Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

I study his face, but in profile it’s hard to read his expression. ‘She works as a cleaner now,’ he continues. ‘Offices, private residences.’

‘Does she like it?’

‘Like it?’ He turns to me as we pull up at a traffic light. ‘Getting up at 5 a.m. to clean toilets for minimum wage?’

‘Sorry, silly question.’

‘Clizia’s got two degrees, Claude. She’s read more books than anyone I’ve ever met.’

‘Sorry.’

The light turns green. To the left, the tanks and towers and vats of the Guinness factory loom zanily over a high stone wall, like something from an alcoholic fairy tale. ‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘At least as a cleaner she doesn’t have people looking at her. She’s basically paid to be invisible. Although it’s not nearly as much as she got paid for taking her clothes off.’

‘And you?’

‘Me what?’

‘You are working too?’

‘I have a few irons in the fire.’

‘A book?’

He wags his head. ‘That ship has sailed. Maybe in a country like Clizia’s, where they’ve only got three hours of electricity a day, you can still make a living writing books. Here people don’t want them any more. They’ve got other things. Phones. Games. Porn. Horse tranquillizers. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying, these are the market realities.’

‘And it is these market realities that persuaded you to stop writing?’ I say.

‘Pretty much.’

‘It was not, for example, because of the review?’

‘What review?’ His head snaps round.

‘The Mary Cutlass review of For Love of a Clown .’

‘Oh, that,’ he says. His tone is indifferent, but his face has turned the colour of a London bus. ‘I didn’t pay much attention to it.’

‘Really?’

‘All that woman likes to read about is genocide,’ he says. ‘The Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica, if you’re writing about some soul-harrowing nadir of human depravity you get a big gold star. My book is about a girl who falls in love with a clown. How could she not hate it? It was like sending a dog to review Cats .’

He still hasn’t explained what he meant by irons in the fire, but before I can ask him an enormous peal of thunder shakes the sky; a moment later, water sluices down with a kind of exultancy.

‘Dad, it’s raining.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Are we going home?’

‘No, we’re not.’

Signalling right, he brings us back over the river and up through an imposing gate. On either side of a long avenue, behind cascading veils of rain, the park materializes as a damp shimmer of colours, viridian, jade, ochre and crimson bleeding into one another and pulsating weakly as if through static. ‘A duck!’ Remington cries. He is right: between a pond and a bed of rose bushes stands a lone mallard, his motionless beak pointed proudly skywards. The car pulls up; grabbing his bread, Remington makes a bid for the door. His father yanks him back by the hood of his coat.

‘It’s pouring rain! What’s your mother going to say if I bring you home soaking wet?’

‘We could tell her I fell into the pond?’ Remington says hopefully.

‘We’ll just have to wait till it stops,’ Paul says. As he speaks another peal of thunder cracks through the sky.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Remington says in the back seat.

‘Remington.’

‘I’m just saying what you say,’ Remington replies innocently.

Paul mumbles darkly to himself.

‘Christ, what a country,’ Remington says.

‘That’s enough.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, this fucking country.’

‘Okay, look’ — Paul unbuckles his seat belt, then opens the door to extricate Remington — ‘try and find a dry part to play in, will you?’

With an exclamation of pure joy, Remington tears away across the grass, throwing fistfuls of bread at the surprised duck.

‘He is a very energetic little boy,’ I say.

‘He certainly is.’

‘ Remington ,’ I repeat. ‘Is that a family name? Or from your wife’s homeland, perhaps?’

‘Not exactly, Claude,’ he replies, with false pleasantness. ‘Tell me, have you ever heard of a TV detective called Remington cocksmoking Steele?’

‘Of course, although in France he is just called Remington Steele.’

‘Well, it turns out that in a certain corner of the former Soviet Union old Remington Steele is still very popular. In fact, it’s the number one show over there, bigger even than Celebrity Gulag and Top Ten Interrogation Bloopers . I thought it was a ludicrous name for a boy. But I was overruled.’

Out on the lawn, the duck has escaped; Remington entertains himself by running around in long, uneven ellipses, making quacking noises. He seems not to notice the rain. Looking out at him, Paul folds his hands atop the steering wheel. ‘Okay, Claude. This proposal of yours. I’m presuming it’s some kind of revenge, right? Some kind of sting or hidden-camera-type deal, where you can show my web of lies to the world?’

‘No,’ I say, disconcerted. ‘It is just as I said to you in the apartment. I have developed feelings for Ariadne, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had any kind of relationship, and I fear that, as you said, there is not enough of me showing up on the page.’

‘So you want me to help you.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You want me to rewrite your character, so it’ll click with this girl in the café, like Pretty Woman or something.’

‘Yes, or Cyrano de Bergerac . You have diagnosed very accurately the emptiness of my life. Now I want you to help me to fill it.’

He puffs out his cheeks, watches a busload of ponchoed tourists alight into the rain.

‘You don’t like it. You think it is an impossible idea.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ he says. ‘Frankly, I’m so broke that if you were proposing I dress up as your nanny and spank you I’d give it serious consideration. But I don’t get it. You’re not a bad-looking guy. You have a ton of money, you’ve got your whole French thing going on. What do you need me for? There must be lots of women out there just dying to jump in the sack with you.’

‘They are all the wrong women.’

‘And Ariadne, who you barely know, you’re certain is the right woman.’

‘Yes. But I don’t think she will be impressed by my money. Or my Frenchness.’

‘It’s always the one you can’t have, eh?’

‘I don’t know. It is this time.’

‘And why ask me?’

‘I liked your novel. It seems to me that it too is a story of opposites attracting.’

‘Okay, sure, but the fact remains I tried to rip you off, Claude. Why would you trust me after that?’

I consider this. ‘Your plan was very stupid. Yet your intuitions were strong. First, to pick me out as the subject for your scam — to find someone, as you say, who feels something is missing from his life and so can be manipulated. The next thing, you discover Ariadne. From all the women you could have chosen, you find exactly the one I will fall in love with.’

‘I picked her out because she happened to be in my line of vision. If it had been the blonde one I would have said her.’

‘I disagree. These split-second decisions are a matter of pure instinct. It’s the same thing that makes the great trader. He can see the story before anyone else — not all of it, just the first lines, the edges, as they are coming out of the future. But that is enough.’

Paul does not react to this, just continues to gaze at the shifting silver-grey mosaic of the rain on the windscreen. ‘You don’t have to literally write the words in my mouth,’ I tell him. ‘What I want is a consultant. Someone who understands this world of the heart that has become foreign to me and can advise me what to do. If you agree, then I propose to pay you —’