The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “I’m still worried about his future,” she said. “He can’t keep playing forever, and then what’s he going to do?”

  “Long as his hands stay steady and his eyesight holds, nothing’s forcing him to retire. Besides, he can always commentate for the BBC, do endorsements.”

  “I don’t see him as a commentator. He can be awfully inarticulate in public. Product endorsements? Oh, great. When I picture his later life, it seems depressing. I think having been something is sort of awful.”

  “Has-been beats never-was.”

  “I know you have a thing for snooker,” she ventured. “But I’ve still found your friendship with Ramsey hard to understand. You don’t seem to have much in common with the man. You’re used to being around people who read the newspaper.”

  “You don’t get male bonding. And Ramsey tells great snooker stories.”

  “Don’t those stories ever get tired?”

  “Alex Higgins throwing his own television out the window? You’ve got to be joking.”

  AT THE STATION IN Bournemouth, Lawrence flagged a cab. While it was pleasant to be taken care of—not to have to bother her pretty little head about tickets, reservations, and taxis—passivity was enervating. Once they were off, too, Lawrence chatted up the taxi driver about the Grand Prix, while Irina sat silently alongside.

  “Swish has seen better days, ain’t he?” said the cabbie. “But he’s old guard, and it’s bloody amazing the geezer’s still at the table—”

  “Ramsey’s not only got staying power, but Ramsey’s got class,” Lawrence proclaimed. “O’Sullivan’s a whiner and a sore loser. Not to mention a moron.”

  Irina winced. For all Lawrence knew, the cabbie was an O’Sullivan fan.

  “Hear him caterwaul in the first round, like?” the taxi driver rejoined; Lawrence was lucky. “Never stopped whingeing—about the baize, the calls, the kicks. Made the ref clean the ball twice, he did. Nothing’s ever good enough for the Rocket.”

  “The guy’s a prima donna, and he’s spoiled. Sometimes you can be too talented. He’s never had to work hard. When matches don’t fall in his lap, he busts into tears.”

  “American?” the cabbie picked up.

  “Las Vegas.” Lawrence happily claimed the town he detested if it added color to his bio, and leaned hard on his Rs in a refusal to apologize for his accent. Since Americans in Britain were wont to feel cowed about their crass vowels and violent consonants, Lawrence’s unadulterated pronunciation surely displayed a strong sense of self. But for some reason, his aggressive skirl grated on her ear this evening.

  “You Yanks don’t follow snooker much, am I right?”

  Irina struggled forward. “No, in the US—”

  “Not generally,” said Lawrence. “But I love snooker. Makes pool seem like something you’d play in a sandbox. And we’ve gotten to know Ramsey a little over the years, you know, friend of a friend? Helps give me a feel for the game.”

  “You don’t say. How do you find him, mate?”

  “Great guy. Modest. Incredibly generous.”

  “Though he does have something of a chip—” Irina began.

  “He has a sense of honor,” Lawrence plowed on. “A real man’s man.”

  “Oi, from what I hear the bloke’s not unpopular with the ladies as well,” the cabbie leered. “Not quite the blade he once was, what with that gray around the temples. But you watch your woman about that fella. He’s more of an operator than he lets on.”

  “I don’t know about that. He was married for several years. To an insufferable twit, I might add.”

  When the cabbie let them off at the Bournemouth International Centre, Lawrence tipped him a whopping 30 percent—a benevolence that Irina knew full well hailed not from sympathy for hard-workers in service industries, but from gratitude that the driver had stooped to banter with his lowly passenger. Lawrence could come across as so brassy and arrogant, but in the odd excuse-me-for-living moment her partner’s emotionally emaciated upbringing poked through like a bone.

  Much like Lawrence himself, the conference center was trying too hard. The bulky brick building’s materials were ostentatious, and Irina wondered if its designers had any idea that their project was failed and ugly. The tall, tinted windows overlooking the bay, which made the long, ghost-white pedestrian pier extending into the water look not only enticing but permanently out of reach, somehow recalled Lawrence as well. He seemed to peer at his own experience like Alice in Wonderland, after nibbling the wrong side of the mushroom and now much too tall to fit through the door, looking longingly at the tiny garden. On outings like this one they tried to have fun, and every minute positively ached with mutual good intentions. Yet unself-conscious, fully inhabited joy mysteriously eluded the man, and Irina yearned to give it to him like a present, to give him nothing less than his own life.

