Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Well maybe you’ve got this landlord character all wrong,’ I said. ‘Maybe if you just explain it to him, he’ll understand. Explain that, you know, Droyd stole the money to spend on drugs and that you’re very sorry but you’ll get it to him as soon as you can. Didn’t you say he was an ex-policeman? An ex-policeman’s going to understand about these things, isn’t he?’

Frank laughed hollowly for about five minutes. I simmered and kicked my heels and twirled the Dunlop tennis racket in my hand. Suddenly Frank reached up and grabbed it. ‘Charlie, you can get us some money can’t you?’

‘Me?’ I said incredulously. ‘Where am I supposed to get you money?’

He rose to his feet and stood over me. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘this is no time to be a scabby bastard.’

‘I’m not being any kind of a bastard. I don’t have any money,’ I said, backing away.

‘But you have to,’ he insisted mechanically, advancing on me, swinging his tree-trunk arms. ‘You’re from fuckin Killiney you’ve all got loads of money —’

‘Damn it, can’t you think for just two seconds?’ I shouted at him. ‘If I had any money at all do you think I’d be living here? In a slum? Do you think I’d be spending my day traipsing around looking at heroin addicts, or hauling people out of opium dens? I was supposed to be moving in with air hostesses! Air hostesses, Frank! From Sweden ! I mean, did it ever once occur to you that this might not be my ideal living situation, trapped in a ghetto with a scrap merchant and a juvenile delinquent?’

For a moment, I was sure he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead his face seemed to sort of crumple ; and covering it with his hands, he sank back down to the ground.

A small voice piped up: the rain had woken Droyd. ‘I’m sorry, Frankie,’ he said in slurred, slow-motion words, tugging Frank’s elbow. ‘It’s all about the music now, I swear.’

‘That’s what you said the last time, you geebag,’ Frank said, grinding his teeth.

‘This time I mean it,’ Droyd pronounced. Rain spilled down his lolling forehead. ‘I swear. Don’t worry, Frankie, we’ll get out of this fuckin kip. We’ll go to Ibiza, an’ we’ll sit on the beach all day drinkin cans… an’ all the birds’1l be after us, cos we’re the men…’

‘Just shut up, you cunt. Can’t you see I’ve fuckin had it with you, you fuckin juvenile delinquent.’ Frank sank his head in his hands and buried it between his knees. ‘We’re fucked,’ he sobbed. ‘We’re fucked.’

I put my hands in my pockets and shuffled uncomfortably. Away to the east, somewhere beyond the power lines, the first guests would be arriving for dinner. If I left now I could still make the starters. Tomorrow, perhaps Frank and I could sit down together and figure out a plan; there was no point dallying any longer, getting into Mother’s bad books on top of everything else. I was just turning to say pip-pip and set off across the waste ground when suddenly I had a premonition. Suddenly, vividly, I could see myself, sitting at the dinner table and relating today’s adventures to Bel. I was presenting it as a kind of a picaresque yarn about the difficulties I had had getting here tonight. But she didn’t appear to be seeing the funny side; instead she was getting angry and launching into me as I tried to enjoy my duck terrine. Frank puts a roof over your head, she was saying, and this is what do you do for him in return? You let Amaurot slip through your fingers, and now you’re going to let them take Apt C Sands Villas as well ?

I glanced down. Droyd had fallen back asleep with his head on Frank’s shoulder. Look, I told the premonition-Bel, Mother said eight sharp. She had been very clear on that point, and Lord knows she was close enough to disinheriting me as it was. And furthermore, what about you? I said, pointing to the premonitory suitcases waiting in the hallway beneath the glass frieze. I don’t see what you’re getting so high and mighty about, when you’re traipsing off to Yalta. When do you think Frank and Droyd will get to go somewhere like Yalta? Never, that’s when. They’ll probably never get out of this godforsaken place.

But none of this seemed to matter. She just looked at me in that way she had, and I looked down guiltily at my imaginary duck terrine.

And then I had an idea.

Admittedly it didn’t seem like much of an idea at first, particularly when we turned out our pockets and found we had only four pounds seventy-eight in change (Frank’s) and one unusually coloured pebble from Killiney Beach (mine) by way of collateral. But after we had taken Droyd back to the flat and put him to bed in Frank’s room and barricaded the door with the sofa and the tallboy and a set of dumbbells that kept falling off the bar and told Laura not to let him out no matter what, I brought Frank outside to the van to discuss it. He was understandably shaken by events and before he’d listen to anything he insisted on smoking some of his hashish to calm him down; and as I was feeling rather in need of calming down myself, and I hadn’t any baccy, I took some of it too and put it in my pipe. Then, when we were both calmer, I outlined my plan.

‘The best way to look at it,’ I said, ‘is that basically we have nothing left to lose. In a way that’s a sort of an advantage, do you see? It means we can take bigger risks, because, I mean, how much worse can things possibly get?’

‘I don’t know, Charlie,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘I’m good at it,’ I said. ‘Honestly. It’s probably the one thing in the world I’m actually good at.’

Frank shook his head, sending scurrying little puffs of redolent smoke.

‘You’ll just have to trust me,’ I said; and, with a small but expressive moan, he handed over his last four pounds seventy-eight.

And even as we approached in the van, it was apparent that this was a fated night. The rain was falling vertically and bouncing off the glass roof, and the floodlights shining through it gave the dog-track, as we neared it, a kind of a halo, so that it seemed to glow , like a magical city, as if everything that had happened in our lives were no more than a yellow-brick road bringing us here. Drawing up in the van in a humble and trepidatious silence, I had the most curious sense that things had come loose from their everyday fixtures. Colours seemed brighter, sounds deeper, starker; thoughts and memories, past and future, bled out of their confines into the air. The Roma women with gold teeth selling magazines in the car park, the inhuman voice announcing the next race over the tannoy — everything seemed to carry a secret marker; everything took on the glaze of destiny.

I managed to persuade Frank to stay up in the bar this time. A little table with two chairs waited for us right beside the window. Outside, the stands were full and the atmosphere electric — literally, as over the stadium thunderclouds swirled and massed. I ordered a Tom Collins and set to work.

2003 Masterpiece Ivor Biggun Trouble in Paradise 5/1

2018 Twink’s Mother Dunroamin The Great Pretender 8/3 on

2040 Flashdance My Other Dog’ s A Mercedes Liberty Bell evens

Picking the winners did not require much divination on my part. If there were, as seemed increasingly to be the case, unearthly forces at work that night, they were making little effort to disguise themselves. Instead they seemed to be using the dog meet to single me out and pillory me for my recent errors in judgement. Oh Brother!; Good-time Charlie; I’m Off — in every race there was a barely concealed indictment, meant solely for me; and every indictment cruised infallibly into victory. The money poured in thick and fast, and after an hour and a quarter of it my nerves were in shreds. Needless to say, this was completely lost on Frank.