Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I could bear no more. Holding my handkerchief to my mouth, I staggered away from the table, grabbing the telephone when they weren’t looking and bringing it into my room. There, kneeling in the darkness, I brushed a tear from my eye and dialled Boyd’s number. The phone seemed to ring for a long time before it was answered; and then all there was at the other end was a sort of a low croaking noise.

‘Boyd?’ I whispered. ‘Is that you?’

‘Charles…’ the pitiful croak responded.

He was unrecognizable — indeed, he barely sounded human. A chill wave of dread surged up through me. ‘What’s happened to you?’ I said. ‘Is it that awful cold?’

‘Not a cold,’ he whispered.

‘It’s not? Well what on earth is it?’

‘Lassa fever,’ he said dolefully.

‘Lassa fever ?’

‘Looks like it,’ he said, breaking off for an extended fit of coughing.

‘But that’s absurd,’ I said querulously, picking up the phone and carrying it across the room. ‘How could it be? Where would you possibly get Lassa fever?’

‘Air hostesses,’ he said bitterly.

‘Oh,’ feeling my knees give way and lowering myself on to the mattress. ‘Oh, hell.’

One of them had brought it back from Africa, and now the whole house had come down with it; they were all in quarantine, Boyd said. ‘There’s a policeman at the door, even,’ he said glumly. ‘In case we try to break out and rub ourselves up against the local shopkeepers. No one’s allowed in except doctors.’

I slumped back against the wall. I was getting that hideous sensation of inevitability I’d had before in the hotel: as if I was not master of my own destiny, as if someone or something were out to teach me a lesson. Bawdy laughter rang out from the kitchen.

‘Sorry, old man,’ Boyd mumbled.

I rubbed my jaw bluely. There was nothing to be done, and Boyd sounded like he was getting worse by the minute; I told him to go to bed before he keeled over.

‘Yes,’ the voice slurred at the other end of the line. ‘Better do that. The rhinoceros’ll be coming in soon, y’know.’

‘That’s right, so go to bed.’

‘’S a damn… a damn pest, Charles… keeps waking me up… wanting to play strip poker…’

‘Yes, yes. Look, be a good fellow and —’

‘I tell it, how c’n you play strip poker? M’n t’say, y’re a bloody rh’nos’rus, so (a) in the first instance you’ve no hands , and (b) you’ve no… bloody… clothes, thing’s a foregone, a foregone c’nclusion…’

Droyd did not go home that night, nor the next morning, and for most of the following afternoon I was subjected to what he referred to, seemingly without irony, as his ‘music’. Sometimes it sounded like a huge metal something — a tank, maybe, or an enormous set of cutlery — falling down an infinite staircase; sometimes it sounded like a hundred thousand Nazis, goose-stepping through the Place de la République; the general idea seemed to be to capture the sound of civilization collapsing, so loudly that while it was on one could do little more than lie on one’s mattress and vibrate.

Obviously one didn’t want to be inhospitable, but the next day when he was still there I began to feel that our good nature was being taken advantage of. During an especially loud passage in his racket-making, I took Frank to one side in the kitchen for a quick word.

‘What’s that, Charlie?’ he shouted, taking a can of beer from the fridge.

‘I said, obviously one doesn’t want to be inhospitable,’ I bellowed back with my fingers in my ears, ‘but I mean, isn’t he planning to go home at some stage?’

‘Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I don’t want to ask —’ I broke off. This was hopeless. With every thump the mugs on the draining board danced a little closer to the edge, a tendency with which I could thoroughly identify.

‘Y’see, the thing about Droyd is — here, want a can?’

‘No,’ I said, but he didn’t hear and handed me an opened can of Hobson’s Choice, the cheapest beer on offer at the petrol station.

‘The thing about Droyd is he doesn’t really have a home. So he’s prob’ly better off stayin here for a bit, till he sorts himself out. I mean we don’t want him goin back to that fuckin Cousin Benny, like.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, ideally we —’

‘Anyway, there’s plenty of room for the three of us. And it’s nice to have a bit of music, it sort of cheers the place up a bit, doesn’t it?’

I was about to make a sarcastic reply, but realized at that moment that the music had dislodged a filling, so instead I returned to my room and cocooned myself as best I could in my threadbare duvet.

In a way, I suppose I am indebted to Droyd. Left to my own devices, I might have drifted along for ever in my post-Amaurot fugue. Thanks to him, the situation became untenable almost immediately.

The simple fact of it was that sharing a room with him was totally unbearable. He made Frank look like Noel Coward. He thoroughly spoiled the Test Match I was trying to watch by shouting ‘Howzat!’ at inappropriate times, even after I’d explained at length to him precisely what the term meant. He insisted on referring to the Pakistani team as ‘the wogs’ and to England as ‘the shirtlifters’. The air was constantly choked with the fumes from his cannabis cigarettes, which he smoked more or less nonstop, with the result that I kept nodding off; then every five minutes or so, out of the blue, as it were, his stereo would produce an almighty thump that made me jump out of my seat. When I asked if he wouldn’t like to switch it off for a while and perhaps catch up on his reading, he told me he’d ‘rather iron his sack’. It was after this last exchange, as I recall, that I went to fetch the newspaper I’d stolen from the Radisson to see if I could find somewhere else to live.

There were several classifieds regarding apartments for rent; I circled half a dozen, taking note of the viewing times. They were all rather on the pricey side, as Droyd pointed out when he came to see what I was doing.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ he exclaimed, reading over my shoulder. ‘Where are you going to get that kind of money?’

‘That’s my business,’ I said unkindly, pulling the newspaper away from him.

‘You need to be a fuckin millionaire to live in this city these days,’ he reflected.

‘Yes, well,’ I grunted. But there, after all, was the rub. I didn’t need to open the credit-card statements that Mother had very kindly forwarded to me to know that my days of being a millionaire were long gone. And yet I simply couldn’t go on living like this. It looked like there was nothing for it but to borrow more money from Frank. However, when I took him to one side for a quick word about it that night, he told me he didn’t have that kind of money.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘I thought business was booming.’

‘It’s not booming that much,’ he said. ‘And there’s rent to pay, and food and stuff for you lads…’

‘All right, all right,’ I snapped. Was it that he enjoyed seeing me brought low? Was that it? I wiped my brow with the back of my hand.

‘You could always get a job, Charlie. I’ve a mate’s got a warehouse, if you want I could give him a call. He’s a good bloke, and the money’s —’

‘A job, oh yes,’ I ejaculated. ‘Why don’t I just get a job, and sell off my soul to the highest bidder, and then everybody’s happy. If you ask me it’s a damned poor reflection on so-called society that in this day and age the only way a man can survive is to sacrifice his ideals and his dreams and his whole identity —’

‘That’s it,’ Frank agreed. ‘As me oul lad used to say, there’s nothin comes easy in this life…’