Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “Have you seen what they’ve done to the Washington Bar?” chimed Damien. “The yuppies have shined up every chink. Looks like a bleeding Wimpy’s. And they’ve shoved the boyos to the back, for they don’t fit the new decor.”

  “The Washington, bollocks, the Britannic!” Callaghan exclaimed.

  “Aye,” Duff sighed. “The Crown has soiled herself.”

  “You been in?” asked Damien.

  “Tried once,” Callaghan snorted. “And this fat specky cod in the doorway puts out his arm, like. Points to a sign about PROPER ATTIRE. Told him my tux was in the cleaner’s, thank you very much. Fucking hell, I’d not drink there if you put me on salary.”

  “All part of the picture,” said Damien. “Don’t you know Maggie sent a check from across the water to do up the Crown’s top floor. And you can wager the Washington’s part of the conspiracy, and all those shoe stores in the town: more rape of our culture. Get the ladies addicted to bun warmers and Earl Grey tea, sure they won’t bang bin lids anymore.”

  “Aye, the whole place has gone soft, like,” keened Callaghan. “And you know who’s the worst of the lot—”

  “The Provos!”

  “Better freakin’ believe it! The gombeens poove about in ties. I tell you, Sinn Feín is the worst thing ever happened to West Belfast. A ballot box in one hand and after-shave in the other—”

  “Wasting time in City Council screaming Point of order! Point of order! instead of digging their balaclavas out of mothballs. I don’t give a toss for a Republican who can’t fire off anything but his mouth—”

  Estrin choked on an incredulous guffaw.

  “But sure it’s time for a change, d’you follow? Twenty years and how far are we, just?”

  “Exactamente!” said Callaghan, who holidayed in Spain. “So they plant a wee bomb here, a wee bomb there. Who gives a frig? Isn’t the whole kit accustomed to a bit of a bang from time to time? Don’t grannies knock the plaster from their hair and take another spoon of egg mayonnaise? No, to shake this place up now you’ve to do better than knock a few windows out of Windsor House. And the Brits-and-peelers strategy is off the mark. It’s civilian casualties have an impact. Look at Enniskillen: the Provos bow and scrape how it was a mistake, but I say it was fuckin’ brilliant! Got wider coverage than any operation in the last five years.”

  “Aye, but there’s press and press, Mike lad, d’you follow—”

  “Impact is all that matters. The Provos claim this is a war and then conduct it like a badminton match. If this is a war, I say let’s have it, all out. There’s no such thing as a civilian in Ireland. You choose your sides and your weapons, and I am bleeding sick of waiting for some eejit to wave a flag and shout, Go! I am dead bored with reading about one more shooting here, one car bomb there; why, even Enniskillen was small potatoes—”

  “So do it!” Estrin had run out of bar to wipe. It was a tribute to the durable powers of the human body that after fourteen days without food her face could still turn such a vivid color of fuchsia.

  Callaghan turned. “Por favor?”

  “Go ahead! Fly to Libya and stuff a few Sam-7’s in your carry-on! Honest to God, it would be a relief just to see this crowd do anything! All this flannel night after night, and I have to listen to it, for hours. Bullshit, that’s what we call it in America, you are bullshitters. Because for all your talk about Milltown, Andytown, Gibraltar, with all this aspiration to a united-fucking-Ireland, you think I don’t know what you really do? You sleep till noon, kick around hoovering crisps until the club opens, and then drink yourselves psychiatric! You can’t hoodwink me, I pour the booze! Okay, it’s your life, but I just wish, if that’s the way you want to spend it, you’d face that, snoot down your row of pints, and shut up!”

  “Now, Estrin, love,” Duff stuttered. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh, now—”

  “Harsh!” Her voice skipped up an octave. “I have hardly begun! Sailbheaster sits back there night after night mugging in dark glasses for the INLA until his mummy comes to collect him. In my day we played cops and robbers, but I was eight! I feel as if I’m running a babysitting service! And all of you hit on poor Clive every time you’re short of quid, and score a stout in exchange for some bogus interview. You’ve never told him a damned thing he couldn’t find in the papers, or worse, because you get the details wrong. And you, Damien, with all your bitching about how you’ve had it with this place and you’re going to travel, you’ll get a Guzzi like mine and—well, go! Go, go, go! I mean, it’s like listening to a 78 of The Cherry Orchard on 33!”

