Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Little by little both people and objects popped from the room. The only thing in the universe which never disappeared, not for an instant, was the gun. In the end he clung to it, as a focus, until on into the thirtieth, fortieth Farrell O’Phelan he found a funny love for the weapon, as his sole purchase on why this was happening, why his own name had been parted syllable from syllable: Farrell was still alive, but his name had been shot.

  At last tiring of the game, Callaghan licked his lips and glanced at his companions. “Yeah,” he drawled, “that’s what we thought.”

  The Rips rolled in hilarity. They were soused.

  “And why are you paying us a call?” asked Callaghan politely. “Mr. O’Fanlon?”

  “To invite you to form a Provisional cell,” Farrell mumbled.

  “Well, aren’t we chuffed.”

  “We’re chuffed,” said another.

  “Bleedin chuffed,” said Callaghan. “But tell me, Farjet—and I can call you Farjet, can’t I?”

  “I suppose you can call me anything you like.”

  Callaghan smiled. “Right you are, Farthing. But why’d the Provies call you in, O’Phallus?”

  “It was agreed both sides mistrusted me to an equal degree. It seems there was a miscalculation.”

  “Getting to be a regular poli sci butterfly, aren’t we, O’Fairy? ’Cause we heard about your conference, like. But how’s it happen the RIP weren’t invited? We’re hurt, mate—freakin psychiatric from neglect.”

  “Only the major parties—”

  “Now watch yourself, Fartlett. You wouldn’t want us to get insulted, like.”

  Farrell just sighed.

  “Frank, call your man a taxi. He’s a busy, important gentleman. Has places to be. As for you, O’Failing, tell your Provisional friends they can stuff their wee songs and codes of conduct and endless bloody boring pamphlets about Bobby Sands right up the arse. And if I was you, I’d get that suit cleaned. Such a class pair of trousers, a shame to muss them up like that. You smell something, Frank?”

  “I smell shite, Mikey.”

  “I do too, Frank.”

  Farrell turned white.

  “What’d you say your name was?” The barrel nuzzled his temple affectionately. “Farwell?”

  The taxi took its time.

  When Farrell tottered back downstairs, Callaghan had to hold his arm to help him walk. His knees trembled. Even beside the taxi and more or less safe, Farrell did not turn and fire a Make my day. In fact, for the whole night he had not cut a single smart remark.

  A Rip leaned out the window overhead and screamed into the night, “How do they call you now?”

  Squeezing the trigger of the door handle, the gaunt man in his wilted pinstripe answered unexpectedly back. “O’Phelan!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Farrell O’Phelan!” For the first time in two hours that sounded like someone he had heard of before.

  In the taxi, he crawled into the corner and pressed his knees together, slipping his hands beneath his jacket to hold his own chest. Feebly he groped for insights. It struck him, for example, that the interrogation technique the RIP used was copied straight from Long Kesh. Further, he wondered with the amount of instant power it conferred why every sod with twenty quid didn’t carry a gun. More to the point, why didn’t he? And Farrell caught himself on: frankly, if Callaghan had asked his name saying pretty please, holding out a sweet, or palming a tenner, he would have refused to speak; before a pointed pistol he had answered. So for all his decrying of violence to well-behaved Trinity audiences, Farrell had neglected to mention one little problem: It works.

  All these thoughts straggled with the wet coils of his hair. He did not have the energy to find any of this interesting. The most persuasive insight he took from Newry that night was that insights counted for bugger-all.

  He had the driver stop in Hillsborough at a public house and went straight for the loo. He had not soiled himself since he was seven years old, but found the shame identical. He was surprised to find the damage minor; then, the feel of your own excrement to your bum enlarged itself as a lump in your mouth to your tongue. He used an entire roll of paper to swab himself clean. He left his Y-fronts in the bin.

  At the bar Farrell ordered his first whiskey in six years. “Cheers,” he toasted the publican. “To the mayor of Carmel.”

