In regard to a single quantity was Emer Branagh the soul of generosity. That would be edification. She was quite the authority on how to augment Sara’s Thai curry paste with lime leaf and galangal, ingredients unavailable in Belfast, without which a stir-fry was destitute. She delivered set piece anthropological lessons about her previous port of call—the Burmese prize celibacy; they don’t have surnames—with the overpatience of a schoolteacher reviewing a unit before a test.
But one Burmese did have a surname: the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Brave, virtuous, self-sacrificing, and pretty, the Nobel Prize–winning dissident was Emer Branagh’s idol, whose name she couldn’t mention enough times, showily rattling off the whole mouthful, which Sara could never remember. (Defiantly, Sara would refer to “Dawn Ann Sally Sukiyaki,” “Susie Sun Myung Moon,” or “Molly Moo-goo-gai-pan,” grimly satisfied that Emer took offense.) When speaking mournfully about Sukiyaki’s difficulty meeting up with her critically ill English husband in Britain before he died, Emer might have been one of those Midlands tabloid readers still torn up about Dodi Fayed and Princess Di. Since American liberals took it for granted that any new acquaintance was one of us, Emer presumed that Sara, too, agonized over oppression in the martial state, and would not rest until its newly elected president Dawn Ann Sally Sukiyaki beamed from the cover of People magazine in a knockout new dress.
Though she’d no time for tyrants, Sara’s working herself into righteous lather in her Belfast sitting room wasn’t going to spring a single prisoner of conscience in the opposite hemisphere. (Her own diatribes against the IRA had never spared a single RUC reservist a sniper’s bullet, either. But then, political consternation was like sex: arousing to partake in, embarrassing to watch.) A purely practical reluctance to get exercised to no effect must have read to Emer as callousness. When the subject of Burma arose after ten days or so, the subletter’s eyes burned with contempt.
Up to a point, Sara was interested in Emer’s expertise on Southeast Asia, whose tap water she would soon be avoiding herself. She might have welcomed reminders to keep your mouth closed in the shower and not to order salads in restaurants, if only she’d been allowed to pay for the advice with her own. But Sara couldn’t even tell Emer the location of the nearest public library. Emer would cut her off flatly, “I’m already a member at the Linen Hall.” Well, excuuuuuse me.
Moreover, Emer stymied any attempt to find common ground. When Sara once alluded to “Myanmar” (hoping to impress), Emer upbraided her that Burma’s official name implied sympathy with its military government.
“Just like Northern Ireland,” Sara said gamely. “Whatever you call the place, you give your politics away …”
Emer’s eyes drifted to the book in her lap, Grief in the Gorse (or whatever).
Sara got the message and put a lid on it. Oh, she could have produced a handy little cheat sheet on which of a panoply of names for this blighted bog corresponded with which affiliations. Yet the adroitness with which Emer dodged using any of these terms suggested a surprising shrewdness. She’d obviously never cite the baldly Protestant Ulster, but she also never employed the gutless nationalist appellation, the North of Ireland, either. Why, she’d not once referenced the moderately impartial Northern Ireland. She was more wont to nod passingly at “here,” wherever that was.
For what most frustrated Sara about the dratted woman was the elusiveness of exactly where on the finely gradated spectrum of Northern politics the subletter put herself. As best Sara could guess, Emer belonged to the finds-it-all-too-painful-to-bear set whose prissy nonalignment implied that to choose sides was to become part of the problem.
But hatred was not a spectator sport. To understand this squishy mire, you had to sample firsthand the fuel that powered the Troubles’ perpetual-emotion machine, and that meant coming to detest, detest and abhor, at least one of its factions, without equivocation, to your very marrow. Accordingly, Sara Moseley hated IRA-supporting republicans, hated them with a factual simplicity that was almost elegant. While she’d nothing against Catholics per se (some of her best friends—well, they were!), she also plainly disliked Northern nationalists with an expansive, elective abandon that made it the more interesting prejudice.
