Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Restless, she launched out and combed the city for a selection of herbal tea bags; tannic brews corroded an empty stomach. At Waterstone’s she bought: Famine, about the 1848 potato blight, and Beresford’s Ten Men Dead, about the 1981 hunger strikes in Long Kesh. She returned to 133 and arranged her teas, pleased with her discovery of “nettle,” its bramble of punishment, tea from a crown of thorns. How pleased Daddy would be that his defiant, agnostic daughter was still hounded by the ancient metaphors. Father, take this cup from me—she wondered how long she could find this funny.

  Until about four in the afternoon. She had sanded her kitchen table through three grades of paper; the dust caught in her throat. Inability to sneeze contributed to a feeling of triviality. She felt partial. The colors of the room bled weak, fey yellows and beige; the weather was pasty, but could not rain. The phrase she had marshaled to rally this first day, an act of sustained concentration, already rang false. Hunger only fragmented her attention: she looked at that smooth table and didn’t care. Estrin could not for the life of her understand why she could not have a piece of toast. The first day is the worst, she remembered. Because you feel silly.

  At the Green Door Estrin announced she was “on the wagon” until her birthday, which aroused little comment. The club was used to these easy disavowals, just as easily broken.

  Day Two, Estrin started Famine, in decorative discomfort—those families would never have allowed the potatoes to rot in Estrin’s hydrator. Still, the story was absorbing, and she read better without bolting up for biscuits, without drink. That afternoon she went running. Her time was slow and she felt crummy, but that was to be expected. By the evening of Day Two, she was calm; at work, funny and energetic. She had not lost her touch. She could run, she could fast. Now all she had to figure out was why either capacity counted for sweet fuck-all.

  By Day Four she was hitting her stride, well into Famine. With the table refinished and the spare bedroom repainted, she decided to try the weight room. She also decided fasting was easy, and that was a mistake.

  The weight room was a disaster. Though she limped through every set, Estrin had trouble with her heart. It palpitated; for beats at a time it would stop. Her stomach churned, her bile rose. After, she showered for half an hour with her eyes closed.

  The queasiness persisted, especially mornings. Estrin decided against weights; she would only run. In previous fasts, even the longest, the two-week one, she had played tennis and squash, cycled, swum; but this time even the running grew more burdensome than she remembered. Her time slowed further. By the end of the week she had to admit she was jogging. Her vision would darken curiously. The tea slurped in her stomach and leaked up her throat.

  With Famine finished and every character defunct, Estrin moved on to the David Beresford. Even early in the account, she gripped the arms of her chair in frustration. Bobby Sands inflamed her. By page 120 she couldn’t bear to sit down and agitated around her living room, raving. United Ireland! Lord, hadn’t she heard enough of that chatter in this neighborhood. Dying for a united Ireland, what did that mean? It was like dying for Munchkinland, like dying “because.” And for status? So you got POW status. So you proved this was a war. Big fucking deal, call it a war! Aren’t there stupid wars? Aren’t there bad wars? Shouldn’t most wars never have been fought, and aren’t there wars of which half the lot are on the wrong side? Weren’t there plenty of Nazis who called themselves POWs, and what did that prove? Her reading crawled, as every few pages inspired another tirade. Because the problem wasn’t that she didn’t understand. The problem (Day Eight. Day Nine … ) was understanding all too well.

  For if the hunger strikes expressed a microcosm of the Troubles, wills at impasse, Estrin had reduced them further still, Sands and Mrs. Thatcher in one five-foot-two American girl. Estrin, too, was a prisoner of war.

  “It is not those who inflict the most, but those who suffer the most who will conquer.” Terrence McSwiney, 1920 hunger striker and dead person. Sands’s pet homily, and the loopiest assertion Estrin had read in her life. Languishing late afternoons with the book falling from her hands, spent from railing at Bik McFarlane, it dark so early now but too fatigued to turn on a light, Estrin Lancaster understood that those who suffer the most: suffer the most. That suffering per se was without moral qualities—for discipline, the Five Demands, pain is only pain and it is probably best if there is less of it. Estrin was surprised in reading the Beresford how Catholic she’d become, despite Presbyterian force-feeding: her admiration of agony, her repudiation of the mince pie, so reminiscent of Farrell as a boy renouncing sugar in his tea. And the repudiation for Estrin had extended to her whole life, so that now she’d found a man more like her and more splendid than any man in any country, she was bound to forswear him more completely than any man before, not to write or ring but to fly to the most foreign part of the world she could find, a cold climate where she would deny his very language. How she had out-Catholicked this place, out-Farrelled O’Phelan. She would deny herself so completely after three weeks of tea and eleven years of travel that, sidereal, she would evaporate.

