Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Ballot boxes were locked up overnight; counting would start at 9 a.m., so there was no point in heading back to City Hall till morning. The remaining conferees drove home or went back to bed. Farrell, liberated once more from the twenty-four-hour day, which was clearly only for ordinary people, stayed up to flip magazines. How arbitrarily you chopped your life into little pieces of days, weeks, years, when it was really one long uninterrupted sigh. He roamed the empty rooms of the hotel. The Antrim Arms had not begun to recover; and the sight of so much shattered crockery, ties looped over chandeliers, and three-setting political diagrams penned on tablecloths made Farrell encouragingly wistful: he must have had a good time.

  Early morning he packed and, with nothing else on, took a walk to the Giant’s Causeway as the sun rose. Stepping the hexagonal stones with the North Channel slapping under the peach horizon, Farrell observed, It’s beautiful, clinically. Magnificent scenery always seemed to exclude him. It confused him. Farrell didn’t know what to do with it. Just like: women.

  Ah me. It was not true there was nothing left on the agenda; better get cracking. Farrell hiked back to the hotel, where the manager had put together a hefty bill for damages. Sensing he was making one of his usual mistakes, Farrell wrote out a personal check. A bad habit from that childhood of zero credit/total blame: he paid for things.

  It was a brilliant, clear morning. Testing his immunity to scenery, he had the taxi take the coast road. Meanwhile, the X’s began to flutter one by one into the pigeonholes of City Hall. Sometime in mid-afternoon they should have a profile of the results and turnout, and that was when Farrell would pay the call on Angus MacBride he’d looked forward to all year, if not for the last twenty-five.

  Day Twenty. Goldenrod sun, light which cast the Falls in the hue of an earlier century. It was hard to tell if the shimmer off the neighborhood was due to the weather, yesterday’s election, or the army, out in force. There was always more energy here with the Saracens plowing up and down, patrols jogging side streets. Their jungle camouflage amused the American, for there were few trees in West Belfast—the bright blotchy green only made the boys stand out. In effect, the soldiers were the trees.

  Estrin walked downtown. The waist of her jeans puckered under her belt. She had excellent posture. Shoulderbones poked her leather jacket. Browsing in Waterstone’s, Estrin selected, with care, The Chocolate Book. In Kelly’s, when she ordered coffee and they put milk in it, she had to send it back. When it returned black she couldn’t hack it, but the cup kept her hand warm. Otherwise, she felt startlingly normal, less shaky than for the whole last week. She paged recipes at the bar, determined to find the one concoction with the most butter and chocolate, and finally lit on Truffle Cake, requiring no flour at all.

  Estrin shopped through early afternoon. Farrell liked good prawns, and they were hard to find. So was high-quality bitter-sweet chocolate. But Estrin, having waited twenty days, was patient. She bought expensive Côte de Jura, with a color like the morning’s startling sun; freesia and mums to match; cognac. She took ten minutes in the bakery selecting her exact loaf of bread. The slabs of salmon were the color of steak. In the end, she spent fifty pounds she could hardly spare: part of the fun.

  Roisin cleaned. She decided what to wear. She went to the Botanic Gardens and strolled through the Palm House. The extra oxygen lightened her head; the moisture felt kind on her skin. Later she shopped for perfume and new shoes. She called by the caterer’s once more, who was annoyed at so much checking up on a two-person meal. Roisin was impervious to paltry annoyance. For touches, she returned to town for french roast and champagne truffles. She asked the off-license for a fine white wine. They suggested the Côte de Jura. It was dear, so she believed them. And brandy, she said. Champagne! They looked at her like, How drunk does he have to be? I don’t know, she wanted to explain. Very.