  “Well, aren’t we the lofty one, Little Miss Well-Traveled,” said Callaghan. “And what mighty works have you executed, that you sit at the right hand of you-know-who?”

  “Nothing,” she said squarely. “I have done absolutely nothing. But do you hear me whining about what all I want to do but the British won’t let me, I can’t because I’m lower class or a woman or short, or whatever excuse an American gets to use—or do we get any? No, at least I admit that no, I do not want to accomplish anything, I only want to have a good time—”

  “Some good time,” muttered Damien.

  “And no, I have zero political opinions, and that may be deplorable to you, but at least I don’t sit around pounding the bar and sounding ferocious and still having no more effect on my country than a sick mouse on the dole.”

  “And your fancy man O’Phelan,” said Callaghan, “you figure he shows us up, like? He’s a bloody paragon?”

  “At least he gets off his butt.”

  “And on top of a fair number of others, I’ve heard—”

  “What’s that supposed to—”

  “Sure we’ve all got our dreams, d’you know?” Duff interrupted quickly. “And when they don’t come through—”

  “You mean when they don’t arrive in the mail—”

  “A man needs the odd sip of consolation, d’you follow?”

  “Yes, I follow, because if you aren’t the worst of the bunch.” She wheeled on Shearhoon. “All your stories about the old days, when the most you’ve had to do with barricades has been to become one! As for your literary ambitions—”

  “Now I did send To Kill a Whirlybird into Blackstaff, and it was simply too radical—”

  “When?”

  “Sorry?”

  “When did you send it?”

  “Why, that must have been—”

  “Ten years ago!”

  “Well, perhaps the disappointment, d’you follow—”

  “The consolation, more like it. And when did you write it, this grand epic of Irish resistance?”

  “Why, I believe it was—”

  “Twenty years ago! And when, Duff Shearhoon, was the last time you actually read a book?”

  “Sure the other day just—”

  “Sure you cannot fucking remember! I’ve traveled all over the world, but Christ, I have never been anywhere more calcified with self-pity—”

  “Est—”

  “Resentful of anyone’s success—”

  “Est!” Malcolm guided her to the back kitchen with a hand on her arm. He closed the door behind them and sat her in a chair. Her head fell over the back, and Malcolm stroked her hair. “What,” he asked softly, “is wrong?”

  The ceiling buckled; for a moment the wriggle of tiles disappeared. Estrin closed her eyes and said nothing.

  Malcolm stooped at her side. “You look desperate, you know that? You’re pale and skinny and I never see you eat anything, and now you don’t even drink. I pass you in Andytown flopping by the mile; it’s cold, it’s raining, and you’re bloody killing yourself. What’s up, Est?”

  She was not forthcoming. He rose and rubbed his own neck. “The rest could use a browbeating, but I wish you’d let up on Shearhoon. It’s Callaghan should be carpeted.”

  “I know,” she sighed, and didn’t recognize the sound from her mouth; her very voice was losing weight. “But Callaghan frightens me.”

  “Why,
just?”

  “The others rattle me because they’re all talk. Callaghan rattles me because he’s not.”

  “You overrate the chump. A dozer like the rest, and he fancies you, like. They all do.”

  “Malcolm, what are you doing?”

  From his knapsack the boy had produced milk and several packets of tinfoil, and was rustling over pots. “I told you I’d a surprise. There’s not a meal to coat your ribs like Malcolm Dunlea’s Irish champ. You’ve never had the real thing, says you. Now the spuds is all cooked—”

  “Malcolm, we really need to cover the bar. It’s half an hour to last call.”

  “Don’t you be fussed, I’ll pull the pints.” He glugged milk in the pan and sprinkled scallions on top. “Meantime, you can sit back here—”

  “No, really, I’ve had my tea.” Estrin was sorry there was no one to get the joke; tea in Ulster meant dinner, and didn’t it.

  “Aye, your three leaves of lettuce and a Brussels sprout. Now the trick with champ is not to boil the milk but still cook your spring onions—”

  “Malcolm.”

  “And then you build a big moat, like, with the creamed spuds—”

  “Malcolm, stop.”

  “Fill the lake with hot milk, and then float your really massive lump of butter in the middle—”

  “Malcolm, I can’t!”