  For Estrin inescapably identified with the hunger strikers the more she despised them. Rising to boil water with her hands trembling on the arms of the rocker, watching the walls ripple as if underwater, feeling her heart thunder from the mere exertion of standing up, Estrin envisioned with feverish clarity the straight-backed chairs of Long Kesh, the single keg of water, and the helpless tyranny of their own demented determination. Because that first bowl of porridge left cold had sealed their deaths. How well Estrin understood, just as weak before an equally deranged resolution, for it seemed—and she was beginning to vomit some of the tea, that had never happened before, not even in the two-week fast in the Philippines—that she was physically allergic to food; anywhere near the bread box her hand crippled. Comestibles repelled her. The peculiarity of fasting is that there is no temptation. And the terror of fasting is that it is possible.

  But the days were so long! Every task loomed enormous. She tried to keep working on the furniture, but even the smell of shellac turned her stomach, and the reek of paint stripper drove her out back to retch tea. Brushing her teeth, smoothing the enticing mint on her tongue that she could not swallow, was the best moment of her day: because it was over.

  The second-best moment was morning, groping with hot, slit eyes to the calendar and marking off the day before with a big crude X, the scrawl of a prisoner chalking off a sentence on the wall of his cell. On December 17, she’d sketched a birthday cake, with confetti, streamers. Mornings through the first week she had embellished the picture with a wedge of Stilton, champagne, but no longer, for into the second week food had lost its frivolous, sensory appeal. More and more she wanted to eat to digest. Paging through the sixty-some-day decomposition of ten hunger strikers, one at a time, as each lost first his muscle, his appetite, his sight, his voice, and finally his mind, though never, through to the very last hour, his ability to mutely refuse salvation, Estrin grew less eager to taste Madeira cake again than simply to survive.

  From a penchant for starvation in the past, much of the experience was familiar: the headaches, the excessive heartbeat, the nursing-home care with which she rose from her chair; the funny metallic emission from her gums. Cold lips, sometimes a touch blue. Looking up at the clock and realizing she’d been sitting in the middle of the floor doing nothing for over an hour. Recipe fantasies. The phases: this is a cinch/this is a nightmare. I feel perfectly normal/I feel perfectly grotesque. Long sleep, attempted hibernation. Swings from torpor to irrational elation, bounding irresponsibly upstairs to clap Robin on the back even as she declined, easily, his offer of a Cadbury Milk Tray.

  The elation, however, was rare. Unusually rare. The sleep was fearfully narcotic. Surely this was worse than before. She felt back for memories of last time in the Philippines, cooking all day, never able to lick her fingers. Lying on the beach weekends like washed-up kelp. It had been bad; it was alway
s bad. But surely not this bad. Of one thing she was confident: the nausea was new. Oh, she’d been woozy from time to time, but actually puking up tea, never. And she’d never shaken so much; all her muscles ached, and her breasts were chidingly tender.

  Estrin told herself that fasting had never been a picnic and she’d simply forgotten what real discipline was like. Certainly the pleasures of fasting are few, though there is one: the will is a muscle, and beginning the second week Estrin’s began to burn.

  Will, of course, has the same reputation for righteousness among Protestants as suffering among Catholics, but will, too, is a neutral quantity, as easily put to the service of evil as good—there is nothing so all-fired wonderful about determination to do something lunatic, any more than there is about misguided suffering. Agonized folly, disciplined folly, is folly all the same. And so Estrin pumped the muscle with shy horror. She was feeding an animal that was not quite tame. It’s a queer business to not quite control—your own control. Weakness can be protection. Because Estrin’s will was violent. Estrin’s will was dangerous. And had she been locked in the H-blocks in 1981, Estrin’s will would have slaughtered her with unambivalent joy.

