Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

She waited a moment, and then when I hadn’t said anything added brightly, ‘There’s the couch, of course, you can always sleep there, if you’re stuck… Or perhaps one of your friends has a spare bed?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said through clenched teeth, as if it had just occurred to me. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll ring around.’

‘Do call, darling, if you’re still stuck.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘This is your time, Charles. You’ve spread your wings, and now you must fly high, you know we’re all terribly proud —’

I put the phone down. Harry! I felt my blood bubble with rage. That jackanapes, with his Trojan horses and his offbeat hairstyle, he was the golden boy now, was he? I picked the phone up again, and dialled reception to tell them I wanted to extend my stay.

‘Certainly, sir,’ the girl said. ‘Room number, please.’

I gave her my room number. She put me on hold.

‘Mr Hythloday?’ she said, returning.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re booked up.’

‘Just a single? For one night even?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

The concierge had got there first! I was beginning to get the unpleasant sense of being caught up in some sort of mechanism over which I had no control: as if, in leaving Amaurot, I had submitted myself entirely to the whims of Fate, and I could do nothing but follow on docilely until it had brought me where it wanted. I took the last Baileys from the refrigerator under the mirror, poured it into a plastic glass and went to the window. The Radisson had a couple of acres of park around it; the land had used to belong to a convent. Perhaps this was where the nuns would play rounders and tip-the-can on sunny days.

There was nothing for it: I would have to find another hotel, preferably a cheap one. I still had a couple of credit cards left I could use. I returned to the locker side of the bed, picked up the phone again and dialled Frank’s number to tell him the move was off.

‘What’s the story?’ Frank said. His mouth was full of something.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said irritably. ‘The point is I’ll have to stay somewhere else for a few weeks first.’

‘Must be costin you,’ the voice said. ‘I’d say them places set you back a good bit.’

‘I’ll survive,’ I replied curtly.

‘Yeah, but,’ he continued, then paused to swallow his — chicken balls , suddenly I found I knew it with the unshakeable certainty of an epiphany — ‘but here, why don’t you just kip in my gaff for a while?’

I was caught off guard. ‘What?’ I stammered. ‘What?’

He repeated his offer. I cast about for an excuse not to take it; but after all the twists and turns the evening had taken I found I was unable to think straight. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ I said feebly.

‘I don’t give a monkey’s,’ he assured me.

In the distance I seemed to hear singing, as of ghostly nuns. ‘Well, that’s very kind,’ I tried to sound grateful, ‘that’s really very kind.’

‘Nice one,’ Frank said.

And so the next morning I left my room and took my suitcases down in the elevator to the lobby, where I handed in the key. Every movement, every tiny social transaction seemed backlit, consecrated somehow, like the footsteps a prisoner counts off in his head as he is marched to the scaffold. Frank was waiting outside, leaning with his arms crossed against his rusty white van. Someone had drawn a penis in the dust on its side. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Capital,’ I said. ‘Capital.’

Frank’s apartment was part of a tall redbrick building — Georgian, by the looks of the fanlight over the door — that must once have been a respectable, even a dignified townhouse. Here and there were traces of a more illlustrious past: delicate flourishes to the mouldings, fragments of the original plasterwork. But they were no more than traces, like shards of pottery in the dirt. The façade had been blackened and corroded by decades of grime, and most of the original fixtures torn out in the course of splitting the interior into ever-shrinking tenements. The present landlord was a former Garda who owned several properties in the area and was, Frank said, ‘a gobshite even for a Garda’.

Apt C was composed almost entirely of corners, as if whoever built the house had cobbled together an extra room from the nooks and recesses that were left over at the end. The rooms wobbled in a way that one was not accustomed to in architecture, and certain walls could not be leaned on because they were, I quote, ‘holding the ceiling up’. Even the daylight seemed to have trouble negotiating the flat’s eccentricities: it came through the window and then stopped short, with its finger on its lip, so to speak. Consequently it was always rather dark — or dank , perhaps dank was a better word. It was easily the dankest apartment I had ever stayed in.

I slept on a mattress of uncertain lineage in a room about the size of one of the smaller broom closets at Amaurot, with those possessions that the patrons of the Coachman had been kind enough not to steal — improving book, shaving kit, second-best dinner jacket, socks, Gene Tierney memorabilia, journal of thoughts largely as yet unthought — arranged in a little heap beside me. The bulk of the apartment was taken up by Frank’s junk. Every day he’d come home with more, carrying it in from his van in crates and dumping it where he could. Cigarette cases, ballet slippers, window sashes, hymnals, cornerstones, cash registers, rocking horses, picture rails, things with parts missing, parts separated from their things — everywhere you looked you were confronted with uprooted elements of other people’s lives.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, examining a stringless Dunlop tennis racket that had just arrived. ‘How do you tell what’s valuable, and what’s, you know, garbage?’

He thought for a moment. ‘The stuff people won’t buy is garbage,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Most of the stuff they bought: evidently it was a good time to be in architectural salvage. Half the city was being demolished and built over; things could be picked up for a song, and then sold on at a premium to all the people with new pubs and new hotels and new houses who wanted to give their property a touch of authenticity. ‘All this old shit,’ Frank waved his hand over the latest plunder spread over the floor, ‘like horseshoes, signposts, firemen’s helmets and that — pubs go mad for it. They’re gag-gin for old gear to put on the walls to make it look more old-lookin, like. Same with the new flats. People don’t like things just bein new. They want to be reminded of bygone days and that.’

‘Why don’t they just stop knocking down the old buildings, then?’ I said. ‘If everyone’s so wild about bygone days.’

‘Cos then we’d all be out of a job.’

Piled up like that, in no particular order, the junk seemed to take on a kind of generic identity — a musty, melancholy pastness that filled the room like an old perfume. During the day, when Frank was out, it made me feel a little like a relic myself. I had nothing to do, other than fidget with the tassels of my dressing gown — which may not sound unusual in itself, but this was a different kind of nothing than before, a fluttery, restive, unsatisfying nothing. I rarely went outside, other than brief forays to the petrol station, where one could buy the essentials at trumped-up prices; most of my time was passed at the window, gazing down at the grim slums below.

The streets of Bonetown were grey and dismal, without trees or decoration, and the greyness, the dismalness had etched themselves into the faces of the inhabitants. I discerned two distinct strata to Bonetown society. Firstly, the natives. These, to speak plainly, were as villainous a bunch of ruffians as one would find anywhere in the world. They were uncouth and badly dressed, and they spent their days lurching from the pub to the bookies to the petrol station, toting seemingly infinite numbers of children — many of whom, I noticed, bore a strong physical resemblance to Frank. I mentioned this to him, but he only smacked his lips and made some arcane remark about how looking like someone didn’t actually prove anything in a court-type situation.