Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “Did you notice all those L’s and R’s on people’s cars, Dale? Do you suppose that means Loyalist and Republican?”

  Estrin flinched. The stickers meant Learner and Restricted, and she saw locals look to each other and smile. No one corrected the woman’s mistake. Estrin didn’t either. Simply, she didn’t want to be seen with them: sheer badness. Americans embarrassed her. They made no distinction between what came into their heads and what came out—an endless stream of petty desires and ill-examined impressions dribbling from a hole in the face, the affliction amounted to mental incontinence.

  Better you’re not seen running after me, MacBride,” said Farrell coldly to the man in the doorway.

  “Only tourists. That was the idea.”

  “We were to run into each other. You’re getting sloppy.”

  “Successful. Seen off with Farrell O’Phelan, I’ll survive. You’re such a chameleon, I paint you the color I like. More harm done you, I’d think.”

  “On the contrary, one of my accomplishments—”

  “One of the many,” said MacBride pleasantly.

  “—is I can be seen with whomever I like.”

  “Everyone knows we were mates back.”

  “Everyone was everyone’s mate back,” said Farrell. “What makes this place so sordid.”

  “Quite a lolly passed me at the door,” MacBride observed, moving on to more interesting business. “All that black leather, wouldn’t have to dress her up, like.”

  “Young for you,” said Farrell distractedly.

  “Looks old enough to know how.”

  “Haven’t you your hands full with—”

  “Ah-ah.” MacBride raised a finger as they drew within earshot of the group. “Now that is sloppy.”

  Estrin knew Bad Work, so she recognized the strain in their guide’s patter. He injected his information with artificial enthusiasm, like pumping adrenaline into a corpse. If he kept the job he would have to give over, and not simply to boredom, for there are states far beyond that, where you no longer recognize that at 2:45 there is any alternative to repeating “Our water rises in peaty ground” one more time. It’s relaxing, actually, a sacrifice to other forces. Minutes stretch out so wide and meaningless there is no more time, there are no more questions. Beyond interpretation or struggle, the advanced stages of Bad Work amount to a religious conversion. Also to being dead. She assessed the guide: Estrin would have quit by now.

  She swung between the pot stills towering fifteen feet overhead, shining Hershey’s Kisses. Bushmills kept the copper polished—now, that was the job she would keep. Estrin loved metal—its resistance, its arrogance, its hostility. She could see herself arriving weekly with chamois in every pocket, to rub down the curves, the stills now looking less like wrapped chocolate than firm upright breasts.

  NO MATCHES OR NAKED FIRE.

  It was the sign between them. Estrin, once more lost in her own world, which she was always mistaking for the world at large, had almost run into him. The tall man shot her a weary smile. He did not seem very interested in the distillery.

  “We’re honored, sir.” The guide hustled over to Farrell’s friend. “What brings you?”

  “Tired of single-handedly supporting the shop short by short. Thought I’d save a few quid to come buy the lot of it.”

  The guide laughed. Farrell sighed.

  Through the warehouse, where whiskeys married in boundless sherry casks, Estrin hung back to inhale. She tucked away stray jargon—cooper, blend vat, spirit safe—souvenir knickknacks. Pretty and useless, they packed well. Best of all she pocketed the smell, for Bushmills steeped the Antrim coast for miles around with a must of rising bread, liquor, and ripe manure, evoking pictures of a stout woman baking while her fagged-out husband rests his dung-crusted boots on the hearth and slowly gets pissed.

  At the end of the tour, downstairs for her sample, Estrin felt sorry for the harried bartender and held back—the woman had to keep smiling and ask, “Hot, black, regular, or malt?” over and over in a happy voice, explaining slowly to Germans what goes into a toddy, fighting back disdain for Americans, who could easily afford a case, still so eager for their free drink. Estrin had the same problem in restaurants, where, whether or not her order was wrong or cold or late, she identified with the waiter rather than herself; in shops she sympathized with rattled salesmen, not clientele; in high-rises she allied herself with reception, janitors; and even in the restroom her heart went out to the lady with the towels. From a well-established Philadelphia family, Estrin Lancaster had downwardly mobile aspirations.

