Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  Because it was true that Farrell was browning inside, but the seeds remained gold in him, as Tarja knew. Estrin had panned one from his river of sweat in Whitewells, and she would secrete the nugget home, slipped far up inside, the way wives smuggled messages from Long Kesh. She would sneak the best of the country through customs undeclared. He could not be trusted with his own treasure. He had to be wrested from himself, and she had pickpocketed the shining spiral, the 44-carat corkscrew. For once, like it or not, Farrell O’Phelan had given himself away.

  The shower hadn’t done him much good, since after a certain age there’s a kind of clean you can’t get.

  Still, something happened. It was the same kind of happening that had struck him for a while now: nothing you could point to, nothing you could tell. Farrell chose his dark pinstripe and red tie, just what he’d worn when they met. Bounding from Whitewells, he was filled with a wild, irrational urgency.

  Two blocks down Castle Street, he suddenly doubled back to his bank. Lunchtime, an appalling queue. “An emergency.” He strode straight to the teller. “I wish to stop payment on a check. This number here. —No, I have no idea how much it was for, I was poleaxed. —I don’t care if you have to ring every bank in this city, and post office besides. I am one of your largest depositors, and if that check is honored I will have your job.”

  Back on Castle Street, the queue for cabs was worse than the bank, and guarded by enough spud-wielding binners he’d best not jump rank. With the stop-payment, he could afford the walk. A miracle he remembered about the check, as the whole evening dreeped so slowly to his head.

  —I’m in love with you—

  She’d never said that before. Christ, and what did he say back? He’d declared as much himself plenty of times, but that was cheap, and she knew it was cheap—damn it to hell, what did he say—

  Tomorrow is my birthday.

  That’s today. Today, and he’d nothing to give her. Bollocks! It wouldn’t do to show up empty-handed. Once more, he turned about-face and ran to Anderson McAuley’s. Farrell stood paralyzed in the middle of the first floor. Why, he’d never bought Estrin anything—except that Soviet book, and that was no present, it was a dare. Now she was taking him up on it. While at Roisin’s he’d always arrived with some bauble in tow. Och, for her anything glossy and expensive had done the job. But agitating past colognes, scarves, garish jewelry, Farrell felt crazy—rubbish! None of the clothes looked like anything the Swallow would wear, and as for objects, he suddenly felt he didn’t know her so well, or he maybe knew too well she’d despise all of them. Raving in the mindless grabby sea of Christmas shoppers, Farrell chose blindly, reasoning the main thing was to get her something, even if he had to apologize it was wick.

  Move, you eejit, it’s already afternoon. This wasn’t the plan. On waking to that first grim gray, head tolling, the girl so far away and so tiny, and those first spits of the evening sputtering in, he had groaned and set himself off to finish the squalid little project he’d started, with every intention of returning before she woke. But with geriatric taxis, Roisin, Whitewells, it was too late and there was a poor chance of that. Again up fucking Castle Street, over the motorway, getting some looks now since you saw precious few pinstripes skeltering past Divis Flats.

  Up the road, however, he slowed a tad, for he had so rarely felt this impelled toward any woman, and so rarely felt this driven to apologize—really apologize, and not to Roisin, who in some ineffable way asked for it or deserved it, but to Estrin, who did not—that he wanted to savor the trip. And so, as memories sometimes came to him that would prove connected only if he indulged them a complete rerun, he recalled up the Falls not the story of his last bomb disposal on the roof of Whitewells, told often, but the very first disposal, told seldom, even to himself.

  Since the only sport for a sot is where he hoovers his jar, in the mid-seventies Farrell made a point of frequenting Orange bars—joyriding for drinkers. A dicey business, and Farrell didn’t hunch obscurely over his pint, either, but often sang, told Republican jokes—maybe his very brashness kept him safe. He was lucky, but not this time.

  Farrell retreated to the bog of Union Jackie’s when one of the local Presbyterians was getting suspicious; Farrell had failed to rattle off the right grammar school. In the next stall some joker was shitting his guts out, and Farrell waited till after the flush to slip out. He had in mind gliding out of the bar unnoticed; while the unnoticed part went easily enough, the door part did not.