  It was unlikely Angus would get away from his election party, but in the fantasy they both came. Though apparently a ghastly mistake, in a way she had arranged it. Painful maybe, but enough was enough. Face things. They would each make their bid for her, furious with the other. She would stop them from coming to blows. This isn’t your decision to make, for once, she reproaches them. Men, you never seem to recognize when for once a woman has the power. I choose. And I have chosen. She turns. I love you. The confession would seem brave, but only just before, and then when it came, it would be easy. I have loved you from the first. I think I have loved you when you were only a name to me. I love you in the way we say the weather is fair, or that is a chair: my love is not an opinion but a fact. I love you in the same way I am five foot nine, and I could no more feel otherwise than grow shorter. My love is real as any object, and in this way it is simple and even ordinary. It sits with us beside the wine, stationary and calm, in the way of things. Because my love is not a demand, an assertion, a complaint: it is a fact. And I will love you every day for the rest of my life with this same ordinariness, just as I do laundry and fix lunch—your laundry; your lunch.

  By the time Farrell arrived, City Hall was already packed and perking; the stewards were having difficulty keeping out interlopers without passes. Outside, groups clumped around the building according to affiliation, breaking out packs of Harp on park benches. The entrance was looped with cables, and cameras boomed into Farrell’s face as he shouldered through the crowd. Not only the microphones of RTE and the BBC nosed forward, but ABC, NBC. He failed to answer questions posed in Finnish, German, and Italian accents. Inside, the crowds were already impatient with the coffee served in the rotunda; flasks glinted down side halls. MacBride was easy to locate by the ooze of supplicants, that big red beacon of a face beaming the length of the chamber like an overgrown Boy Scout’s.

  And little wonder. By noon the votes were largely tabulated in counties Antrim and Down; the big white billboards outside the counting rooms scrawled with the approval of the whole Province. My votes, thought Farrell, and would not, just today, chastise himself for being small. Just: My votes. Inside, Farrell went up to the pigeonholes and stuck his finger through the grid to touch the actual paper. He was waved off. But those are my votes. Mine.

  Plenty of hungry hangers-on sucked up to Farrell as well. Yet the attentions felt unpleasant. They were impersonal—to position, inclusion, info. How much would any of these prats have had to say to him in the days of Talisker? He found himself searching the chamber for someone to confide this to. Just as in the distillery, a figure flirted in doorways, with the elusive flicker of someone who was just leaving, or who had decided, with a glance in the room, not to come in after all.

  Grocery shopping had never been more voluptuous. For all of yesterday’s diet had felt cruel. While planning to scrape it aside, Estrin was still conscious of starving someone besides herself. She would like very much to feed the child a farewell banquet.

  For this rebellion was of a premier order. While the fast had become almost easy and she could see her way clear at this point to Day Fifty-nine, when Francis Hughes had kicked it, Estrin had invited Farrell not for Day Twenty-one, but for Day Twenty. Because Estrin thought she was full of shit. Estrin had decided fasting for three weeks was dorky. It took a form of super-discipline to overthrow herself, an exotic will not to meet a goal but to reject it. She had never taken on a more formidable enemy, the absolute enemy who knows the position of all your troops and even where you are thinking of moving them. Having outflanked an opponent with perfect intelligence (You’re just weak, you can’t make it … ), Estrin clutched her plastic bags stretching at the handles, the spoils of war. Her exaltation was indescribable. She bought nuts, ice cream, fruit, all for the day before her birthday, a date she could never remember celebrating precisely, and so, after thirty-two years and 364 days, it was about time.

  The results of the poll were officially disclosed at 3 p.m. The power-sharing initiative had passed by 70 percent, better than expected, even endorsed in some of the border territories of Armagh. Turnout was hardly brilliant, but they were n
ot suffering large-scale boycotts. In a politic of absolutes, the referendum had been destined to get slapped with SUCCESS or FAILURE and they had squeaked by.

  The bomb outside Boots seemed positively celebratory.

  MacBride slipped in a few interviews while still lucid; by six his only serious dialogue was with bottles of champagne.

  The festivities were in a large rented room of the Europa. Big, square, brown, neon over unstable press-wood tables, the Europa met Angus’s requirements perfectly. On the one hand it had ghastly decor, exorbitant prices, and appalling security; on the other, it was not Whitewells.

  “Don’t I deserve at least a glass?”

  Angus pip-pipped as he had in Cambridge, and made a show of pouring for his old friend, but one he staged for the lot; Farrell was getting routine bluster, generic congratulation. This amounted to being ignored. Farrell would take care of that.