  Farrell cast about the crowd, goaded by those sanctimonious poppies on every staff lapel. Thank God, it was Remembrance Day, after which the Somme would once more be over for another good eleven months. Farrell supposed dully that there was nothing wrong per se with mourning your war dead, though of course every gesture was subverted here and that wasn’t what the poppies connoted at all. Those are OUR wars. Those are OUR dead. Take ’em, thought Farrell, childish bastards. Little matter that plenty of Catholics had died in both world wars; fact had never contaminated anyone’s politics in Ireland. (The fiction was wick, since who needed it? We’ve got history.) No, ceremonies were divvied up and the Prods had picked Remembrance Day, the Twelfth, and probably Christmas, since they’d more cash. The Taigs got Easter, Internment Day, and for twenty years a whole smattering of, ah, unscheduled celebrations all across the calendar. Let the Prods have their sorry paper poppies and weepy parades to cenotaphs, it was only fair.

  Don’t get the wrong idea. This left Farrell in a conflicted position—Catholics didn’t wear poppies and Prods did, but if Farrell were Protestant, being Farrell, he would refuse to wear a poppy, so to express this alienation in Catholic terms should he wear one instead? For his own people had excluded him as well, or he’d excluded himself; each had leapt to disown the other. Farrell despised groups of all kinds and made sure they despised him in return; then he needed the backs of crowds to feel wholly, spitefully himself. He was no different from the rest of this tip, where you loved your enemy all right, but not quite the way Christ had in mind—loved him precisely for being your enemy, for obliging you with something outside your own mirror to revile.

  He was easy to locate, thick platinum hair curling over the crowd. The large crown and high forehead bent toward his boisterous companion. While Estrin found Irishmen a frumpy crew, given to bundling—they wore sweaters with their suits, jackets binding and short in the arm—Farrell’s dark wool three-piece was impeccably tailored, European; his crimson tie, silk handkerchief, and long Dickensian overcoat suggested a kind of style she’d not seen on this island—that is: style.

  And, she observed on the way over, he was a drinker, since in this deluge of a country whiskey was the only force of nature that gave the national complexion any color at all. So she was surprised on arriving at their corner to find his measure clear.

  “Hot water,” he explained.

  “You don’t drink?”

  “Wine. After eight.”

  “A.m. or p.m.?”

  “I sleep little enough to lose the distinction.”

  Estrin raised her malt. “I like to break my rules from time to time.”

  “You can afford to,” he said severely. “You’re still young.”

  “Not that young,” said Estrin with a trace of irritation. “And I can’t afford not to. Too many rules and too much obedience are just as dangerous as going off the deep end.”

  “Don’t you worry now,” said the heavier man, slapping his friend on the back. “Farrell O’Phelan’s in no danger of being too obedient a boy, or too faint a drinker, either. Knows how to impress the ladies with a cup of hot water at tourist draws, is all.” He laughed, though Farrell didn’t, exactly, join in.

  “You brought me here to torture me,” said Farrell, and meant it; the smell was beginning to get to him. How happy it would make MacBride if he strode up to the bar and threw back a double. And how it firmed his resolut
ion, to deny Angus that joy.

  “Now, it was damned decent of Bushmills to open today. And I could hardly meet you at the cenotaph this morning,” MacBride muttered. “Sure you’d hum ‘The Battle of the Bogside’ all through the two minutes’ silence.”

  Farrell was about to quip that he was more likely to hum Polish polkas than some whimper of Irish resistance, when he noticed the American’s eyes had sharpened; most foreigners here were clueless, but he did not like the way she looked from one to the other and he did not like the way she looked at MacBride. He shut up. He did not want to be understood. That was the first thing women didn’t understand.

  “The fumes off that wort were something, what?” recalled the girl. “Ripped in thirty seconds. Like sniffing glue, and the end of the tube is six feet wide.”

  “You sniff glue?” asked Farrell.

