Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Meanwhile, Farrell still never turned down a speech engagement, for he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to blind one more complacent audience with epiphanies of apocalypse. He could always depress them with visions of murder and division irremediably drizzling on, Irish bad weather. But how much more he relished answering questions about what would happen in the advent of a unilateral British troop withdrawal: rampaging Protestant armies decked out like adverts for Soldier of Fortune; Irish Americans pouring in funds so the Provos finally get their sting missiles and matching uniforms; the South trooping up ineffectually to protect the Catholic minority. Eager to get in on the fray, Scottish and Welsh nationalists rebel; after a hysteria of secession, England is left with the Falkland Islands for holidays. In short, the collapse of the British “Empire.” Farrell liked to proceed from here to the destabilization of the whole Western alliance, but they often ran out of time.

  And maybe Farrell couldn’t say no because he couldn’t overcome the flattery when even the feeblest library asked him over. Why, hundreds of people would sit in a room with their hands in their laps and listen to what he thought. He liked honoraria, even the twenty-dollar check and shamrock tie clasp. He liked to be flown, that luxurious passive tense, just as he liked to be driven in taxis. He liked first class. He liked it in the States, where they routinely introduced him as Dr. O’Phelan. Deplorable not to correct their mistake, but damn it, Farrell had lived on the margins for twenty years and he was due.

  And he was worthy; he would try, harder than anyone had ever tried anything, he would fly anywhere, his exertions more diversified than ever: adding another linking agent to remove him from Callaghan, Farrell continued to negotiate between the Provos and the RIP; he was still raising funds for the conference in America; he crisscrossed the North and the Republic alike to win every stray councilor’s support for his Border Poll; and he still hadn’t lost his more personal touch, arranging sentence reduction for a repentant Loyalist now eager to make TV spots for Confidential Telephone. The time between washing his teeth and reaching for his jangling alarm was now shorter than it took most families to have tea. Yet he never overslept, for the clock was supremely effective—it frightened him. The same cheap Boots make used to time so many of the devices he’d dismantled, its digits big and childish, with the deceiving, conniving face that had lied to him in the Brown Thomas bag, not even wound. Well, it woke him up.

  While Farrell did snatch the odd sausage roll and wrangle an occasional appointment from a pub to a restaurant, he had to face the fact he was more or less living on white wine. Truly the rule about not drinking until 8 p.m. began to blur when you were finishing your third bottle at eight in the morning. But drink was work, intrinsic to Irish negotiation.

  With poor nourishment, wine, the scurry down airport moving sidewalks tripping over bags and children, the storm down the aisles of Boeings to be the first off the plane, it was lack of sleep that slayed him. Now that four hours constituted an indulgence only after neglecting to go to bed altogether, he would wake to find air traffic routes scored under his eyes, trails of exhaust wisping across his forehead, cirrus clouds drifting through his skin. Confronting the mirror shaving became a grim ordeal, acid tributaries eating across his cheeks, his face an aerial photograph of defoliated Vietnam. Farrell’s eyes went gluey; the stagnant pools of his pupils eroded a murky shore. Though he would miss more sleep rather than not bathe, by the end of the day his hair had curled with sweat and thickened with salt, because a day was too long, it was a whole day. Worst of all, that boundary itself gave way, for he slept so little that one day bled borderlessly into the next, and he surprised himself, such an extraordinary intellect dependent for a sense of order on the distinction between Thursday night and Friday morning.

  While he’d once been charmed by his own cognition, now thinking was a tyranny, frantic, uncontrolled. Why, he even bought a Walkman, but even the St. Matthew Passion could not overwhelm the merciless chorus in his head: Call on Devlin at the Maze. The Kesh? The prison “outside Maze.” Never know what to call the bloody place. Matter? Does. Myth. War of Symbols. So the RIP want autonomy. Won’t get it. Unreasonable bastards, will want a bloody dental plan next. Speech at U. Mass Wednesday. “The final victims of effective propaganda are those who put it out.” Tighten. “Propagandists victimize themselves.” Not quite. Title? Entrapment, a title with entrapment. You told the Swallow tea tomorrow, you’ll be in Boston. Cancel, be sure to sound knackered. How could I sound any other way? And ring Derry. Ring Ohio. Ring, ring, ring … Phrases, assertions, plane schedules batted birdlike in his rafters, airy, fluttering, a panic of wings.

