Laura’s pyjamaed silhouette appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you doing up?’ she said. ‘You should go to bed, there’s no point both of you worrying.’
‘I’m not worrying about Droyd,’ I scowled.
‘You’re not?’ she said, walking past me to the refrigerator.
‘If you ask me, we should be counting our blessings.’ I spoke
sotto voce
so Frank wouldn’t hear. ‘It takes a particularly low sort of a blackguard to steal a man’s penny jar.’
‘Are you worried about Bel?’ She opened the refrigerator door and a neat rectangle of light unfolded over her face like a blank page. I began to reply and stopped. Somehow it had slipped my mind how simply, how matter-of-factly lovely she was; and for an instant I was seized by the old hope that I could blink my eyes and transport the two of us to another, less contrary world, a world that could fit that kind of beauty. ‘You should be glad about it,’ she said, pouring a glass of lactose-free chocolate milk. ‘It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Like she’s so into it, all that acting stuff.’
‘I am glad,’ I said unconvincingly, then trailed off and restarted suddenly: ‘I say – do you remember a girl in your class by the name of Kiddon? Jessica Kiddon?’
Laura mulled this over, reciting the name under her breath. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Who’s she?’
‘She’s the girl Bel’s supposed to be going off to Yalta with,’ I said, frowning. ‘
Apparently
she was in Bel’s class. But I don’t recall seeing her in any of the yearbooks.’
‘It’s a big school, though, Charles. Like who could possibly remember a whole yearbook?’
‘Mmm.’ I made an ambiguous, throat-clearing noise.
‘But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Like I’m sure she’ll be totally fine.’
‘Mmm,’ I said again, not intending for it to sound quite as bleak as it did. She drifted behind me and placed her hand on my neck. ‘Charles,’ she said gently, ‘did you ever hear that thing, if you love somebody, set them free? It was in that ad for ice cream? With the talking bear?’
Her fingers stroked my nape; I hung my head, and shut my eyes. The kitchen was filled with the rumble of the rain against the glass.
‘It’s like someone’s angry with us,’ she said, as if to herself. Then she snapped her fingers and spun back round to me. ‘I’ve finally realized who you look like!’ she said.
‘What?’ I said, startled.
‘Without your bandages – it’s been driving me mad since you came back from the hospital. It’s that painting, you look just like that painting in your house.’
‘What painting?’ I said. ‘There’s lots of paintings.’
‘You know, that one of that guy. The one in the hallway. You look just like it.’ She laughed again, pleased with this observation, then cut herself short as Frank huffed into the room. He had a frazzled, wild-eyed, vaguely prehistoric look about him, rather like one of those cavemen that they find from time to time encased in ice.
‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘we have to do something.’
I thought this meant we were finally going to contact the authorities, and I began drawing up a list of stolen properties. But it wasn’t what he meant. He was proposing that we ourselves go and out and look for Droyd.
‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.
‘We can’t just leave him out there,’ he said. ‘We can’t just leave the little feller out there roamin the streets, in the rain and the cold.’
I protested; I pointed out that there was every reason why we should leave him roaming the streets, given that he had lied to us and misled us and stolen three months of rent and basically abrogated the social contract, not to mention the whole penny jar business –
‘Will you forget about the fuckin penny jar!’ Frank exclaimed. ‘Who else is goin to look for him if we don’t look? No one, that’s who. We have to find him, or – or before you know it they’ll sling him back in jail!’
There had been four years’ worth of pennies in that jar; but Frank was insistent, and eventually I caved in and agreed to help, if only because it was obvious that he had no idea how to organize a search. He seemed to think you could just go out and wander around. I told him that if there were to be any point to this at all, we had to be methodical and exhaustive. The last sighting of Droyd had been in Christchurch, and I surmised that he was probably still in the city, it being more plentiful in terms of old ladies and unwary tourists. The obvious strategy was to fan out over the centre, but as there were only the two of us, we decided to take a side each: I the area south of the Liffey, and Frank the north, reconvening at lunchtime to compare notes. We left at first light.
