Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

First published by Farrar Straus and Giroux 1990

Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1990

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008134778

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008134785

Version: 2015-08-18

Praise for Ordinary Decent Criminals:

‘Lionel Shriver is an original, by turns exuberantly comic, whimsical and cruel … The men – performers, compulsive talkers whose insistent self-revelation masks their emptiness – are wonderfully captured. This is a love story, and a surprisingly moving one. But Shriver’s edgy, accurate wit, her ear for rhetorical inflation and self-deception, and her refusal to be conned by personal or political platitudes expand her novel: its real subject is the seductiveness and sadness of Belfast itself’ Independent on Sunday

‘Shriver has obviously immersed herself deeply in Belfast life at the cellar-bar level … That Shriver is an uncommonly gifted writer is obvious even in the early pages. This is an unusual and impressive achievement’ Spectator

‘Shriver doesn’t rely on the glamour of violence or political intrigue for dramatic effect: she consciously shuns the hackneyed Romeo-and-Juliet yarn and the IRA-bomber-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché … The background details and dialogue ring very true to life; and the story is anchored in a recognisable Belfast. Shriver was able to infiltrate the local ethos and quickly assimilate its culture … Humour is a vital element in the novel. Shriver has a mischievous, hard-edged wit which borders on the cynical … The author’s indifferent comic perspective is best revealed in the novel’s “Glossary of Troublesome Terms.” Doubling as an often hilarious guide to Ulster politics and an astute mini-essay on the complicated nature of the situation, the glossary contains the kind of home truths which have eluded political analysts for decades’ Independent

‘If this is a love story, Lionel Shriver is no romantic, and the myths of the misty isle have failed to seduce her. She writes about self-destruction with all the muscular confidence of her leather-wearing heroine. Sentence after truthful sentence comes cruel, fresh and clever … As Ms Shriver observes, the last thing the civil war in Northern Ireland needs is another book. What a surprise then to find she has written a novel which is alight with perception, complexity, originality and, yes, laughter’ Daily Mail

‘Shrewdly caustic and unexpectedly moving … Ordinary Decent Criminals spares no one, offers no hope and – here’s the kicker – is bitingly funny … Wheelers and dealers, outspoken sentimentalists, dreamers and hoodlums all hope to profit from the violence; they would, in fact, be lost without it … Shriver is a gifted mimic. Born in North Carolina and educated in Columbia University, she’s gobbled Northern Ireland down and recreated it on the page with deceptive ease. At times, the book reads as if it were written exclusively for her Belfast co-residents. If Americans get it, that’s fine. If they don’t, it’s their loss … The bracing, acid wit and rich hyperbole are constant and a little terrifying. Who can be this cynical about horrors? Shriver can—and for a purpose. You may think she’s numbing you with her wisecracking nightmare when actually she’s leaving you all the more vulnerable to her final devastating plot twist. That’s the ultimate paradox in this feverish book. Ordinary Decent Criminals quivers with enticing energy, seduces you with its nervous amoral appeal’ Washington Post

‘One of the shrewdest, most disturbing pieces of fiction this place has thrown up in twenty years. Ordinary Decent Criminals reveals a considerable intellect at work in tandem with an acute ability to discern our deeper motivations. There is also a terrific sense of humour, sharp and sympathetic’ Belfast Ulster News Letter

‘[Shriver] says more about wee Ulster than dozens of other novelists before her put together. ‘Calcified with self-pity’ is one phrase that lingers’ Belfast Irish News

‘An uptight, acerbic thriller with no limits on intensity, and no concessions to sentimentality’ Belfast Fortnight

‘Here indeed is that rare bird – a novel set in Northern Ireland and written by an American which eschews the simplistic drawing of battlelines, which refuses to see the people of the North as merely Orange or Green, but as an assembly of ordinary decent sinners, and which portrays neither heroes nor martyrs … One of the most insistent themes in Ordinary Decent Criminals is that the people of the North are excited by their Troubles, and would die of boredom if they ended … Certainly Lionel Shriver is not bored by the Troubles, and no reader could be bored by this novel, enlivened by a sizzling ironic humour’ Dublin Sunday Tribune

‘Lionel Shriver being a young American who found her way to Belfast in 1987 to write a novel, chances were her book would be tinged either with Noraid naivety or the blood thirst of a war-zone junkie. But Ordinary Decent Criminals is neither; instead, it is an unflinching and bleakly comic novel that sees through the sloganeering of both sides while retaining a feel for the local colour, orange or green … This is a haunting tale, set against a background where to sit on the fence is to ride barbed wire’ Glasgow Herald

‘Shriver passes the accuracy test with very high marks.… The argot is accurate, and the fine detail of republican West Belfast and bourgeois South Belfast rings true. The author, moreover, has added richness by bravely including much local allusion which will only be appreciated locally … Shriver writes with great power’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Shriver knows her Belfast and her speckled politics, and yet, like her heroine, she has a salutary detachment. She too knows that there is a world elsewhere and has a deep-rooted suspicion that all the nonsense is not about republicanism or loyalism but about wish-fulfilment and the perpetuation of alternative systems of power … At one stage she makes Estrin say truthfully: ‘The last thing this place needs is another book.’ Yet if the place must be written about, I suppose a ‘jeer on both your houses’ is as good a stance as any’ Irish Independent

