Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “Hiya.” The kiss on her cheek felt impersonal. More than three weeks apart, they did not feel quite comfortable with each other. As resort, Estrin fetched a bottle of wine he did not need. She poured two glasses, and held hers up to the candle; Farrell bent behind the glow: golden. Of all the women Farrell had mentioned, Estrin liked Tarja best.

  “So, the poll passed,” said Estrin. “Congrats.”

  “Aye, thank bloody hell it’s over.” Farrell flopped on the couch, loosening his tie. “I will spare you the regimen I’ve kept these three weeks, though you can guess.”

  “Why not,” said Estrin. “I’ve spared you mine.” Estrin twisted her wine, but did not sip. She had promised herself at most one glass, over the night—test the waters. But from even this she hung back. No ceremony? He didn’t know. The glass seemed beautiful but small, both luminous and insufficient, like a promise to be broken. “But you expected it to sail.”

  “On the contrary, this election has been on the brink of disaster from the beginning. It has taken constant supervision, like minding a baby with the croup.”

  “What would you know about babies with croup?”

  “I was one.”

  “Still are.”

  “Now that was frosty. Are you miffed? I’ve done something?”

  “No, Farrell, you’ve done nothing at all. For a month.”

  “Haven’t I rung up?”

  Estrin felt heavy and wilted, so overwhelmed by a three-week swoon of puked-up tea, the smudge on the footpath of Amelia Street so recently Duff Shearhoon, that plastic cup in the Royal with its tiny potent tablespoon, the ghastly loom of A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union so soon a day in her own, that she felt curiously at a loss for conversation. She threw coal on the fire. He was beginning to miss out on so much of her life there was nowhere to start, nothing to say; they weren’t even close. She looked over at the drunk man on her sofa and tried to remember her affection for him, the way she would sometimes search for a word in Russian she must have learned: lyubov.

  She raised her glass. “We should toast. Tomorrow’s my birthday.” Resigned to it meaning nothing to him, she took her small sip of Côte de Jura and so ended a three-week fast twenty-one hours and twenty minutes early, its few calories seeping through the weakest of victory smiles. It drizzled astringently down her throat, and did not taste so different from camomile tea. Wine could not save her, neither muscle tone nor the Soviet Union could save her, and that man slopped on her couch most certainly could not save her, but, oddly, whole-wheat bread would. She rose abruptly from her crouch before the coals. “I’m off to get dinner,” she announced.

  “Is it ready? I’m famished. Haven’t eaten all day.”

  “You poor thing!” Estrin cried. “It won’t take long.”

  In the small kitchen, he was impatient. His long legs were in the way; she had to keep stepping over them. Though she intended a simple meal, Estrin was proud of her cooking and couldn’t resist embellishments; last-minute tasks added up. Dividing her attention between the stove and Farrell, she boiled the dill hollandaise and had to start again. Farrell glowered.

  “We should have gone to 44. It’s after eleven. Maybe you should skip it.”

  “Tonight,” said Estrin through her teeth, “I am not skipping dinner.”

  “This scullery is stifling. Sure you could survive one night without food.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not sure I could.”

  “Have you just a can of soup, then?”

  “Farrell, when a woman fixes you dinner, it’s supposed to be a favor. Not a problem.”

  “Have you just a biscuit, then? My dear?”

  She plunked the plate of prawns before him and returned to sautéing mushrooms. When she looked around, he was not only ignoring the Stilton cocktail sauce but was eating the shrimp with the shells on. His expression was stoic and grim: he was hungry. He would eat these shrimp. He would be a good guest. They were positively indigestible, but he would say nothing.

  “I can’t stand it!” she declared, turning off all the burners and pulling up a chair. “I’ll shell them if you won’t. Here.” She was messy but swift, and cleaned a heap to keep him happy. So much for leisurely peeling over confidences and wine. She swept up the shells and wondered whether it was best to cry now or later. Later. No amount of surly abuse, disappointment, no, tonight not Farrell O’Phelan himself would keep Estrin from trying to keep something down her throat.

