Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Likewise sex, the nitty-gritty, took less than five minutes, as Estrin noted with a glance at her watch when she was through. You could keep most of your clothes on, unzip, get the job done, buckle your belt, and there you were. For women, there wasn’t even anything to wipe up. But this time, not even bothering to recline on the sofa but remaining upright in an uncomfortable chair, Estrin admitted as she never had exactly that sex by yourself did not always feel good. In fact, masturbating tonight had much the same quality as the Stilton, the like—not like, the little badness. Under the unflattering overhead light, she pictured herself slouched in the untidy room with paint cans, jeans binding her thighs, her stomach bloated with whiskey and muesli and lemon pickle. Though she’d read often enough you can “satisfy yourself best,” her fingers felt ignorant. The orgasm was boring and laborious.

  While relieved it was over, with the nagging twinges of renewed tension Estrin suspected it was not. She only halfheartedly tugged at the jeans. Estrin often experienced lust as pain, only to be met with pain—grasping down again, she felt no pleasure. Scratching was more satisfying than masturbating tonight, defrosting the freezer would have been more fun. This time at least she came more quickly, but the orgasm was worse, heavy, hesitant, a shudder. It did not round up nicely but stuttered off, unpronounced. Promptly, the itch grew more insistent than before, so it was no use pulling up her jeans again; doggedly, Estrin went back to it, with annoyance, only wanting the twist between her legs to go away.

  It was after the fourth time that Estrin realized she had a problem, for while to come this many times in an evening was not unusual for her, in company or by herself, to still feel this randy after was. Launching dutifully into number five, she found both that she didn’t have any choice and that another go would only make the urgency worse. She pressed her crown to the chairback until it hurt. Her knuckles chafed on her zipper. Her socks flopped off her feet, comically, but ugly-comic. She slouched lower, and coming was stupider, slower, a squirm, a turn in her chair. Six. She counted orgasms like sets, first with perverse fascination, later with increasing terror, as six only went to seven, ever less full, ever more demanding when it was done. Her buttocks ridged from the seat; the taste of whiskey in her mouth turned rancid. Soda bread, Horlicks, and raspberry rose. Estrin crawled up and splashed some water on her face, but it dried quickly and left the skin tight. The chair was waiting.

  Estrin came twenty-five times. By the end she wept, arced so far off the seat her knees hit the carpet. Please, please don’t make me, please no more, please—Finally the gullet could swallow no more, for the last climax was one or two spasms, a little gag.

  Estrin stood, shaking; her head was light, her clothes damp, her skin blotchy. Her right hand ached, and her genitals were swelling. Incredibly, deep inside the sore, abused flaps the tingle tugged again, petulant, unsatisfied. Estrin hung her arms, a haggard mother who would finally let the child cry. Worst of all, she checked her watch to find the entire erotic nightmare had consumed only an hour and a half. It had at least exhausted her, so breaking three records in one evening, she faltered up to bed at 8:45.

  The next morning, Estrin tried to act normal, and nearly carried it off except for a few telltale flaws, the kind by which an astute dealer can detect a forgery. Reading the paper, she had to keep going back to the beginning of the article to remember what country it was about. In Safeway, while one jar of jam, a single package of biscuits were routine indulgences, Estrin looked down to find several foreign products in her care, even losing track of her cart in baked goods because she didn’t recognize the lemon Swiss roll, iced fruit buns, and Madeira cake as groceries she had chosen. Oh, it wasn’t like being someone else entirely; the basket was piled with the usual four pounds of carrots, two cabbages, and whiting fillets, but instead of one drab allotment of petits beurres, there appeared chocolate oatmeal mini-flips, Walker’s thick-cut shortbread, and bourbon creams. The world had not turned on its ear, but there seemed to be a tiny hole in the universe through which these alien packages were streaming.

