It was freezing. Her flat at the end of Notting Hill (a distant poor relation of London’s fashionable district) had no central heating, just a single clanky gas fire installed in each drafty, cavernous room. The gas had a dodgy smell, moldy and suspicious, to which Sara became accustomed over the winter, but after this trip to the States the odor was bound to bother her for a while in September.
“You’ve always told me,” Lenore said soberly, “that staying overseas turns your life into ‘one long adventure.’ Well, where’s the adventure in Belfast? You’ve been there eleven years. Your adventures lately must run to, like, taking out the garbage.”
“Rubbish,” Sara furnished with a wobbly smile.
“That’s enough for you? Swapping garbage for rubbish, that still gets you off?”
A trill from the foyer delivered Sara from this savage campaign that she abandon her only home. While Lenore answered the phone, Sara dismissed the Bangkok lark as physically impractical. Sara Moseley was clingy, hoarding, and cheap. She had no idea how she’d got up the antimaterial zeal to divest herself of everything she owned at twenty-nine, but she knew she didn’t have it in her to shimmy through the tag-sale striptease a second time. On the other hand, she wasn’t about to carton everything up and pay, what, hundreds, maybe thousands of quid to shift all her worldly goods to the other side of the world on a whim of Lenore’s. What if it didn’t work out? Another small fortune wasted on schlepping the chattel back again. Adventure was all very exhilarating so long as you were foisting it on someone else, and didn’t literally have to pay the freight.
“I do have her number there, but this month she’s in the States,” Sara overheard. “In fact, this week she’s staying with me. Would you like to speak to her?”
Lenore returned trailing the cord, and extended the receiver. “Friend of a friend,” she whispered. “Don’t know her.”
“Hello?”
“Sara.” The name sounded insistent, almost accusatory. “I’m very pleased to have found you,” a youngish female continued with disconcerting solemnity, as if playing grown-up. “I’m a friend of Evelyn McAuley, whom you may not know. Evelyn said her friend Lenore Feinstein knew someone who lived in Belfast. This must be fate, reaching you with one local call. I’d been prepared for overseas day rates.”
Sara would have thought the same thing, but wouldn’t have said it aloud. “So how can I help you?”
“My name is Emer Branagh. I’m on my way to Belfast next week, to stay for at least nine months. Since Evelyn said you’ve been over there a little while—”
“Eleven years,” Sara provided pointedly.
“I was hoping you might have a room to let. Or could suggest where else I might start looking.”
Sara shuddered inwardly at the vision of this notional flatmate, whose aggressively ethnic name implied another root-grubbing Irish American. Worse, the affected brand that stressed the second syllable of Belfast as a badge of authenticity. (Try this for truly authentic hairsplitting: Locals in Ba-al-fahst gently stressed the second syllable only when the city was preceded by a directional modifier, like “West Balfahst.”) The Yankee Belfaster was a one-upsman. The gasping emphasis induced anxiety in compatriots that in referring to Belfast they’d made unwitting asses of themselves for years.
“Have you tried the internet?” Sara asked coolly.
“I was thinking more along the lines of personal connections. You see, I’m an author. I’m hoping to write a memoir about my experiences there.”
Good lord, not another My Year in Bel-FAST. Its dialogue would be riddled with apostrophes and quaint respellings like “Nor’n Iron,” its profiles of the writer’s overnight fast friends—all, by coincidence, Catholic—recounting for the umpteenth time the heroic struggle of the second-class citizen against the repressive occupation of the six counties by British Crown forces. Unfortunately for our budding memoirist, on the heels of the Good Friday Agreement ructions in the Old Sod were winding down, but that was part of being clueless: having no sense of timing.
Unkindly, she even resisted steering the girl toward the Belfast Telegraph’s classifieds. The Tele was Sara’s newspaper, both her local daily and her employer. She felt protective, jealous—jealous of what was already hers, but it’s funny how you can covet what you have.
Yet curiously, it was thinking about the Telegraph that occasioned a turn.
