Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “A lot, I—I’m leaving, Farrell. Sooner than I thought. I guess I will go to Armenia. I won’t have time to sell the house. So I need enough for an airline ticket. Probably three, four hundred pounds.”

  “Oh, aye.” He rustled through his pockets. “Whatever you need. I’ll write you a check.” The signature was so indecipherable she wondered if the bank would honor it.

  Estrin dragged Farrell in a fireman’s carry up the stairs, impressed that after all that fasting those thigh muscles still rallied round when she asked.

  Farrell went right to sleep, curled on the far side of the bed in his usual position, hands sandwiched under his genitals. Estrin lay straight on the other, staring up, awake. She would at least have liked him to have noticed that she’d dropped so much weight—not to appreciate how svelte she was, but to say, “You’re much too thin,” and sternly force eggs on her in the morning. She could live without his admiration, but she longed for his concern.

  Finally she slept, never so much as brushing his arm. And there was no chance of wrangling over eggs at breakfast, for when she woke around nine he was gone.

  “Well, well,” Estrin said to the ceiling. “Happy birthday.”

  chapter twenty-three

  What Is So Bloodcurdling about a Swallow in Your Kitchen?

  You stood me up.”

  Indeed, the room appeared an overnight Miss Havisham’s house from Great Expectations: the freesia had withdrawn; the assortment lacked a single chocolate; the champagne bucket, its water tepid, rested in a white ring. Amid a profusion of utensils and curlicued china at table, the peaks of napkins had folded.

  Farrell collapsed into the sofa. Plumped pillows sprayed cool air refreshingly up his neck with a smell of cotton and furniture polish. “I gather Angus didn’t call?”

  “You see about you the detritus of drunken revelry? The glasses smashed on the wall, the tattered tissues of popped crackers? Shoes on the stair, nylons trailing from seat cushions? Perhaps it’s the telltale snoring overhead, or maybe just the weary but satisfied gleam in my eye that gives away the whole wild, glorious celebration.”

  Farrell did not know where the notion originated that women were not aggressive. In his experience, any one of them would fill out a pillaging Viking horde to its considerable advantage. “I’m sorry, I decided it was best I renege. Now that the election is over, there is no further need for us to see each other again.”

  “Pardon?”

  It’s interesting how when you say something unpleasant people will physically not hear you. “I am ending this relationship.”

  “I don’t believe this!”

  Farrell sighed. The third version in twelve hours, he was quite bored with this story. “I can’t say that’s of any consequence. You’ve time.” Farrell’s gaze toured the room, patiently waiting for her reaction to proceed to Phase Two.

  “You mean you’ve just—used me!”

  Two! “Yes,” he encouraged, as with a quick student. “Mercilessly.”

  “To keep me from—”

  “That’s right.”

  “You are a—a—”

  “This is the local consensus.”

  “You forget, I—I could wreck you and Angus both!”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” Farrell picked a bit of shrimp shell from underneath a nail. “Rumor won’t slay Angus now, not after he’s absconded with my referendum. And I’ve plenty evidence that you and I have rolled in our share of hay. Remember where you are, my poppet: you merely end up looking like a whore. Of all of us it’s your name needs protecting. As for me, give yourself more credit. You bolster my reputation.”

  “Along with a whole harem of others, I suppose?”

  “There is,” he continued with a measured, imperturbable softness that must have enraged her, “one other woman. Whom I have also treated abominably, I fear. I intend to make it up to her, or try. Though I believe it would be kinder if I avoided women altogether. I don’t seem to be good for them.”

  “I could tell Angus.”

  “My dear, he already knows. He is not jumping for joy. But he will eventually realize I saved his arse. Besides, what can he do, sic the UVF on my taxi? He’s a statesman. Or, after all this fuss, refuse to accept the office of Secretary of State, for revenge? Because I tried to warn you long ago: Angus has his eye on the Nobel like a big, sticky sweet Mommy has promised him. He wants credit for sorting out this Province far more than he wants you, or to flummox an uppity Taig who nicks his mistress—one of them. And he will do a good job here. We will be irrelevant.”

