Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  The queasiness didn’t last long. Fact was, she was damned lucky. Angus MacBride wasn’t meal-a-crushie, now. And they had their times. More and more he believed you snatched your afternoon here and there, you’d more than most. What was a life but a few days, one after the other? And if she didn’t like it, she could quit, like. Angus was not by nature a guilty person. It gave him enormous power over those that were. Someone should tip off the Catholics: taking the blame never absolved anyone, or solved a woe. And it was funny if you simply refused to feel obligated to people how little you actually had to do.

  He snuffled through the pantry a bit further before resigning himself there wasn’t a morsel to be had. Why call it a scullery at all? Why not turn the room into a snooker parlor? So he went for his Bush, only to suffer a rude shock: disappeared. Angus banged cupboards. Was she taking a nip herself? Welcome to it if she replaced it. But here he was, stranded in this wretched Catholic ghetto, utterly unable to walk into a pub within two miles, and to light into an off-license he’d have to bundle so up to the eyes they’d be sure he’d arrived to knock the place off.

  Angus trooped the house, sourly looking for a place to work, the cheerful picture of nestling into a corner with a golden short at his elbow now giving way to a stark splay of papers on laminate with crumbs. The whole place enraged him today. It was too clean, for one thing, though had it not been he’d have complained at the grot. He couldn’t bear the way everything matched. The walls and furniture and drapery in the parlor were all the same dim floral print. Further, each corner dithered with trinkets. Why, it was like living in an Oxfam outlet. And nowhere, for a poet even, was there a serious workspace, with paneling, books, good light, a map on the wall. Disgruntled, he settled back to the kitchen table, drumming his fingernails. They were bright pink.

  You know, it wasn’t cleanliness or clutter. There was something deeper wrong here, some critical lack of gusto. Sure the sorry appetite had something to do with her mother and Catholicism and Ireland, the whole desperate lot that would douse the fire in any woman, and did. Why, he wanted to take Roisin’s hand, lead her to Stewarts and say, Here. This is the way you go shopping. You take a big cart, not one of those miserable baskets, and you hurtle down the aisles until the wheels rattle. You skip all those bitty tins and go straight to fresh meats. You have them special-cut you two-inch-thick fillets. You grab a hunk of Ulster Cheddar, a dozen eggs, two liters of whole milk, thank you, a pint of double cream. Lob in a slab of real Northern butter, and spare us that low-cholesterol E-Z-spread-golden-sunshine best shelved in hardware as lawn-mower lubricant. Vegetables? Haul out ten pounds of spuds, and do not mess about with lettuce, because it takes too much time to wash and too much time to eat, and in the end what have you got? Toss over a few chunky soups and a loaf of plain. What with large-size hankies and a pack of fags at checkout, there you are. You have shopped. Now, when you go home you will have food, where before you did not. For it was quite clear that when Roisin came back from Stewarts nothing had changed.

  Grab hold, woman! Get your pinky out of the air! Muss up that sitting room; go buy some massive cord pillows, a leather recliner, and a sheepdog. Roller over the twee wallpaper, chuck that electric fire with the red light rotating behind plastic coals—who do you think you’re fooling? Light a real bloody fire, stretch yourself out on the rug with a mugful of hot whiskey, and take off your clothes. Christ, what was wrong with people? What were they afraid of, and what in God’s name were they waiting for? Day after day, the timorous huddled in well-manicured dungeons like these, terrified of living their own lives. Now, who bloody well was going to live them for you, and who was going to strike you dead if you lived them yourself? Sure you’ve had enough bad moments, unreported bank errors, spite on the phone, to figure out that Jesus is not waiting outside your door with a .22? Your countrymen, ladies, are blasting each other through chain link like mince, and what happens to them? They slink off to the Republic and toast the tricolor over a jar! Meanwhile, you’re afraid to unzip your dress! Because why did Roisin always have to twitter about needing to visit or hoover or jot when he came by, whinging why couldn’t they go out, maybe somewhere they weren’t known—China, Angus suggested—before she “broke down” and went to bed? Just: take it! Angus wished that for once he’d slip in that back door and Roisin would grab him by the balls.

