Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “Your head’s a marley,” said Callaghan.

  “Luchann alaibh, Michael,” said Damien, kicking Callaghan and jerking his head toward Clive. “Ta Americanle. Ar freisin drinkoine. Te understandua, eejiteanna?”

  “Ach, right! Ard fheis! Ard Chomhairle! Bus Eirreann!”

  “Chucky arla. Slantia ceili an phoblacht.”

  “MacStoafain o’muillior sinn feín! Fianna fail fine gael charlie haughey RTE. Clannad gay burn aer lingus. Yeats! GAA! Och! Um, och …”

  At one time the Green Door’s loos were labeled in Irish, but the signs had to be changed because the customers kept going in the wrong bog.

  Quickly the crowd circled around Clive and his microcassette recorder, graciously conceding to speak in English for the sake of their guest.

  Callaghan began a tale, turning the white scar on his temple toward Clive. “It’s after midnight, right. Out for a stroll all by myself like, and I look about and fuck me pink! if I’m not in the dead center of Sandy Row. Murals of King Billy and memorials to John McMichael swirling round my head, glossy photos of Princess Di gooning through in every window, red, white, and blue scuffing up my trainers. So I flip right off my chump—”

  “Ends up in Sandy Row by accident, do you follow?” Shearhoon nudged Clive. “And lived here all his life? Sure the American here could have steered you clear of the hole, Michael.”

  “And I find myself shouting,” Callaghan proceeded, not to have his story undermined. “Black Fenian bastards—!”

  “Doesn’t make any sense, lad,” Shearhoon intruded again. “Black Fenian bastards?”

  “I was half mad with discrimination in this vicious sectarian police state.”

  “Half tore, more likely,” Damien muttered.

  Clive pressed his recorder forward. “Do you experience regular infringement on your civil rights?”

  “Does the Pope shit in the woods?” asked Callaghan. “Are bears Catholic?”

  Clive looked confused.

  “So before I know what I’m about,” Callaghan went on, “out hunkers a pack of fifteen-stone Proddies—”

  “Och, sure you got them out of bed!”

  “Duffed me up drastic. So naturally, after getting patched at the Royal, I report my misadventure to your local champions of justice, right? Fill out the peelers’ bleeding forms. Nip round to the NIO in the morning. Sue for lack of police protection. Well routine.”

  Shearhoon’s eyes narrowed. “That red Toyota out front—?”

  Callaghan jingled the keys for all to see.

  “Fucking hell!” moaned Damien. “How much?”

  “Five thousand quid,” said Michael modestly.

  “You sly old shitpot, you!”

  “I seem to recall,” noted Shearhoon, “you whinging for a car before your misadventure, do you follow?”

  “Now, what did you shout exactly?” Damien tugged at Callaghan’s shirt. “What street?”

  “I don’t get it,” Clive interrupted.

  “Restitution,” Shearhoon explained. “For sectarian violence. The Brits have a rating system, d’you know? Set quid per broken bone.”

  “Stitches,” Callaghan announced, “pay top dosh.”

  “But that’s …” Clive calculated, “eight thousand dollars!”

  “Not bad for a night’s work, eh?” Callaghan winked. Everyone in the club was very proud of him.

  Estrin had hitherto kept her mouth shut to hide her accent, the way some women avoid smiling to disguise bad teeth. At last she couldn’t resist. “I read the other day that, in the last eight years, out of all the suits against the U.K. for tripping over loose paving stones, 98 percent were from Northern Ireland. Twenty thousand claims. In one district, like, sixty homes made up for a hundred and fifty stumbles.”

  “Aye,” commiserated Shearhoon. “The state of the footpaths in this town is desperate.”

  “The crown forces maintain roads only for troop transports,” Callaghan pointed out. “They couldn’t be arsed over footpaths.”

  “Up to thirteen claims in a single family,” said Estrin. “So maybe it’s not the sidewalks, Michael. Whole families of spastics. I’ve met a few.”

  “Och, up the road from me,” Damien volunteered, “a lad prized up one of them stones to throw at the Brits. His ma steps out to fetch him in and falls in the hole, see? Breaks her arm. Sues. Two thousand quid.”

  “Beautiful,” whistled Callaghan.

  Now Estrin had betrayed herself, Clive launched predictably into the whole where-are-you-from. On hearing Estrin lived on Springfield Road, he sighed. “Queen’s found me an apartment off Malone. It’s very nice,” he despaired. “But gosh. You must get searched by the army and everything.”

