But she
did
crash the car, I said, confused. What was the point of setting up such an elaborate plan, doing all that groundwork, and then at the last minute abandoning it in favour of a crash – inflicting all that chaos on us, all that pain?
‘How’s the theatre?’ she asked lightly, suddenly, changing the subject. ‘How’s Harry and Mirela and all those plans for Amaurot?’
I was rather thrown for a moment. Because the theatre was gone, of course. The plans for Amaurot – the refurbishment, the statues, the marriage of art and commerce, Harry and Mirela’s engagement – all of these things had been destroyed along with the bottle-green Mercedes. But only then did it dawn on me that this could have been deliberate: that the crash could have been a deliberate act of sabotage, severing the house from its future and leaving it in darkness as surely as if someone had cut the power; or a stay of execution, whichever way you chose to see it. I kept quiet as this thought established itself, and all my other thoughts reordered themselves around it. Then I said, ‘Everyone’s fine. Everyone’s right as rain.’
I got to my feet, and walked over to the warehouse door. ‘What’s it like over there, Bel?’
‘You’d like it,’ she said. ‘Everybody drinks a lot of vodka.’ She laughed, and I laughed too, cradling the phone against my jaw and scanning the car park outside: because in the movie of
our
lives, that’s surely how the scene would play; I’d see her looking at me from a telephone kiosk mere yards away…
‘Are you ever coming home? May I remind you there’s no place like home?’
‘Maybe someday,’ she said. ‘Or maybe someday you’ll come over here. But I ought to go now. Let you get back to your work.’
‘Well… thanks for calling.’ I turned back inside, to the perspex roof, the silently hanging garments.
‘My pleasure.’
‘Happy New Year, old thing.’
‘Happy New Year, Charles.’
Or maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. Maybe that was just a silly fantasy I made up myself; maybe we had already received a very nice letter from a former school-friend of Bel’s who had waited for Bel to come that night, who had rung the house but not been able to get through and in a panic had taken a taxi out to the airport herself, had taken the plane alone and arrived alone in a resort-town in Russia where the news was waiting for her, where she watched for a week as a blizzard raged outside her window until the roads were clear enough so she could turn around and come home again, too late though, too late for the funeral. Or maybe it was just a wrong number on the phone that time, or it was Frank, calling to see if I wanted him to pick me up a kebab when he and Droyd were down at the kebab shop, or someone else, Patsy Olé for instance, asking if I’d like to meet up later on.
You can take the alternative if you want, with the endless dreams of seaweed-braided arms, the countless glimpses of her in clouds, billboards, the faces of strangers. But this one is the version I prefer: the one where she lies awake at night, drawing up her plans; where she is set free from her life, from her unspellable name, and spirited away; into the MacGillycuddian universe, where people disappear only to resurface elsewhere, with French accents and false moustaches, where everything is constantly changing and nobody ever dies.
‘Why do they call it being on your uppers? Surely uppers ought to be good things. Upper class. Upper hand. Surely you’re on your downers, if you have no money.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Patsy and I were walking along the strand behind the warehouse. It was late and impossibly cold, and the night scrolled up over the sea blue and starry like cheap paper scenery. Patsy was still wearing her foam antlers from work. She had come back from her Grand Tour to find the family embroiled in one of those ghastly tribunals; her father was up in Dublin Castle practically every week, answering questions about these supposed payments, and meetings he’d had three or four
years
ago, how was he supposed to remember that? ‘And in the meantime all the accounts have been frozen. So here I am, serving coffee and damned panini to idiots.’
‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘It is. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ She pulled on her cigarette. ‘Antlers, Charles. What kind of despot
forces
a person to wear antlers? In Nazi Germany they didn’t make people wear antlers. Someone ought to write to Amnesty International.’
‘I think they’re rather deer.’
‘Charles darling.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I expect it’ll blow over soon enough, though,’ she said, exhaling a long plume of smoke. ‘I mean that’s the beauty of white-collar crime, isn’t it? Nobody really minds.’
‘It must be dreadfully hard on you, all the same,’ I said gently.
She clapped her hands together meditatively. ‘I know Daddy’s no saint,’ she said. ‘But Charles, who is? You have to get your hands dirty if you want to succeed in life, don’t you? And anyway, do you know what these tribunal lawyers get paid? They get paid
heaps
more than Daddy paid himself. Someone should haul
them
up in front of some old judge.’ She sighed. ‘It’s so wretchedly tiresome. All Daddy seems to do any more is run around the house looking for bits of paper and burning them in the back garden. You should have seen our Hallowe’en bonfire this year, Charles. It was like the Towering Inferno.
And
he’s taken my credit cards.’ She flicked her cigarette out to the sea. ‘It’s all so un
speak
ably tiresome,’ she said, narrowing her eyes in judgement of the whole of civilization.
We walked on a little further. Somewhere along the way, her hand found its way into mine, and we swung them back and forth against the cold, like children.
‘What about you?’ She gave me a sidelong glance.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘My heart will go on, I suppose.’
She gazed reflectively at the misty banks of rain blowing in from the sea. ‘It’s this damn country,’ she said. ‘How’s a person supposed to live in a country where it rains all the time?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe Hoyland has the right idea – I saw Hoyland the other day, was I telling you?
He
thinks we should all just give up on this ghastly place. Move to some tropical island, and start our own superior society there. You know, we could have a beehive, and a polo ground and so forth.’
‘
Nine bean-rows will I have there
,’ I recited absently, ‘
a hive for the honey-bee
…’
‘What?’
‘Oh, sorry. Yeats. Sorry. Had sort of a similar notion, back in the 1900s. Couldn’t stand this place. Had this idea of a magical mystical Ireland, wanted everyone to come along. Utopian sort of a thing. Didn’t work, needless to say. Never does.’
‘You’d have to get someone in to clean, obviously…’ Patsy said thoughtfully, stroking her chin; then throwing her hands up, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, it’s all perfectly hopeless!’
A billboard on the road above overlooked the strand. It showed a beautiful girl in ragged, dusty clothes. Her face was stained with grime and tears; she stared out impassionedly from the rubble of a bombed-out city. CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT IT? the slogan read at the bottom of the billboard, with the Telsinor logo in the right-hand corner. I used to know that girl, I said to Patsy.
The wind blew; the water crashed. The headlands to the east and west threw their arms out around the sea, as if to hold in place something that really, really wanted to go. Like a photograph, I thought: like those pictures in the yearbooks, the girls in their plaits and pony-tails who had stared out at my friends and me as we huddled round behind the cricket pavilion; who were embarked on digressions of their own now, but would remain with us, to be guessed at and sighed over, in the shape of that split-second before the shutter fell; before the shutter fell and the camera clicked, and everybody laughed and clambered over each other, and giggled off into the next lost frame of their lives, and the next, and the next.