  Looking at the tight, stringy woman across from him, Farrell felt a first moment of tenderness. Roisin St. Clair had felt irrelevant her whole life. It hadn’t been easy—while her renowned Republican father got shot in his bed and her two brothers ran guns from the South before getting lifted, Roisin was writing poetry. Her mother never let her forget it, either. How often in this last year Farrell had heard the woman spout after a dose up the road: Of course it’s Roisin markets when the arthritis gets bad, Roisin who’s sent to buy fruit for the lads, who does their bloody laundry, all so Ma can troop up in a Provy bus to the Kesh and bring packages and weep every freaking visiting day, and all I ever hear about is Mark and Lalor, Mark and Lalor and the Struggle. Struggle! If anything is irrelevant, it’s the Struggle! The real struggle is, Mama, look, I’ve published another book; remember me, I’m your daughter. The real struggle is, Angus, look at me, I’m thirty-seven and I do want a family, you bastard, what are you going to do? Then, thought Farrell, suffering doesn’t always ennoble. Sometimes it makes you petty. Hadn’t the insights Roisin occasioned routinely been this cruel? Why, now the real struggle must be in this sitting room, in not reaching out and wringing his own neck.

  “But you said we might have a child—” she choked.

  “I lied. Children don’t apply to me.”

  “And a wee house in Ardara where I could write …”

  “The whole there’s-a-place-for-us I filched from West Side Story. You shouldn’t read so much, Roisin, most of my material is from films. Myself, I haven’t had the concentration to finish a book in ten years.”

  “Not even mine.”

  “Least of all yours. Oh, I dandered through them, mind you. Research.” Farrell wondered if he should stop himself. But the astounding credulity she’d displayed for months now inflamed him. He was offended she hadn’t found him out. Like all his previous successes, this coup embarrassed him. Any victory Farrell had ever won merely exposed the contest as bogus, his opponents as cardboard; had he ever had a proper game in his life? Anyway, he wanted to hurt her, badly. He would teach her not to let men walk on her by walking harder than any man ever. She would think twice the next time some gobshite asked her for a jar in Kelly’s Bar and straight off put his hand on her shoulder.

  Of course, he would teach her nothing, so it was only for the mental exercise that he went on. “If I were you,” he advised her genuinely, “I would get married. Soon. To someone a bit older. Catholic, to make it easier, not because of your beliefs. He should be neither handsome nor accomplished. Make him well enough off. He’ll be grateful for a reasonably pretty woman, and impressed by your poetry because it’s in print. He will not only give you a child but go through ordeals of doctors, thermometers, and funny positions to conceive. Most of all, he should be a bore. But he will never be bored with you, he’ll be fascinated. You can have your scenes. You can hide in bed for days, and he will shut the door softly behind you on his way to work, work so dull you can’t even remember what your own husband does for a living. And he’ll buy you that house in Ardara, if that’s what it takes to find out you don’t want it.

  “That is what you need. Because if you don’t heed my advice, you’ll end up one of those birdlike women nipping sherry at 11 a.m. Face it, you’ve not many vaulting Heathcliff affairs left in you. And frankly, you’re no good at it. You avail yourself and demand nothing back. Whether Tom and Gerry like it, this is still a capitalist soci
ety, where you’re worth the price you ask. A diamond is worth five hundred quid not because it’s lovely but because it costs five hundred quid. And you sell for a song, my pigeon.” Funny, that was the first time he’d used the dubious endearment out loud.

  Fleeing to Whitewells for a shower, he did not manage to avoid one more of the ugly revelations Roisin could trigger: that it was hardly on to maintain to yourself that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

  Estrin cleaned the kitchen, then fixed herself coffee with two-thirds milk. She hefted out her neglected Truffle Cake, heavy for such a puck of a thing, to dollop a slab with cream. Unlike the salmon, the cake tasted fantastic. She finished it effortlessly, and had a small second piece.

  On her next cup of coffee, Estrin studied the check, with its poor mangled scrawl, newly co-signed with a chocolate fingerprint. He’d made it out for five hundred pounds; it would more than cover a shuttle ticket and an abortion. She’d mail the remainder to Whitewells.

