Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Soon it would become a sport: he would deliberately arrive late, to find her leaning on the seat of that crazy motorcycle chuckling at the Grand Opera House and a moment later not telling him the joke. It was a joke to herself, and he loved that. From now on he would leave for the bog and lurk around the corner to watch the muscles at her mouth, so tight from smiling to please him, collapse down, her hands rising to embrace her cheeks. That was the return: a meeting of parts, a family reunion. She reached for and held her own hand. That was what made her so portable, wasn’t it? For all the starving and lifting and forcing herself up airplane ramps, there was a caretaking in her he envied. She cupped herself. Of course, this was not always so, but at least she knew moments when she was beloved to herself. Beloved. He was surprised to be able to perceive this, since it was entirely unfamiliar in his own life.

  Maybe he occasionally paid attention after all. For suddenly Farrell saw not only the similarities she kept insisting on but differences she did not. Estrin may have known self-loathing, thick as treacle and that dark, but she was far less acquainted with a simpler and in fact far more disturbing self-dislike—the same inconsequential distaste you felt for strangers in dental surgeries with whom you avoided conversation. And she did not understand him, for she did not know the vacancy of a man who has let go of his own hand, or has never truly held it, because sometime long ago someone else had never reached down to it when it was tiny and damp and hadn’t yet learned to gesture aggressively in pubs, slip out a credit card, snip detonator wires—or that was the way he explained it to himself, something about his mother. But he was beginning to realize that the mother he missed was his mother—a semantically difficult distinction—his mother, but not some namable woman with a reprimand of a face and overdone Brussels sprouts, for even Medbh O’Phelan’s rare redemptive affections could not soak in. You could never hear what you were not somewhere in yourself already saying; Medbh O’Phelan was irrelevant. He had lost his mother inside. That was why Estrin shrank when he shrieked over her upstairs and his eyes filled with thick tears that would not quite drop and later absorbed back, unshared. She could not imagine years like fields, scrub grass, worse, carparks, gray tarmac, without hatred, just emotional nausea, long borderless days given structure only by the orderly demise of a liter, nights that never precisely ended but slumped upright in a chair. There had never been an arm around him; he’d struck no partnership; avoiding alliances, he had refused affiliation with himself.

  Then this whole banjax was missing a pinion, wasn’t that the score? There was bloody well only one of you, wasn’t there? So how can you have a relationship with yourself of any description? You are your frigging self! There should be no such thing as self-love or self-loathing. Except this wasn’t Farrell O’Phelan’s private dementia, was it, since there are such words, coined long ago by other poor bisected bastards who died in twos. Or had they? Was death alluring partly because in being nothing there was only one nothing, you could not count nothings, you couldn’t help but die whole? For in the worst of Talisker Farrell had looked in the mirror and seen halves of his face like shoes from different pairs; in fact, when he only saw two soles, the day was easy.

  That was what Genesis was all about—you could find this in the journals of Farrell’s early twenties at Queen’s, recording for posterity he’d been a boring old sod then—expulsion from the garden was the exile of the self from the self. Good Christ, it was as if God had planted a bloody nail bomb in the human psyche, because this very thinking should not exist, those passages from twenty years ago should not exist, gangling Farrell O’Phelan sorting out the rabble between his ears while his city went up in flames. Self-respect, subconscious, superego, parent and child—whichever jargon you found more clever, they were all just names for bits when the while kit didn’t add up. There was only one of you; it should speak with one voice, and it was insane that this orator should ever address itself; it already knew what it was saying.

  Gritting down Royal Avenue with his papers, Farrell glanced at the headlines while surveying the damage: a car bomb, Provo maintenance work. They were obligated to x number of routine bombings, y number of assassinations, and at least one high-profile, all-out Incident a year, just to keep up appearances. He sometimes pictured the Army Council mapping out the year’s campaign much like any advertising firm with a job to do, having another coffee, letting the conversation wander; bearing down again, the foolscap black with crossed-out ideas: Anderson-McAuley Primark; Crown Court three judges (in rapid succession?); drumming their fingers, trying to think of a new angle, combing the map for an RUC station they hadn’t hit in a while, racking their brains for a catchy gimmick to sell the Struggle like any other product whose billboards had gone stale.