  She returned to collect her laundry. She stood for several minutes waiting for Estrin to stuff it in a duffel and strap it to the bike. Estrin didn’t. She shrugged and went downstairs to cut wainscoting for the dining room, hoping Estrin would show up to tend to the clothes before the cleanerette closed. Sawing the baseboard, she would ordinarily have drawn straight forty-five-degree guidelines, but today she only eyed them, resulting in cockeyed corners of a sort that signaled, according to Estrin herself, that you shouldn’t lend her money or ride in her car.

  At 4:00, in her most magnificent impersonation of the day, she bounded upstairs in a performance virtually indistinguishable from Estrin Lancaster getting ready to run.

  Though the blue and the green shorts were both clean, she insisted on rooting through the entire pile of dirty laundry for the red ones. She paused with an irregular shiver between tying her left and right shoes.

  The weather was nippy but dry; nothing to complain about. The first few strides, her molars clacked. Her feet went plop, plop, plop, not pet, pet, pet. She concentrated on not reading the An Phoblacht mural one more time, and consequently read every word.

  Over and over, five miles uphill, and why? Here she was, always switching countries, how was it that wherever she went she re-created what she had before, one more ten-mile course? Change itself became the same old change, newness got old; even the erratic became pattern. There is no such thing as perfect randomness, she remembered that from math. Randomness is an abstract ideal to which you can only imperfectly aspire, for in her determination to do nothing and live nowhere, she always fell shy; as an absolute, too, no rule asserted a more ruthless order than chaos.

  Her shoes splatted; her fingers fisted; her side stitched. The only part of Estrin that was really running was her nose.

  Suddenly, outside the cage of the Felons, the plop, plop, plop went quiet. She looked at the fence and the view did not shift. Fence. Estrin looked at her shoes. Suede slick, stripes torn, heels rounded, toes worn to sock, the pair would have constituted a remarkable monument to perseverance had they not been deathly still.

  Estrin felt calm. She had not, in fact, decided to stop. She had stopped, which is different. She read a poster for Diary of a Hunger Striker at Conway Mill. Well, well, she thought, almost cheerfully. Soon the sky would fall, pigs fly, and the law of gravity be repealed. Orbits and the behavior of molecules in a gas were no longer reliable. Your pet would bite. Maybe that explained the self-appointed apocalyptics on street corners: they had risen to do what they had always done, until one day they had not: the end was near.

  Estrin wandered back through Milltown cemetery, humming. Protestant vandals had recently attacked Republican headstones with a sledgehammer; crosses were toppled, a statue of Mary dethroned; the big black honor roll of the County Antrim Memorial was cracked. Impressive work, she thought, big rocks. But the destruction did not make her angry or sad. It had happened. Estrin kept humming.

  Back down the Falls, the letters I, R, and A did not form an army. All of West Belfast floated before her in pieces—soldiers stalking backward, children throwing stones, quotes from Wolfe Tone bobbed separately past like balloons. The afternoon felt festive, like schooldays ended early from a sudden snow, a presidential assassination. She had reached for a little knob in her own life and turned it off.

  Because what made this woman’s to-and-froing possible was that Estrin herself was immovable. She had not changed her hairstyle since she was ten. She would not have dinner with you because it was Thursday, and that meant the weight room. Philadelphia to Bangkok, she always brushed her teeth beginning with the right back molar. In theaters she sat in the very front or the very back, always on the aisle, the better to get out. If you had not been to the movies with her before, she would reliably subject you to her theories about where you placed yourself in a crowd: Estrin didn’t understand people who sat in the middle. She wrote letters on narrow-ruled notepad
s, and it didn’t matter if none of these details cohered neatly into Traits—the important thing was that she would never walk into a stationery anywhere on earth and pick up wide-rule paper over narrow without having suffered a brain seizure. A tiny, stubborn bump on a big planet, with no profession, no family so’s you’d notice, no national allegiance, Estrin was only conceivable for being a homebody, staunch, cranky, conservative, and for two days in a row now she had been winking out like a badly screwed in light bulb.

