Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Oh yes,’ I said nonchalantly, ‘we’re playing tennis tomorrow morning.’ Carrying it to the recital room, I whispered, ‘M?’

‘C?’

‘The situation has changed. We have to move fast. Let’s get down to business.’

The All-Seeing Eye’s Gold-Seal Guarantee was no lie; in the few hours since I’d left him he had gathered all manner of information on my foe. Frank, as I had conjectured, came from a bad area, had gone to a terrible school that got burned down at least once a year, left with a pass grade in shadowy circumstances, had never been married although was suspected of fathering one or more children in said area, had attended a technical college where he studied Panel Beating (one year) and Advanced Panel Beating (one year), before a stint abroad with the UN Peacekeeping Force. ‘After the Peacekeepers,’ MacGillycuddy told me, ‘he started work in a scrap dealership in Dublin, and then got into architectural salvage. Last year he went into business for himself. He does quite well out of it.’

‘Architectural salvage? What’s that?’ I had an absurd image of Frank scuba-diving to the bottom of the sea and pulling up old libraries and Palladian casinos.

‘Essentially it’s about digging up old junk, cleaning it off and selling it on at an enormous profit,’ MacGillycuddy explained.

‘Like antiques?’

‘No…’ MacGillycuddy seemed reluctant to expand. ‘More like… put it this way, antiques are to architectural salvage what museums are to, em, grave-robbing.’

I blanched.

The hunting-ground of the architectural salveur, he went on, was the dilapidated mansion, the bankrupted family grocer’s, the outdated factory or hospital or train station: anywhere fallen on hard times, that the changing economy had rendered unviable and marked for death. To these the salveurs would flock like crows: to the auctions, the derelict rooms, the still-smouldering embers, where they would pick up for a song or for nothing at all the skeleton and innards of these institutions, anything that could conceivably be polished up and resold as an antiquity, a charming foible of the past, for installation in modern apartments, pubs and hotels. Mercilessly MacGillycuddy described how they uprooted floor tiles, pulled out banisters and columns, removed lamp fittings, doorknobs, shop signs, lanterns, tea kettles, sawed off piano legs and marble table tops, dismembered cornices and plasterwork, rifled through boxes for old picture-frames, photographs, advertisements, concert programmes, wardrobes for hats and wedding dresses and old-fashioned shoe-racks –

‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘No more!’

This was far, far worse than anything I had imagined. Good God, could such people really exist? And was he doing a salvage job on us? Could it be that we were nothing more than carrion to him, that he had caught the smell of death on us before we even guessed, picked out Bel as his personal treasure… Fury boiled in my veins. But at the same time, a tremulous voice inside me was whimpering: who is there to steal me away? Where is the mantelpiece out there for me?

‘Is everything all right?’ MacGillycuddy inquired.

What could I say? Everything was crashing down around me; suddenly, our destruction seemed not only inexorable, but perfectly logical. There was only one option remaining.

‘What were you saying earlier about faking your own death?’ I said.

‘It just seems so drastic …’

‘Not at all. You’d be surprised how many people are doing it these days.’

MacGillycuddy was sitting on the bench opposite, a sack of post resting at his heel. ‘People from all walks of life, from the mighty barrister to the humble greengrocer. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.’

A blackbird hopped about in the mouldering eaves above us. MacGillycuddy’s voice seemed to come from far away. ‘It’s the death part, that’s what’s bothering you. It’s a natural reaction, you hear that word and you start worrying. But the whole point is, you’re not dying. You’re pretending to die. Oh, it’s a big step, I’m not denying that. But really it’s not that much bigger than, say, getting a kitchen fitted, or buying a new car.’

‘Mmm…’ A thick fall of ivy hung down over the gazebo door, filtering damp light from the rambling orchard outside. Ivy was probably all that was holding it together, I thought morosely. No one came to this corner of the garden any more.

‘Another thing that people tend to worry about,’ he was saying, ‘is the loss of identity. There’s no getting round it, a man’s identity is something very special. Nothing tells you who you are like your identity, and losing it is something that each customer has to come to terms with in his or her own way.’ He shifted about on his seat, and raised a finger philosophically. ‘The important thing is to have a positive attitude. There’s no point faking your death if you’re not going to make the best of it. So what I say is, look at it as an opportunity. Don’t think of it as losing your real identity; think of it as trading in an old identity for a new one. How many people get to have two identities?’ He looked at me inquiringly.

‘Not many,’ I conceded.

‘Exactly. So have fun with it. Think of someone you’ve always wanted to be and — well, I’m sure you have plenty of ideas of your own. My point is, it needn’t be a negative thing. I’ve done a good few of these now and I can tell you honestly that in many ways I envy you, abandoning your life and your loved ones. It’s like a big holiday. But what do you think, does that sound any more attractive?’

I thought about it. Sales pitch aside, MacGillycuddy really did seem to have a good understanding of insurance fraud, and though there was still something gnawing at the pit of my stomach I was beginning to feel less apprehensive. ‘And you’re sure the policy’ll pay out?’

‘Sound as a bell.’ He thwacked the paper against his thigh. ‘Accidental death, can’t fail.’ A weak rumble came from outside as Mrs P hauled the garbage down the driveway to the gate. Seeing me still wavering, he continued: ‘Look. We’ve gone through the figures. You’re not the first person to be in this position. You care about your family. The bank wants to take their house away from them. You have a problem, this is the solution. It’s as simple as that.’ He paused Socratically, straightened his back, took a long draught from his glass of milk.

I clasped my fingers and studied the warped floorboards. Once upon a time, before it all went wrong, Patsy Olé and I had spent a happy night here against the clammy wood, serenaded by creaks and rustles and distant waves. And now to take my bow and disappear… The magnitude of it made it difficult to think straight; but magnitude was what was required now: courage, sacrifice, the graceful noblesse of the true aristocrat — sprezzatura , something grand and altruistic and absurd to fling in the teeth of the Golems –

‘Well?’

That line of Yeats’s: Fail, and that history turns into rubbish, All that great past to a trouble of fools –

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said MacGillycuddy with a Faustian gleam, reaching into his jacket for a pencil and paper. ‘Now, as to the details…’

One might expect there to be a lot of work in bringing something as convoluted as a life to a close: so many loose ends to tie up! So many final movements to be choreographed! But to my surprise — to my dismay — after that morning it all simply fell into place, the intervening days eliding so that it seemed one minute I was there with MacGillycuddy in the decaying gazebo, and the next standing blearily at the curtains, watching Saturday dawn waxy and white, a carpet of frost on the lawn, gulls crying over the morning ferry in the crystalline blue distance; and then downstairs to pace out the void of those endless final hours, drifting through the rooms like an afternoon ghost, or fidgeting in the kitchen annoying Mrs P –