  “So how are the plans for Leningrad coming?”

  “I’ve thought of Armenia instead. Spitak, or Leninakusk. Earthquake relief.” Estrin’s ears picked up, as if someone else had spoken. She wondered what she would say next.

  “Fashionable. Right up your street. Disaster and more sectarianism—Armenians versus Azerbaijanis. But Armenia will hardly be de rigueur by the time you get there. You’ve got to stop arriving places when they’re passé.”

  “That’s my thought, I guess. That in a few months no one will give a toss for Armenia, some other catastrophe will be in vogue. But those villages will still need rebuilding, on or off the six o’clock news. I’m a good carpenter. And maybe that’s the test—being willing to do something boring and has-been.”

  “The test of what? Your extravagant altruism?”

  “I’ve never claimed to be an altruist,” Estrin bristled. “But I do try to avoid being a creep.”

  “I am an altruist,” Farrell declared. “One of a brave few. Because I’m an altar boy and a cynic. I dispose of people’s pesky bombs and wash their mingin’ laundry and don’t believe it makes the slightest difference. I am an altruist and I will be the first to tell you that altruists are prats. I am the saint of futile goodness. And I have defiled myself for its sake. I have wallowed in shite for this Province, for a crowd who only deserve to go to hell.”

  “Haven’t they?” Estrin interjected, flaking open the salmon under the broiler.

  “Och no, all the indignant UDA Methodists and devout, rosary-grubbing Provisionals are in seventh heaven. And when they do each other in, they drift straight to God the Father, smelling like the Anderson McAuley perfume counter. They have beliefs, you see. They are willing to die for their beliefs, and they are so generous with their convictions they’ll let you die for them, too. No, these gombeens are as happy in Ulster as bunnies in a briar patch. It’s me lives in hell on earth. And sure I’ll only burn when it’s done. Because haven’t I delivered my soul up to grot? I have damned myself for gobshites not worth the parings from my toes. That’s what’s wrong with the Christ story, in my opinion. This cod about how he rose and floated up. A real savior goes down. When you take on the sins of the world, you sin, for fuck’s sake! You smear yourself in its excrement like a stinking blanketman in the Kesh! No, my Jesus goes straight to hell. We’ll meet down there, roast bangers, and play bowls. Swap yarns! My Jesus has some stories to tell.”

  “Sounds like you do, too,” she said warily, and lured Farrell out of the kitchen by uncorking another bottle of wine. She brought the plates to the living-room table, with candlelight. How curiously, again, the scene was just as she imagined: the salmon red in the middle, its sauce smooth and weedy, the fine beans and baby corn bright and crisp … Farrell ignored his plate.

  But Estrin pondered hers. She no longer comprehended food, for fasting reveals the secret that you never need to eat, really—see, not a nibble and you’re still strolling streets right as rain. All the signs of a population that eats turn strange: fast-food parlors and groceries alike seem vestiges of a queer if widespread religion whose sham you have uncovered. Loyal to her own vows, however, Estrin partook—gently, in a tiny, well-chewed communion. It did not exactly taste good, but she hadn’t yet run to the loo. And she did not feel guilty. This was the first meal she’d eaten for the last two years and not felt guilty.

  “Estrin, my swallow,” Farrell sighed, retiring from his untouched dinner. “I’ve wondered how I might have turned out in another town. This one has eaten me from the c
enter. I feel like one of those shiny apples that deceive you until you take a bite. All around the core mealy and brown. I’m sorry.”

  “Farrell,” said Estrin. “What.”

  He closed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. Rubbing his bleary sockets, he spoke in a blur behind his palms. “For the past year Angus MacBride’s career has been in serious danger. And this must never leave your house. But keeping the whole slop to myself has been like not taking out the rubbish. It begins to smell. Angus has been carrying on with a woman, a Catholic, which doesn’t help. She was talking. She needed to be won from him, and silenced. I did the job.” Farrell emerged from behind his hands. “I believe she’s quite in love with me now. The referendum is passed. And I’m left looking quite the ogre, aren’t I? I feel shabby. I could bathe for hours. I could raise my face to a showerhead and drown.”

