Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Thank you.’ I dab at my eyes, which are streaming again.

‘You have a cold,’ she chides, going behind the counter then returning a moment later with a mug of herbal tea. ‘You boys are all the same, you don’ take care of yourselves.’

‘Thanks.’ I sniff again, taking the mug. It seems Ish’s aphrodisiac has played its part after all: my copious sneezing rules me out as any kind of threat, except as a disseminator of germs. I drink my tea, surreptitiously take in her dark beauty, shimmering against the backdrop of the rain-teeming window. Everything is just as it should be; my line presents itself as if I have the page right in front of me. ‘About the other day.’

‘Don’ worry,’ Ariadne says. ‘Your Dr Cyrano has come in and explained everything.’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Cyrano — the psychiatrist?’

I roll my eyes, then realize this makes me look more bipolar. ‘Oh yes, of course.’

‘He told me about this experimental drug you’re taking that makes you act weird around women?’

‘Yes, that’s right, the experimental drug. However, I have stopped taking it now. In fact, I am completely cured.’

‘Oh, that’s great!’

‘Yes, I wanted to let you know. And also to apologize if I alarmed you.’ I pause, looking down at my knees mysteriously. ‘There was something else I wanted to ask you.’

‘Oh?’

‘It relates to your paintings.’

She lights up. ‘You want to buy one?’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that. If you have a few minutes, maybe we could … ?’

She looks intrigued, but the noisy approach of a floor-polishing machine, piloted by her blonde colleague, restores her to reality. ‘Ah, but we are closing,’ she laments.

‘Oh,’ I say, then, innocently, ‘Maybe tomorrow would be better?’

‘Tomorrow I am going away,’ she says.

‘I see.’ I frown, then look at my watch. ‘Perhaps a quick drink? Before you go home?’

I can’t help being impressed by my own suaveness here; it’s as if Ariadne is acting as a kind of catalyst, in whose presence I am transforming into someone half-worthy of her.

Ariadne tocks her tongue thoughtfully against her palate. ‘I have somethink to do,’ she says. ‘But you can come with me, if you want? Is not so far?’

‘Perfect,’ I say. The scene is unfolding just as I intended — although it is a surprise when she thrusts a large black garbage bag into my hands.

‘Buns,’ she says enigmatically. She whisks away into the kitchen, then reappears behind a trolley, on top of which sits a large steel vat. ‘There’s a couple of places we bring what we have left at the end of the day,’ she says.

‘Ah,’ I say, and then, suavely, ‘They are fortunate to get such excellent food.’

‘I think leftovers is always tasting of leftovers, whatever they are. You coming?’

I jump up and hold the door for her, then thrust open my umbrella and raise it over her head; in this manner, like some strange new creature of feet and wheels and umbrella spokes, we pass over the threshold of the Ark and outside. Outside! Where we are no longer waitress and customer, simply woman and man; where as far as the world is concerned, we could be on a date, or lovers, or ecstatic newly-weds …

We make our way over the plaza in the direction of the river. Ariadne is saying something, but I am too giddy to hear. This is happening! This is my life now! As we approach the quays, the rain dies away and we see, shattering the clouds, a glorious sunset strung across the water. ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ croons Ariadne, coming to a halt. I just smile, as if I had arranged it myself. Ariadne gazes happily at the sky’s deep blush, then raises her finger and traces a kind of a benediction in the air. ‘You know the artist Yves Klein?’ she says. ‘When he is young, he lies on the beach and signs the sky with his finger. He says it was his first artwork.’

‘A nice idea,’ I say. ‘Though hard to fit in a gallery.’

She laughs.

I seize my moment. ‘Speaking of galleries,’ I begin, and then stop. Ariadne has crossed the road and stepped on to the bridge. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, but she doesn’t hear me over the rattling of the trolley. She couldn’t be taking me to — we’re not going to — are we?

But we are.

The squalid tents — fewer in number than the last time I looked — are drenched with rain; rainwater puddles in every available surface. On the improvised fence, rain-bleached posters blare grim statistics of government and bank collusion, with crudely rendered images of pigs in top hats smoking cigars, and fists squashing euro signs. A whiteboard importunes passers-by for ‘Things We Need!’, followed by a list: tea bags, soap, batteries, and so on. Over the camp a banner hangs, declaring damply, FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU, THEN THEY FIGHT YOU, THEN YOU WIN. I feel some of my new-found suaveness escape into the cooling air.

Ariadne opens a makeshift gate and wheels the trolley into the compound. ‘Hello!’ she shouts, and again, until a dreadlocked head pokes out from one of the tents. His face, painted corpse-grey and decorated with an array of sutures, breaks into a smile when he sees her. He scrambles out and to his feet.

‘Ah you’re a saint,’ he says.

‘Just a few bits an’ pieces,’ Ariadne says to him, handing over a bulging bag. ‘Mostly food from today, but there’s a jar of coffee too, and some washing-up liquid and other stuff.’

‘Fantastic,’ the zombie says, beaming down into his trove, then nods at me. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Claude,’ Ariadne says, adding, to my mind unnecessarily, ‘he works in a bank.’

‘Oh yeah?’ The zombie draws back and examines me with a new attention.

‘We are not part of this …’ I wave my hand at the protest signs, the skeletal ruin of Royal Irish. ‘My bank is an investment bank, not a retail bank. And we haven’t been given any government money. In fact, we have been punching above our weight.’

‘Right,’ the zombie says.

‘Listen, I’m not here the next couple of weeks,’ Ariadne says to him, ‘but I tell Riika to keep bringing down something, okay?’

‘You’re going back to see your parents?’

‘Ay, they tell me they are fine, but I can’ help to worry. All this craziness, riots, petrol bombs, young people fighting the police every night? No trains, no food in the supermarkets, these lunatics who march around with swastikas — and meanwhile from Europe all they hear is, where’s our money?’

As she says this her face quite changes, almost cracks open, revealing a dark, fretful interior I never knew existed. I feel a pang of guilt, having advised many clients over the last year of the dangers of the Greek contagion, not to mention counselling Howie to short Greek bonds for all they were worth, which by the time he was finished was a lot less.

‘Europe won’t abandon Greece,’ I say, as much to reassure myself as Ariadne. ‘There are mechanisms in place. People won’t be allowed to starve.’

‘The mechanisms are only there to make sure the fat cats get their money back,’ the zombie interjects. ‘All this has happened before. The bankers lose the run of themselves, they bring the whole system crashing down, and then the people who have to pay to get it back on the rails are the ones on the very bottom. Then the CEOs give themselves a big fat raise for a job well done.’

‘That’s not strictly accurate,’ I say.

‘Latin America in the 1970s,’ he says. ‘The banks lend a ton of money to a bunch of gangster dictators, thinking they’ll make a packet. Then when all the loans turn bad and the US and Euro banks are on the point of tanking, the IMF steps in with emergency credit so these unfortunate countries can pay them back. But who pays back the IMF? The peasants, the farmers, the factory workers and the shoe-shine boy. That’s what happened in Tunisia, Russia, East Asia. That’s just what’s happening here. It’s like this great big circle of debt, with the only result that the people with the very least get poorer and poorer and poorer.’