Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Depressed? Who said that? She did not consider herself depressed.

  That’s how depressed she was.

  No, it was all right, the days flapping with Fortnights, evenings with a fistful of toast as she stared out the window at the branches webbing over the panes like the veins in her eyes. She merely needed a polestar. Like the reference draftsmen use to give a landscape proper perspective, she needed a disappearing point. Farrell O’Phelan was a dot off her page.

  Once more he had not asked her out exactly, but they were beyond that. Even Oscar’s didn’t bother with reservations anymore but routinely saved their table. And after a fourteen-hour workday she would let him pick up the tab tonight. With half an hour before his return, Constance luxuriated around the suite, a paler but softer place without him, still steeped in his presence but spared its pricklier forms. She loitered into his office and eyed the correspondence. Constance could be trusted implicitly around open bottles of expensive liquor, cold cash, but curvaceous addresses on envelopes flushed her with wild kleptomania. The artless girls in the Tissot prints arched their eyebrows, goody-goody.

  She disciplined herself from the post, on a whim creaking instead into the closet to finger Farrell’s bomb disposal suit. A reek wafted from the hanger as if she were releasing something that wasn’t supposed to get out. The suit made her feel nostalgic; a little hurt; delivered. Constance had secured it for Farrell’s Christmas present that last year. It had taken plenty of finagling to pinch the suit from the British Army, the kind of project Constance could sink her teeth into. Though used, it was in good condition. Farrell had never worn it. Och, he had his reasons. It was heavy, sixty pounds or so, and limited mobility. Furthermore, it smelled ghastly, permeated not only with the acrid, almond tinge of explosives but permanently imbued with nervous sweat. Like breathing pure terror, he says. And sure he was a fastidious man, a fresh shirt every day, starched. As a child, grotty hands made him cry. As an adult, nothing had upset him more than the Dirty Protest; why, he was positively relieved when prisoners moved on to hunger strikes. Maggots in spoiled food, shite spread on the walls because it dried faster that way, less noxious than in a pile … Even reading about it now, he would agitate around the office and go back to biting his hands.

  But the stench of the suit had been an excuse. He preferred pinstripe. And if a bomb had ever blown he’d wanted to go with it.

  Farrell was himself thinking of Constance as he whistled up the walkway. He was sometimes concerned on her account, and wondered at how often this compassion expressed itself as rebuke. The problem was, he liked her too much. She was good-humored and bright, earthy but not crude, and, for all her community adventuring, essentially shy. As his hours in her company racked up, they only improved. However, if they had too good a time, the next day he’d be brisk and find something wrong with her work and disappear.

  When he found her in his office—where she had no business—Constance was perched on his desk tugging at her stockings. As she whisked the skirt back down, Farrell couldn’t help but think, What heavy thighs. She seemed to see this in his face, and instead of boistering the incident away, she timmered to the other side of the room.

  They didn’t talk. Farrell dialed. Constance scuffled by the closet. Sometimes he could not bear that she knew him so well. He might have preserved more of a private life, but he ended up telling Constance most of it just so she would tend to its aggravating logistics. So the rare times he was up to something that left her out, the air knotted like the roots of trees.

  Farrell turned his back. He lowered his voice into the Little White Girl. He rested the receiver and waited a punitive beat. “I do not like to be listened to while I am making a personal call.”

  Constance realized with confusion she’d been eavesdropping. There should be no such thing in this office. She knew everything. “You might’ve said.”

  “I shouldn’t have to.”

  Constance felt suddenly estranged. She didn’t know quite who she was or where. Rather than the disorientation seem odd, she was astonished she didn’t slip out of kilter more often. She was impressed with having negotiated so many ordinary moments of her life with such social grace in the past. She felt someone should commend her. “Sorry.”

  “Likewise. This evening I am engaged.”

  Constance remained still, as if for a long exposure. The shutter clicked; she had misunderstood engaged. Her very heart had stopped for the picture, and while the word returned to its routine usage, her pulse was sickening.