  “But, Est—I brought all the bits—the best champ in West Belfast—”

  “For Christ sake, Malcolm.” She stood up. “It’s only mashed potatoes.” Brisking to the bar, she left the door swinging. When she returned an hour later, the pan was rinsed, all the foil packets bagged away.

  Day Fifteen. Estrin continued to have trouble with her eyesight. In Ten Men Dead it said that fasting, you begin to go blind because your body feeds off your brain tissue for protein. Estrin told herself this was too soon, that she simply wasn’t sleeping; as she wasn’t, for she tossed by the hour with relentless visions of Francis Hughes. He limped her bedroom in Doc Martens boots, dragging a jug of plain water, Ulster’s Ghost of Christmas Past.

  Estrin abandoned the North and checked out The Life & Times of Michael K from Linen Hall. She read it in one sitting, though lines of text vanished from time to time. A clammy hand had guided her selection. Michael K begins to live entirely on pumpkin, and as in every book she’d read for fifteen days, the main character starved.

  Day Sixteen. Estrin calmed herself, there was no doubt now she would make it. Then, Day Twenty-one was the point at which the Long Kesh hunger strikers were routinely checked into hospital.

  It was Friday, but her customers were cool, as they’d been the night before. Damien and Callaghan stopped talking when she approached; Sailbheaster kept his gloves on, his jacket zipped to his chin; Clive arrived with a paperback of The Crack and though not turning any pages did not look up. Malcolm didn’t tell Estrin about hurley practice. Duff moved his regular stool conspicuously from the bar, and ordered only from Malcolm; the twitch in his eye fluttered like the wings of a hummingbird.

  So on Day Seventeen she did not find their silence inexplicable. Estrin was in one of her improbable phases of exuberance and hoped to effect a reconciliation without apologizing outright. She tried a joke with Clive; his eyes went small. She brushed past Malcolm and began to assure him that next week was her birthday, and most certainly they would have that champ, with bangers and rashers and potato bread besides, and a big bottle of Bush to wash it down … When Malcolm only rolled a plastic bullet, she cut it short. They sure held on to a grudge. At least Duff would warm at her touch like the big ball of cookie dough he was, but when she turned to his stool, for the first time since she’d worked this job, it was empty.

  “Duff’s not in the loo, is he?” she asked Malcolm. “I don’t see his coat.”

  “You’ve not heard the news, then. I was wondering.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “He tried to plant a bomb in The Crown Bar.”

  “But Duff loves The Crown!”

  “Aye. Made it more of a personal sacrifice, like. For the cause.”

  “What cause?”

  “Yours, I’d venture. I figure he wanted to do something.”

  “Fucking hell.” Estrin sat down, hard. “All I had in mind was a poem.”

  A cathedral of drink in the center of town, The Crown was a cross-sectarian bar. Unlike the haughty, disinherited façade of Stormont, the grand but inevitably British City Hall bannered front and back with BELFAST SAYS NO, St. Anne’s or St. Patrick’s each patronizing its separate part of town, The Crown was a landmark on common ground, a corner Switzerland in gold, manila, and pale greens. Close-ups of the bar’s watery stained glass, hand-painted tiles, and curling plaster ceiling lavished National Trust postcards. Neither side, perhaps superstitiously, had laid a sheet of Semtex any nearer than the big brown eyesore of the Europa Hotel across the road (open season and no loss). You could sprinkle the RUC over the glens of Antrim like so much gentle rain, riddle the island’s best smoked salmon with grape-shot in Marks and Spencer, or drill your own grandmother with an SLR, but you did not bomb The Crown Bar.

  For The Crown was a real reconciliation camp, unifying the intemperate, where Duff Shearhoon and his hefty counterparts on Sandy Row alike could extend in long confessional booths, shutting the dark wood doors with their leonine gargoyles tightly on the conflict. When the Troubles are cleared away, The Crown will be what is left. The Crown was above the Troubles; it did not need the Troubles. The name may have sounded British, but the bar was Irish to its girders, a world view: Sure what’s your hurry now, you’ll have another Bush, you will, there’s plenty of time for all your carry-on tomorrow … The Crown didn’t fast. Unquestionably, The Crown was the capital of Eddie McIlwaine’s Ulster, and it was only a regular pilgrimage to such a shrine that made the prospect of the house in Castlecaulfield remotely bearable.

