The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “I wouldn’t doubt it, madam,” said the man. His brittle politeness made a mockery of good manners; the British often use decorum as a weapon. “But the players go on in a matter of minutes. You wouldn’t want to disturb your man as he collects his thoughts.”

  Your man was only an expression, and Irina had to stop herself from insisting, You don’t understand, he really is “my man.” She struggled to keep her voice level. “I think you’ll find that if you do contact Mr. Acton, he’ll be very, very grateful that you alerted him to my presence. He’s not expecting me, but he would be very pleased to learn I was able to make the match after all. The name is Irina. Irina McGovern.”

  Face set in stone, the ticket seller neglected to jot down her name. “I’m sure that Mr. Acton is grateful to be playing to a full house,” he said, “and sorry that any number of punters in addition to yourself have been turned away.”

  Alas, her voice grew shrill. “Mr. Acton will be very, very cross to learn that you refused to apprise him of my arrival, and if you don’t at least sell me a ticket—you know you have a few in reserve—I’m afraid you could get into BIG TROUBLE.”

  “Is that so,” he said flintily. “I’m touched by your concern. But I reckon I’ll take my chances, madam. Next?”

  Threatening the man had been a mistake. Exiled from the counter, Irina began to sob. If it wasn’t her habit to weep in public, she hardly made it a habit either of walking out on perfectly marvelous men and throwing herself at snooker players. Making a spectacle of herself was the least of her problems.

  “Sorry—” The portly character with barbarously short hair looked like a bouncer, but his touch on her sleeve was gentle. “Couldn’t help but overhear in the queue. As it happens, me mate was poorly this evening, and I’ve a ticket only bound for the bin. Would you take it? Never could bear to see a lady cry.”

  Irina wiped her eyes and accepted the proffered ticket. “Oh, thank you so much! You’ve no idea how important this is. You’ve saved my life. Can I pay you for it?”

  “No, I won’t take your money. Just chuffed it won’t go to waste, like.”

  “Oh, it won’t be wasted. I’m not just anyone, whatever that ticket agent thought.” Unable to contain herself, she blurted, “Ramsey, you see—I’m in love with him!”

  Her benefactor shot her a sad smile. “Wouldn’t be the first one, sweetheart.”

  Irina chided herself: of course the man would mistake her for one more smitten fan. But then, according to Lawrence, that’s precisely what she’d become.

  IRINA FOLLOWED THE SIGNS to Purbeck Hall, outside of which bookies had scrawled the odds for this match on a white board in felt-tip marker. Ramsey Acton paid five to one. (How awful, to have other people’s lack of faith in you put in such brutal numerical terms.) Delightfully, she was directed to the second row, albeit right next to the burly young man who’d bequeathed her the ticket. She should have reasoned before she made a fool of herself that of course if he had a pair of tickets she’d be sitting beside the man for hours. She tried to shoot him the cordial smile of a normal person.

  With game-show brassiness, an MC announced that the Rocket “needed no introduction” and proceeded to introduce him. Irina was familiar with the statistics. O’Sullivan had broken the very records—fastest maximum break, fastest clearance, youngest winner of a ranking tournament—that Ramsey had set.

  Ronnie emerged from the curtain, raising his cue high to his rowdy fans. In his early twenties, he was coarsely handsome, though not pretty. Pale with black, longish locks that were probably washed every day but somehow managed to look greasy, he had a loutish aspect, his face roughly hewn, his eyebrows lowering, every feature a tad too thick.

  By now, Irina was well familiar with the Rocket. His background was colorful: O’Sullivan’s parents ran a porn shop, until his father was put inside for cold-cocking a black pub patron and his mother was incarcerated for tax evasion. While both porn and tax evasion paid well, his accent was impeccably proletarian; in post-match interviews, he asserted the likes of, “I shou-ah known beh-ah.” (One of the luxuries of which the underprivileged were deprived in the United Kingdom was consonants.) As for Ronnie’s game, it was swift, aggressive, and—when he was on form, which he wasn’t always—impossibly perfect.

  Lawrence detested him. Ronnie’s tendency to boo-hoo when he lost a match, to go before the cameras in a state of crestfallen dejection and to forswear playing snooker ever again in his entire life in the spirit of taking his marbles and going home, was in Lawrence’s view the conduct of a consummate baby. The ultimate unforgivable to Lawrence, Ronnie was an inarticulate yob, an idiot savant—“emphasis on the idiot.”