  Farrell started breaking things, knocking over his wine. Holding his after-shave one morning at the sink, he simply: let go. The glass smashed into every corner and the smell rose for days, reminding him that he could no longer go on automatic for these most rudimentary of chores. If he picked up a bottle he needed to concentrate: Squeeze your fingers.

  The whole frame of his vision would jolt an inch aside; sometimes the vista winked out altogether. He kept his eyes open extra wide, remembering with the same deliberate effort of holding bottles, Eyes open! He refused to blink until the balls dried, in fear of the lids latching lash to lash, as he might avoid letting doors close behind him to which he had no key.

  Beside him bar stools danced; furniture remained stationary only when he stared it straight down. He was frequently convinced that when he turned around he returned to find a chair in a subtly different position. Everywhere in the crevices of cabinets at the Maze reception, in the upholstery piping of the NIO waiting room, he saw silverfish; ants scurried the surface of airline trays, picnic blanket. Pigeons and kittens skittering under parked cars he always mistook for rats. Strangers distorted on banisters and the bevels of Guinness mirrors into people whose bombs he’d dismantled or whose rallies he’d sabotaged.

  Soon he would become dangerously narcoleptic. Already a moment would jump cut to beats later and he would find his companion several words on, his own chin an inch closer to his tie. Bad splicing, he called it, but the simpler word was sleep. He was falling asleep, in taxis, between points in his own lectures, dozing through a question from the audience and then answering the one before.

  For Farrell had fought to dispose of bombs with every bit the military vigor with which they’d been planted, and now, deprived of that campaign by one shaky epiphany, he had launched into his political phase like the Somme. Yet he had to confess that there were nights he stayed up to the requisite hour merely staring at those soft women in the Tate prints, that there were days he whipped from Derry-Dublin-Derry because of deliberate sloppy planning, to make an enemy of his own schedule, to lance with cabbies, traffic, the very geography of his island as the North’s own Don Quixote. Farrell was one more veteran who could not adapt to peacetime, like any UVF or IRA volunteer a career soldier, and saddled with the problem of ordinariness that descended even on battle if you fought every day. He no longer believed in fighting, but he did not understand what you did otherwise with your bloody time.

  Furthermore, he suspected he stayed so busy to avoid his own simpering, predictable company. A rude admission: he didn’t like being alone. He would ride all the way to his office to make phone calls instead of ringing from home, simply to hear Constance humming over the computer nearby.

  It was on his way to Boston in May that Farrell noticed from paper banners through Central Arcade the approach of Mother’s Day—and even this attention was unlike him. For there is a trick to avoiding obligation he had sorted out early. Maybe on Mother’s Day flowers are in order, a card, a call. Those are the rules. But you can escape through a wee loophole: I am like this. All you need do is establish early that you are Not the Sort of Person Who Calls on Mother’s Day, and lo, you are not. Expectation can be trained to zero. If you are Not the Sort of Person Who: goes home at Christmas, returns phone messages, responds to letters, or “keeps in touch,” there is no discussion and, surprisingly,
no anger. There may be rules, but it is not so difficult to make it clear that these are for other people. And your mother and lover and sisters will all, oddly, admire you, speak of you wistfully around the Christmas tree, a little envious because they didn’t feel like coming this year either. “What do you suppose Farrell’s up to now?” they might sigh, surrounded by wrapping paper and noisy children and expensive indications of how poorly they know each other after all. In any country you can achieve the stature of a separate nation with its own laws and system of justice, and you will have diplomatic immunity in your own family. What you are—and you must play on everyone’s sense of the incontrovertible, on fact—is your excuse: I am like this. So your sisters will eye you lighting once more into a taxi with the single briefcase for Boston, for you are Not the Sort of Person Who Checks Luggage, while they are stuck pawing furry slippers in Marks and Sparks for Ma. You are the tall one who, in a fit of adolescent brilliance, cast himself as the exception; it is not your fault that exceptions require majorities to whom the rules apply. So when you let the weekend pass by, long after your sisters’ flowers have wilted on her table your mother will still love you, or whatever it is she does, and maybe even more than your sisters, because from you she can miss what from them she simply takes, and you will imagine (you have worked this out so beautifully that you actually believe this) that should you freakishly remember Mother’s Day this year she would only be disappointed.

