Jesus, is Raymond’s first reaction. She said her own name like it was a question. Does she think me that bad that I wouldn’t recognise my own sister?
‘Have you spoken to Mum today?’ she says. ‘We arranged I’d bring her to the dentist, but she wasn’t here when I called for her and she hasn’t come back yet. I waited as long as I could, then had to go and collect the twins for their grinds. Has she phoned you?’
‘No, I’ve not spoken to her yet this week.’ It’s not untrue, he thinks. He hasn’t. But he mightn’t have spoken to her last week either. Raymond loves his mother, he would say so without hesitation if asked, but over the years that love has become an abstract, calcified into an uneasy-but-dedicated admiration. It lies somewhere above his respect for indie music, below his love for Guinness and Krzysztof Kieslowski films. Yet as a child he had adored his mother. With a fierce, possessive passion, he’d believed the two of them to be inseparable; that he was as vital an appendage to her as her own leg or arm. (He has often wondered since why she encouraged him in such fervour. Or, at the very least, not discouraged it.)
Raymond believes that the bond between them began to short-circuit when his schoolwork started falling off. His mother believes that he lost interest in anything academic when he started acting, but in truth he had long since stopped caring by then. He'd got the role in Baysiders, and instead of being excited, proud, thrilled – any-bloody-thing, in fact – she was . . . nothing.
‘So,’ she’d said, her voice careful, ‘does that mean medicine is out of the question? You’d make a lovely GP.’
‘Mum, I’m never going to do medicine, no matter what,’ he’d replied. ‘You know that, I’ve told you before.’
‘Dentistry, then?’
He'd stopped calling her Mummy years before, but it was then that Mum had begun to shrink. The letters became harder to form in his mouth, turned awkward, slippery and dangerous as marbles. It was Ma next, and then one day Ma came out as Mags. And that was it. Severed. She was no longer Raymond's ally, his protector, his limb. She was Mags.
'So you haven't spoken to her?' Anita is saying. 'Well?'
‘Huh? No, sorry. She probably just got chatting to the neighbours or something. You know what she’s like.’
‘I’ve tried them, the few who are home during the day anyway. Nobody’s seen her.’
‘Have you tried her mobile?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Raymond, I’m not stupid, you know. Of course I have. She left it here.’
'Okay, okay. Look, Anita, you're worrying about nothing. It's only, what, a quarter to five?' He glances at his watch. Nice one, he thinks, only fifteen more minutes to go. A dull hum in the background tells him that the shutters are already coming down on the building. Despite what he (mostly) privately thinks about his managers in the South Mall Municipal Library, he values their ability to have the library closed on the dot of five, a practice that is achieved by beginning the close-up at half four. Earlier, if it's quiet. He sees the Guinness waiting for him, its soft, creamy head waiting to kiss his lips. The day is over, that touch whispers to him. You're safe now, you're free. I'm here. I've been waiting for you, faithfully, just as I promised I would. There's a magic to the first pint of the day that is never captured by any of those that follow it, no matter how hard he tries. God loves a trier, isn't that what Mags says? He'll just have the one tonight, though: he's been promising himself he'd knuckle down to the screenplay.
‘But, Raymond . . .’ she is saying, and trails off when he tunes back in. He was sure she was about to say more, to berate him, but, unusually for her, she doesn’t. Anita is a relentless quizmaster: when she wants to know something she goes on and on until she gets the answer she’s looking for. And all the better if it is the exact response she predicted it would be, because then she’s proved right on two counts.
‘What can I say? Who wouldn’t want to skip out on the dentist? She’s probably just gallivanted off into town for the afternoon. Didn’t this happen a while back? Mags told me how pissed off you were that she went shopping without you.’
‘That was different.’
‘In what way?’ How typical of Anita. Of course it wasn’t different. Anita is taking it personally as she always does everything. ‘Look, Anita, I’m a hundred and fifty miles away, and I’m at work, so I really have to go now. What do you want me to do? If she calls me, I’ll tell her to phone you or I’ll text you myself. How about that?’
Bzzz. Jensen, University of Life: No points. Anita's silence informs him that he gave the incorrect answer. He hangs up, thinking, Typical. That's just typical of Anita. When he phoned her just before Christmas to ask what should he buy Mags, Anita moaned about how busy she was, and how much work it all was, and had ended the call with 'Thank God, this time next week it'll all be over.'