  Ramsey’s fatherly concern that the boy would never exploit his potential unless he shored up his all-or-nothing ego (Ronnie was either bloated on adulation like a succulent, or as wilted and bruised as a crushed petunia) was more complex. Famously gallant, Ramsey was averse to admitting to rancorous emotions like resentment, envy, or bitterness. But these would be apt. That taxi driver had iterated the collective consensus: in terms of technique if not temperament, Ronnie O’Sullivan was Ramsey Acton resurrected. As many a parent is ambivalent over a child’s success, Ramsey was uneasy recognizing his own younger self sprinting around the table firing colors into pockets like mortars into enemy dugouts. Nobody likes to be replaced.

  The MC introduced Ramsey “Swish” Acton; always being described as merely a “finalist” in six World Championships must have smarted. As the curtain parted, cheers rose from older members of the audience. In comparison to the roar from O’Sullivan’s boosters, the duration of applause was noticeably shorter.

  Nevertheless, Irina’s heart melted. Crudely handsome maybe, but Ronnie O’Sullivan couldn’t hold a candle to Ramsey Acton. In equine terms, Ronnie was a dray, while Ramsey was a racehorse—long legs lean as well-bred fetlocks, the edgy, pitched vibration that emanated from his figure that of a high-strung handicapper on tight rein. There was a classical refinement to his elongated face and an elegant, vertical grace to his bearing that O’Sullivan’s vulgar and swaggering presence couldn’t touch with a barge pole.

  Irina’s ferocious clapping failed to attract Ramsey’s attention. She wasn’t sure if she should be trying to catch his eye or not, for she was nervous of distracting him from the task at hand. The one thing that would never endear her to the man was damaging in the slightest his chances of winning a snooker match.

  The lights dimmed, the crowd quieted, and the game commenced. Ronnie broke, dislodging a single red marginally pottable from the balk cushion. Rashly, Ramsey took it on. Rash and brave are kissing cousins, and the red went in. Ramsey built a splendid break of fifty-six, although not quite ample enough to take the frame. Alas, once Ronnie returned to the table, he hogged it like a fatty at an all-you-can-eat buffet. After clinching the frame at seventy-fifty-six, the Rocket sank the final black, ricocheting the white around three cushions just to show off. Bad form, if typical.

  This was Irina’s first live snooker tournament, and at first she missed the whisper of BBC commentary from urbane old-timers. There was a starkness to the contest unadorned with historical tidbits, its shots not foreshadowed with, “Oooh, this is a tricky one, Clive!” The sound of the game was so different, with all the wah-wah quiet, the empty space. But gradually as the second frame got under way she began to appreciate the purity of the exercise without a murmurous voice-over telling you what to think—why this shot is problematic, whether a player has got position on the pink. Absent chitchat, the reverberation of the balls echoed for seconds through the hall, and reds rattled in the jaws before tumbling into pockets with the suspenseful resonance of a drum roll. The competitors gliding about the table in total silence provided the game an atmosphere less of sport than of rite, like the mystical, unfathomable progress of Catholic mass when still conducted in Latin. Following the game was a more demanding business sans Clive Everton’s spoon-feeding. You had to pay more attention.

&nbs
p; Irina was indeed having trouble paying attention. Lawrence’s face in the rain that morning constantly interposed itself—that devastating wobble, the weak waggle of his farewell wave.

  On stage before several hundred spectators, Ramsey did not seem to belong to her in any but the most fractional sense. The crowd made her both proud of him for being such a star, and resentful of these strangers for making him one—since apparently he was a toy she would have to share. She could lay claim to such a parsimonious slice of the man that his very attractiveness became a torture.

  What was she doing here? Having wandered off by herself to the south coast of England, she felt like an impetuous grade-school runaway—who, with no source of food and nowhere to sleep, grows rapidly aware that the whole project is wrongheaded, but who insists on plowing down the street with a stuffed bunny and fistful of Oreos until the cops scoop the kid into a cruiser. Maybe walking out this afternoon was an act of sheer bloody-mindedness, nothing more.

