Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “I am.” He held her neck. “Hopelessly. Of every man who rattles through that cage. Of every hand you press with twenty p. Of the soldiers you wave to, the shopkeepers you banter with, even young Malcolm Dunlea. Satisfied?”

  Her neck arched against his palm. “You’ve avoided my question. Because lately I need to know where I stand, Farrell—”

  “Swallow.” He pulled her neck back. “You are my only passion.” He kissed her summarily, like sealing a letter with wax—he’d issued his statement. Estrin draped into a chair, marveling, Imagine. Some women get yes or no.

  “Are you really going to play Malcolm?”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “Think you’ll beat him?”

  “He’s sixteen!”

  “Just be careful. Malcolm is very sweet.”

  “I should let him win?”

  “I guess not. Still, I don’t play chess, but can you at least arrange the game so it’s close?”

  Farrell laughed. “My dear, you and I are quite different.”

  “Which one of us are you criticizing?”

  “You. You’re much too pliant, self-sacrificing. Kindness is the mark of a loser.”

  “That’s such a dreadful thing to be?”

  “Yes.”

  Plastic,” Farrell despaired, squinting at his queen.

  “Still works.”

  “Barely. I’m one for trappings. Ivory, green felt pads. These pieces make the game seem so unimportant.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  He liked Malcolm. “Quite.”

  For all their triviality, Farrell aligned his pawns with quiet, remembered glee. It had been a long time. He rarely thought of chess anymore, yet one look at this board unshelved a whole way of thinking that he now employed in only the most shadowy of terms. The uncorked bottle of wine was poised by the board, the barrel of a starting gun.

  Farrell held out both fists, and was pleased Malcolm chose white. Farrell preferred black, the disadvantage; it was bad enough to be playing a boy.

  Farrell extended back in his chair; Malcolm leaned forward on his hands. The first few moves went fast and easily. Farrell sipped his wine with less urgency than he would usually down his first glass of an evening. Maybe Malcolm would learn something at that. A nice kid, really; cheeky, but Farrell preferred that. And if Farrell didn’t miss his guess, the picture of a certain supple American bum bending over a dustpan had kept the boy up nights more than once.

  Farrell looked down at the board and shook his head. “You’re sure you want to do that?”

  “Aye.”

  “Look hard now. I know you’ve taken your hand off, but I’d let you take the move back this once.”

  “No, we play by the rules. The move stays.”

  “Fair enough.” Farrell sighed, and began his dirty duty. Part of Malcolm’s education, then. Hadn’t MacBride taught him this lesson more times than he cared to count. And hadn’t it been good for him at the end of the day. (Liar, Farrell heard unexpectedly back. That defeat is improving, a platitude for failures to console themselves. Hardly; it eats you alive. And those games at sixteen are still eating you and they’re only getting deeper, closer to the bone. That shite. That smug, to-the-manor-born, self-congratulatory Prod. Fucking hell, at least twenty-some years ago Farrell did have feelings.)

  From the other side of the bar, Estrin eyed the game, drying glasses. She supposed, predictably, Farrell was on top—he looked relaxed, he made jokes; Malcolm hunched with schoolboy concentration. But they seemed to be having a good time. And no doubt this was as engaged as she’d ever see Farrell O’Phelan with children. In general, he spoke of them like a tribe of pygmies he’d read about once in National Geographic.

  However, when she wiped down the bar, she noticed a crease or two on Farrell’s brow. He had drawn more upright. He tucked his hands between his thighs. He’d gone quiet. The bottle of wine had disappeared, and he signaled impatiently for a second. His opponent stuck to Lucozade. Malcolm wasn’t being creepy; he didn’t put his feet up, light a fag, cool about the club, but remained dutiful, patient, direct, hands flat before him on the table, his expression less self-satisfied than slightly perplexed. Malcolm expected to lose; he’d confided as much before the game. After all, like every other boy in West Belfast, he’d grown up on tales of Farrell O’Phelan: not the sort of larger-than-life you beat at chess.

  This time it was Malcolm who asked, “Sure you want to do that?”

  Farrell snapped back, “Of course I’m bloody sure, or I’d have moved somewhere else, wouldn’t I?”