  He retreated to observe. Amazing. MacBride had managed to mop up credit for the whole shebang. But it was my bloody referendum. My idea. I put it across in Westminster. I sold it down South. I won over the SDLP. And wasn’t the conference the same: filched. Look at the news. It was actually being called the MacBride Conference. By election day it had become the MacBride Referendum. A tiny Catholic experience of plantation. And with his typically unconstitutional, two-faced Fenian terrorism, Farrell had exacted his revenge.

  Farrell kept running in his head the moment this evening when MacBride would look at him really, for once the two of them in a room talking straight. Farrell could not recall a single discussion with MacBride when they hadn’t, secretly, been talking about something else. The quality of their relationship had grown only more ulterior, and it was wearying.

  As the party pickled on and Farrell decided he had earned more than one slainte of champagne, he began putting the impending showdown off. Why, by the time he angled toward Angus again, he was clearly forcing himself, and the glass in his hand was shaking. When he fetched the journal from his overcoat, the cover stuck to his fingers, tacky with sweat. By the time he sidled up to the thief of his referendum, Farrell had faced his disappointment: that he was not enjoying this; that he simply wanted to get it over.

  “You’ve a room upstairs?”

  “Aye, but not to spirit the likes of you.”

  “You had better.”

  “There’s trouble?”

  “There has been considerable trouble, which you were spared. Take your glass. You’ll need it.”

  Grumpily Angus relinquished his limelight and led Farrell up to his room. Angus sat on one of the single beds and slapped his thighs. “Well, now. Let’s make this jiffy.”

  Farrell remained standing. “I’ve yet to formally congratulate you.”

  “You couldn’t have brought me up here for that.”

  “No, I brought you up to congratulate me.”

  “Spot on, then. Thumbs up, well done. Can we go? I’ve my eye on one silky slip of a girl worked terrible hard for the SAYS YES campaign; she deserves a reward.”

  “I’m pleased you’ve such a panoply of lovelies to toast our success. You won’t miss one.”

  “Come again?”

  It was not quite the look Farrell was shooting for, so he fired on. “Besides, I only borrowed her. You can have her back if she’ll go.” Farrell’s coolness was a bit overdone. He had played this scene in his head too many times, and now found himself imitating his own images; reality was not measuring up. He tried to remember some of the zingers he’d concocted in the back of taxis. Instead, he was reminded of the pebble dash in Newry, bungling Eastwood’s lines.

  “Stuff your fancy footwork, O’Phelan. You’ve something to say?”

  Farrell handed him the Fortnight. “I know it’s tedious. But sometimes you should read your own mistress’s poetry.”

  Angus scanned the page, then glared up for explanation.

  “Surely you recognize the voice. It’s been whispering in the back of the ear since you were sixteen.”

  Angus tossed the magazine on the spread. “Why can’t you be a man for once and say flat out you’re bumping my girlfriend?”

  “Have been bumping; I am through. The point is, I did it for you—”

  “How can you—”

  “Hear me out. She was on the verge of leaking your affair. Once the rumor hit the Sunday World, she’d have wrecked you. And SAYS YES. Not just because she’s Catholic, but in case you need reminding, you are a married man.”

  “Your head’s cut. Roisin’s no tout.”

  “Roisin St. Clair is an attractive but aging woman, childless and unmarried. Face it, in another year or two you’d be through with her yourself. She knew that. But in the future, old boy, try to pick your mistresses with more care. Roisin seems quiet, but she’s scrappy. A tout? She could always pass the tattle off to herself as loyalty to the Republican movement.”

  “Roisin doesn’t give a toss about the Republican movement.”

  “Aye, but she did about you, MacBride.”

  “In which case, how could it be in her vaguest interest to spill? She’s kept her bake tight for two years. Your story’s not holding together, boyo.”

  Funny, Farrell thought the same thing. “By the time I got to her she’d concocted some remarkable fancies. All to do with myths of the two communities and that. You’re Protestant; you can divorce. She reasoned if she car-bombed your career, you’d have nothing to lose by leaving your wife.”