  For Angus could tell you he wanted a steak or a woman or the Nobel Peace Prize, but at the end of the day Angus simply wanted. Consequently, he cheated with a clear conscience. He considered himself a dying breed, for how many men were left out there capable of bona fide lust? His infidelity amounted to a moral position. The mustering of that much sheer appetite deserved reward.

  Because MacBride had less fled his fundamentalist upbringing than rounded it off a bit. He did believe in God, but Angus’s God was a decent sort who sometimes looked the other way. He wanted you to have a good time. And He knew the difference between a little carousing and real-life rank shite. Amid so much reeking degeneracy He couldn’t be fussed about your wee departures; in fact, He surely found MacBride’s good-natured box-spring squealing a welcome relief. MacBride’s God was a bit of a lad. MacBride’s God played rugby.

  Angus would acknowledge that his religion was lazy. He went to church because he had to; C of I, but Angus wasn’t particular. He merely aspired to a rough sense of there being an order out there that would take care of itself. Rather than call him to a higher perspective, Angus’s religion dug him happily into the garden of earthly delights. Someone else was looking after the big picture, freeing Angus to call the woman with the tight red skirt into the hallway on some pretext and press her up against the wall.

  Because at some of these Unionist do’s the presence of several attractive women in the room at once brought tears to his eyes. It was a smorgasbord of a feeling, and as the definition of attractive spread with the demise of a bottle, the sensation grew only more uplifting; desire rose in his throat. For one of MacBride’s gifts was seeing what made a woman beautiful—every woman—finding the floozy underneath the wee Presbyterian bow. Why, he’d even felt pulled toward Constance Trower, one plain Jane, and so efficient so she was, so very, very Good at Her Work, so upright and sensible. But he could see that one hand at her breast and she’d collapse like a house of cards.

  Wasn’t that the wonderful thing about women. Sex only made men sturdier and more willful. MacBride was convinced, for example, that his numerous extracurricular activities, within the bounds of strategic discretion, had only improved his political career. But women? Touch the right place in them and they folded up. He loved that one lost sound they made, a mewl of helpless surprise, and boyos, this isn’t when they come; you just have to touch there and they go limp and spill, until the bed is a regular rice paddy. Christ, Angus fucks Roisin and bounces to the carpet for his DBA taping in twenty minutes and Roisin lies there as if she’s been shot.

  Angus gladly pictured himself a predator, all claw and yawn and stretch. He liked being a man, and thought he made a mighty good one; women had told him as much. So how could this paragon of masculinity be left in a scullery feeling so churlish, so girlishly petulant?

  Fine. Maybe he wasn’t spiritual enough. Maybe he shouldn’t let it ruin his afternoon that his whiskey had disappeared and there was nothing to eat and his woman had dandered off lunching instead of bundling into his arms upstairs. And maybe there was something to this I’ll-have-a-piece-of-toast, oh-no-I-shouldn’t, want-won’t. Maybe a hungry, thirsty, randy afternoon had freed him into the deeper folds of tempest-torn introspection; maybe the way was now cleared to face down the stark eloquence of a crust of bread and a white square of paper—the prime advocate of which, of course, wasn’t Roisin St. Clair at all.

  Such an ancient opposition; Angus had to smile. The great galumphing hunter versus the clever but obsessively self-scrutinizing prey, a creature so complete that he will not only elude your chase but lay your traps for you; better, his own. Farrell O’Phelan. Yo
u are so much your own worst enemy that I have sometimes resented you most for making me feel superfluous. We could put you alone in a room and come back the next day and you’d have neatly skinned yourself and hung yourself to dry with the guts in a pail in the corner, the blood squeegeed down the drain, the floor swabbed, the rag rinsed and wrung and hooked on the door.