For Sara, the Northern Irish nationalist had transcended political classification to character type. Although by local definition a nationalist aspired to a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means, Sara had met the Northern nationalist, in a temperamental sense, all over the world, and many samples of the species would mistake Michael Collins for a mixed drink. Indeed, the disposition increasingly dominated discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, and not via sheer numbers, but by hitting a distinctively shrill rhetorical register, like those high frequencies broadcast outside convenience stores that drive young people insane. The ilk was technically nonviolent, but squealing that people will do almost anything to get to stop amounted to terrorism of a kind.
A nationalist is a Moaning Minnie, a bellyacher. He’s hard done by; he’s been abused and deserves recompense. Yet no matter how many concessions you shovel him, they will never suffice, for all penance is paltry, any attempt at reparation an affront. Like a bunny in a briar patch, he glories in violation. He feels sorry for himself, of course, but this self-pity is competitive; it bristles around rival brands. And it is triumphalist self-pity. A nationalist uses his suffering as a cudgel to beat you over the head. He never does anything wrong himself. And he never shuts up.
While brandishing his minority status, the nationalist runs in packs. Drunk on Dutch courage from his mob, a nationalist is a bully. But he’s never satisfied with merely getting his way; it has to be achieved at your expense. A nationalist is never happy unless he’s making someone else miserable. That said, he’s never happy. The happy nationalist is an oxymoron.
Accordingly, the worst thing you can do with a nationalist is to attempt to give him whatever he claims to want. He may love his children, his parents, his dog—nationalists are people, too—but the one thing that a nationalist loves above all else is his grievance. Any effort to fulfill a nationalist’s ostensible agenda will read as malicious: you are trying to take his grievance away. A nationalist will bite the hand that feeds him.
Nationalists, in this metaphorical sense, were everywhere. As a temperamental class, they weren’t necessarily predisposed toward devotion to kin and country, and a goodly proportion of the genus had never set foot in Northern Ireland. Nationalists were determined to ban fox hunting in Britain, and the average nationalist over a lifetime of dinner parties would lavish hundreds of times more indignation on vulpine anxiety than on genocide in Rwanda. Nationalists trampled seedlings of genetically modified crops. Nationalists campaigned for prayer in the schools; nationalists campaigned against prayer in the schools. Nationalists insisted on special degree courses in Inuit Studies. Nationalists were book burners; nationalists decried book burning. Nationalists were into “power walking,” and nationalists wrote letters to the editor to complain about cyclists who run traffic lights. Nationalists sponsored referendums to require that creationism be taught alongside evolution as an equally credible scientific theory. Nationalists had nut allergies; it was thanks to nationalists that you could no longer get a proper packet of peanuts on airplanes, but only chalky pretzels. Nationalists demanded untimed SATs for students with Attention Deficit Disorder. Nationalists wouldn’t let you use the word retarded, even in reference to yourself. Nationalists murdered abortion doctors out of dedication to the sanctity of human life. Nationalists boycotted products developed through animal testing, and nationalists bombed cancer labs full of researchers and hamsters out of love for all creatures great and small. Nationalists were vegetarian, and nationalists would never rest until you were vegetarian, too.
Was Emer Branagh a nationalist? Spoiling for a showdown, Sara resolved to lure her subletter out into the open.
“Check this out,” Sara commended in the sitting room, and read from the Irish News in her lap: “
‘A Belfast hospital has come under fire for flying a Union flag over its grounds.’ Shockers. A Union Jack. Which so happens to be the flag of this country.”
No reaction, save a slight shift in the facing armchair, perhaps the suggestion of a prim sigh.
“Now, Ranger fans are Protestant, Celtic fans Catholic, right?”
“Of course,” Emer said tightly.
“‘An irate caller to the Irish News also claimed a security guard directing traffic into the car park at the Ulster hospital in the mainly loyalist Dundonald area was wearing a Rangers hat.’ Can you credit it?” Sara glanced up. Emer was looking twitchy. “‘“It was a disgrace,” said father-of-four from Portadown. “I felt intimidated going into the hospital grounds. You’d think that a hospital would be a safe haven from sectarianism.”’ And get this: Sinn Fein Councilman Alex Maskey has raised the issue of football caps on hospital parking attendants with the British Secretary of State, who has promised to look into it. Tell me this place is not Romper Room. Tell me, Emer, that it’s not funny.”