‘Any novel about the Northern Ireland troubles that opens in the Bushmills whiskey distillery has clearly got a useful perspective … American author Lionel Shriver maintains a keen sense of proportion between the fabric of the Troubles and the individual lives of her three-dimensional characters; in addition, she’s caught the flavour and the language of the city where she’s lived since ’87 with astonishing deftness, without either showiness or romanticism’ London City Limits

‘A big read that never flags and that I pursued with ever-increasing delight … Ms Shriver writes a bouncing, buoyant prose that carries one along as merrily as a band of roisterers hell-bent for glory. And she has beautifully caught that air of desperate wryness that people on the edge of danger are supposed to exhibit. Her novel is as life enhancing as an optimistic outlook or a good laugh. Buy it and see’ Irish Sunday Press

‘“All people know about Northern Ireland is what they see on television,” says Bill Rolston, lecturer at the University of Ulster and part-time pulp authority. “[Troubles] novels, apart from being truly awful, help to perpetuate that ignorance.” Rolston does however pick out a few acceptable popular fiction examples. Troubles by Naomi May merited inclusion, alongside Seamus Heaney, in The Rattle of the North. Also spared is Ordinary Decent Criminals by an American woman named Lionel Shriver’ Guardian

‘This is a streetwise book, inasmuch as Shriver, an outsider, pretends to an insider’s authority on the situation she portrays. That she carries it off as well as she does, particularly at the level of personal relationships, counts as an achievement’ Irish Press

‘This is an exceedingly powerful, inspired novel. Shriver is an American living in Belfast, the setting for her engrossing story. She brings to this benumbed and blighted city an outsider’s eye and ear … Shriver’s writing is outstandingly lucid and bright, with an original blend of American and Irish whimsical irony. Commanding both the sweep of Irish politics and the nuances of human relations, she draws a splendid map for getting nowhere’ U.S. Publisher’s Weekly

‘Ordinary Decent Criminals proposes an entire politics of paradox: people who fight for peace love to be at war. Estrin feathers nests in order to leave them. Farrell keeps himself intact for the pleasure of flirting with destruction. Only the author can triumph in such an arena, and Shriver does … Shriver’s prose, frequently gnomic and invariably unpitying, offers virtually none of those made-for-TV movie devices that neatly freeze-dry settings, heroes, subplots. Writing for the pleasure of her story, she allows the reader to fill in the lacunae there. And she rightly trusts herself to recreate a wide range of universes. In Female of the Species, she dealt with anthropologists studying African tribes; in Checker and The Derailleurs, with rock musicians in Astoria. Here she’s even bolder. Her Belfast is stripped of martyrologies, serving Estrin and Farrell as moonlit nights or certain Manhattan nightclubs do lovers in less ambitious, less convincing fiction’ New York Village Voice

Dedication

To the Old Man:

Revenge is tribute

In case of difficulty with acronyms,

jargon, and the morass of Irish history,

the reader is urged to consult

the Glossary of Troublesome Terms

at the back of this book.

‘Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing, with promise of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it’

Ernest Hemingway Islands in the Stream

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Ordinary Decent Criminals:

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One: Hot Black Bush

Chapter Two: Roisin Has Enthusiasms

Chapter Three: The Green Door, or Everybody Likes Lancaster

Chapter Four: Women on and Off the Wall

Chapter Five: Cape Canaveral on York Street

Chapter Six: Roisin’s Furniture Goes Funny

Chapter Seven: Constance Has Inner Beauty; About Farrell We Are Not So Sure

Chapter Eight: Big Presents Come in Small Packages

Chapter Nine: As You Are in Pieces, So Shall Your Cities Fragment

Chapter Ten: The Vector and the Corkscrew

Chapter Eleven: The MacBride Principles

Chapter Twelve: Americans Have Good Teeth

Chapter Thirteen: Checked Luggage, or The Long Fuck

Chapter Fourteen: Negaphobia, and Why Farrell Doesn’t Do Windows

Chapter Fifteen: Ireland, and Other Hospitals

Chapter Sixteen: The House in Castlecaulfield

Chapter Seventeen: The Fall of the House in Castlecaulfield

Chapter Eighteen: Form Over Weight

Chapter Nineteen: Notice-Notice

Chapter Twenty: Harder-Harder, More-More, Worse-Worse: Estrin Turns Into a Lamppost

Chapter Twenty-One: Chemical Irritation

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Saint of Glengormley

Chapter Twenty-Three: What Is So Bloodcurdling About a Swallow in Your Kitchen?

Epilogue: Boredom as Moral Achievement

Glossary of Troublesome Terms

About the Book: Teatime in London: Why I Spurn My Gerry Adams Mugs for the Cups From the John Harvard Library

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

chapter one
Hot Black Bush

Between them, pure alcohol coiled from the turned-back lid; the air curled with its distortion. Vaporous, the face stretched longer and thinner than the pillar it began. The shimmer off the vat worried his expression, tortured his eyebrows in the heat, further emphasizing a figure already overdrawn: too wild, too skinny, too tall.

As she stood on tiptoe to lean over the wooden tub, on the other side the tall man saw only the dark tremble of a girl’s unruly hair. He wondered at letting children tour a distillery. Then, why shouldn’t they be confirmed early, sip at the chalice—Bushmills was the real Church of Ireland, after all. Later, he would catch sight of her down the walk toward bottling and not recognize the grown woman in black leather bouncing the red motorcycle helmet against her thigh. Though she was barely over five feet, at any distance her slight proportions created the optical illusion that she was not small, rather, farther away.

