Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Right, right,’ I gabbled, fumbling for my wallet.

‘Hurry up,’ cuffing me roughly.

‘Ow!’ I wept, finally locating the damn wallet and passing it up to him — and then at the last second pulling it back. ‘Just a minute,’ I said.

‘Don’t try anythin,’ he warned.

I squinted at him through the rain. ‘Droyd?’ I said.

This gave him pause. ‘Yes?’ the figure said warily.

‘It’s me, you idiot!’ I expostulated, pushing his knee aside. Droyd appeared totally thrown by this. He sat up and blinked heavily. I realized that he had never seen me unbandaged before.

‘It’s Charles!’ I elaborated. ‘ Charles! ’

He put his hand over his forehead a moment. ‘Ah fuck,’ he said. Then, without further consultation, he turned tail down the alley.

The apartment was already in a state of upheaval when I eventually got back.

‘It’s the landlord!’ Laura shouted in my ear from the safety of the bathroom. ‘He called again about the rent!’

A loud crash issued from the next room. ‘I thought we paid the rent!’ I shouted back.

‘He says he’s going to evict you!’ Laura returned over the sound of the back coming off the dysmorphic sofa and a heartfelt ‘Fuckin — culchie — pig — bastard —’

‘What’s he doing in there?’ putting my hands over my ears.

‘Breaking things, maybe you shouldn’t mention about Droyd —’ She dropped her voice as Frank abruptly hove into view and demanded to know what about Droyd.

She was right: the news did little to calm matters.

‘Ah fuck Charlie!’ he wailed. ‘This is very bad, this is very bad.’

‘Well I know, I mean I have the luxury of my own face for all of five minutes and then somebody’s punching it —’

‘Where did he go? Did he say where he was goin?’

‘He was mugging me, neither of us had time to exchange pleasantries.’

‘But, like —’ he tugged his hair desperately. ‘How did he look?’

I considered this. ‘Very focused,’ I said. ‘Obviously concentrating on the job at hand, and —’

‘No, Charlie, did he look like — did he look like he was usin ?’

I didn’t know quite what he was getting at, and before I could puzzle it out he had rushed off to his room, staggering back in a moment later with a green-and-white sock in his hand, to tell us that the money was gone.

Everything was gone, as a matter of fact; the apartment had been cleaned out. All of Frank’s savings; anything of value that could be carried away from the salvage; the blighter had even made off with my penny jar. It occurred to me that the extent of the theft was such that it must have been proceeding over some time. Only then did we realize that this month’s, last month’s, maybe even before then’s rent had never made it to the landlord. ‘Ah Jaysus,’ Frank gasped as if he had been winded, dropping into the chair.

The phone began to ring.

‘And now that I think of it, that story of his about the dog waylaying him on the way to the post office, and running off with the giro for the electricity? That was pretty unlikely too…’

The phone stopped ringing momentarily, then started up again.

Frank didn’t sleep at all that night; I knew this because I didn’t sleep either. I sat at the kitchen table in the candlelight and listened to him in the next room, barging restlessly through the furniture like one of those lumbering, outmoded-looking mammals, a pangolin or a three-toed sloth. My play was laid out before me, not that I held any hopes for it now. Lopakhin had won, Frederick and I both knew it. The vineyard’s reputation was in tatters. Lopakhin had photographed Frederick in what appeared to be a deep embrace with Babs and released it to the press. It was a total fabrication, of course: what had really happened was that Babs, believing Frederick to be gone for ever, had signed her half of the estate over to Lopakhin and then in a fit of despair thrown herself down the stairs; and she would almost certainly have died, had Frederick not happened to come back early from the cork-makers’ convention and found her lying there in the hall and saved her life by performing mouth-to-mouth on her. But this innocent act, in the hands of Lopakhin and his scurrilous friends in the newspapers, looked like it was going to be enough to ruin Frederick’s name, on the very day he was about to unveil his new vintage Burgundy to the notoriously conservative French wine industry. The fiendishness of Lopakhin’s plot seemed to have shocked him into a kind of stupor; and now all he did all day was sit in his study, sticking wine labels in his scrapbook and playing backgammon with the Bosnians, as if marking time until the inevitable end. It was depressing; I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it and go to bed. Perhaps I hoped that by simply staying awake I could somehow hold the world as it was: keep it in that dark, rain-filled moment, and stop the fateful day from coming.

Laura’s pyjamaed silhouette appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you doing up?’ she said. ‘You should go to bed, there’s no point both of you worrying.’

‘I’m not worrying about Droyd,’ I scowled.

‘You’re not?’ she said, walking past me to the refrigerator.

‘If you ask me, we should be counting our blessings.’ I spoke sotto voce so Frank wouldn’t hear. ‘It takes a particularly low sort of a blackguard to steal a man’s penny jar.’

‘Are you worried about Bel?’ She opened the refrigerator door and a neat rectangle of light unfolded over her face like a blank page. I began to reply and stopped. Somehow it had slipped my mind how simply, how matter-of-factly lovely she was; and for an instant I was seized by the old hope that I could blink my eyes and transport the two of us to another, less contrary world, a world that could fit that kind of beauty. ‘You should be glad about it,’ she said, pouring a glass of lactose-free chocolate milk. ‘It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Like she’s so into it, all that acting stuff.’

‘I am glad,’ I said unconvincingly, then trailed off and restarted suddenly: ‘I say — do you remember a girl in your class by the name of Kiddon? Jessica Kiddon?’

Laura mulled this over, reciting the name under her breath. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Who’s she?’

‘She’s the girl Bel’s supposed to be going off to Yalta with,’ I said, frowning. ‘ Apparently she was in Bel’s class. But I don’t recall seeing her in any of the yearbooks.’

‘It’s a big school, though, Charles. Like who could possibly remember a whole yearbook?’

‘Mmm.’ I made an ambiguous, throat-clearing noise.

‘But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Like I’m sure she’ll be totally fine.’

‘Mmm,’ I said again, not intending for it to sound quite as bleak as it did. She drifted behind me and placed her hand on my neck. ‘Charles,’ she said gently, ‘did you ever hear that thing, if you love somebody, set them free? It was in that ad for ice cream? With the talking bear?’

Her fingers stroked my nape; I hung my head, and shut my eyes. The kitchen was filled with the rumble of the rain against the glass.

‘It’s like someone’s angry with us,’ she said, as if to herself. Then she snapped her fingers and spun back round to me. ‘I’ve finally realized who you look like!’ she said.

‘What?’ I said, startled.

‘Without your bandages — it’s been driving me mad since you came back from the hospital. It’s that painting, you look just like that painting in your house.’

‘What painting?’ I said. ‘There’s lots of paintings.’

‘You know, that one of that guy. The one in the hallway. You look just like it.’ She laughed again, pleased with this observation, then cut herself short as Frank huffed into the room. He had a frazzled, wild-eyed, vaguely prehistoric look about him, rather like one of those cavemen that they find from time to time encased in ice.