While on holiday, Sara filed “Yankee Doodles” from the States. The column was due Friday morning. It was Wednesday afternoon, and she’d yet to decide on a topic. A Monica Lewinsky reprise would backfire; Northerners refused to hear a word against Bill Clinton, because he came to visit. She’d lethargically considered this week’s anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bomb, but that peg was out, too. Tele subscribers would rather be bored witless by their own Troubles than concern themselves with anyone else’s. Sara had been writing “Yankee Doodles” for nearly nine years, and as of this day exactly, with no forewarning, she had nothing more to say.
“Now that you mention it,” Sara supposed into the receiver, looking Lenore in the eye, “my flat may be available for sublet. I’m headed for Southeast Asia.”
Dizzy from her mental plunge, Sara still insisted on taking Lenore and her husband, Caleb, out for dinner that evening. Though her one-child, two-income hosts were awash in cash, Sara was determined to express official thanks for being put up the previous week. Lenore had visited Belfast only that once, so balancing the scales by hosting her friend in return was unlikely. (Lenore protested that being spared even one more night in Belfast was compensation enough.) When Lenore remarked that they could always whip up some pasta and finding a sitter was kind of a hassle, Sara chose not to get the hint. Her rules of reciprocity were militant. She would be grateful over Lenore’s dead body.
For Sara was a stringently conscientious houseguest. Per custom, she’d shown up in Somerville with her own ground coffee, Melitta filters, pint of milk, and grease-spotted bag of cranberry scones. Rather than filch cold cuts, she skipped lunches, and for the odd nightcap didn’t mooch from Lenore’s crowded liquor cabinet, but scrounged through her carry-on for Drambuie miniatures squirreled away on British Airways. So scrupulously did she not impose—buying a whole bottle of shampoo for a few nights’ stay—that she may have disconcerted her benefactors, who’d never have begrudged her the Herbal Essences in the shower stall. In truth, she was guarding against the very disproportionate resentment she’d herself feel toward a freeloader who used up her coffee beans, cadged her shampoo, and expected lunch.
To celebrate that afternoon’s rash pronouncement, Sara opted for a Thai curry house. She reminded Lenore over lemongrass chicken that Karen’s flat in Bangkok might already be taken, half hoping that it was. After she swallowed a whole green chili in one bite, Sara’s forehead broke into a cold sweat. To what had she just committed herself? Had she the remotest qualifications to freelance about economic collapse? So over coffee, she regressed to more commodious subject matter: Emer Branagh.
“Most of these seeker types are so unsussed,” Sara despaired, “that they’re oblivious to being clichés. They’re always convinced they’re, like, Mayflower passengers in reverse, and no American has ever set foot on the shores of Antrim. I guess this makes them lucky, but they never notice that they’re objects of derision. Locals are sniggering into their pints, and meanwhile these memoirists think they’ve found their true home away from home and everybody loves them.” Sara had tried to leaven the diatribe with feigned sympathy, but the tirade came out acrid.
“Doesn’t that make you a cliché?” Caleb asked.
“Of course,” Sara concurred cheerfully. “Although contrary to convention, I’m a unionist, so I don’t hero-worship convicted murderers. And at least I know I’m a cliché—”
“Sara, what’s this girl to you?” Lenore broke in. “You’ve never even met her.”
Sara pulled up short from asserting You don’t understand—a regulation Northern refrain with foreigners, the be
tter to shield a tawdry, quotidian bickering that, given opportunity, outsiders might understand all too horribly well.
“On the face of it, she’s a known quantity,” Sara said instead. “I’ve met stacks of Americans passing through that town: conflict junkies, reconciliation missionaries, human rights watchdogs, the odd genealogical quester whose, you know, third cousin five times removed hailed from Carrickfergus and who snaps a whole roll of prints when he finds ‘McErlean’ on a bakery sign. If they’re not naive or loud, they’re naive and loud, and the combination is desperate. Most visiting Americans have embarrassed me, or at least made me mad, since—when they know what one is—every single one, without exception, has turned out to be a nationalist. So I guess I’m prejudiced.”
“How can you be prejudiced against Americans,” Caleb exclaimed, consternated, “when you are one?”
“It’s more than possible,” Sara said, not backing down, “to be prejudiced against yourself. Still—Lenore’s right. I don’t know this Emer person, and I shouldn’t make harsh assumptions based on the thousand credulous eejits who preceded her.” For the rest of the evening Sara didn’t mention Emer again, though she was surprised by how much restraint the omission demanded.