The rain was still coming down, dripping from the fairy lights strung between the lamp-posts, from the tinsel and the Japanese lanterns, making the streets a carnival of jostling umbrellas. In spite of the hour and the weather, great throngs of people were pouring up and down the thoroughfare, laden with bags of Christmas shopping. The windows of the department stores glittered with kitchenware, electronic doodads, gorgeous mannequins swathed in opulent fabrics. The atmosphere was so dizzy and unreal that I began to get rather disorientated and to forget who I was looking for. I kept seeing Bel’s face everywhere; I kept thinking that these people hurrying down the Royal Hibernian Way must be rushing to get ready for tonight, and picturing my dinner jacket waiting for me on the back of the bedroom door.
Still, by one o’clock, when I met Frank as arranged by the statue of that woman with the fish cart and the décolletage, I was able to tell him categorically between mouthfuls of my crêpe that having comprehensively covered the southern metropolitan area I could confirm that Droyd was definitely not staying in the Conrad, the Westbury or either of the Jury’s Inns, and that he hadn’t been in Tie Rack all morning. Frank turned a funny colour when I told him this. I wondered if he was hungry and I asked him if he wanted some of my crêpe.
‘Tie Rack?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why the fuck would he be in Tie Rack?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought he might spend the money on a tie.’ Tie Rack struck me as the sort of place someone like Droyd would buy his ties.
At this point the strain of it all became too much for Frank. He started going berserk. His speech does not bear repeating here: suffice to say it was fuck this and fuck that, cunt this and cunt that, suddenly everybody was a cunt – but the general gist of it was that I must have been living with my eyes closed for the last three months if I thought any cunt in Bonetown ever had call to wear a tie except when they were up in court, or would ever in their entire lives get past the door of the Westbury, or had anything at all to do with any of that stuff; that Droyd had spent the money on heroin, that all there was to spend it on in Bonetown was heroin – ‘Heroin, Charlie!’ he yelled. ‘Heroin! The whole fuckin place runs on heroin!’
I didn’t reply. People were beginning to stare. He stopped waving his arms about, and looked me full in the eye, quivering with anger. Then he took my crêpe and threw it in the dustbin. ‘Come on,’ he said, stomping off in the direction I had just come from.
The route we took can’t have varied much, cartographically speaking, from my original exhaustive search earlier on: yet it seemed like another city, existing alongside the glossy one I knew. This city was composed of dead ends and blind alleys and back streets full of garbage bags, and had its own cast of inhabitants, who lived in a permanent stench of urine and decay and had to be nudged to life with a toe before one could question them as to Droyd’s whereabouts. Sometimes they were too intoxicated to speak; sometimes they tried to make up stories in the hope of getting some change. Sometimes they didn’t respond to the toe, and we would have to roll them over and squint at their grubby faces till we were sure they weren’t him. The sheer volume of these wretched people was incredible. And as we made our way back down Grafton Street, I realized that they were here too, had been here all along, living their heroiny lives: slumped by cash machines, lurking in suspicious-looking groups around dustbins, making lunatic speeches to office workers who scurried by pretending not to hear, or simply ghosting wall-eyed through the crowd, with beakers from McDonald’s and misspelled cardboard signs.
It was slow, painful work. As the day dragged on, and yet another pile of garbage bags disclosed yet another human form, it started to seem as if there could hardly be anyone left who hadn’t, in some fashion, fallen through the cracks; and the city began to take on the appearance of a newspaper photo, when you look at it close up and at some unannounced point the image gives way, leaving you with a collection of unsignifying dots in a vast empty space; so much space that you forget there had ever been a picture at all. ‘He’s not here,’ Frank said bleakly.
We trudged down the quays and caught the bus back to Bonetown. We sat on the top deck. Frank stared straight ahead, making the small-animal noises he made when he was picking his Lottery numbers.
Laura had taken the day off work to stay in the apartment in case Droyd reappeared. But the only contact had been from the landlord. ‘I couldn’t really understand what he was saying,’ she said. ‘But he was really angry. He kept going on about how no city slicker was going to make a laugh of him.’
‘Ah fuck,’ Frank said, collapsing into his armchair. ‘Ah fuck.’
‘If only I could get my deposit back from that stupid estate agent!’ Laura said. ‘She won’t give it back to me, Frank!’
‘That’s it,’ Frank said. ‘That’s it. We’re going to be fucked out.’
I shook my head fatalistically. ‘
Plus ça change
,’ I said, ‘
plus c’est la même chose
.’
‘Charlie, for once could you not talk French?’