  Malcolm shrugged politely and took Farrell’s knight. Bringing the next Pouilly Fuissé, Estrin looked down at the board. Not knowing the game, she couldn’t decipher their positions, but there was something about the starkness of the grid stripped down to so few pieces that tightened her stomach. Farrell relished showdowns, the cold absolutes of capitulation and conquest; Estrin, they appalled. It had always bothered her, for example, that contests won 10–9 had exactly the same result as 10–0. It didn’t seem fair.

  Estrin was in the kitchen, but she heard the “Aha!” clearly from there. She ducked out to find Farrell’s face flushed more brightly than since he’d had pneumonia. He was scooped gluttonously over the board with a look she’d sometimes seen on Duff Shearhoon poised over a pasty supper when he hadn’t eaten for an entire three hours. When Farrell pounced on his castle, he dropped it back from above the square so the plastic pipped. Spittle webbed at the corners of his mouth and, pronouncing, “Mate in four!” he sprayed saliva over the board.

  Malcolm slumped back for the first time in the game, and flicked his king on its side. “Aye.” He allowed himself a bit of a glare, but otherwise made no remarks. Methodically he picked up the pieces and placed rather than pitched them into the box. Of the two of them, with the boy so controlled, it was amazing Malcolm was the sixteen-year-old.

  “A kiss for the victor,” Farrell demanded, but when he smacked her, Estrin flinched, his kiss landing awkwardly on her nose. She wiped it with the back of her hand, feeling like a cheap, irrelevant prize. She read the SMASH H-BLOCK and STOP STRIP SEARCHES posters she’d read a hundred times, rolled up her sleeves though she was chilly. While she’d been frustrated by Farrell’s melodrama, his elusiveness, the transparency of his own self-torture, she had never disliked him before.

  Malcolm jerked on his jacket. “Right. I’m away,” he said tersely, though not without turning to Farrell to add, “And I was dead on, mate. I learned something.”

  “Malcolm, wait!” Estrin caught up with him at the gate. “I’m sure you had him nervous for a bit. Good job.” She kissed him carefully on the lips.

  But Malcolm was unappeased and looked at her far more sourly than he had at Farrell. “You could do better, Lancaster.” He brushed her temple. “Watch yourself.”

  Instead, she returned to watch Farrell, more what Malcolm meant. His flush subsiding, his hair still teased from his head: it was like watching a junkie come down. He would be solidly depressed within the hour.

  So it was a brief and pathetic fix, but he was hooked, wasn’t he? That was it: he liked to win more than to please. He would sacrifice compassion and grace, even allow himself to become ugly, for a single feather in his cap. And in that Farrell had found all his victories hollow, Estrin didn’t understand him.

  “Whitewells?” he proposed. “To celebrate?”

  “Celebrate what?”

  In the end she went to Whitewells out of pity.

  Had him nervous for a bit?” Malcolm fumed the next night in the kitchen. “He was dead! Two more nails in the casket and we’d have dropped him and his bloody plastic king in a hole!”

  “What happened, then?”

  “I just—” Malcolm threw the dishrag at the ceiling. “Bolloxed it. Wasn’t thinking. One gormless move, and knew it soon as my fingers left the pawn. Aye, and he knew it, too, mind you. But this time, do we get Are you sure, would you like to take that back? Not on your life!”
r />   “You said it wasn’t important.”

  “Aye. But it’s important if you fancy a dickhead. And I don’t care for him. He’s too serious for you, and he’s too old. I think he’s a cod up one side and down the other. Fatuous and cutthroat. Smarmy—”

  “Malcolm!”

  “Well, he doesn’t—”

  “What?”

  “It’s not my right to say. But mind what I told you. And if you’ve any trouble with the ghett—which you will have—come to me.”

  “And what would you do?”

  “At least play the bugger again and beat him dead to rights. Leave him looking a right eejit. If I’ve the bastard’s number, that’s the best punishment. I’d say take you off him, but, Lancaster, I’m not convinced losing you would pain the man much as it ought.”

  Is it true? I thought Malcolm might have been exaggerating. Did he have you hammered? Did you win only because he made a mistake?”

  “Losing is always a mistake, isn’t it? But aye. He had me crucified. I would have called the match, but I kept playing, on the off chance of just that sort of carelessness.”

