The Mark and the Void: A Novel Read online

  ‘Yes, I can hear you, you are standing right beside me.’

  ‘And I can hear you,’ Paul confirms, cupping his hand around his own earpiece. ‘Okay, looks like we’re ready to go.’

  ‘Are you sure that thing is safe?’ I look dubiously at the ancient transmitter humming ominously on the balcony. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to use my Bluetooth?’

  ‘Stop delaying,’ Paul says. ‘Let’s do this.’

  It must be said that as I make my way towards the café, I feel even less authoritative than usual. Out here, away from my models and spreadsheets, everything feels flimsy and contingent, at the mercy of riptides and crosswinds, the random vicissitudes of nature.

  ‘How are you getting on there?’ Paul’s voice sounds in my ear.

  ‘Fine,’ I say tightly.

  ‘That’s great. Now you just keep cool. Remember, she’s a character in your story. She’s there for you. And we’ll be with you too, every step of the way.’

  I turn and look back up at my balcony. Two figures wave down at me, like mocking, malefic insects. What am I doing? Am I really going to go up to her and just start talking? It feels so crude and anachronistic! To my left, Transaction House croons to me seductively. I could go back to my desk, think this through properly; maybe I could friend her online, find out her likes and dislikes, then in six months or so take the next step, it wouldn’t be so dramatic in terms of the story, of course, but realistically –

  ‘Keep going, Claude.’

  The door of the Ark. I push it open, a ton weight. Happy diners gabbing to each other, the compressed bedlam of the coffee machine, the clank of cutlery on porcelain. ‘Claude strode into the café,’ a voice – Paul’s? My own? – urges inside my head. My body feels alien, unwieldy, like an enormous robot that I am controlling with levers from a tiny chamber behind the eyes. As I lurch over the floor all sound disappears, save for the industrial suck and hoosh of my breathing; I stumble through a forest of disconnected sense-impressions until, like a beacon, Ariadne comes into view.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, but it comes out as a cough.

  ‘Hi you!’ she says, sliding a tress as rich and dark as coffee back behind her ear. ‘You want a table?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, though this is not what I want at all – already the narration is slipping out of my grip! Ariadne turns away to find me a seat, my cheeks flame with failure, it’s all gone wrong – and then something distracts me. ‘New painting?’

  Ariadne glances behind her to where the canvas hangs, I imagine illegally, on the fire door. ‘Yes,’ she says, lowering her green eyes bashfully. ‘I just finish this weekend. I don’t know if it works, or what.’

  The painting features a series of warped helices knotted into each other, like the DNA of some painfully malformed beast: it seems to protrude bulkily out of space itself. ‘I like it,’ I say.

  She laughs. ‘This morning, I heard a customer say it’s like a zebra ate a whole load of fractals and got sick.’

  ‘Bof, they said the same thing about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers,’ I tell her.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says, and she smiles – not her usual waitress smile, it seems to me, but a deeper one, incorporating her whole being. A sudden wave of joy wells up in me. Here I am! This is happening! How did I ever believe there was anything to fear? Ariadne is everything that is good, therefore only good things can come of this. ‘What’s it called?’ I ask her.

  ‘Simulacrum 122.’

  I nod, tapping my nose thoughtfully. Out of nowhere, Paul’s old idea has popped into my head: that we bond over French philosophy. ‘I wonder, by any chance are you familiar with –’ I begin. But at that moment there is a loud and painful buzzing in my ear, and then Paul’s voice says, ‘Sorry, Claude, we lost the connection for a minute there. Are you in the café?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, trying to incorporate it into my question for Ariadne, ‘yes, I wondered if –’

  ‘Okay, Claude, you’re doing great. Now, are you ready to approach the subject?’

  ‘I have always wondered,’ I repeat, trying to dig the earpiece out of my ear without calling attention to it, ‘whether, ah –’

  ‘Wait, were you talking to her already?’

  I cough deliberately.

