week. This was an untruth, as for most of the week he’d been sitting around the apartment snuffling, and I told him so. He squirmed about unhappily. ‘I don’t want to go out there on me own, Charlie.’
‘Out where? Out to Amaurot? Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, hanging his head. ‘I just don’t.’
‘That’s absurd,’ I told him.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed pathetically, and then, lighting up: ‘Here, you could come out with me.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you could give me a hand, like.’
Now it was my turn to prevaricate. My plan for some time had been not to return to Amaurot until I had made a success of my life. I didn’t want to go back now, in my current straitened circumstances, and have Mother going I-told-you-so and those hateful actors gloating at me – and I didn’t think I could bear to witness Bel embarked on yet another ill-conceived romance, with all that oleaginous stroking and canoodling. But there really was something sinister about that wheelchair, and in the end I gave in.
Frank barely said a word the whole way out. His knuckles bulged whitely on the wheel, and I confess that I too felt a certain frisson as we left the city for the coast road. Wind ruffled in through the broad slat of the open window; buildings gave way to trees, flicking past match-pale; to our left the sea surged introspectively in and out, like a grey ghost pacing its corridor. And now here was the iron gate, and the old horse chestnut with the scar where Father had hit it late one night, from which a covey of pigeons broke as Frank took us up the bumpy driveway.
‘Looks well, the old place,’ he said woodenly, as the roof and upper floors of Amaurot began to peep over the trees.
‘Mmm…’ It seemed bigger than I remembered: I suppose because of spending so much time in Bonetown, in that cramped apartment. The closer we got, the higher the walls seemed to tower, the heavier the house’s shadow bore down on us and the rusty white van… And then, from behind us, came a cheery
Parp! Parp!
‘What the blazes…?’
‘Looks like someone’s drivin round that old banger of your dad’s, Charlie.’
‘Thank you, I can see that.’ The bottle-green Mercedes was out on the lawn, white-blue smoke pouring merrily from the exhaust pipe as it trundled round in low-speed circles. ‘What does he think he’s doing?’
‘Hello there! Hi there! Hythloday!’ We were being saluted by a figure in a tweed cap and old-fashioned leather motoring goggles.
‘It’s that ponce Harry,’ Frank said darkly.
‘Just ignore him,’ I said. ‘That oik – no one’s taken that car out in twenty years. If it explodes under him, it’ll be too good for him.’ Balefully I sat back in my seat. ‘Taking liberties like that. And who does he think he is in those ridiculous goggles, Toad of Toad Hall?’
Lapsing into a bad-tempered silence, we drove on and pulled up outside the portico, where we got out, took the wheelchair from the back of the van and set it down by the steps. I had lost my house-keys some weeks ago down the back of Frank’s sofa, which was the Bermuda Triangle of the apartment; however, if memory served, Mrs P kept a spare set down here under the laburnum… I was casting about on my hands and knees when I heard the engine restart behind me. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. Frank had climbed back behind the wheel of the van. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’
‘Ah no, Charlie,’ bobbing his head evasively, ‘no, better get back to the old work –’
‘But it’s Sunday,’ I protested. ‘Don’t you want a cup of tea, even?’
‘No, I just remembered this thing I have to do…’
‘Well, can’t it wait a minute? We can’t just leave the damned wheelchair sitting there, help me carry it inside.’ He gunned the motor, drowning me out, and with a fugitive expression began to reverse the van and turn back down the driveway. ‘For heaven’s sake, she’s not going to bite you!’ I called after him, to no avail. ‘How am I supposed to get home?’ Too late: the indicator blinked and the van nosed out on to the road. For a moment I wished that I had gone back with him
Cursing him, I went back to my search for the keys. I was still searching when the elderly Mercedes came chugging up a moment later.
‘Hey there, Charles,’ Harry said, dismounting. ‘Long time no see.’
‘There’s a reason for that, you oik,’ I muttered under my breath.
‘What’s that?’
I straightened up and shot him a cold, reproving look. His hair was more annoying than ever, but he seemed to have traded in his revolutionary attire: instead of combat trousers he was wearing pantaloons of a robust tweed, and the tedious peasant jacket had been replaced by a waistcoat with an appalling Aztec motif. ‘What do you think you’re doing, driving that car around?’ I said.
‘Just thought I’d take it for a spin,’ he said mildly. ‘Seems a shame to keep a beautiful machine like that cooped up in a stuffy old garage.’
‘That car is a museum piece,’ I said. ‘It is not meant to be driven.’
‘Oh, come on!’ he laughed. ‘Of course it is. That’s what cars are for, not sitting around under a tarpaulin.’ He ran a gloved hand affectionately over the bottle-green flank. ‘It still runs like a dream. All it needed was a little tinkering.’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said in a tight voice. ‘I’m telling you now that that car is a priceless antique, and I would prefer if it were left alone.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he shrugged.
I turned my back on him and resumed my search beneath the flowerpot.
‘You know, if you’re looking for the keys, we don’t keep them there any more,’ he said.
Slowly, I rose again to my feet, clenching my teeth.
‘Don’t worry, though, I can let you in. But hey – you haven’t met the new inmates, have you?’
‘What, more Disadvantaged?’ I said witheringly.
