He sees the whole thing in a flash – the hardcover edition, press quotes on the back.
Shocking. Brilliant. Urgent.
He takes a sip from his drink.
With blistering honesty and a prose style that wouldn’t be out of place on a Man Booker shortlist, Larry Bolger’s essay on the nature of power will be required reading for generations to come.
He hits a key on his laptop and the screen lights up. He opens Word.
He takes another sip from his drink, hesitates. Stares at the blank screen.
But there’s something he needs to do first.
He gets up and strides out of the room.
Where’s his phone?
He finds it on the table in the kitchen. Scrolls down through the list of names.
V for Vaughan.
It’s only when it’s ringing that he realises what time it is. That they’re five hours behind in New York. And probably all still asleep.
It goes into message. ‘You have reached…’
He waits for the beep.
‘Mr Vaughan? It’s Larry Bolger.’ He pauses. ‘How are you?’ His voice sounds strange, heavy, a bit slurred. It sounds drunk. He sounds drunk. He is drunk. ‘I called you a few months ago, left a message on your machine, but you never got back to me. Why didn’t you get back to me?’ Now he sounds like a fucking teenager. It’s how he feels, though – angry, frustrated, thwarted. ‘I don’t see… I don’t see why you couldn’t have got back to me. A simple phone call. Is it… is it because you’re so fucking high and mighty? Is that it? You’re so important?’ He pauses, possibly for a long time, before eventually saying, ‘Prick.’
Then he holds the phone out in front of him and looks at it, a little confused, as though someone has just called him a prick.
He puts the phone back to his ear and listens for a second. Nothing. He holds it out again and presses End Call.
Puts it on the table. Furrows his brow.
Huh.
He goes back into the living room.
What was he doing?
Oh yeah. A drink. He looks over at the cabinet in the corner. He was going to have another drink.
As he comes off the roundabout and approaches the entrance to Tara Meadows, Dave Conway can’t believe what he’s seeing. It’s only been three weeks since he last came out here and already it’s as if a ravenous Mother Nature has reclaimed substantial sections of the development for her own.
He goes through the gates and drives on for a hundred yards or so before pulling up at the kerb. He takes a small torch from the glove compartment, puts it in his pocket and gets out.
He looks around.
The perimeter fences are entwined with prickly bushes and briars. Nettles are everywhere and weeds – thick, green, poisonous ones – are growing, it seems, at an alarming rate, rushing up in busy clusters overnight.
The rows of detached houses on the right and left – the only residential units to be completed so far – seem forlorn, as though abandoned after some environmental catastrophe. Windows have been smashed and walls have been daubed with slogans and graffiti. The other houses – the ones on the far side of the so-called town square – have been abandoned, too, but not by their occupiers. These have been abandoned midway through construction by the very people who were building them – the contractors, the bricklayers, the electricians. From what Conway can make out, most of these houses are roofless and surrounded by half-erected scaffolding. Diggers and cement mixers lie awkwardly on the roads in front of them, entrenched in gullies of dried mud, like dinosaur skeletons.
Conway walks along the left-hand pathway of what was to be called Tara Boulevard. At the end of it lies the town square. They hadn’t decided on an official name for this and had been toying with the idea of simply calling it the Piazza. Or the Plaza. Conway still thinks of it – from the early design and development days – as the Concourse, which is how the architect always referred to it.
It’s an impressive space – airy and adaptable, at least in theory. Surrounding it are the completed ‘civic buildings’, what were to be the heart of this new urban development – a town hall, a hotel, two apartment blocks and a shopping mall. It’s short on the ‘civic’ perhaps, but all of that stuff was grandiose brochure-speak in any case. The truth is that Tara Meadows was never intended to be much more than an upscale commuter-belt housing development (with an expected first phase of buyers feeding in from the nearby Paloma Electronics and Eiben-Chemcorp industrial plants).
He walks across the eerily deserted Concourse. It’s midday and this place should be buzzing. There should be cafés open, restaurants, a hairdresser’s, a multiplex.
There should be people.
Busily crisscrossing the square.
With money in their pockets.
Driving our economy forward.
Yeah, right.
Conway approaches the entrance to the as yet unnamed two-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel.
As yet unfurnished, unfitted, unwired.
He wanders across the lobby area, glancing in at the vast darkened ballroom over to the right.
As he enters the stairwell he takes the torch out of his pocket and uses it to light his way.
He goes up six flights of stairs and comes out onto a long dim corridor. There are no carpets or skirting boards. Cables hang from the ceilings. The air is simultaneously dank and dusty. A few doors are open and these let in enough light from the outside for him to put the torch away.
He walks along the corridor, slowly, and stops at the first open door he comes to. He looks inside.
It’s just an empty hotel room. Concrete floor. Plastered walls. Bare, fitted windows. Sliding glass door leading to a balcony. Nothing else.
He nudges the door fully open and goes inside. He crosses the room, opens the sliding door and steps out onto the balcony. He looks directly down onto the deserted Concourse, and then beyond it to the entire development.
Tara Meadows has imprinted itself on the landscape, no question about it. From this perspective the whole thing is stunning – so much more than just another soulless grid of housing units.
Which is why he comes up here every now and again. To see the big picture – quite literally. It gives him a degree of satisfaction, of reassurance.
He leans forward now, hands on the balcony rail.
But there’s nothing of that sort on offer today. How could there be? Conway Holdings borrowed a total of two hundred and twenty million euro for this project, with the promise of a further eighty million to keep the wheels turning. One of the banks he borrowed from, however, North Atlantic Commercial, is looking for its money back, and none of the other banks are lending anymore. The problem is, without the further eighty million there’s no way he can keep the wheels turning, and without the wheels turning there’s no way he can hope to pay back any of the original money.
Naturally, he’s trying to scare up alternative financing – he’s in negotiations at the moment with a team from Black Vine Partners, a private equity fund – but unless he’s prepared to go as far as collateralising the internal organs of his three children there may be no practical way out of this.
All of which should be enough – you would imagine – for any man to have to worry about.
But right now this isn’t even the issue for Dave. This is just background noise, like a headache you can’t shift when you’ve got something more important to think about – such as, for instance, that little chat he had earlier on with Larry Bolger. He’d been convinced that Larry had somehow heard the same thing he’d heard, about the Susie Monaghan book, and was rattled about that, needlessly as it would have turned out.