Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Special deal,’ she says. ‘Buy anything, get two other things free.’

‘Some special occasion?’ I am praying that Brent has got it wrong.

She shrugs fatalistically. ‘We are closing.’

Nothing changes, but everything does: I feel like an extraterrestrial in a comic book, who, looking up at a blank square of sky, knows that his home planet has exploded. ‘I see.’

‘I have told you the landlord wants to put up the rent, right? So we went to see the bank, but they say there’s nothing they can do.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ I say softly.

‘Today’s our last day, that’s why we get rid of everything. If there’s anything you want, just take it. I don’t charge you.’

‘What’s in there?’ A florid woman beside me points suspiciously at a wicker tray of buns. I wait while Ariadne explains that these are cinnamon, these pear, these raisin; the woman, still glowering mistrustfully, throws a couple in her basket, then stalks off. Outside the rain rattles from the overflowing gutters like gunfire.

‘The Ark is leaving just when we need it most,’ I say.

‘Ay, what can we do? We don’ want to close, but is impossible. I don’ know who does the landlord expect to move in and pay his crazy rent. Or does he jus’ want to force us out?’

I start to explain the logic of the upward-only rent review — that the value of a building as an asset is based on the rent that could be charged for it, meaning it often makes more sense to keep that rent high and the building unoccupied than to lower the rent and have to mark down its overall … I tail off. Ariadne is gazing at me with a mixture of bewilderment and horror. All I can do, even now, is parrot the lines of the enemy! What is wrong with me?

‘What will you do?’ I say quickly. ‘Where will you go?’

‘I don’ know yet,’ she reflects. ‘Everything happens so quickly. I’d like to stay, but it’s hard to find work here, and is so expensive, and …’ She lets out a heavy, troubled sigh. ‘Is people just going to let this happen?’

‘You mean the rent review?’ Though I know she doesn’t.

‘I mean everything .’ She casts a sallow hand at the window, the waterlogged, debt-laden nation outside. ‘It gets worse and worse, and still people just shrug their shoulders. In Greece, in Spain, they’re out on the streets. Here, if you go on the streets, they think you’re a fool or a criminal and you deserve whatever you get. What’s everyone so afraid of? Why don’t they do something? If they care?’

As she says this, her eyes swing directly up to meet mine, their challenge so violent that I take an involuntary step backwards. I begin to ask her about her friend the zombie, then realize that the answer, whatever it is, will probably not reflect well on me, so instead I change the subject. ‘Oscar will go with you? If you leave?’

‘Of course,’ she says, it seems to me curtly; and then from behind me there comes a crash, and we look over to see that someone has knocked a box of pasta from the shelf. Ariadne groans, and fetches a dustpan and brush. ‘Mother of Christ, these people,’ she murmurs, kneeling down to sweep up the spilled linguine. ‘If any of them have come before today, we wouldn’t need to close.’

‘Why don’t you give the food to the shelter?’

‘Because it close too. Last week. Brendan says the government won’t give any more money. You know, they have all this bullshit with the banks.’

‘Yes,’ I say faintly, and with a flush of shame.

The door opens and closes, opens and closes; the beginnings of the lunch crowd join the pandemonium, a fresh stream of shoulders and elbows bruising their way by.

‘I must go back to work,’ Ariadne says defeatedly.

She takes a step into the melee, and it hits me, like an axe blow, that this is the last time I will see her. There will be no sunsets, no hooting train whistles, no valedictory speeches: I have not earned any of that. She will simply leave the frame and be gone and never be replaced, that’s how it works in the real world –

‘Wait!’

She turns, looks at my hand on her sleeve.

‘Maybe I can do something,’ I say, with a dry mouth. ‘For the café. Find a backer, negotiate with the landlord for a couple of months’ extension. Buy some time, at least.’

‘Thanks, Claude,’ she says gently. ‘But I think it’s too late.’

‘I know people,’ I insist, still clutching her arm. ‘I should have thought of it before. I’ll go back to the office and make some calls.’

‘Thank you,’ she repeats. ‘That’s very kind.’

Investors are always looking for a good opportunity, I tell her, forecasts for the service industry are strong, then take into account footfall in the Financial Services Centre, and the growing market for specialist foods — on and on I babble, with less and less idea what I’m saying, just to keep the conversation alive, to keep her here with me for a few seconds longer, until at last the words run out and I am left gaping at her in silence. Ariadne doesn’t move away. Instead she looks down again at my hand on her forearm, then up again at me: some invisible veil falls away, and in that instant I see that she has understood everything. Nowhere to hide now; all I can do is pretend I haven’t noticed she’s noticed, find some trivial remark that will give us both an escape route. But my powers of dissembling have deserted me; instead I hang wretchedly in the lamplight of her gaze, like an abject, sodden stranger who appears on her step in the middle of a rainstorm and throws himself on her mercy.

Someone is calling her name from behind the till. With a supreme effort I manage to relinquish her arm, but she stays where she is a moment longer, holding my gaze with strangely liquid eyes. ‘Goodbye, Claude,’ she says at last. Leaning forward she kisses my cheek. And then she is gone, devoured in the churn of lunchtime vultures.

The rest of the day is an unremitting agony. Never has the office seemed so toxic. The bland pastel shirts, the veined mock-leather of the desks, the swirling screensavers and bright glowing spreadsheets: these are merely lesser darknesses in a vast and opaque and airless night, a lesson in entropy that is repeated and repeated until it has drummed its emptiness into every cell of my being.

The scale of the pain catches me off-guard. I thought I’d reconciled myself long ago to being without her. Now I realize that instead of giving her up, my heart had concocted a future in which we would go on, if not together, at least in parallel — that I might continue to love her from a distance, and she would continue to live her life with that love wrapped around her, an unseen protector, like an angel’s wing …

I do my best to keep my promise to her, but with the bank in its current state of public disintegration, pitching an investment is like a poisoner trying to sell cookies door-to-door. At this stage most of my contacts don’t even answer the phone. There must be something I can do! In a novel, the café’s rack-renting landlord would turn out to be one of our wicked clients — Walter Corless, maybe, who for all these years has harboured an irrational hatred of macrobiotic foods, and plans to convert the café into a car park; I would confront him, and gloatingly he’d reveal to me all of his sinister and illegal business dealings, only to discover that I’d recorded the conversation, and thus brought down his whole Babelian empire.

But in the real world, which is the world of business, there are no stories like this — with heroes and villains, motives other than profit. The ‘landlord’ isn’t a person, just the name given to an investment portfolio; the decision was made in the void eye of another hurricane a thousand miles away, a Canadian pension fund, a German reinsurance firm, an asset management company in Tokyo or Sydney or Lahore. No one working there will ever have seen the Ark or know anything about it, except as a figure on a spreadsheet; the lease is doubtless administered by someone just like me, wishing he was elsewhere, sending off the rote email while dreaming of another waitress in another café …