  All right already!” The pounding grew more insistent. Estrin checked the clock. Jesus, she didn’t think the Brits barged in this early. And the first search, okay, she’d been excited. But Little Miss Adaptable had learned the local irritation with her usual precocity. Douche-bags better not touch the rocking chair; the varnish was still wet. “Cram it, I’m coming!” Estrin bundled down to the door with as much hostility as it was possible to muster out of a dead sleep. That was a fair bit.

  “Bend a hairpin in this house, I’m on the steps of the American Consulate by sunrise!” She flung open the door in mid-thud, and the man behind it shadow-boxed forward. “Farrell!”

  He bungled into the hall, knocking into a table. “Are you plastered or what?”

  Farrell only made soft sounds, snuffling, lowing, breath. He scuffed into her sitting room, but would not sit down. As he kicked at the carpet, his hands spread and swiped at books, a wineglass, as if to fling them, but his fingers swept shy.

  Did it ever take work to get the story.

  “Now let me get this straight,” said Estrin. “They asked you your name—and you told them.”

  “More”—Farrell stared at the ceiling—“than once.”

  “Seems to me you were lucky. If that were the UVF you’d hardly have the leisure to repeat yourself. Just past the apostrophe your brains would have been a Rorschach on wallpaper.”

  “I might have preferred that.”

  “Well, what do you think you should have said?”

  “Fuck. You. That’s what. Fuck. You.”

  “And what would that have proved?”

  “You don’t understand.” Farrell was weeping. “They could have made me do anything. And they knew it.”

  “That’s right.” Estrin took his head in her hands. “And you did real good. Because if they asked you to recite Georgie Porgie with a clock on your head or read Ulysses while standing on one leg and swinging a dead chicken and you did, you’d have done good, too. Sometimes dignity is a luxury you can’t afford. You survived. In the end that’s proud: not letting someone tempt you into throwing your life away. This country is full of people dying for bullshit. That’s not pride. It’s low self-esteem.”

  “You cannot—allow anyone—to humiliate you.”

  “You can’t allow anyone to kill you! If they brought you back here in a trunk because you wouldn’t tell them your name, I’d be humiliated! I’d be embarrassed and I’d be furious! At you, asshole! Would you stop wishing someone would shoot you? Are you really just disappointed that you let another chance go by? Because I”—she kissed him—“I am not disappointed.”

  She’d been concerned he’d not fit on her mattress at six-foot-four, but curled on his side Farrell conformed nicely, tucking his head down, pressing his hands together, and slipping them between his thighs. Such a thin man, he collapsed into convenient luggage, a lover for travelers, like a folding comb or retracting clothesline from a bus station vending machine. In the dim streetlight through the window, the gray hair shone as it had long ago, gold. Most of the men Estrin had slept with sprawled over the bed, territorial, or took her to their chests, protective. Yet this one-man bomb squad, this fast-lane politico, this pinstripe T.E. slept like a child.

  She stroked his head. “Over the top,” she whispered, when sure he was asleep. He wasn’t, and they both smiled.

  chapter fourteen

  Negaphobia, and Why Farrell Doesn’t Do Windows

  Farrell woke convinced he was still in Newry. He had stopped answering their questions not from defiance but from weariness. He wasn’t brave; he just didn’t care. Apathy is another form of cowardice. They were going to shoot
him, and Farrell could only roll over and sigh.

  But the room was too clean. Where was he? The walls were white; the cornice and window frame British racing green; muslin curtains. Narrow, the only other furniture a white dresser and white cane chair, the bedroom suggested a ship’s cabin, or maybe a little cottage by the sea, the kind you could track sand in and no one would carp. He liked the idea he could walk out the door to comb for driftwood, though where did he get that picture? Farrell didn’t take holidays.

  Up on his elbows, he looked over to find Ophelia beside him, drowning in her fecund greens. One of his office prints. He was being followed.

  He smelled coffee and toast. Downstairs he found Estrin on a ladder in the kitchen, hair bound up, draped in a big splattered button-down in which she looked unreasonably attractive. He watched her caulk a seam of Sheetrock. “You’re handy with that,” he observed.