Slowly Emer lowered her book, and looked at Sara with pained parental disappointment. “You’re being rather insensitive, don’t you think?” The gentle castigation, don’t you think? was Emer’s favorite phrase, its coercive inclusivity calling Sara to her nobler self. “After living in Belfast for so many years, you must have learned the significance of symbolism in this place. I have to say, you surprise me, Sara.” Emer’s scolding way with her flatmate’s Christian name made Sara want to snatch it away from her.
“After living in Belfast for so many years,” Sara returned, “I have learned that these people get up in the morning to be offended. Now, they can fill my newspaper with nonsense, but they can’t force me within the privacy of my own home to take their trumped-up grudges on board as anything but calculated nuisance. I hate to pull rank, but if you think this sorry father-of-four whinge-bag in Dundonald is doing anything but yank Mo Mowlam’s chain you haven’t been here long enough. It’s all wink-and-nod, Emer. They know what they’re doing. And dig deep enough under every brown-nosing British concession to rename their streets ‘Oglaigh na hEireann Avenue,’ and paint ‘Bruscar’ instead of ‘Rubbish’ on their wheely bins, and reroute yet another Orange march around their delicate cultural sensibilities, and you’ll find a gun. The Brits are piss-in-their-pants terrified of these people, and Sinn Fein is making the limies dance. It is funny. But it ain’t pretty.”
“These people, as you call them, have suffered greatly,” Emer said. “I worry that you forget that.”
“Please,” Sara implored, “don’t lose any sleep over the state of my soul.”
Emer closed the book in her lap slowly and placed her palm on the cover as if on a Bible in the dock. “Maybe you should lose sleep over your soul. Sara,” Emer remonstrated, nodding at Sara’s newspaper. “Is Belfast anything to you but entertainment? Does it exist to you, as a city that people live and die in, or is it only an amusement park?”
“Right, sure, it’s an amusement park,” Sara returned, glaring, and the meniscus that had been bulging from the drip-drip of Emer’s confounding condescension finally broke. “After eleven years here, my friends are still cardboard cutouts—toys, paper dolls—and I care nothing about their health and safety. So it’s a matter of supreme indifference to me if the shops they shop in—and, incidentally, I shop in—sporadically explode. In fact, if anything terrible happened to the people I live among every day, I’d be happy! More amusement. The Good Friday Agreement, since it’s shut down the fun fair for now, is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me here, and I can’t wait for the whole thing to fall apart so the fireworks can start back up—you know, body parts flying through the air, maybe an arm or a leg of someone I know but—being such an awful person—don’t give a damn about. As for the politics I’ve written about every week for nine years, they’re a mere ha-ha to me, and I cynically manufacture a straight face on paper to reap my big fat hundred pound fee on Saturdays. You, on the other hand, have been here an entire six weeks, and so of course you’ve already learned to weep when Belfast weeps. I just hope you’re in my flat long enough for some of your large-hearted, sober-sided compassion to rub off on my mean—shallow—callow—insensitive character.”
After a pacifistic moment of silence, Emer replied stonily, “I see no need to be unpleasant.” Again with that remote, rising-above refusal to get her hands dirty, she went back to her book.
Burrowing masochistically into her Irish News, Sara blackly tallied the clues: sense-of-humor lobotomy, moral superiority, entitlement complex that extends to everything from my shampoo to my very home … Nationalist! Whatever her tortuous position on the Border, Emer Branagh had tipped her constitutional hand.
