Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

My head thumped back on to the pillow. ‘Are you out of your mind? Don’t you have any idea how society works ?’

‘I know it sounds strange,’ she reached her arm out imploringly, ‘but if you’ll only lis ten, there’s a reason for it. I’ve talked to Geoffrey. He says that if we presented ourselves right we’d be eligible for all kinds of government grants. You know, if we’re helping people, and then there’s the cultural diversity element too, with Mirela being from the Balkans. If the theatre was successful we might even be able to have Amaurot registered as a charity. Then think of it, Charles, we could stay there as long as we wanted, and never have to worry any more about banks, or creditors, or how we’re going to keep it running…’ She sat back and hunched her shoulders earnestly. ‘And aside from the money, it’s a chance to put Amaurot on the map again, for it to mean something. Isn’t that what you want? We’d finally be using it for something good . And the possibilities are endless, once you start thinking about it. We can give classes — you know, drama classes, for inner-city kids, they can come out for the day and —’

‘Why stop there?’ I said. ‘Why not throw the doors open altogether? We could give guided tours: “This is Charles’s bedroom, visitors are asked kindly not to extinguish their cigarettes on his, on his childhood stamp collection —”’

Outside in the corridor a bell began to ring. Sighing, Bel picked up her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘I’m asking you to understand that we’re not rich any more. We’re just not. Living in Amaurot, it’s like we’re struggling to maintain ourselves in a — on a little island that’s floating further and further away from what it means to actually exist —’ She sucked in her cheeks and let them out again. ‘Can’t you see, this is a good thing?’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll be able to keep the house, and we’ll all be able to stay together…’

Even in my distrait condition, I realized that this hand was the first time she’d touched me since the whole accidentally-kissing-her farrago — that she was offering me an olive branch. But I wasn’t going to be bought off so easily. Without replying, I stiffly turned my head and fixed my gaze on the shard of sky at the window, until her hand lifted and I heard the chair creak beside me as she rose to go.

The thing was, though — the thing was that deep down I knew she was right, about the way everything was changing, about the new money taking over. You would see them at the weekends, these new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow winding roads in BMWs or hulking jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anaemic sharks. What if this really was the only way to secure the house from them? I tried to imagine Amaurot as a Residence, full of babbling strangers; I pictured myself at the breakfast table, the Disadvantaged sitting across from me. Would I be expected to make conversation? Would they want to borrow things? My razor, a tie? The notion was too painful to contemplate. A far better solution seemed to be to pretend that none of this was happening, and that my conversation with Bel had never taken place. I was getting enough painkillers to make this quite unproblematic: they made reality fat and viscous and blurred at the edges, broken only by the comings and goings of the doctors and nurses, and the mortal wheezing of the patient in the next room, like a dry wind through a petrified forest.

That night, however — my first night back on earth after my hiatus — I wasn’t able to sleep. I lay awake for hours, gazing at the banks of screens and monitors arranged around me telling the ineffable story of my body in blips and graphs and pulses. It seemed to me that I could see things in the saw-toothed waves; all kinds of things: explosions, prophecies, impending disasters, all hastening in on top of one another until I couldn’t bear it any longer and, seized in a cold grip, I pressed the panic button and cried out ‘Help, help!’ until the night nurse’s clipping stride came down the corridor, not the attractive buxom nurse in charge of sponge baths but the thermometer-happy one with no behind.

‘Yes?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’

I cleared my throat and pointed at the spikes and troughs on the monitor and said, ‘I’m a little concerned about, ahem, that is…’

‘Do you feel sick?’ she stamped impatiently. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Well, no, not as such,’ feeling all of a sudden that I could possibly have blown things out of proportion. ‘It’s just that — those sort of spikes there, don’t they look a little, you know, off?’

‘No,’ she said with an abrasive sigh, ‘they are perfectly normal, just like the last time, and the time before that.’

‘Oh. It’s just that I thought they were a bit off.’ There was a moment of silence broken only by her tapping foot; ‘Busy?’ I said, because even if she was hatchet-faced and anally fixated she was still someone to talk to –

‘ Very ,’ she snapped as if she’d been waiting for it, turned on her heel and whipped out of the room, back to her crossword puzzle or her tray of entrails or whatever it was she did in her glass box down the hall; leaving me to the silent procession of the waves, to think of home, the blossoms on the trees, the ballroom where ghosts in tails and enormous hooped dresses whirled each other round in quadrilles and cotillions, as the walls mildewed and spiders made nests in the chandeliers…

Someone pushed open the ballroom door. ‘There you are. You didn’t wait for me.’

‘Oh — I didn’t think you meant actually wait…’

‘It’s freezing .’ Mirela rubbed her hands over her bare arms. ‘What are you doing down here? You’re missing the party.’

‘Oh, you know… just thought I’d take a breather.’

‘Your mother’s been looking for you.’

‘I know,’ I said bleakly.

She sat down on the other side of the aisle. ‘Are you all right? Is your head hurting?’

‘No, no…’ I crossed my legs towards her, suspected it looked effeminate, crossed them back again. ‘I suppose it’s just the first time I’ve seen everything finished. Gives me an excuse to be maudlin.’

‘ “Maudlin”?’

‘Sad, you know, like when you think about the past.’

‘It must be strange, to come home and find everything changed like this.’

I looked up at the raised stage, the flat planes of colour, the exposed wooden beams that had replaced the fusty wallpaper and rococo plasterwork. ‘It’s all right,’ I said nobly.

‘I’m glad you were able to come back today,’ she said. ‘In time for the first performance.’

‘It did help to have the painkillers still in my system,’ I agreed.

She laughed. ‘Poor Charles! Didn’t you like it even a little bit?’

I liked you , I wanted to say: even if your wig kept slipping, even though you pronounced love like laugh and made joyriders sound like something from a Transylvanian folk tale, still whenever you were onstage the dialogue momentarily stopped grating and almost began to sound a little like music. But I didn’t say it; I just mumbled something about the realistic costumes.

‘Mmm,’ she said, looking down into her clasped hands as if she were carrying a ladybird in there, out to the garden. ‘Charles — now that you are back — there was something I wanted to say to you.’

‘Oh?’ I said, and cleared my throat.

‘It’s a bit difficult.’

‘Well — try anyway,’ I said. Because the truth of it was that I had been wondering… I mean, what happens in films when something extraordinary happens to a fellow, like he goes on the run or he gets blown up or his sister turns his house into a community theatre, is that he then meets a beautiful woman who immediately falls in love with him and helps him along on his new path. They don’t go into why she falls in love with him. It’s just the way it works. Maybe it’s a kind of reward from the Fates for daring to disturb the universe. I was thinking that none of this might seem quite as bad with a girl like Mirela by my side.