The man did not need to clutch the rim, but leaned at the waist to inhale. When the girl looked up he saw she was not ten or twelve but at least twenty. Their glances met; both took a deep breath. The man reared back again, snapping upright; the woman went flat on her feet. Tears rose and noses began to run. The fumes went straight to the center, acupuncture. The staves of the cavernous room warped cozily around them. The man could no longer remember what had so concerned him moments ago; for the first time in months he felt his face relax. Across the tub, she watched the lines lift from him and decided he was not fifty, as she’d first thought, but thirty-two or -three. In fact, if she’d asked him just then how old he was, he might have claimed yes, he was thirty-three, because the last ten years had been trying and he could not remember anything trying while breathing over a washback with this pretty girl. Christ, he missed whiskey.

“Better than shots,” she admitted. “This is my second time through.”

The alcohol evaporated from his head. He recalled what he’d been sorting out, and returned to one and a half million paupers would never get a full vote in the EEC. Her twang was unmistakable: bloody hell, she was American.

Their group had moved on; the two treated themselves to one more inhalation of the wort, which roiled between them like whipped cream gone off, Guinness on a stove. Its surface churned and kneaded into itself, a little sickening, too brown. The American let down the wooden flat regretfully. “We’ll be missed.” As her boots echoed down the washbacks, she passed a beefy man at the door.

“Farrell, lad. A wee five-minute tour and you’re away.”

Farrell. She remembered his name.

Farrell waited, not wanting to walk with her. He’d no desire to violate the intimacy of their brief debauch with the disappointing whine of an American tourist. His head cleared, the last two minutes had encapsulated his life: the giddy rise and fall of it. Excessive indulgence to excessive discipline, and that was substances, though women the same—the clasping of hands over tables, the grappling in the back of taxis, the sweaty riot in the hotel, so quickly giving way to veiled excuses, impossible schedules, the dread cold quiet of a woman’s phone unrung. Increasingly, he had an eye outside the abandon, the desperate swings; all he could see was pattern, and in this way nothing changed. It was harder and harder to perceive anything at all as actually happening.

Estrin Lancaster was not the only American on this tour; the piping comments of just the couple she longed to escape had led her to bottling. The two were Northeasterners, though Estrin could no longer decode their accents into states. Abroad the better part of ten years now, Estrin was growing stupid about her own country, and had to admit that while she plowed her Moto Guzzi over the Middle East she hadn’t a clue what was going on in Pennsylvania; and that this, like any ignorance, was no claim to fame. Rather, she’d made a trade-off, a real important trade-off, because there was a way you could know the place you were born that you never got a crack at anywhere else, and Estrin didn’t have that chance anymore.

These years her access to U.S. news had been spotty, and lately, when Americans glommed onto her—a national characteristic—she didn’t get their jokes. She was currently following the Birmingham Six appeal, with all the unlikelihood of a British reversal—the more miserable the evidence on which the six Irishmen were convicted, the more certain the decision would remain, for didn’t people defend their weakest opinions with the most violence? Yet Estrin barely skimmed articles about presidential primaries in the States. She knew she was lost when in her Irish Times she no longer understood Doonesbury. The detachment had become disquieting.

“Did you notice all those L’s and R’s on people’s cars, Dale? Do you suppose that means Loyalist and Republican?”

Estrin flinched. The stickers meant Learner and Restricted, and she saw locals look to each other and smile. No one corrected the woman’s mistake. Estrin didn’t either. Simply, she didn’t want to be seen with them: sheer badness. Americans embarrassed her. They made no distinction between what came into their heads and what came out—an endless stream of petty desires and ill-examined impressions dribbling from a hole in the face, the affliction amounted to mental incontinence.

Better you’re not seen running after me, MacBride,” said Farrell coldly to the man in the doorway.

“Only tourists. That was the idea.”

“We were to run into each other. You’re getting sloppy.”

“Successful. Seen off with Farrell O’Phelan, I’ll survive. You’re such a chameleon, I paint you the color I like. More harm done you, I’d think.”

“On the contrary, one of my accomplishments—”

“One of the many,” said MacBride pleasantly.

“—is I can be seen with whomever I like.”

“Everyone knows we were mates back.”

“Everyone was everyone’s mate back,” said Farrell. “What makes this place so sordid.”

“Quite a lolly passed me at the door,” MacBride observed, moving on to more interesting business. “All that black leather, wouldn’t have to dress her up, like.”

“Young for you,” said Farrell distractedly.

“Looks old enough to know how.”

“Haven’t you your hands full with—”

“Ah-ah.” MacBride raised a finger as they drew within earshot of the group. “Now that is sloppy.”

Estrin knew Bad Work, so she recognized the strain in their guide’s patter. He injected his information with artificial enthusiasm, like pumping adrenaline into a corpse. If he kept the job he would have to give over, and not simply to boredom, for there are states far beyond that, where you no longer recognize that at 2:45 there is any alternative to repeating “Our water rises in peaty ground” one more time. It’s relaxing, actually, a sacrifice to other forces. Minutes stretch out so wide and meaningless there is no more time, there are no more questions. Beyond interpretation or struggle, the advanced stages of Bad Work amount to a religious conversion. Also to being dead. She assessed the guide: Estrin would have quit by now.

She swung between the pot stills towering fifteen feet overhead, shining Hershey’s Kisses. Bushmills kept the copper polished—now, that was the job she would keep. Estrin loved metal—its resistance, its arrogance, its hostility. She could see herself arriving weekly with chamois in every pocket, to rub down the curves, the stills now looking less like wrapped chocolate than firm upright breasts.