Karen not only emailed that her flat was still available, but also offered to give her old friend a thumbs-up with the features editor at the Bangkok Post, a well-regarded English-language broadsheet looking for new voices. As a financial backstop Sara could also edit publications for the UN, which always needed native English speakers to catch second-language gaffes and to cull enough bureaucratic twaddle to make text faintly comprehensible. The reports were soul-destroyingly dull, Karen warned, but the pay was super. Thanks to the Asian economic crisis, both Korean Air and Thai Air were offering scandalously cut-rate fares. Sara’s whim took shape. It was doable.
Subsequently, other Boston running buddies of yore proved if anything too enthusiastic about this Bangkok caprice, betraying a widespread consensus that she’d been in a rut. Sara was abashed to discover to what extent she’d become the subject of her friends’ conspiratorial despair. But frankly, they were dead on. She’d started out such a world beater, game for anything new or anywhere fresh, which is how she ended up in Belfast to begin with. Unbeknownst to herself, she’d become as much of a stickin-the-mud in Northern Ireland as she might have had she never left Medford. Why, knowing nothing about Bangkok was good reason to go there. Had she lost faith in her capacity to learn? She didn’t used to know a loyalist from a hole in the ground. What would stop her from mastering the causalities of Southeast Asian recession?
In binding herself to fragile intentions, Sara seized on logistics. Accordingly, Emer Branagh proved key. Sara could neither afford two rents nor shift kit and caboodle to Bangkok sight unseen. But subletting her Notting Hill flat had proved a tall order in the past. Sara inhabited the attic story of an older Scottish couple’s creaky Victorian manor, and a tenant was obliged to ascend by the central staircase of the main house. Whenever she’d tried to sublet to students from Queens for her summer stint in the US, they’d recoiled from the incursion on another family’s home. So she’d have to make nice with the bird in hand. Besides, if Sara didn’t act on this kooky impulse right away, she knew she’d go back to Belfast, dawdle over “Yankee Doodles,” churn daily on the stationary bicycle in the Windsor Lawn Tennis Club fitness suite, and mesmerized by her soporific routine would dismiss the whole Bangkok folly as temporary insanity. Clueless, maybe, but Emer was also a godsend.
Sara and Emer spoke perhaps three more times. Attempts to meet for coffee were scuppered by Emer’s preparations for her flight to Belfast on the evening of August fourteenth. Sara’s own ticket returned her to Belfast on September tenth. So she proposed to post Emer a duplicate key. Emer could move into the flat while Sara was still in Boston, locate a temporary room elsewhere for when Sara returned for perhaps three weeks to wrap up her affairs, then move back for the duration once Sara left for Thailand. The arrangement was cumbersome, but no doubt desirous of a place to lay her head on arrival in a strange city, Emer agreed.
In explaining the eccentricities of her abode, Sara took pains to ingratiate herself. Relating her waterless technique for cleaning the cast-iron skillet with heat and salt, she furnished a degree of detail that was deliberately comical. Tentatively identifying a few items that Emer might avoid using, she made light of her attachment to a gaudy Belgian beer glass lugged all over Europe. Yet through the smoke screen of self-ridicule Emer must surely have concluded she was a nut.
Sara was a nut. An honest catalog of the cherished items of which Emer should beware would include every bit of bric-a-brac in the flat. Sara was a passionate custodian of the lowliest appurtenance. All that she owned was implicitly cherished for the very fact that she owned it, helping define the vigorously defended boundary where the rest of the world stopped and Sara Moseley began. Arguably, it was the perfect impermeability of her own perimeter—that militant distinction between what was hers versus what was other people’s—that explained most profoundly why at forty-one Sara Moseley remained childless and unmarried, and why she might be attracted to a foreign polity whose consuming obsession was the Border.
Emer as well seemed eager to please—neither wanted the other to get away—although wont to endear herself with oppressive sincerity. She attended to prolix explanations about the skillet with grave patience, and no amount of Sara’s self-mockery could tempt her subletter into a shared chuckle. Dangling herself as a professional asset, Emer volunteered a host of do-gooder contacts in Southeast Asia whose causes “as a responsible independent journalist” Sara would have a moral obligation to promote. Over the phone, Sara would find herself jotting down the address of a pressure group that was campaigning to have the Khmer Rouge leadership brought to trial in Cambodia or the phone number of a little outfit that refurbished computers for underprivileged Thai schoolchildren. Once Emer rang off, Sara would look at the scribbles on her notepad, mutter What’s all this shite?, tear off the pages, and throw them away.