  ‘What was that? The connection’s not that good here.’ In the background there is a popping sound, rather like a cork from a bottle.

  ‘What do you wonder?’ Ariadne cocks her head and regards me bemusedly.

  ‘Just stay calm, Claude, and remember you’re in charge. I’m going to go out on the balcony and see if I can fix this transmitter. Igor, you take over here for a second.’

  ‘I wondered if you have ever read –’

  ‘You have great big dick,’ a gravelly voice booms in my ear.

  ‘What?’ I can’t stop myself blurting.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Ariadne says, surprised.

  ‘You have biggest dick in world, you are striking her with your firmness.’

  Frantically I pull at the earpiece, but it is wedged in tightly by its many points. Ariadne’s beautiful forest-green eyes cloud with concern.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she says.

  ‘Your wood is so hard, you are the master.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I tell her, desperately poking myself in the ear.

  ‘You are lion between the sheets with your mighty length.’

  ‘Please stop,’ I whisper.

  Ariadne flinches, ever so slightly. ‘I have to take an order,’ she decides. ‘I come back to you.’

  I watch in agony as she hurries away, and at that moment it seems to me as if the whole café were merely a stage set after all, now collapsing and disintegrating before my very eyes. I reach after her – but before I can speak, a tremendous peal of static explodes in my ear. Just barely managing to suppress a scream, I turn and flee, offstage, out of the theatre, into the null space of the outside.

  Paul is on the sofa in my living room, leafing through a magazine. He gets up when I come in. ‘There he is! There’s the hero!’

  I do not give him the acknowledgement even of a snort of exasperation, simply wrestle off my jacket, now soaked with rain, and throw it over a chair.

  ‘Igor had to leave,’ he says. ‘He had a big exterminating gig. Beetles.’

  I go into the kitchen area, where cupboard doors have been flung open and the counter littered with tartine and cookie wrappers. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, we got hungry, so we made a snack.’

  ‘And drank two bottles of Brouilly?’ I say, finding the empties upended in a bin.

  ‘Yeah, we were thirsty, also, it turned out.’

  ‘How did you drink two bottles of wine in twenty minutes?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t drink both of them, we –’

  ‘My rug!’

  ‘Yeah, see that’s most of bottle one there.’

  Clenching my jaw, I slam the cupboards shut, bundle up the debris and wipe down the surfaces.

  ‘So I think we made some important headway there,’ he says.

  ‘We made some important headway in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he says ambiguously, and then, ‘Look, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. That didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan.’

  ‘I know it didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan,’ I say. ‘I was very well placed to see it not going according to plan.’

  ‘Igor and I have been discussing it,’ he says. ‘We both feel we may have taken a slightly wrong turn with the whole virile, masterful thing.’

  I stamp back into the living room, strew salt over the wine-stained rug. ‘Maybe this whole idea was a wrong turn.’

  ‘Don’t say that. It was just a dry run, remember? And at least she knows who you are now, right? You’ve put yourself on the map, so to speak.’

  ‘I have put myself on the map as a gibbering psychopath,’ I say.

  ‘You’re blowing it out of proportion. Try and see it from the perspective o
f a novel. When do these things ever work out the first time round? There have to be a few comic mishaps, right?’

  I replace the salt in the cupboard and dust my hands.

  ‘And anyway, there was a positive outcome.’ Paul follows me back into the kitchen. ‘By listening to your conversation, I was able to work out something that you had in common: a shared love of modern art. That’s something we can build on.’

  At the present moment I don’t want to build on anything; I am damp and hungry, and desire nothing more than to go back to the office, putting this misconceived episode behind me. But Paul, no doubt sensing a threat to his pay cheque, keeps buzzing about me. ‘Look, if you’re really feeling bad about it, we can start over.’

  ‘How can we start over? This is reality, not typing. We can’t just throw it in the bin.’

  ‘Ariadne’s not the only beautiful waitress in town. I’ve got a whole folder full of them, brunettes, blondes, redheads…’ He falls silent, realizing he has said too much.

