“And you think Russia will be any less heavy and gray?” Sara laughed. “God, you must really think Belfast is a horror show!”
“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. Just a little poky. You can have it.”
“Knowing what I do,” Sara said, “I’m not sure I should thank you.”
The taxi tooted in the drive below.
“Russia might suit you at that,” Sara added with a glint in her eye. “Plenty of suffering.”
For once, Emer cracked a half smile. “There’s only one kind of suffering I really can’t abide,” she admitted. “Mine.”
Sara helped with the luggage, her stomach doughy. She hoped the sensation was regret about something larger than outstanding rent. She was just vowing with all the born-again resolution she could muster that this time she’d forgive and forget when Emer stopped on the landlords’ ground floor.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been so distracted.” The apology was Emer’s first in their acquaintance. “I meant to leave you some money.” She rustled into her carry-on, and hastily counted out a pile of twenties.
Sara accepted the wad with embarrassment, but did a double take when it proved so thick. “But Emer,” she said, shuffling the notes. “This must be, what, close to four hundred quid! That’s way too much.”
Emer ignored the ten twenties that Sara proffered back, and shouldered her bags again. “Oh, I don’t know, there’s the rent, utilities. I made a couple of calls to Petersburg. And, you know, I used a few of your groceries and stuff. Keep the change.”
Helping bundle the baggage into the Fone-a-Cab, Sara wished her subletter luck, and meant it.
Once the taxi had wended down the drive, Sara ambled back up to the flat, counting the notes again in astonishment: £460, all told. This was not the Emer Branagh of yore, who expected reimbursement for mayonnaise. Whether the woman had experienced a change of heart or merely a change of circumstances was impossible to say. Maybe the lavish overpayment was intended to shame Sara for having kept such exacting mental accounts, though how would Emer know? Or maybe it was Sara’s reward for having been a tolerable flatmate for four whole days. In allowing that she was “impressed” by Emer’s trip to Burma, she had said one thing nice; in confessing that she was too scared and stuck in her ways to go to Bangkok, she had said something modest; and she had offered Emer a bowl of pasta. If the wages of common decency had proved excessive, this fat roll of twenties delivered a downright Buddhist lesson about karma. That is, “keeping track” might assure just the compensation you were due, or somewhat shy. Generosity could boomerang back to you with dividends.
Standing at the middle room’s tall front window, Sara gazed out at the hazy hump of Black Mountain on the horizon. The sky was low and dull. Ulster’s brief Indian summer was abruptly at an end, and it had started to bucket. The weather could easily remain this unremittingly dim, wet, and dreary through to next May. Saint Petersburg! The city’s architecture was supposed to be entrancing, and like Burma’s the problems faced by post-Soviet Russia made Northern Ireland’s seem small beer.
Sara tidied the flat, having anticipated this moment as one of triumphant reclamation. Yet her mood was unaccountably doleful. Once the dishes were done, the carpets hoovered, Emer’s bedclothes tossed in the hamper, the flat still looked tatty. She couldn’t help but keep noticing that the plaster was cracked, that the gas-fire flames had left dark smudges on the walls, and that the furry black mold on the sitting room ceiling, so recently wiped down, was growing back apace. The air was clammy with a biting chill, and when she lit the fire in the sitting room it smelled chemical and tainted, measurably more nauseating than the faint residue of gardenia incense it overcame. For once she looked at the garish floral wallpaper and didn’t hate it with affection, but simply hated it.
A phone call to her editor was short but not sweet. Diffidently, she informed him that her “plans had changed,” and she’d like to take her column back. Ach, after we printed such a pretty farewell? Featherstone chided. In short order, she was close to begging. You’ve had a good run, pet. What’s it been? Ten years? Only nine, Sara corrected mournfully. Maybe we both need a change, don’t you figger?
Plunked in her usual chair, Sara treated herself to a sherry a little early. Listlessly she rifled the Telegraph. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine how decommissioning could have seemed scintillating for an instant. The truth was that she had stopped attending IRA funerals and Orange marches not because she was getting old, but because the Troubles were getting old. Like it or not, she had outgrown them.
There was still, of course, the good crack, the friendly banter with her neighbors when dandering out for wheaten bread and a chunk of Coleraine cheddar. But with Emer Branagh off to down piroshki and caviar with shots of frozen vodka, Sara felt swindled. Sure any old bog could seem priceless so long as some other patsy was willing to fight you for it.
About the Author
lionel shriver’s novels include Big Brother, the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk about Kevin. She has contributed to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.
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Also by Lionel Shriver
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047
Big Brother
The New Republic
So Much for That
The Post-Birthday World
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family
Game Control
Ordinary Decent Criminals
Checker and the Derailleurs
The Female of the Species
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
property. Copyright © 2018 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
“The Self-Seeding Sycamore” was originally written for the short story collection Reader, I Married Him, edited by Tracy Chevalier and published by William Morrow Paperbacks. “The Royal Male” was first published in the Telegraph (London), “Exchange Rates” and “Negative Equity” in the Times (London), “Kilifi Creek” in the New Yorker, “Repossession” in the Guardian, “Vermin” on Stylist, and “Paradise to Perdition” in Raffles Hotels & Resorts Magazine.
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs, clockwise from top left: © goran cakmazovic/Shutterstock; © Maica/Getty Images; © Johner Images/Getty Images; © Maica/Getty Images; © Maica/Getty Images; © Kryssia Campos/Getty Images; © Maica/Getty Images; © SantaGig/Shutterstock; © Maica/Getty Images; © Kryssia Campos/Getty Images; © Anthony Bye EyeEmGetty Images (center, top); © Maica/Getty Images; © Jon Boyes/Getty Images (center, bottom)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-269795-0
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-269793-6
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