  “Physical competence,” she declared with a voice that argued she’d been up for hours, “is the beginning of every other kind. I mean, look at that.” She pointed to a table slapped over with streaky green paint of a shade that managed to be both garish and dour. “You wouldn’t want to have a jar with the man who chose that color. You wouldn’t want to get in the car of a man who couldn’t tape edges straight or who let big drips dry down the legs of his furniture. Get a character to paint a table and I could tell you if you should lend him money or trust his version of what happened yesterday. In short, I wouldn’t give two bits for anyone who couldn’t spackle a flush nail hole.”

  “And I wouldn’t give a tuppenny damn for anyone who couldn’t find a good spackler to do it for him.”

  “You can afford to say that. You have money.”

  “I have means. If I hadn’t come into Whitewells, I’d have dug up something else. Means are all. You overvalue the minion.”

  “Naturally. I am one. Coffee?”

  Farrell wandered with his cup to the sitting room. The paint was fresh, the carpet new. Here, too, projects—stripped chairs, electric sanders, wallpaper rolls. Traces, too, of travel—Buchladen Ostertor matches, Israeli earplugs, flamingo feathers. Snapshots of dark men by empty liquor bottles. This was more ulteriority than he was prepared for this morning. The woman was incoherent: a weight-lifting motorcyclist from Philadelphia; a cook from the Philippines; a drug counselor from Berlin; a night-shift overseer for an Israeli plastic boots factory; a barmaid in Belfast … She was a dilettante. This morning he settled for one word.

  He drifted to her books, expecting Cal, Juno and the Paycock, The Uncivil Wars. Instead, he found All Quiet on the Western Front, Good-bye to All That, The Great War and Modern Memory, The Road to the Somme.

  “I suppose it makes perfect sense,” he shouted, “that you’d come all the way to Belfast to read about World War I.”

  “It does, actually.” She strolled in, paring plaster from her nails. “Grotesque, unnecessary, protracted—like a joke no one knew how to end, so it just kept going, shaggy dog. Big parallels. For years I avoided the First World War because it disturbed me. Now I like being disturbed. I’m beyond World War II. It’s too easy. Auschwitz, Baden-Baden—Yes, there’s evil: that comforted me a long time. Now I suspect the clarity. World War II lulls generations of Allies into believing that when the time comes the path of righteousness will be marked with the neon arrows of a Holiday Inn sign. In Germany, you get the feeling it will be just as badly marked as the way to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen memorials are now—tiny little signs, in neat, embarrassed printing, smaller and more obscure than directions to Toiletten. I’ve had it with goodies and baddies. I’m more fascinated by bungling and murk.” She nodded at the window. “Trees without forest.”

  “What trees?” He smiled.

  “The thing I really love about the trenches”—Estrin paused for a lungful of turpentine, varnish, and wet paint, white smells, tingling with evaporation and disguise; the whole house exuded this odor of opportunity, an American smell, as if you really could start over—“is the way soldiers would run into each other, like, having just shared a Dixie of tea a few hours before? They’d embrace! They’d clap their buddies on the back and cry. They’d congratulate each other, just for being alive. Because I can’t figure why I don’t meet everyone I know like that, every day. Presumably they could all walk out their front doors in the next ten minutes and get run over by trucks. Because the whole planet is a trench, isn’t it? With trucks.”

  Farrell didn’t want her to say anything funny or interesting or intelligent. Estrin was a diversion. You didn’t store heavy cargo on the side or your hull would list, so Estrin had to be kept light. He found himself glancing at her from the corners of his eyes, so that for moments she would comfortably disappear. He didn’t move much or abruptly, lest the house capsize.

  “Russian?” A grammar splayed on the couch.

  “Da, eta moya kniga. Soviet Union’s the next adventure. Takes advance prep. Those six cases are the living bitch.”

  The fog of his waking was not burning off. Farrell felt lost, his fingers held from his trousers, extended, balancing. “I don’t understand. You’re going away?”

  “Farrell—I’m always going away.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. End of the year, early in the next. I don’t want to zip off to Leningrad until I get a grip on the genitive plural.”

  “But that’s—eight months from now. Why paint your kitchen?”

  “I do this everywhere, don’t you get it? My flat in Jerusalem was exquisite by the time I left. Oriental carpets, Armenian pottery.”