NO MATCHES OR NAKED FIRE.

It was the sign between them. Estrin, once more lost in her own world, which she was always mistaking for the world at large, had almost run into him. The tall man shot her a weary smile. He did not seem very interested in the distillery.

“We’re honored, sir.” The guide hustled over to Farrell’s friend. “What brings you?”

“Tired of single-handedly supporting the shop short by short. Thought I’d save a few quid to come buy the lot of it.”

The guide laughed. Farrell sighed.

Through the warehouse, where whiskeys married in boundless sherry casks, Estrin hung back to inhale. She tucked away stray jargon—cooper, blend vat, spirit safe—souvenir knickknacks. Pretty and useless, they packed well. Best of all she pocketed the smell, for Bushmills steeped the Antrim coast for miles around with a must of rising bread, liquor, and ripe manure, evoking pictures of a stout woman baking while her fagged-out husband rests his dung-crusted boots on the hearth and slowly gets pissed.

At the end of the tour, downstairs for her sample, Estrin felt sorry for the harried bartender and held back—the woman had to keep smiling and ask, “Hot, black, regular, or malt?” over and over in a happy voice, explaining slowly to Germans what goes into a toddy, fighting back disdain for Americans, who could easily afford a case, still so eager for their free drink. Estrin had the same problem in restaurants, where, whether or not her order was wrong or cold or late, she identified with the waiter rather than herself; in shops she sympathized with rattled salesmen, not clientele; in high-rises she allied herself with reception, janitors; and even in the restroom her heart went out to the lady with the towels. From a well-established Philadelphia family, Estrin Lancaster had downwardly mobile aspirations.

Farrell cast about the crowd, goaded by those sanctimonious poppies on every staff lapel. Thank God, it was Remembrance Day, after which the Somme would once more be over for another good eleven months. Farrell supposed dully that there was nothing wrong per se with mourning your war dead, though of course every gesture was subverted here and that wasn’t what the poppies connoted at all. Those are OUR wars. Those are OUR dead. Take ’em, thought Farrell, childish bastards. Little matter that plenty of Catholics had died in both world wars; fact had never contaminated anyone’s politics in Ireland. (The fiction was wick, since who needed it? We’ve got history.) No, ceremonies were divvied up and the Prods had picked Remembrance Day, the Twelfth, and probably Christmas, since they’d more cash. The Taigs got Easter, Internment Day, and for twenty years a whole smattering of, ah, unscheduled celebrations all across the calendar. Let the Prods have their sorry paper poppies and weepy parades to cenotaphs, it was only fair.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This left Farrell in a conflicted position—Catholics didn’t wear poppies and Prods did, but if Farrell were Protestant, being Farrell, he would refuse to wear a poppy, so to express this alienation in Catholic terms should he wear one instead? For his own people had excluded him as well, or he’d excluded himself; each had leapt to disown the other. Farrell despised groups of all kinds and made sure they despised him in return; then he needed the backs of crowds to feel wholly, spitefully himself. He was no different from the rest of this tip, where you loved your enemy all right, but not quite the way Christ had in mind—loved him precisely for being your enemy, for obliging you with something outside your own mirror to revile.

He was easy to locate, thick platinum hair curling over the crowd. The large crown and high forehead bent toward his boisterous companion. While Estrin found Irishmen a frumpy crew, given to bundling—they wore sweaters with their suits, jackets binding and short in the arm—Farrell’s dark wool three-piece was impeccably tailored, European; his crimson tie, silk handkerchief, and long Dickensian overcoat suggested a kind of style she’d not seen on this island—that is: style.

And, she observed on the way over, he was a drinker, since in this deluge of a country whiskey was the only force of nature that gave the national complexion any color at all. So she was surprised on arriving at their corner to find his measure clear.

“Hot water,” he explained.

“You don’t drink?”

“Wine. After eight.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“I sleep little enough to lose the distinction.”

Estrin raised her malt. “I like to break my rules from time to time.”

“You can afford to,” he said severely. “You’re still young.”

“Not that young,” said Estrin with a trace of irritation. “And I can’t afford not to. Too many rules and too much obedience are just as dangerous as going off the deep end.”

“Don’t you worry now,” said the heavier man, slapping his friend on the back. “Farrell O’Phelan’s in no danger of being too obedient a boy, or too faint a drinker, either. Knows how to impress the ladies with a cup of hot water at tourist draws, is all.” He laughed, though Farrell didn’t, exactly, join in.

“You brought me here to torture me,” said Farrell, and meant it; the smell was beginning to get to him. How happy it would make MacBride if he strode up to the bar and threw back a double. And how it firmed his resolution, to deny Angus that joy.

“Now, it was damned decent of Bushmills to open today. And I could hardly meet you at the cenotaph this morning,” MacBride muttered. “Sure you’d hum ‘The Battle of the Bogside’ all through the two minutes’ silence.”

Farrell was about to quip that he was more likely to hum Polish polkas than some whimper of Irish resistance, when he noticed the American’s eyes had sharpened; most foreigners here were clueless, but he did not like the way she looked from one to the other and he did not like the way she looked at MacBride. He shut up. He did not want to be understood. That was the first thing women didn’t understand.

“The fumes off that wort were something, what?” recalled the girl. “Ripped in thirty seconds. Like sniffing glue, and the end of the tube is six feet wide.”

“You sniff glue?” asked Farrell.

