The Mark and the Void: A Novel Read online

  I clear my throat. ‘All right. Quel acteur est une copie de lui-même – this means, Which actor is a copy of himself?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘George Clon-è.’

  Ish looks confused.

  ‘In French, you see, Clooney sounds like Clon-è,’ I explain. ‘Like he is the clone of himself.’

  ‘Yeah, I get it.’

  ‘This is actually quite a good joke.’

  Ish laughs, lays her hand on my arm. ‘Oh, Claude,’ she says. ‘How could I leave you here on your own? It wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. But she just keeps laughing.

  * * *

  The conversation throws me; at the same time, I know how she feels. Now that Ariadne is out of the picture, now that chapter is definitively closed, I keep expecting some kind of change; instead, life just keeps going, as it always has. I wake a few seconds before the morning alarm; I read the market forecasts as the light begins to break; I analyse reports, brief clients, at night lie in bed and try to decide which is worse, the dream where I watch paralysed as Ariadne walks away, or the one where by some unspecified miracle she is there in my arms and my heart is bursting with happiness, and I know that in the morning I will have to undergo the desolation of losing her all over again. While she is away, I watch all the riot footage I can find, in case I might glimpse her amid the tear gas and flying brickwork. When she returns, I cannot even watch for glimpses; instead, as I walk past the Ark, I force myself to look away. Having her close by only underlines how out of reach she is, giving her up only crystallizes how much I desire her; love loves these paradoxes, love generates paradoxes like this ad infinitum. Perhaps it is no wonder that so many people pursue money instead, possessions, power, goals that are lifeless but at least achievable. Perhaps, after all, that is the true purpose of Business: to replace the shifting, medieval labyrinths of love with the broad, sanitized avenues of materialism, the lightless, involuted city of the self with something grid-like and rational – a reordering in the name of reason, a vast Haussmannization of the heart.

  Autumn comes: in our denatured domain we see it in the clenched skies, a new chill edge to the rain. The mood in the city has darkened too. A series of revelations about Royal Irish comes at the same time as leaked details of the next round of austerity measures; the zombie encampment swells with fresh recruits, who sit on the quay, battering pots and pans so relentlessly that even at night when it is quiet we still hear it in our ears.

  More significantly, sections of the non-zombie population have also taken to the streets. On the way back from a meeting, my taxi runs into a protest outside government buildings.

  ‘Might be a while,’ the driver says, dropping his hands resignedly over the wheel. ‘Sorry, mate.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I say. In the near distance I hear horns, drums, voices chanting.

  ‘It’s them cunts of bankers are to blame.’ The taxi driver shakes his head. ‘Bad as the paedos, they are.’ He thinks about this for a moment, then goes on: ‘In fact I’d say most of them are fuckin paedos. They have that look about them, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I say ambiguously from the back seat.

  ‘I’m tellin’ you, if one of them thievin’ paedo scumbags ever got in my cab…’ He mashes his fist into his palm, then breaks off, turns to me and asks sunnily, ‘What line o’ work you in yourself, pal?’

  Mercifully, my phone strikes up; feeling rather as Frodo must have slipping on the Ring, I excuse myself to answer it.

  At the other end of the line, to my surprise, is Paul; to my even greater surprise, he wants to take me to lunch. ‘You have some new scheme for finding me a woman?’ I query. ‘Because you know this is no longer something I wish to pursue.’

  He laughs. ‘No schemes, no set-ups, no strings attached. Just two friends, catching up over a good meal.’

  I meet him in the plaza outside Transaction House. He looks different – spruce, as they say in English. He has had his hair cut, and sports a natty blazer with a thin stripe. ‘Have a few meetings lined up later today, got to look the part,’ he explains, as we walk across the bridge.

  ‘Meetings – about Hotwaitress?’

  ‘That’s right, only it’s not called Hotwaitress anymore. We gave up the domain name after we got sued, and when we went back a few weeks ago we found someone else had taken it.’

  ‘Someone has used your idea?’ I say, trying to sound sorry.