'Bloody hell.' He turns to Pauline. She is stamping out three large-print Jo Nesbø books. She leans hard on the date stamp and doesn't look up. He likes the rhythm of it, the dull duh- DUH. 'Jesus! She can really push my buttons.'
‘Who can?’
‘Anita.’
Pauline closes the final cover, hands the books up over the counter (‘There you go, Mrs Butler. Two weeks of mayhem there. Enjoy yourself’) and turns to him. ‘Of course she can, Raymond.’ She smiles. ‘She’s your big sister. She installed your buttons.’
Flannerys is five minutes’ walk from the library, which is about right, Raymond thinks. Just enough to get a breath of air after the dust and smell of grubby plastic covers and overheated pensioners, but not too far that he’d be tired and ratty when he arrived. He switches on his phone. Nothing. Jean must be working late again.
‘Evening,’ says the barman.
‘Precisely,’ he replies.
And that is all it takes for Mick to reach down under the bar for a clean pint glass. This code is a source of pride to Raymond. It's belonging, it's kinship. A perfect pint is more than just a drink - that's what the ads don't get right, he thinks. All that focus on the pour, the head, the natty-looking bar staff, the gang of lads around you all drinking the same thing . . . That's not what the perfect pint is to him. It's more than the wait between the first pour and the finish. It's his favourite stool at the bar, no one on either side but a few other faces for a bit of chat if he feels like it. It's the conker-brown sheen of the countertop. The melted-cheese smell from the toasted sandwich maker out the back. Even the occasional fart of bleach when the door to the Ladies is opened. Flannerys looks like it hasn't changed in decades. Mick has told him that during the boom they'd taken to putting crisps and nuts out on the tables every evening: 'But all you'd hear would be the giving out: Doesn't everyone know stuff left out in bowls is always covered in piss, blah-blah. Sure you'd be driven demented.' Mick had added, 'Not like the bowls weren't always empty by the end of the night, mind you.' They stopped bothering with the free snacks when the recession hit.
Mick places the pint on the bar and they silently admire it. Raymond bends his head and takes a long sip, the bitter black under the white head reaching his lips like communion. It had taken him a while and many false starts to find Flannerys when he moved to Cork, and now he can’t imagine his day without it. Just the one this evening, though. He’s got work to do at home. That screenplay won’t write itself.
‘How’re all the big thinkers in the library today?’
‘Grand, Mick, they’re grand.’
Few of the library customers, as they're now meant to call them ('What's wrong with users?' Pauline had grumbled), look like big thinkers. There are days when Raymond's not even sure how many of them are readers.
‘The wife gave me a thriller, Tom Clancy or one of them lads. I must show it to you, I’ve it out the back in my jacket to read on my break.’
This is one of the – admittedly few – occupational hazards of his job: everyone he meets assumes he wants to hear what they’re reading. People produce books and hold them up to him as though they are cats dragging half-dead bounty across the kitchen floor. E-readers now, too, which he dislikes even more, because he’s expected to admire the device as much as the content. When he’d moaned about this to Pauline, she laughed and said, ‘When my auntie heard my brother got a place at art college, she phoned to ask him what colour she should paint her bathroom.’
He puts his glass down. It’s a good third empty already. The day must have taken its toll - he’s thirstier than he realised.
'Two lads in last night,' Mick says, continuing a conversation Raymond didn't know he was having. 'And they were on their mobiles as good as the entire time. Your Facebooks and your Twitters and what-have-you. I goes to one of them when the other was in the jacks, Would you not just have a chat with each other? and he looked at me like I was mental. We are, he goes to me and shows me his phone, and there's the other lad – the one in the jacks – and his Facebook page and hasn't your man put a picture of his pint on it and the first lad only gone and liked it?' With a sigh that is world-weary and bemused all at once, Mick moves down the bar to a new customer.
Another regular. Raymond nods over a greeting. ‘All right?’ the man says.