“Putting together balsa Sopwith Camels at eight or nine? We breathed too much, they didn’t fly so hot, but we’d had a good time. My life has had to do with airplanes from way back.”

“How so?”

“I’m tempted to return-address envelopes, ‘Window seat. Nonsmoking.’ Though I don’t send so many letters anymore … Lufthansa,” she commended.

He clucked. “Free cocktails, but frozen salad.”

“You travel much?”

“Same address, but on the aisle.”

“Long legs.”

“I like to be the first off the plane.”

“I like to look out the window. Flying into Belfast I was pressed so close to the pane that the man next to me asked if this was my first flight.”

“And you said?”

“Always. I never get bored with flying. Though I am sympathetic to the aisle seat,” she noted. “My mother claims I used to stand in my crib and plead through the bars: Ah wan ow. She was impressed that I started talking in a whole sentence. But I’m impressed what it meant.”

“Which was?”

“I want out.”

“And have you? Gotten out?”

She seemed to consider this more seriously than the facile question required. “Maybe not.” Abruptly she accused him, “I have it on good authority that locals never touch this place. You don’t even drink whiskey. What are you doing here?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Are you used to being interrogated?”

Farrell faltered, and wondered momentarily if she knew who he was—ridiculous. “Just—a diverting opening.”

“You play chess?”

“Aye, and you?”

“No. I wouldn’t have wanted to learn unless I was great. And I don’t quite have that kind of brain. So instead of being second-rate, I just don’t play.”

“Then you do have that kind of brain,” Farrell observed. “Abstention is a strategy.”

“Never will forget that first game,” MacBride nosed in again. “This sorry scarecrow teetering to the board. I shook his hand and nearly crushed it—a sickly sort, this one. But ten moves later, who’d have guessed he had it in him? Loopy, I thought, the boy’s in a fever!”

“But I won.” Farrell poked MacBride’s chest in a gesture he realized too late was exactly like his own father’s.

“’Twas not a sound game, mate. Later that same afternoon I sat down to me own board and had you hammered three ways round.”

“The gentleman at your right plays a sedulous game,” Farrell explained. “Uses all the time on his clock. Knows all the books—”

“You could stand yourself—”

“Never! Never opened a page.”

“Your man here considers learning a cheat.”

“There seems little point in testing some other gobshite’s wits when the idea’s to test your own.”

“I thought winning was all, Farrell. Why not read up, then, if it topples the other fellow’s king?”

“I don’t collaborate, at anything. I win.”

“We might observe,” said MacBride dryly, “that by that arrangement you get singular credit for falling on your arse.”

“When you two play,” asked the girl, “who does win, anyway?”

“Did,” said MacBride.

“Oh, we still play,” said Farrell softly.

At last MacBride had given up ogling the girl, because he couldn’t resist looking at Farrell; funny, they were both showing off, for they had often used each other, or perhaps more accurately their relationship, to entice women. “I was trying to tell you, lass”—MacBride turned back to her—“the gawk here played reckless chess. Might seem a tame sport from the side, but your man conduct his pieces like commanding his crew into uncharted high seas. Could make you woozy to watch the board.”

“And you,” said Farrell, “never made an original move in your life.”

“No such thing as an original move. That’s your vanity, and your ignorance is vanity. It trips you, too. I always watched the larger game. You got too caught up in your flourishes, your flashy attacks. You wanted to impress me. It was the ruin of you.”

“Fischer and Kasparov were both victorious.”

“Aye, and where’s Fischer now? Crawled off in a hole.”

“Why did he quit?” asked the girl.

“Couldn’t keep it up!” cried MacBride.

“No,” said Farrell. “He was disgusted. Sick to death.”

“Och, for you to fasten on to your man Kasparov and that, it’s hubris of the first order. At least those lads had a clue. You, Farrell, just lit out. Never quite thought it through. You’re impulsive, man.”

“Yes,” said Farrell. “And you’re a bore.”

“O’Phelan, you never have seen the difference between a hero and a fool.”

“In my experience,” the American ventured, “just as many cautious people get run over by buses as careless.”

Farrell smiled.

As the trio trailed from the bar, the usual questions tumbled in: Where was she from in—, How long had she been—, How long was she planning—, Sure isn’t her name—? Ten years of this conversation, how rarely she gave straight answers anymore.

“Esther Ingrid,” she explained a bit through her teeth. “Little brother. It stuck.” The shorthand was getting so clipped it was incoherent.

“So what do you do in the States?” asked Farrell.

“What I do everywhere,” she leveled. “Leave.”

“Does that pay?”

“Often.”

“Yes,” he agreed with a collusive smile. “Handsomely.”

Both men were placated when she mentioned Belfast.

“And how might we look you up, now?” the lusty man inquired.

Estrin sighed, and glanced from one to the other. She had grown up with brothers on either side, and still attracted men in twos; the last cut was tense. And, she reminded herself, how frequently she had failed to keep Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime poised on the tip of her tongue, letting a few digits trip off instead, because it’s easier to give people what they want from you. But Estrin paid for laziness later, with the rude thud on her front door, a total stranger with flowers and expectations smoothing the tattered receipt where she’d scribbled an address only to get rid of the man. Don’t say anything dorky: it was a new discipline. So she was about to toss off, “Put a note in a bottle and throw it in the North Channel,” when some flicker in Farrell’s eye seemed to catch her in her very thought, as if he knew she was pressed for her number often and saw these scenes purely as something to wriggle out of. My dear, read his expression, don’t switch on automatic, you might as well resign. Well enough, you’re harassed by plenty prats, and good luck to you turfing them aside. But look harder now. You can’t sell us all downriver, and you like men—it comes off you like a smell. You look wildly young to me, but you’re no nun—you’ve that shine in your eyes as if you’re always getting a joke no one’s told yet.

