Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

The silence seemed to deepen; the punters buried themselves guiltily in their pints. I couldn’t take any more. I staggered away to the bar, squeezed in beside a silver-haired gent, and with the small sum of money that was now all we had left, ordered myself a triple whiskey. So much for destiny, I thought bitterly; so much for giving all the heart. The world had made suckers of us again. Cousin Benny’s words kept circling through my head: we were cunts, we would always be cunts.

A gasp went up at the window for some fresh outrage on the track. I took a slug from the glass without looking round, wincing pleasurably at the sour familiar kick. To hell with the damned race. I had enough whiskey here to get stinking drunk. At least when I was drunk I knew where I stood: and I didn’t need anybody’s directions to get there. To hell with Frank, and the lousy dinner party; to hell with Bel too. Let her leave if she wanted to leave, let her write off the one person who actually cared about her, who didn’t think of her as an eternal outpatient with impossible dreams…

The punters roared in anguish.

‘Sounds like someone’s taking a beating,’ the silver-haired gent beside me remarked.

‘Someone’s always taking a beating,’ I muttered without looking up.

‘I suppose that’s true,’ the gent agreed.

I turned around. The smoke was making it hard to see, and the room kept spinning, but when I squinted I could make out a well-cut if somewhat vieux jeu worsted suit and a pair of wire-frame spectacles. I wondered what he was doing here with this rabble. He motioned the bargirl to refill our glasses and, as if in answer to my question, said: ‘Still, one has to take one’s chances, doesn’t one?’

‘I don’t see why,’ I said, clinking my ice cubes.

‘Come on, Charles,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You know why.’

The room seemed to lurch, and a sweltering buzz rose up from my toes to engulf me. At that moment the crowd roared again and the punters at the bar rushed over to the window. I found myself thrown forward: standing on tiptoes, I peered blearily over the mass of heads.

It appeared that Celtic Tiger, having vanquished his foe, had not gone on and finished the race like a sensible dog, but instead had turned his attentions on the dogs grouped miserably together a hundred yards behind.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ the crowd were crying, clutching their heads as the cowardly dogs turned tail and fled with Celtic Tiger now in hot pursuit. ‘The other way, you prick! Run the other way!’

‘Too much PCP,’ a whiskery geezer with defeated eyes observed beside me.

But that was not all. At the other end of the track — far away from where the stewards were trying to fend off Celtic Tiger with a steel pole — An Evening of Long Goodbyes was beginning to stir. At first no one noticed — everyone was too busy trying to convince the renegade favourite to rejoin the race — but then a lone voice cried out, ‘Hey! That thick dog’s not dead yet!’

There was a pause and then a collective rustling, as people checked the number in the programme: and then, sporadically, from one or two points in the crowd, the shouts came: ‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes! An Evening of Long Goodbyes!’

The dog’s tail thumped once, twice against the ground.

Seeing this, more voices joined in. The shouts grew louder. ‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes! An Evening of Long Goodbyes!’

And slowly, painfully slowly, the dog picked himself up, until, on legs as frail and ungainly as a newborn calf’s, rain pasting his fur to his bony head, he stood there blinking at us in wonderment.

The clamour was deafening. Men shouted and pummelled the glass and stamped their feet. ‘That’s it!’ they bellowed. ‘Go on, you cunt! Go on, Goodbyes!’ Everyone was of one voice, as if the only reason any of us were there was to cheer on this chewed and rather mangy-looking dog, which seemed to feed on these waves of furious noise and energy and — as the cheering grew to a roar, as Celtic Tiger was ushered into a cage by two men with cattle prods — now wagged his tail, and began to trot towards the finishing line.

‘ Sprezzatura ,’ a voice in my ear said; and I looked round to see, in the midst of the churning punters and the pillars of smoke, a familiar grey emanation. ‘What?’ I said faintly. He smiled hermetically, and pointed out the window; and turning, I saw the rainy stadium filled with men in top hats and tails, with black dicky bows and carnations in their buttonholes, cheering on the dog they’d bet against as the voice behind me mused, ‘What was it Oscar used to say? In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat .’

I spun round — there was so much I wanted to ask him, there were so many things I didn’t understand. ‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘Come back!’ But he was already halfway to the door, hoisting on to his head, as he melted into the throng, what appeared to be a giant sombrero… And now, after a series of dramatic collapses, An Evening of Long Goodbyes finally hauled his carcass over the line, and the place went crazy. It was as if we had just won a war. People whooped and sang; they tore up their losing stubs and threw them in the air like confetti. Frank appeared, laughing, and caught me in a bear hug. ‘We done it, Charlie!’ he exclaimed. ‘We done it!’

Someone must have overheard him, because before I could correct his grammar, we were picked up and borne along on a sea of strangers’ hands to the betting hatch, where, with the crowd amassed behind us, the clerk hastily agreed that it would be poor form to declare the race forfeit, and paid out our winnings on the spot. Everybody in the bar applauded; Frank asked if anybody wanted a drink, and it turned out that most people did; and everything was so breathless and euphoric that it took me a while to pinpoint that irritating bleeping noise. Finally I realized it was Bel’s phone. I had brought it along to give back to her tonight. It appeared to be having some kind of an episode. I pressed some buttons to make it stop and it started talking to me — a girl’s voice, someone looking for Bel.

‘She’s not here,’ I shouted, putting a finger in one ear. ‘She’s at home.’

‘I can’t get through to her at home,’ the girl said.

‘They’re having a dinner thing,’ I said.

‘Oh. Well, can you pass on a message?’ The girl had a husky, rasping voice, as if she made a regular thing of smoking too many cigarettes. ‘Will you tell her Jessica wants her to —’

‘Wait, you’re Jessica?’ I interjected.

‘Why, does my fame precede me?’

‘It most certainly does,’ I averred. ‘I’d like to know what you mean, running off with my sister.’

‘I wasn’t aware I was running off with anyone,’ the girl said. ‘Who is this, anyway?’

‘It’s Charles,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Bel told me about you,’ she added, rather pointedly.

‘That’s neither here nor there,’ I said. ‘The fact is, Bel is clearly not fit for — what did you mean by that last remark? What did she say about me?’

‘All sorts of things,’ Jessica said light-headedly, as if she had never until now believed they could be true.

‘Well, be that as it may,’ I muttered uncomfortably. ‘The thing about Bel is —’

‘Aren’t you going to this dinner?’ she interrupted. ‘Or have you been blacklisted?’

‘Yes, I am going,’ I snapped. ‘Look, just give me your damned message, will you?’

‘Certainly,’ she said primly. She told me that their flight was at seven, so would Bel get a taxi for four, and pick her up on the way? I said I would pass this on; there was a pause, and just as I was about to look for the off button, the voice came again: ‘Charles?’