  ‘It’s just some joker putting up candids of waitresses in truck-stops. But he’s got the name. In fact most of the premium domain names are gone. Hotwaitress.net, Hotwaitress.org, Naughtywaitress, Saucywaitress, Flirtywaitress, Dirtywaitress, Shamelesswaitress, a whole load of others, all taken.’

  ‘How frustrating,’ I commiserate.

  ‘Yeah, a lot of perverts out there these days,’ he says. ‘Luckily, we were still able to get hold of Myhotswaitress.com.’

  ‘Myhotwaitress,’ I say, weighing it up. ‘Well, this is as good as –’

  ‘Sorry, Claude – it’s Myhotswaitress. Hot-s, with an s.’

  ‘Myhotswaitress,’ I repeat dubiously.

  ‘It sounds strange at first, but you get used to it. In fact, it’s really grown on me. It’s like, these waitresses are so hot that they’re hot plural. They’re hots. Anyhow, that’s the reason I wanted to take you to lunch today – as a small thank-you for all you’ve done in bringing this together. If it weren’t for you, Myhotswaitress might still be on the shelf, gathering dust. It was your story, and your faith in me, that inspired me to give it another try.’

  ‘My faith was in you as a novelist,’ I say. ‘I was hoping to inspire you to write another book.’

  ‘Well, the point is that you inspired me,’ he says. ‘Whatever direction that took.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I say, as we have been walking for a while and I am getting hungry.

  ‘It’s not much further. I have a feeling you’ll like this place, Claude. I have a feeling you’ll like it a lot.’ He permits himself a mysterious smile. ‘But what you were saying there, about wanting to inspire me to write a book – in a sense, that’s what you’ve done. I’ve been thinking lately that Myhotswaitress isn’t so different from a novel. Or to put it another way – some people might make the argument that a website like Myhotswaitress is the novel’s natural replacement.’

  ‘What people? Igor?’

  ‘Think about it. Why don’t we read novels anymore? Because thanks to technology, we can turn our own lives into stories. Each of us can be the hero of our own movie. Yet for all the incredible leaps we’ve made, there are some blank spaces. Things technology can’t give us. We’ve got social media, on the one hand, where we can edit our relationships, control how we appear to the world. We’ve got porn, on the other, acting out all of our fantasies for us. But between them, in that space between sex and friendship, there’s still something missing.’

  ‘Go on,’ I say warily.

  ‘What happened between you and Ariadne made me realize we’re still waiting for a twenty-first-century way of experiencing love. Even in the digital age, love is something we want and need. But it’s tricky. In some ways love is the novel of the emotional world. If you stick with it, and put in the hours, there are wonderful rewards. But it demands a commitment, and today, people don’t have time for that. They like the idea of it, certainly, but more and more of them are saying about love what they say about the novel: TL, DR – too long, didn’t read. So the question becomes, how do we upgrade love? How do we give that deep, rich, novel-like experience in a modern, easily digestible form?’

  ‘By watching waitresses on a spycam?’

  ‘Before you dismiss it, just ask yourself, what do we want from love? We want to be in a story, right? Isn’t that how you put it to me? It’s like a book: we want to be immersed in detail, pulled along by a narrative, intimately involved with profound or beguiling characters. At the same time, when we’re reading a bo
ok, we don’t actually want to be in the story. We don’t want a bunch of reanimated dinosaurs actually chasing us around a theme park, for instance. And that’s where I realized we went wrong with Ariadne.’

  I am confused. ‘You think the relationship would have been more successful if I had never tried to talk to her?’

  ‘Exactly!’ he says. ‘When are we most in love? It’s almost always at the start, right? Sometimes before you’ve got to know the other person at all. There are two reasons for that. First, once you know them better, you realize there’re all kinds of downsides and negatives to their personalities you never imagined. They’re drunks, they’re Nazi sympathizers, they have husbands, whatever. Second, as soon as you get something, you automatically stop wanting it. It’s human nature. New shoes, new phone, new love, it’s all the same. Think of Marcel in In Search of Lost Time. He spends about a thousand pages running around after Albertine. But the minute he gets her, he loses interest.

