Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘It’s got nothing to do with anything,’ he says impatiently. ‘Can we just drop the subject?’

‘Not if I’m being implicated in one of your scams.’

‘It’s not a scam, it’s a totally legitimate business venture, and anyway, it’s over, it’s all in the past … oh, for God’s sake.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you, all right? But you have to promise to keep it secret.’

He glances over his shoulders; then, bringing his hands together and pulling them apart, as though unfurling an imaginary banner in the space over his head, says, ‘Hotwaitress.com.’

‘Hotwaitress.com?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What is Hotwaitress.com?’

‘Right now it isn’t anything.’

‘But it was a business venture? Some Internet thing?’

He sighs. ‘Well, really I should go back to the beginning. To seven years ago, when For Love of a Clown came out. I was young and naïve, I had the usual fantasies — everyone would stop what they were doing to read it, I’d become famous, it’d usher in a new era of peace and harmony, all that. Instead it got one terrible review and then vanished without a trace. Look, the world is full of books. Moaning because no one wants to read yours is like complaining that you’ve been standing on the street corner with your dick out for an hour and nobody’s stopped to give you a blowjob. Still, it hurt me. And when I sat down and tried to start book number two, I had problems.’

‘You were blocked?’

‘I was blocked, I’d lost faith — whatever the reason, nothing was happening. And meanwhile, of course, I’d got married, we’d taken out this huge mortgage to buy the apartment, Remington was on the way, I had no idea how I was going to pay for it all.

‘I didn’t tell Clizia because I didn’t want to worry her. I acted like the new book was coming along fine, and I kept heading out to work every morning. But at this stage I wasn’t even trying to write, I was just sitting in cafés, looking out the window, wondering if everyone would be better off if I just jumped off a bridge.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Clearly you’ve never been in debt, Claude. After a while it’s all you can see. And it’s a vicious circle, because the more I worried about it, the less chance there was that I’d ever come up with an idea for a book. Anyway, there I was, being depressed in various cafés. There were maybe three or four I’d go to at different times of the day. Over time I got to know a few of the waitresses quite well, and if it was quiet we’d have these long, philosophical talks. They were young, they had all these hopes and dreams, and though I couldn’t exactly share their optimism, still, it was a way out of this endless despairing conversation I was having with myself the rest of the time. In fact, I realized after a while that talking to the waitresses was actually the high point of my day. And then it hit me — that was the idea.’

‘What? Become a waiter?’

‘No, no, I mean that relationship. Waitress and customer.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You think you’re the first man to fall in love with a waitress, Claude? This is a growing phenomenon. And it’s no mystery. Think about how we live now, packed off in our digital eyries. Yes, we have phones, we have email, but we might not speak to an actual flesh-and-blood person all day. And then we go to a café, and suddenly in the midst of our fully networked isolation there’s a pretty girl who smiles at us and asks how we are. She’s actually there, not just a face on a screen. And she’s bringing us cake! Is it any wonder we form attachments?’

‘That sounds plausible,’ I say gruffly, embarrassed at having my own situation so unsparingly detailed. ‘But how does your business venture relate to it?’

‘Okay. So you’ve developed these feelings, which are very natural and human. What happens when you sit down in a café or restaurant only to find that your favourite waitress isn’t there? On the one hand, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But seeing her was literally the only thing you had to look forward to all day! And it actually feels pretty crushing. That’s the kind of scenario Hotwaitress is designed to eliminate. What we proposed —’

‘ “We” — this means you and … ?’ I ask with a sinking feeling.

‘Me and Igor. What we proposed was a comprehensive guide to waitresses in cafés and restaurants all over the city. When they’re on, when they’re off, what sections they’re working, their likes, dislikes, hobbies and pastimes, the latest gossip as well as plenty of pic—’

‘Wait, wait,’ I interject. ‘Are you serious? This was a genuine business venture?’

‘Well, yeah,’ he says, looking slightly offended. ‘What’s the problem?’

There are so many problems I have difficulty focusing on one. ‘How exactly would you find out all these personal details? The waitresses are just going to tell you?’

‘No, of course not. We’d have a dedicated data-collection team deployed across the city. And we’d also repackage whatever the waitresses have uploaded themselves, on to Facebook and so on.’

The surveillance equipment: at last the pieces fall into place. I feel a kind of deep and distressing pang within, a sort of moral headache. ‘Surely this can’t be legal.’

‘It’s an information service, that’s all,’ Paul says. ‘How can information be bad?’

He sits down opposite me and leans earnestly over the table. ‘Imagine being able to tap into a resource like that for Ariadne. Think what a comfort that would be.’

‘I wouldn’t be comforted by the knowledge that countless others were out there, stalking her online.’

‘It’s not stalking,’ Paul says.

‘It is,’ I say.

‘It’s not.’

‘It is practically the definition of stalking,’ I say.

Paul throws his hands in the air. ‘It’s the twenty-first century! People expect to be spied on! For a good-looking woman it’d probably be more upsetting if she found out she wasn’t being spied on.’

‘And your wife, what did she think about this business venture?’

‘Oh, Clizia,’ he says impatiently.

‘Well? You told me before how much she hated being stared at by men in the club. What did she think of you keeping waitresses under surveillance?’

‘Clizia’s living in a fool’s paradise. We have to eat, don’t we? This is what people want now. They don’t want novels. They want reality, up close and personal.’

‘Someone else’s reality, turned into entertainment.’

‘You might not like it. But I’ll tell you this, the response to Hotwaitress was the polar opposite of the response to Clown . We had investors queuing out the door! Venture capital, private equity! We had a pre-launch party with an elephant — an elephant!’

‘So what happened? Why aren’t you an Internet millionaire?’

His face clouds. ‘There were legal issues. You know how it goes — it got tied up in court, all our funding went on solicitors’ fees.’

‘Maybe for the best,’ I say.

‘It could have been big. Loneliness is one of the few growth areas these days. And it’s self-perpetuating, you know? Because the more people pay to stop feeling lonely, the lonelier they tend to get.’

‘Is that why you spend all your money on lap dances?’ I say.

He purses his lips, lowers his eyes. ‘About that,’ he says. ‘I’m going to need another advance.’

ELEPHANT RUNS AMOK AT CITY CENTRE EVENT

A man was seriously injured last night and the ground floor of a Dublin hotel badly damaged when a hired elephant went on the rampage at the launch of a new Internet dating service. Witnesses reported that the animal became enraged when an intern employed by the service attempted to dress it in a ‘French maid’ costume. After trampling the man, who remains in hospital, the elephant overturned a number of tables in the reception room and charged at hotel guests. A zookeeper who arrived to sedate the animal described it as ‘extremely agitated’. The hotel manager, Mr Wallace Willis, said that the event had been ‘a fiasco’ at which ‘basic safety had been thrown out the window’. The company’s director, Mr Igor Struma, was not available for comment last night. Mr Struma, described in the company’s press release as an entrepreneur and bounty hunter, is wanted for questioning by authorities in Ukraine in connection with the robbery five years ago of a consignment of gynaecological equipment. The company’s president, Mr Paul