“The Green Door, Whiterock Road.” Estrin flipped her club between them like a coin to beggars, turning to avoid their scuffle for the toss.

“Looks as if you’re white this time,” said MacBride to Farrell good-naturedly. “With that address.”

“I thought you were so successful these territorial niceties didn’t faze you anymore.”

“Successful, not mental, kid. For all that leather, I’d not slop into the Green Door. Think of the laundrette bills to get out the smell.”

“Laundrette? Mortuary.”

Farrell never liked to win anything by luck, though he preferred luck to losing; his eyes followed his new chip. He’d no intention to cash in. The option was sweeter than any dreary discreet evening. Still, as he watched the small woman work on the thick gloves and dive into the red helmet with, he thought, a certain snail-like relief, Farrell had an unresolved sensation he hadn’t felt in long enough that he didn’t recognize what it was. The girl knew they were watching and hurried, switching the engine and failing to warm it long enough; the bike lurched and stalled. Feeling this wasn’t a woman easily rattled, Farrell noted her fluster with satisfaction.

Finally the big red motorcycle pelted away; wind whipped the Union Jack down the road as she passed, the red, white, and blue curbside clouding with exhaust.

Their tour guide rasped up the drive toward MacBride. He was running, his face red with anticipation, as if he’d found the MP’s umbrella and was savoring how obliged MacBride would feel at the trouble taken to return it. But the guide’s hands were empty, and MacBride had his umbrella, and his hat.

“Your honor!” the little man panted. “Have you heard, sir? The radio—”

“Calm down, boyo, what’s that?”

The guide gathered himself and pronounced, “Enniskillen.”

It was a test. Enniskillen? A small town. Prod, a wee orange bud in the otherwise deadly green slime of Fermanagh, choked on all sides, a lone flower in a pond gone to algae—or this was the image that sprang to MacBride’s mind. Otherwise unremarkable; a fair concentration of security-force families, that was all.

However, the Bushmills tour guide did not say the name of Enniskillen like a small town, as no one in Northern Ireland would for years to come. Because Enniskillen was no longer a pit stop for lunch on your way to Galway, a Bally-Nowhere to be from. No, Enniskillen had been elevated beyond a dot on the map. Enniskillen was an atrocity.

The guide detailed the news grandly, taking his time. In the midst of Remembrance Day services, a bomb had gone off by the town cenotaph and blown out a gable wall. Nine, ten people dead, maybe more. Civilians every one. A bollocks. And injuries galore …

“Why, Angus,” Farrell noted. “If it isn’t a mistake.”

“Bleeding cretins,” MacBride puffed. “Freaking Provo barbarians—”

“Come on,” Farrell prodded. “Use scum. I know you save it for special occasions, but sure this counts as one.”

There was much commiseration and head-shaking. They were both relieved when the guide was gone. All that indignation was exhausting.

Angus dropped the twisted brow when the guide turned the corner.

“Does it ever strike you,” asked Farrell lightly, “that the Provisionals are quaint? Really. The Iranians blow three hundred air passengers with a briefcase. At current levels of technology, massacre by the dozen expresses considerable restraint.”

“Grand,” said MacBride. “I can see myself launching into the BBC with that one. I would just like to say that I thought Enniskillen was quaint.”

“Handy, this,” Farrell observed.

“Bastard of a thing,” said MacBride. “Bastard.”

As the two men whisked toward the Antrim Arms to find a TV, their step sprang, hands played with keys in pockets. Farrell began to whistle and stopped himself. Angus jostled against the taller man’s shoulder and kicked schoolboy at stones, the mood of both gentlemen unquestionably bolstered.

chapter two
Roisin Has Enthusiasms

Why couldn’t he nip in the back? Would he blink like a red light?”

“Blamed if I know, Roisin, you’ve never said who you’re talking about.”

“Lord, I can’t, Con. It’s not I don’t trust you. But matters being as they are—”

“Spare me how matters are.”

A little snippy, Roisin thought. “I’m only saying, so he was recognized, where’s the harm? He might shake my hand and say how very much he enjoyed it and smile and only the two of us the wiser.”

“Why risk it?”

“I want him to hear me read!”

“Then curl up in the coverlet and recite with your man on the next pillow. That way no one’s the wiser.”

Roisin bit her lip over the receiver. “Connie, you understand far better than you’re letting on.”

“So do you. You want your toy boy to see you all tarted up in that blue dress, in front of a whole crowd of eejits queuing for signed copies of The Dumb and Frumpy Cows—”

“That’s The Brave and Friendly Sheep! And it’s inhuman of me, when I see his own bake big as life on the telly every night?”

“… On the telly, now?”

“Forget I said that.”

“A fine way to get me to remember.”

“Seems to me, just,” Roisin went on nervously, “he might slip into one reading, who would point a finger.”

“Such a TV star, why not? The English Lecture Theatre’s hardly the King’s Hall … What show might he be on, now?”

The biggest show in town. Roisin smiled. The only show. “I’ve name enough by now, he’d only display decent public relations, attending a do for a major Six County poet.”

“A Republican poet.”

“I’m not a Republican poet.”