  On into the summer the light lengthened as if to accommodate his hours, the sky staying up with him until three, rising at six. So surely what happened in New York in August was a gift, for on this quick two-day fund-raising trip for his conference an air traffic controllers’ strike delayed his plane back to London for a week. Raving or palm-greasing, Farrell was not getting out of this city without a rowboat, and he didn’t swim. A frustration, but the perfect opportunity to catch up on sleep.

  He would not. He stayed up anyway, for no apparent reason. Drinking, reading, talking, it didn’t matter as long as it lasted till three. Then he would reach for his trusty Boots clock and set the alarm for six. At sunrise he would pace his hotel room, “thinking.”

  For once he’d done his presentation for the III and drafted a speech for Women Together he was now doubtless going to miss, Farrell had nothing to do. Nothing. It was awful. He spent nearly a thousand dollars on international phone calls, but less for pressing business than maundering to Estrin, Constance, what’sherface, not even to talk but to stay awake. He watched himself stay awake. He would admit this was insane. But whenever he leaned back on the pillow in his stocking feet of an afternoon, he would bolt upright in five minutes, heart racing; he would put on his shoes.

  Farrell wondered should he take a butcher’s at New York, but he had no intention of gawking over the edge of the World Trade towers like an eejit. He had work to do, work—Not here.

  Frankly, New York made him nervous. Its population was five times larger than all of Northern Ireland’s. No one here knew his name, his exploits, the family he ignored. For that matter, they didn’t know the Provos, Stickies, Irps, or Rips. They couldn’t list the Five Demands. Bobby Sands could be a line of clothing, Stormont a resort hotel. They didn’t know the Anglo-Irish Agreement from pork pie. They didn’t understand his accent or his expressions, bollocks, dosed off, gobshite. This was an experience not unlike those narcoleptic absences, the blinking out of the world, only this time New York remained in view; it was Belfast that disappeared.

  He did enjoy telling men in bars where he was from—bloody well wasn’t Teaneck, New Jersey, now, was it? Their brows shot up. But all they knew was bombs. Not the school-bus incident versus the Falls Swimming Center versus Crossgar, just bombs. They asked him was it dangerous, and Farrell said rather, fudging; privately he admitted to finding New York a damned sight dicier than back home. While he usually felt tall, bulky black men swelling in torn sweats made him feel mostly thin. The cars might not explode, but were taped with cardboard. NO RADIO and EMPTY TRUNK. Panhandlers tugged on every block: Buy me an apricot, I just need bus fare back to Macon, My baby has AIDS … “Crack” was no longer good conversation.

  He refused to debunk his own city, which enjoyed a New Yorker’s respect. When they asked if it was blasted to bits, he didn’t say, “Hardly,” but, “In parts.” Yet should he start in on British incompetence, they drifted to the baseball screen overhead.

  “Does Sunningdale mean bugger-all to you?” he ventured once at McSorley’s.

  “Sunny Dale …” his companion ruminated. “He in the Bears?”

  Och, it wasn’t they refused to listen. Sure, he discovered plenty of rice pudding receptive well-meaningness, blank propped-up smily faces full of niceness to strangers, an unfastened Interest in Fascinating Places, but you could tell they hadn’t a clue. Later, spending more and more money on his hotel phone, he talked to Estrin about her travels for the first time without derision. An American in Berlin, couldn’t she as well have been a polar bear?

  “Porta-problem,” she supplied.