  There was one other pleasure, rather sweeter than the rising specter of a private Third Reich on Springfield Road. When she woke slow and groggy mornings, her hands would slip softly from her thighs, finding the scoop of her hipbones hollowed enough to serve soup, the rib cage sharp enough to carve lamb. Gradually and conditionally, warmth returned to her fingertips, and she smoothed the tight rump of her hips, finally earning a few tentative strokes of her own affection.

  However, as she shrank down half a pound a day, unearthing the knolls of muscle that had so inexplicably persisted through her decay, the morning of the eleventh day, with her eyes still closed, her hands padded their way up this new body to find her breasts had remained curiously full. It was time for her period, but this was ridiculous. Estrin had never been big there, and in her heyday had nearly reduced them to pectorals. She cupped them impatiently getting dressed. They were too—female. They were an affliction. She marched to the kitchen to boil water, glowering as the swells bobbled ahead, and rinsed the U.S. Out of Nicaragua cup stained with rosehips from the night before. But when the thin medicinal reek wafted from the nettle tea bag, she fled out back with the dry heaves. Pale and bracing herself on the brick, Estrin returned to the kitchen, having a hard time closing the door. It was brittle out there, with a rare frost. She’d have to head back out for coal; her breath fogged at the stove. Without food Estrin got cold easily and huddled over the steaming kettle, shivering. She forced herself to dip the tea bag, and stirred the tea for a long time. She had to force down liquids or she’d end up in the Royal for sure.

  Briefly the picture salved her: Malcolm stopping by when she didn’t turn up for work, finding her on the floor in a coma and calling an ambulance, lifting her on a stretcher and saving her from herself. Estrin had led such a nightmarishly healthy life, she envied Farrell. She would like his lungs. Because no one ever took care of her. She would like someone to take care of her.

  On the other hand, in a hospital they would ask what happened and they would try to feed her and she would shake her head and press her lips like a stubborn child. After repeated refusals she’d admit to having eaten nothing for eleven days and that she “only had ten more to go.” The nurses would be horrified. They wouldn’t understand the spiritual quest, that this was a return to herself, an act of loyalty and honor, even love. But Estrin knew from Beresford that they could break you, stick tubes in you and perforate your purity, pollute your exquisite Germanic perfection with glucose until you were any old hungry person once more. No, she did not want to end up in the Royal, and so she finished the tea and boiled more water, a good girl cleaning her plate. A different sort this time, fennel—why, what an opulent variety of tiny cardboard boxes lined the stove.

  Estrin built a coal fire and, wrapped in three blankets, propped with Ten Men Dead. She was beginning to deal with herself as an invalid who had to be carted to different rooms, propped with pillows, and given something to amuse it. She was most captivated by the second hunger striker, Francis Hughes. Bobby Sands was overserious and wrote woeful poetry. Hughes, however, was a soldier. He always dressed in fatigues. He was credited with murdering up to thirty members of the security forces, and if you were going to make a career of killing people, you might as well do it right. He’d been captured by the Brits at last after being trailed for fifteen hours shot in the hip. When they operated on the wound, he spurned general anesthesia for fear he would talk. He was motivated by loyalty to his friends and good old-fashioned revenge, having been badly beaten by the UDR as a boy, a justification Estrin preferred to the right-to-national-self-determination, freedom-from-the-tyranny-of-capitalist-imperialism rinky-dink they never got quite right at the Green Door. And Frank was physically competent, good with bombs, the inventor of the historically important clothespin booby trap. He was handsome and a drinker, had a foul mouth but a beautiful singing voice. Of all the hunger strikers it was Frank who persisted in exercising in his cell: Estrin was in love.

  But Estrin knew her own Francis Hughes, who’d not designed bombs but dismantled them, whose politics were fierce with respectable disgust. By early afternoon, after fifty-nine days of fasting, Frank had passed from man to myth, claiming, “I don’t mind dying as long as it’s not vain or stupid.” Estrin let the pages flap and announced out loud, “Sorry, Bootsie, but it was stupid,” adding, “I know all about stupid,” and lapsing into now recurrent fantasies of Farrell at 44.