“Wise up! With your father and those brothers in the Maze, write a donkey’s years about birdies and butterflies, or for that matter, join the UVF, burn your own house as a bonfire on the Twelfth, and go up with it, sure you’ll still get your name engraved on the County Antrim Memorial, with a full IRA cortege strung out to Lenadoon.”

“For years in my work I’ve tried to—”

“Doesn’t matter a jot, Rose,” Constance interrupted with the impatience that was beginning to characterize this entire call. “You are what they say.”

“What has that got to do with Thursday?”

“He’s a Prod, sure that’s no secret.”

“I never said that.”

“Och, no! You’re bumping the daylights out of Bill Cosby.”

“Stop stirring me up! I said he was known, that’s all—”

“And enough times.”

To the injured silence on the other end, Constance continued. “I’m sorry, Roisin, but I can’t hold with this carry-on month after month about your famous man this, your famous man that—it’s a bit much, love. You’ve put the man terrible high up and there’s your problem. He can’t be as fancy as you figure, and if you could stare that down, maybe you wouldn’t let him wipe his shoes on your face. There’ve been times if I’d not seen the marks I’d swear you were making him up.”

“He’s not a cruel man, and it was only those two times. And I’ll not have you run him down or make out he’s some wee Prod—”

“If you’d stop exaggerating to me, you might stop exaggerating to yourself! So he’s some councilor or other—”

“Angus MacBride is no councilor.”

“You don’t say,” said Constance gravely.

“I haven’t said.” Roisin spoke with reserve, her dignity restored. “Now do you see why?”

“One of the bigger plums in the pie,” Constance conceded. “And you’re both better off he stays clear of the Thursday reading and every other.”

“I’d not mind if it were only politics,” said Roisin, already growing sullen, though with herself; her stomach felt glutinous, as if she’d eaten too much potato bread. “Truth is, he’s not mad for poetry, even mine. Claims he doesn’t understand it.”

“Fair enough,” said Constance. “You don’t understand politics.”

Roisin was too sickened now to rise to the charge. “I’ve to sort out my selection for tomorrow, so I’ll ring off. But, Connie—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep quiet. All the same—” Constance paused. “You shouldn’t have told me his name, love.” The receiver clicked in Roisin’s ear like a full stop at the end of any other simple, true declarative: The sky is blue.

It was, and it shouldn’t have been; it should be bucketing. Roisin fidgeted from the phone and, to keep from ruining her well-kept nails, frantically hoovered the carpet. Well, obviously the only way to prove once and for all to Constance Trower just how big a secret she was keeping was to give it away.

The hoover was full of cat hair, and filled the room with pet smell; Angus hated the cat and despised the smell. She kicked off the machine.

Loose Talk Costs Lives.

She’d pinned the poster at the entrance to the bedroom not long after she’d first started up with MacBride.

In taxis

On the phone

In clubs and bars

At football matches

At home with friends

Anywhere!

WHATEVER YOU SAY—

SAY NOTHING.

While Seamus Heaney’s advice was clearly lost on Roisin, every party in the Province followed the slogan to the letter.

I have a story you’ll like,” Farrell announced, with that long stride she had learned to keep up with. “Enniskillen. Now, the way bombs are handled in the Provisionals now, one cell makes the device, those that plant it are different lads altogether, no one ever meets anyone, correct?”

“That’s the conceit—but Fermanagh? Sure they’re all first cousins and play on the same hurley team.”

“Well, that’s what the Prods think—that every Taig knows who did it and won’t tell. But bear with me—”

Constance smiled. The Prods, not you Prods. After so many years she had earned herself out of her people. From Farrell, that was a compliment.

“—So the bomb was assembled weeks ahead of time. Now, it blew by the cenotaph smack in the middle of nurses and schoolteachers, and that’s why it was a mistake, right?”

“Giant PR black eye. A real shiner.”

“They forgot about daylight saving time.”

“I don’t follow.”

“One hour later, there would have been only soldiers by that cenotaph—everyone knows the ceremony, it’s the same dirge every year. But the boyo who made the bomb set it to go off at 11:45 a.m. on November 8, and forgot that in the meantime the clocks would change!”

“Who told you this?”

“A little bird with a balaclava.”

“I think it’s a story you like.”

“Well, yes. Perverse. Anarchic. Absurd. Their devices are so much more advanced than in my day—”

“It’s not your day?” She sounded disappointed.

“I don’t think I’d know where to begin with the contraptions they put together now. Microcircuitry, long-range radio control. But I could tell the bloody time.”

“How is Enniskillen likely to affect your referendum? You figure it’s really given the place a taste for reform and that? Enough is enough, let’s get off our bum?”

They were crossing the Lagan on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, and stopped to lean over the river. It was only 3:30, but in Ireland’s stingy December already the sun was setting. Samson and Goliath, the two Harland and Wolff cranes, dipped the foreground, gold birds taking water. From here Belfast glowed, a vista never broadcast in news clips—a low city, its horizon stitched with spires. The light alchemized even Eastwood’s Scrap Metal with its Midas touch; hulks of burned-out City Buses mounded the shore, pirate’s treasure. Constance hoped the sunset was doing the same job on her face—projects of equal challenge, she supposed.

“I’ve been sniffing the wind, and it smells, as usual. The Prods are already getting resentful that the wet-nosed ecumenists have hijacked their tragedy. Pretty soon they’ll want their atrocity back. And Gordon Wilson’s getting to be a regular celeb—forgiveness as song and dance. There are churches in the States now that want to fly him, all expenses paid, to get up in front of their congregations and repeat for the umpteenth time, I forgive the men who murdered my daughter. So they can all feel warm and gooey. There’s money in grace. The man should get an agent.”