  “Sorry?”

  “I yak through dinner saying the same thing all over the world. I’d love to find a city where I felt confused. I envy you.”

  While at home he flapped for news about places like New York, here he scanned the Times for the North. In the Travel Section on Sunday, Farrell devoured an article on B & Bs in the Republic he would never glance at in his Dublin Tribune. He bought an Irish Echo, foaming when he found it full of easy expatriate Republicanism, a facile support for the IRA that would never cost anyone here Semtex under their Volvos. In his indignation, Farrell felt more normal than he had all week.

  Finally, one morning in the hotel coffee shop, he found an article on an inside page of the Times, and it was so small! Six people had died, and it was only two columns wide! He crumpled the wretched paper. Who died? In Lisburn, but near Thiepval? Downtown? The “IRA” took credit, but which faction? They bombed a “Fun Run.”

  “Rips!” he exclaimed out loud.

  A woman beside him checked her blouse. “Where?”

  Uncontrollably, he strolled into O’Anybody bars with green awnings, full of third-generation immigrants whose idea of being Irish was to buy lurid emerald soft-serve on St. Patrick’s Day. While delighted to hear Farrell’s accent, they couldn’t tell Glengormley’s from Cork’s; the punters slapped him on the back and started to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” but Farrell didn’t know the words. They thought Charlie Haughey was on Hill Street Blues. With their own speech thickened as if by a mouthful of ballpark hot dog, aslur with yeahs, okays, and I guesses, these local O’Reillys and O’Flanagans were about as Irish as Yasir Arafat.

  A few glasses down, Farrell lit into song himself. He’d been in the boys’ choir as a child and never lost a serene tenor. He treated the lot to the latest Ulster diddy, “Song Don’t Spike”:

  Agent O

  Said don’t let ’em go

  And keep traffic out of the way.

  F. said to me: Take out all three,

  and make sure Miss J. can’t see.

  So I shot ’im, I shot ’im,

  I shot ’im and shot ’im,

  Sixteen times from behind.

  I know I shouldn’t oughta but the people of Gibraltar

  Were uppermost on my mind.

  Bombmaker Savage,

  We caused ’im some damage,

  To make sure he’d not bomb again.

  Off went the siren, so I started a-firin,

  He spiraled with his arms beside ’im.

  I shot ’im, I shot ’im,

  I shot ’im, I shot ’im,

  I trod upon his chest;

  And while he lay static, with my Browning automatic,

  Used minimum force arrest.

  Then we were seen

  With our guns down our jeans,

  Our berets and axes in bags.

  I won’t give a Provo a chance to abuse me,

  I didn’t shout a warning, but I did say
“Excuse me.”

  Then I shot ’im, I shot ’im,

  I shot ’im and shot ’im,

  Till the passersby were sick.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Mordue, but I really can’t afford to

  Let some poofta spoil my trick.

  Six months later,

  We’re filling the papers

  in Gibraltar to tell our tale.

  Paddy McGrory won’t swallow our story,

  Nor will Felix or the bleeding jury,

  So we shot ’em, we shot ’em,

  We shot ’em and shot ’im,

  So the world would always see:

  You can’t jail an SAS man when he’s Maggie’s assassin

  On a shoot to kill policy.

  So we shot ’em, we shot ’em,

  We shot ’em, we shot ’em,

  Cause we’re soldiers A to D (yessiree!)

  We shot ’em, we shot ’em,

  We shot ’em, we shot ’em,

  We’re soldiers A to D—eeeeeee—!

  Now, Farrell may have gotten carried away with those last We shot ’em’s, but face it, the piece was a gem, a coup, a prize, and it was fresh, de rigueur from the homeland, and Farrell O’Phelan didn’t waste his time memorizing any old mumble from West Belfast except, give us a break here, it was hilarious. But no. Farrell might have gotten more laughs with Peter, Paul, and Mary. Later, he prodded these gombeens on current events, and though the shooting was the biggest story for Northern Ireland in at least the last three years, in New York Gibraltar seemed associated purely with some insurance company.