Was it middle-aged complacency that had turned her such a shut-in? Curled in her newsprint-smudged armchair that Monday night, having progressed only three pages into the section on Thailand in Let’s Go Southeast Asia, Sara conceded that few of those diversions back in the day had been exactly fun. While at length republicans’ hypocritical blend of thuggishness and faux-liberal indignation put her off even more than the drunken, flagrantly pathetic murderousness of their loyalist counterparts, fundamentally her factional predilections came down to competing aversions. By throwing in her lot with the stodgy, rectitudinous, law-and-order Prods, she might as well have joined forces with Sunday-go-to-meeting evangelicals in Iowa. Plenty of Protestant unionists were perfectly pleasant people, but they were also a big drag.
To be more candid still, Sara had never quite located the backslapping, more-the-merrier animation that was ostensibly so Irish, and definitive of Belfast’s holy grail of “good crack.” Perhaps the renowned boisterousness and loquacity that attracted American tourists to the island was a myth; sure Sara’s sampling of pub life was duller and meaner than cliché would have it. Then again, Sara herself was a little tight of temperament, and didn’t care for crowds. Maybe pub patrons were mean around Sara because they wanted her to go away. Maybe matey, Guinness-guzzling abandon was out there in buckets, but Sara couldn’t raise the silver-tongued high spirits to jump in.
For all Sara knew, Emer Branagh had the goods. To date, the subletter had proved cool, shut off, and po-faced, but one of the great frustrations of this mortal coil was that you could rarely know what someone else was like without you in the room. With no love lost between the two, Emer might have generated a dead mask of sobriety exclusively for Sara’s benefit, thereby disguising a whole other frolicsome side of herself, some wild Irish rose that bloomed in the smoky fiddle-dee-dee pubs by the harbor.
For that matter, maybe this very night, while Sara stewed with this stupid guidebook feeling too torpid to get up and flip the Van Morrison cassette, Emer was down at the Rotterdam. A traditionally bunged, underlit bar that brought in live bands of tin whistles, Uilleann pipes, and bodhrans, the Rotterdam had proved too much a schlep from Notting Hill for burnt-out Iri-phobe Sara Moseley for donkey’s years. But Emer was new here; a four-mile trip would still seem short. Maybe Emer had a fine fluty voice that lilted above the clink of glasses a cappella; maybe she knew all the words to “Galway Bay.” Or maybe her very reticence, so un-American, would challenge the boyos to bid for biographical titbits with beer.
Sara could envision the subletter enthroned at one of the big front tables, surrounded by brimming pints with which half a dozen suitors have curried her enigmatic favors. In the swirl of fiddle music, at last a Mona Lisa smile creeps across the comely countenance aglow in lamplight, as stout is hoisted high—“Slainte, mates! Here’s to the luscious lass from Boston, Mass, God love her! Long may your woman dander the docks of Belfast City!” This is Ireland. Arms raised, patrons leap toe to knee. A dashing rogue, rugged, older than the rest, pulls the bonny American lady to her feet. Keeps to herself surely, but aye, she can turn a pretty jig. Look at those wee boots fly! Yet your man’s eyes glint with a bitter business, about which our young visitor best be left in the dark. Ach, youse can never be sure who you’re meetin’ in our dark town, who in a crowd has shook hands with the devil hisself … This is Belfast.
Sara had to stop because she was going to hurl. She had clearly lifted the scene from a Carlsberg advert. Still, it wasn’t incredible that while Sara was bored with this burgh Emer could be having a wonderful time, or that Sara was bored with Belfast not because Belfast was boring but because Sara was boring. And bollocks, she had forgotten, again, to ring those London bucket shops! Tomorrow, she would get that ticket out of here. But already the resolution had the hollow ring in her ears of those self-deceiving provincials in The Three Sisters who were still plaintively pining, “To Moscow!” in the last act.
Sara hated grand schemers who were all talk, so the following morning she rang her editor at the Tele. When David Featherstone said squarely, “So you’re leaving us, then?” her gut stabbed.
