Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

I took the job, sure that he would come around in time. Why did I think that? This was a man who had chosen, in the 1980s, to pursue the trade of blacksmith. Pig-headed defiance was his métier . He loved difficulty, loved it more than he loved me.

And so we played out that first conversation over and over again. Sometimes he would lure me into it, pretending to have a question about the nature of, for example, derivatives, in order to harangue me about the inequities of the global financial system — ‘… so if you wanted to cover yourself, you could then buy what’s called an option —’ ‘Which is nothing, am I right? You are trying to sell me thin air?’ ‘It’s not nothing, I am selling you the choice to buy something for a specific price at a specific point in the —’ ‘Why do I need you to sell me the choice ? Don’t I have the choice myself?’ ‘Well, not in terms of —’ ‘I’m a free man, last time I looked! Your crowd hasn’t managed to sell us all down the river yet!’ ‘No, but I’m saying, if you wait, the price could —’ ‘Down with the collabos ! Vive la France! Vive la France! ’ — and so on, until Maman came in, and told him he must take his medicine.

More usually, though, he launched straight into his jeremiad, calling me a criminal, a parasite, taking me to task for the sins not only of my own profession but those of countless others — of the developers uprooting the city, of the American neoconservative movement, of ‘Rat Man’, as he termed our president, and of Rat Man’s brother Olivier (who was, in fact, a banker). He seemed to enjoy making himself angry — that was the only pleasure either of us found in my visits.

‘What does he want me to do?’ I said to Maman in the kitchen. ‘Become an anarchist and live in a squat?’

‘He is old, Claude,’ she would sigh. ‘He is old and he cannot bear it.’

Eventually I stopped visiting. I told myself I blamed my father for coming between my mother and me; in truth, it suited me rather well. I was busy at work, and there were more enjoyable ways to spend my few hours of leisure. I’d started seeing a girl, a model with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne. I didn’t go home for six months. As a result, I didn’t find out my mother was sick until she’d been admitted to hospital.

I found my father at her bedside; all the fury I felt at him disappeared in an instant. He sat there, waxy hand on hers; his eyes, blinking uncomprehendingly at me across the white wastes of the hospital sheets, reminded me of the horses that would be brought into his shop to be re-shod, the ones the cabbies drove around and around the Bois de Boulogne for the benefit of tourists — expressive of both resignation and a kind of glacial panic, one that unfolded slowly, over years.

After she died I thought things might be different. I made an effort to see him; for a time I even considered asking him to move into my apartment in Auteuil. But as the shock of her death wore off and bitterness took over, he became more and more impossible. He complained constantly about petty or imaginary things: the postman was opening his mail, the greengrocer overcharged him. He would not eat what I cooked for him; he made racist remarks about the proprietor of the tabac ; whenever we went for a walk he would light on some new act of gentrification, some cutesy new patisserie or macaron shop festooned with love-hearts, and start on a tirade. He discovered plans were afoot to turn the beautiful, collapsing magasin général into a hotel. In the artist’s rendering online, it had gondolas floating in front of it on the canal. ‘Gondolas!’ my father spluttered hoarsely. ‘ Gondolas! ’ When the headhunter called me with the offer of a position in Dublin, I didn’t have to consider it for long.

I palliated my guilt about leaving by hiring an expensive live-in nurse; and surprisingly quickly, guilt ceased to be an issue. Ariadne was right: Dublin during the boom was custom-made for forgetting.

The past, the present, the sins of individuals and multinationals alike, everything dissolved in money and cocaethylene and was borne away by the river. When the crash came, that was better still: the streets were deserted, it was easier than ever to imagine that only the market existed, the numbers that concatenated night and day, and always, always, good times and bad, held within them some means of making money.

I didn’t speak to my father often; most of my contact with him came in the form of Skyped complaints from the nurses about his behaviour, or Skyped interviews with their replacements when they quit. It was nurse no. 5, a sweet girl from Martinique, who called me that morning to say he’d passed away overnight; ‘like switching off a light’, she said approvingly, a good death. Beside me the radio was babbling the market news; through the window I could hear the tram-bell ring. It was six in the morning, I was dressed for the gym. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. It was all I could think of.

The line manager arranged for two weeks’ compassionate leave. I stayed at the old apartment; I spent most of my time tidying, as if he and she were about to arrive home after a trip away even though I knew that everything would very soon have to be boxed up and taken from the building. I put fresh flowers in the vase on the table; I topped up the bird feeder on the balcony, stood at the door, listening to the whirr of the tiny sparrows’ wings, like the riffling of the pages of a book. I kept being surprised by my reflection, the way you might by some minor self-portrait in a neglected corner of the Louvre, having lost your way between masterpieces: tie half-done around my neck, shirt a spectral white that gave my skin a greenish tinge, eyes like those islands of discarded plastic found floating in the middle of the ocean, opaque, polymerized, indestructible.

My father had lost the lease on the yard ten years ago; more apartments had been built on the site of his forge. In a cupboard, I found a trunk filled with old equipment — a heat-mask, various lengths of rubber tubing; at the back of this trunk, thrown there with an appearance of carelessness, I discovered the cache of photographs. It was funny, I couldn’t remember him taking them; yet here I was beginning school, here was Maman in a new dress, here were the three of us, visiting my aunt in her little house in Normandy, Maman and me again, at my college graduation; our lives, our family, bound up together in a way that I had never recognized the first time around. I sat on the ancient couch they had never replaced, and went through the pictures over and over. I laid them out in patterns on the coffee table, little coloured squares of time, as if I were playing solitaire, as if there were some perfect configuration that would win the game, retrieve the past in its totality.

Yet the more I tried to retrieve it, the more it shimmered, like a tesseract, into being, the lonelier I felt — as if I were viewing some marvellous planet from a bleak satellite suspended above it. At his funeral, I’d read a line of poetry: No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved ; it was from Théophile Gautier, a writer my mother had adored, and initially I found the thought consoling. Now, however, I began to wonder if the reverse also held. If nobody loved you, could you still say you were alive? The few relatives were long gone; I sat there turning over pictures that I didn’t even see; I felt a freezing cold, of an order I had never experienced before, as if I were somehow locked outside of the very moment I inhabited, a derivative of something that had ceased to be, and therefore about to disappear too — ‘triple witching hour’, they call it in banking, when stock index futures, stock index options, options on futures all expire together in a hiss of unbeing …