Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Bow-wow-wow-wow!’ Remington exclaims. ‘Dogs like bones!’

‘That’s enough, Remington — now, as to the novel, I’ve had some very —’

‘Dogs like barking! Bow-wow-wow!’

Paul turns to his wife with a pained expression. ‘Can’t you do something with him?’

‘Certainly, darling,’ Clizia says. ‘You want I take him to nursery? Or bring him for stroll around garden?’

‘Bow-wow-wow!’ barks Remington, tearing around the limited floor space. ‘Bow-wow-wow-wow-wow!’

Paul pulls his hands down his face. ‘I’m losing my fucking mind here.’

‘Why don’t I just ring for Nanny?’ Clizia says brightly. Her husband responds with an expletive, and in an instant, while I stand there in a paroxysm of embarrassment, the argument begins all over again.

‘Mum and Dad are always fighting,’ Remington whispers to me confidentially. ‘It’s because I’m bad.’

‘I’m sure you’re not bad,’ I say.

Remington pauses a moment, contemplating this; then he slaps his two hands over his eyes and will not reappear, no matter how I cajole.

Clearly the best thing is for me to go. But as I make my way out of the apartment — picking my way past Louis Quatorze chairs, black chandeliers, other signature excesses of the Celtic Tiger — something catches my eye. On a stack of loose papers scattered over an approximately desk-sized area of floor sits the red notebook. I flinch: it’s like seeing Excalibur resting in the umbrella stand, or the Maltese Falcon propping up a lowboy.

I glance over my shoulder. Clizia is issuing a torrent of foreign words that sound vaguely like backwards French; Paul is shouting that he will have her deported. I look back. The notebook calls to me like a siren from a rock, enjoining me to turn its pages. I know I shouldn’t; yet something is not right here, and it may hold the answer. Nobody pays any attention to me as I edge over and lift it from the floor. With a dizzying sense of anticipation and dread, I go to the first page.

It is blank.

I turn to the next page.

It is blank.

I begin to feel a queer sort of chill, like a draught blowing down the hallways of my being. Fuck you, Clizia is bellowing at Paul. Fuuuuuuuckkkk youuuu!

The next page, the one after, and the one after that — blank. The page following is filled with handwritten text: a single word, blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah , repeated to take up the whole page. Opposite it is a crude cartoon, a stick-man in the basket of a hot-air balloon. The stick-man wears a crown and holds a bag marked with a euro symbol in either hand. On the page after that, a doodle of a camel, then more pages featuring similar doodles, either of breasts or of erect penises, or of erect penises defiling the breasts in one way or another. Then I come to a sequence of what seem to be measurements. Measurements, diagrams that seem ominously familiar, and a few pages later, a heading in capitals: WHO’S OUR MARK ?

‘Whoa-ho-ho, what are you doing with that?’ Before I can read any further, Paul has appeared and snatched the book out of my hand.

My head snaps back; my vision swims. WHO’S OUR MARK ? The question jigs mockingly before me.

‘You know you’re not allowed to see that,’ Paul scolds, stowing the notebook in a drawer.

‘It’s empty,’ I say, though my voice seems to come from elsewhere.

‘Well, it’s just rough notes,’ Paul says. ‘A word here and there, aides-memoires, as you’d call them.’

‘Our conversations, our stories, the time you spent with us …’

‘All up here.’ He taps his head with an index finger. ‘Locked away in the vault, don’t you worry.’

I barely hear him. I feel like I’ve been drugged, and that line keeps flashing up at me. ‘Who is Mark?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You have written, WHO’S OUR MARK ? What does this mean?’

‘Oh, that — that’s nothing, just an old idea I didn’t end up using —’

‘Perhaps you thought it might be a good name for the Everyman, before you met me,’ I reason faintly.

‘Yes, that’s exactly it,’ he agrees, guiding me towards the door. And it sounds plausible; yet I can still feel the question descending through me, WHO’S OUR MARK ? rearranging everything, like some powerful agaric hidden in a plate of food.

‘Now why don’t you head back home’ — he reaches for the door handle — ‘and first thing tomorrow I’ll come in and tell you all about this new direction I’ve thought up —’

WHO’S OUR MARK ? Fragments whirl before my eyes, snatches of old films, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney — what are they saying to each other? I lean in to read the subtitles …

‘Claude?’

Rather than just working in the bank, instead we have him rob the bank.

‘Claude, is everything … ?’

And up from the dark depths, silent and swift as a shark, the truth now surges into view. The mark: the patsy, the mug, the sucker. ‘ Le gogo ,’ I hear myself whisper.

‘What?’

‘ C’est bon pour les gogos .’ The words come out without me knowing why; and as if I’d uttered a magic spell, or whatever is the exact opposite of a magic spell, in an instant I understand everything. ‘There’s no novel,’ I say.

‘What?’ He seems baffled. ‘What are you talking about? Of course there’s a novel!’

How I yearn to believe him! Yet even as I look at him he seems changed: the artist of the last weeks vanished, his place taken by this other man, furtive, contingent, mired in the trash of the everyday. It’s like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is — mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.

He is still making protestations of innocence. I let them wash over me. Everything is clear now, terribly, unforgivingly clear. The novel was simply a ploy, to win my trust and get him into the bank. From there he would have free rein to plan his theft. ‘And Igor — or whatever his name is — he is not an experimental poet.’

‘Well, I mean, not precisely —’

‘He’s a pest exterminator,’ Clizia says. ‘He is the brains of the operation,’ she adds sardonically.

‘You’re not helping — Claude, listen, we can still make this happen. Nothing has changed!’

He goes on: he entreats and implores, he issues a myriad offers and possibilities. But the words have become meaningless, as if he were speaking another language. For a moment I watch his mouth gobble, without hearing what it says; then I rise to my feet. ‘I have to go.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like for me these last years — the pressure I’m under …’

I trudge heavily back around the table. He lays a hand on my arm. ‘Look — it’s true, I needed something to tide us over. But just so I can finish what I’m working on. I’ve got something up my sleeve so big it’ll make all of us rich. Rich!’

I shake him loose and open the door, walk through the darkness to the stairwell.

‘There’s no need to involve the authorities!’ Paul cries after me, as I begin my descent.

‘Wow.’ Ish sits back in her chair, fingering the chain around her neck.

‘Mercurial,’ Jurgen says. ‘Very, very mercurial.’