  ‘You see, when it comes to love, the relationship has always been the weak link in the chain. The gap between the person you imagine and the reality that time reveals. In the beginning you’re in a story, then you find yourself in the truth, with all of the problems that you were trying to escape in the first place. But thanks to modern technology that doesn’t need to happen anymore. You can experience the most intimate details of another person’s life, without ever having to speak to her. You can preserve the illusion – you can stay in love – for as long as you want. It’s like your own personalized, never-ending novel!’

  ‘You are saying that your twenty-first-century concept of love does not involve a relationship at all?’

  ‘Well, of course there’s a relationship. You’re there relating to her, through your computer, feeling all kinds of very passionate and intense emotions – but without the fear of those emotions being compromised by the kind of irritating details that derail analogue or legacy relationships. It stays pure. It’s actually very romantic! And that’s something I only started to realize when I talked to you. Myhotswaitress isn’t just for lonely weirdos. Everyone has a secret crush they’d like to get closer to. Men and women, young and old. It doesn’t just have to be waitresses either. Already we’re thinking about how to carry out surveillance on nurses, air hostesses, shop assistants –’

  ‘Weren’t there some legal issues with this?’ I say, increasingly troubled by the thought that I have played some part in unleashing it.

  ‘The law will change,’ Paul says firmly. ‘If it’s what the people want, the law can’t stand in their way. This is the future. We’re not going to stop until we’ve turned the boring old world into a sexy, fun MyHotsWorld. All we need is a small initial injection of capital.’

  His last sentence seems to hang in the air between us, glinting and turning like a fishing lure, and then he says, ‘Well, here we are.’

  It appears that we have reached our destination; above the portico I see a promising-looking star.

  ‘I asked for a table with a canal view…?’ Paul tells the maître d’.

  ‘Certainly, sir. This way.’ He leads us to our table and tells us the waiter will be with us shortly. From the window I can see swans drifting lazily through the water; around us, there is a pleasant buzz of well-heeled conversation. I feel my mood lift.

  ‘Anyhow, that’s enough shop talk,’ Paul says. ‘Here, why don’t you choose the wine.’ He hands me the list, and as I make my way through the familiar names he sits back expansively, surveying the room.

  The waiter arrives and asks us if we would like to order a drink; I am thinking of a Pernod – but then I see Paul’s face. He is staring at the waiter as if some great offence has been committed. ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘A drink, sir?’ the waiter repeats. ‘Or some water?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Paul demands.

  The waiter, a slender young man in his early twenties, is understandably startled. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Who are you? Where’s the girl?’

  The waiter’s eyes flicker over to me, but I am equally baffled. ‘If you need more time, sir…’

  ‘We don’t want more time! We want the girl! We want Ludmila! Where is she?’

  ‘Ludmila’s not working today, sir,’ the waiter quavers.

  ‘But she always works Thursdays!’ There is a note of appeal in Paul’s voice now. ‘Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, then she does the split-shift with Michaela on Saturday –’

  ‘Michaela’s away on Sunday,’ the unfortunate waiter tells him, evidently too scared to question Paul’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the restaurant’s work roster. ‘So Ludmila’s covering for her and taking her day off today instead.’

  This news falls on Paul like a hammer blow; the furious colour drains from his cheeks, and he slumps back leadenly in his chair. ‘Oh,’ he says.

  ‘Would you like someone else to serve you, sir?’

  ‘No, no,’ Paul says defeatedly.

  ‘We do not have to stay,’ I offer, although I still don’t understand what is wrong.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ he says. ‘Let’s just get this over with. You go ahead and order, Claude. I’ll have the same as him,’ he tells the waiter, who raises his order pad with a trembling hand.

  I duly select for both of us; a moment later, a different waiter arrives at the table with our wine, which he carefully presents and then pours without making eye contact.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I ask Paul, who is listlessly prodding the wicker bread-basket with his fork.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says.

  ‘Who is this Ludmila?’

