Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘What’s he doing hanging around here anyway?’ I said. ‘What sort of theatre has MacGillycuddy as a consultant?’

‘Hmm? Oh, he’s…’ She stopped and frowned. ‘Well I don’t know, exactly. He just seems to appear . I don’t think anyone’s ever asked — oh look, Charles, there’s Harry!’ Gaily she waved her hand at a group of dramatic types in the corner: and my heart sank as I realized that, just as I had feared, ‘Harry’ and the annoying fellow with the avant-garde hairstyle were one and the same person.

Bel had her arm linked to his right, and now Mirela insinuated herself into his left.

‘I don’t consider Burnin Up to be a play as such,’ he was saying. ‘It’s more of a call to arms. It’s a kind of an insurgency. It’s about exploding the whole —’

‘Harry, this is Charles that I wanted you to meet.’

He glanced around uninterestedly and gave me a vacuous smile.

‘Charles, this is Harry that I was —’ Mirela turned back to me.

‘We’ve met,’ I said grimly.

‘We have?’ Harry said.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. For the penny had finally dropped. I knew where I’d seen him before: and the mechanics of this whole sinister enterprise were now clear to me. The supposedly Disadvantaged Actors clogging up the recital room were none other than the food-scrounging Marxists who had plagued my afternoons during Bel’s college days; and this fellow, though he’d had pink hair then, and gone under the name of Boris, had been their ringleader. How many times had I overheard him harping on about dreams or freedom or revolutions to some starry-eyed girl as he lay with his feet up on the chaise longue, or agitating Mrs P to rise up against her oppressors, viz. Mother and me, even as he stuffed himself with truffles or devoured the pecan plait that one had specially set aside for oneself. ‘Oh yes,’ I said again, to let him know that I was on to his game and would be keeping a very close eye on him. However, the conversation had already moved on, which is to say that the girls, gushing like twelve-year-olds who had eaten too much sherbet, were pulling his sleeve and asking him to tell them more about the insurgency, so I took a couple of canapés from a passing tray and contented myself with chewing on them in a vaguely threatening way.

‘Well, the way I think of it is as a kind of “guerrilla warfare”,’ Harry said. Close up, his plaits looked like a gaggle of snakes that had been poisoned while crawling over his head. He was one of those people who makes imaginary quotation marks with their fingers, which seemed another good reason to despise him. ‘Taking an elitist art-form and using it essentially as a Trojan horse from which we can then spring out and confront bourgeois audiences with their own hypocrisy. So the play itself has to have the kind of explosive power that can so to speak “shatter” the edifices it’s being staged in, like a bomb —’

‘Just a minute,’ I cut in here. ‘You’re not talking about shattering Amaurot , I hope.’

‘It’s a metaphor, you dope,’ Bel said crossly.

‘We’re hoping we won’t have to use any actual explosives,’ Harry said to me.

‘I should hope not,’ I said, returning to my canapé. ‘You can’t fool around when it comes to blowing up edifices. I speak from experience.’

‘Because I suppose the legacy of postmodernism,’ Harry went on, ‘has been to deny art the power to make any kind of meaningful statement — about this, about us. So it seems to me that what we have to do is get back to the theatre of Berkoff, of Artaud —’

‘Charles, you’ve got pâté all over your bandages,’ Bel said.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. No, don’t rub it, you’re just making it worse… Oh, now it’s really disgusting.’

The assembled faces groaned and assumed attitudes of repulsion. Bel lowered her eyebrows truculently at me, like a bull about to charge.

‘I’ll go and wash it off,’ I said apologetically, and withdrew to the bathroom, past the florid gent who was now slumped weeping over the closed piano lid. I did not rejoin the actors when I came back; instead I took up a position by the wall, shielded from Mother by a potted plant, and sucked dejectedly on an ice cube. It was turning into a singularly depressing evening. Wasn’t there anyone who wanted to talk to me?

As if in answer, a large malformed shadow at that moment fell across me. ‘All right?’ it said.

I confined myself to a soundless expletive.

‘What’s the story with the oul head, anyway?’ he said. ‘Have you still got one under there, or what?’

‘I am reliably informed I still have a head,’ I said.

‘Cos I was thinking, right,’ Frank said, ‘you wouldn’t want to turn out like your man in Batman , would you, like when he takes the bandages off and he’s turned into this freakish Joker.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No, I’m hoping that’s not going to happen.’

He nudged me conspiratorially. ‘I’d say there was some bangin nurses there in hospital, was there?’

‘Mmm,’ I said, wishing this conversation had some kind of ejector seat. What was he bothering me for, anyway? Shouldn’t he be off groping Bel?

‘Ah yeah — as me oul man used to say, there’s only two things in life you can be sure about — death, and nurses.’ He followed this wisdom with a long sigh: a curious expression passed over his face, and I had an unsettling intimation of some deep chord of melancholy ringing through his monolithic interior. I was wondering whether I ought to get out of the way when, scratching his stomach, he asked offhandedly if Bel had said anything about him to me.

‘About you?’ I said. ‘To me?’

‘It’s not important,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I haven’t seen much of her these last few weeks, that’s all.’

Casting my mind back, I seemed to recall her saying something along the lines of Frank, ugh that time she came to visit me in the hospital; but apart from that she hadn’t even mentioned him, or their apartment-hunting, for that matter. I looked over at her now where she stood with the theatre types, and then back at Frank. It struck me that I hadn’t seen him groping her or trying to look down her shirt all evening.

‘I was just wonderin,’ Frank said morosely. ‘Every time I call out here she’s busy putting in wires, or doin her lines or havin meetins. Half the time she won’t even talk to me on the phone.’ There was a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead and the most forlorn look in his eyes. I had the strongest urge to toss him a Bonio.

‘Well… she’s busy,’ I said. ‘That’s all. She’s tied up with this wretched theatre. I’m sure she’ll be back to normal before long.’

‘Charlie,’ he whispered, ‘what are they doin puttin a fuckin theatre in your house anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said tersely. ‘I was away in hospital. The house was full of women. Anything could’ve happened, in that kind of a situation.’ I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He was making me uneasy: even as I spoke I was thinking that there had been a certain coolness between Bel and me tonight too. To the uninformed observer it might appear that Frank’s situation and my own had distinct parallels. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word with her, all right? I’ll find out what’s going on. But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. This theatre shouldn’t last long. You know Bel, she gets bored with everything after a few weeks —’

It was only when I had said it that I realized the statement’s full implications. Frank gaped at me in horror. ‘That is —’ I began in a strangulated voice, but it was no good, I couldn’t bear to stay there one second longer. With a gurgle of apology, I turned and fled. I saw that Mrs P had left the bar unattended; I slipped behind it and, without quite knowing why, began to fill my pockets with canapés.