  Duff Shearhoon so worshipped The Crown that he only delivered himself to its forgiving arms once a week, like saving the good china for Sunday tea. He could be found on Great Victoria Street reliably every Friday at three, an adventure that cost him no small huffing and puffing—busing his bulk even small distances amounted, in sheer poundage, to organizing a school field trip. The Crown was a good afternoon bar, shielded with stained glass, impervious to times of day; it was never too early for a jar. And despite the fact that Duff had been impeccably unemployed for years, Fridays retained their atmosphere of hard-earned holiday; from his youth as a civil servant, Duff still ritually observed the salient feature of a working week: celebration that it was over.

  The Crown’s recent renovation had been loyal enough, but its accompanying unveiling of the Britannic Lounge on the second floor was pure betrayal. A dress code? and a bouncer? What was left of it curled Duff’s hair.

  So it was a queer business that Shearhoon had failed to take the bouncer into consideration, who later that night described to the RUC a great heifer of a man in a shabby olive anorak clutching a parcel tied up with a manic amount of string. Admission to the Britannic was discretionary. Though the doorman complained the gentleman wasn’t wearing a tie—and with Duff’s chin, neck, and shoulders all roughly the same circumference there was nowhere for a tie to go—one suspected from the distasteful portrait of puffy lips and wheezy shambling your man’s real objection was to Duff himself. The customer had appeared in a state of “agitation and inebriation,” and persisted, gasping, that he had an appointment, d’you follow? Then, the rebuff went easily enough, for Duff was less likely to storm past the bouncer than need help up the stairs.

  For how many times had Estrin listened to Duff grunt off his stool, whistling through flared nostrils? So she could picture him clearly on Amelia Street, ambling from the Britannic in the same bald corduroy she waited five minutes each night for Duff to wrestle on, with the affectionate tussle of a master with his aged dog. Bewildered by his package like mail order he no longer remembered writing off for, never in his life more desperat
e for a pint, he had gazed into the beloved amber windows glinting with the saffron memories of so many Friday afternoons gone by. In fact, the bouncer described the Britannic’s rejected patron as merely standing beside The Crown for several minutes in a paralytic stupor, waving the package about as if trying to give it away, and at length galumphing wildly to a street bin on the corner and depositing the bundle on a bed of Harp tins. The package disliked being abandoned, however, and complained.

  Much as the reluctance cost him, it warmed Estrin that Duff could not, in the clutch, sally into the welcoming fold of his beloved pub with so ungrateful a present. Maybe he imagined he could damage only the Britannic Lounge, since for true it was a sad little bomb, rural, HME, good for a sprinkling of injuries, a counter, a bar mirror, and a floor of windowpanes, or, apparently, one human barricade.

  Estrin glared up at Callaghan from her slump. “You know, this doesn’t sound like Duff’s idea to me.”

  “How do you figure?” asked Callaghan pleasantly.

  “Nothing would alienate this whole town more perfectly than hitting The Crown Bar. Impact,” leveled Estrin.

  “Aye, the choice was bloody brilliant,” he concurred. “But the job was wick. Maybe you were right, Yank. Shearhoon was never much of a hard man, like. Suppose you feel a bit poorly, so you do. After the rousing call to action.”

  “Do I feel depressed, yes. Responsible? I told him to get off his butt. I did not suggest fertilizer. I mean, where did he get it, Callaghan?”

  Michael shrugged. “This is West Belfast.”

  “This is the Green Door! Haven for the clueless and unconnected! Christ, you are a shit.”

  The pasty man scratched the bulge between his shirt buttons and squeezed the same old smile. He did not feel bad, and he never would. It is generally only good people who feel bad; guilt, unfairly maligned by popular psychology, is the signpost of decency.

  Estrin was sad and she would miss Duff, but she couldn’t quite cry. It seems the whole club felt this way. Duff was a man whom everyone had liked, and liking, as Estrin had observed herself, is a trivial, disposable brand of affection, easily replaced. Then, he had never asked for more. An entertainer, he would never bore his audience with stories of promising, witty schoolboys drabbed by careers of collecting rates, of fifty-year-old sons who would still return home every night after ten merry pints and weep themselves to sleep over parents more than a decade dead, of lonely fat bachelors. No, Duff was an anecdote.