  Farrell was surprised, expecting a scene. Her face was impassive. She looked nonplused. “Tomorrow,” he offered as reward. He tucked his red handkerchief into his pocket and poofed it out again, smoothed on gloves of tight cream suede. He pecked her cheek on his way out with an exaggerated Mwah! that was insulting.

  He forgot she was still in the room and turned out the light. The smell of the bomb disposal suit lingered behind him. Standing in the dark, Constance felt as she had at three years old when she was first aware of her arms when walking and was mystified by how to hold her hands.

  I’m aware that Americans compulsively ask what you do. I’ve restrained myself, but I can’t stand it any longer—what are you?”

  They were back at 44, only the second time, but this established that to whatever degree there would be an always, they would always eat at this place.

  “This is Ireland. We should begin with what I was.”

  “Sixty-nine?”

  “A drunk.”

  “Seventy?”

  “Keep going.”

  “Drink is all you did?”

  “It’s a full-time job!”

  “Until?”

  “Well into my twenties. I lived at home. My father lambasted me, my mother sighed and left St. Patrick’s medals dangling inside my overcoat. It was quite satisfying. Might have continued indefinitely but for the Troubles. I lived in Glengormley, a mixed neighborhood that has yet, even now, to see many tiffs. Horrifically, people get along. Watching news reports, you Americans must have assumed the whole Province was smoking. But swaths grazed on placid as sheep. We watched that footage just as you did. And the peace pockets were the hellholes. Och, sure I ended up in the odd fracas on the Falls, a good place to find drink after hours. But I didn’t spend every Friday out rioting with the rest. I wasn’t invited. I began to feel left out.”

  “You’re included now?”

  “Of course not. Exclusion is an emotion; you don’t live it down. I was a sickly child. I couldn’t play football. Later, when the boys around me were nipping off to smoke on Sundays, I was still an altar boy, fasting, writing religious sonnets, forswearing sugar in my tea.”

  “And you promised yourself every night you wouldn’t wank under the covers. It didn’t work.”

  Farrell’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Please.”

  “You have a prim side.”

  “I prefer the word discreet.”

  She trailed a nail down the heartline of his palm and kissed the pulp of his fingertip, like sucking the oyster from a quail. “I don’t often meet men I can embarrass.”

  “You can be one smutty item, I must say.”

  “See? When was the last time I heard smutty? Ireland. The last bastion of real sex. Real sex is disgusting. Real sex is repressed. Mash down on anything that hard and it just spurts out higher somewhere else. Because every night you plonked away despite yourself, right? And it was great. It’s never been that great since. I’m telling you, all that Catholicism did you a world of good.”

  “I thought at one time of becoming a priest.”

  “Naturally! Walking around with a hard-on sixteen hours a day, what else was there to do but become a priest?”

  Farrell wiped his chin, following Estrin’s hands as she ran them over her arms and bare shoulders. He liked watching a woman touch her own body. “We’re still on the starter,” he pointed out. “I can’t imagine how we’ll make it to coffee without getting arrested.”

>   “Still, you’re no priest, with that American Express card.”

  He shrugged. “Whitewells.”

  “The hotel?”

  “My hotel.”

  Estrin sat back. “How did you come into that?”

  “I saved its life so many times, it thinks I’m its mother.”

  “Say what?”

  “The man who owned Whitewells, Eachann Massey, was a Catholic. But even Republican sympathies and a son in the Officials couldn’t protect the hotel. Once the Provos and Stickies started feuding, the son was a fair liability. Whitewells has always housed plenty of journalists and foreign politicos, and makes an attractively high-profile target.”

