Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘All right, this next one,’ he scanned the racing-sheet. ‘Looks like a straight fight between Brits Out and… You Tore Me Down.’ And he looked up. ‘What’d you think, Charlie, is it Brits Out or —?’

‘You Tore Me Down, damn it!’ I exclaimed miserably. ‘You Tore Me Down, what else could it possibly be? This whole programme has been nothing but a, but a witch hunt …’ rubbing my fists in my eyes.

‘You all right, Charlie?’

‘Of course I’m not all right, I mean a fellow makes one mistake and instead of letting him make amends everybody just wants to gloat and point the finger. What about Harry, why does he get off scot-free? Why don’t they name a few dogs after him?’

‘Charlie, I think all that ganja’s makin you a bit paranoid.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ I tugged at my collar. ‘Damn it, why is it so hot in here? Don’t you find it oppressively hot? I say, get me a Manhattan, will you?’

‘You prob’ly shouldn’t be drinkin so much on top of it either, Charlie.’

‘Don’t touch that, I’m perfectly fine, anyway it’s helping me concentrate, I said don’t touch it —’

Frank shrugged and put his pencil in his mouth and looked through the next race as I snapped my fingers for the lounge girl. ‘Right… How’s Your Billabong eight to one… McGurks Mutual Finance Limited five to one… Oh wait, Shit Creek nine to two on favourite. Shit Creek, ha ha…’

You Tore Me Down thundered home, and so did Shit Creek. Frank whooped and went to collect our winnings. I watched the clock over the bar. They would be finishing their soup by now. Would Bel be wondering where I was? Or would she be glad I wasn’t there?

‘’Member the last time we were here, Charlie?’ Frank sat down cheerfully with another wad of bills. ‘With Bel, that was a good laugh, wasn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’

‘It was that time she was tryin to get into that play,’ he reminisced. ‘’Member? Fuck’s sake. Mad about that fuckin play she was. I thought she’d top herself when they told her she couldn’t be in it, she was that into it.’ He piled the money into a little stack and sat back in his chair with his arms flung expansively over the back.

‘Damn Chekhov,’ I muttered.

‘Dunno why , like. All it is is these Russians goin on about their fuckin orchard and tryin to ride each other. Beats me why she’d be so mad into it. Do you know why she was so mad into it, Charlie?’

‘She was in it in school,’ I mumbled into my Manhattan. ‘She forgot her lines.’

‘Ah yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. Cos like, maybe in the olden days it was good, like before they had special effects and stuff. But now , I mean, it’s just fuckin borin . Like you don’t even see the fuckin Cherry Orchard. No, wasn’t my type of thing at all…’

I tuned him out, watched the lightning play along the rooftop. The family of aristocrats returning to their old house… it was coming back to me, it’s about to be sold off, but they don’t do anything about it. I remember becoming quite fond of them; they were a lazy, amiable bunch, quite gay in spite of everything — that’s the spirit, I remember thinking, sunny side up…

‘All she ever talked about was that play,’ Frank recalled. ‘She even made me learn this speech to help her, that was like a whole fuckin page long. What was it it went like?’

It was the spring: Father hadn’t been around, so Mother had dragged me along instead; we sat on stiff-backed chairs in the freezing auditorium, a dozen expensive perfumes intermingling over deeper, older school smells of Christmas tests, double gym, morning assembly and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Giddy children whispered, parents clutched mimeographed programmes; Mother sat erect on my left, mouthing the words with Bel whenever she came on — she played an old maid, always fretting and nagging and waiting to be romanced by another girl in a hairnet with a false moustache on –

‘Think Ania!’ Frank bellowed, making me jump in my seat. ‘Your grandfather your great-grandfather and all your forebears were serf owners that owned livin souls! Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every leaf and tree trunk, don’t you hear voices —’

And then she forgot her lines. How had she forgotten them? When for the last two weeks she’d been doing nothing but wandering around the house with a towel over her head, mumbling away incessantly to herself like Franny Glass? And she had breezed through the first half with no trouble at all. Yet here she was centre-stage, with her mouth half-open and her arms held out like a men’s room attendant waiting for someone to hand them a towel and clearly no idea how to proceed –

‘Don’t you see human beins gazin at you from every cherry tree in your orchard?’

It didn’t take long for the audience to cotton on, and for giggles and snickers to begin to escape the smaller members; I squirmed in my seat and felt my face go hot and wished I had the courage to just run up on stage and deus ex machina pull her out of their wretched play and disappear with her into the night. Someone, a teacher presumably, hissed the line from the wings, but she didn’t seem to hear; she stayed frozen to the spot, like a deer caught in headlights. The actors tried to continue the scene around her, but it was impossible, ludicrous — and people were enjoying the spectacle now, they guffawed heartily as the teacher hissed out the line again, and the room filled with derisory applause as the curtain hastened down, and Mother’s hands rested perfectly still and white on her purse –

‘Yet it’s perfectly clear that, to live in the present,’ Frank went on, ‘we must first at — atone for our past and be finished with it —’

‘Give it a rest,’ I murmured, ‘there’s a good fellow.’

She had been furious afterwards, Mother, I mean, even though the play had restarted five minutes later and Bel, though jittery, had managed to get to the end without any further hiccups, which I thought was a credit to her, and anyway surely these things were just an occupational hazard — there was no reason for Mother to say what she’d said, and if you asked me it was no coincidence that it was the very next day that Bel had got sick and the doctor had had to come –

‘ — and we can only atone for it by suffering —’

Because that trouble before the play, the shouting and the broken crockery, that had been enough to put anybody off, and when Father didn’t come home we had driven to the school in a hissing white-hot silence: but that’s how it had all started, the sickness and the doctors and then Father too, then two years of white coats and not sleeping and drugs with unintelligible names and one’s jaw hurting from clenching one’s teeth all the time — that’s when it all began, at that infernal play, why did she have to keep circling back to it, why couldn’t she just forget it?

‘ — by suffering by extraordinary unceasing exer —, exertion —’

‘Damn it —’

‘Forward, friends! Don’t fall behind!’

‘That’s enough —’ my hand coming down so hard that the ashtray skipped right off the table and exploded on the floor.

‘Janey, Charlie, I was only havin a laugh.’

‘Sorry,’ I said curtly, knocking back my drink.

‘Seriously, you feelin okay, Charlie?’

‘No,’ I said. How could they just let her go, without saying anything? How could they pretend nothing was wrong, let it all happen again, just so they could get her out of the way?

‘You prob’ly just need a bit of food,’ Frank said. He turned to the girl knelt sweeping up the shards of the ashtray and asked her to bring over ten packs of peanuts.