  It was a common Belfast fillip, checking out your street and the photo on the front page and they being the same view. Farrell reviewed the blackened brick, two floors of windows out—it looked worse in the pictures. Here, not so impressive, tarted up in a day or two. Belfast worked fast with plate glass, from practice. Already the stationery had erected a sign over its demolished storefront, BUSINESS AS USUAL.

  Now, didn’t that put it in a nutshell. For even when he searched for the traditional twinge of Didn’t-I-hear-that-blow-last-night, Aren’t-I-where-it’s-happening, he could only dredge up the sour savvy of Aye, weren’t we due. It didn’t even pique him that the journalists knew fuck-all, while Farrell had the contacts to worm out the real story down to who twisted the wires, where the det was from; he wouldn’t bother. It was harder and harder to get goosed by these productions. Why, with his own local headlines in the Herald Tribune, the coverage had come to have the opposite effect. This was where everything was happening according to the rest of the world, and Farrell knew very well nothing was happening here, so where was the real news, or was there any? For Farrell often experienced the conflict as trumped up; when Newsweek bought it, the whole world seemed a cod.

  Then, flimflam was just one phase, and there were so many others; later some detail, ironic, idiotic, would start him thinking. For while the Province had eerily stabilized, his mind had not, and ceaselessly turned and consumed this town, constructing models that explained it. As more glass and mangled car parts skittered at his feet, today’s theory had to do with bits.

  If your whole self was shattered, one piece chatting to other pieces, hiding from some pieces, wrestling with others, is it surprising the streets were in shambles, continents were drifting, the planet chunked part from part? You make the world in your own image. As you are in pieces, so shall your cities fragment. As your bits are at war, so shall you fight each other. Peace on earth would come only when people made one piece of themselves. And this was different from loving themselves or repressing their bad selves or facing up to their bad selves … Nope, the whole tinkling crumple was no-go. And so a united Ireland, unionism aspired to the same paradise, where you thought one clear thought without compulsively thinking the opposite at the same time, where your feelings about your father did not bifurcate like putting on someone else’s glasses, with one picture vitriolic, the other groveling, gooey-eyed, little wonder you could never remember his face; where your decisions were not bicameral, whole bloody sessions of Parliament, but a slice like cutting cake, simple and over and unregretted, taking up no more time than a line space; where no one made cartoons with angels on one shoulder and devils on the other, no novelist invented Jekyll and Hyde. Both Nationalists and Loyalists were yearning for the same cohesion, why the solution to the Northern Irish problem was to line up the locals one by one, tilt their heads to the side, and pour Super Glue in each ear.

  As far as Farrell could tell, however, the world was entirely peopled with heads in parts; he could hear them rattle as he walked by, those cauliflower clumps of the brain segmented every which way—lying from truthful, shallow from deep, waking from dream. As a result, though Farrell may have lived in a city whose inhabitants shot each other and magneted gelignite to cars, he remained str
uck less by their lunacy than by their integrity, for while Farrell mocked himself for being tortured, he did find living very hard and could not understand why more lives around him weren’t utterly disassembled. He was impressed, for example, that on the whole the population managed to feed itself, sleep, and look both ways before crossing the street. He was mystified why you did not pass more people standing on the corner screaming. Others found the rate of alcoholism in the Province astounding; so did Farrell, but he didn’t find it nearly high enough. He was in awe of rough sanity. While the international press questioned why so many murders, Farrell wondered, Why so few? And with their heads full of gravel, Farrell was most astounded by widespread self-affection, the way scads of people chose shirts they thought they looked best in mornings and ate breakfasts they liked, happily skipping articles in the Irish Times they did not find interesting. Farrell wasn’t interested in a single article, and he read every one.

  So, was that your first bomb?”

  “I’ve been here six months!”

  “How do they make you feel?”

  “Odd.”

  “Odd? That’s all?”

