Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Oh, sure.’ He examines his front teeth with a finger and thumb. ‘They say you’re barred, but then in a week they’ve forgotten all about it.’

By the stairwell, the bouncer is laughing with his cronies; now they step aside to allow in a stag party.

‘So this is what you do instead of writing,’ I say.

‘When I can afford it,’ Paul replies tersely. He drags himself to his feet and spits.

‘I think that is a great shame,’ I say.

‘You’re one of a very small number.’ He takes his wallet from his pocket, peers into it fatalistically, then replaces it.

‘You never answered my question.’

‘What question?’

‘Why did you pick me? For your … plan?’

He shrugs, looks away. ‘I told you before. You were different. You had qualities.’

‘What qualities?’

‘Loneliness. Desperation.’

This stings; to cover it up I spit out another question. ‘And the book? Did you ever intend to write it?’

‘Oh Jesus, Claude, what does it matter?’ he exclaims, jumping to his feet. ‘Okay, I never intended to write a book. Happy?’ I don’t reply, look down at the cracked asphalt instead.

‘And I’ll tell you what else, if I did through some calamity start a new book, I wouldn’t write about you and your friends in a hundred years. A bunch of people with one character attribute between them, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy and Mr Greedy, like something out of Roger Hargreaves’ nightmares? Who’s going to want to read about that?’

He stares at me with blazing eyes, as if expecting an answer. I say nothing; I feel a huge rent has been slashed in the canvas of my soul, and blackness is billowing out.

‘Look,’ he says, maybe regretting his candour. ‘You’re not the worst of them. I’m sorry I did this to you. But my God, man. You don’t even live in the world. You don’t breathe the air, you don’t eat the food. You’re up in your strange little satellite, placing bets on all of us down below like kids racing beetles. How could you think, how did you ever possibly think that you were an Everyman?’

I can’t speak; what can I possibly say? Paul waits a moment, with his hand on my shoulder; and then he turns and walks away, leaving me in the shadow of the club, from which the music booms so loud that even out on the street I experience it not in my ears but in my chest — pounding between my ribs, like someone else’s heart.

I meet Chris Kane in the gym the next morning; he tells me that he stayed out with the Tordale team till three. He appears aglow with health, in spite of his long, debauched night and minimal sleep; this is often the way with my banking colleagues, even the older men, as though they had a picture of themselves mouldering in the attic, or, more likely these days, had outsourced the disintegration of their bodies to some proxy in the Third World, some Manuel or Cho or Pradeep who wakes up one day with shattered capillaries, clogged lungs, a fissiparous liver that are none of his doing. ‘Great bunch of lads,’ Chris Kane says, and then, ‘I just hope Ish didn’t damage our chances.’

‘That guy was out of line.’

‘He wasn’t serious! Fuck’s sake, you have to show you’re able to take a joke!’

Upstairs, Ish is already at her desk. I can feel the resentment directed at her from around the room — as can she, to judge by her posture, crouched behind her terminal.

‘Thanks, Claude,’ she says in a low voice when she sees me.

‘Thanks for what?’

‘For sticking up for me.’

I blush, as our pusillanimous show comes back to me; if Tordale were testing our moral fibre — though they almost definitely weren’t — we failed with flying colours.

‘What a night,’ Ish says.

‘Just business.’

‘I bet Rachael’s bulling.’

‘They never intended to take us on.’

‘Howie said they did. Howie said that when we were having our argument he was in the jacks doing rails with the main guy, and the main guy started telling him he was thinking of leaving his wife.’

‘So?’

‘He said it showed we’d got to the next level.’

‘It didn’t show anything. They’re not going to take us on. They won’t take on Danske either. They came here to drink, that’s all.’

I find Jurgen standing at the window, peering out at the zombies with his binoculars. They are just beginning to stir: one heats a saucepan of water on a gas burner, another eats a bowl of cereal in the opening of his tent. They are not wearing their costumes yet: you can see how young they are.

‘Have we heard anything?’ I say, keeping my tone neutral.

‘They will revert to us by the end of the week,’ he replies in the same clipped, mechanical tone. A pretty girl with a heap of tousled brown hair emerges from a tent and turns on a string of fairy lights; adjusting his focus wheel, Jurgen says, ‘You have completed your report on Royal?’

‘It’s not due for two more weeks.’

‘That is not what I asked you.’

‘No, it’s not finished,’ I say, and then, feeling rebellious, ‘but I can tell you now that I would not recommend Royal Irish to any client.’ Jurgen says nothing to this, just continues to stare out. I am about to step away, then I stop. ‘What happened last night,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘We are supposed to be a team.’

‘Yes, we are supposed to be a team,’ he returns.

‘A team looks after its members.’

He remains silent, stares out at the zombies. Then he says, ‘A team exists to achieve goals. If there were no goals, there would be no team. Therefore goals take priority over members. And members who do not achieve the team’s goals will be replaced.’

The report is going slowly, very slowly. Financial institutions are chimerical creatures at the best of times, but Royal’s books are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Every figure is a door into a world of illusion — of shapeshifting, duplication, disappearing acts. Deals are buried or recorded more than once; borrowers are split into two or lumped together; mysterious sums arrive and depart without explanation, like ships full of toxic waste that pull into a harbour in the middle of the night and the next day are gone again.

Royal Irish: the name sounds like a bad poker hand, one that looks unbeatable until it capsizes and you lose your shirt. After everything that’s happened, it’s sometimes hard to remember that until quite recently it did look unbeatable. When I first arrived at BOT, only a couple of years ago, Royal was being described as ‘the best bank in the world’.

Across the ocean, the subprime market was just beginning to turn, but Ireland was still booming. Coming from Paris, which for several years had been in the doldrums, I felt like I had stepped through the looking glass. Every day was like Christmas Eve: the shops, the pubs, the restaurants were all full, all of the time. In the beginning, the boom was fuelled by IT and pharmaceuticals. Now it was construction. Dublin was undergoing its very own Haussmannization. Cranes cluttered the skyline, new builds were everywhere; the old architecture, meanwhile, was being transformed, hospitals becoming shopping malls, churches becoming superpubs, Ascendancy manors becoming five-star golf resorts.

And at the heart of it all was Royal. They were the developers’ bank of choice, spinning out the credit from which the new city would be built. In the fevered boomtown climate, the value of property could double every six months; already several of these developers had become billionaires. But they didn’t rest on their laurels. Instead, they used what they’d made on their last project to borrow more for their next one. Royal were happy to pay out: they had a steady stream of cheap credit from European investors, eager to gain exposure to the turbocharged Irish economy.