We make our way over the plaza in the direction of the river. Ariadne is saying something, but I am too giddy to hear. This is happening! This is my life now! As we approach the quays, the rain dies away and we see, shattering the clouds, a glorious sunset strung across the water. ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ croons Ariadne, coming to a halt. I just smile, as if I had arranged it myself. Ariadne gazes happily at the sky’s deep blush, then raises her finger and traces a kind of a benediction in the air. ‘You know the artist Yves Klein?’ she says. ‘When he is young, he lies on the beach and signs the sky with his finger. He says it was his first artwork.’
‘A nice idea,’ I say. ‘Though hard to fit in a gallery.’
She laughs.
I seize my moment. ‘Speaking of galleries,’ I begin, and then stop. Ariadne has crossed the road and stepped on to the bridge. ‘Where are we going?’ I ask, but she doesn’t hear me over the rattling of the trolley. She couldn’t be taking me to — we’re not going to — are we?
But we are.
The squalid tents — fewer in number than the last time I looked — are drenched with rain; rainwater puddles in every available surface. On the improvised fence, rain-bleached posters blare grim statistics of government and bank collusion, with crudely rendered images of pigs in top hats smoking cigars, and fists squashing euro signs. A whiteboard importunes passers-by for ‘Things We Need!’, followed by a list: tea bags, soap, batteries, and so on. Over the camp a banner hangs, declaring damply, FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU, THEN THEY FIGHT YOU, THEN YOU WIN. I feel some of my new-found suaveness escape into the cooling air.
Ariadne opens a makeshift gate and wheels the trolley into the compound. ‘Hello!’ she shouts, and again, until a dreadlocked head pokes out from one of the tents. His face, painted corpse-grey and decorated with an array of sutures, breaks into a smile when he sees her. He scrambles out and to his feet.
‘Ah you’re a saint,’ he says.
‘Just a few bits an’ pieces,’ Ariadne says to him, handing over a bulging bag. ‘Mostly food from today, but there’s a jar of coffee too, and some washing-up liquid and other stuff.’
‘Fantastic,’ the zombie says, beaming down into his trove, then nods at me. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is Claude,’ Ariadne says, adding, to my mind unnecessarily, ‘he works in a bank.’
‘Oh yeah?’ The zombie draws back and examines me with a new attention.
‘We are not part of this …’ I wave my hand at the protest signs, the skeletal ruin of Royal Irish. ‘My bank is an investment bank, not a retail bank. And we haven’t been given any government money. In fact, we have been punching above our weight.’
‘Right,’ the zombie says.
‘Listen, I’m not here the next couple of weeks,’ Ariadne says to him, ‘but I tell Riika to keep bringing down something, okay?’
‘You’re going back to see your parents?’
‘Ay, they tell me they are fine, but I can’ help to worry. All this craziness, riots, petrol bombs, young people fighting the police every night? No trains, no food in the supermarkets, these lunatics who march around with swastikas — and meanwhile from Europe all they hear is, where’s our money?’
As she says this her face quite changes, almost cracks open, revealing a dark, fretful interior I never knew existed. I feel a pang of guilt, having advised many clients over the last year of the dangers of the Greek contagion, not to mention counselling Howie to short Greek bonds for all they were worth, which by the time he was finished was a lot less.
‘Europe won’t abandon Greece,’ I say, as much to reassure myself as Ariadne. ‘There are mechanisms in place. People won’t be allowed to starve.’
‘The mechanisms are only there to make sure the fat cats get their money back,’ the zombie interjects. ‘All this has happened before. The bankers lose the run of themselves, they bring the whole system crashing down, and then the people who have to pay to get it back on the rails are the ones on the very bottom. Then the CEOs give themselves a big fat raise for a job well done.’
‘That’s not strictly accurate,’ I say.
‘Latin America in the 1970s,’ he says. ‘The banks lend a ton of money to a bunch of gangster dictators, thinking they’ll make a packet. Then when all the loans turn bad and the US and Euro banks are on the point of tanking, the IMF steps in with emergency credit so these unfortunate countries can pay them back. But who pays back the IMF? The peasants, the farmers, the factory workers and the shoe-shine boy. That’s what happened in Tunisia, Russia, East Asia. That’s just what’s happening here. It’s like this great big circle of debt, with the only result that the people with the very least get poorer and poorer and poorer.’
The heat in his cheeks is visible through the corpse paint. Ariadne gazes at him pityingly, as if he had personally been chased up and down Patagonia by neoliberal economists.
‘Look,’ I say, feeling my own cheeks turn red. ‘It’s not a conspiracy. The fact is —’
‘In Indonesia they got rid of food supports for the poor,’ the zombie interrupts. ‘In Madagascar they cut the mosquito eradication programme, and ten thousand people died of malaria.’
‘The fact is,’ I persist, ‘that Greece is deeply in debt. It can’t afford to pay its workers. It can’t afford to keep its electricity on. This is why the IMF is there, to stop the country from completely disintegrating.’
‘If they wanted to stop it disintegrating, they’d just cancel the debt,’ the zombie says.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Write it off. It’s all imaginary anyway. Numbers on a piece of paper. So erase them.’
‘You have to pay what you owe,’ I snap. ‘That is the cornerstone of our civilization.’
‘Unless you’re a bank, right?’ the zombie returns. ‘Look at this place right here!’ He sweeps his hand at Royal Irish’s grey façade. ‘My grandchildren are going to be paying off the money they blew. My grandchildren are going to be born into debt because of them and their incompetence. And still the government’s pumping them with more cash!’
Aha: here I have the advantage of him. I feel my anger recede, my suaveness return. ‘Not for much longer,’ I say. ‘The bank will be wound down very shortly. And you and your friends can go home.’
‘That’s not what I hear.’
‘What do you hear?’ I say sardonically.
‘They’re going to keep it open,’ the zombie says, throwing back a dreadlock. ‘They’re going to bring in new taxes so they can dredge up another few billion. They won’t stop till we’re in administration.’
‘The people won’t let that happen,’ Ariadne comes in. ‘They can’t.’
‘This is Ireland. There’s a lot of things people are willing to let happen.’ He seems to deflate, gestures gloomily at the rain-sodden tents. ‘Half of our lot have given up in the last week. They think there’s no point. Nobody’s paying any attention.’
‘Ay, these guys are paying attention,’ Ariadne says, nodding across the street to where, outside the defunct bank, two enormous security guards have appeared, staring at the encampment with arms folded.
‘They’re there all the time,’ the zombie says. ‘I think they work for the Centre. So far they haven’t crossed the road. Although someone turned a water hose on us last night. All our stuff got soaked, the sleeping bags, the generator. Here, maybe you should head off,’ he says quickly, as one of the guards starts speaking into a walkie-talkie. Leaning forward, he kisses her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’