  A burly character with a buzz cut behind them in the tickets queue was looking impatient. Frosty at first—sir this, sir that—the booking agent had warmed to Lawrence’s schmooze about the upcoming match, and was now conceding that, though the wager would pay little, he’d had to put his money on O’Sullivan. “Ronnie’s the future, mate!”

  “Listen,” said Lawrence. “Any way you might get a message to Ramsey Acton?”

  “This look like a Royal Mail office to you?”

  “Mind if I go ahead, mister?” the man behind them finally intruded. “Just trying to return a ticket before it turns into a pumpkin.”

  “No problem, no problem!” Lawrence demurred frantically. “Just thought I’d ask. Thanks a lot,” he said, in gratitude for tickets he’d paid for, adding to the beefy man in the queue, “And sorry about that, pal, really, sorry for keeping you waiting!”

  He might have pressed his case about getting a note to Ramsey a little harder, and surely all that groveling was unnecessary.

  This compulsive criticism was out of control, and she had to stop it.

  Purbeck Hall was spacious, so once they found their seats she could not fathom whence derived this sensation of explosive claustrophobia. It had been kind of Lawrence to buy her an overpriced program, but she flapped it, reading nothing, just to keep from looking at his face. She couldn’t suppress a feeling of constraint, as if she were tied up, and when Lawrence reached over to push a strand of hair from her eyes she battled a ludicrous impulse to slap his hand. Yet it was only when Ramsey strode on stage that Irina realized this trip to Bournemouth wasn’t just a dubious journey in bad weather or a trip to see a sport she was tepid about when she’d rather stay home and work. It was a catastrophe.

  A catastrophe, as in the definition of a collision: two objects trying to occupy the same space. As soon as Ramsey materialized, a feeling of wrongness permeated the hall, of an occurrence that shouldn’t be physically possible, like parallel lines meeting, or attending your own funeral. Suddenly the occasion felt off, out of kilter, like that uncertain period that precedes full-fledged nausea when you don’t yet accept that you’re going to be sick.

  Although she’d suffered that little dolorousness on seeing Ramsey on television last night and feeling no pang of desire, on balance her neutral response to his broadcast image had been a relief. Yet now that he was loosed from the cage of the screen, Irina’s urge to reach out and rest her hands on either side of those narrow hips was overwhelming. As Ramsey assessed the lay of the balls after O’Sullivan’s break, her mind’s eye spontaneously fit her own hips into the cups of that barely broader pelvis. Over her own dead body, her head compulsively slipped two hands around the tight, delicately muscled back, up under the shirt, knuckles brushing the starched white fabric. Irina felt crazed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. That attraction in July, it was bad and traitorous and stupid and just the result of too much drink; but now she was stone-cold sober. July was supposed to be a one off. She couldn’t have been more devastated if, after testing clean past the crucial five-year mark, a doctor had informed her sadly that a lethal cancer had recurred.

&nbs
p; It seemed impossible that Lawrence couldn’t tell. But he didn’t appear distracted from the game by the fact that his partner was at this very moment having some kind of public sexual attack, with a flush rising—visibly, she was sure—from her clavicle to her hairline. She considered claiming to be suddenly indisposed and insisting they go straight to their hotel, except that now she’d laid eyes on Ramsey in the flesh—she thought that very phrase, in the flesh—it was too late.

  Irina had sampled a smattering of illicit drugs in her youth, but she’d picked her spots—a few tabs of acid and mescaline, a little ecstasy and grass, the odd upper. She’d steered clear of heroin, crack, and crystal meth. Whether or not she’d prove susceptible to these more famously addictive substances, she theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn’t refuse, for which you’d sell your soul—and anyone else’s. There was no way of knowing which quantity would produce a permanent craving until you took it. As soon as you took it, even that single, investigative taste, you would have to have more. Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it. Presented with a palmful of tablets guaranteed to induce her own customized version of consummate bliss, she would scatter the pills to the winds.

