Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Suddenly I was too exhausted even to be properly angry at him. I closed my eyes and held my head. ‘Get out of here, MacGillycuddy.’

‘It’s not my fault if she’s like you,’ he said, raising his hands defensively, ‘with a head like fuckin cement. I just gave her the facts. There’s no right or wrong about a fact. I can’t be held responsible if —’

I feinted at him: he sprang sideways, like a cat from a hurled stone, and then slunk away towards the back door. ‘And don’t come back!’ I called after him; then joined the others crowded anxiously around the wings.

The lawyer and the beautiful model were back in the kitchen. They had decided to come clean about their affair; now they were waiting for Bel to return from visiting Mother and the new ramp so that they could tell her. In the script this leads Bel to an epiphany, wherein she realizes what a horrible person she’s been and in a spirit of setting things to rights decides to undergo the revolutionary but potentially fatal new procedure — which goes tragically awry, killing her and leaving Harry and Mirela free to get married. But of Bel there was no sign: Mirela had given her cue three times now, and the two of them were beginning to look a little edgy.

‘I hope nothing’s happened to her,’ she said from the table, looking to the crevasse on the far side of the stage.

‘Who knows?’ Harry improvised. ‘Possibly the thought of taking her destiny into her own hands, instead of moving her to re-evaluate her role in society, will cause her to shrink back into moral cowardice.’ He lifted a pedagogical finger. ‘In which case, Ann, it will be up to you and me to convince her —’

But no convincing was necessary, because at that moment Bel walked out on to the stage.

The audience gasped.

‘Ah, Mary,’ Harry stammered. ‘Where’s your wheelchair?’

Without replying, Bel crossed the floor to come in behind Mirela, who sat stock-still, staring at the table. Bending down, she whispered, quite audibly, in her ear: ‘Cuckoo.’

One or two of the spectators laughed nervously. Beside me, Mother murmured something I could not make out. Bel rounded the table and came upstage to where Harry was standing with his shoulders raised slightly, as if girding himself for a blow; and for a long tense moment, everything around them seemed to fade into darkness. She gazed at him with the same dissecting gaze I had been subjected to on a couple of occasions. ‘Golem,’ she said; then she turned and walked gracefully offstage, breezing right by us in the wings as if we weren’t there.

The audience rustled uncomfortably. Mirela fell back limp in her chair. For a moment the house, the world, seemed to list in utter disarray. Then Harry snapped back to life. With an opportunism one could not help but admire, he went to Mirela, drew her to her feet, and said: ‘Don’t you see what’s happened? We’ve saved her. Oh darling — we’ve saved her.’ And with that, he pulled her to him and kissed her.

‘The curtain,’ Mother gurgled in my ear. ‘The curtain, for the love of God —’

I bounced over to the panel, where the tubby stage manager stood dumbstruck, and pulled a likely looking lever. The curtain fell to absolute silence.

‘We’re ruined!’ Mother wailed. The cast and crew gathered wretchedly around, looking to one another in bewilderment. One of the actors proposed quite earnestly that we take advantage of the curtain to flee and begin a better life elsewhere; this was vociferously seconded by the others, but before I could suggest Chile as having much to recommend it, a great noise rose up from the other side. It was huge and amorphous — like an avalanche, I thought, or an entire forest falling down — and then the whoops and hurrahs began, and the curtain was winched back up for us to be confronted by a standing ovation.

A triumph, the reviews would say next day: Harry Little’s amiable melodrama lulling the audience into a false sense of security, then delivering from nowhere a knockout punch, when the growing love between her sister (a luminescent Mirela Pribicevic) and the dashing young lawyer (Little) prompts wheelchair-bound Mary (sympathetically played by Belle Hithloday) to literally find her feet and take her first faltering steps into solitary but redemptive freedom. What seems at first a slight though generous work examining the difficulties of the mobility-impaired in getting in and out of buildings, reveals itself in a shocking and conflicted resolution almost Lacanian in its prematurity — the latter half of the play is only seventeen minutes long — to be an explosive commentary on the nature of freedom and the compromised but still cathartic power of love and also the theatre in the modern world — etc, etc.

‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘I mean, it looks like your little épater les bourgeois may actually have saved the day.’

‘It hadn’t escaped me,’ she said dully, as the doctor-cum-joyrider conga’d by with a drink with a little umbrella in it. Around us the party was in full swing: Bel was watching it from between her knees, her expression with every passing second becoming more remote, like a Cinderella who has outstayed her time to see not only her carriage change back to a pumpkin, but Prince Charming’s suitcase fall open and a whole horde of glass slippers spill across the floor… I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my thighs, and massaged my bandaged scalp. ‘Damn it, Bel — what on earth were you thinking?’

‘I was angry,’ she said.

‘I know you were angry — that’s not what I mean. I mean the pictures. Mac Gilly cuddy. What possessed you?’

‘ I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘He gave me a Gold Seal Guarantee of Success.’

‘MacGillycuddy’s Gold Seal Guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,’ I snapped. ‘You know perfectly well that everything that man touches turns to disaster. How could you have been so… I mean, I just don’t understand it.’

‘I just wanted to make it work,’ Bel mumbled through the cleft of her knees. ‘That’s what you do when you like somebody, isn’t it? You find out what things they like, you pretend you like the same things, you laugh at their jokes…’

‘But don’t you see ?’ pulling at my ear in frustration. ‘Don’t you see there’s a difference, between laughing at someone’s jokes, and — and having them investigated by MacGillycuddy? I mean it’s just not like you…’

‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘I had to do something, didn’t I? You don’t know what it’s been like here, with her crowding me out all the time, trying to control everything, practically undressing in front of him at rehearsals, even though she didn’t even want him, it was just so, just because she could …’ Her brow puckered sorrowfully. ‘God, they must have rehearsed that kissing scene a hundred times…’

‘That’s no reason to try and fabricate an entire romance like that. I mean how did you expect it to turn out? How could anything good come of that kind of…?’

‘It worked, didn’t it,’ she said quietly.

‘That,’ I said, ‘is what they call a moot point.’

‘It did work,’ she insisted, as if to herself. ‘That night up on the roof, everything was perfect.’

‘Well, if it was all so perfect,’ I said sourly, ‘why did you have him trailed with a camera?’

Bel dipped her head, fiddled with the pendant that had been restored to her neck. I didn’t mean to be so harsh. I suppose I was just feeling a touch misused myself. I sighed. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’m going,’ she said slowly, ‘to have another drink.’ She held out her empty glass.