“For a few months,” she hedged, though she’d promised Karen to sublet the Bangkok flat for a full year. Still, the notion of burning this of all bridges was more than Sara could bear. As she’d rehearsed a dozen times before picking up the phone, she threw herself a lifeline. “In fact, while I’m in Thailand—naturally traveling to lots of other interesting places like Vietnam, Laos, maybe even Burma—I wondered if you might like me to keep filing ‘Yankee Doodles.’ You know, the miracle of modern technology and all. And it might add a cosmopolitan touch—”
“Sara, Sara,” Featherstone cut her off. “The Tele’s come a long way. We run the odd full-page comment from Adams now. We even carry stories from the South. But that’s the south of Ireland, kid. Not south of Asia.”
“David, you’re always publishing interviews with some Northerner who’s back from Tangiers—”
“Right you are, we’d interview a native son of Ballynafeigh who took a day-trip to Doncaster. But you’re an American, just.” He broke the news gently.
“Even though I’ve lived here for eleven years—?” Sara was trying not to whine.
“For the Belfast Telegraph, a Yank who lives in Timbuktu just isn’t, ah—”
“In the picture,” Sara finished heavily for him.
“Tell you what,” Featherstone said, and for a moment his tone of concession raised Sara’s hopes. “You must be at sixes and sevens, getting ready to head off. So let’s stand you down as of this week. No need to get your knickers in a twist doing a dozen things at once—”
“Don’t you at least want me to write a farewell column?” Her voice caught. “I wouldn’t want my readers to think I just got, like, sick of them or something.” Though wasn’t that close to the truth?
“Only if you’ve time, so. I’ve another American girl—new arrival—might be interested in your slot. Fresh perspective—stranger in a strange land sort of thing, all wide eyed and what’s-this. So don’t think you’re leaving me high and dry, just. That do us? Bon voyage, then. Send us a card, will you, Sara? That’s a good girl. Ta.”
Sara held the receiver out from her body like a dead fish. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t blink. Finally she inhaled, and shuddered.
Who else would it be? That thieving bitch wanted to assume Sara’s whole life, like those bioengineering thrillers in which an evil clone replaces the original twin, now buried in the garden. It all made sense now! In eating Sara’s very food, Emer Branagh was practicing being Sara Moseley.
Given her state of shock, it was asking too much of herself to ring those bucket shops, and Sara made no more headway on her plans. Instead she worked up a hot, resentful sweat in the deserted Windsor Lawn Tennis Club fitness suite, stamping furiously on the StairMaster. What does Emer bloody Branagh know about Northern Irish politics? Sara fumed half-aloud, having jacked the random-climbing program to level 12. Could she detail off the top of her head the Byzantine decision-making rules of Stormont’s new assembly? What do you want to bet that she thinks “D’Hondt mechanism” has something to do with digital TV? Besides, Featherstone, you’ll never get any finished copy from that bleeding heart. She’ll sag over her computer harrowed by the anguish of it all, and short out the keyboard by busting into tears!
Later that afternoon, Sara made a stab at a farewell column for “Yankee Doodles.” In the first version, she let fly all the scathing derogations of this conceited, inward-looking statelet that she had stifled as counterproductive these many years. She accused the Northern Irish of being misshapen as much by self-pity as by violence. Catholics and Protestants alike had been pandered to and fawned over, for with its plethora of initiatives, commissions, subventions, and peace funds the whole province was spoilt. She used words like navel gazing, precious, and overblown. She decried the thousands of novels, documentaries, miniseries, movies, and rock songs that had fetishistic
ally elevated into an insoluble impasse of mythic proportions a down-and-dirty, small-minded brawl. Regarding the tiny extent to which she herself had helped inflate the North’s vanity with her own attentions, she expressed profound remorse. It was a scandal that a dispute over the border between two virtually indistinguishable democracies in the EU had led to the slaughter of so much as a stray cat. Thousands had died here all right, but the ultimate tragedy was that each and every one had died for nothing over nothing.
Getting the diatribe out of her system was cleansing, but on review she could see that it backfired. The repudiation misleadingly implied that she’d had a terrible time here; that, perhaps having been wounded in some fashion, she was gunning for payback. Ulsterfolk didn’t seem nasty; she did.