  She put it down. Picked up the phone. While she knew you could buy a shuttle ticket at the airport, Estrin called a travel agent and talked for several minutes, scribbling. Then she made one more call, fidgeting when the ringing went on so long. But of course, she realized when the woman’s voice croaked over the distance, it was five in the morning there.

  “Mother—?”

  It’s amazing how a parent can burst into tears from a dead sleep.

  “… In Belfast. —No, wait … No, let him sleep, just listen. Mother—? Mother! I’m coming home.”

  With two bombs in the city center after election results, Angus moved quickly to curtail what incidents he could. Much violence and the British would lose their confidence that, unlike Sunningdale, a MacBride coalition could prevail. Maximum finking was in order. There was no better place to start than the RIP. The Provos would play prima donna, print out letter-quality preconditions for talks, and invite The Guardian. The RIP were flattered, and happily agreed to a breakfast meeting without press as long as Angus was buying.

  This was the first Republican paramilitary philandering he had done without working through Farrell, and while Angus had sponsored a few public definitions of scum himself, he did find the contact exhilarating. They were not such different people as himself—at least they did something about what they wanted without agonizing over whether every little move would get a Sunday-school Good Samaritan prize. A gruff, inarticulate rabble, they had not yet learned to waste your time with talk; amazing the concrete bargaining they got done in less than an hour. City Hall would fork out a flat fee if Rips refrained from planting bombs for the season, in the same way a government will pay farmers not to plant crops. Sure they didn’t trust him, but he didn’t trust them either, and there was a cleanliness to that. Otherwise they seemed intrigued to like him; the meeting was good crack. Angus intimated that being in with the powers that be is never all that painful.

  “Where does O’Phelan fall?”

  “Aye, isn’t that forever the question.”

  “He’s with you, like?”

  “O’Phelan has never been with anyone but himself.”

  “You wouldn’t want him, like—”

  “Och no,” Angus assured them. “Mr. Morality, so desperate for our admiration, he’s too perfect. And how would you replace him? Since for all his fingers on the pulse, the whole Six Counties—” MacBride smiled ingratiatingly. “You boys, the Provies, the Prods—we’ve all got him sussed. The kid’s an egomaniac and transparent as hell. That’s the sort to have about. The Great Manipulator’s been skippered himself more times than he’d care to know. Don’t you worry now, O’Phelan’s something between harmless and handy. A safer creature never walked the earth. We’ve all puzzled how the ghett could survive this long, well, that’s how: by being everybody’s patsy.” MacBride’s only dissatisfaction with this speech was that O’Phelan wasn’t around to hear it. “On the other hand …” he ventured. “I’m curious. You consider yourselves more or less sectarian?”

  Their leader, a stranger from Newry, smiled. “Well. The dwarfs are for the dwarfs.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Skip it. Of course, no one likes the word sectarian. But everyone has their people here. We do not, ideologically, object to having your own people.”

  “I’m wondering, see, about your policy on mixed relationships.”

  “We’re old-fashioned on that point. A bit down on them, so we are. Why, positively hos-tile.”

  “Because O’Phelan seems to have a hot and heavy arrangement with a young Protestant lass. Sure you don’t approve?”

  “We bleeding well don’t.”

  “I don’t exactly approve myself,” said Angus. “This business of having your people—well, it is important to maintain coherent cultural identities, isn’t it?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t recall. Oddly enough, she lives off the Falls.”

  “Right queer.”

  “More injurious mixing. Perhaps—espionage.”

  “I know the lass,” said a man in beige who’d said little and didn’t seem very important. “Springfield Road.”

  “At any rate,” said Angus, “it’s a well-known carry-on. I thought, if we’re going to do business—and preserve the integrity of our two traditions—it’s consorting might be made an example of.”

  His eyes met the man’s in beige, who said nothing. Of course, Protestant carried meaning only within the strict confines of Northern Ireland; the religion of a foreigner was moot. So it was funny, though they both knew the girl, that neither of them mentioned she was American.

  Roisin sat. She ate another chocolate. The morning felt—familiar. She was doing something wrong. She’d been doing something wrong for a while.

