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 stilclass="underline" 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 …
It was the bank that came to my rescue. They called one day, on my parents’ phone (I’d kept my mobile switched off) — someone from management whose name I didn’t recognize, wanting to know where I was. I was shocked: how long had I been here? Yet when I checked the calendar, everything was in order. I’m on compassionate leave, I told the caller; I still have five days left.
‘Yes,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he knew this already, and then, rather cursorily, ‘I’m sorry.’ The line was silent for what seemed a long time. I wondered if I’d been cut off, or put on hold. Then he said, ‘Claude, we would like to offer you a 50 per cent raise in your salary.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, confused.
‘I can also offer you a guaranteed bonus,’ he said. He named the amount; it was significant.
‘Oh,’ I said. It took me a moment to realize he was waiting for a reply. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, mostly so I could get off the line.
‘I’ll courier you over the paperwork right now,’ he said.
It wasn’t until I was on the return flight that I realized what had happened: that BOT believed or feared that I was using my compassionate leave to speak to banks in Paris with a mind to finding a new and better-paid position. I was surprised, but I didn’t suppose it mattered. The plane began its descent; I saw the black river snaking through the city. Liffey or Lethe? That didn’t matter either. I found I was relieved to get back to Dublin, where even if I wore black every day for a year no one would ask why, where I was free — free to be a persona ficta, free to lose myself in the labyrinth of the present. Or maybe I was imprisoned in the present, in the persona; either way I got paid, and the difference seemed of little consequence.
The zombie was right. The next morning the government announces a further bailout for Royal Irish.
The Minister delivers the news from the steps of the Dáil. ‘After a careful study,’ he says, ‘it is clear to us that Royal Irish Bank is of systemic importance. As its failure would have severe consequences for Ireland and Europe, the government commits to meet all of the bank’s present and future capital requirements until liquidity is restored …’
‘What the fuck?’ Ish says. ‘He’s digging out those dirtbags again?’
‘Systemic importance, baby,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Too big to fail.’
‘But the whole point of our report was that it wasn’t important,’ Ish says. ‘It’s like he went through it and did the exact opposite of everything we recommended.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first client to do that,’ Gary says.