  “So you took advantage. Of a moment of weakness.”

  “That’s what games are about, my dear.”

  “I hate it when you call me my dear.”

  Farrell smiled. “I know.”

  “You’re not ashamed of yourself?”

  “For compulsively trouncing a boy? Of course I am.”

  “But you can’t pass up any chance to win, no matter how inglorious.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you are proud of that.”

  “I take my opportunities as they’re presented me. Some are more honorable than others. But I’ll take them all the same. Pride has nothing to do with it.”

  “No, I mean it’s like everything you think is wrong with you. You love it. You wouldn’t be any other way. There’s no fucking difference for you between self-criticism and showing off.”

  “There’s such a thing as neither, my dear. There’s such a thing as stating fact.”

  “Crap! You adore your isolation, your competitiveness, your stoicism, your obsession with control—the whole cut-off shtick. Get off it, you think you’re bloody marvelous!” She was breathing hard.

  “And so do you.”

  The last breath was sharp, and she turned from him. “Yes.”

  While Estrin may have known nothing of the Normal Relationship, she knew this wasn’t it. She’d been going out with Farrell for nine months now, but lately felt as she did biking through strange cities, looking around and finding a familiar pile of pistachios at the corner shop and realizing she’d been here before; torquing off again, taking exactly the same perverse turn, and staring once more at the same nuts after going through half a tank of gas. It was simply an inability to get from A to B. With Farrell she could not name where they were not getting, though eventually nonevent becomes event—for each return to that same corner has a little less charm. One more dinner at 44, the same, but it should not be the same, so it was worse. As always, he would be obligated all weekend and not explain why. He would still only tell stories at least five years old, as if a statute of limitations had finally run out. She assumed in five years’ time other women would finally get to hear about Farrell and the American over a Bushmills washback. He would still reach from the bed for the phone in that single motion from waking to the bedside table with which chain-smokers will reach for a cigarette. He would still drag the phone around the corner and shut the bathroom door on the cord, and he would never later refer to the call or to whom it had been placed.

  And while splitting nights equally now between Clonard and Whitewells, they were not even. On Springfield Road Farrell could slip out an open letter while she made coffee. He could squeeze the foam-rubber earplugs from the boot factory, ping the Weitzen glasses nicked from her corner kneipe, rattle her pink pebbles from the Philippines, mock her rows of Shipham’s salmon paste, each jar holding about a tablespoon, Estrin’s idea of dinner on melba toast. But Whitewells told her nothing but why his credit card was platinum. The stationery was blank, the rings of glasses wiped away. The staff smiled too much, stopped talking while she went through security, and began again only when the lift gate latched tightly closed. Whitewells knew its master and kept his secrets, while Estrin’s life splayed over 133. The only reason Estrin kept her privacy intact was that Farrell was insufficiently curious to pry.

  Yet in the same way that when you are lost or stuck you get increasingly annoyed, Farrell began to pick. When he drank he used to extol, romance; now he was more likely to get contentious. He condescended when she didn’t recognize the names Peter Robinson or Ken Maginnis, and claimed if she’d lived in the Middle East she should certainly know Gemayel. A conversation over dinner became a regular current events quiz, and Northern Ireland was not enough. When was Pinochet’s plebescite? What were Benazir’s chances now Zia was dead? And why didn’t Estrin know anything about the Dukakis platform, it was her country, wasn’t it? And one argument in 44 lasted all the way to brandy, whether short bomb warnings did or did not serve the IRA’s purposes; she suspected he really had no opinion at all, or even agreed with her, but preferred to fight.

  Further, he needled her about her menial jobs, poked at her lack of ambition, struck poses of weary amusement at her weight training, a regimen she would never cancel, not even for Farrell. He made caustic reference to the Lancaster Fan Club at the Green Door, and one evening he asked her, carelessly between spoonfuls of soup, when she was going to leave.

  “Leave?”

  “You know, for the next war-torn politic where you will dabble on the fringe. The next torrid ten-month affair with foreign exotica. What’s on the agenda now? Afghanistan?”

  She actually punched him. The cream of leek spilled onto his lovely suit. “Fuck you! Don’t you care? Do you want me to leave?”