Sara knew the type. Emer sounded exactly like the American volunteers for the Peace People on the Lisburn Road, who organized lemonade and biscuits for cross-community day camps. The unmitigated earnestness of these virtuous summer interns always dumbfounded local pub patrons at the nearby Four in Hand, who after repeatedly fruitless attempts to engage the visitors in slag-for-slag banter would contrive the same pitying dispensation for the Yanks as they might have for the simpleminded.
Emer emphasized that she had written a memoir before. Attaching herself to a small international school run for the children of diplomats, she’d lived for a year in Burma. The resultant first-person account was published by a Vermont press of which Sara had never heard, “with very good distribution,” the girl stressed sternly.
Sara embellished. Young Emer’s involvement with the region doubtless hailed from some stimulating undergraduate foreign policy course at, say, Sarah Lawrence. The professor would have been a seductively unstable Vietnam vet with whom the smitten Emer conducted a torturous affair. After graduation, the girl had beelined for the most fucked-up country left in Southeast Asia—to impress Arsehole. Arsehole wasn’t impressed, since arseholes never are.
At least this much was not Sara’s invention: the girl was clearly in the heady throes of Newbie Author Syndrome. That is, an unimpeded life of letters seemed to have opened before her. One after another, she would tame trouble spots to the page. Sure, thought Sara grimly, it was a pretty picture—as yet unsullied by word processor chain-smoking, dismissive squib reviews, flyspecked remainder copies, copacetic editors exiled to genre imprints, demands for massive rewrites meant to presage outright rejection of whole commissioned manuscripts, the odd close-call brush with mortality that makes our heroine gun-shy since sometimes trouble spots weren’t merely theme parks but were actually dangerous, and joyless authorial alcoholism.
Cheerfully weaving the innocent’s threadbare future, Sara formed a vivi
d picture of Emer Branagh, whose lifeless chestnut hair would be shoulder length and straight. Bangs. Thin if physically weak, she would disguise a passable figure with dowdy liberal clothes: loose corduroy slacks, plaid flannel button-downs, and lace-up umber Timberlands with corrugated soles. The girl was certainly short. However even-featured, her face would lack the hint of subterfuge that might have made it sexy. She was bound to sport big doggy brown eyes, and perpetually to wear the trusting, how-can-I-help expression of a pre-burnout social worker.
The plain-Jane mind’s-eye portrait was satisfying, but Emer’s Burmese escapade gave Sara a pang. A brutal regime conferred cachet, just as the Troubles had laced the bracken of a wet, underpopulated island with belladonna. On the heels of the agreement, the only peril Ulster reliably afforded was a dander to the shops without an umbrella. And while violence made any boondocks exotic, the same could not be said of a bland, business-section recession. Momentarily, Sara faltered, nervous that rather than flying to Thailand she should really be booking for Iraq.
At 2:45 p.m. on Saturday, August fifteenth, 1998, a fertilizer car bomb exploded in the town center of Omagh, County Tyrone, killing twenty-eight people outright, and injuring over three hundred; a twenty-ninth victim would die in hospital by September. The bomb would be claimed two days later by “the Real IRA,” the military wing of “the 32-County Sovereignty Committee”—both names that, owing to the scale of the casualties, countless television commentators would be forced to deliver on camera with a straight face. Though instigated after a formally brokered peace, the bombing of Omagh’s town center was the single most lethal atrocity in the history of the modern Northern Irish conflict.
Troubles maven Sara Moseley learned of the tragedy a full thirty-one hours after the fact. She and Lenore had gone on a weekend camping trip to the Cape, and had pitched their tent out of the range of newspapers, televisions, and satellite signals since the previous Friday evening. Only when fiddling with the car radio as Lenore drove back to Boston late Sunday afternoon did Sara tune into: “ … including a young woman pregnant with twins. Northern Ireland’s first minister David Trimble has denounced …”
Property Page 28