‘Of course,’ I said understandingly. ‘Of course.’
There was clearly nothing more I could do here, and time was moving on. I excused myself quietly, leaving him sitting in his armchair with the vacant air of a man under hypnosis; I went to my bedroom and began to change into my evening wear. I had just run into the usual difficulties with my bow tie when there was a knock at the door. It was Frank, holding a length of wood.
‘I know where he is,’ he said.
‘You do?’ I said, undoing the knot again. ‘I say, Laura, you couldn’t give me hand with this, could you?’
‘He’s in Cousin Benny’s,’ Frank said. ‘I know it. It’s the only place left he could be.’
‘Ah yes, the infamous Cousin Benny.’ Laura pushed up my chin and adjusted the collar. ‘Well, give him my best if you see him, tell him not to worry about the, the mugging –’
‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘I need you to come with me.’
‘Me?’ I said.
‘I can’t go down there on me own. It’s down the bad end. I need reinforcements.’
‘Well, I’d love to help you, old man, but the fact is I
can’t
, I mean I’ve got a dinner party to go to and Mother’ll have conniptions if I’m late, I mean it’s bad enough I’m not bringing a date…’ I tailed off feebly. Damn it, what did he want me there for? Didn’t he know my track record in fisticuffs? How could there possibly be a bad end of Bonetown? Laura’s cool green eyes looked into mine as she folded the tie over and back on itself.
‘Hell,’ I said faintly.
‘Right,’ he bounded purposefully out the door. Laura tied the tie tight and I felt something pressed into my hand. It was the stringless Dunlop tennis racket. ‘Good luck,’ she said, and planted a kiss on my cheek.
We ran down the street with our jackets over our heads, dancing between ravines full of muddy water, over petrol rainbows and a moonscape of scorched earth, until we came to a low concrete bunker. The steel shutters had been covered with many layers of graffiti; the pitted ground outside was littered with cigarette ends and broken needles. I had been here before.
‘We’re going in?’ I said. ‘Into the Coachman?’
Frank turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Charlie, I want you to just follow me and do exactly what I tell you, right?’
‘Right,’ I squeaked. I gripped my tennis racket a little tighter. ‘Fine. Well. Once more unto the breach, eh, old chap…’
‘And don’t say anythin either, all right?’
We went through the door, which didn’t immediately seem to make any difference to the volume of water falling on our heads. A dozen pairs of hostile eyes fell on us. I looked around dumbstruck. It was the sort of place Egon Ronay must have nightmares about: warped linoleum on the floor, too-bright lights, no furniture to speak of other than rickety stools and picnic tables marked Dept of Forestry. At the bar were sitting six men with literally no foreheads, one of whom bared his teeth at us.
‘All right?’ Frank said. No one spoke. Casually, Frank passed his plank from one hand to the other and we began to sidestep along the wall, as though skirting the rim of a volcano. From the bar, the eyes tracked us, but the men did not move. At last we reached a door marked Gents and pushed through. I heaved a sigh of relief and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was an indescribably putrid stench that grew worse and worse as we walked along a narrow corridor and arrived at a steel door with a grille set at eye-level. With an almighty clanging and booming, Frank started beating it with his plank, until the grille slid back to reveal a pair of moist black eyes.
‘Yes?’ a voice said.
‘We’re here for Droyd,’ Frank growled.
‘Francy!’ the voice said. ‘Is it yourself? Wait till I get these –’ The grille slid shut again, and a complex series of unlocking noises ensued. At last the door swung open. We were greeted by a thin man in his forties, with lank hair and bad skin and the general appearance of having recently taken part in an oil slick. Cigarettes of unequal length burned between the middle fingers of his right hand. ‘Long time no see, Francy.’ He nodded at me. ‘Who’s this, your butler?’
‘We’re here for Droyd,’ Frank said before I could set him straight.
‘Droyd, eh?’ Cousin Benny stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Haven’t seen him. Sorry.’
‘He ran off with three months’ rent.’ Frank lifted the plank threateningly. ‘I know you been sellin him gear,’ he said.
Cousin Benny seemed to find this amusing. ‘Have you not heard?’ he said. ‘Droyd’s gone straight. Clean as a whistle.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘No loyalty, these kids. Take the best years of your life, then they just chuck you aside…’