  “Oh,” Estrin sighed, “I would hate to see that place blown up.” Locals felt the same way, for Belfast’s notoriety was often priced with simple disappointment: just, Och, no. My parents honeymooned in that hotel; they still tell stories about the fruit. We couldn’t afford to stay there ourselves, but some days it’s worth a few extra p to take the weight off in those enormous chairs downstairs and have coffee with whipped cream and scones with wee jars of black currant conserve—And then someday you’re shopping downtown and the pressure changes in your ears; all the windows in Anderson McAuley rattle. You feel nervous, excited, and stretch with everyone else who knows nothing as the peelers cordon off Royal Avenue with white tape. But the excitement dies down and the klaxons leave off until it’s next Saturday and there’s nowhere for coffee but the top floor of C & A or dingy old Kelly’s, where it’s weak as water, and freaking hell, you’d just as well go home.

  “I’d hate that, too,” said Farrell. “Why I’ve taken measures downstairs.”

  “The security is new?”

  “The place was wide open in the seventies. Threats, car bombs out front every month. But Eachann’s IRA connections and Republican politics made it awkward to call the army. So he called me, several times—’81, his sons picked off, one by the Provos, one by the UFF, wife long gone, middle of the hunger strikes Eachann dies, of all things, from natural causes. He left the hotel to me. Claimed if it hadn’t been for O’Phelan there’d be nothing but a carpark to leave.”

  “Why had he called you in for bomb scares?”

  Farrell looked pained, for he liked to tell his stories systematically. Conversations with Estrin didn’t work that way. “For five years I was an independent bomb disposal man.”

  “Independent? Why didn’t you just work for the army?”

  “If you’re going to pretend to know me so instinctively, my dear, you’re going to have to ask better questions.”

  “No, I can see you in the military. An officer. Shaving in the desert with two tablespoons of water, and no one understands where you keep finding a clean shirt. Brilliant but unorthodox campaign, blind dedication of the men …”

  “T. E. Lawrence. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  “I guess I was observing: they do.”

  He smiled. “All the same, you’re hardly describing any of those poor grubby bastards stationed in these hinterlands. And I’m Catholic; as an Ammunitions Technical Officer I’d likely be shot by my ‘own people.’ Mark the inverted commas, please.”

  “Who are your people?”

  “I am affiliated with no one. Which has driven the entire Province to distraction.”

  “And more than a few women,” Estrin hazarded.

  “You have a terrible time staying on politics for more than fifteen seconds.”

  “Not really.” She would not be ruffled. “I just don’t see politics as separate. More stuff.”

  “How adroitly put,” he said sourly. “At any rate, it took effort to keep the business from growing. Countless eejits wanted to join. I said no. I worked alone. I refused to become one more woolly do-gooder coalition. Mother of God, look at the Peace People: in no time, a snarl of hostile camps scuffling over their constitution, while every streetcorner busybody sniffed about Betty’s mink coat. Envious, divided, a model of the conflict more than a solution to it. I aimed to avoid that.

  “At first, I’d do anything to save a life, a knee, or property I happened to like—Whitewells. Anything to take the mickey out of a load of rubbish. I’ve snipped up Gerry Adams’s sound system. I’ve bribed an army helicopter pilot to hover over an Ian Paisley rally close enough that no one could make out a word and women lost their hats. I ran my own dirty-tricks squad. It was all supremely down-to-earth, if sometimes adolescent.”

  “Why are you still alive?”

  “Good question. You’re getting the knack of this place.”

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “So I don’t need to be congratulated every time I seem to realize the IRA is not an Individual Retirement Account.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You were saying: why you’re not dead.”

  “I took care to be a thorn of equal length in everyone’s side. If I dismantled a Provo gelly bomb in a hijacked oil tanker, I’d be sure to loose an angry ram on a Save Ulster from Sodomy rally on the weekend. A balancing act of impartial disruption. I convinced each faction that I was a sufficient liability to its adversaries to keep about.”

  “Were you ever interned?”

  “Oh, aye. In the first instance, I was pleased. There was a time in West Belfast no one would trust you if you hadn’t been in the Kesh at least seven days. The second and third instances I could have skipped. Face-offs in a white room and a single mattress chained to the floor. A chair if you were lucky. Sleep if you were lucky. Water if you were lucky. I wasn’t lucky.”