  Yet here was Ramsey Acton, propped on stage like an upended capsule concocted in some back-room laboratory as the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She’d had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.

  However much a mess, Irina didn’t need the overhead monitor to keep track of the score. She could readily read the tide of play in the language of Ramsey’s body.

  He was winning. His cuing was a model of economy; not a muscle moved that was not in the service of the shot. At rest, he was exquisitely still, demurring from even pro forma sips of water. Last night on TV, he’d looked so lifeless; he visibly didn’t give a damn. What he appeared to have clawed back for himself in the meantime wasn’t so much his cueing skills per se, but the very quantity that gave rise to them in the first place. He had made himself care. No mean feat, when she thought about it—to care violently about a bunch of little balls, and about whether in traversing a rectangular surface they bounced against one another in such a way as to land into holes.

  Lawrence applauded frantically after every frame, obviously hoping to draw their friend’s attention to the fact that a certain couple was in the audience. Irina’s impulse was to the contrary, and she slumped in her second-row seat, praying that the stage lights didn’t cast enough ambient glow to illuminate their faces.

  At the interval, Ramsey’s removal from her sight was a relief, for simply sitting in his presence was aerobic exercise. Despite a chill in the auditorium, her hairline was damp. Though Lawrence had piped “Ramsey!” as the players withdrew, their friend had disappeared without a backward glance.

  “This is a fantastic match,” Lawrence proclaimed. “I bet right now O’Sullivan’s crawled back to his dressing room to bawl.”

  Irina looked at him oddly. It wasn’t quite as if Lawrence were speaking a foreign language—she understood each individual word as it emitted from his mouth—but she could not make sense of them together. Heart skipping, skin slick, mind festering with so much soft-core porn that she could rent out videos, she was at an utter loss why Mr. Trainer seemed to be talking about, of all things, a snooker match.

  “… You look bored,” said Lawrence, not concealing his disappointment.

  “I’m not bored,” she said honestly.

  “Then, so far, are you glad you came?”

  Irina crossed her legs. They were her best feature; Lawrence seldom admired them. “It’s very interesting,” she said, and meant it, too. But then, acid rain was interesting, and Srebrenitza.

  As the cheers rose when the players returned to the stage, Lawrence resumed his feverish clapping. Irina patted her hands inaudibly together, for form’s sake. Despite the moist mash of her applause, or perhaps because of it—as if Ramsey had a canine sensitivity to the very softest sound in the hall—before the lights had fully dimmed, he turned to look at the second row, sighting with the one-two of a knock-out combination first Irina McGovern, then Anorak Man beaming in the next seat.

  He smiled.

  But this was not the smile of ease, of expansiveness, of anticipatory triumph that one might expect from a sportsman in the advantaged position of six frames to two. Slight and asymmetrical, it had an element of the wan, the bittersweet, the self-mocking and sardonic. Disconcertingly for a player enjoying such a dramatic lead, it was a fender-bender, a prang of a smile, crumpled, a little twisted. It was a smile of defeat.

  As if determined to coordinate his game with his facial expression the way some women accessorize outfits with pocketbooks to match their hats, Ramsey began to lose. It was dreadful to witness, like watching a compulsive gambler in the black squander his prodigious pile of chips until there’s nothing left to bet besides his house. After Ramsey folded in eight frames on the trot, Irina was left with the perplexing impression that not only was he losing on purpose, but that he was doing so to show off. The ritual sacrifice of his lead seemed to constitute the inverse of conspicuous consumption, the way some wealthy people try to impress you not with what they’ve got but with what they’re willing to throw away.

  Irina was unsure if she was supposed to be flattered. Ramsey had, after his fashion, given her the Grand Prix—though normal men would try to impress a girl by winning it, would they not? For all his appearance of gentlemanly containment, there was something flamboyantly self-destructive about Ramsey Acton that was downright childish, and won or lost what was she supposed to do with the Grand Prix?