In the second draft of her swan song, Sara confessed that leaving Belfast presented the biggest challenge of her adulthood. She said that especially in an intellectual sense she’d grown up here, and that the North had provided a richer, more nuanced political education than she might have received at Harvard’s School of International Affairs. As for her take on the conflict after all this time, again she reached for the word small-minded, but qualified it with seemingly—going on to explain that she herself was a “remembering person,” who had difficulty dismissing so much an unreturned umbrella. The grudge she might bear over an unreturned husband or sister staggered her imagination. Finally, she conceded that though she had always been mindful of her place, respectful of the fact that she wasn’t born here, during her tenure Northerners had gone out of their way to make her feel welcome, down to including her in the exchange of ideas in this very newspaper. It was trite, of course, for Americans to extol the friendliness of the Irish, but Sara accepted the risk of cliché. She’d never encountered a people as a whole who had a warmer, lighter touch in the doings of daily life, and far more than the adrenal rush of bombs downtown or eleventh-hour intrigue at Stormont Castle she would miss good-natured banter with her neighbors when she idled down the road for soda bread.
By Tuesday evening, it was Sara who sagged over her keyboard, and it was Sara who burst into tears.
For the rest of the week the two women negotiated one another’s proximity with the wary caution of two paramilitary antagonists on mutual cease-fire. Nothing Emer ever said was precisely rude, but she continued to project a monolithic lack of interest in Sara’s life. The indifference offered protection of a kind—when she went out, Sara needn’t worry about rifled journals, steamed-open post, or browsed floppy files—but the very safety of these documents felt like an insult.
Frustrated, Sara began to fling herself before her subletter with a brash immodesty that with a man would have come across as slutty. If the phone rang while the two were reading—at each other—in the sitting room, Sara would conduct the conversation at full voice. “So now that the Real IRA has declared a cease-fire,” she might posit caustically to a friend at Radio Ulster, who shared her indignation that the agreement provided for the wholesale release of paramilitary prisoners, “does that mean the lowlifes behind Omagh get off with a year and a half inside? … I’m serious! The Good Friday Agreement is potentially one big kill-one, get-one-free sale! Coin yourself a paramilitary outfit—make the name really moronic sounding, so they know you’re legit. Mow down anybody who gets on your tits. Call a cease-fire, give yourself up, and bingo, you’re out the door by May 2000!”
Every time she rang off, she’d feel sheepish. They’d both know she was showing off.
Yet clips of “Yankee Doodles” left pointedly in plain view never tempted the subletter even to peer at the lead. Flatteringly vitriolic hate mail was left untouched. The only belongings of Sara’s that excited Emer’s curiosity were her groceries.
Alas, Sara could not pretend to indifference in return. But with Emer so guarded, asking flat out whether she had indeed applied for Sara’s “Yankee Doodles” slot seemed prohibitively degrading. While phone calls for Emer were few, she always took them in the study with the door closed. The one line from these calls that Sara had ever made out when she just happened to be passing by was, “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
As far as Sara could discern, Emer had disliked her well before they met. A self-styled free spirit wouldn’t have fancied picking up where another loudmouthed American left off. When Sara fomented over the papers (as she did even when no one was there), Emer looked as if she were playing deafening music in her head, lest this strident claptrap corrupt the clean white pages of her virgin memoir.
More personally, Emer was doubtless annoyed that Sara was presentable. Women were more at ease with one another when there was no contest in the looks department, and Sara adjudged the two as running at a dead heat. Sara may have been the elder, but good gene stock and dedication at the gym had kept her slight and compact. While her loose strawberry hair contrasted with Emer’s jet-black crop, they both had the sharp, shifting features at which men and women alike looked twice. Presumably Emer might have taken a shine to her readily enough if only Sara were fat.
Emer was as fastidious about her appearance as she was slovenly about everything else. She hogged the bath like a teenager, and the sitting room cum boudoir was eternally scalloped with clothesline laden with handwashing. She was never to be caught slumping about the flat in stained gray sweats with a face covered in cold cream.
Sara was slovenly about her appearance, and fastidious about everything else. Yet by the end of their first week sharing the flat, Sara was rinsing musty blouses from the back of her closet and ironing in secret. After grossly mismanaging a pimple into a pulsing goiter, she spent ten minutes in the lav meticulously doctoring the mangle with concealer before she caught herself on: she wasn’t going anywhere for the rest of the evening besides upstairs. Her relationship with the subletter seemed to be degenerating into a miasmic admixture of antipathy and a schoolgirl crush.