  Farrell mopped at his jacket and said quietly, “You have done nothing since we met but prepare me for your departure, Swallow. I am only taking you seriously. What is the longest you’ve stayed in any country in the last ten years?”

  Estrin mumbled, “A year and a half. That was Berlin.”

  “And then the boyfriend—”

  “I flew to Belfast the day I found the syringe.”

  “So on the outside you’re here another four months.”

  “What would you do if I said I had a reservation to Leningrad next week?”

  “Try to take you to 44 one last time, I suppose. Wish you well. Maybe buy you a little something.”

  “And kiss me on the forehead.” Estrin would have plunged herself in the Lagan, but they were not on a bridge.

  “What do you expect?”

  Burn my ticket, hide my passport. You’re a trickster, you’ve sabotaged Ian Paisley rallies, you could at least keep a small American in town. “Not enough,” she said, and folded her napkin.

  On their way back to Whitewells, their dynamic once again achieved the funereal nostalgia of Farrell’s convalescence. Stringing down Donegall Square East, Estrin checked out the latest car-bomb damage by the taxi rank, as always searching for something piquant, a clue, as if a boy’s mangled toy truck, a single bloody tennis shoe would bring some poignancy to bear on an otherwise mundane scene—for true in Belfast, you grew inured to this; the entertainment value of bomb sites lapses. Gnarled window frames, broken glass, blackened doorways, powdered brick: that was about it, and that was always about it, with varying numbers of locals in hospital. What she was looking for, then, was an explanation. Though with an authority on Northern politics at her side, she could hardly inquire after all this time, What is this about again? A united what again? What? The most helpful single commentary Farrell had offered her was “It’s about nothing”—concise, but too succinct—and the puzzle remained inscrutable as ever.

  A compelling puzzle all the same, and for once Estrin looked around and noticed she was here, in a remarkable if bizarre town, where the g
utted Victorian Assurance Building was as routine passing scenery as the Wimpy’s up the road; next week the Wimpy’s would be hollowed out, and that would be routine, too. God, it was fucked up, but she loved Belfast. The infrared camera on City Hall followed their progress down the block, its one sore eye. The skein of shattered shopfronts, Land Rovers squealing down Wellington Place, the RUC chatting in their nicely ironed light-green short sleeves and handsome black flak jackets, and the tall man swinging by her side with soup on his coat all sharpened, bittersweet. For Estrin no longer walked a city of this world but a street of next year’s memory, another home she would leave, one more recollection to infuse with sudden color and fade as she cruised down a boulevard in Leningrad.

  While she could always pop back to Belfast, Estrin had a rule: Never visit. The image wormed in anyway, with a stranger lodged in 133; staying in Whitewells and having to pay; scheduling out a week or two of trying to “see everyone,” but Malcolm would have left, like all the bright kids, for across the water; Clive would have flown back to Iowa; maybe she’d be lucky and Callaghan would finally be locked in the Crum. While for the first year or so she would have read every article she found on Northern Ireland, eventually one more barracks bombing would flap from her breakfast table half unread. So what would they talk about, as she shared a fag with Robin in the attic or bought Duff a pint? Farrell would be involved with another svelte, well-preserved woman in her thirties, whom he would take to 44 and lead up the lift in Whitewells. The three of them would hardly get together when Estrin dropped back into town, but she would feel her replacement’s presence in the niceness of the date she and Farrell did have. Suddenly 44 would seem shabby, and the chef would overcook her fish. At dinner Farrell would act much more interested in her life than he ever seemed now, but from politeness, inquiring whether she found glasnost real or a show. Estrin would have the opinions lined up, and they would make it through to brandy, which she would need. He would pick up the check, despite her protests, and walking back along these same streets bend solicitously toward her to hear from fourteen inches overhead. Though not yet midnight, he would claim he had changed his habits and tried to get enough sleep now. It had been a long day, though it was lovely to see her again. With a kiss on the cheek he would hand her a key to a room on a lower floor, and she would smile weakly. And very likely anticipating the nightmare of such a civilized evening, she would visit town in two years and stay instead at the Wellington Park and not look Farrell up at all; or she would obey her own rules, flirt with this one more city, and then let Belfast go. Forever. She dropped Farrell’s hand.