Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Magical thinking: an invaluable quality for an entrepreneur, until it isn’t. But Walter!

Jurgen shrugs. ‘Walter is a person. People do irrational things. They act according to the story they want to hear, instead of the reality.’ He cocks his head, a mechanical bird. ‘Where is Ish?’

I leave the office early. Ariadne waves to me from the window of the Ark. I remember she wanted to speak to me about her problems with the rent, but I feel contaminated after the Dublex revelation, so I just wave and pass on. At home I turn on the news, only to find myself faced, as though the broadcast were coming directly from my conscience, with the Minister again — haggard and worn, reciting the findings of the faked report like some poisonous spell whose consequences he has no conception of.

When the phone rings, my first, dreadful thought is that the journalists have somehow got my mobile number. But this time the caller is Paul. William O’Hara has emailed him to confirm our place on the guest list for his public interview with Banerjee at the Black & White Festival. ‘It’s two weeks on Thursday,’ he says. ‘So time to get moving.’

‘Excellent,’ I say.

‘Excellent, so when are you coming over?’

‘You want me to come over?’

‘I thought you said you were going to help,’ Paul returns, a little sharply.

‘Yes, although I meant in the way of providing background detail, moral support, that sort of thing.’

‘Oh, I see, so basically you’re saying I have to do it all by myself.’

‘Aren’t novels usually written this way?’

A sigh crackles from the receiver. ‘This isn’t a novel, Claude. It’s a proposal. I’ve got a few ideas, but I want to bounce them off someone first.’

Bounce them off someone : the phrase reassures me. It suggests there will be little more required of me than a physical presence. I can be a presence; and a bout of artistic creativity might be just the kind of activity I need to purge the noxious taste of the day. I set out, trying not to think about Dublex and its shaky foundations, trying not to see in the streets and faces I encounter a reality that has been secretly changed, the first imperceptible marks of a new and lessened future; I concentrate instead on novelistic details: fruit stacked in the grocery, the stooped old woman casting breadcrumbs to the pigeons, a convoy of robed priests climbing aboard a bus.

The rain has been falling all day; it seems a whole sea must have spilled from the sky. The swollen river lours like a drunkard disturbed from his sleep; clogged gutters quickly become filthy lakes, over which pedestrians skip and dance and hop with grim grey faces, as in some totalitarian musical. On Paul’s street the weather has driven almost everyone indoors, though a couple of men make do with a sheet of polyurethane beneath which they share a dog-end, like doughty Tommies in a Passchendaele trench.

Paul, when he answers his door, has a twitchy demeanour I haven’t seen before. ‘Let’s get to it,’ he says. ‘Clizia’s going out in a minute, so we’ll have a couple of hours totally free.’

‘Volleyball?’

‘Yes, they’re in the quarter-finals. Nearly there, eh?’

‘Good for them,’ I say ingenuously, while a surge of rain strikes the window in a mocking minor chord.

‘Okay, down to business,’ he says, directing me to sit at the kitchen table.

Instantly, Remington detaches himself from the television.

‘What are you doing, Daddy?’

‘We’re writing a story,’ Paul says. ‘Now be quiet.’

‘Is it a story about an ant?’

‘No.’

‘Is it a story about an ant who goes all around the world and then he comes back and he lives in a matchbox and his name is Roland?’

‘Go and watch your cartoons,’ Paul says, gripping the boy by the shoulders and shunting him back towards television. ‘That’s an order.’

With a little sigh, Remington picks up the remote; a torrent of explosions, strobes and rainbows fragmenting into hissing diamonds blasts from the TV, like ECT with product placement.

‘Okay. Okay.’ Paul seems considerably tenser than usual. He picks up a plastic biro, chews the end, then sets it down again. ‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘I don’t think this is going to work.’

Clearly my role here is going to be more involved than I’d expected. ‘It’s just a proposal,’ I tell him in a calming voice. ‘And you already have most of it, in what you told Dodson at the party.’

‘But that’s just it, Claude.’ He looks up at me with eyes that are flashing vortices of anxiety. ‘ Anal Analyst. What is that? You know?’

‘Well, it is just as you said, a working title. Obviously you will not use Anal in the actual book.’

He shakes his head vigorously. ‘ Anal ’s not the issue. Anal is fine. The problem is Analyst. Who wants to read about an analyst? Who knows what an analyst even is ?’

‘I know what an analyst is. I can tell you.’

‘You’ve already told me. You’ve told me what you do ten times, and I forget it straight away. It’s like it’s too boring to be retained by the human mind.’

‘Can’t you make it interesting? Isn’t that your job?’

‘Within reason. But I need some kind of story. I need something to happen . Today, for example, tell me what you did today.’

I flinch inwardly. His eyes fix on me, enormous, gibbous, like the eyes of some nocturnal animal peering out of the forest; in them, as if from a hidden camera, I see myself at Rachael’s desk, promising to lie about the phoney report … ‘I developed a financial model of a notional amalgam of the three main Irish banks,’ I say.

‘That’s what I mean! No one wants to read about some guy going around developing financial models.’

‘Dodson wanted to. He said it sounded bold.’

‘ Bold is code for no one’s going to buy that . Look, I’ve made my decision, the analyst’s out. So what we’re left with is Anal . Igor and I talked through a few ideas earlier today. See if anything jumps out at you.’ Placing a pair of reading glasses on his nose, he frowns down at the notebook. ‘ Anal Amateurs . The comic tale of two medical students as they attempt to raise the money for college by opening their own unorthodox proctology clinic. Eighteen and Anal . The battle of an uptight young man to shake off his authoritarian upbringing. Twenty-Four-Hour Red-Hot Anal . In Finland, the land of the midnight sun, a local blacksmith’s decision to open a colonic irrigation centre causes tension in the old community —’

‘I will be honest, I think you are going down the wrong path with these anal themes.’

‘But we told Dodson that it was called Anal Analyst ,’ Paul remonstrates. ‘That’s the idea he wanted to hear about. We’ve already scrapped the analyst. If we chuck Anal too, what’s left? You want me to hand him a pile of blank pages? Publishers won’t pay money for blank pages, Claude. I’ve tried it and they won’t.’

Before I can reply (what can I possibly say?) the bathroom door flies open; like a goddess emerging from a volcano, Clizia steps out in a billow of steam. She is wearing boots of white patent leather that climb up above her knee, leaving perhaps twelve scandalous inches of thigh exposed between them and the hem of her mini-skirt, which is also white and also patent leather. ‘I am going to volleyball,’ she says deadpan, but then, raising her voice abruptly, ‘Vot is this?’

‘What’s what?’ Paul turns to follow her pointing finger. ‘Oh, for God’s sake — Remington, what’s in your mouth?’