  “Do you still get harassed?”

  “A certain Lieutenant Pim from Thiepval arrived on the scene of a rather wicked job I had already finished; he was charmed. That poor pillock actually did try to get me to join the army. He wanted to work with me. He liked me. He wanted to be my friend.”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t oblige, but Pim did. He fixed my computer file. Whenever I’m stopped at checkpoints now, they go back to their Land Rover. They come back smiling, and nervous. They shake my hand. They tell me, Safe home. They hope the delay hasn’t caused me any inconvenience.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Haven’t a baldy.”

  Estrin eyed him critically. “I bet you loved being interned.”

  “Answering the same question fifty times? Spread-eagled against a wall for six hours?” He considered. “Oh, aye. Those were some of the great moments of my life.”

  “As opposed to now?”

  His face shadowed, its parallels listed. “I came to realize I was entirely motivated by self-glorification.”

  “You’re not anymore?”

  “I have made repeated efforts at becoming a butterfly. Sure I’m as much of a worm as ever.”

  “Does anyone do anything for anyone else ever?”

  “I’ve seen it,” he admitted. “Singed passersby combing into McGrady’s for more survivors as the bar burned after the blast. But most heroism can be explained away as extended self-interest. To make allegiances is to preserve the race, the Catholics, your own family; however your lines are drawn. In which case I am biologically flawed. I do not ally. And I not only refuse to defend my people, but I’m out to destroy myself. I’m a failed mutation, a danger to the species which fortunately has not reproduced. I am a rocky, hostile island. Don’t wreck your ship on my shore.”

  But the warning turned on itself. I am so wonderful that I know what’s wrong with me. Estrin was reminded of medieval monks who would whip themselves, feel righteous for whipping themselves, whip themselves for feeling righteous, only to feel righteous all the more and whip themselves again—an endless spiral of shame lapped by self-congratulation. In Ireland to run yourself down was to prove what a fine fellow you really were. “Self-criticism,” she observed, “is a form of preening.”

  “You then, my swallow? Are you the world’s helpmate?”

  “It’s all I can manage to avoid being a flat-out shithead. And people bungle so much doing ‘goo
d,’ I figure it’s safest to do zip. I don’t hit children; I don’t litter; I also don’t work for the Peace Corps in Zaire. I try to have no effect on my environment whatsoever.”

  “But doing nothing often has a great deal of effect. And I get restless. I have to do something even if at any distance I find myself comical.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  “I’m not nearly so colorful a character, I’m afraid. I’ve gone from prankster to community handyman. At the moment I’m negotiating for the release of two boys held at Secretary of State’s Pleasure. Rather than finagling whirlybirds to descend, I’m trying to get them up again; a woman in Armagh with a house near the heliport is losing her nerves. I’ve helped the area around my office organize against the rebuilding of an RUC station there, since the last thing that keeps you safe in this town is the proximity of the police. And we got blown up last time; it’s someone else’s turn.

  “As for the disposal business, I have moved from defusing bombs to politicians. I set the North before myself like a chess problem: As long as the Brits are kicking doors in up the Falls at 6 a.m., firing after eleven-year-old joyriders, and tossing the odd innocent in the Crum without charge, the IRA will flourish; as long as the IRA flourishes, so will the UVF, UFF, and everything else beginning with U. As long as paramilitaries thrive, the troops stay; as long as the troops stay, paramilitaries thrive: a perpetual-motion machine that slows only from the physics of exhaustion.”

  “I have never been anywhere with such a plethora of neat formulations about itself.”

  “How to get the troops out without leaving behind a month of Bloody Sundays? Next to the North, chess is Snakes and Ladders.”

  “So this is the game you play now with Angus MacBride.”

  She thought he’d be pleased she’d recognized his friend at the distillery, for they’d not been introduced. Instead, he snapped, “In reference to my current work, you are not to mention anyone’s name in public under any circumstances. Understood?”

  Estrin rolled her eyes. “Melodrama.”