  “Awed,” she repeated. “Full of awe. Grim … Happy,” she announced. “Wildly happy, and that’s the way most people feel here, too, perfectly, gleefully happy, and they never admit it. They wring their hands and moan, but inside they are eating it up. I’ve seen it on their faces as well as on mine. The smallest little child knows how delicious an explosion is, and I’m sick to death of old ladies not admitting they feel the same way.”

  Farrell had a strong sense of having had this conversation before. There was little to be observed of bombs he had not said or heard already. Though he’d raised the subject, he didn’t want to talk about them now or ever again. He wanted to talk about bits. He wanted to ask Estrin whether she talked to herself, and especially, didn’t that strike her as peculiar. But he suspected such an exchange in ready danger of going stupid. You had to watch the conversations you involved yourself in, because they implicated you—and Farrell despised thinking something precious to him and having it come out taradiddle. As a result, his most intimate convictions he never expressed. He’d been able to tell a woman he loved her, for example, only when he didn’t mean it.

  For Farrell didn’t believe in language. Not like this one here. Look at her, scraping for those adjectives, when what was the difference between awed and odd in the end? Words had let him down enough times he had resorted to their more perverse pleasures, that shiny red apple you pluck when you say, “I went to the cinema,” when really you went to the tobacconist. Sometimes Farrell would change trivial elements of a story just for the sensation.

  “Next time,” Estrin was saying, “we go to Clonard. Or to your place. Just not always here. It’s artificial. Protected and tidy and tells me nothing about you.”

  “We never, but never go to my bungalow.”

  She looked stunned.

  “Sometimes I forget where it is,” he amended.

  “I have to leave,” she mumbled, her brow all piled up like an accident on the M1. “I’m supposed to meet Kieran this morning to fiddle with the books. Convince both the British and the Provos he’s not making any money. Shouldn’t be hard. He’s not.” Estrin screeched her chair out. Scouring her hands on the linen napkin, she could have been a mechanic degreasing with an oily rag. She pulled her leather jacket over her dress.

  “Clonard!” he conceded after her, unconcerned by Estrin’s huff. She was already hooked. The story of Farrell’s Farewell always worked a treat on women.

  He leaned back for a second cup of coffee. Now, that parting was typical. Not just “I have to leave,” but “to meet whomever to whatever—” American. Farrell had appointments, full stop.

  But Farrell was already turgid with the day’s agenda. Midcup, he withdrew to look at himself, look-look. His mouth quirked; he heard an inward clucking. How’d you land in this muck, me boyo? He wondered did he feel bad? No, he checked, feeling his mind up and down as he might run his hands over his body after a fall. No, he didn’t feel bad at all.

  Farrell dabbed his mouth with his own napkin like a civilized man in a restaurant. Funnily enough, that boyo voice he heard—it wasn’t his. It was Angus MacBride’s.

  chapter ten

  The Vector and the Corkscrew

  By the time he nipped in the back door he wasn’t sure it was worth it. He’d had to exchange his Escort for a Council car, in case anyone recognized his plates. No, he did not want a driver. And all the while those thick-necked Sinner bodyguards leaning on bulletproof glass, smoking and tossing chips in his direction, as if to the pigeons, but barely missing MacBride’s tweed slacks, their taunting remarks falling equally short of his ear. Hoods, no one would convince him different, and it remained one of the great scandals of Western society that this surly slag littering the carpark was actually allowed into the sanctum of City Hall like real human beings, and their cronies were elected to office and could even vote for their own murderous propositions at public expense. It brought the blood to his face that those pistol-packing wogs oiling out of the building now were actually paid by the people of the United Kingdom, and that money like as not could be traced directly to the blackened mangle of shopfronts on Royal Avenue last month. For pity’s sake, Belfast putting Sinners on salary was like hiring someone to set fire to your own hair.

  Then looping roundabouts for twenty minutes when the lass just lived up the road, shoving his floppy felt hat down his forehead, slipping on the dark glasses, and swathing the muffler over his chin until he looked like one of the Blues Brothers with a cold— There’s them would find this a jolly game, but Angus was well weary of it, thank you very much.

  He drew the scullery curtains before unwinding and plopped in a chair. When Roisin walked in, she jumped a few inches higher than usual.