  “Putting together balsa Sopwith Camels at eight or nine? We breathed too much, they didn’t fly so hot, but we’d had a good time. My life has had to do with airplanes from way back.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m tempted to return-address envelopes, ‘Window seat. Nonsmoking.’ Though I don’t send so many letters anymore … Lufthansa,” she commended.

  He clucked. “Free cocktails, but frozen salad.”

  “You travel much?”

  “Same address, but on the aisle.”

  “Long legs.”

  “I like to be the first off the plane.”

  “I like to look out the window. Flying into Belfast I was pressed so close to the pane that the man next to me asked if this was my first flight.”

  “And you said?”

  “Always. I never get bored with flying. Though I am sympathetic to the aisle seat,” she noted. “My mother claims I used to stand in my crib and plead through the bars: Ah wan ow. She was impressed that I started talking in a whole sentence. But I’m impressed what it meant.”

  “Which was?”

  “I want out.”

  “And have you? Gotten out?”

  She seemed to consider this more seriously than the facile question required. “Maybe not.” Abruptly she accused him, “I have it on good authority that locals never touch this place. You don’t even drink whiskey. What are you doing here?”

  “Is this an interrogation?”

  “Are you used to being interrogated?”

  Farrell faltered, and wondered momentarily if she knew who he was—ridiculous. “Just—a diverting opening.”

  “You play chess?”

  “Aye, and you?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have wanted to learn unless I was great. And I don’t quite have that kind of brain. So instead of being second-rate, I just don’t play.”

  “Then you do have that kind of brain,” Farrell observed. “Abstention is a strategy.”

  “Never will forget that first game,” MacBride nosed in again. “This sorry scarecrow teetering to the board. I shook his hand and nearly crushed it—a sickly sort, this one. But ten moves later, who’d have guessed he had it in him? Loopy, I thought, the boy’s in a fever!”

  “But I won.” Farrell poked MacBride’s chest in a gesture he realized too late was exactly like his own father’s.

  “’Twas not a sound game, mate. Later that same afternoon I sat down to me own board and had you hammered three ways round.”

  “The gentleman at your right plays a sedulous game,” Farrell explained. “Uses all the time on his clock. Knows all the books—”

  “You could stand yourself—”

  “Never! Never opened a page.”

  “Your man here considers learning a cheat.”

  “There seems little point in testing some other gobshite’s wits when the idea’s to test your own.”

  “I thought winning was all, Farrell. Why not read up, then, if it topples the other fellow’s king?”

  “I don’t collaborate, at anything. I win.”

  “We might observe,” said MacBride dryly, “that by that arrangement you get singular credit for falling on your arse.”

  “When you two play,” asked the girl, “who does win, anyway?”

  “Did,” said MacBride.

  “Oh, we still play,” said Farrell softly.

  At last MacBride had given up ogling the girl, because he couldn’t resist looking at Farrell; funny, they were both showing off, for they had often used each other, or perhaps more accurately their relationship, to entice women. “I was trying to tell you, lass”—MacBride turned back to her—“the gawk here played reckless chess. Might seem a tame sport from the side, but your man conduct his pieces like commanding his crew into uncharted high seas. Could make you woozy to watch the board.”

  “And you,” said Farrell, “never made an original move in your life.”

  “No such thing as an original move. That’s your vanity, and your ignorance is vanity. It trips you, too. I always watched the larger game. You got too caught up in your flourishes, your flashy attacks. You wanted to impress me. It was the ruin of you.”

  “Fischer and Kasparov were both victorious.”

  “Aye, and where’s Fischer now? Crawled off in a hole.”

  “Why did he quit?” asked the girl.

  “Couldn’t keep it up!” cried MacBride.

  “No,” said Farrell. “He was disgusted. Sick to death.”

  “Och, for you to fasten on to your man Kasparov and that, it’s hubris of the first order. At least those lads had a clue. You, Farrell, just lit out. Never quite thought it through. You’re impulsive, man.”

  “Yes,” said Farrell. “And you’re a bore.”

  “O’Phelan, you never have seen the difference between a hero and a fool.”

  “In my experience,” the American ventured, “just as many cautious people get run over by buses as careless.”