  “Only once,” she consoled him. “They were surprisingly polite.”

  “Do the Provos give you a hard time? Hijack your car, take over your house?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I figure they know I’m there; it’s a small place. But a little five-foot-two foreigner doesn’t seem to worry them much. If you know anything about Provos, you assume they won’t take me seriously because I’m a girl.”

  “Has stuff, you know, gone off?”

  “Well, there’s an RUC station across the way that gets petrol-bombed a lot—” She cut herself off, because she couldn’t bear people who bragged about bombs. “But otherwise it’s quiet. You go shopping, you put up with the Brits, it’s—just poor. Mostly it’s very poor. Excuse me.” She ducked behind the bar to slice lemon for G&T’s no one had ordered. She didn’t want to be seen talking to Clive very long.

  Luckily Duff took over, and Estrin rolled her eyes. Iowa! Back home they were aghast: Belfast. When on Malone Road you could as well live in Scarsdale—hardwoods, big brick houses, boisterous Presbyterians washing their cars. In one of those mysterious bodies that managed to be both scrawny and overweight at the same time, Clive leaned forward and dipped his head with bovine regularity. When patrons insulted him, he never looked hurt or angry but only the more interested. That Midwestern nasality twanged in her ear like a badly tuned guitar. No doubt he had Irish ancestors, and arrived with the usual prepared Republican sympathies, the whole tatty anti-imperialist Tinkertoy mock-up she got enough of at the Green Door and could not abide in Americans—

  Estrin was not sure what did it, what turned. Duff’s arm was still around Clive’s shoulders, and the Iowan was buried gratefully in the huge staypuff armpit as in a beanbag chair. Shearhoon had been one of the first people she’d met in Belfast, during those long three months waiting for a black virus to show itself, avoiding men for once for their sakes, living in a bombed-out house with the ceiling caved in. How grateful she, too, had been for the snuggery of Shearhoon, the way he had hugged her just like that but never with the suggestion of a pickup, not only because he was a middle-aged fat man and she was pretty, but because he couldn’t be bothered; why, undressing must have taken Duff an hour or more. How much he preferred to order her a “hot black Bush” and wink, to take her touring West Belfast in his sputtery hatchback, which the joyriders had so far ignored because it was too ridiculous to be seen in—fluffy furred seat-covers with tiger stripes. It smelled of dog and Duff didn’t have one.

  For it was Duff put her on to the Green Door, Duff helped her wrangle with the Housing Executive for 133, reminding Estrin that she had successfully negotiated foreign countries all over the world not only from self-reliance but because someone had always been nice to her at the start. And here she was avoiding Clive Barclay like a bowel-bypass bag.

  Didn’t Estrin know better than anyone how hard it was to travel as an American? Inside it, the United States may stretch from the New York island to the country highlands, but a quick ocean away the country shrinks to a coffin, in which the rest of the world will bury you. Oh, they know so much about you—your race problems, your swimming pools. Sure, when the crack is slack, you can always pick on the Yanks—their trumpeting laugh, their hot-apple-pie flab. How often had her foreign compani
ons looked straight at Estrin’s dark solid cottons and complained about Americans’ loud polyester clothes? For soft as your speech, local as your larder, you will never defy the facts: you have a belting voice and you feast on croissantwiches. You have money but no class, good distribution but no culture. You have no sense of history. You shower incessantly; you are obsessed with flush toilets; you have good teeth. You are right-wing. You may have gone to Yale, but your schools have no standards, so while you surely have strong, unfounded convictions about Afghanistan, you picture the country somewhere off the coast of East Africa. You are boastful. You will confide the most intimate details of your personal life to strangers. Your loyalty is easily won, but just as easily lost. You have a Cadillac smile, and when you invite the natives to your home in America you don’t mean it. You travel largely to collect objects and to confirm opinions already in trim by the time you leave Kennedy. Experience is one more object, of no value unless you save it on film and can therefore show off Armalite-riddled Republican murals to your friends in Coralville. You are fascinated with violence but fundamentally unacquainted with the real thing; you imagine blood comes in bottles like ketchup, and when a shoot-out is over everyone wipes up and orders carry-out fajitas. You think the world is one big Epcot Center got up for your entertainment. Since you do not know real pain, they can mock you with impunity. You do bleed ketchup. This is the box. It’s smaller than a coffin, really—closer to the size of a TV.