As for the Buddhist palaver, the religion seemed harmless enough, though if we are indeed ceaselessly reincarnated as we climb the ladder of enlightenment, Sara was bound to be returned relentlessly to earth until she got subletting right. (Perhaps she was already trapped in a hellish Groundhog Day loop whereby in her forty-first year an Emer Branagh cognate sponges gooseberry jam in ever-larger quantities as grudge-bearing Sara Moseley makes spiritual progress by the tiniest of increments.) At least Emer’s flitting from hot spot to hot spot, shedding mercy and sagacity on the suffering of strangers, was pedantically consistent with the Buddhist concept of merit. Still: priggishly removing Sara’s dribs of Stoli and Jameson to a far corner, Emer had reestablished her altar on the sitting room’s ad hoc liquor cabinet, and whenever she passed the melon offerings and Christmas lights, she made a deep, pietistic bow—palms together, eyes closed. Sara refused to believe that Emer went through this folderol when no one else was home.
Sara continued to treat the sitting room as shared living space. At fifteen pounds per week, Emer wasn’t letting more than a mattress. Emer hadn’t got her nose in a sling about the matter, perhaps having calculated that, apropos of the kitchen, porous borders served her larger interests.
The source of Emer’s income was mysterious. Evasive about whether her Ulster memoir was under contract, she was surely writing it on spec. Yet her clothes and jewelry were expensive. Rich family? Sugar daddy? For Emer’s affected casualness about who-bought-what worked only one way. While Sara was obsessed with getting accounts to balance, Emer was equally obsessed with coming out ahead. In sum, Emer was a taker. Everywhere she went she would siphon off a little more than she gave back. The Emers of this world were levied on the whole species, like a tax. She pulled the pickpocketing off partly by being attractive, but also by being arty and passionate. She was dedicating her life to justice, empathy, and lamentation. The least the philistine ruck could do in return was to take up her logistical slack.
It was amazing, too, what you could get away with so long as you made a habit of it. Since repetition transformed the one-off impertinen
ce to convention, Emer’s tax on no. 19’s larder was now routine. Surmounting her outrage, Sara began to indulge in the scientific fascination that drives clinical experiments on small animals. With crafted insouciance on their second weekend, she called as Emer started down the stairs, “You know, the mayo is down to scrapings. Could you pick up a jar on your way home? And I’m not usually brand conscious, but Hellmann’s is worth the few extra P.”
When Emer returned she’d forgotten, but Sara wouldn’t let the matter drop. After two more reminders, Emer came home swinging a plastic bag for the very first time, in which nestled a single jar—the small size, but to give the woman credit, not the very smallest—of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Sara felt the same burst of triumph that must buoy pet owners when kitty finally poops in the litter box, until Emer mentioned in the spirit of afterthought, “Oh, that mayo was one pound sixty.”
Sara’s mouth dropped. “Sorry?”
“I’m glad to run an errand,” Emer said with grave goodwill, surveying the shrinking stash of tins in the kitchen cabinet. “But this project is on a tight budget, and I will need to be reimbursed.”
Sara stared. They called it stones in Boston, chutzpah in Israel, cojones in Mexico, cheek in England, and chancing your arm in Ulster, but Sara decided that motherfucking gall would do nicely.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any change,” Sara stonewalled, resolved to fasten upon this ploy for the duration: politely request that Emer pick up groceries, never have cash at ready hand, feign the same maturity about piddly this-and-that with which the leech concealed her own unremitting larceny, and forget all about it.
“No problem,” Emer said at Sara’s back. “I can just deduct the mayo from this week’s rent. Oh, and would you like an olive?” She walked out, nibbling a pit. “Though I’m afraid they’re not cold.”
Sara told herself that it wasn’t the olives themselves. It was the principle of the olives. Respect for another person’s property, no matter how paltry, emblemizes respect for its owner, and no one likes to be fleeced. Yet at bottom she knew better. It was the olives. It was the olives, at one pound ten.
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