Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Mother brought her right foot down on to the next step and screamed, ‘You can’t even get that right, can you? You don’t speak to him for weeks on end and then you keep him up half the night because you suddenly feel paternal —’ She flinched back as he hurled the bat in her direction. It clattered on to the gravel and slid under a car. Mother span on her heel and stamped back inside, slamming the door behind her. I retrieved the bat and waited. Father was standing under a tree, rubbing his temples.

‘Dad, do you want me to bowl?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Are you ready, or —?’

‘Tell you what, let’s call it a night, old chap. Your mother’s right, it’s time you were in bed.’ He sighed as he trudged over towards me. He patted my head and turned to look out over the bay. He jingled the keys in his pocket and cleared his throat, and after we had looked at the bay some more he said, ‘The thing is, Charles, that life is a lot like cricket. The wicket is… no, well, listen, anyway, it’s… life’s a nasty business, can be a nasty business…’ His breath nearly knocked me down. ‘What I want is for you and your sister, for you and Christabel… I don’t want you to have to claw through the, the shit , do you understand?’

He never swore in front of us; my heart pounded with alarm. ‘Yes, Dad.’

‘“ Unshapely things ”, remember that. World’s full of unshapely things. Some of ’em’ll look shapely enough, though. Some’ll be quite alluring. So you can’t listen to anybody. And what you’ve got to do, is… what you’ve got to do…’ He stopped, seeming to lose his thread; turned away from me and shambled back towards the house, pulling at his jaw, lost in his own thoughts. So I never found out what it was I had to do; I could only take my best guess. And closing the door of the recital room gently behind me twenty-odd years later, I had to admit to myself that it was quite conceivable I had got it wrong.

One of Bel’s actor-friends had taken the piano and was tinkling out a melancholy ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ as, with my suitcase in my hand, I proceeded down the hall. Voices fell in for the parts they knew: ‘ There’s a land that I dreamed of …’ I walked by the glass frieze of Actaeon down to the door and surveyed my lost kingdom through a fine, sifting rain: the forlorn trees the birds had deserted, the twisted iron lattice where the Folly had been.

Would the Twister that had seized our lives never set us down in Kansas again, in good old black and white? Or couldn’t you ever go back? Was that only for fairy tales, was the real world everybody got so excitable about precisely this gaudy Techni-colour, this relentless, senseless propulsion?

‘ Birds fly over the rainbow ,’ the voices filtered out from inside, ‘ why then, oh why can’t I ?’

Numbly I descended from the porch. I passed Frank’s van there among the Saabs and Jaguars, and wondered briefly if I’d ever see him again. Then, retrieving a squashed canapé from my pocket, I took the first dark, rain-laden steps of my life away from Amaurot.

‘This really is awfully good of you.’

‘No bother, Charlie, no bother.’

‘I mean, it’ll only be for a week or so, until I get myself sorted out…’

‘This is us here, Charlie.’

‘Aha, yes.’ We stopped outside a plain white wooden door. I hummed nervously to myself as Frank rummaged for the key.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Age before beauty.’

‘Ha ha, thank you,’ edging into the gloom. ‘Oh. Well. Isn’t this…?’

‘It’s a bit of a mess. I didn’t get much chance to tidy up.’

‘Not at all, not at all, it’s quite — oh dear, I seem to have stepped in someone’s, ah, someone’s dinner…’

‘Don’t worry about it, Charlie, I wasn’t goin to eat any more of it.’

‘Oh good, good. More of an atelier , really, isn’t it? I say, is it always this dim?’

‘Hang on, I’ll turn on the box.’ He pushed past me and pressed a button on an ancient television that squatted in a corner. After a moment two women in bikinis appeared, taking swipes at each other with large foam clubs. ‘Don’t worry, your eyes get used to it after a while.’

‘Yes, yes, of course…’

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘Thanks.’ I lowered myself gingerly on to the edge of an armchair. Its guts spilled out of a rent in its side. I sat with my legs pressed tight together and tried not to touch anything. The floor was conspicuously sticky and when you looked at it out of the corner of your eye appeared to be moving.

‘How do you like it?’ Frank’s voice called from somewhere within a teetering wilderness of junk.

‘Just milk, please,’ I replied faintly. There was an overpowering smell in the air, a kind of vastly amplified version of the one that followed Frank around. A magazine entitled Tit Parade rested on the coffee table, the young lady on the cover entirely naked save for some carefully positioned citrus fruits. ‘ Grocer Greta’s Grabulous Melons ’, it said.

Frank re-emerged with a couple of mugs. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing one to me and depositing himself upon a dysmorphic sofa opposite. ‘So,’ holding his arms outstretched, like Kubla Khan welcoming Marco Polo to Xanadu, ‘what do you think?’

‘Nice,’ I croaked. ‘Very nice.’

‘Home sweet home,’ he said fondly, and slurped his tea.

‘Although…’ I began.

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, I have to say,’ I said, in a careless, jokey sort of way to show there were no hard feelings, ‘I don’t think much of your doorman.’

‘Doorman?’ Frank repeated.

‘Yes, the doorman,’ I said, trying to maintain my smile. ‘You know, he was really quite slovenly.’

‘That wasn’t a doorman, Charlie, he’s homeless.’

‘Homeless?’

‘Yeah, he lives in that cardboard box on the steps.’

‘Oh,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I wondered why he wasn’t wearing a cap.’

There was a pause. ‘Doorman,’ Frank chuckled to himself.

Light struggled in through the ungenerous window, weak grey light that was more like the residue of light. I looked down thoughtfully into my tea, which had bits in it. After a time I said judiciously, ‘I imagine that’s why it’s taking him so long to bring up my cases.’

Frank put his cup down, wincing. ‘Ah, Charlie…’

‘You don’t suppose,’ I ventured, ‘he might have forgotten which room —’

But Frank had already leapt from his seat and was hurtling back down the stairs. I got up and hurried after him, catching up outside the front door, where he stood studying the cardboard box and blanket until a short while ago occupied by the homeless person/doorman. ‘Fuck,’ he said, stroking his chin.

‘He’s gone,’ I said superfluously. The street was empty save for two moon-faced children watching us from the kerb opposite. One was standing in a supermarket trolley, the other gripped the handle; both were entirely motionless.

‘Come on,’ Frank poked me in the ribs and took off down the street. We reached a crossroads dominated by two huge breezeblocks of flats, where we took a left past a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and burned-out cars and came to a long concrete bunker with metal shutters. I padded after Frank to the door, where he stopped.

‘What? Is he in here?’

‘Charlie,’ he said gravely. ‘You must never, ever, ever go in here, all right?’

‘Fine,’ I squeaked. He went inside, and I waited there, whistling tunelessly with my hands in my pockets, attempting to blend in with my surroundings. It was hard to tell which buildings had people in them. The shop windows were covered with heavy grilles. In some of the blocks clothes were hanging out on balcony washing-lines, but the doors were boarded up and covered in graffiti. Others seemed in such a state of disrepair as to be uninhabitable by man or beast — and then one would hear a radio from an upper level, or a child would pop its head out to spit down on to the pavement.