  According to the monitor overhead, while she’d been drifting Ramsey had lost another three frames in a row. Irina forced herself to focus on the fifth frame. The pattern repeated itself: Ramsey built a substantial but less than consummate lead. Once the Rocket horned in, Ramsey spent the rest of the frame sipping Highland Spring.

  Irina may have been in no mood for sport, but she gradually found the spectacle more engrossing. The two players’ styles so mirrored each other that the match seemed the supreme expression of Lawrence’s axiom that ultimately in snooker you “play against yourself.” For if Ronnie O’Sullivan had ever studied anything in his life (which was questionable), he had studied Ramsey Acton’s snooker game. Indeed, the match took on an Oedipal flavor, the son out to slay the man who sired him.

  But in Oedipal contests, the younger contender reliably enjoys the advantage. Snooker was visibly fresher to O’Sullivan; he was more engaged by its vicissitudes, more gleeful over its command. By contrast, Ramsey looked faintly wearied by configurations that, although no constellation of snooker balls is ever, strictly, repeated again, he had broadly seen before—and before and before. His quiet, seemly satisfaction when a ball went in appeared subtly overshadowed by foreknowledge that there were more shots to come—more matches, more tournaments, more seasons—and the next mischievous sphere was not predestined to be so obliging. Wisdom and perspective are the compensatory comforts of old men, and little service the moment.

  Thus Ramsey played fast; O’Sullivan played faster. Ramsey took on pots improbably long; O’Sullivan took on pots that were longer. Ramsey cracked in colors with the velocity of Mighty Casey at the bat; O’Sullivan upped the technological ante, and launched them to oblivion with the force of a particle accelerator.

  Irina had given up trying to clap with extravagant pitch and pace to draw Ramsey’s eye; her seatmate’s concerned looks had made her self-conscious. The lighting on stage haloed the table and left the audience in murk; he couldn’t see her. She scrambled for a Plan B. Presumably access to Ramsey Acton would be as blocked after the match as it was beforehand in the lobby. How would she ever get him the message that the woman he loved was within arm’s reach? She’d no notion in which hotel he was staying, and that frosty booking agent was unlikely to volunteer an address.

  At the interval, the score a discouraging six-two, the players retreated to their dressing rooms, and Irina dared to pipe, “Ramsey!” But he was too accustomed to hearing his name called from an audience, and disappeared without a backward glance.

  It didn’t help that her seatmate was now convinced he had given away his extra ticket to a lunatic. As they both stood to stretch, Irina submitted with the lameness of the well-adjusted, “O’Sullivan’s really on fire tonight.”

  “They say Ronnie’s got more natural talent than the game’s ever seen,” he said, and promptly fled.

  Irina plopped back down with an eye-roll. She’d already heard this old saw about O’Sullivan two dozen times. Was this what her future held in store? Fielding snooker clichés and anodyne statements of the obvious night after night?

  At least Ramsey’s assessments had more nuance. To wit, while the doughy World #1 Stephen Hendry and the slouching bad-boy Ronnie O’Sullivan might seem to vie for the title of Best Snooker Player Ever Born, Ramsey had observed that the two young men claimed distinctly different crowns. Where Hendry had mastery, O’Sullivan had inspiration; where Hendry went at the game like a job, O’Sullivan made it an art. Like a good schoolboy, Hendry seemed to understand the nature of geometry; like a riveting evangelical, O’Sullivan seemed to understand the nature of the universe. Hendry was all knowledge, O’Sullivan all instinct, and—however inexplicably—intuition is more captivating than intelligence every time. (Something clicked: no wonder Lawrence couldn’t abide O’Sullivan.) Yet as Ramsey and his reincarnation returned to the stage, Irina registered a sinister corollary: intelligence is reliable, and inspiration, with no warning, can fail you.

  This time, Irina didn’t clap at all. She didn’t feel like it. She rested her hands in her lap, resignation lending her deportment a measure of repose. This whole Bournemouth mission was turning out a fiasco, and giving over to point-blank disaster was relaxing. After the anguish of leaving Lawrence and the chill scuttle to Waterloo with neither gloves nor toothbrush, under a Tinkertoy umbrella in the rain, she would probably have to find a hotel room in the area and curl on a cold mattress by herself. Ramsey was perfectly wretched about retrieving his phone messages.

