Paul Murray: The Mark and the Void

‘I have a meeting with Walter this afternoon.’

‘Come on, Claude, you can’t live on Carambars.’ She grabs my arm and starts tugging me.

‘All right, all right,’ I say, reaching for my suit jacket, pretending not to notice the disapproving eye she casts over me as I put it on.

Ish studied anthropology back in Australia; Casual Day, one of the few rituals we have at Bank of Torabundo, is something she takes very seriously. For most of the staff a pair of well-pressed chinos and perhaps an undone top shirt-button will suffice, but Ish is wearing a low-cut top fringed with tassels, and a long, multicoloured skirt, also with tassels. She has even topped up her tan for the occasion, a deep greasy brown that makes it look like she has smeared her body with pâté. This image, when it occurs to me, immediately makes me nauseous, and as we descend in the lift my stomach dips and soars like a fairground ride. I dislike Casual Day at the best of times; today it spurs my paranoia to new and queasy heights.

‘Is Kevin coming?’ I say to distract myself.

‘He went on ahead to try and get a table,’ Ish says.

‘This whole place goes mental on Casual Day,’ Jurgen says.

At every floor the lift stops and we are joined by more people in pressed chinos with their top shirt-button undone, squeezing in beside us, sucking up the air. The crush makes my heart race: it’s a relief to step through the double doors of Transaction House and into the fresh air — but only for a moment.

Pastel waves of identically clad bodies are converging on the plaza from every direction. I scan the approaching faces, the bland gazes that beat against mine. Amid all the smart-casualwear a figure in black should be easy to spot — but that means I too am an obvious target, and in a freezing flash I can picture him making his way through the sea of bodies, a cancerous cell swimming in the innocent blood.

‘Thinking of getting a bidet,’ Ish says.

‘For the new apartment?’ Jurgen says.

‘Wasn’t something I’d thought of initially, but the bloke from the showroom called up and said because I’m going for the full suite they can throw in a bidet for half price. The question is, do I want a bidet? You know, at this stage I’ve got my toilet routine pretty much worked out.’

‘You do not want to feel like an alien in your own bathroom,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘I suppose Claude would be the expert. Claude, how much of a benefit do you think the addition of a bidet would be?’

‘Do you think French people do nothing else but eat baguettes and sit on their bidets?’ I snap. Out here I am finding it hard to hide my nerves.

Jurgen starts telling Ish about a special toilet he has had imported from Germany. I tune him out, return to my search. Above my head, monochrome birds wheel and swoop, like scraps torn from the overcast sky. How long has it been now? A week? Two? That’s since I first became conscious of him, though when I think to before that, I seem to find him there too, posed unobtrusively at the back of my memories.

There’s no discernible pattern to his appearances: he’ll be here one day, somewhere else the next. In the gloom of morning, I might see him by the tram tracks as I make the brief, synaptic journey from my apartment building to the bank; later, bent over a pitchbook with Jurgen, I’ll glance out the window and spot him seated on a bench, eating sunflower seeds from a packet. In the deli, in the bar — even at night, when I stand on my balcony and look out over the depopulated concourse — I will seem to glimpse him for an instant, his blank gaze the mirror image of my own.

The Ark is in sight now; inside, I can see the waitresses gliding back and forth, the customers eating, talking, toying with their phones. Of my pursuer there is no sign, yet with every step the dreadful certainty grows that he is in there. I stall, with a clammy mouth begin to mumble excuses, but too late, the door is opening and a figure coming straight for us –

‘Full,’ Kevin says.

‘Balls,’ Ish says.

‘They’re saying fifteen minutes,’ Kevin says.

Jurgen looks at his watch. ‘That would give us only twelve and a half minutes to eat.’

‘Oh well,’ I say, with a false sigh. ‘I suppose we must go back to —’

‘What about that new place?’ Ish says, snapping her fingers. ‘Over on the other side of the square? You’ll like it, Claude, it’s French.’

I shrug. So long as we are moving in the opposite direction to the Ark, I am happy.

The ‘French place’ is called Chomps Elysées. An image of the Eiffel Tower adorns the laminated sign, and on the walls inside are photographs of the Sacré-Cœur and the Moulin Rouge. Nothing about the menu seems especially Gallic; I order a moccachino and something called a ‘panini fromage’, and while Kevin the trainee offers his thoughts on Ish’s lavatorial options, I sit back in my seat and try to relax. Be reasonable, I tell myself: who would be interested in following you? Nobody, is the answer. Nobody outside my department even knows I exist.

This thought doesn’t cheer me quite as I intend it to; and the panini fromage, when it comes, only makes matters worse. It is not that the cheese tastes bad exactly; rather, that it tastes of nothing. I don’t think I have ever tasted nothing quite so strongly before. It’s like eating a tiny black hole wrapped in an Italian sandwich. There is no way food this bad would ever be served in Paris, I think to myself, and experience a sudden stab of homesickness. How far I have come! How much I have left behind! And for what? Now with every chew I feel the emptiness rising inside, as if, like a kind of anti-madeleine, the panini were erasing my past before my very eyes — severing every tie, leaving me only this grey moment, tasting of nothing …

I approach the counter. The waitress’s scowl appears authentically Parisian, but her accent, when she speaks, denotes the more proactive hostility of the Slav.

‘Yes?’ she says, not pretending that my appearance has made her any less bored.

‘I think there has been a mistake,’ I say.

‘Panini fromage,’ she says. ‘Is French cheese.’

‘But it is not cheese,’ I say. ‘It’s artificial.’

‘Artificial?’

‘Not real.’ Prising apart the bread for her inspection, I point at the off-white slab sitting atop the melancholy lettuce. It resembles nothing so much as a blank piece of matter, featureless and opaque, before God’s brush has painted it with the colour and shape of specificity. ‘I am from France,’ I tell her, as if this might clarify matters. ‘And this is not French cheese.’

The girl looks at me with unconcealed contempt. You are not supposed to complain in restaurants like this one; you are not supposed to notice the food in restaurants like this one, any more than you notice the streets you hurry through, latte in hand, back to your computer. The screen, the phone, that disembodied world is the one we truly inhabit; the International Financial Services Centre is merely a frame for it, an outline, the equivalent of the chalk marks of a child’s game on the pavement.

‘You vant chench?’ the girl taunts me. I raise my hands in surrender and, cheeks burning, turn away.

Only then do I realize the man in black is standing right behind me.

Around us, the café has returned to normal life; the sullen girl rings up another panini, the office workers drink their uniquely tailored coffees. I goggle at Ish at the nearby table, but she doesn’t seem to notice — nor does anyone else, as if the stranger has cast some cloak of invisibility over us. Blinding white light pours through the open door; he gazes at me, his eyes a terrifying ice-blue.