  “Piffle.”

  “Yes,” said Farrell sadly. “You have to admire women sometimes for what they can believe. I’ve urged Roisin to move on from poetry; I’m convinced she has a much greater talent for science fiction.”

  “So O’Phelan came to the rescue?”

  “I’ll be candid, I’m not sure how much I was motivated by deep personal loyalty. But I would not see the opportunity to sort out this Province glitched because you get an itch in your trousers late afternoons.”

  MacBride was finally growing incredulous. “You actually expect me to be grateful!”

  “You bloody well should be. It hasn’t been easy, linchpinning a delicate political scaffolding with a man who fingers down every pair of knickers with expandable elastic. Really, Angus, this womanizing has got to stop. I pulled you out this time. But I’m not about to devote myself to seducing your lovers in order to dismantle bombshells in your personal life. My disposal days are over. And this has been particularly sordid fiddle I don’t wish to repeat. So settle down, or even stick to Roisin. I imagine I’ve rendered her relatively harmless.”

  “How could she possibly go back to this ugly old bear once she’s sampled the refined wares of Farrell O’Phelan?”

  “Well, she seems to have stomached both of us for some time now.”

  “How long?” asked Angus warily.

  Farrell had an intuition he shouldn’t say, but it felt too delicious, a spade in black dirt, a blade through wormy ground. “This whole last year.”

  “You are one stinking wog—”

  “I figured you wouldn’t shake my hand. But I expect in the light of day, as Secretary of State, you will see my administrations as more charitable. She’s rather pretty in low light and a nice dress, but not my first choice. And certainly devoted—a little too. Clinging, in fact. Still, no one deserves to be shattered, do they? If I were you, I’d call round to pick up the pieces.”

  “I suppose O’Phelan the Fascinating has broken her heart?”

  “Yes,” said Farrell simply, and with a glance at his watch reached to let himself out, lest he make it two.

  “You’ve always had an exalted sense of your own importance, O’Phelan,” Angus called at his back. “I’ve brought you along for the ride. Yourself, you’ve never more than piddled on the sidelines. Disposed of a bomb or two, put up with Frankie Millar in The Crown. But I could have pulled this off without you, kid. You’ve always missed the ticket here: this game’s all about who your friends are. I’m about the only one you’ve got. Right, for once you joined t
he proper team. But without me you’re outside the fence—one more unruly football fan.”

  The lift shut. Farrell felt dimly depressed. In all, he’d found MacBride’s reaction rather pale.

  Even after twenty days, two extra hours were interminable. Her preparations done well before eight, she’d had to cellophane the salmon and put the bread back in its bag. She’d left the shrimp unshelled for casual effect, to seem to go to little trouble, though by now she could have shelled them several times. Estrin decided not to get angry. She would not be manipulated into one more trivial domestic, livid that dinner has been ruined! while the man is out tending to the affairs of the world. So she got depressed instead. The old pictures churned her head: nausea and inattention. She was nervous about digesting her food. She was afraid if she explained about the fast he would only find her potty. And she felt guilty for being pregnant. How quickly she’d assure him she wouldn’t have the child, to prove it wasn’t a ploy.

  When the knock came at last, her dread had steeped the kitchen as the smell of boiled cabbage infused so many Irish walls, and she was sure he would scent the reek of her terror. So ethereal this morning in nineteenth-century sunlight, having worked herself to such a pitch whipping cream, whisking chocolate, never licking the bowl, only to sit here three hours with her feet up, now that it was past ten she was half tempted to tell him to go home. The evening no longer felt appropriate; she didn’t even feel hungry; she’d rather go to sleep.

  Ordinarily her visions of an event and its nature on arrival clashed so radically that the fantasy could not survive fact: afterward she could not even remember the mock-up. Whatever she imagined, at least she could be sure it would be wrong. So Estrin was startled to open the door to find the dream kick into real life. Right off she was looking at a bad night. He was holding the door frame on either side in order to remain standing. His eyelids drooped. She felt convinced if he’d shown up at eight, this evening would have gone quite differently, but that was idle speculation now.