  ‘You have a folder full of waitresses?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s a figure of speech, that’s all.’

  ‘A figure of speech meaning what?’

  ‘Nothing, forget I said it.’

  Cogs begin to turn in my mind. ‘Has the folder of waitresses … has it got something to do with all this bizarre surveillance equipment?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with anything,’ he says impatiently. ‘Can we just drop the subject?’

  ‘Not if I’m being implicated in one of your scams.’

  ‘It’s not a scam, it’s a totally legitimate business venture, and anyway, it’s over, it’s all in the past … oh, for God’s sake.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you, all right? But you have to promise to keep it secret.’

  He glances over his shoulders; then, bringing his hands together and pulling them apart, as though unfurling an imaginary banner in the space over his head, says, ‘Hotwaitress.com.’

  ‘Hotwaitress.com?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What is Hotwaitress.com?’

  ‘Right now it isn’t anything.’

  ‘But it was a business venture? Some Internet thing?’

  He sighs. ‘Well, really I should go back to the beginning. To seven years ago, when For Love of a Clown came out. I was young and naïve, I had the usual fantasies – everyone would stop what they were doing to read it, I’d become famous, it’d usher in a new era of peace and harmony, all that. Instead it got one terrible review and then vanished without a trace. Look, the world is full of books. Moaning because no one wants to read yours is like complaining that you’ve been standing on the street corner with your dick out for an hour and nobody’s stopped to give you a blowjob. Still, it hurt me. And when I sat down and tried to start book number two, I had problems.’

  ‘You were blocked?’

  ‘I was blocked, I’d lost faith – whatever the reason, nothing was happening. And meanwhile, of course, I’d got married, we’d taken out this huge mortgage to buy the apartment, Remington was on the way, I had no idea how I was going to pay for it all.

  ‘I didn’t tell Clizia because I didn’t want to worry her. I acted like the new book was coming along fine, and I kept heading out to work every morning. But at this stage I wasn’t even trying to write, I was just sitting in cafés, looking out the window, wondering if everyone would be better off if I just jumped off a bridge.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Clearly you’ve never been in debt, Claude. After a while it’s all you can see. And it’s a vicious circle, because the more I worried about it, the less chance there was that I’d ever come up with an idea for a book. Anyway, there I was, being depressed in various cafés. There were maybe three or four I’d go to at different times of the day. Over time I got to know a few of the waitresses quite well, and if it was quiet we’d have these long, philosophical talks. They were young, they had all these hopes and dreams, and though I couldn’t exactly share their optimism, still, it was a way out of this endless despairing conversation I was having with myself the rest of the time. In fact, I realized after a while that talking to the waitresses was actually the high point of my day. And then it hit me – that was the idea.’

  ‘What? Become a waiter?’

  ‘No, no, I mean that relationship. Waitress and customer.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You think you’re the first man to fall in love with a waitress, Claude? This is a growing phenomenon. And it’s no mystery. Think about how we live now, packed off in our digital eyries. Yes, we have phones, we have email, but we might not speak to an actual flesh-and-blood person all day. And then we go to a café, and suddenly in the midst of our fully networked isolation there’s a pretty girl who smiles at us and asks how we are. She’s actually there, not just a face on a screen. And she’s bringing us cake! Is it any wonder we form attachments?’

  ‘That sounds plausible,’ I say gruffly, embarrassed at having my own situation so unsparingly detailed. ‘But how does your business venture relate to it?’

  ‘Okay. So you’ve developed these feelings, which are very natural and human. What happens when you sit down in a café or restaurant only to find that your favourite waitress isn’t there? On the one hand, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But seeing her was literally the only thing you had to look forward to all day! And it actually feels pretty crushing. That’s the kind of scenario Hotwaitress is designed to eliminate. What we proposed –’

  ‘“We” – this means you and…?’ I ask with a sinking feeling.