  1. She has agreed to meet him, reluctantly. She arrives in her best black dress, drawn and tiny-wristed, skin translucent, tubercular: Dostoevsky. Farrell orders wine. Estrin orders Ballygowan.

  “You’re thirsty?” he asks.

  “Yes.” There is no explanation. The conversation is lively. He tells her about the conference. Her attention is perfect, her comments succinct, her humor dry. Farrell orders cherrystones, salmon, mixed salad; Estrin asks for a second mineral water. Farrell is startled.

  “I’m not hungry.” She shrugs, and smiles only on the teeth side of her mouth.

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “Yes.” Her hands are clasped.

  Farrell is unsettled and gulps his wine. He eats guiltily, slurping the clams; they drip. In the end he gets quite drunk. Estrin has remained composed. For once she sees him across the table stripped of the glow of Pouilly Fuissé. In her sobriety she is critical but forgiving. She notes the Béarnaise sauce on his collar, the fishy webs in the corners of his mouth. He gets a bit sententious. Estrin becomes only more understated. Perhaps there is even an argument. Estrin wins it, though he is too sozzled to be aware of losing. That is all right. Because there is a subtitle running: I have not eaten for eleven days. And tomorrow this same fantasy would run again, with twelve. A number dominated her day. Eleven was important because it was just past halfway. She had never understood eleven so completely. It is prime. If you subtract it from twenty-one you get ten. Ten more days … tomorrow nine …

  The fantasy was the not-saying. That was the extra challenge this time: to tell no one. Dining with Farrell and refusing to ask for admiration. Later, only after, would she permit herself to tell. Only on her birthday would she permit herself to tell.

  2. December 17. Farrell has dressed elegantly. They are seated in 133. She has made the meal herself. The candles are lit. Casual, patient, she lifts the fork to her mouth. Chews thoughtfully. Swallows. She knows the nothing of this moment: food tastes no better than it ever did.

  “I am a bit hungry,” she remarks.

  “Good,” says Farrell. “Your appetite’s been poorly.”

  “I’ll say.” Her voice is wry. “I haven’t eaten anything but herbal tea for three weeks.” Another slow, cardboardy bite of fish.

  Funny, in this picture every time he doesn’t hear her. He lets the comment slide by. The fantasy goes wrong. He does not drop h
is fork and say, “What?” He talks about the conference. Estrin shakes her head and feels sick. She can no longer keep down solid food. She excuses herself to the john and pukes. She returns blanched and barely able to stand, but this, too, he fails to notice. Later, when he’s drunk, he says she is beautiful. But Estrin is not beautiful, she is damp and jaundiced. She has not eaten her dinner. She needs to lie down. When Farrell makes love to her he is, as usual, flamboyant, half off the bed, but Estrin is passive and whimpering and he doesn’t notice. Why even in her fantasies did he never notice anything? Why, starving and light-headed in her half-built bombed-out house, no longer able to turn a page and still planning on running ten miles, could she not at least solicit his compassion in her head? For he was only critical now. He picked fights; and the sex, she could be anyone. Over and over she ran both visions, and each time the second, the birthday, went wrong.

  And there was something wrong with the first one as well. Yes, if she went out with Farrell before the seventeenth, she’d drink mineral water and keep her mouth shut, but because he’d not admire her after all. Estrin knew this because she did not admire herself. Her eyes throbbed in their sockets and she could cool them. The beloved leg muscles twinged in rebuke, the only reason she couldn’t feed them that she was a fruitcake.

  Once more Estrin Lancaster sacrificed for nothing. At least in Long Kesh the hunger strikers had the illusion of cause, and they did have each other. As usual, Estrin had nothing and no one. Just like weights, Estrin fasted only for vanity, for prettiness, because she lived in a time when lovely women were thin. For power, but petty, personal power, a base control over her own arm as it reached not for jam jars but for camomile. Estrin had refined the perfect suffering that did not respect itself. At last Estrin could whip herself and feel only cowardly and small. Maybe she had something to teach those medieval monks after all: to end the cycle of self-abuse and self-righteousness, lose your faith. Whip yourself for nothing. Feel the emptiness of your gesture. For Estrin starved herself and knew only shame.