  Maybe it was the fact that alone in the audience she wasn’t clapping. Maybe Ramsey’s sixth sense switched on at last. Or maybe Ramsey finally took advantage of the interval to retrieve his goddamned voice mail. For whatever reason, he turned to look squarely at the second row, sighting Irina McGovern as if lining up a color with a pocket.

  He smiled.

  Now, in tournaments Ramsey smiled seldom. He was certainly not given to smiling when behind six-two and being roundly beaten by his own double. But when he deigned to, he transformed not only his countenance, but his whole surround, so that the snooker table at his side seemed illuminated not by lights overhead but by the refractive radiance of his tall, white teeth. It was not merely a smile of warmth, of kindness, of graciousness, as given his reputation you’d expect, but it contained an element of the zany, the manic, the alarming. It was not, entirely, a nice smile. It was anarchic—and now freshly festive with indifference. After spotting a certain someone in the audience, Ramsey Acton couldn’t be arsed whether he recouped his losses in this match, for it seemed that earlier in the day he had won a much more considerable contest.

  Irina’s returning expression was mild, though it might have appeared, in its very gentleness, a little smug. She leaned back in her seat, which suddenly seemed more comfortable, and crossed her legs. Her seatmate, who’d been flapping his program in desperation to avoid talking to her, peeked at this erstwhile bint with new respect.

  Ramsey’s demeanor on the dais eased like a raw egg spreading on a plate. The high-pitched vibration that had jittered off his figure through the first session lowered to a steady thrum. In defiance of his famous fleetness, his motions grew dreamy, almost torpid. Ronnie broke, but this time when one long if notionally pottable red emerged from the pack, Ramsey coolly ignored it. He played a safety instead, landing the white behind the yellow so snugly that he snookered Ronnie from every red on the table.

  It was like that. Ronnie loved to play fast, so Ramsey dragged the pace to a crawl. Ronnie loved to pot, so Ramsey paralyzed the table with safeties. Once O’Sullivan’s rhythm was destroyed, Ramsey began to bait the cocky parvenu by leaving tantalizing but frankly ridiculous balls available that he knew the boy could never resist. Ronnie tried for each of these unlikely shots and missed. Ramsey’s masterful handling of not only the balls but of his opponent raised the question of whether Irina herself had been as astutely manipulated. If so, she could only admire him. Presently he was making his way about the table in the very same lithe, languid manner in which he negot
iated her body.

  In fact, by spotting her in the audience, Ramsey seemed to have discovered the female in the strategic respect. After all, when playing a younger, more vigorous revamp of your own game, you’re not going to beat it with the fatigued forty-seven-year-old version. Ramsey would never defeat O’Sullivan with power and aggression, but with guile—with feline deviousness and cunning. With the kind of snooker that O’Sullivan despised. With the kind of snooker that Ramsey despised: slow, boring, and sneaky. Since Ramsey knew his own game, he knew what was wrong with it. He knew that momentum players get tripped up when they have to keep rising from their seats only to play a single shot and sit back down. He knew that the one side of the game he himself had neglected to practice as a young prodigy was safety play, which he had odiously shoved down his own throat in middle age.

  After losing four games straight in this frumpy fashion to level the score, Ronnie unraveled. He took on ever more ludicrous pots, and missed them more lavishly—while Ramsey grew only more coy. By the end of the session, it was Ronnie playing what Lawrence deemed “demolition-derby snooker,” cracking balls every which way but in the pockets. Manly snooker was held up to ridicule, and girly snooker, at nine-seven, won the day.

  As the lights rose, Irina’s seatmate turned to her with a deferential nod. “So you’re mates with Ramsey Acton?”

  Irina messed with her wet jacket. “I thought I mentioned that in the lobby.”

  “So you did. Known him long, like?”

  “Awhile,” she said vaguely. The young man’s sudden solicitousness was creepy. Lacking a powerful hankering after celebrity on her own behalf, Irina had an immeasurably small hankering after celebrity by association. She had no intention of plying scraps of inside gossip on Ramsey Acton the way some folks post letters from famous writers on eBay. Thus when her seatmate asked whether it was true that, having opposed Ramsey’s becoming a snooker pro from his childhood, his parents had refused to attend a single tournament, Irina didn’t parley, “Yes, and even at forty-seven that hurts his feelings,” but claimed to have no idea.