Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘The Texans are talking about seceding from the Union,’ Gary McCrum says happily. ‘The dollar’s sunk like a stone.’

And not just the dollar. In the resulting turmoil, Dexter’s, the ratings agency, has downgraded the investment rating of the world’s safest security from AAA to AA. What the repercussions for the rest of the world will be, no one can tell; but for BOT, it means one very, very, very lucrative trade.

‘Betting against T-bills.’ Joe Peston shakes his head in admiration.

‘Extremely counterintuitive,’ Jurgen notes. ‘Essentially, Howie has combined two inspirational memos into one unstoppable supermemo.’

‘But how did Blankly know?’ Kevin asks. ‘How did he know all this stuff was going to happen?’

‘That’s why they’re paying him the big bucks,’ Gary says, clapping him on the shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Kevin says, turning towards the window and gazing up, as if Porter Blankly might be circling among the clouds out there, like Superman.

Official celebrations are scheduled for the following evening; tonight Kevin, Ish and I are trapped in the office, labouring to finish the report on time. The sixth floor empties and the lights in the buildings around us wink out one by one; the inky near-black of the sky only adds to the sense that we are literally submerged in Royal’s accounts, a labyrinth of debt with some terrible wrongness at the centre of it that at times I catch a glimpse of but never for long enough to lay hold of …

‘He’ll get the idea,’ Ish says, meaning the Minister. ‘No way he’ll chuck any more money at them after reading this. Best thing at this stage’d be just to shove them off a cliff.’

At 4 a.m. I mail the completed document to Rachael and Jurgen, then go back to my apartment to sleep for a couple of hours before returning to the office. Thankfully, the next day is relatively quiet, apart from a mid-morning meeting with Walter, most of which he spends complaining about the cost of port capacity in Belgium, where Dublex is shipping the cement they can no longer use in Ireland after the collapse of the construction industry. As I’m about to leave I ask him whether he has money in Royal Irish. He stares at me a moment, then says, deliberately, ‘I have no holding in that bank.’ I tell him that’s good news, as it’s about to lose whatever minimal value it still has. He doesn’t respond to this; he’s hiding something, but then businessmen are always hiding something, particularly at his level, where the meticulous world of contracts and accounts and due diligence dissolves, and international commerce reveals itself to be an ethereal matter of nods, winks, unspoken understandings.

As soon as evening falls, I set off for Paul’s apartment to hear his initial ‘plot outline’.

A commotion is issuing from inside. He answers the door as soon as I knock, his expression grave. ‘Remington’s ant escaped,’ he tells me.

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘Come on, come on,’ he says, chivvying me over the threshold, ‘we don’t want it getting out.’

Obligingly I step in –

‘Stop!’ Paul shouts, frantically waving his arms and staring at my feet. I do as I am told, waiting on the spot for further instructions.

The scene in the apartment is chaotic. Cupboard doors have been flung open, tins emptied, drawers pulled out, hideous Ectovian rugs overturned. Clizia, dressed only in a towel, is on her hands and knees, calling ‘Roland! Roland!’ into the darkness under the couch. The ant’s owner, meanwhile, is standing in the doorway opposite, a stubby, bellowing fountain of grief.

‘It’s the damnedest thing,’ Paul says, getting down on all fours. ‘That ant lived like a king. A nice cosy breath-mint box. A delicious sugar cube all to himself. Why would he run away?’

‘I suppose a cage is a cage, no matter how opulent,’ I reflect.

‘In retrospect I may have made the air holes too big,’ Paul reflects. ‘Well, I hope he’s happy, breaking a little boy’s heart like that. The poor kid’s been crying for so long I’m worried his body’s going to run out of liquids. Here, I’ll go this way, why don’t you check in there.’

The bathroom is clouded with fragrant, Clizia-inflected steam, which makes it both hard to see anything and rather disconcertingly intimate. The small space is dominated by a Jacuzzi, black and gargantuan, like a hippopotamus backed into a broom closet; cluttering the damp rim are tubes of creams and lotions, many with the ends cut off so the remnants can be scraped out. A toilet, also black, looms menacingly out of the mist. I cannot see any ants, but reaching for the door handle I find myself grasping instead a pair of knickers that hang from it. They are sheer and stringy, almost to the point of dissolving in my hand; I feel embarrassed even being in the same room as them, and hurry out again, only to discover the way back blocked by Clizia, her towelled rear pointed up to me and her nose pressed to the floorboards in the manner of some impossibly sexual aardvark. ‘I’ll just take a look in here,’ I say in a high voice, and push through the door on my left.

I am in the master bedroom. It features the same Babylonian trappings as the rest of the apartment — velour drapes, gilt sconces, ornate architrave — but here they are almost invisible, because everywhere I look, there are books: stacked double on shelves, crammed into cases, piled in towers that reach almost to the ceiling, resembling nothing so much as the walls of a child’s fort, a meticulously constructed and intrinsically doomed attempt to keep the world at bay. A laptop sits on a desk by the window, the manufacturer’s logo rotating and distending anamorphically; I regard it with a certain degree of temptation, wondering whether my story may already be taking shape there. Then I notice something on the desk itself — a numbered sticker in the corner. This must be the writing desk that Clizia pawned! Paul has redeemed it! My heart leaps. For why would he do that, unless he intended to write?

The thought that my plan for him is already having an effect gives me high hopes for his plan for me. I look again at the laptop. Surely under the circumstances it wouldn’t be wrong to have a very quick glance at what he’s doing? Given that I’m providing the material and the financing? Just a peep, a sneak preview as it w—

‘Oh God!’ Reeling back from the computer, I slip on a paperback and fall backwards on to the floor; a tower of books pounces gleefully on top of me.

‘Research! Research!’ cries Paul, running in from the next room and diving between me and the computer screen, although the image has already seared itself indelibly into my brain. ‘That’s a separate matter I’ve been looking into,’ he tells me, clearing fallen books from my chest, ‘for a potential — hey!’

‘What’s going on in there?’ Clizia yells from the next room.

‘I’ve found him!’ Paul calls, crouching down in a corner.

‘You found him?’ Remington comes rushing in, with Clizia behind him; she levels a single, reductive glance at me, still prone on the floor, then looks away.

‘See for yourself.’ Paul rises to his feet and opens his cupped hands. ‘Look, Remington. Who do we have here?’

Remington glances down into his hands and snuffles. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, it’s Roland, see? Look, he’s waving his little leg at you. Hi, Remington! ’

‘That isn’t him.’

‘What do you mean? Who else would it be?’

‘A different ant.’

‘It’s not a different ant, take a listen — Roland, is that you?’ Paul brings the conched hands to his ear, then says, in a high-pitched voice, ‘ Yes, it’s me all right .’ He lowers his hands again to address the ant. ‘We’ve all been very worried about you, Roland, where have you been? I went away to see my AUNT! That’s very funny, Roland, but next time let us know in advance, okay?’