  The polarity went long and perfectly back. Sure, in school Farrell and Angus had both been highfliers, three-A-grade material, but MacBride’s intelligence was so much more direct. He’d never had any problem seizing an argument and mercilessly supporting it. O’Phelan wormed around it, and though he’d follow through on the kill, in private he flirted with the other side—in fact, you could be sure that no matter what the lad claimed, he was secretly more attracted to saying the opposite. O’Phelan’s sentences wove down the page like macramé, all to worry some niggling distinction that made zero difference in anyone’s life, while MacBride’s essays were short and punchy, with tight, muscular phrasing and relentlessly practical points of view. As a result, the kid now made a reasonable lecturer, since he could squirrel about a subject while the audience made cootie detectors from their programs, but he’d be a nightmare as a frontline politician; Angus was a genius. You wouldn’t think it would take talent, now would you, to be able to say something in particular and then shut up?

  But the harpoon of Angus MacBride versus the coil of Farrell O’Phelan—the dichotomy had extended to everything. Food, for example: O’Phelan didn’t like to eat as a kid. Or he did—and he didn’t—he did. Something queer. Whereas Angus: did. Full stop. Hungry-eat. Or girls: Farrell would skulk around corners and fixate on some brunette in sixth form who passed by every afternoon at 3:45. And funnily enough, he didn’t pick out the poor, shy, misunderstood sort, the awkward artistic variety who might recognize a kindred outcast. Rather, he went for confident, garrulous, pretty girls with lots of friends. Angus had found this hilarious, since that was the very definition of the girls O’Phelan couldn’t get. Why would such a plum choose a tongue-tied asthmatic? Even so, what did O’Phelan do? Zilch. Oh, he probably wrote about the poppet, though not to her. Why, he wouldn’t even discuss his fancies, and when Angus ribbed him like any reasonable schoolboy, Farrell shot him the most acidic eyes. A violently private boy who never, in MacBride’s memory, got a single one of those gregarious lovelies to so much as hold his hand.

  Angus, now—he’d tried to teach Farrell at the time. You like? You take. Any idea the number of women who will say yes just because you asked? MacBride got an itch for a girlie one day, he was on her doorstep the next. She said no (oh, rarely), sod her. By the end of the week he’d be off cuffoffling with someone else. Sure, some were sweeter or smarter or more—adventurous; but they weren’t that different, especially when you actually talked to them instead of ogling from the other side of the street. But O’Phelan would iconify the lass—it was so pathetically Catholic.

  One thing they had in common was a preference for the other side of the fence. It was O’Phelan who’d admitted he liked Protestant girls’ legs; their knees weren’t all red and mashed from kneeling on wooden rails. More seriously, Farrell must have liked in them the same directness he found in MacBride—their simple Protestant laughter, with no hand over the teeth; the square posture of possessors; the sway of a ruling class that knew want-get rather than want-can’t have. Anyone so tangled inside must have drooled at all that clarity—good grades, combed hair, clean nails. For the last thing O’Phelan would scan bus stops for would be more agony.

  As for MacBride, he’d found Catholic girls more of a challenge, and once the Troubles set in, this predilection transformed into all-out derring-do.

  Then, Farrell’s failings with the ladies might have had less to do with sect than looks. He was tall, but that was the end of it—all limb. His sleeves left three inches of wrist to chap in the winter wind; his trousers never reached the top of his socks, so you could see how his legs had hardly any hair. Farrell’s joints were loose and audibly creaked; his frame hung like a marionette, sticks on strings. The eyes weren’t extruded exactly, but too wide-open. His hair was out of control. The cringe of shyness was almost feminine. Farrell’s whole atmosphere was hysterical: he looked from side to side too often, moved abruptly and unpredictably, breathed too fast—asthma. His complexion periodically boiled. At any rate, if Angus had been a girl he’d have avoided O’Phelan. Even if Farrell wasn’t exactly hideous, he did look strange.

  Angus, on the other hand, was handsome. Beamingly, boyishly handsome, with a physical symmetry about him that suggested a stability of a larger sort. He had broad shoulders and a grizzly chest, short legs but otherwise perfect proportions, rich brown eyes that always looked at something rather than simpering off into oblivion. Angus imagined he would have made a fine World War I soldier, for he had a body made for uniforms, well cornered, erect, the kind PM’s could successfully truss up in support of stupid, romantic causes, and somehow the very beauty and rhythm and material logic of the vision would inspire them to plant it squarely in range of a trench mortar. Angus was made for propaganda. Even now, a stone or two heavy and a few too many jolly nights on, he profiled well in papers and looked forceful on video.