  She didn’t cry. She would later. She’d cry a lot. Roisin liked to cry. It was the only time she felt completely herself, in a state of perfect disappointment. She was never too sure about the poetry, but crying, it was one thing she knew she did well. Roisin cried with confidence.

  She moped to the scullery and considered throwing out the poached salmon. She unwrapped the aluminum: Christine did a beautiful job. It would keep Roisin in dinners for a week. She slipped the fish in the icebox.

  She lay down on the sofa. And it was no use. After over an hour, she still couldn’t hate him. In fact, she couldn’t squeeze out one drop of ordinary dislike. Why, she’d never had trouble out and out despising Angus MacBride—one of the man’s more appealing qualities. But her pictures of Farrell O’Phelan continued to tinge amber. No matter what he did to other people, Farrell would always appear the tragic one. It had something to do with the perpetually lachrymose expression on his face, which, no matter how lively at times, seemed the mask of keeping up a good front, as if he knew of something dreadful about to happen but was keeping it to himself for your sake.

  She tried to work up a good you’ll-be-sorry. Why, she’d be internationally anthologized, awarded prizes in London at six-course banquets in satin dresses, and he would read about her—no, look in the window—be invited—sit with her—hold her hand … Och, he would only wish her well in her career, politely. And in Roisin’s most malicious moments she could not trump up any more bleak an ambition than that he remain as unhappy as he already was.

  Desultorily, she removed her pearls, a present. She proceeded to collect all his gifts from around the house and pile them by the truffles. The hillock spangled; he had well-heeled taste. She could not keep such shining reminders of perfidy about her person. There was no choice but to expunge her life of any trace of the man, photos (Fortnights?), letters (he hadn’t written any), and these trinkets here would go clanging in the bin.

  She fingered a gold band, and at length clasped it around her wrist. She stared into her plastic fake fire. Well. It was a lovely watch.

  If she couldn’t dislike him or even toss his gifts, what was she supposed to do, add him to her Christmas card list? Roisin rehearsed his limpid sorrowing a
cross a table; his repeated dithering over her “exquisite ankle bones,” in his desperation to find a single one of her attributes attractive; their tandem savaging of Angus MacBride, and the one aspect of her company that even in retrospect he enjoyed; and upstairs, hands where she dare not even put her own when he was clearly thinking of one other woman, whom I have also treated abominably, I fear—

  No, this version did not add up. She had seen a look in his eye, and in Roisin’s experience there are forms of lying that are flat out impossible. He was finishing their relationship all right. But it was so obvious! The passion, he couldn’t take it. The poor kid was scared witless. She knew Farrell by now. He had to be on top, in control, and his feelings for her had grown too overpowering. She remembered how cruel he had been that morning, and saw he’d been fighting himself. A sad figure in the end. Roisin was flattered. He could only have afforded to stay with her if his emotions had been modest. It was perfect proof that she had won him that he had fled.

  Not long ago, Estrin had been up in the attic with Robin at Linen Hall and asked him idly for a book about birds. She had checked the index for S’s. Sure enough, Farrell was correct: the swallow takes off in its youth and remains in the air for up to four years, until finally it mates, nests, and rears its young. What Farrell failed to mention, however, is that the swallow does not settle down with a two-car garage popping Cheez Doodles. Once the offspring are old enough, the parent lifts on wing once more, wending its way through storm clouds of quelea in Botswana, squealing to trekkers in the Himalayas, surveying the Chilean elections from a safe half mile, swooping once more through the cupola of Ulster’s City Hall, sweeping over the domes of Jerusalem’s Old City, curling up against the Coral Reef outside Manila, where they still serve Estrin Lancaster’s famous ceviche. Swallows could take off again.

  Estrin pulled out only one suitcase, since her most important chattel was already packed, and had been for two months or more. For Estrin’s mind was working in a way that made her suspect it hardly ever did that; what use was thinking if it didn’t change anything, and for once Estrin’s opinions had consequences: like that your finest moments are rarely sought but more often thrust upon you; or that sometimes “altruism” was not rescuing Armenians but raising one child right.