But the past isn’t done with him yet. Howard’s sitting in front of the TV news that night – already on his fourth beer, a fringe benefit of not having a job to go to tomorrow – when he realizes he’s staring at an image of his own house. It appears with its neighbours, a series of gently sloping triangles silhouetted on the crest of the hill, behind the brassy bouffant of a reporter.
He starts; then, with an eerie sense of impending revelation, of a kind that perhaps haunts all inhabitants of the television age, he leans forward and turns up the sound.
The story is about the new Science Park. It seems that, while digging the foundations, engineers unearthed some kind of prehistoric fortress. On the orders of the development company, however, they kept schtum and continued with their work, and apparently the whole thing would have been bulldozed if a disgruntled Turkish labourer, denied his overtime for the fourth week running, hadn’t blown the whistle. ‘Archaeologists are calling it a “find of incalculable value”,’ the reporter says. ‘We put these allegations to the project’s Publicity Director, Guido LaManche.’
‘No,’ Howard says, out loud.
But it is he: Guido LaManche, bestower of wedgies, infamous farter, doughnut-eating champion, pioneer of the bungee jump in Ireland – here he is now in a well-tailored suit, telling the reporter that as far as he can see these commentators are generating much heat but very little light.
‘ “A find of incalculable value,” ’ the reporter reminds him.
Guido permits himself a gentle, slightly flirtatious chuckle. The years have been good to him; he is slimmer and fitter, and speaks with the confidence and surety of the world-shaper. ‘Well, Ciara, the truth is that in a country like Ireland, you can’t build a sandcastle without making a find of incalculable value. If we were to ring-fence every single historic this or that we discovered, there would literally be nowhere left for anyone to live.’
‘So you’re saying it should be bulldozed,’ the reporter says.
‘I’m saying we need to ask ourselves where our priorities lie. Because what we are trying to build here isn’t just a Science Park. It’s the economic future of our country. It’s jobs and security for our children and our children’s children. Do we really want to put a ruin from three thousand years ago ahead of our children’s future?’
‘And what about those who say that this “ruin” gives us a unique insight into the origins of our culture?’
‘Well, let me turn that question around. If the position was reversed, do you think the people of three thousand years ago would have stopped building their fortress so they could preserve the ruin of our Science Park? Of course not. They wanted to move forward. The whole reason we have the civilization we have today – the only reason you and I are standing here – is that people kept moving forward instead of looking backward. Everybody in the past wanted to be a part of the future, just as today everybody in the Third World wants to be a part of the First. And if they had a choice, they would swap places with us in a second!’
‘Moving forward!’ Howard claps his hands like he’s cheering on a racehorse; at which point the power cuts out, leaving him with his beer in the dark.
Moving forward. After the bungee jump, Guido had relocated to a private school in Barbados, never to be seen again. It hadn’t made much difference: in the eyes of the school, Howard was really the one to blame. Cowardice, that was the unforgiveable sin for a Seabrook boy. Most people were kind enough not to say it to his face, but he knew it with every breath he took, and he has lived with it every day and night since.
But Guido did not live with it. Guido moved forward. He wasn’t about to let one fleeting episode determine the whole trajectory of his life thereafter. For Guido the past, like a Third World country, was merely another resource to be exploited and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you’re actually supposed to believe.
He’s still laughing – or is he crying? – when the phone rings. It takes him a while to locate it in the chaotic darkness, but the ringer is persistent. Answering, he is addressed by a gruff male voice that cannot quite conceal its youth. ‘Mr Fallon?’
‘Who is this?’
A cautious pause ensues, and then, ‘It’s Ruprecht. Ruprecht Van Doren.’
‘Ruprecht?’ Howard gets an unsettling worlds-collide sensation. ‘How did you get this number?’
There is a scuffling sound, as of rodents tussling in the under-growth, and then, ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Now?’
‘It’s important. Can I come over?’
Dazedly Howard casts an eye over the chiaroscuro dereliction of the house. ‘No… no, I don’t think that would be appropriate.’
‘Well, how about Ed’s? Ed’s in half an hour?’
‘Ed’s?’
‘Beside the school. It’s important, half an hour okay?’ The boy hangs up. Howard stands there a moment in mystification, dial tone burring in his ear. Then the significance of the venue strikes him, and with it the realization that there is only one possible reason Ruprecht should urgently want to see him. Somehow he has come to suspect the coach.
He pulls on a jacket as he dashes outside. The night has grown teeth, and the cold binds with the anticipation in his stomach to banish the fug of cheap beer. What has Ruprecht found out, and how? An overheard conversation? Did he hack into the school network? Or maybe Juster left a note that’s only surfaced now? He climbs into the car, and as the distance between him and the answer diminishes, exhilaration courses over him like the freezing air that gusts through the vents. He bursts breathless through the doors of the Doughnut House.
The diner is almost empty; Ruprecht sits alone at a two-person table with a box of doughnuts and two polystyrene beakers. ‘I didn’t know what flavours you liked –’ he gestures at the box of doughnuts. ‘So I got a mix. And I didn’t know what kind of drink you like, so I got Sprite.’
‘Sprite is perfect,’ Howard says. ‘Thank you.’ He takes a seat and looks around the room. He has not been in here for years. It is little changed: generic Americana on the walls, glossy backlit photographs of pastries and croissants above the counter, air with an anonymous odour you can’t quite put your finger on – the smell of fluorescent lights, maybe, or of polystyrene beakers, or whatever the mysterious arid liquid is that they are selling as coffee. He remembers the excitement in school when it had first opened. An international chain, right here in Seabrook! Back then, when Ireland was a global backwater, this had seemed nothing short of a wonderful kindness, like a mission opening a school in the jungle; flocking into its bland homogenous interior, designed by committee and replicated the world over, he and his friends had felt proudly apart from the parent-dominated city immediately outside, aligned instead with something almost mythic, something that transcended the limits of time and space to be a kind of everyplace, an everyplace belonging to the young.
‘I’m sorry you got fired,’ Ruprecht says to him.
Howard flushes. ‘Well, I haven’t actually been, ah, it’s more of a sabbatical…’
‘Was it for taking us to the park?’
Without knowing why this embarrasses him so, he affects not to have heard. ‘Quiet tonight,’ he says, smiling glassily.
‘People don’t really come here any more,’ Ruprecht replies in a monotone.