  For outside the loo, three things struck him as queer: the whole bar was deserted, even by the publican; there was a young man he recognized, frantically rattling the front door; and the boy was unquestionably from Ballymurphy.

  “It’s a poor wee Taig who has gone astray,” Farrell sang behind him, and the boy shot six feet. “Not to worry, I’m on an intelligence-gathering mission myself,” he lisped in the Catholic’s ear. “Haven’t found any.”

  “The door,” said the McGuckian boy.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s locked. From the outside, like.”

  Farrell tried it himself, and sure enough, it was one of those thief-proof locks which with the nib down only turned with a key. “Find the barman—”

  “He’s away,” said McGuckian miserably.

  “Aye, with the lot. Why?”

  “There’s a bomb scare.”

  “What?” said a woman stepping from the ladies’.

  “They didn’t clear the bogs.”

  The trio checked for other exits, but there was only the one door; the phone was out of order. Farrell—sozzled, needless to say—cheered them that spending the night with an open bar could only be so desperate. For, “Sure it’s a hoax.”

  “It’s not,” said McGuckian.

  “Bloody hell, if you were in the bog, how do you even know it’s a bomb scare?”

  Drunk people are slow. McGuckian, now the color of the Province’s distinctively flavorless and thin vanilla soft serve, nodded unhappily at his own bookbag.

  “Why, you dirty wee skitter, ye,” said the woman.

  “Well, turn it off!”

  “You don’t just turn off a bomb, you gombeen.”

  “I don’t care what you call it, make it stop! The door is bleeding locked!”

  “I don’t know how!” McGuckian wailed.

  “What kind of terrorist are you?” accused the woman.

  “I just delivered it. I don’t know the first frig about bombs. I haven’t even looked inside.”

  “Look, then,” said Farrell.

  “I’ll not touch it, sure I won’t. I’m getting out of here.”

  They tried the windows, which were grated and too small to crawl through anyway. McGuckian kept returning to the front door, as if his fairy godmother should have arrived by now to unlock it. “Would you stop rattling that thing?” Farrell requested.

  “Where are the police?” the woman demanded.

  “They’re out protecting our part of town,” said Farrell.

  “You’re—!”

  “Oh, aye. Light out for a jar in your local and what do you get but two Taigs and a bomb. We’re everywhere.” He leered, and later wondered if it was because of the drink he was the only one of the three that hadn’t driven well round the twist in ten minutes’ time. McGuckian was obsessed with the door, and the lady kept insisting, “The RUC will be by in a jot, surely—” when McGuckian confessed that they had only five minutes left on the TPU, the lady claimed she could hear Land Rovers. McGuckian returned to the window grate, but its opulent riveting was a regular monument to Protestant paranoia. How often in Belfast you were trapped by your own defenses.

  “If we would all just sit tight and wait for the constabulary—”

  “Madame,” Farrell interrupted, long aggravated by the sort of permanent child that cannot conceive of a situation where Mommy or Daddy or the Nice Policeman will not come rescue you. Farrell himself was at the height of his anarchism and only took pleasure in the view tha
t bad things happened to good people and there was no one to turn to. “The RUC is undoubtedly cordoning off this whole area for blocks, they do not know we are here, they are too far away to hear either McGuckian’s fruitless scraping or your optimistic bleat, so sod off, please. The bomb squad will not necessarily arrive at our convenience.”

  But while the lady trusted to the RUC, Farrell’s trust in nothing was as helpless. So it was a large corner indeed he took around the bar to advance on the bookbag, for Farrell didn’t believe in anyone’s capacity to affect anything—Farrell was a fatalist, a cynic, and a drunk. Neither did Farrell believe in heroes, least of all in becoming one. He had gladly watched his city self-destruct to reflect his own degradation, and the next day would have read about the decimation of Union Jackie’s with only a smile if he hadn’t found himself locked smack in the middle of the dive that night.