  “Have a seat, my pet.” He patted his lap. “Though with a week such as I’ve had, all my vital juices are near drained off. Whatever you do, don’t mention the word Gibraltar.”

  “You’d might have warned me. In a tick I’m away.”

  “Cancel.”

  “Can’t. I’ve to meet—someone about my book. About reissuing Bare Limbs on Basalt.”

  “Sure we could ring up Blackstaff—”

  “Och no,” she said hurriedly. “I wish you would stop regarding my career as merely what I do to keep busy when you’re not here.”

  “Women and their bloody careers! Aren’t we straight from Me magazine. The point is, Roisin, I swapped the car and went through the whole fancy dress just to see you, love, and it’s little enough to ask in return you reschedule a wee lunch. Who is it—Hilary?”

  “No, someone new. And no. It’s on.”

  A good politician, Angus knew real no’s from the soft-centered and recognized this was, incredibly, a jawbreaker. “Fair enough,” he grunted. “You’ll not be long, then?”

  She shrugged and drew on her coat.

  “I’ll wait, for I’ve work to do. Might be by the time you’ve returned I’ll have eased back in the mood, like. There’s nothing wilts a man like taking a back seat to blank verse.” He reached for the phone and dialed violently, lurching to a frame of mind for busy signals and press releases from the one he’d prepared for playing with the tiny hairs in the small of Roisin’s back. “MacBride here. That bandy boss of yours about?”

  Roisin stood at the door, watching.

  “It’s not he figures the phone’s tapped again, is it? Because you tell him for me that not a soul considers him that important!… Och, everyone’s off to lunch, and not so much as a filled roll for a poor starving MP. How about you and me rustling us up a bit of champ, Con? But sure we’d fall in love, and then where’d we be?… You’ve a sarky mouth on you, woman. All the better to keep himself in line. No, I’ll ring back. Cheerio.” Angus beamed to Roisin; even missed contact with that snollygoster brightened his eyes. He slapped his mistress on the thigh; suddenly working for an hour or two appeal
ed. “Awfully tarted up for an editor, love. I’m getting suspicious.” He laughed and shoved his hat rakishly down on his head to fetch his papers from the car.

  After her tepid kiss goodbye, Angus ranged the pantry in disgust: Weight Watchers cream of asparagus soup, thimble-sized jars of tuna, barely nibbled wheaten that would have made a bonny boom to knock down Divis Flats. And the icebox was worse; why, you could make a regular poem out of the refrigerators of single women (and why didn’t Roisin write about that?): a wee drawerful of well-intentioned vegetables (I Really Should Start Eating Better), but the broccoli was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of resolution; you could have sold her carrots to low-budget reconciliation camps for making bracelets in crafts; the parsnips bowed, all weak and hairy like old men’s legs. There were traces, too, of I Really Deserve a Reward: a package of Marks and Spark’s chocolate meringues, one half eaten and both soggy—women! Why couldn’t she eat the whole bloody thing? A container of coleslaw with one tablespoon in the bottom, God forbid she should throw it out. And then a silly array of costly gourmet jars in the door—pesto, mango pickle, ginger chutney—with nothing to complement, like dandies without dates.

  The array made him doleful, not, for Angus MacBride, a common emotion. He wondered, this also rare, if he did Roisin a disservice; a delicate, fading flower maybe, but with the air of a schoolgirl still. In fact, he loved to pass St. Mary’s letting out afternoons, with the girls’ pert green skirts and shlumpy jumpers, the scrumpled ties; he always put Roisin among them, carelessly swinging her bookbag, looking down at the footpath with that funny combination of self-consciousness and utter unawareness of how pretty she was. She still had a girlish laugh, clean as a tin whistle, in a mournful Celtic key. (Never do to let it out, but he had a taste for fiddle-dee-dee. O’Phelan, of course, reviled it. Well, bugger O’Phelan. Hadn’t a sentimental bone in his body—or had he? Sometimes Angus suspected that behind closed doors Farrell was a slobbering, maudlin old fart.) And maybe the lass was a reasonable poet; he’d have to take Blackstaff’s word for it, since he couldn’t abide the malarky himself. Yet here he was, keeping her to himself for the odd afternoon.