  While Estrin scavenged the world for extravagant Scots, crybaby Englishmen, slovenly Germans, fair-minded white South Africans, and Jewish mothers who won’t feed you a damn thing, there was a generosity she was willing last of all to tender her own ken. With a father who gave a third of his moderate salary to the ACLU and Amnesty International and still felt guilty for indulging himself with a pint of expensive ice cream, Estrin had packed off with her inheritance of liberal shame, an apologist for her nation, racing to deprecate her people before strangers like a Wild West quick draw. After ten years of beating by joining, Estrin had become the worst of the lot. Estrin Lancaster was anti-American.

  “Here.” She put a double J.D.-on-the-rocks down in front of Clive. “Compliments of Philadelphia.” She smiled, Cadillacwide.

  As her own easy derision of Clive Barclay haunted her the whole next week, she grew obsessed with the idea that everyone was making fun of her behind her back. Estrin’s mere presence in Belfast read as voyeurism to most, and maybe it was. When she mentioned attending the funeral of the Gibraltar victims attacked by Michael Stone, she noticed how locals glanced at each other and smiled. And weren’t you tickled pink there was trouble. Didn’t the pock-pock of those grenades shiver your pretty neck? Bastard’s trying to kill us and to you it’s a merit badge, a story on the phone. You cow. Why did you even go if you think Republicanism is so empty? Looking to get shot at? Grow up. The rest of us are ducking while you’re taking snapshots. And Belfast after Jerusalem, the Philippines, Berlin—hadn’t Farrell called her a “conflict groupie,” and wasn’t that as justified as lambasting Clive for his swish Iowa haven on Malone Road? Wasn’t her own choice of Clonard, smack on the Peace Line, far more comic? Estrin felt tacky. When she worked out in the Queen’s gym, she felt less the disciplined athlete than one more skinny single in her thirties, sweating off cellulite, afraid of getting old. The Moto Guzzi seemed ostentatiously tough, the rev of her throttle a show of bravado from the small. Her own vowels skirled in her ears; she virtually stopped talking. For she could hear how often her jokes were flat, her politics simplistic, her tales tattered from repetition and transparently self-serving. Even ordering farls in O’Hara’s, Estrin read in the baker’s eyes, Another American, titillated, and Estrin skeltered out, fumbling with the door, pushing when she should have pulled. She skulked after work to her house on Springfield Road, crunching around the carcasses of burned overturned lorries, thinking, Wouldn’t Daddy approve—slumming with the underprivileged. Then, admit it, you really could wire home for money in a jam. This is playacting, Strapped Like Me; is there anything more bourgeois? All that travel seemed suddenly rootless and grasping. Meanwhile, the bulge of pints and the bars of the Multigym warped her reflection; the Guzzi’s tailpipe pitted her face with bits of missing chrome; the round pushover cheeks bloated upside down in spoons.

  By the end of the week she was so withered by her own condescension that Damien asked if she’d lost weight. At work she mumbled and was often asked to repeat the tab. She did not banter. It was Duff Shearhoon’s pillow of a palm that raised her chin. “Why so tucked in, little one?”

  She sighed. “I feel preposterous.”

  “Brilliant!” Shearhoon beamed around the club. “You’ll fit right in.”

  Give me a break is an American expression. Her impatience with prepackaged socialism aside, many of these men had been kicked and jeered at as scrotes by the British Army, searched and detained just for being Catholic, refused the right to take a leak or get a drink of water for hours, and while a lot of the abuse was minor, it added up, and it was often the little things that got you; surely at one time or another they had all gone home red in the face from their spread-eagle in Castlereagh, vowing to get the bastards back. It was a big leap from there to the IRA and Estrin wouldn’t make it in her most understanding of days, but she could see the jump was short on Whiterock Road. For everyone in the bar that night broke Estrin’s heart. Somehow Estrin had spent two hours or something talking to Clive all about his parents’ farm, one of the last small concerns left in the state. She’d had him describe the outbuildings and his mother’s cotton print housedresses and the tongue sandwiches in his school lunches when he was eight—

  It was all inconceivable now that she had somehow roped herself into introducing the guy to the Linen Hall Library this morning, another chilly parting with Farrell behind her and all her generosity and goodheartedness out the window. She saw Clive standing on the steps, a dowdy American grad student losing his hair young, looking all smiles and surely expecting Estrin to still be this friendly Philadelphian flat out riveted by what he’d fed his cows. She glowered. Clive was boring.

