Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

As for Bel, I was quite sure she had thrown herself into her belle époque , no pun intended, without so much as a thought for the purgatory to which her bleeding heart had inadvertently condemned me: though that didn’t mean I didn’t think about her, didn’t wonder at any given moment what she might be doing as I sat counting dust motes in the eviscerated armchair; it didn’t mean I wasn’t dreaming every night of home, the squeaking trolley wheels outside my window becoming Old Man Thompson’s rusty weathervane, the susurration of faraway traffic the sound of waves on Killiney beach, the fraught cheerless urban night becoming a July evening where Bel and I threw a party on the lawn, with Manhattans and lobster bisque laid out under an advancing sunset that stretched flamingo-pink across the whole sky; until ‘Come on,’ she’d whisper, and we’d steal away hand in hand, through the trees, to that spot on the clifftop where Father had looked out and recited his poems; where the sky had turned that eternal-seeming blue of twilight and we watched the sea fetched up and dashed again by a teasing moon, and the lights on the far-off shore like tiny blazing shipwrecks…

And then one night I was roused from my sleep by a calamitous thumping. The noise reverberated through ceiling, walls and floor alike: the whole apartment was juddering unmercifully as if we were having a minor, very localized earthquake.

My first thought was that someone was trying to demolish the building. This had happened before, Frank had told me: apparently when the developers couldn’t shift someone from a house they wanted to knock down, they would arrive in the middle of the night and accidentally-on-purpose drive a lorry into it. I rubbed my eyes and put on my dressing gown, intending to go out and tell them that they had the wrong house. But as I stepped into the living room I realized that the noise was coming from right here. An enormous stereo-machine had materialized atop the television; and beside it, wagging its head in time to the noise, was what appeared to be a large, shiny ferret that had learned to walk on two legs. Or that was the impression I got in the split-second before the ferret launched itself at me; then, to my infinite surprise, I found myself on the floor being throttled.

This fellow had obviously throttled before; he cleverly defused my resistance by banging my head on the ground as he was strangling me. After a minute he was clearly getting the best of it and it’s fair to say that had I not managed to cry out before he got a good grip on my windpipe things might have come to a sticky end then and there. But just as I was about to black out, a hand appeared at his shoulder and pulled him away, and the din stopped abruptly. After I’d rolled around coughing for a while, I was recovered enough to drag myself halfway up the armchair — and see Frank, not beating my assailant to a bloody pulp but shaking his hand and clapping him on the back!

‘All right, Droyd!’ he was saying. ‘How’s your fanny?’

‘Not three bad, Frankie,’ the ferret thing chuckled, ‘not three bad.’ He was small and wore a sort of two-piece tracksuit with a satin finish, the same kind the actors had worn in Burnin Up. Around his neck there was a heavy gold chain, and on his hands clunky gold rings as well as clumsy tattoos in blue ink that looked like he had done them himself.

‘Would someone mind explaining to me what is going on?’ I rasped. ‘Who is this fellow? What the devil does he think he’s doing, coming in here unannounced in the middle of the night?’

‘This is Droyd, Charlie,’ Frank said, then turned to him. ‘What are you doin here?’

‘I just got out,’ the ferret said.

‘Out of where?’ I pursued.

‘Out of prison. Frankie, who’s this shirtlifter anyway?’

‘That’s Charlie. Are you all right, Charlie?’

I waved an arm stoically from my position on the floor, on to which I had collapsed again to hyperventilate.

‘You shouldn’t’ve strangled him like that, he’s a bit sensitive like.’

‘Wasn’t my fuckin fault,’ the other voice returned somewhere over my head, ‘I wasn’t expectin some fuckin Egyptian mummy burstin in like that.’

‘Ha!’ I rejoined hoarsely. ‘That’s funny, because, you know, I wasn’t expecting some total stranger to break into my home and wake me up at an ungodly hour —’

‘It’s not ungodly, Charlie, I haven’t even had me dinner yet.’

‘That’s funny, neither have I,’ I heard the ferrety chap say, whereupon Frank of course invited him to dine with us. I tried to sneak away, back to my room, but Frank grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Come and have a bite to eat with us. Soon we’ll all be the best of friends.’ And so, only half an hour after being dragged from my bed and beaten, I found myself sitting at the table with the two of them, listening to Frank inquire of the interloper how he’d enjoyed his time ‘away’ — as if he’d been off taking the waters at Carlsbad! — and numbly wondering how I had managed to bring my life to this terrible pass.

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Droyd was saying. ‘It was like anythin, there were good days and bad days. And you’d meet some right characters in there. Like you know that bit in Lethal Weapon where Riggs is in the straitjacket and he like fuckin pops out his shoulder so he can escape?’

‘That bit’s fuckin disgustin,’ Frank recalled pleasurably.

‘Well, I had a mate in the Joy could do that. Well, he could pop it out but he couldn’t pop it back in. Actually it wasn’t him what popped it out so much as this other bloke done it to him called Johnny No-Fingers. Now he was a real character…’

It seemed that Droyd had been imprisoned for his activities as henchman to a local drug peddler called Cousin Benny. This Cousin Benny lived in a tower block over to the west, and he wasn’t anyone’s actual cousin: I would hear his name again during my sojourn in Bonetown, always accompanied by a lowering of the voice and a furtive glance over the shoulder. Even Frank appeared somewhat daunted by him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘How’d’you get mixed up with that scumbag?’

‘I was on the gear,’ Droyd said matter-of-factly. ‘You know how it is. You never have enough money. I started off just robbin old ladies. But soon that wasn’t enough, so I started robbin cars. But then that wasn’t enough either. So I started workin for Benny. It makes sense if you think about it. He used to give me an employee discount.’ He chewed and swallowed and laid down his fork. ‘Ah yeah, it’s all a laugh in the beginnin,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But it’s a mug’s game, a mug’s game. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. I’m a changed man, yes sir.’

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and cracked his knuckles, the subterranean light of the television playing over his bony face; for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, and I was about to ask whether he’d taken heroin to replace the self-worth that society hadn’t given him when, turning his attention to the plate in front of him, he said, ‘Here, d’you ever notice how pasta when it’s wet sounds just like when you’re givin a bird the finger?’

‘What?’ Frank said.

‘Listen.’ Droyd had taken his fork and was prodding the pasta with it to produce a series of slaps and slurps and squelches. ‘See? It sounds exactly like when you’ve got your fingers up a bird’s growler.’

I set down my plate and inhaled deeply. ‘I say,’ I appealed.

‘You’re right,’ Frank said. ‘That’s fuckin amazin.’

‘Look, stop that, will you?’

But now Frank had joined in with his pasta, and the air was filled with lubricious noises. ‘Give it a go, Charlie. It’s fuckin amazin.’