  That was not exactly what turned the key, wanting to save his own skin. For Farrell the bookbag was positively opportune. Six years into Talisker, he could certainly stand a break from his own good time. Tarja’s flight to Finland was just long enough ago that the story had changed, and instead of his having driven her away, she had capriciously abandoned her new husband. Those were the days he weaved across the M1 screaming, “Come and get me!” at rush hour, cars swerving to shoulders, horns wailing forlorn farewells; at last a lowly bookbag had answered his call. But while he didn’t know the McGuckian kid well, his mother was a peach, who had persistently defended the Peace People even after Betty’s mink coat; and though this other bird here was delightful as a dose of salts, when she exclaimed, “But I have five children!” he conceded there were a few people out there for whom she was more than a girn.

  “My father,” announced Farrell as he unstrapped the flap, “is an electrician,” which may have bolstered their confidence, though hardly his own. Farrell’s role in the family was, among others, Mechanical Incompetent—recording an LP, he would press Play and Rewind; “helping” with tea, he could never sort out whether the round beater went into the left or right jack of the mixer, in an allergic reaction to domesticity that in its most inflamed state would become Inability to Boil Water. All willful idiocy, for when he looked down at the bomb—Farrell’s bomb, not his father’s, Farrell’s first bomb—it was a logical business to follow the wires and what would connect with where when the timer arm reached this point, logic far cruder than chess or even the resourceful scavenging required to score one more wee whiskey when shy of ready quid. Though he had every right to be frightened, when he reached down with a pair of nail clippers, Farrell felt only exhilarated and his hand was dead steady. It was his first taste of immortality, and of faith: that it was indeed possible to affect matters. So when piece by piece, with the other two cowering in the corners with their hands over their heads, he separated the elements of the device, it was by far the best round he’d ever seen stretched out across a bar. Bits. With the bomb asunder, Farrell fused.

  The woman threw her arms around his neck and burst into tears. McGuckian was immediately released into the impending implosion of his life without the bomb, for now the inevitable arrival of the army did not strike him as salvation. Farrell reached behind the bar for the Jameson’s 1780 and poured them each a large, proprietary short.

  “Slainte.” He touched the lady’s glass.

  “Slanty.” And though she seemed a right tight old Prod, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him smack on the mouth.

  There was a flight out of London tonight; she could fly standby this time of year, for she very much hoped to give some of Farrell’s check back, all of it in time—she didn’t want his money.

  The suitcase full, Estrin paused to focus: no, she hadn’t time to clear out of here for good. And maybe not the inclination. Frankly, while she needed a mother now—inside and out, both mothers—she was not intent on settling in Philadelphia so much as anywhere longer than a year and a half. She had a good start on this town, and it wasn’t out of the question. She loved Belfast, Robin, Malcolm; whether or not the power-sharing initiative flew, she’d like to follow what happened here, to finish a story she’d started. There was just one problem, and perhaps he could be avoided. Better to decide later, and plan at least one trip back to sort out the house and motorcycle.

  This resolved, she unpacked the Guinness glasses and yesterday’s Irish News, which had suddenly seemed rare. She straightened up and took out the garbage. Estrin eyed the house for a moment: with those curtains, a few plants, an Oriental rug, the sitting room would be lovely. And though it had been absurd to install good windows in this neighborhood, she hadn’t been able to resist puttying in the leaded stained glass in the front door, and one pane on the second floor where it poppled the stairway late afternoons with red and gold.

  Estrin munched leftover prawns: protein. She wondered what damage she might have done the foetus fasting; remarkable she hadn’t miscarried. Must be Farrell’s child: it thrived on suffering.

  Estrin popped vitamins with another glass of milk, and was about to dash out to cash that check before the banks closed when there was a knock on the door. She glanced out the curtains to make sure it wasn’t a certain someone, but kicked herself when it was only a DHL courier; why expect him, hadn’t she learned her lesson yet? How much work it would take to keep from hoping: now, that was discipline. Then, you did not transform overnight, though it was a nice, literary idea.

  “What on earth?”

  “From a Mr. O’Phelan, miss.”