‘Stay there a second.’ He jogged over to the undergrowth by the garage, and started making a clucking noise.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I’m in rather a hurry –’ That is, I began to say it; but then, out of the bushes, strutted the peacocks, and my jaw dropped.
They were barely recognizable as the vermin-infested creatures I had left behind: in fact, I don’t think they had ever looked so handsome. Every vein of their nacreous feathers shone, every eye on their fanned tails glistered; and running about and cheeping in front of them were what appeared to be small, very mobile balls of dust.
‘What,’ I said incredulously, ‘you got new ones?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘Rosa had them last week – we call the taller one Rosa, after Rosa Luxemburg?’
‘She never did that before,’ I said, scrutinizing the peacock in question.
‘Well, I thought when I got here they looked a bit down, so I changed their diet a little, fixed up their coop – I used to work with birds when I lived in Guatemala. I guess I must have put them in the mood for love, because next thing you know Rosa has these two little bundles of joy, little Che and Chavez.’
What was he doing to my house?
‘Yes, well, you must be very proud,’ I said. ‘Look, if you wouldn’t mind letting me in now –’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. He bounded up the steps and turned his key in the lock, then bounded down again to help me carry in the wheelchair. We set it down inside the door. I looked at him. He smiled at me gormlessly.
‘I can manage from here,’ I told him.
‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘See you later, then.’
He ambled back down to the lawn; for a moment I stood there in the threshold, contemplating the hallway. Everything appeared to be just as I had left it: there was the poinsettia, there was the Brancusi, there the glass frieze of Actaeon threw its queer curlicues of light on to the floor. And yet in some unaccountable way it felt different – unconvincing, almost, that curious sense of dissonance one gets when one finally visits a place seen many times in photographs. Then, as though specifically to allay these misgivings, Mrs P bustled out of the kitchen with a tray of butterfly cakes and a carafe of orange juice.
‘Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘Is it really you? Please, you will take a butterfly cake?’
‘Thanks,’ I said. This was a bit more like it.
‘How long you have waited to come to see me?’ she scolded. ‘Why have you waited so long?’
‘Oh, you know how it is,’ I said carelessly. ‘How’s things? How is the old place?’
‘Ay, Master Charles, we miss you very much,’ she sighed, moving behind me to take my coat. ‘Now everyone is working, everything is rush rush, nobody has time to sit, enjoy a nice meal… But you too, Master Charles, you are important too, eh? Now that you work, make money…’
‘Not
that
important,’ I assured her, as she folded the coat over her forearm and brought it away to the cloakroom. There was a creak on the stairs behind me. I looked around – and with a little kick of exhilaration saw Bel coming into view.
‘Charles!’ she exclaimed.
No, wait, it wasn’t Bel, it was Mirela wearing Bel’s silver kimono: I felt my heart back up, as if it had taken a wrong turn down a one-way street –
‘My goodness, how are you?’
‘What?’ I said distractedly, trying not to look at the shapely halfmoon of flesh disclosed by the aperture of her kimono as she leaned out over the banister. ‘Oh – tolerably well, tolerably well…’
‘I wish I knew you were coming,’ she said, sashaying down the intervening steps. ‘You catch me looking like this. Why haven’t you come to visit before? Did you forget about us?’
‘Oh,’ I croaked, ‘you know…’
‘I suppose your new life is much more exciting. But couldn’t you have called me, at least?’
I should explain that I had given considerable thought before coming out here as to what strategy to adopt if, as was likely, I ran into Mirela. In the end I’d decided against making any direct accusations as regarded her negligence or general heartlessness, in favour of a tone of polite but implacable
froideur
. However, everything already seemed to be getting confused; for she – paused just above me with her hand resting on the stair-rail like the flower of some exquisite vine – seemed adamant that it was
I
who had neglected
her
. ‘I thought we had such a good talk that night after the play,’ she said. ‘But then you were just gone. You didn’t even say goodbye.’
I could only gape. Had I got everything back to front? Had she been pining for me all this time?
‘You look well, Charles,’ she said softly, coming down on to the second-to-last step.
‘They changed my bandages,’ I whispered.
Who knows what might have happened had she been allowed to reach the bottom of the stairs. But without warning, our idyll was shattered – by Mrs P, who arrived back from the cloakroom and took up a stance behind me, from which she launched into a wordy and by the sounds of it highly critical speech in Bosnian.
‘Oh Mama, speak English, can’t you?’ Mirela shouted. This served only to increase the volume of the harangue. ‘Why can’t one of the boys do it? They’re just sitting in there playing
backgammon
–’
Mrs P folded her arms and eyed her daughter squarely; and after a moment’s token resistance, Mirela buckled. ‘All right, all right, in case anyone should forget my mother is the
maid
.’ She turned to me entreatingly. ‘Sorry, Charles. But maybe we’ll have a chance later to catch up,’ and I felt her hand slide coolly over mine to squeeze my fingers, before she hoisted her head and marched down the hallway, her prosthesis clattering defiance on the parquet as she went.
‘See what I mean?’ Mrs P expostulated beside me. ‘Everybody so important!’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly, caressing the fingers of the lucky hand. ‘Yes…’
Mrs P went to pick up her tray of cakes. ‘I must go and bring these to the others. Master Charles, you have eaten lunch?’