Sara had plenty to do. She had to write Karen and get the email address of the features editor at the Bangkok Post, then introduce herself to the guy and get the professional ball rolling. She should photocopy a batch of her best clips. For running her laptop and epilator, she should investigate Thai voltage and the configuration of Thai plugs, buying converters and adapters as necessary. She had to change the billing address on her credit cards. She ought to pick up mosquito repellent, since Let’s Go said malaria was still a problem outside Bangkok. She needed to make an appointment for hepatitis and yellow fever inoculations, as well as for tetanus and polio boosters. She should check out travelers’ health insurance. On the assumption that this expedition was not to be a complete damp squib, she should stop by Dunluce Health Centre and get a new diaphragm and fresh spermicide; piquantly, her lone tube of Ortho-Gynol was past its sell-by date. She had to find out if AOL serviced Thailand, and if not, how to get online with another provider. Nuts, and did she need a visa? She probably needed a visa! More expense, perhaps more delay. And what about these other “interesting countries” she planned to explore? Vietnam, Laos—the third world always demanded visas, since they’re nice little earners. And how the hell did you get into Burma, through pleading, bribery, or prayer? The prospect of asking Emer was intolerable.
But Sara could concentrate only on the wrong end of her expedition. She agonized over how to avoid paying monthly dues at Windsor Lawn Tennis Club in her absence without canceling her membership; they had a waiting list, and it could be difficult to get back in. She debated whether to cut off the phone—maintaining the same account would leave her vulnerable to an unpaid bill on return—although what tormented her was not the meanness of making Emer pay to reconnect, but the potentially permanent sacrifice of a phone number to which she was sentimentally attached. She searched out a foolproof hiding place for her cast-iron skillet and systematically depleted what little food remained in the kitchen, since a few preventive measures might keep the List from growing like knotweed.
Compared with the daunting task of controlling one’s mind, controlling one’s mere behavior was child’s play. Regarding the latter, Sara was if anything too proficient. Each morning Emer poured another bowl of muesli from Sara’s new bag (Tesco Finest this time, the cheap kind with sultanas but no nuts). The only signals of Sara’s simmering fury were a clipped tone of voice while she talked about something else and a shadowy poppling from the rhythmic clenching of jaw muscles. But Sara purchased the surface civility of their relations with pitched internal apoplexy.
If Sara was to continue to indulge her habit of talking to herself, she could at least have been rehearsing a few Thai expressions from her new phrasebook—like mai pen rai (“you’re welcome, never mind”), pen kan ehng (“take it easy, make yourself at home”), jai yen (calm, or “cold spirit”), and arai kadai (“it doesn’t matter”)—whose implicit heedlessness might have proved therapeutic. Instead Sara stomped down Notting Hill muttering, I slice up half my bunch of broccoli, using the stem, which I don’t much like, to make it last another night, and the next day I find all the fleurettes hacked off this amputated STUMP! So unabated had her bitterness become that it triggered the cerebral equivalent of acid reflux.
Sara to
rmented herself with visions of Emer Branagh flouncing around her flat in silks after nasty, Troubles-know-it-all Sara Moseley was gone for good, perhaps “accidentally” breaking a few of the vulgar coffee mugs that celebrated Goons with Guns. But even more insufferable than turning over to a nemesis her beloved tumbledown digs was the imminent handover of Northern Ireland itself.
Despite the agreement’s afterglow, no sheaf of paper could sort out in a single stroke decades of partisan antipathy; the average Northern citizen carried a mental list of grievances every bit as lengthy and specific as Sara’s own. Nevertheless, earlier that summer Ulster’s political future had seemed largely to comprise tedious mop-up chores, the civic analogues of picking up beer cans and taking down risers at the end of an unruly rock concert. For the spectator, it had seemed time to go.
But Ulster’s woes had never seemed more exquisitely intractable as they had in the last three weeks! In the wake of Omagh, both communities had talked big about overcoming their differences to end this madness, but the feel-good unanimity wouldn’t last. The row over the decommissioning of paramilitary weaponry was heating up fast. Chris Patten’s report on reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, due next summer, was certain to raise a ruckus if it so much as recommended a change of the force’s name. And with the agreement under belt, this year Northern politicians were sure to snag the Nobel Peace Prize! Blair and Ahern, or maybe Hume and Trimble, but would they include Adams? Would Oslo be that out of touch, to award the man responsible for 1974’s Bloody Friday a peace prize because this year he declined to mastermind twenty-six criminal explosions in one day? A travesty, but opportunity for a bang-up column in “Yankee Doodles” … Sara kicked herself. She’d resigned.
Property Page 33