Donal Ryan - A Slanting of the Sun

He insisted I desisted. All scholarly activity was to cease. Pending the outcome of an investigation. I hadn’t realized, I told him, that an investigation had commenced. The students were put on notice. I had a letter issued immediately to each and every one of them, to the addresses they had supplied to us at enrolment. Agata huffed and whined and pursed her heartbreaking lips. There was shuffling and banging and shouting from downstairs yesterday, raised voices, screams even. I plugged my headphones into my record player, and reclined, and listened to Olaf Aaberg singing about Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. Olaf the Giant. Beautiful Olaf. He choked on a fishbone in a restaurant in Oslo. Ten stout men bore his pall to the flames.

A long man shouting short sentences burst in here this morning. He had men to pay. Kids to feed. He wanted what was owed to him. I felt sad for him. I told him I knew how he felt. I tried to placate him but he wouldn’t stop shouting so I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and alternated a low hum with a loud lalalalalalala. When I opened my eyes again he was sitting silent and wide-eyed, unblinking and red. He was a rugby player once, I’m fairly sure. Thickly handsome. A backward forward. Jesus, he said, and shook his head, and hulked away. He left some papers on my desk. I haven’t touched them yet. I admonished Agata for letting him in. Sorry, she said. She’s very beautiful and so I forgave her. I forgive you, I told her. Oh, okay, she said, and rolled her ice-blue eyes away from me, towards heaven, and back to her magazine.

Some manner of navvy rolled in an hour or so ago. I spotted him as he skidded to a stop, lengthways across two wheelchair spaces. DENIS O’SULLIVAN BUILDING CONTRACTOR it said on the side of his van. I rang down to Agata and said under no circumstances was she to buzz him in. I am not a stupid, she said. I watched through my privacy glass as he stood roaring at the door, stabbing the buzzer. Eventually he seemed to tire and crumple; his chin dropped chestward and he was silent and still except for a slow, rhythmic shaking of his head and a corresponding hunching and dropping of his broad shoulders. He pulled the windscreen wipers from a Mercedes that he must have supposed was mine before he left. I don’t know whose it really is. One of those chaps from the auditors next door, I suppose. A pair of bored and oily men came to the house for my car weeks ago. They attached a hook and chain to it and dragged it onto their truck-bed. Olive cried and hid from the neighbours. I’ve been driving her Micra since. It’s a slow and uncomplicated little thing. Just like Olive.

Another breaking voice on the phone. Something about the apartments we were building. Who’s we? Me and my echo. Me and my impatient ghost. I am a director of seven companies. I can’t remember all their names. Workers protesting, occupying the sites. Union goons on colliding warpaths. Subcontractors suing. All the pies my fingers were in are stale and crumbling. But still my fingers won’t come out. Something else about the horse. Lame, or dead. Olive’s voice on the phone, tear-strangled and shrill. Something else about our daughter, or our son, or a credit limit reached, or breached, or rescinded. Agata swept in and brought clarity with her. She hasn’t smiled at me in weeks. There’s a light I can move towards: a smile from her. I took four folded fifties from my wallet for her weekly ‘expenses’ and watched her perfect closed face as I handed them to her and she glanced at them and secreted them fluidly in some dark delicious fold. I ache to follow the money in there, to hide in the hills and valleys of her. Busy, busy, she said. Yes, I agreed, happily abetting her lie. She pierced me with a sigh and left, taking a random folder with her.

Pyrite, someone was saying just then. I’m not sure exactly when. Blocks crumbling like Weetabix. Class action. There was something on the radio about this the other day but Olive’s stereo emits mostly static since she left her aerial up in the carwash. Thank God, I thought, we escaped that one, at least. Now here it is, joining with the others at the mouth of my cave. A pack of red-eyed fang-bared beasts, sensing my weakening, slavering, waiting for my fire to die so that they can enter and devour me flesh and bone. Agata will tend the flames and hold them at bay. Until the firing runs out. I haven’t many fifties left.

A cave with Agata. Me in a bearskin, she in her bare skin. My head spins as my blood is summoned to its most base and necessary duty. I should eat. Olive hands me something in the mornings as I leave, pungent and seed-covered, casketed in Tupperware. I thank her and I kiss her cold cheek and I empty the box into the dog before I drive away. If Olive died this day I’d cash her in and run. I’d stop in Paris on the way east and show Agata the Place de la Concorde. I’d kiss her by that phallic rune that was heaved there from some eastern place; I’d ask her to say that she loved me. That lie from her lips would be sweeter than any everyday truth.

My man in Bangladesh is still recruiting happily. If he gets me twenty more that’s sixty grand, enough to float my canoe downriver from this creek. We know all about your agent, the plastic-shoed fellow from earlier in the week said. Your agent is a visa salesman, he said. That’s defamatory, I replied. Oh, he said, is it? I thought defamation required an absence of truth? And he slammed an A4 page of foreign words on my desk and he raised his grisly mono-brow and smiled. I’ve never seen that before, I told him, and he told me that I was not obliged to say anything and so I said nothing except Get new fucking shoes. His biro had pissed itself all over his shirt by then and he still hadn’t noticed. But the shoes were the worst of all.

A noise from across the room, near the filing cabinet. Agata let the cleaner in, then. How long ago, I wonder. A different one comes each time. Twice a week, I’m nearly sure. A man with a ratty face and hooded eyes undercut the last crowd by fifteen per cent. How is that possible? I asked him. Oh, he said, there’s loads of ways, all legal and all, like, of getting round all a them things that makes business impossible to do. His breath stank of dead things. Sure you know yourself, he said. I do, I do, I agreed pleasantly from behind my left hand, which was clamped across my nose and mouth. He didn’t seem to notice; he only had eyes for my right hand, which was signing his little contract.

The cleaner has an Aztec cast to her features. She’s young, brimming, strong-legged and squat. Shapely rump, though, and a tight black skirt. Has she an indolent husband, I wonder, in a pitiless favela , chewing the shoots of some opiate plant in a shanty’s lee, awaiting her airmailed wages? So he can swagger and swan and squander the price of her labour in some flyblown hooch-dive. Has she babies left behind, in the care of other mothers? The ache in her, the sorrow in her brown eyes. She has an extraordinary chest. Up the walls, she says, looking nervously at me, smiling into silence, as she upends my wastepaper basket into her refuse bag. A sweet and guileless affectation, projecting the vernacular of here onto that of there, a spoken palimpsest.

Olive will die soon enough. All of her womenfolk were smote early, her mother and aunts and sisters, by diseases that seem to prey on slight and nervous women. They all succumbed quietly, obligingly, and left their men to their horses and golf and secretaries. I’ll miss her shuffling presence when she’s gone. My chiselling indifference eroded her. I never loved her enough. I don’t know if I loved her at all, or how I’d know, at this remove. I can’t remember how I was then, when I was young. I could have another life as long again as this one’s been. I’ll have to become something to which squalor is suited. A writer, maybe, or a painter, sleeping on an ancient ornate bed in the corner of a wide and open garret, dissected in the day by sunbeams in which fiery dust-motes dance. Jars upon jars of brushes in water, tubes and charcoal and bottles and palettes and canvases covered in dashes and daubs to which others can ascribe meaning. Or reams of paper covered in jostling words, mugs of pens and chewed pencils, an ancient Underwood set before a sunlit wall on a table of oak, chipped and stained.