  Once the rest of the audience had cleared off in the desultory spirit of leaving a sporting event that had started out cracking but ended rather crap, Ramsey tooled coolly out on stage with his untied dickie bow stringed around his neck and his pearl-colored waistcoat unbuttoned, hooking over his shoulder a short-cut black jacket whose leather looked thick enough to saddle a horse. After such a disgraceful performance, he should have been shuffling with rounded shoulders. Instead he peacocked toward their seats, wearing an unflappable expression that most people can only manage with dark glasses. The very ferocity of her annoyance angered Irina the more. The ex-husband of an estranged friend should elicit none but the mildest emotions of any stripe.

  “Yo, Ramsey!” cried Lawrence, standing. “What happened?”

  Ramsey exuded a ridiculous cheerfulness, moving with the celebrative lightness of a man who has just lost a great deal of weight. “I been at this donkeys’ years,” he said, squinting. “Sometimes I just lose interest. Can’t predict it. And can’t be helped.”

  “When you lose interest in snooker,” said Irina, “do you get interested in anything else?”

  “Whatever else would I be interested in, ducky?” He looked her in the eye.

  “Listen,” said Lawrence, his glance flicking from Ramsey to Irina with an ear-pricked, wind-sniffing alertness that one rarely sees outside of wildlife programs. “We should probably check into our hotel. But according to the Internet, it’s not far from here. You available for a bite to eat?”

  “If I’d have won, an appearance at the Royal Bath bar would be expected. But losing makes the colleagues nervous—they’re afraid they’ll catch it like crabs—so I’m free. We can swing by your hotel in the limo, and then make a night of it.” His gray-blue eyes glinted. “Sure I’m massive behind on Afghanistan.”

  If it was a joke, it was at Lawrence’s expense. Before she fell in behind the two men, Irina muttered at Ramsey’s side, “Since when have you ever even heard of Afghanistan? I bet you a hundred quid you couldn’t find it on a map.”

  “I’m full of surprises,” he said.

  “You’re full of something.”

  It was like that, and it had better stop being like that. Irina shut up.

  Outsid
e the stage door, Ramsey issued them into his limo, muttering in Irina’s ear, “Nice gear.” She plowed gracelessly in front of Lawrence in order to insert him between her and the snooker player—scooting down the leather upholstery as if sternly sliding a wine glass out of her own reach.

  When Lawrence gave the driver the address, Ramsey interceded. “Oi, Anorak Man, the Novotel’s a tip! Why not let me get you a room in the Royal Bath?”

  “Nah,” said Lawrence. “I checked out their Web site, and it’s out of our league.”

  “On me,” Ramsey offered.

  Lawrence stolidly refused Ramsey’s generosity, and the limo proceeded to the Novotel. Irina fought a disappointment. They never stayed in upmarket hotels; the extra towels, terry-cloth robes, and gold-plated faucets might have been fun. Her disappointment redoubled when they arrived—at an address that wouldn’t have collected many snooker celebs in limos at its curb. A doorman hustled out to ask the driver if he was lost.

  After Lawrence checked them in, they skipped up the stairs (thin carpeting, gold-and-navy paisley) to give the room a glance. Lo, it was one of those overheated units with plastic water glasses, powdered-coffee sachets, bare bars of Ivory, and windows with brown aluminum frames that didn’t open. The color scheme was mauve. Lawrence hit the remote, flicked through the stations, and frowned. “No cable.”

  “No fresh flowers! No champagne! No fruit basket!”

  “Hey—did you want me to take him up on it?”

  “No, you were right. He’s sure to pay for dinner, and that’ll be pricey enough.”

  “Sometimes that guy throws his money around in a way that—I don’t know. Some of us have to work for a living, right? And he doesn’t have to call this place a dump. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Bottom line”—a smile—“it’s warm and dry.”

  “Too warm,” said Lawrence, searching the walls. “And I don’t see a thermostat.”

  “I admit it’s a little grotty, but it’s only for one night.”