Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Oi! What’s going on here?’ Ish arrives with a tray of drinks. ‘You know the rules, Claude. Friday night — no Frenchness!’

‘I’m just explaining that we have all come to banking from different disciplines,’ I say.

‘Kevin here was halfway through a medical degree,’ Ish says. ‘Imagine, he could actually have been useful to somebody.’

‘Doctors don’t make shit these days,’ Kevin says.

‘It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people,’ Paul says.

‘Maybe the smartest people got smarter,’ Kevin returns.

‘ I’m not going to spend the rest of my life at it,’ Ish says. ‘I’ve still got a box of my old clothes at home. As soon as I get my next bonus, I’m going to chuck my whole wardrobe of daggy work shit straight into a skip and fuck off to the Pacific. It’ll be like Corporate Ish never existed.’

‘What about your apartment?’ I say.

‘Oh yeah.’ Her face falls. Turning to Kevin she says, ‘Here, want to buy an apartment? It’s got a bidet.’

‘Property’s finished,’ Kevin says. ‘I’m putting all my money into global pandemics.’

As midnight approaches, I see Paul put on his coat.

‘The end of your first week,’ I say. ‘It is all going well?’

‘Sure,’ he says — but I detect a hesitation.

‘Only … ?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he reassures me. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how it all hangs together.’

‘If you have questions, maybe I can help.’

At first he blusters nothings, then he pauses, looks at me, as if deciding whether to take me into his confidence: ‘I feel like I’m missing something,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the characters, what you do, the rhythm of the day. But I still — I feel like I’m not getting to the heart of things, you know?’ I must look very worried, because he claps me on the shoulder. ‘It’ll come. Maybe I just need to change my focus a little bit.’

‘We will see you on Monday?’ I say.

‘Of course.’ He grins. ‘Have a good weekend. You’re off-camera! Let your hair down.’

Not long after, the lights come up; Life begins to empty, its pinchbeck promises having slipped away, as always, through the cracks of the night.

We gather our things and make our way outside. I am deep in thought: what Paul said about missing something bothers me, and as if picking up on that, Jurgen says, ‘So he has told you what’s going to happen?’

‘Happen?’

‘In the book.’

‘We know what is going to happen in the book,’ I say. ‘It is about me, a modern Everyman, experiencing a typical day.’

‘Yes, but there will be some kind of story also?’

‘That is the story,’ I say.

‘That is the story?’

‘Yes.’

‘You, sitting at your computer, writing research notes about banks.’

‘That’s right.’

Jurgen says nothing to this.

‘It’s not supposed to be one of those books where things happen,’ I explain. ‘It’s about discovering the humanity in ordinary lives.’

‘Oh,’ Jurgen says.

There is another silence.

‘It’s not going to be boring,’ I say.

‘Of course not,’ he says.

Around us the Centre looms, darkened and empty like a Perspex necropolis. I think again of Paul’s parting words, and anxiety quickens in my sinews once more. ‘Did he say anything to you?’ I turn to Ish. ‘What were you talking to him about for so long?’

‘He was asking about the Torabundo archipelago. I travelled around there a bit with Tog back in the day. She pauses, then says, ‘ I reckon he’s got something planned for you.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like … I don’t know … maybe you fall in love.’

‘I’m not going to fall in love,’ I say categorically.

‘In a book this is exactly the kind of thing the main character will say right before he falls in love,’ Jurgen says.

‘Yeah,’ says Ish. ‘Plus, you’re French. You lot practically invented love. French kissing. French letters. It’s the whole French thing.’

‘How would you feel if I said the “whole Australian thing” was kangaroos and tinnies and daytime soap operas?’

‘That is the whole Australian thing, Claude. Why do you think I left?’

‘Yes, well, then you will understand that not everyone fits into the national stereotype.’

‘I certainly do not think that when people speak of the “typical German”,’ Jurgen chuckles, ‘they are imagining a crazy man who loves reggae music, and writes articles about medieval economics while listening to reggae music on his computer!’

‘My point is that adventures, escapades, dramatic reversals, falling in love — these are the hackneyed tropes that Paul’s trying to get away from,’ I tell Ish, though I am perhaps trying to persuade myself as much as her. ‘He wants to depict modernity as it genuinely is.’

‘Love’s not hackneyed,’ Ish says obstinately.

‘What does love have to do with this place?’ I throw my arms up at our surroundings, great glass panopticons surveying all the other panopticons. ‘I am serious, what does love have to do with anything we do all day long?’

‘Well, that’s what he’d better work out,’ Ish says. ‘If he wants anyone to read his book.’

‘There are plenty of good stories without love.’

‘Like what?’

I think for a moment. ‘ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea .’

We have emerged on to the quay. Over the river, beneath the concrete skull of the unfinished headquarters, the zombies sleep in silence.

‘Just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean you don’t need it,’ Ish says, staring into the dark water. ‘Every story needs love. Even at the bottom of the sea.’

Over the weekend, Forbes publishes a long article about our new chief executive, Porter Blankly. The accompanying photographs show a man in his sixties, with the craggy, portentous good looks of the star of a Hollywood Bible epic, and white hair in a sculpted wave, like a roll of ice cream caught mid-scoop. In every picture he is shaking hands with someone, as if that’s all he does for a living; anyone in the industry will know that each of those handshakes represents a game-changing new synergy, a market stampede, and a multimillion-dollar windfall for his shareholders. The piece is titled Blank to the future , and it runs as follows:

Four years ago this summer, Porter Blankly achieved a dream he had cherished since childhood: He became a billionaire. Subprime mortgages were booming, and Danforth Blaue, a bank once perceived as a starchy also-ran, was thanks to his leadership right at the heart of the action. The day stock options took his wealth on paper to the magical ten figures, Blankly celebrated with a quiet dinner at home with his wife and legal team. Then he bought eight stories of the Empire State Building.

Porter Blankly has always dreamed big. Hailing from a hardscrabble town of blue-collar laborers, many of them employed on his father’s private railroad, he was spotted as a teenager by a scout for Harvard’s varsity golf team. He dropped out of ‘Old Crimson’ after only a year to play full-time, and although a shoulder injury cut short his professional career, his experiences on the courses of the 1960s were formative. This was a time of ferment in the Massachusetts golf scene. Ideas and books by the young firebrands of the new conservative movement were being passed around — as well as other material. ‘[US Ryder Cup team captain Don] Hartford turned up one day with a sheet of blotter acid,’ Blankly recalled later, ‘and everything changed. The fairways were rainbows, the holes were mouths, speaking to you. You’ve heard about crazy golf — at that time all golf was crazy. People were showing up in sunglasses, without ties … everything was being questioned.’