Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Ha, you have not written word in seven years!’

‘Look, would you please just — Jesus, Remington, what are you doing to that rug?’

‘I want to see if the grey bits taste different from the blue bits.’

With a gurgle of exasperation, his father picks him up and carries him to the sink, where he begins wiping fluff from his tongue.

‘If you want to become close to this woman, you bring her a nice bunch of flowers,’ Clizia says to me. ‘Not idiot conspiracy.’

‘It’s his money, isn’t it? He can do what he wants with it,’ Paul says, over his shoulder. ‘Look, this is impossible. Come on, Claude, let’s go somewhere we can talk about this in peace.’

‘Wait!’ With a swift sidestep, Clizia blocks his passage. ‘Bring the boy!’

‘But we’re trying to have a meeting!’

‘He needs fresh air.’

‘Clizia, the whole reason we’re going somewhere else is that neither of you will be there!’

Clizia folds her arms.

‘Can we go to the park, Dad?’ Remington tugs his sleeve. ‘Can we feed the ducks?’

‘Oh Christ,’ Paul says. ‘Sorry about this, Claude.’

‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘The park is a perfectly good place for a meeting.’

Remington runs to the fridge and comes back with a bag which he presents to his father. Paul looks displeased.

‘We have no tea or coffee, but we’ve got a whole loaf of stale bread?’ he says. ‘We’ve nothing for the humans, but a fridge full of food for the ducks?’

Clizia chooses not to hear this.

Scowling, Paul puts Remington’s coat on and leads us out to the hall. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Claude,’ he says, pulling the door closed. ‘Never marry a lap dancer.’

‘Right,’ I say uncertainly, and follow them down the dimly lit corridor.

The lift is still broken, and on the landing the plastic sheeting that covers the portal to the unfinished wing whispers and sways. ‘Are there other people living here?’ I ask.

‘That depends what you mean by living ,’ he says, starting down the stairs. ‘And by people .’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘Ours is the only apartment they actually managed to sell. We bought it off the plans.’ He laughs. ‘That was the boom for you. A first-time novelist and an ex-stripper could get half a million from the bank for an apartment that didn’t exist yet. Now we’re in so much negative equity we’ll probably be stuck here for the rest of our lives.’

‘It’s a nice apartment.’

‘It’s a classic Celtic Tiger piece of shit. There’s a Jacuzzi, but the water’s brown. There’s a heated towel-rail in every room, but the radiators don’t work. That’s not the worst of it, either.’ He pushes through a heavy metal door, to a vast, inky space; at first I have the bizarre notion that we are underwater, then in the distance I spy a car. ‘Look at that.’ He points to the wall. A long, ragged crack stretches all the way from the ground to the ceiling. ‘And there’s another one, on that side. And another one there.’

‘What happened?’ It looks as if there has been an earthquake.

‘Pyrite. In the walls, in the foundations. It expands when it gets wet. They might as well have built the place with icing sugar.’

‘So …’ I frown, not wanting to draw the obvious conclusion.

‘The whole building’s worthless. Totally worthless. Ten years or so it’ll probably fall down with us in it. Until then, of course, the bank still wants its mortgage repayments.’

‘Dad, can I have the keys?’

Remington runs off to a point right in the centre of the grey morass, where he raises his arm stiffly, like an orchestra conductor; in its corner, the car bleeps and flashes obediently. He scurries over to it and opens the door.

‘There’s nothing you can do?’

‘Not much. The builder’s gone bust. The insurance say they’re not liable. We don’t have the money to bring it to court.’ He climbs into the car. Remington has already belted himself in at the back. ‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘As a former novelist, I do get some enjoyment out of living in a giant metaphor. Pyrite. Fool’s fucking gold. If you put it in a book, no one would believe it.’

He starts the engine; we pull out into the wan sunshine. The neighbourhood doesn’t look much better by day. A new selection of garbage lines the footpath; the street is deserted, but in the heavily graffitied playground a succession of cadaverous figures shuffles up to a man in a leather jacket, while a solitary child amuses itself on the broken merry-go-round.

‘Dad, how many ducks are there in the park?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘Do you think there was ever a boy who had a pet duck and he kept it in his bedroom?’

‘No, I don’t think there was.’ He cranes his head around. ‘Now, Daddy and Claude have important things to talk about, so I want you to play at being quiet, okay?’

‘Okay. Dad?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who would win in a battle between Aslan and a dinosaur?’

‘Aslan would win.’

‘Even if the dinosaur was really big?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even if he was bigger than the universe?’

‘Is this you being quiet?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Remington remembers.

The car noses on to a bridge; the river glints sullenly below us.

‘So your wife,’ I say.

‘What about her?’

I want to ask him about what he said in the hallway about marrying a lap dancer, but can’t quite summon the courage. ‘She is from Eastern Europe?’

‘That’s right. Little place called Ectovia. Used to be part of Makhtovia, then when Transvolga seceded from Makhtovia it became a subdistrict of Transvolga. Then it seceded from Transvolga, to become the Ectovian Free Democratic Republic. Though “Free” is a bit of a stretch, they’ve had the same president for the last fifteen years. He used to be a carpet salesman. In fact, he sold us the rug in the living room, the one Remington was licking, I don’t know if you saw it?’

‘And how did she come to be in Ireland?’

‘Well, the Ectovian economy’s been in a bad way for a long time now. No jobs, no money, young people queuing up to leave. Clizia was one of the lucky ones, she was recruited to come here and work as a waitress. But then when she arrived, she found out she’d actually been contracted to a lap-dancing club. She couldn’t get out of it till she’d paid off the people who brought her over.’

‘And is that … how you met?’

He laughs. ‘I’m afraid so. I was out celebrating my book deal with some friends; Velvet Dream’s is where we ended up. My friends got me a lap dance with Clizia as a joke. You can’t imagine how embarrassed I was, this woman who looked like she’d just come down from Mount Olympus, and she’s stuck in this little cubicle with me, doing this ridiculous … Anyway, I was so nervous I started jabbering away to her about my book, and then she , who’s standing there in her underwear, starts telling me about Dostoyevsky and the dialogic imagination. I didn’t even know what the dialogic imagination was. I still don’t. But by the time I left that cubicle I was head-over-heels in love with her.’

We come off the bridge and nose our way slowly along the quay, in the opposite direction to the river.

‘In Ectovia, they take literature very seriously, that’s what I found out later. They used to have a special firing squad just for novelists.’

‘And does she still work there? In Velvet Dream’s?’ Thinking this might explain my bizarre encounter with him last week.

‘No, she hasn’t done that stuff for a long time. A couple of weeks after I met her I bought her out of her contract. Took half my advance, probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever done.’ He pauses, and then says, ‘I’m not sure she ever forgave me.’