Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Then one day, quite out of the blue, Yeats asked me to turn on my side as he had to administer something anally, and when I looked around to make sure I’d heard him correctly he had changed into a hatchet-faced nurse and Chile into a dimly lit room with green paint on the walls and perforated ceiling tiles. There was a strange tight clinging about my skull and shadowy figures standing around me. I resisted as best I could; I shut my eyes, I begged them to leave me in peace. But it was like being underwater: no matter how I wriggled, every second impelled me closer to the surface; and already Chile, our little house, the lime trees, were far, far away…

‘You! You! You!’ Bel pounded across the floorboards, gold bangles rattling down her forearm. ‘It was you what got me addicted to smack!

‘Me?’ Mirela said incredulously, rising from the table. ‘But how could it be me?’

‘Don’t you see?’ Bel implored. ‘My addiction was a cry for help. Heroin was replacing the love that you, and at a larger level society, weren’t giving me.’

Mirela reached for the back of the chair to support herself, her long dress brushing the floor. ‘How can you say I didn’t love you?’ she said haltingly. ‘Wasn’t it me what clothed and fed you all these years? Wasn’t it me who scraped together the few shillings so you’d always have your books for school?’

‘Ma, you still don’t understand,’ Bel said. ‘You’re just like the government, in terms of not understanding the younger generation. We need more than just methadone clinics and back-to-work schemes. We need to respect ourselves as real people, just as good as anyone else. Yes, you done all them things for me. But you never got round to telling us the three little words what are the most important thing to any child.’

Mirela seemed to wilt, right there in front of us; as she lowered herself painfully back down into the chair, you could have heard a pin drop in the old ballroom, scuppering my hopes of making a quick trip out to the bar for a revivative short.

‘It’s a vicious cycle, Ma,’ Bel went on. ‘Cos then, see, we never learned to love ourselves. That’s what pushed Dougie into joyriding — the buzz he got from robbin cars, like the temporary release of taking drugs, took the place of the self-worth that society would not give him and let him escape the monotony of long-term unemployment.’

‘If only I’d known this earlier…’ Mirela shook her head sadly, sending a cloud of talc puffing from her wig. ‘He might not have died so senselessly.’

Bel placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not too late to save the others. If we all work together, and remember the lessons we learned tonight.’

‘I’m proud of you for coming through this,’ Mirela said, ‘and becoming a stronger woman for it. It gives me hope for the future.’

I too was given hope for the future and started reaching for my jacket; but the curtain did not fall, because Bel was saying to Mirela that speaking of the future she was pregnant. Every time you thought it was over somebody got pregnant or run over by joyriders. My head was pounding. Couldn’t they tell we were being pushed too far? I ground my teeth; I tore little strips off the programme Burnin Up a Play by the RH Workshop and rolled them into balls and threw them at Frank in the front row; I knitted my brows and willed the plot to come to a close, which only made my head hurt more and drops of sweat collect beneath my bandages.

The hospital had discharged me only that afternoon; if anyone had bothered to ask me, I might have told them that all things considered I’d prefer to spend my first night home without the company of a hundred gawping strangers. But no one had asked me, and well into the first act a few anxious faces were still turning around to check on me in the back row, perhaps surmising I was one of the endless string of long-lost joyriding half-brothers, or worrying that I might pull some kind of a Phantom of the Opera stunt and go swinging from the gantry, which I confess was by this point not a million miles from my thoughts. But there, now, the lights went down, and up, and the audience was on its feet clapping. Bel and Mirela stepped forward, beaming, to take their bows; I paused briefly to applaud then hurried out ahead of the crowd to the recital room, where Mrs P was polishing glasses behind the bar. ‘Soda, please,’ I said.

‘Is finish?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually, you know, maybe I’ll have some Scotch in there too.’

Mrs P reached for the bottle. I licked my lips, watching as it tipped the rim of the glass. ‘In fact, maybe forget the soda and make it a double Scotch,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering.

Mrs P stopped, and looked at me suspiciously.

‘Master Charles, I think you are not allowed to drink.’

‘Eh?’ I said, feigning incomprehension; but all the bad acting must have rubbed off on me. Mrs P put the bottle back down with a reproachful look. ‘Yes, the doctor has say to you, no booze.’

‘He said no such thing, Mrs P, you must be thinking of someone else, Mother perhaps…’ This got me nowhere. ‘Look, would I lie to you?’ I squeezed her arm cajolingly. ‘For God’s sake, woman!’

‘Master Charles, you are hurting me!’

‘Special occasion, eh?’ I begged her feverishly. ‘Momentous, celebrate?’

Audience members were beginning to shuffle in from across the hall. Shaking her head, Mrs P poured the whiskey and pushed it across the bar, and I retired gratefully with it to a secluded corner. But just as I was about to send it down the old hatch, the glass was snatched from my lips — by Bel, no less, with a gaggle of her noxious actor friends in tow.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Give that back.’

‘He’s not allowed to drink while he’s on his medication,’ Bel told the actors. ‘He’s crawling up the walls. The world has lost all meaning to him.’

‘What happened to him?’ a fellow with foolish plaited hair inquired.

‘Mind your own business,’ I offered.

‘It’s a long story,’ Bel said, sipping at my drink. She was still wearing her make-up from the play; offstage it looked gaudy and incongruous, as if she’d just wandered in from a Victorian gin palace. ‘Basically he tried to blow up the Folly for the insurance and got clocked on the head by one of his own specially commissioned gargoyles. He was in a coma for six weeks.’

‘The poor thing,’ clucked a not unappealing blonde, bestowing on me a Concerned Glance.

‘Not to worry,’ I assured her, ‘life in the old dog yet, what?’

‘He’s quite all right now,’ Bel said. ‘You should have seen him the night it happened though, his head looked like a pumpkin.’

‘How awful,’ the blonde crooned, glancing at me concernedly again.

‘And you are…?’ I pressed, but again she had returned to Bel for further details, as if I were a chipped hatstand, or a beagle with a bandaged paw!

‘It was actually sort of funny,’ Bel said, ‘because for a couple of minutes after he was hit he was still running around the lawn, picking up bits of exploded silverware and putting them into Frank’s van —’

‘Into the van ?’ the fellow with the hair said.

‘Yes, so I went over, you know, to try and get him to lie down until the ambulance arrived, and he holds up his hand like this —’ her face was quite pink and she took a moment for her giggles to subside, ‘— and tells me to please remain calm , that he’s not sure which way South America is, but that we can probably ask directions —’

‘Well, of course, the reason for that was —’ I began: but they were all guffawing too much to hear me. I was starting to have some inkling of what that Phantom of the Opera must have gone through. These theatrical types could be quite unfeeling. Try as I might to give my side of the story, the conversation rolled right over me like so much motorway traffic; and as there didn’t seem to be any hope of getting my drink back from Bel, I eventually gave up and stalked off.