  So that was it? Ruddy, upright, popular Protestant, good at sports and trailed by the ladies, takes awkward yet bright Catholic introvert under wing, to teach him social skills and encourage his fledgling intellectual powers, to instill the confidence that has braced the Protestant from childhood? Right? And how admirable, even before ’68, to cross the divide at all, much less to befriend such a sickly social millstone after one lucky lunatic interschool chess match! What magnanimity Angus must have displayed, and sure Farrell looks back on those years with tearful gratitude for the loyalty of a boy with no need to hamper his otherwise impeccable social stats!

  An attractive version which, at the moment, thanks to Roisin, Angus did not have the chemical resources to indulge himself in.

  O’Phelan should have been grateful, blast it! Och no, he flat out refused the first several of MacBride’s invitations. Albert O’Schweitzer apparently had some elaborate schedule of duties and penances to perform. He was an altar boy, had a pathological relation to his schoolwork, and at any given time would be carrying on twenty chess games by mail with players all over the world. Further, he always kept a board in his bedroom, where he played against himself, and later MacBride sorted out that it was this game that absorbed the best of O’Phelan’s attention. It was certainly the game that made MacBride—jealous.

  So finally the saintly consumptive from Glengormley deigned to spend the afternoon with this suspiciously healthy footballer from Ballynafeigh, with his earthly ambitions and terrifying rapacity. The relationship started out as no ball of fire, either. They played chess, and Farrell acted bored. Between moves he would walk back to his own board and contemplate the real game. Angus smoldered. He was having a hard time getting hold of this acrobatic chess style, which never seemed to settle into recognizable gambits. And he was not used to any boy not falling over backward to ingratiate. So it must have been about the tenth afternoon, when Farrell was particularly ill behaved, sighing, standing up, looking down at the game from a condescending angle, picking up his pieces at their very tips and moving quickly as if fearful this lower level of play would contaminate him if he held it too long. Angus, however, had been watching, and after each afternoon had gone home and studied his blunders. He’d begun to discover that underneath some of these capricious moves of Farrell’s lurked routine strategies. Either the sideshow aberrations were a deliberate diversion or Farrell himself didn’t have the education to recognize the essentially mundane nature of his play; it was theater either way, which Angus now ignored to play the center ring. He traded off some pieces and cleaned up the board. He would never forget the look on Farrell’s face—so repulsively pimply then—when he first glanced down at the game, his expression prepared with the usual yawning disdain, when he suddenly noticed he was losing
. Not just starting to lose, but—in fact—Farrell sat down for once—in fact—He put his chin in his hands and sussed out his position. After five minutes he looked back up at Angus, there is no question, for the first time. Absolutely: the face that stared across that toppled king wore the look of someone who has just found a total stranger in his bedroom and who wonders how on earth this young man got here and how long he has been sitting there and why hasn’t he introduced himself before. Farrell nodded, once, and smiled. Oh, it wasn’t a happy smile; don’t mistake Farrell for one of these sorts “just looking for a worthy opponent,” don’t imagine he was glad. Farrell hated being beaten, long his common denominator with Angus MacBride. Still, he held out his hand, and though the shake was weak, now Angus officially existed. It was no way to win Farrell’s heart, mind you, but the best way to get his attention was to whoop his arse.

  Somehow, in the gluttony that characterized MacBride from a small child, Angus felt Farrell had something he didn’t and he was determined to get it. Like, when Farrell got excited, little apoplectic splotches rose to his cheeks and his hands went spastic. Angus just got louder, where Farrell would often lose his voice. What in all that did Angus want? Because whatever it was, he had still not gotten it; Farrell was holding out.

  Angus had gone after it with a vengeance. MacBride continued to trounce Farrell at chess, getting only more solid, more methodic, better planned. To the Catholic’s credit, Farrell threw no tantrums, cut the glancing down at the board and walking away, sat still and intense but polite and lost. And then he would get Angus tea and biscuits, and they would talk about Kant.