  Estrin put down her fork. “You mean you’ve been having an affair. Another one.”

  “Have I ever.”

  “For a year. All the while with me.”

  “It hasn’t been easy.”

  “You seem to have managed.”

  “You’re so cold.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “A bit of compassion. I am exhausted—”

  “You’re always exhausted.”

  “When have I ever before asked you for sympathy?”

  “Pretty much every time I’ve seen you.”

  “You’re disappointing me. So icy. For once I take you into my confidence—”

  “Farrell!” Her voice hit a harmonic. “We’ve seen each other for a full year; you sleep in my bed; I’m in love with you; and now you tell me that this entire time you’ve been fucking some other woman and I’m supposed to be sympathetic? Who do you think I am, Mother Teresa? Or just a moron?”

  “Someone you are not, obviously.” He drew himself up. “You’re being churlish. And I thought that you of all people might understand—”

  “I do understand.” Her voice descended again, deeper than usual. “That’s the trouble. You’re not remorseful at all. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sound ashamed unless you were apologizing for being nice! You and your ‘futile goodness,’ I sometimes think you had to give up bomb disposal because you figured out that it was useful! Pull off being a dickhead and you’re crowing! Some poor girl in this city is crying her eyes out, and I’m supposed to hold your hand? You should hear yourself, you raise the hair on the back of my neck: I believe she’s quite in love with me. One more heart to throw in the box with the rest, like tin pins for good attendance at confirmation class.”

  Farrell went stony. “I don’t wish to discuss this further.”

  Estrin cleared the dishes and scraped the food in the garbage. She returned to stab at the fire. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t have told me, but—”

  “Your point of view has been duly noted. The issue is closed.”

  For a second time that night, unexercised, Estrin’s anger went soft. A wave of weakness crossed her; she dropped a shade paler in her face. Her intestines began to squirm. She was cold, terribly cold, and, though unable to wrest enough calories from either her dinner or the coals, crowded before the grate as if it could offer comfort of a more enduring sort. The truth was, she wasn’t his wife or even his “girlfriend” exactly, and in the obscurity of their relationship he could hide. Had she a claim to legitimacy of any reasonable kind, Estrin might throw things, but under these conditions even to have raised her voice was pushing her luck. How little she had of him. And wasn’t she leaving this country soon enough besides. Why bother to protest. How cleverly he had always managed to keep her helpless. He really was a remarkable man.

  For the betrayal was too subtle to name. There is a way of lying that is simply keeping your mouth shut: he had never said he was not messing about, never explained his obligations, but the enormity of the not-said all these months bloated her sitting room, the countless conversations in these same seats when he had swallowed this story with his Chardonnay and spoken instead about censorship of Sinn Feín. Too, there are betrayals to promises specifically not made—had he ever vowed to be faithful, or to tell her when he was not? No, but the issue fell away before the larger betrayal that he had not made these promises.

  She talked to the fire about Duff; she felt so far away it was amazing he could hear her without a bullhorn. And how they managed to move from Shearhoon to German concentration camps Estrin would never quite piece together the next day.

  It was two in the morning. She did remember at some point mentioning having been to Bergen-Belsen. Farrell responded that he would never visit such a camp because he “couldn’t take it.”

  “I bet you couldn’t,” said Estrin, propped at a broken angle in her chair. In the last two hours she had come to think of Farrell as someone she had once known. Her single glass of wine was barely touched. She pictured herself in a pillbox outside an RUC station. The door is locked, the windows bulletproof. The only way to get through is to speak in a tiny microphone in the glass. The sound is bad. There are guns if she wants them. In the glow of a three-grille space heater, Estrin is smoking and reading a magazine. She is a middle-aged man with no family, and will soon drive home and watch television. “You couldn’t take not being an inmate. Auschwitz survivors must destroy you with envy. Christ, you look like one, you’d fit right in. You could not sleep, eat badly, work too hard—a camp with all your favorite pastimes, better than arts and crafts. Couldn’t drink, though. That might prove a problem.”