  ‘Who is Ludmila.’ The thought of her rouses him. ‘Tall, elegant, refined, with a perfect size-ten figure and distinctive ash-blonde braids, Ludmila Trotyakova is one of the most enchanting figures on the Dublin restaurant scene. Don’t be misled by her efficient service; Ludmila is happy to stay and chat with diners about her interests, which include mountain-climbing in Slovakia, the work of the Slovakian composer Ján Levoslav Bella, and the history of the tenth-century duchy of Moravia, later Slovakia.’ He shakes his head. ‘She would have been right up your street. Damn it, when Igor rang up pretending to be her uncle they told him she’d be here! Now we’ve come all this way for nothing, and it’s going to cost me a damn fortune.’

  ‘So that’s what this lunch is about,’ I say, as the original waiter scurries past, dropping off our starters with an inaudible blur of words. ‘All the talk of friendship and catching up was just a trick. You wanted to dangle this waitress in front of me, so I will invest in your website.’

  ‘No, Claude, no!’ Paul reaches across the plates to seize my hand. ‘Okay, I admit I wanted to give you an idea of how Myhotswaitress might work. But I also wanted to show you that there are other waitresses out there. You don’t have to give up on love just because it didn’t work out with Ariadne!’

  ‘I don’t think that coming to a restaurant to ogle the staff can be described as “love”.’

  ‘Believe me, if you’d seen Ludmila, you wouldn’t say that. Ogling her is a transcendent experience, like the piano sonatas of Ján Levoslav Bella.’ He presses his lips together contritely. ‘Look, I know I wasn’t entirely upfront with you. But try and see things from my perspective. Do you know what it’s like out there for the entrepreneur at the moment? The banks are all on the point of going bust, it’s impossible to get any credit! All I’m looking for is a little leg-up. If you don’t want to invest, the very least you could do is set up a few meetings with some of your clients.’

  ‘I think you will find that I can do a lot less than that.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s lovely, Claude, after all I’ve done for you.’

  ‘What, exactly, have you done for me? Apart from the incessant lying.’

  He goggles at me furiously. ‘You know. The, the…’

  ‘The attempted robbery? The non-existent book?’

  ‘The advice!’ he snaps. ‘The advice!’

  ‘It seems to me that y
our “advice”, like your business ideas generally, amounts to little more than a vicarious attempt to sleep with waitresses.’

  ‘Well, let’s just drop the subject, shall we?’ Paul flashes me a deliberately synthetic smile, and swabs his plate with a hunk of bread. ‘Let’s just drop it, and concentrate on enjoying this overpriced, pointless meal.’

  ‘An excellent idea,’ I respond in kind. ‘Let us leave the heavy topics for another time, and simply take pleasure in our long-standing friendship.’

  The ensuing silence continues until the waiter returns to relieve us of our plates, when I take the opportunity to add a side of potato dauphinoise to my main course. ‘And … how are the petits pois today?’

  ‘Delicious, sir. Fresh from our own farm.’

  I see Paul glare at me hatefully from the far side of table. ‘Perhaps I will have a side of those as well,’ I say.

  The waiter departs, the silence resumes. Then a machinating smile breaks across his face, and Paul says, ‘I meant to tell you – I saw a film last night, reminded me of you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yeah, it was called Anal Analyst. What was the strapline … “We’ve all been fucked in the ass by banks … but here comes the biggest dick of all!”’

  The couple beside us look at each other in alarm. ‘Ah, superb,’ I say, as the mains arrive.

  ‘What it is, Rod McMaster is this banking analyst, okay? And in his office there are these two hot girls with really big asses…’

  He proceeds to give me a lengthy and extremely graphic description of the banking analyst and his associates’ adventures at an asset management conference in Luxembourg. If he thinks he is going to embarrass me out of my meal, however, he is wrong.

  ‘On the subject of culture,’ I say, when there is a break in the narrative, ‘Bimal Banerjee is reading in Dublin tonight.’

  Paul recoils violently, as if I had thrown acid in his face.

  ‘They say he will win the Raytheon again this year,’ I muse. ‘I hope so. Ararat Rat Rap is a staggering achievement.’