Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I couldn’t get out to her as often as I should have liked, and I did worry about her. I rang the Cedars once, to inquire about the possibility of having her return there, just for a short while; but there had been some sort of trouble with the last cheque, so I let the matter drop.

Thus I passed my new life. My work hours meant that I rarely had to speak to people, and the quiet order of it suited me; it was like swimming underwater, through the ruins of some drowned city.

And then one night I got a call.

It was one of those bitter, sleety winter nights, so desperately cold that in the warehouse even the uniforms seemed to shiver on their rails and yearn to clap their hands together, if they’d had hands. I had gone into the village on my eight o’clock break in search of coffee to warm myself up. There was nothing visibly out of the ordinary when I got back. Rosco was working at the far end; the pile of cardboard boxes was just where I had left it. And yet the air seemed somehow heightened ; hyperreal, as if the focus wheel had been turned and a new clarity been added. I waited a moment there at the door, looking over the cold hall, then realized that a phone was ringing.

With a tight feeling in my chest, I tracked the sound: past the foreman’s cabin, past the shuttered doors, down the aisle of nurses’ uniforms till I came to my writing desk, and lifted a pile of order forms to find Bel’s phone.

I had kept it more as a souvenir than anything else, a souvenir or a pet. Droyd had showed me how it worked, how to unlock it and keep it fed; but I never used it, other than to wonder at its little green display, and hardly anyone ever called me. Yet here it was singing away. I picked it up and pressed a button; and a voice said, ‘Charles?’

The entire warehouse, the entire world, the particles in the air seemed to freeze and hang motionless in suspension.

‘Hello?’ the voice said.

‘Yes, yes, I’m here,’ hurriedly.

‘I was hoping you’d pick up,’ the voice said.

I sank on to the chair.

‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’

My heart was racing, that was why. I wiped a frost of sweat from my forehead, and said, with some effort, ‘Is this you?’

‘Of course it’s me, don’t you recognize me?’

‘No, I — damn it,’ the damn phone was so small , it kept losing itself in my hand, ‘damn it, we all thought you were —’

‘I suppose that was the idea.’

‘That was the…?’ rising again, caught in a bewildering mixture of emotions that ranged from relief to gratitude to apoplexy: ‘we’ve been so worried — not even worried, we’ve been — I mean of all the wretched, selfish…’

There was a silence at the other end. For one terrorized instant I thought I’d scared her off. Then the voice said: ‘I know. I’m sorry. But I didn’t think you’d think — I mean I thought you’d work it out.’

‘Work what out?’

‘The name.’

‘The name?’

The name, she repeated, the name, come on, Charles: and slowly it stole across me. Jessica Kiddon: Jess Kiddon: Just Kidding.

‘MacGillycuddy,’ I breathed.

‘Maybe I should have gone with Tempora Mores,’ Bel mused.

Just kidding: it was one of his conceits, I’d have recognized it a mile off; and once I did I couldn’t believe I hadn’t guessed before. I should have known he’d be in this up to his neck; I should have known that banishing him from our lives was like asking a genie to kindly get back in its bottle, or trying to shoo a charging bull with a big red rag. Before she said another word, several unexplained phenomena suddenly became clear. The dinner invitation that hadn’t arrived; the mysterious school-friend who wasn’t in the yearbook; the chopping noise I had heard that night, clearing a path through the trees for the car, to the same cliffs MacGillycuddy had been so determined I fall off instead of exploding myself. There was no masterclass in Yalta; there was no Jessica Kiddon. Bel had lifted the entire idea from me and my abortive flight to Chile — which, given the uncomplimentary things she’d said about it at the time, I thought was pretty rich.

In fact her plan, as she explained it to me that night, was significantly more detailed than mine. It had to be, she said; she hadn’t had any money of her own, and the only way to fund her escape had been to create this new persona, the respectable girl who could persuade Mother to part with the necessary sum. Furthermore, familiarizing us all with the fictitious Jessica (I thought here of our flirtatious conversation after the greyhound race, and blushed) would lend her both time and a means of muddying the waters after her initial departure. The idea was to travel to Russia in her own name, under cover of the Chekhov trip: as far as we were concerned, Jessica would be with her and everything would appear above board. It was only when she was over there that the phoney papers, passport, etc. that MacGillycuddy had arranged would come into play. The way she had set it up, she would then have a six-month window (the length of the spurious class) in which she could merge into Jessica — Jessica, who had no roots, no background, could disappear quite easily and never be traced — and let Bel Hythloday simply melt away, without any of the mess or pain or logistical headaches of an actual faked death, a drowning or an explosion or a car crash.

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.