Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

I shrug.

Her hand remains on my arm. In the dusk her green eyes are dark pools in which the reflected street lights swim like lilies. ‘So you are alone,’ she says.

The wind swirls down the river, the quayside traffic judders like a heavier, earthbound wind; everything seems to liquefy, as if something had broken open.

I realize my story is at a turning point.

The subterfuge, the plotting, the misdirection, all of that falls away, and the dull details of my life here too, the whole maze tumbling into itself like panels of scenery. The lie has brought me, as promised, to the truth. ‘Look,’ I begin.

But that is as far as I get. Ariadne’s phone has started to ring. ‘Sorry, one second,’ she says, holding up a finger to suspend our conversation, like a fairy bringing time to a halt with a twitch of her wand, then unleashes into the phone a torrent of accelerated Greek.

Sequestered within the alien noise, my mind is racing. Am I actually going to do this? Should I talk to Paul first? But the time for Cyranos and surveillance equipment has passed. I have been in a story long enough, trapped on a flat page, delivering lines written by others. Now is the time to step out into the world. How else could this end, but with the hero speaking in his own voice? Ariadne gives me a wrapping-up sign. I take a deep breath, I gird my loins; then into the phone I hear her say, ‘ S’agapo, Oscar, s’agapo … I love you, baby, I’ll be home soon.’

And around me it seems that a hundred doors and windows have been flung open, as in some stuffy room; and all of the potential, the dreams, the imagined futures borne away in an instant, like banknotes thrown to the wind.

‘And what did you say?’

‘What could I say?’

‘Didn’t you ask her who it was?’

‘No, I simply ignored it, and then continued my pretence that I had approached her only out of an interest in her work.’

‘And that was it? Then you just went back to the office?’

‘First I bought a painting. Simulacrum 103 . There it is, by the mantelpiece.’ I point to the painting, still in a cardboard box, like a cold, avant-garde pizza. Paul opens the lid, winces, closes it again. At the breakfast bar Igor, who arrived uninvited with Paul, tosses pistachio nuts into his mouth and flips the shells on the ground.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Paul says. ‘The two of you are getting on fine, everything’s going according to plan, then she gets this phone call, during which she says —’

‘ “I love you, Oscar. I’ll be home soon.” ’

‘That’s all?’

‘The rest was in Greek.’

‘Well then!’ Paul spreads his hands expansively. ‘She could have been talking to anybody. Her uncle, her brother. The guy who comes to fix the fridge. You know these Mediterraneans, they’re very demonstrative.’

‘It wasn’t the man who comes to fix the fridge,’ I say, recalling the light that jumped in her eyes as soon as she took out her phone. ‘She meant what she said.’

‘So who is he, then? Who is this Oscar?’

Who is Oscar? Since that moment at the waterside, when my dreams were so casually atomized, I have thought of little else. In my imagination he keeps changing, one moment garrulous and witty, the next silent and serious; right now I picture him as a handsome, athletic type — tanned, stubbled, a pilot for Médecins Sans Frontières who in his spare time writes surprisingly tender poetry. The others have differing opinions: Paul sees him as a brilliant entrepreneur, a wild-eyed maverick making a fortune from imperceptible flaws in the system; Igor proposes that he is a professional sex worker, ‘with wang like the extinguisher of fires, who has made her addict to his sex, and she cannot stop sexing him’.

‘See, with a high-quality waitress-surveillance system there’d be none of this ambiguity,’ Paul says, frowning. ‘Without knowing what we’re up against, it’s hard to work out the best course of action.’

‘Only one course,’ Igor says. ‘Good old-fashioned maiming. Without this monster wang of his, she will soon turn elsewhere for her pleasures.’

‘I don’t think it will make a difference,’ I say. ‘The writing was on the wall long before she mentioned Oscar. She hates banks with a passion.’

‘But we expected that, right?’ Paul says. ‘That’s why we were pushing the benefactor thing. Didn’t she go for that at all?’

‘She seemed uncomfortable taking money for her art from someone who works in a bank. She likened us to Nazis.’

He sighs. ‘Okay. Well, you’re right, once a woman starts calling you a Nazi, it’s time to bow out. Frankly, from what you’ve told me, you may have dodged a bullet. The paintings and the organic food should have been a clear enough warning. Better to get out now, before she starts making you wear vegetarian shoes and call history “herstory”.’

‘And leave her tampons all over the place,’ Igor chimes in wearily. ‘This is what happens with my ex-wife. Tampons, everywhere in my house. Then she try to unionize the strippers. Man who says, “We must educate the womens,” I say to him, “You think anybody pay to see strippers who have cut off their hair and now dress in boiler suits that they will not take off?” ’

‘Igor here actually owned his own strip club back in the old country,’ Paul explains.

‘Happier times, happier times,’ Igor says mistily.

‘Anyhow, the main thing now is that we put Ariadne behind us and get you back in the game,’ Paul says, bending down to his bag. ‘If you’ll take a look at the laptop here, you’ll see the beta version of the new Hotwaitress. We’re still updating the database, but there are plenty of options …’

‘I appreciate your help,’ I say. ‘But for me, I think the game is over.’

‘Over?’ Paul looks up from the laptop with a start. ‘What do you mean?’

I rise from my chair and go to the window. Uninhabited office blocks blaze with light against the dark sky, a ghost armada sailing the black ocean. ‘I suppose I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet,’ I say. ‘I think the bullet went right through me.’

‘Then why stop?’ Paul says, jumping to his feet. ‘We can find out more about Oscar. Maybe there are cracks in the relationship we can exploit. We’ll redesign you from the ground up, so whatever Oscar lacks, you have in spades.’

I smile. When I asked him to come over, I still thought there was something he could do; now I can see that the very fact I’m having this conversation shows how hopeless the situation is. Tricks, artifice, the implacable double-agency of money — this is my world, not Ariadne’s, and there is simply no way to go from mine to hers.

‘Artifice is everybody’s world! You think Ariadne gets out of bed looking like that? You think she doesn’t put in her time in front of the mirror, getting her beautiful ebony hair to flow just so? Look, you’ve had a disappointment, I understand that. But a few weeks ago you didn’t even know her. What’s to stop you having the same feelings for somebody else? Take a look in our database.’ He holds the laptop open for me, faces arrayed on the screen like chocolates in a box. ‘There are literally hundreds of other waitresses here. Just take a look.’

‘No.’

‘Look, that’s all I’m asking.’

‘I don’t want anybody else,’ I say.

Paul sighs. ‘Okay, Claude. It’s your decision, of course. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re being awfully naïve about this. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that’s great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you’re left watching somebody’s body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.’