White City by Kevin Power

Author:Kevin Power [Power, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner UK
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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I had been living in The Brokerage for almost two weeks when I exited the lobby to find my father waiting for me on the other side of the street. He was leaning against the door of his ancient BMW – the one with the grey-brown apron of dust on the bonnet and the cracked rear indicator light. This was the car that my father had driven throughout my childhood: the family-holiday car, the lifts-to-school car, the ambassadorial emblem of his early successes in banking. Now it had a collapsed look, and sat low to the ground in a way that made me think of the word craven. My father stood with his arms tightly folded. We looked at each other through the flicker of passing traffic. Over the last few days he had been leaving me abrupt voicemails: ‘Ah, Ben, ah, hmm. Give me a ring if you get a chance. Nothing major. Just… Okay. Bye.’ These I deleted. I had also been spotting the usual headlines, in shops, on social media: REVEALED: [REDACTED]’S DESPERATE PHONE CALLS TO ‘GOLDEN CIRCLE’. Now my father raised his hand in a slow wave and grinned, as if to say, Indulge me.

‘Let’s go for a drive,’ he said, when I had made my way across the street.

The interior of the car smelled of old leather and motor oil. ‘They took the Landcruiser,’ my father said, his eyes on the road. ‘This one could probably do with a tune-up. It was sitting in the garage for what – five years? But they make a reliable car.’

I said nothing.

‘We might go out to the Yacht Club,’ my father said. ‘Have a spot of lunch.’

But when we reached Dun Laoghaire he parked on a concrete bluff overlooking the pier and sat behind the wheel, unmoving. Across the bay the brown brunt of Howth Head was visible through an Alka-Seltzer mist.

‘You’re getting on okay?’ my father said, and coughed. He was wearing some sort of dowdy anorak or windcheater that made him look like one of those dumpy losers who spend their spare time watching planes from the Old Airport Road. This, I thought, was the man once described, in newspapers, as ‘the best networker of his generation’.

‘Tickety-boo,’ I said, choosing – deliberately – one of my father’s favourite pre-war Britishisms.

My father clicked the headlights on and off. ‘This deal you’re involved with,’ he said. ‘What is it, exactly?’

‘That’s privileged information, Dad,’ I said.

‘Some property thing, I gather,’ my father said. I had forgotten that he still knew people: bankers, solicitors, journalists. He still read the business pages.

‘If you know what it is,’ I said, ‘why are you asking me about it?’

‘I’m just asking,’ he said, in a tone of despair.

He was silent. I fiddled with the cartilaginous fabric of my seatbelt.

‘You’ve probably been reading the papers,’ my father said.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘How’s it all going?’

My father took off his sunglasses and peered out at the harbour, which bristled with the masts of sailboats. ‘We have the best men in our corner,’ he said.

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