  So Estrin walked into her living room as if a new acquaintance had invited her in for tea. It was only 5:00, with extra time now to do her Russian exercises before work, but Estrin picked up the grammar with the polite disinterest of a guest paging while her hostess put the kettle on. She flipped it open to the last chapter she’d memorized. None of the words looked familiar. Though technically studious, in fact she’d been losing vocabulary by the day. Estrin would pick up a karandash on the weekend to find by Monday it was merely a pencil.

  Estrin was poor at languages and had slyly sought countries where English sufficed. This time, for more foreignness, farther afield than ever, she would relinquish the very words in her mouth. If that terrified her, so be it—harder, farther, longer—the shadow of the lamp pull crossed the dialogue, a raised whip. Farrell’s A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union glared from the table, a beautiful hardback of well-produced photographs at which she had barely glanced. But it was a nice present. Wasn’t it?

  The grammar dropped. Her hands felt alien to her thighs, her body a jalopy pieced from different cars. The half-trimmed base boards, half-refinished furniture, and half-plastered ceiling no longer exuded the atmosphere of projects that would be finished. Photos of far, far too many men leered from the wall.

  Where is my mother? And has my mother ever dissolved in the middle of her own house? Mother, do you ever lose your way from the kitchen to the foyer? Mother, I am unmoored, I have come too far! Like the afternoon when she was three years old: Estrin looked about her, having adventured past her stoop, chin raised to the wind, patent leather braving down the pavement, and suddenly did not recognize the neighborhood. At least at three she had cried, and a kind old man had called the police; they had driven her back up the street in a squad car asking, patiently, as she wept, “Is it this house? This one?” Finally, though the whole world had grown strange and even that last house looked foreign, as it would evermore, slightly crooked, ajar, her mother shouted from the porch and tumbled to the car. But when Estrin got lost at thirty-two there was no flag of an apron, and across the Atlantic her mother would die without a daughter. Estrin was not even disoriented down the block but in her own living room; there was no kindly old man, only a not-boyfriend who couldn’t tell the difference between an emotion and a model airplane; the British Army crouching down her street with SLRs had replaced the friendly Philadelphia police, and she could not cry. She could not marshal nearly so focused a sensation as loneliness or fright.

  Estrin discovered she was standing, for she no longer felt related enough to her furniture to sit in it. For once time had passed quickly; she would have to hustle to be on time for work. Necessity is a kind of solace; however haphazardly, Estrin fit herself together again and stood at the door in her leather jacket, with her keys, her helmet, though with that vaguely unwholesome air of the repaired. She glanced behind her before killing the light; like the manse in Philadelphia, 133 would never look the same again, an architectural changeling. Likewise, outside, the countryside looked arbitrary. Estrin had no idea what she was doing in Northern Ireland. Eventually this happened everywhere, and more than men or wanderlust explained why she had to leave.

  Maybe you’ve seen it now: both had lost their mothers. Farrell because his had held out, refusing to give him anything until she got everything, until she got more than he had or was. Farrell had offered, too, had sat before her as if on the other end of a seesaw; feet dangling, he had never weighed enough for her. He could not remember a single time she was pleased—chess was trivial, though she would cluck when he lost; good grades were only to be expected; his Christmas presents were squandered money or too cheap. With choices of failure and lesser failure, disapproval and disapproval in the extreme, he had found an eerie freedom—how little difference if he curled with Talisker. Long ago he’d climbed down from her teeter-totter, leaving her, arms crossed, still waiting for his spindly soul to lift her off the ground.

  Maybe that accounted for her nagging efforts to feed him when he went home—and how ironic, all that chopping and baking, when in any of the important ways she had starved him to death. Besides, he was uncomfortably reminded of Hansel being fattened up. For what? Or if the feeding was not ulterior, it was at least guilty—and should that parade of apple tarts be apology, he turned desserts down flat: he did not accept.

  Estrin, however, had a fine mother. Ruth Lancaster had cut the sections of her daughter’s grapefruit. She had hugged the girl tight even as she felt the child stiffen like overwrought metal in her hands. Estrin left those arms behind because she could not afford the comfort. Her mother’s generosity was too easy. It wasn’t fair to be loved for nothing. There were people like Farrell out there working so hard to be held, and here Estrin had come into her embrace with all the injustice with which others inherit mansions, swimming pools, mink. Estrin traveled the world to prove she was worthy of what was given her without leaving the house.

