The Mark and the Void (23 page)

We have arrived back on the quays; directly in front of us stands a tall sculpture, depicting, in blackened bronze, six emaciated humanoids and a little bronze dog. ‘It’s a Famine memorial – you know a million people died, in this tiny little country? And millions more left, on ships that went from right here, and they never come back. So from a terrible thing that really happened, on this spot, we get, a hundred and how many years later, a piece of art, very beautiful, that people can look at as they hurry by with their takeaway lattes …’

I don’t think I have ever looked at it before, with or without latte. I step up to the sculpture, run my finger down the tortured cheek of one of the gaunt, inconsolable forms. ‘It
is
beautiful,’ I say, not knowing whether I am contradicting her or not.

‘Now look down,’ she says.

I do as she says, and see that although the figures themselves are anonymous, names have been printed on the stylized bronze cobblestones beneath their bare feet – names of companies, names of banks, names of individuals: the corporate and private sponsors who paid for the work. Billionaires, businessmen, a disgraced prime minister, a society hostess; others I recognize from newspaper accounts of deals and court cases, corruption charges that were never proved.

‘So ask yourself, who does this artwork want you to remember?’

I step back with a chill. The wind pulls and chafes at the surface of the river; on the far side, the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness from the air, storing it within them. ‘Maybe in a hundred years, some artist will make a sculpture of the old women in Athens looking through the garbage for something to eat,’ Ariadne says, resting her cheek against the cold metal shoulder of a peasant. ‘And passers-by will stop their rocketpacks to film it with their magic future phones, and they’ll think how beautiful, how sad.’

‘So you’ve given up on art,’ I say in summary. ‘You’re turning down my offer.’

‘I haven’t given up on anything,’ she says. ‘And you are very kind to make me this offer. But I
like
working in the café. Making a space where people can come together and feel safe and good, for me it’s not menial work. Even if they’re bankers, maybe if they eat the nice home-cooked food that’s made with love, it can change how they think a little bit. And afterwards I can bring the leftovers to the shelter, and at night-time I can paint my paintings, and if anyone wants to buy them they can, they’re not very expensive. What does it mean to become a famous artist, anyway? That your paintings cost more money, right? That’s all it means, deep down. But why should rich people have all the beauty?’

‘Not all the beauty,’ I qualify, wistfully taking in her dark radiance, the twin lights in her eyes.

She holds my gaze a moment, then looks away. ‘I have made enough escaping. Now I am here, I want to
be
here.’

‘Though you are going back to Greece,’ I remind her.

‘My father is very sick,’ she says. ‘And everything is so fucked up over there right now that in the hospital there’s no food or medicine, so your family has to bring them for you. If you have a family.’ She hoists her shoulders, as if shrugging off a cold and sodden cloak. ‘Do you go back home often? Are they still in Paris, your parents?’

‘No, they died.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry.’ She has separated herself from the statue and come towards me; she rubs the black cloth of my suit between her finger and thumb. ‘It was recent?’

I shrug.

Her hand remains on my arm. In the dusk her green eyes are dark pools in which the reflected street lights swim like lilies. ‘So you are alone,’ she says.

The wind swirls down the river, the quayside traffic judders like a heavier, earthbound wind; everything seems to liquefy, as if something had broken open.

I realize my story is at a turning point.

The subterfuge, the plotting, the misdirection, all of that falls away, and the dull details of my life here too, the whole maze tumbling into itself like panels of scenery. The lie has brought me, as promised, to the truth. ‘Look,’ I begin.

But that is as far as I get. Ariadne’s phone has started to ring. ‘Sorry, one second,’ she says, holding up a finger to suspend our conversation, like a fairy bringing time to a halt with a twitch of her wand, then unleashes into the phone a torrent of accelerated Greek.

Sequestered within the alien noise, my mind is racing. Am I actually going to do this? Should I talk to Paul first? But the time
for Cyranos and surveillance equipment has passed. I have been in a story long enough, trapped on a flat page, delivering lines written by others. Now is the time to step out into the world. How else could this end, but with the hero speaking in his own voice? Ariadne gives me a wrapping-up sign. I take a deep breath, I gird my loins; then into the phone I hear her say, ‘
S’agapo, Oscar, s’agapo
… I love you, baby, I’ll be home soon.’

And around me it seems that a hundred doors and windows have been flung open, as in some stuffy room; and all of the potential, the dreams, the imagined futures borne away in an instant, like banknotes thrown to the wind.

‘And what did you say?’

‘What could I say?’

‘Didn’t you ask her who it was?’

‘No, I simply ignored it, and then continued my pretence that I had approached her only out of an interest in her work.’

‘And that was it? Then you just went back to the office?’

‘First I bought a painting.
Simulacrum 103
. There it is, by the mantelpiece.’ I point to the painting, still in a cardboard box, like a cold, avant-garde pizza. Paul opens the lid, winces, closes it again. At the breakfast bar Igor, who arrived uninvited with Paul, tosses pistachio nuts into his mouth and flips the shells on the ground.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Paul says. ‘The two of you are getting on fine, everything’s going according to plan, then she gets this phone call, during which she says –’

‘ “I love you, Oscar. I’ll be home soon.” ’

‘That’s all?’

‘The rest was in Greek.’

‘Well then!’ Paul spreads his hands expansively. ‘She could have been talking to anybody. Her uncle, her brother. The guy who comes to fix the fridge. You know these Mediterraneans, they’re very demonstrative.’

‘It wasn’t the man who comes to fix the fridge,’ I say, recalling the light that jumped in her eyes as soon as she took out her phone. ‘She meant what she said.’

‘So who is he, then? Who is this Oscar?’

