Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘No,’ I said.

‘It’s deadly there,’ he sniffed. ‘There’s these foam clubs where they pour in all this foam on to the dancefloor and birds just come up to you and start ridin you. It’s magic.’

‘Yes, that does sound jolly…’ I had been examining the serviette from different angles, but the wedges were stubbornly holding on to their secret. ‘This looks all right to me,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you read it out, and we can hear what it sounds like.’

‘Right.’ He took back the serviette and, tracing his finger along it, read in a halting monotone: ‘For DJ Droyd it is all about the music. He is like a machine cos like nothing can stop him. Also cos nothing matters to him except the beats, which they are the only hope for the future. He is known as the Droyd to represent what he is sayin like in his music. He is sayin that we are livin in a future war zone and it is goin to get worse. When the war comes against the robots and the computers they will easily win probably because they don’t get tired or hungry like humans and they never give up not like humans. The only hope is to be more like a robot yourself and not go mopin around havin feelins and that like a sap. This is what he is sayin.’ He looked up. ‘That’s all I done so far.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘Thought it possibly strayed off the point a little towards the end, that whole part about the war against the robots. Over all, though, very impressive.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Droyd said in a low voice, pulling down the peak of his cap.

‘What is?’

‘All this stuff, right,’ waving his hand at the prevailing clutter, ‘it’s all an illusion. We seen a film about it in the Joy. It’s just created by the computers so we won’t realize what’s really happenin, which is we’re in these energy pods and they’re harvestin our energy,’

‘Cripes,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

In spite of his occasionally erratic metaphysics, we did reach a kind of détente over those weeks. He told me how Frank and he had first met, when Frank had gone to salvage a bathtub from a condemned building and found Droyd sleeping in it. He’d taken him back to the flat in his van with the rest of the junk, and then let him stay on the couch until he sorted himself out, which turned out to be the best part of a year.

‘Then what happened?’ I enquired.

‘That’s when I started taking the gear,’ he said, wiping his nose matter-of-factly. ‘You know yourself, you start off just smokin a bit to come down after you’ve had a few yokes, next thing you know you’re knockin off the chip shop.’

‘And working for Cousin Benny…?’

‘Yeah, but that’s all behind me now,’ he said. ‘Here, what’s the most yokes you’ve ever had?’

‘Hmm, let me see…’

‘Once I had seventeen, right, me and Frankie were at this rave in this car park down the country. It was fuckin mad, me heart stopped for five minutes. They had to take me to hospital in a helicopter and then I was in a wheelchair for two weeks and this doctor told me if I ever took a yoke again I’d die.’ His eyes misted over nostalgically. ‘I just told him to fuck off.’

As far as I could work out, these ‘yokes’ were some manner of energy-boosting pill, with similar effects to a multi-vitamin supplement. According to Droyd, malcontents and dropouts gathered to consume them at ‘raves’, open-air dances staged in the middle of the night under motorways or in muddy fields.

‘Fields!’ I said. ‘But what if it’s raining?’

Droyd shrugged. ‘You have to have a laugh, don’t you?’ Jogging his knee, he turned back to the empty black square of the window. ‘Cos otherwise, y’know, what’s the bleedin point?’

As the days went by at Mr Dough, each one identical to the one before, this was a question I frequently put to myself. Far from stepping up to bat, and fulfilling my long-cherished dreams of becoming a productive member of society, I felt I was embarked on a vast and inconsequential digression from my own life; and just as the logs on their way to the sugar-frosting machine merged, under my gaze, into one, so the hours and days blended into a single unbounded expanse, and life itself took on the trappings of the conveyor belt. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t go on in the same way forever: then one night Frank happened to stay home.

We were all sitting together watching the television. Frank liked to watch the twenty-four-hour news channel, which usually had footage of things exploding from one war or another. My theory was that this enthusiasm harked back to his days in the Lebanon with the Peace Corps, though to hear him speak about it you would think that all they had done out there was lie around and play practical jokes on the US Marines, sneaking up behind them and bursting balloons in their ears, shouting ‘Incoming! Incoming!’

Footage of a tank rolling over the rubble of a woman’s house gave way to a commercial break. A cartoon sun with spirally psychedelic eyes rose to repetitive thumping music over what appeared to be some sort of skinhead prison-island.

‘Ibiza,’ Droyd said authoritatively. ‘One of these days Frankie and me are goin to Ibiza, aren’t we Frankie?’

‘Ah yeah,’ Frank said.

‘One of these days,’ Droyd yawned, stretching his arms wide, ‘we’re just goin to say fuck this, we’re off, see yiz later yiz bollockses… On the beach all day drinkin cans, down the clubs at night ridin all the birds, am I right Frankie?’

‘Ah yeah,’ Frank repeated plaintively, scrunching his can and dropping it to the floor.

Droyd turned around and gave him a long, withering look. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said.

‘What?’ Frank said.

‘She’s only a bird, Frank.’

Frank maintained his expression of witless innocence.

‘You know what I’m talkin about,’ Droyd said, getting exercised. ‘Mopin around the place like a muppet.’ He rose to his feet. ‘The Three Fs, Frankie, who was it told me about them? Find ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em, who told me that?’

‘I say!’ I protested. ‘That’s my sister you’re talking about!’

‘I don’t give a monkey’s!’ Droyd responded hotly. ‘Look what she’s done to this cunt! He won’t come out with me for a fight. He won’t go out to Ziggy’s and take yokes. Do you know what he’s been doin every night? Do you?’

Frank froze.

‘Yeah,’ Droyd rounded on him, voice trembling, ‘you didn’t think I knew, did you, you bollocks. Lyin to me, your own mate. Sayin to me you was goin out drinkin with Niallser and Micker and Ste and Bignose Rogan. They said they haven’t seen you in months.’ He turned back to me, his acne livid on his pasty white face. ‘So last night I hide in his van to find out where he’s really been goin, which is he drives out to Killiney, and he sits there, lookin at the sea .’

Frank cast his eyes shamefully at the ground.

Droyd was now stamping around the room waving his arms in the air. ‘The sea !’ he shouted. ‘The fuckin sea !’

Frank did not reply: he made a pitiful sight, shrivelled up in his armchair. Droyd grabbed his jacket from the floor and pulled on his cap, then came back round to stand between Frank and the television. ‘I can’t take it!’ he bellowed. ‘I don’t know who ye are any more!’ And with that he blazed out of the apartment, slamming the door after him, and leaving Frank and me to a long and uncomfortable silence. ‘… legations of financial and political misdealing that quote boggled the mind,’ the television said, depicting a corpulent man in a grey suit battling his way through reporters outside Dublin Castle.