  ‘Me and Igor. What we proposed was a comprehensive guide to waitresses in cafés and restaurants all over the city. When they’re on, when they’re off, what sections they’re working, their likes, dislikes, hobbies and pastimes, the latest gossip as well as plenty of pic—’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I interject. ‘Are you serious? This was a genuine business venture?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he says, looking slightly offended. ‘What’s the problem?’

  There are so many problems I have difficulty focusing on one. ‘How exactly would you find out all these personal details? The waitresses are just going to tell you?’

  ‘No, of course not. We’d have a dedicated data-collection team deployed across the city. And we’d also repackage whatever the waitresses have uploaded themselves, onto Facebook and so on.’

  The surveillance equipment: at last the pieces fall into place. I feel a kind of deep and distressing pang within, a sort of moral headache. ‘Surely this can’t be legal.’

  ‘It’s an information service, that’s all,’ Paul says. ‘How can information be bad?’

  He sits down opposite me and leans earnestly over the table. ‘Imagine being able to tap into a resource like that for Ariadne. Think what a comfort that would be.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be comforted by the knowledge that countless others were out there, stalking her online.’

  ‘It’s not stalking,’ Paul says.

  ‘It is,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘It is practically the definition of stalking,’ I say.

  Paul throws his hands in the air. ‘It’s the twenty-first century! People expect to be spied on! For a good-looking woman it’d probably be more upsetting if she found out she wasn’t being spied on.’

  ‘And your wife, what did she think about this business venture?’

  ‘Oh, Clizia,’ he says impatiently.

  ‘Well? You told me before how much she hated being stared at by men in the club. What did she think of you keeping waitresses under surveillance?’

  ‘Clizia’s living in a fool’s paradise. We have to eat, don’t we? This is what people want now. They don’t want novels. They want reality, up close and personal.’

  ‘Someone else’s reality, turned into entertainment.’

  ‘You might not like it. But I’ll tell you this, the response to Hotwaitress was the polar opposite of the response to Clown. We ha
d investors queuing out the door! Venture capital, private equity! We had a pre-launch party with an elephant – an elephant!’

  ‘So what happened? Why aren’t you an Internet millionaire?’

  His face clouds. ‘There were legal issues. You know how it goes – it got tied up in court, all our funding went on solicitors’ fees.’

  ‘Maybe for the best,’ I say.

  ‘It could have been big. Loneliness is one of the few growth areas these days. And it’s self-perpetuating, you know? Because the more people pay to stop feeling lonely, the lonelier they tend to get.’

  ‘Is that why you spend all your money on lap dances?’ I say.

  He purses his lips, lowers his eyes. ‘About that,’ he says. ‘I’m going to need another advance.’

  ELEPHANT RUNS AMOK AT CITY CENTRE EVENT

  A man was seriously injured last night and the ground floor of a Dublin hotel badly damaged when a hired elephant went on the rampage at the launch of a new Internet dating service. Witnesses reported that the animal became enraged when an intern employed by the service attempted to dress it in a ‘French maid’ costume. After trampling the man, who remains in hospital, the elephant overturned a number of tables in the reception room and charged at hotel guests. A zookeeper who arrived to sedate the animal described it as ‘extremely agitated’. The hotel manager, Mr Wallace Willis, said that the event had been ‘a fiasco’ at which ‘basic safety had been thrown out the window’. The company’s director, Mr Igor Struma, was not available for comment last night. Mr Struma, described in the company’s press release as an entrepreneur and bounty hunter, is wanted for questioning by authorities in Ukraine in connection with the robbery five years ago of a consignment of gynaecological equipment. The company’s president, Mr Paul

  ‘Whatcha readin’ there, Claude?’

  ‘Nothing. Old news.’

  ‘I saw you in the Ark.’ Ish is chewing one of their home-made cookies. ‘I was waving at you, but you didn’t notice.’

  ‘Ah-um…’ I swivel my chair away, busy myself shuffling documents.

  ‘You were talking to that waitress, and then you just took off, like a streak of lightning! What happened, she catch you sneaking a peek down her top?’