  And so, exactly, this was duplicated with their mothers inside. Estrin would never brave enough tortured countries, win enough strangers, press enough weight, cut a perfect enough corner at 85, keep a fine enough figure, or fire a sufficient quiver of exotic stories over wine. Farrell would never lose enough sleep, deliver enough useless lectures, leave enough women, dispose of enough gelignite. And so long as they could never win themselves, they would never win each other, for you cannot earn what is free.

  chapter nineteen

  Notice-Notice

  I’ve been approached to do a reading for Campbell. A lunch, to raise funds.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I thought I might do it.” They liked to experiment on each other. “After all, you and I have never had the same politics.”

  “You’ve never had any politics.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “You sound like your mother. Genetic Republicanism. The ballot box—in one hand—gets passed on with the dark hair.”

  “Unlike Loyalists, I suppose, whose every generation arrives at its own considered, thoughtful position?”

  “If you’re trying to tell me you’d campaign against my referendum from burning national aspiration, your head’s cut.”

  “Maybe you should be stopped. If the Border Poll falls on its face, no harm done. If it succeeds, all hell could break loose.”

  “It’s a tea party out there now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure there’ll be some kicking and screaming, but whichever way you turn, you step on wee toes.”

  “Why do I have the feeling whenever you use infantile imagery you’re referring to the Catholic community.”

  “Honestly, Rose, you are getting stroppy! Time was you were glad to get a glimpse of a weary old Prod’s P.O.V.”

  Roisin studied the weary old Prod. Other women got to watch their men push children on swing sets, trim hedges on Saturday afternoons. Roisin was convinced she spent most of her time with Angus watching him dress. Today this annoyed her; so many of his suits were brown. They were all too small. While the round butterball hammocked over his belt used to charm her, the teddy-bear vulnerability, the ready-made pillow, this great soft welter of accumulated indulgence, now he simply looked fat. And he always wore nubby tweeds, cords, wide woolly cravats. Lately she’d come to prefer silk.

  “Besides,” he grumbled, snuffling around the carpet, boxer shorts in the air; oh, it was gross. “Sure we’ll keep our noses clean, put together a bloody utopia. But if that doesn’t work, kid, I swear to God I will make Adolf H
itler look like a Boy Scout. You thought I was codding. But I will not have your hoodlums run my Province.”

  “Your referendum. Your province. My hoodlums.”

  “Where is that sock!”

  “You could not conceivably get Farrell O’Phelan behind widespread oppression of human rights.”

  At least that got his bum down. “And that would cock up the whole kit, I presume?”

  “He’s come to have a lot of influence. More than you think.”

  “Thanks to me! My legitimacy! My contacts!”

  “He made a few of his own. The ATOs at Thiepval think he’s brilliant. But I forgot. You’re the one who saw his potential in grammar school. Who lifted him from the obscurity of the Fenian cesspool.”

  “And not entirely out. Why I trust him.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “To be a scoundrel. I understand scoundrels. You, my pet, are a romantic. There’s more to the beast than kisses.”

  “You don’t think Farrell’s a romantic?”

  “Can play one, aye. Could join the RSC. But Son of Corrymeela he is not. Selfish, grasping—”

  “Catholic.”

  “Every Proddie sentiment is not sectarian, love. There is such a thing as personal antipathy.”

  “I mean he’s on my side. He can’t help it; he was born there. For Farrell to support internment, you’re right, would be genetically impossible.”

  “No, love.” He tapped her chest. “Means just the opposite. There’s a special wee hatred that your people reserve for their own kind. Ever listen to Provos talk about the Officials? Better yet, Sinners about the SDLP? Makes their steaming at British soldiers sound downright affectionate. O’Phelan? He doesn’t frighten me, because I’m too far away. I’m in the other camp, and we’ve struck an allegiance of sorts. But, Lord, would I hate to be right next door.”