  “Good Christ. He remembered my birthday.”

  “Your birthday, is it?”

  “Aye,” said Estrin.

  “Many happy returns!” The deliveryman waved and darted to his van, whose engine was still running.

  She tried not to be excited, easy enough when she opened the carton. It was one of those presents that hurt you not by being cheap, just wrong. The ungainly gift expressed too well what she suspected all along: that all those dinners in 44 he hadn’t been listening; that when he scanned her bookshelves at breakfast, peered at photos, picked up bits of her past, he had actually been thinking about the problems of representing minority interests in a democratic system. For no one who had truly paid attention to Estrin Lancaster for half an hour would have launched out and retrieved this—this—object.

  It was a large music box in the form of a cottage, white with lurid green shutters. It was plastic. On top crouched, of all things, a leprechaun. Get out of here! Gift-shop merchandise, obviously for tourists, a category she should have earned herself out of by now. Farrell O’Phelan, what was going on in your head?

  Out of a sick curiosity she wound the box up. It tinkled “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” hardly “their song,” except in the sense that they both despised it.

  Somewhere into the second verse Estrin turned sharply; the smirking leprechaun hit an off note.

  No escapade had ever quite equaled Union Jackie’s. Drunken, unbidden, it was still the one disposal that made him happy. Farrell had always considered happiness beneath him; further, an ambition he morally disapproved of. Yet the few times he had been happy—he didn’t know what else you called it—the sensation wasn’t of a pink tuxedo shirt with ruffles, colored lights with reindeer, but of a plain white button-down, with starch; a single street lamp in fog. He had always conceived of happiness as frilly, trivial, distracted, but he was forced to admit, buoying round the corner to Springfield Road, that what he detested was failed happiness, fake happiness, that he’d simply gotten happiness and misery confused.

  Sweeping into Clonard, Farrell warned himself to hold back. Practically, he didn’t know if he could live with a woman again. He shouldn’t underestimate his privacy, his obstreperousness; however eager he might now feel, the generosity would fade. So he would not arrive with any proposition on his tongue, but with a private hologram in his head:

  She has been in the Soviet Union a month. She already knew how to travel; finally she has learned to return. Teaching English on these regula
r sojourns has improved her Russian; she has taught him a few words. Her r’s trill the back of his neck.

  How absurd to end up in this neighborhood.

  But the house is gorgeous. The door is freshly painted, the planter budding—let’s say it is not quite spring. At the gate, his eyes pinwheel; he likes this moment before he sees her as much as the moment itself.

  Inside, he finds she has already bought flowers. From global warming, the daffodils have bloomed in premature profusion; on sale at every newsstand for 50 p a bunch, and she must have bought five pounds’ worth: mantels and sideboards are aflame. She has run out of vases and stuffed the last bouquets in jam jars.

  She hasn’t heard him come in. “Amazing Grace” winds to the front room on a scent of tarragon. She has a pretty voice; he heard it once in a singsong at the Green Door, though she’d stopped singing when he walked in the club: accurate, though slight, a bit breathy; sweet like her face, but not as wary. Christ, what was so bloodcurdling about a swallow in your kitchen? And he had faced so many of his fears—phone calls to strangers, girls with their clothes off—why could he not confront this last one? Tarja! Angus always thought the marriage a leg pull, but Farrell’s biggest secret was that the wedding had been real. Why else would he have turned tail in mortal terror after only two weeks?

  Seeing her face, he notes she has filled out, just a bit, losing edges. Now that she is no longer weight lifting, her body is not quite so hard. But she still runs when she travels, down long Leningrad boulevards, and in Belfast the two of them play a lot of squash. For some reason his asthma has virtually disappeared. At squash, she beats him. He doesn’t like this one bit.

  She kisses him, but fast; he would teach her to say hello properly. But she is boiling with Soviet politics: the rise of the right, the threat of backlash against Gorbachev, the return of anti-Semitism. Dinner is terrific, but they don’t pay it much attention. For Farrell, too, has stories to tell, having just returned himself from—