  Clive began admiring how lovely she looked in a dress; she cut him off with “Well, get the flattery in now, you won’t see this often,” and swept up the stoop. Clive trailed after her, bewildered.

  The library calmed the girl somewhat. Like Whitewells, its wide banisters, thick tables, and embracing dark-green chairs suggested resort, as if there were some place on earth that was safe. Walls of hardcovers implied comfortingly that there really was something to say. Of course, it would take only one strategic brown paper package left at the desk to put a hole in that one—stray pages, music sheets, overdue notices fluttering over Central Arcade. But today Estrin let the library lie to her: there was such a thing as wisdom and order. If you had a problem you could look it up and have it all explained to you; chaos was misunderstanding. If the world seemed askew outside these enormous, mahogany-framed windows, you had done inadequate research.

  When Estrin said Politics the librarian bloomed and said, “You mean the Troubles collection!” in the same voice she would have directed the girl to Curious George Goes to School. Soon a gangling young man with punked red hair and hoop earrings swung down the aisle singing The Pogues. “Right.” He clapped his hands and took them to the attic, where book piles and looseleafs burgeoned between stacks. “So what’s this thesis about, then?” he asked Clive.

  “The Troubles,” said Clive.

  The librarian, Robin O’Baoigheallain, listened patiently on the edge of his desk. When nothing more was forthcoming, he prodded, “Right, go on.”

  Clive’s eyes panicked the close-packed room. “You know—Protestants and Catholics … just the last twenty years, of course. The … Troubles.”

  Robin roared. He slapped his thighs. He dabbed the corners of his eyes. The Americans waited for the curator to recover. “Kid,” he wheezed, “our first-formers do better than that. This whole floor is the Troubles. Y
ou’d as well write a paper on the Planet, A.D.”

  “B.C.,” said Estrin. “Neanderthal man.”

  “American?” he noted.

  “We’re everywhere. And yes, I’m being condescending. I get tired of finding this petty feud so interesting. Of being so careful and understanding and conceding the complexities. Sometimes this place makes me sick. Your collection”—she nodded—“makes me sick.”

  “Aye,” said Robin. “Me as well. But it’s brilliant still, what we’ve got here. I can show you about. It’s fuckin’ brilliant.”

  It was brilliant: cases full of Ulster Volunteer Force mufflers, UDA sweatbands, Ulster Say’s No coffee mugs, No Pope Here buttons, Orange Order tea towels; full-color Republican resistance calendars, hunger-strike postcards, Sinn Feín daily diaries, tiny gold Armalites for the lapel—though, Robin noted, a few of their own punters had complained that maybe Sinn Feín might take the Armalites off their Christmas cards. Both sides had contributed an array of cassettes, from We Hate the IRA to Irish Republican Jail Songs, with three-color printed labels and professional recordings of “The Extradition Song,” “The Sniper’s Promise,” “Proud to Be a Prod.” The funeral of Larry Marley, attacked by the RUC in 1987, was now out in video.

  Robin explained that every week somewhere in the world a book was published on the Troubles, and the attic was running out of space, the skirmish raw material for the voracious industry of intellection: Nation, Class, and Creed in Northern Ireland; Vogt: Konfessionskrieg in Nordirland?; Guerre Civile en Irlande; La Rumeur irlandaise … Surely Linen Hall stashed the final triumph of imperialism, where academics from Oxford and Harvard would do their stint in the hinterlands, to poke and take notes as if the whole Province had become an obliging laboratory, its factions performing diseases. For the parties obliged—eager for attention, both Sinn Feín and the UDA promptly delivered issues of Combat, Welcome to Fascist Ulster pamphlets, and Ard fheis agendas by the box every month, anxious to be recorded, sonorous in their responsibility to History, here a somewhat cheapened Muse who mythologized tragedies overnight: if IRA volunteers were murdered in November, their ballad would be out on cassette to meet the Christmas rush. In an economy where DeLorean’s cars rusted in ignominy north of town and Harland and Wolff’s once great shipyard came so near folding for lack of work that Protestants and Catholics were actually marching off to Margaret Thatcher together, History was Ulster’s last viable export, churned out and cartoned off, volunteers packed into caskets like so much soap. Weary of foreign hyenas picking over his stacks for scintillating tidbits to beef up yet another manuscript, it was little wonder that when Clive chimed, “I thought of maintaining this isn’t a religious but a tribal war … and that the Protestants suffer the same siege mentality of the Afrikaaner …” Robin only winced.