Who is Oscar? Since that moment at the waterside, when my dreams were so casually atomized, I have thought of little else. In
my imagination he keeps changing, one moment garrulous and witty, the next silent and serious; right now I picture him as a handsome, athletic type – tanned, stubbled, a pilot for Médecins Sans Frontières who in his spare time writes surprisingly tender poetry. The others have differing opinions: Paul sees him as a brilliant entrepreneur, a wild-eyed maverick making a fortune from imperceptible flaws in the system; Igor proposes that he is a professional sex worker, ‘with wang like the extinguisher of fires, who has made her addict to his sex, and she cannot stop sexing him’.

‘See, with a high-quality waitress-surveillance system there’d be none of this ambiguity,’ Paul says, frowning. ‘Without knowing what we’re up against, it’s hard to work out the best course of action.’

‘Only one course,’ Igor says. ‘Good old-fashioned maiming. Without this monster wang of his, she will soon turn elsewhere for her pleasures.’

‘I don’t think it will make a difference,’ I say. ‘The writing was on the wall long before she mentioned Oscar. She hates banks with a passion.’

‘But we expected that, right?’ Paul says. ‘That’s why we were pushing the benefactor thing. Didn’t she go for that at all?’

‘She seemed uncomfortable taking money for her art from someone who works in a bank. She likened us to Nazis.’

He sighs. ‘Okay. Well, you’re right, once a woman starts calling you a Nazi, it’s time to bow out. Frankly, from what you’ve told me, you may have dodged a bullet. The paintings and the organic food should have been a clear enough warning. Better to get out now, before she starts making you wear vegetarian shoes and call history “herstory”.’

‘And leave her tampons all over the place,’ Igor chimes in wearily. ‘This is what happens with my ex-wife. Tampons, everywhere in my house. Then she try to unionize the strippers. Man who says, “We must educate the womens,” I say to him, “You think
anybody pay to see strippers who have cut off their hair and now dress in boiler suits that they will not take off?” ’

‘Igor here actually owned his own strip club back in the old country,’ Paul explains.

‘Happier times, happier times,’ Igor says mistily.

‘Anyhow, the main thing now is that we put Ariadne behind us and get you back in the game,’ Paul says, bending down to his bag. ‘If you’ll take a look at the laptop here, you’ll see the beta version of the new Hotwaitress. We’re still updating the database, but there are plenty of options …’

‘I appreciate your help,’ I say. ‘But for me, I think the game is over.’

‘Over?’ Paul looks up from the laptop with a start. ‘What do you mean?’

I rise from my chair and go to the window. Uninhabited office blocks blaze with light against the dark sky, a ghost armada sailing the black ocean. ‘I suppose I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet,’ I say. ‘I think the bullet went right through me.’

‘Then why stop?’ Paul says, jumping to his feet. ‘We can find out more about Oscar. Maybe there are cracks in the relationship we can exploit. We’ll redesign you from the ground up, so whatever Oscar lacks, you have in spades.’

I smile. When I asked him to come over, I still thought there was something he could do; now I can see that the very fact I’m having this conversation shows how hopeless the situation is. Tricks, artifice, the implacable double-agency of money – this is my world, not Ariadne’s, and there is simply no way to go from mine to hers.

‘Artifice is everybody’s world! You think Ariadne gets out of bed looking like that? You think she doesn’t put in her time in front of the mirror, getting her beautiful ebony hair to flow just so? Look, you’ve had a disappointment, I understand that. But a few weeks ago you didn’t even know her. What’s to stop you having the same feelings for somebody else? Take a look in our
database.’ He holds the laptop open for me, faces arrayed on the screen like chocolates in a box. ‘There are literally hundreds of other waitresses here. Just take a look.’

‘No.’

‘Look, that’s all I’m asking.’

‘I don’t want anybody else,’ I say.

Paul sighs. ‘Okay, Claude. It’s your decision, of course. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re being awfully naïve about this. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that’s great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you’re left watching somebody’s body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.’

‘It is true,’ Igor concurs in a voice gravelly with regret. ‘When I marry my wife, she is filthiest lap dancer in all of Transnistrian Autonomous Region. There are criminals who come out of her stall weeping with shame at the things she has do to them in there. When she choose me, I am joyous as priest in orphanage. But the day we are married, it is like someone steal her away and replace her with her mother. Shoutings, hittings me with rolling pin. Meeting other womens to form terror gangs of feminism. Last time I see her she tell me she want to have breast reduction surgery. I ask her, “Are you mad? God and plastic surgeon have give you best boobs in former Soviet Union, why do you flout this gift?” She will not listen. I cannot bear to see this tragedy, so I come here to begin new life.’ He gazes bleakly into his glass. ‘She must be fifteen now,’ he says.

‘What we’re offering you here is freedom from that,’ Paul says, brandishing the laptop again. ‘Don’t you understand, that’s what Hotwaitress
is
. A way to stay inside the story for ever.’

I understand what he’s offering me: a chance to keep paying him a retainer indefinitely. But I am tired of being his mark. ‘I think this is goodbye,’ I say.

Scowling, he puts the laptop away, takes his coat from the back of the chair.

‘Why don’t
you
stay inside the story,’ I challenge him, ‘if everything is better there?’

‘It’s too late for me,’ he says. ‘I have a wife, remember?’

‘You have an hourglass you’re chained to,’ I say. ‘You’ve already abandoned your career. If you don’t love your wife any more, why don’t you leave her too?’

‘You really don’t understand anything, do you?’ he says. ‘I read somewhere that money kills your ability to empathize.’

I flinch. He opens the door. ‘I do love her,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole problem.’ He turns away, repeating to himself, ‘That’s the whole problem.’