Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

The heat in his cheeks is visible through the corpse paint. Ariadne gazes at him pityingly, as if he had personally been chased up and down Patagonia by neoliberal economists.

‘Look,’ I say, feeling my own cheeks turn red. ‘It’s not a conspiracy. The fact is —’

‘In Indonesia they got rid of food supports for the poor,’ the zombie interrupts. ‘In Madagascar they cut the mosquito eradication programme, and ten thousand people died of malaria.’

‘The fact is ,’ I persist, ‘that Greece is deeply in debt. It can’t afford to pay its workers. It can’t afford to keep its electricity on. This is why the IMF is there, to stop the country from completely disintegrating.’

‘If they wanted to stop it disintegrating, they’d just cancel the debt,’ the zombie says.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Write it off. It’s all imaginary anyway. Numbers on a piece of paper. So erase them.’

‘You have to pay what you owe,’ I snap. ‘That is the cornerstone of our civilization.’

‘Unless you’re a bank, right?’ the zombie returns. ‘Look at this place right here!’ He sweeps his hand at Royal Irish’s grey façade. ‘My grandchildren are going to be paying off the money they blew. My grandchildren are going to be born into debt because of them and their incompetence. And still the government’s pumping them with more cash!’

Aha: here I have the advantage of him. I feel my anger recede, my suaveness return. ‘Not for much longer,’ I say. ‘The bank will be wound down very shortly. And you and your friends can go home.’

‘That’s not what I hear.’

‘What do you hear?’ I say sardonically.

‘They’re going to keep it open,’ the zombie says, throwing back a dreadlock. ‘They’re going to bring in new taxes so they can dredge up another few billion. They won’t stop till we’re in administration.’

‘The people won’t let that happen,’ Ariadne comes in. ‘They can’t.’

‘This is Ireland. There’s a lot of things people are willing to let happen.’ He seems to deflate, gestures gloomily at the rain-sodden tents. ‘Half of our lot have given up in the last week. They think there’s no point. Nobody’s paying any attention.’

‘Ay, these guys are paying attention,’ Ariadne says, nodding across the street to where, outside the defunct bank, two enormous security guards have appeared, staring at the encampment with arms folded.

‘They’re there all the time,’ the zombie says. ‘I think they work for the Centre. So far they haven’t crossed the road. Although someone turned a water hose on us last night. All our stuff got soaked, the sleeping bags, the generator. Here, maybe you should head off,’ he says quickly, as one of the guards starts speaking into a walkie-talkie. Leaning forward, he kisses her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

We are on our way at last, though Ariadne keeps looking back fretfully: news of the sleeping-bag soaking has given a gloss of martyrdom to the zombie sit-in.

‘He’s wrong about Royal Irish,’ I tell her. ‘I just wrote a report for the government, advising them to wind it down. It will probably be announced in the next few days.’

‘How will they get their clothes and things dry in this rain?’ Ariadne says.

The beautiful sunset has gone, leaving a brooding gunmetal sky from which rain descends in fusillades. As we rattle back over the bridge, I review the situation. The zombie has taken the chapter in completely the wrong direction. I should never have let him speechify like that! I should never have let Ariadne go off-piste with the trolley! How can I get the story back on track? If only I had more bila !

We come back on to the IFSC side of the river, rumble northwards past boarded-up doors, broken windows, lowered shutters, roofless houses. We are probably only a couple of minutes from Transaction House as the crow flies, but my surroundings are quite unfamiliar.

‘This is where there used to be all the whores,’ Ariadne says, seemingly untroubled by the menacing ambience. ‘When is call Monto. You know the song?’

‘Song?’

‘Dave taught it to me. Now when the Tsar of Russia, and the King of Prussia, landed in the Phoenix Park in a big balloon …’

A fresh wave of paranoia rises up within me. Who is Dave? Is it the zombie? Or some other interloper?

‘In the nineteenth century, after the Famine, there was no work and no food,’ she is saying, ‘so all these women come here and sold their bodies to the British soldiers. They don’ have another choice, either they do it here, or they get on the ship’ — she gestures back in the direction of the river — ‘and sell it in America. Is funny, eh?’

‘Is it?’

‘Once is the biggest whorehouse in Europe, now is mostly turned into banks.’

‘Oh, yes, I see.’

She bows her head, then says in a lower voice, ‘My mum told me that since the IMF came, there are all these girls every night at the end of our street. Getting into cars with strangers. Girls I went to school with, some of them.’

‘Right,’ I say blandly. This avenue of conversation does not seem promising, romantically speaking.

‘So there is still money to fuck them, I suppose.’

‘I suppose there is.’

‘It’s so horrible what is happening there,’ she says, suddenly passionate. ‘There are people starving everywhere you go. People starving! On the streets of the city where I grew up! And the world acts like we deserve it! We didn’t drop cluster bombs on Baghdad! We didn’t blow up hospitals in Gaza! Now, because we don’ pay back some loans, we are the worst in the world?’

Trying to be optimistic, I tell myself that our misfiring encounter can’t possibly get any worse. But now we arrive at our destination and I realize I am wrong.

A straggling line of men stretches along the pavement. Some are slouched against the corroded wall, others slumped on the kerb, still others sprawled across the footpath, apparently asleep, so we have to steer the trolley around them. They are young and old, bald and hirsute, corpulent and lean as junkyard dogs. There are Roma men with tragic moustaches and pork-pie hats, gaunt Slavs with chilly eyes, a couple of burly Africans murmuring to each other in French; the majority, though, from their features and accents, appear to be Irish: men with wild sailor beards and bulbous, capillaried noses, cans of beer in toxic colours; skeletal, shiftless men with pinhead-pupils; sheepish men, better-dressed than the others, who chew their gum, clear their throats and study their phones, as though it were a connecting flight they were waiting for.

A palpable quickening runs through the line as Ariadne passes along it; some of the men leer, a few of them address her — not by name, more in the spirit of, ‘There she is now,’ ‘Howya gorgeous,’ as well as a less articulate array of grunts and gurns. We make it around the corner without incident, but then in the narrow lane one particularly sordid specimen lurches up and grabs her by the arm. Feverishly I try to remember the tiger-throw Marco taught us in the Transaction House gym — then realize the creature just wants to show her an abscess on his leg, which Ariadne tuts over sympathetically before going through a door.

We have entered a low, poorly lit hall. Men and the occasional woman sit eating at rickety trestle tables, or queue with their trays at the far end, where food sweats unappetizingly under heat-lamps. A dour fellow in a hairnet comes out from behind the counter and greets Ariadne. ‘Thanks,’ he says curtly, taking the trolley from her and parking it by the hatch.

‘How are things, Brendan?’ Ariadne asks.

‘How are they ever?’ this Brendan responds. He pauses, directing an unabashedly hostile look at me. ‘You’ve a new helper?’