  “Is nothing sacred from the whittle of your sarcasm?”

  “No,” she announced. “Nothing.” (Inside the pillbox, it turns out the man is a cripple. He was shot by terrorists and can’t move from the waist down. That’s why they stick him in the guardhouse. But in his immobility, he is free. He used to play sports, but has grown philosophical about not being able to play. At least he doesn’t lose anymore, he jokes. And really he doesn’t mind. He’s happier than he was before. He doesn’t think about women; he’s given them up. He’s impotent. He works crossword puzzles instead. His life is small, regimented, and dull. He knows this, so there will never come a time it hits him over the head. He has no friends; his parents are long dead. He is impervious.)

  “I give the Holocaust Special Category Status. I do not loot death camps for good crack. They are the emblem of evil to me. They have changed the nature of the human race. As such, they keep the Troubles in their place.”

  “No …” Estrin considered. (The man is reading about bottle collecting. He skips all the articles to do with politics. Someone calls through the mike; he keeps his head down. They rap a coin on the glass and he pretends not to hear. His shift is almost over. Pretty soon they go away. He doesn’t feel bad.) “I don’t think the Holocaust changes anything. In my experience, people treat each other like shit all over the world. I suppose they always have. If there’s such a thing as evil, it’s definitely in Northern Ireland.”

  “Do you realize—” Farrell leaned forward. “The Nazis gassed one man every four seconds?”

  “Yes, Farrell—” Estrin rubbed her forehead.

  “Every four seconds!”

  She stopped trying to get through. He was rocking back and forth, with his hands between his knees. Fat tears blobbed down the deep lines by his nose. Mucus spidered slowly from his nostrils to the carpet. Every four seconds repeated itself about that often. He was sobbing.

  It was a maudlin display that gradually eased the angles Estrin had assumed in her seat, not because he was so winningly disturbed by the fate of his Jewish fellowman, but because he was making a fool of himself. She moved to the couch and put her arm around his shoulder. He crumpled against her and draped around her neck; 155 pounds or no, with Estrin tiny herself now, he was heavy. She reached for a napkin and wiped his nose. She supported his weight as best she could and sifted the curls of his hair. She would never have guessed that tonight of all nights one more time she would end up comforting Farre
ll O’Phelan. But in acting like an inconceivable idiot, Farrell broke her heart. She made herself forgive him for embarrassing her. Lord, he was drunker than she’d ever seen him. And there he was trailing snot on her favorite shirt, still apparently convinced he was crying over Nazi concentration camps.

  (The RUC man has gone home. There is no one in the pillbox. The heater is off. The wind sings through the slats of the microphone.)

  That forgiveness was the most she could wring from herself, the bit of succor, water from stone. She had to slip herself out from under his arms and scuttle to the loo. There she shat out all the salmon and green beans and baby corn. It was going to take some doing to get back to food. But at least she didn’t vomit, and it had been so long since she’d moved her bowels that she rather enjoyed the experience.

  When Estrin returned Farrell was sniveling into the sofa, between sobs asleep. She studied him at ten paces. After what he’d admitted tonight, she had every right to kick him out. No sane, self-respecting woman would sleep with a man after an evening like this. But he was in no condition to throw on the whims of the world. Besides, eviction would take too much energy. And how many nights were left, really. Would there even be more than one.

  She kissed him between the eyes. “Why don’t we go to bed.”

  He straightened and wiped his face, glancing around as if remembering where he was. He looked at Estrin with a funny surprise, as if this were the first time all night he’d noticed she was there. “But you wanted to talk to me about something, you said.”

  “Let’s wait it.”

  “No, no. Go ahead. I’ve nattered all night.”

  Estrin looked away. “I need money.”

  “How much?”