  “Seems a waste of effort.”

  “No, I enjoy it. Besides, I sell at a profit and finance my next plane ticket. And most people assume I’m one of the last great anti-materialists. Hardly. The first week I arrive in a new country I’ve bought a potato peeler, a corkscrew. Week two, a dish drainer, a spatula. I suppose if I ever stayed long enough I’d end up with a microwave and wiener cooker just like everyone else. Actually, I love things. If I didn’t, leaving whole furnished flats behind wouldn’t have that satisfying sting.”

  “What about people?”

  “I make fast friends. I fall in love. I flee.”

  He felt it again, the wave of exhaustion this small woman cost him. Again the itchy temptation to cheat, to merely find her amusing. “But if leaving gets too easy,” he groped, “are you not skivving now? No career, no children? At the end of the day, is the challenge not to stay?”

  She smiled, victorious. “Do I miss my guess, or are you usually on the other side of this discussion?”

  Farrell felt tricked. “Quite.”

  “Besides …” she ruminated. “I’m terrified of dish drainers.”

  She didn’t need to explain. Himself, Farrell didn’t own one, that’s how scared he was. He ate out for every meal; he never fried an egg or even made fresh coffee. Despite the security risk, he’d a girl come in to clean. If his sheets were tatty, Farrell uttered a furtive, peripheral grunt; Constance would shop. The bedding arrived on his desk in an unmarked bag. As for laundry (The horror. The horror—), Farrell bundled it into Whitewells every week, and though he’d admit this was more bother than buying his own machine, Farrell would go to a great deal of trouble to seem to be saving it. He had once lit out on an electronics spree, in an orgy of labor-saving devices, but later could not reduce himself to picking them up from the shop. They remained, he supposed, in the back of CVC in boxes. Since, the picture had comforted him: how absentminded he was, how above this world. More truthfully, he had not forgotten them at all. It was simply worth more to him to nurse this vision of neglect than to face the computer he would have to learn to use, the stack-system CD that would force him to have tastes in music and very possibly threaten him with the specter of enjoying himself. As he could hardly send Constance out for suits, he bought all his clothes at the same shop in London once a year, staging a carnival of credit cards and clerks. In the extravagance of buying out the whole department in extra-longs, he
transformed this soilingly ordinary outing into an expedition salesmen would report to their children that night—into an event worthy of Farrell O’Phelan, drama from the squalor of shirts.

  Domestic allergy helped explain why he loved not only Whitewells but all hotels—their impersonality, their cleanliness, their attention to his needs. Whitewells was a mother who never made Farrell eat his sprouts.

  Besides, jealously as he guarded its location, he didn’t feel comfortable in his own home. Maybe he’d made a mistake getting it redecorated. The idea had been once more to get proles to contend with the sordid home life—God forbid he should be discovered in a Donaldson & Lyttle’s shopping for throw rugs. The result, however, was more estrangement he could ill afford. Already the place had seemed sprawling and a little austere, where he felt bereft and most tempted, unwatched, to nip out for whiskey. But now, with exotic trinkets suggesting trips he’d not taken, enormous bowls he could not fill, seascapes chosen to offend no one and therefore to truly appeal to no one either, Farrell had been redecorated out of his house. He could not find the light switches; he could not work the blinds; he had never figured out if the thing in the bedroom was a liquor cabinet or a hamper. Farrell persuaded himself he’d successfully transformed his bungalow into one more hotel suite, but the place had more the atmosphere of a house he used to live in and had shifted out.

  Fastidious or not, Farrell found his digs most cozy when books and papers nested in every corner, jumpers crumpled in every chair. Even tea stains on the counter, rings on wood—at least these were Farrell’s rings, Farrell’s stains. For inheriting Whitewells, money, had this one deadly effect: at one time his own fear of dish drainers expressed itself with dirty crockery, tottery table legs, bomb-shattered windows he wouldn’t bother to ring the NIO to replace for free, but still expression of a kind. With Whitewells, though, he could afford to hire Constance to buy his sheets, the hotel to do his laundry. Farrell mused he might be better off rinsing socks himself—for once to be on intimate terms with something.