  Farrell smiled.

  As the trio trailed from the bar, the usual questions tumbled in: Where was she from in—, How long had she been—, How long was she planning—, Sure isn’t her name—? Ten years of this conversation, how rarely she gave straight answers anymore.

  “Esther Ingrid,” she explained a bit through her teeth. “Little brother. It stuck.” The shorthand was getting so clipped it was incoherent.

  “So what do you do in the States?” asked Farrell.

  “What I do everywhere,” she leveled. “Leave.”

  “Does that pay?”

  “Often.”

  “Yes,” he agreed with a collusive smile. “Handsomely.”

  Both men were placated when she mentioned Belfast.

  “And how might we look you up, now?” the lusty man inquired.

  Estrin sighed, and glanced from one to the other. She had grown up with brothers on either side, and still attracted men in twos; the last cut was tense. And, she reminded herself, how frequently she had failed to keep Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime poised on the tip of her tongue, letting a few digits trip off instead, because it’s easier to give people what they want from you. But Estrin paid for laziness later, with the rude thud on her front door, a total stranger with flowers and expectations smoothing the tattered receipt where she’d scribbled an address only to get rid of the man. Don’t say anything dorky: it was a new discipline. So she was about to toss off, “Put a note in a bottle and throw it in the North Channel,” when some flicker in Farrell’s eye seemed to catch her in her very thought, as if he knew she was pressed for her number often and saw these scenes purely as something to wriggle out of. My dear, read his expression, don’t switch on automatic, you might as well resign. Well enough, you’re harassed by plenty prats, and good luck to you turfing them aside. But look harder now. You can’t sell us all downriver, and you like men—it comes off you like a smell. You look wildly young to me, but you’re no nun—you’ve that shine in your eyes as if you’re always getting a joke no one’s told yet.

  “The Green Door, Whiterock Road.” Estrin flipped her club between them like a coin to beggars, turning to avoid their scuffle for
the toss.

  “Looks as if you’re white this time,” said MacBride to Farrell good-naturedly. “With that address.”

  “I thought you were so successful these territorial niceties didn’t faze you anymore.”

  “Successful, not mental, kid. For all that leather, I’d not slop into the Green Door. Think of the laundrette bills to get out the smell.”

  “Laundrette? Mortuary.”

  Farrell never liked to win anything by luck, though he preferred luck to losing; his eyes followed his new chip. He’d no intention to cash in. The option was sweeter than any dreary discreet evening. Still, as he watched the small woman work on the thick gloves and dive into the red helmet with, he thought, a certain snail-like relief, Farrell had an unresolved sensation he hadn’t felt in long enough that he didn’t recognize what it was. The girl knew they were watching and hurried, switching the engine and failing to warm it long enough; the bike lurched and stalled. Feeling this wasn’t a woman easily rattled, Farrell noted her fluster with satisfaction.

  Finally the big red motorcycle pelted away; wind whipped the Union Jack down the road as she passed, the red, white, and blue curbside clouding with exhaust.

  Their tour guide rasped up the drive toward MacBride. He was running, his face red with anticipation, as if he’d found the MP’s umbrella and was savoring how obliged MacBride would feel at the trouble taken to return it. But the guide’s hands were empty, and MacBride had his umbrella, and his hat.

  “Your honor!” the little man panted. “Have you heard, sir? The radio—”

  “Calm down, boyo, what’s that?”

  The guide gathered himself and pronounced, “Enniskillen.”

  It was a test. Enniskillen? A small town. Prod, a wee orange bud in the otherwise deadly green slime of Fermanagh, choked on all sides, a lone flower in a pond gone to algae—or this was the image that sprang to MacBride’s mind. Otherwise unremarkable; a fair concentration of security-force families, that was all.

  However, the Bushmills tour guide did not say the name of Enniskillen like a small town, as no one in Northern Ireland would for years to come. Because Enniskillen was no longer a pit stop for lunch on your way to Galway, a Bally-Nowhere to be from. No, Enniskillen had been elevated beyond a dot on the map. Enniskillen was an atrocity.