‘All right?’ Raymond answers. But is he? He doesn’t know. There is a little voice in him that the first pint no longer shouts down. It’s more than just the blank screen containing his unwritten screenplay at home, it’s more than the confusion that thinking about Jean brings on, it’s more the fissures of irritation Anita’s call gave him. The little voice is that of fear. Fear that he’s in the wrong life and there’s nothing he can do about it because thinking of how to escape the maze is so exhausting, so entirely consuming and stifling, that he loses the heart even to try. Some days he feels so completely left behind by his life. It is the difference between being in print and online, he reckons. His life is a story lived as a piece of string, a traditional narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Everyone else around him – Jean, mainly, but even Pauline, in her own way – seems to be living a life full of hyperlinks: exciting alternatives and new tangents just waiting to be clicked and chased down. He plods along, and even when he does begin a new chapter, the content will essentially always be the same. His dust jacket gets dustier.
He scans the bar taps that mount the counter and mentally rearranges them. Another occupational hazard. Beamish, Carlsberg, Guinness, Guinness, Heineken, Heineken, Murphy's, Murphy's, Smithwick's. He sighs. Look at you, Raymond Jensen, he thinks. Reduced to alphabetising beer taps. And you a star, once. Okay, he gives a mental shrug, not a huge one; not a mobbed-in-the-street movie star, but a perfectly respectable hey-aren't-you-that-guy-off-the-telly? sort of star. Celebrity, he corrects himself. Just after finishing his Leaving Cert Raymond had gone for an open audition and ended up in RTÉ's most popular home-grown TV soap. He'd never acted before and only went along because he was bored and the lads had him convinced there'd be all manner of actresses strolling around RTÉ, if not exactly in the nip, then not far off.
The audition was in two sections. First, he had to read a scene with an older man, supposedly his dad, in which the dad tells him he’s moving away to London because, unemployed and fifty, he’s on the scrapheap as far as Ireland is concerned. The second scene was a solo one, in which he was upset because his girlfriend had gone off with his best mate.
He aced it. This was life: he hadn’t even needed to act. Raymond Jensen became Tommy Maloney in Baysiders. He got an agent, who found him a few TV and radio ads too. He and Tommy had years – great years! – together. And then. Then it happened. The day every long-running soap actor secretly dreads: the storyline in which he was killed was handed to him, his death neatly typed and photocopied and stapled. Tommy was to be shot by a drug dealer called Steve ‘Masher’ Maher, a man who’d only been in the show for a month. Masher had gun-for-hire written all over him: he wore a suit and smoked with his hand cupped over the cigarette as though permanently trapped in a high wind.
Afterwards Raymond could see that he was the only one not to notice the spectre of death moving ever closer until it hovered behind Tommy's head, as discreet as a bad guy in an episode of Scooby Doo. Certainly his co-stars didn't seem surprised. Over the previous year Tommy Maloney had been slowly going to the bad. A scrape with the local gardaí, then another. A bad crowd was written in, and suddenly Tommy ('And him still in the Scouts when he moved to Bayside!' Mags commented, displaying what was for her an unusual level of interest) was in the thick of it. Drugs, petty theft, muggings. Raymond was disappointed by Tommy. After so many years together he felt that Tommy was letting himself – both of them! – down. And Tommy had started with great ambitions. The only one of the Maloneys to want to go to university, he had taken a part-time job in the corner shop to help pay for it, only he'd let his books burn to ashes around his feet. Raymond had come secretly to despise Tommy's sense of entitlement, his greedy, knee-jerk life, but no way, no way, would he have killed him off like that.
‘I’ll commit suicide sooner than be shot by that fool,’ Raymond had said to the senior producer.
‘Do you mean Tommy would or you would?’ Malcolm answered, alarmed.
‘Tommy would. Will.’
'Raymond,' Malcolm sounded impatient yet spoke slowly, as if talking to the hard of thinking, 'for the last time, you have no say in what Tommy does.'
The prop gun is fired. Tommy falls to the ground gasping and calling for his long-lost dad. And: cut. Thanks, Raymond, it’s been great. The episode breaks all previous ratings.
His pint is down to its last thin inch of black. It’s years since Tommy exited Baysiders in a hearse, but Steve Maher lives there still. He got off the murder charge on a technicality and bought the local pub. Raymond looked for acting work for two years afterwards but couldn’t get anything worth having. And then one day he suddenly understood why: he wasn’t really an actor. Tommy was a one-off, just another version of himself. Raymond hadn’t created him: he’d just let a different bit of himself out for air during working hours.
It’s a good while now since anyone has asked Raymond wasn’t-he-that-guy-from-Baysiders-who-got-murdered?
The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast to be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre on Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
