Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

But I couldn’t forget. Sometimes, if we were having a fight, or if something had upset her, I would think I saw it — the hysteria, the terror — shivering, eclipse-like, at the edges of her, waiting for its moment. It seemed to me that wherever it came from, it was too fundamental a part of her now ever to truly go away. That was why I badgered her about her boyfriends, that was why the unsettled, mercurial mood she’d been in lately bothered me, like that curious gathering of electricity an epileptic feels before an attack. She might have put it all behind her — I knew she hated being thought of as delicate, or precarious — but to me the memory was still fresh. The fear, that was what I remembered primarily: those horrible mornings of convulsions and terrorized, unfocused weeping, and in her eyes the fear so huge and formless that it robbed us both of speech.

The bank was situated about a mile and a half away, in the middle of a shopping centre. I set out to see the manager that very afternoon. I was sure Bel was making more out of this business than she needed to, but I knew I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until it was sorted out; also, it provided a useful cover for another matter I needed to take care of. Pact or no pact, furniture was still disappearing; I wanted to see if I could find some background information on our Golem friend.

I rarely ventured that far from home. Bel took this as another instance of my ‘feudal outlook’. ‘You see yourself as Lord of the Manor,’ she’d say, ‘and these people are your vassals, and you don’t want to rub shoulders with them in case you catch something.’ But that wasn’t it at all. Watching from the back seat of the cab as lofty sea-roads and shady avenues gave way to the encircling suburbs, I was gripped — as I always was — by a sense of claustrophobia and threat. The shopping centre frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent’s whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression: seeming to be skipping whole rungs of the evolutionary ladder, so that pleases and thank-yous had gone south long ago, and I expected to go in some day soon and find them gnawing bones and worshipping fire. As vassals I doubt they’d have been much good to me.

The newsagent’s, however, was where I was headed now: debouching from the cab on to newly laid faux cobblestone and gingerly edging my way through a Walpurgisnacht of middle-aged women with bleached hair, mock-leather jackets and yodelling children. Across the road, a huge billboard dominated the skyline. ‘IRELANDBANK: WE PLEDGE UNTO YOU,’ it said. ‘100 WAYS IN WHICH WE ARE MAKING LIFE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS BETTER AND BETTER.’ Which seemed to augur well for me and my predicament, but then beneath the letters was a picture of the amassed Irelandbank staff, waving mirthlessly up at the camera. There were thousands of them, a silent army clad in uniform blue jackets, the appalling tailoring of which made them all the more menacing.

The window of the newsagent’s was cluttered with dayglo flashcards; I scanned down through advertisements for nannies, lawnmowing, kittens, maths grinds, until I found what I was looking for.

The All-Seeing Eye.

Marital Infidelity? Extortion?

Conspiracies against you in the Office?

The All-Seeing Eye Sees All.

Have your suspicions confirmed

and your mind set at ease.

Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.

I took down the number and went in search of an unvandalized callbox.

‘Hello?’ a cautious voice answered, low and mumbly as if unwilling to divulge the slightest hint of identity.

‘Is that the All-Seeing Eye?’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ the voice said.

‘My name is Charl—’

‘No names!’ the voice interrupted urgently.

‘Fine then, my name is… is C, and I need your help.’

‘Marital infidelity? Extortion? Conspi—’

‘No, no, none of those. There’s a chap in my house stealing my furniture.’

‘Oh,’ the All-Seeing Eye said. ‘Are you sure it’s not marital infidelity?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my sister’s boyfriend.’

‘ Ah ,’ it said salaciously. ‘Want a few pictures, do you?’

‘ No , look here, Eye, are you going to help me or not?’

‘Come to my office,’ the Eye said. ‘118, The Savannah. Come alone. The All-Seeing Eye takes cash and all major credit cards.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Photo development is extra, though, and the All-Seeing Eye reserves the right to hang on to negatives it likes…’

He gave me directions to his office, which was in fact more of a small semi-detached house in an estate of identical semi-detached houses not far away. I rang the doorbell, and after a series of unlocking noises, the door was opened by a familiar figure: none other than our dilatory postman, the one who smelled of gin and only delivered post when he felt like it.

‘What!’ I said.

‘C?’ he said.

‘But you’re the —’

‘No names,’ he said, and after a furtive look around motioned me inside. The hallway was filled with great billows of steam, into which he quickly disappeared. I followed as best I could and arrived in an even steamier room, where after stumbling around blindly for a moment I bumped into something. It emerged presently as a table, with a postbag of mail sitting on it. On either side of the bag was a pile: one of opened envelopes, the other presumably their former contents — hundreds of sheets of handwritten and printed correspondence.

Gradually, through breaks in the vapour clouds, I was able to piece together the rest of my surroundings. We were in a kitchen. The windows were fogged with condensation: on the cooker and counter, several kettles and saucepans were on the go at once, with sealed envelopes resting over each on makeshift tripods of Blu-Tak and cocktail sticks.

‘Tea?’ he said from somewhere.

‘What’s going on here? Is this people’s post? ’

‘I’ll put on a kettle,’ the postman said, abruptly appearing and disappearing again into the fog. I sat down at the table and looked through the damp pages. How is Uncle Harold’s new leg?… We regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful… These girls are beautiful and discreet… Dear Bazzer, Mother died today …

‘I mean, what are you doing?’ I asked in disbelief.

‘Well, I suppose it started as a hobby,’ the postman said over his shoulder, ‘and then it grew into something more. I like finding solutions to problems. Answers. Life is full of questions. Only the privileged few have access to the answers.’

‘But you can’t —’

‘It’s really amazing what people will say in their letters,’ he mused.

‘And this… this heinous intrusion into people’s privacy is what you call detection, is it?’

‘You may not like it,’ he replied, setting a cup in front of me and sitting down, ‘but it means that I can give you a Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.’

‘Hmm,’ I said.

‘Let’s talk business,’ he said. ‘Actually, when I saw you at the door there I thought you must have come about your mortgage difficulties.’

‘Did you,’ I said.

‘Yes, thought you might have been wanting to fake your own death or something. Not unusual, people in your position.’

‘Not that it’s any of your concern,’ I told him haughtily, ‘but the mortgage is a minor matter, a simple crossed wire. As a matter of fact, I’m just on my way to see my bank manager and sort it out.’

He smiled at me indulgently. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. I suppose the repo men won’t be needing this, then.’ He plucked from the pile a single sheet headed with the Irelandbank logo, a sort of euro-sign-meets-swastika affair, and passed it to me. It was addressed to a debt-collection agency, stating that the bank now had legal authorization to take ‘the next step’ and that the collectors could begin shortly with their ‘recovery’.