Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Think the brunette there’s taken a shine to you, Kev,’ Gary McCrum, Utilities analyst, says.

Kevin turns to look. The dark-haired girl at the end of the adjoining table glances up and away again. She has delicate hands, eyes with a little too much white in them, a disorientating air of weightlessness, like a dress on a clothes line flapping in the wind.

‘Totally checking you out,’ Dave Davison, Commodities, confirms.

Kevin scrutinizes the brunette dubiously, like a diner in a restaurant examining the lobsters in the tank. ‘Is she hot?’

‘Is she hot? She’s right there in front of you!’

‘I’ve looked at so much porn I can’t tell any more if IRL women are good-looking or not,’ Kevin confesses. ‘I have to imagine if I saw her on a screen would I click on her.’

‘IRL?’ I ask Dave Davison. ‘This means Ireland? Irish women?’

‘ In real life , Grandad — here, Kev, look at her through my phone. See? She’s an eight, easy.’

‘Well, a seven,’ Gary says.

‘Maybe she is more of a seven,’ Dave concedes.

‘Pff, I’m not wasting a drink on a seven,’ Kevin says, and turns his back on the brunette, who dips her eyes woundedly into her lap, then reaffixes herself to her friends’ conversation, throwing her toothy smile about the room betimes like a cracked whip.

‘I used to feel that way about sevens,’ Dave says sadly. ‘Then I got married.’

‘Those two are really hitting it off,’ Jurgen says to me, nodding over to where for the last half an hour Paul and Ish have been deep in conversation.

‘I hope she is not telling him anything too personal,’ I say.

‘Such as her theories about where it all went wrong with Tog?’ Jurgen says.

‘Yes.’

‘Or the time she got diarrhoea in China?’

My eyes widen. ‘You think she’s telling him the Yangtze riverboat story?’

Maybe I should go and check, I decide; but someone is blocking my path. It’s Howie, arriving with Tom Cremins, Brian O’Brien and a couple of other traders, all carrying glasses of single malt whiskey. They crowd in beside us; the girls at the next table swivel their heads towards ours once more, like lovely, money-tropic flowers.

‘Hear you had a little chat with the government today,’ Howie says to me. ‘What’d he tell you? Are they going to recap Royal?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He must have said something.’

‘He actually didn’t,’ I say, recalling with a twinge of horror the Minister’s grinning, terrorized aphasia. ‘Anyway, even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you — you know I couldn’t tell you,’ raising my voice as he starts swearing at me, ‘it’d be insider trading.’

‘Crazy Frog, if they locked up everyone in this town who’s insider trading, there’d be no one left on the fucking inside.’ Howie plonks his glass down on the table, making the ice cubes jingle. ‘ Someone ought to be making money out of this eurozone shit-show. This whole fucking week has been a disaster on every conceivable level, like getting raped by a guy with a tiny cock.’ The eavesdropping girls flinch, but don’t stop staring; Howie’s attention, however, is already elsewhere. ‘Is that the writer?’ Pushing past me he taps on Paul’s shoulder and asks him the same question. Paul turns with a slightly confused smile. ‘What the fuck are you doing writing a book about this guy?’ Howie demands, gesturing at me.

‘Ah —’ Paul says, looking startled.

‘He’s not a player. He’s a research analyst. It’s like you’ve gone to Silverstone and you’re watching the mechanics. I mean, do what you want,’ Howie sniffs. ‘It just sounds like a boring book, that’s all.’

‘Well, you see, in a way that’s the —’

‘There is crazy shit going down right now,’ Howie interrupts. ‘I mean world-historical craziness. You should be speaking to the traders. Or the hedge funds. If I had a hedge fund, I’d be shorting the shit out of the whole of Europe. And in six months I’d be a billionaire.’

‘You’re talking about the —?’

‘The whole continent’s fucked. The politicians don’t know what to do. All that can save it now is a war.’

‘A war?’ Kevin hiccups.

‘That’s the way it’s heading. France, Italy, Spain are all watching their economies go down the tube, Germany’s there with its arms folded, saying, “Don’t expect anything from us.” There’s all the ingredients for a war, right? And it would stop all the, you know, the bollocks.’

‘ War ,’ Paul repeats, scribbling in his red notebook.

‘War’s a good thing. What stopped the Great Depression? World War Two. Or look at the Baghdad Bounce. NASDAQ crashes, the economy’s assholed, till the US invades Iraq and the stock market goes up 80 per cent. Capitalism needs war. Besides, war’s what made Europe great. The whole reason their currency’s in the toilet is you’ve got a bunch of bureaucrats in charge, trying to pretend the last thousand years of history never happened. Acting like Europe’s all just one big happy family, singing and holding hands like a bunch of fucking Smurfs. And they wonder why everyone’s lining up to short them! Would you invest in a Smurf economy?’

‘ I wouldn’t,’ Kevin says.

‘No way,’ Howie says, but his eyes are suddenly vacant and he peers back and forth as if he can’t remember what he’s doing here.

At that moment, Tom Cremins pulls his sleeve. ‘We’re going,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ Howie says, and drains his glass. He turns to Paul once more. ‘When you get tired talking to this joker, come and see me,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you stuff that’ll have you haemorrhaging from every orifice.’

With that, he and the traders bounce off, their conversation a blizzard of acronyms and stomach-turning sexual references, like a Scrabble game at a gang bang.

‘Interesting guy,’ Paul says thoughtfully. I watch him watch Howie barge his way through the drunken, suited bodies, feeling the same pang I might have at a school dance, seeing the girl I adored bloom at the attentions of some handsome delinquent. Then, as if he senses my unhappiness, Paul turns to me, and with an enthusiasm that strikes me as false says, ‘But then, you’re all interesting! I just had a great conversation with your friend here. Did you know she studied anthropology? I thought you bankers were all rocket scientists.’

‘That’s just the traders,’ I say. ‘My background is philosophy — François Texier, do you know him?’

Paul shakes his head.

‘In fact he might be a useful person to think about for your book,’ I say. ‘He had many fascinating ideas about simulacra, and the derealization of modern life.’

‘Derealization?’ Paul repeats, with a half-smile.

‘Yes. He was interested in a Buddhist concept called sunyata , or voidness. According to this sunyata , reality as we perceive it is an illusion. We see the world as divided up into objects — this glass, this table, this person. But in fact, these are merely snapshots of processes that are in a constant state of change, all parts of a great intermingling flux.’

‘That does sound pretty derealizing,’ Paul admits.

‘Actually, the derealizing comes as an attempt to cover over this notion of flux,’ I say, excited to feel these thoughts coming to life in my mind again. ‘To a culture centred on the individual, the idea that we are all just transitory surface effects on some great sea of emptiness has not been popular. Texier’s argument is that most of Western civilization has been an attempt to build over the void with huge, static systems of thought, religious, economic, scientific, that divide everything into facts, each with its own specific place. We call it analysis, but really it is escape. Or as he puts it, “We write the encyclopedia to explain the world, and then we leave the world to live in the encyclopedia.” The simulacrum is a kind of a derivative of these —’