“You’re one godawful cynic, Farrell O’Phelan.”

“No, it’s sad, really—I did rather admire him. I’d never be able to pull the line off with a straight face myself. But as soon as he’s seen as successful he’s dead. All Gordon needs is the Nobel Prize and the North will have him deported.”

Constance sighed. “Poor Betty. She’s in Florida now.”

“I’ve tried to warn MacBride—if he does win that bauble, this mean-spirited backwater will have his head.”

“But can’t you use it, Enniskillen? Peace PR?”

“Not really. We’re unlikely to get this referendum together for a year yet. I predict? Gordon Wilson jokes. In a year all of Fermanagh will detest him, even the Catholics—for not having the integrity to detest them back. And once the hand-clasping hoopla clears, the Prods will look around them and notice, Bloody hell, those wankers took out eleven of our side. They’ll feel vengeful and persecuted, as always. Constance, how many times have you heard, these are the last caskets we will carry, now we’re all going to be matey and damp-eyed? Now we will understand one another, albeit from separate schools and different sides of town? Of course you murdered my whole family last night, that’s perfectly all right, you were just doing your job? The Peace People may have we-shall-overcomed the multitudes but without Taigs or Prods to bash we’re at each other’s throats after six months; now the office barely limps from week to week with American volunteers. No, Enniskillen will have no effect on the North whatsoever. Like everything else in the last twenty years.”

“Including you?”

“Oh, aye. Especially me.”

“Then why are we working eighteen hours a day?”

“I do not believe anything I do will make the slightest difference. I do it anyway.”

Then you understand me, thought Constance grimly. Why I phone the same number hours on end until I get through because you said “imperative.” Why I meet your planes on early Sunday mornings. Why I bring you cups of hot water and filled rolls you let dry out. Why I clip your piles of newspapers when you’re finished not reading them, why I collect city council minutes from Derry and Strabane when normal women are shopping for pumps: I do not believe any of this will make the slightest difference. I do it anyway.

She took his hand; that was permitted. They had sorted out the rules, even stretched them—he could put his arm around her, kiss her cheek. In tight spots with only a single available they had slept side by side in the same bed. He would curl against her. It was nice. She didn’t even find it painful. And they often held hands.

“I have a story you’re not going to like.”

“Shoot.” He did not sound nervous. Farrell preferred bad news to no news. He loved a turn of the wheel.

“You know Roisin St. Clair?”

“The name.”

“Don’t be coy. Why didn’t you tell me she was doing the nasty with Angus MacBride?”

Farrell pulled up sharply. “Says who?”

“Says herself.”

“You’re right, I don’t like this story.”

“And I’m hardly her best friend, Farrell. Lord knows who else she’s told. For all we know, she’s leaking like a Divis tap.”

Farrell dropped her hand and paced off the bridge. The sun ruddied his face; his eyebrows looked on fire. Now it was hard to keep up with him.

“I have warned and warned him!” Farrell railed. “How are we to kick this place into shape if he’s splayed in a two-page spread in the Sunday World? Look at Papandreou! Carrying on with that blonde is toppling his whole government!”

“You figure Unionists care that much about a wee bit of philandering?”

“Are you serious, it’s all they care about! The North is 64 percent Protestant, 36 percent Catholic, 100 percent gossip. As MacBride knows perfectly well, and still the bugger gropes over Antrim as if he were on holiday in Hong Kong. You must have noticed, he even flirts with you!”

“Even me,” said Constance. “Is the trouble that he’s married, or that she’s Catholic?”

“Either is dangerous, both are poison.”

“Find yourself another softhearted Prod.”

“No, I need the UUU behind this referendum, or it won’t fly. Angus MacBride is the UUU. He’s been coddling the party toward power-sharing for years. Half the lot will balk because they’ll boycott any initiative unless the Agreement is scrapped. And when we’re through lacing the proposition with Nationalist perks, there will be enough links with the South that the right-wingers in the UUU could easily label it an all-Ireland solution.”

“Bye-bye, Border Poll.”

“Better believe it. And it’s Angus keeps that rabble together; they do as he says because they like him. But he’s got to keep his nose clean. Bollocks—!”

“You’re not overreacting?”

“I take my prediction back: a year from now Gordon will be old hat. Angus MacBride jokes in the back pages of Fortnight are passing before my eyes.”

“Cross your fingers. Nothing’s in public yet.”

“When you have a leaky pipe, you don’t turn up the radio and pretend everything’s all right. People lose whole basements that way. No, the problem must be plumbed. Caulked tight.”

“How is a woman like a kitchen sink?”

“That’s the riddle, my dear. Now, tell me about Roisin St. Clair. What’s she like? Pretty?”

Wouldn’t that be the first question. “Rather. Well preserved, anyway. Thirty-five or so. Brilliant with clothes. Thin; I’d say from nerves. And if that lady ever hits the big time, some psychiatrist has it made.”

“Because of her father?”

Constance shrugged. “That’s the easiest answer. But it’s the mother she whinges on about. Roisin’s the only daughter. And the family is—old-fashioned.”

“Low expectations?”

“Where have you been? No expectations. Considering, she’s done well.”

“She a good poet?”

“Lord, I couldn’t say. I can’t bear any of that palaver, you know that. But at least it’s her one original interest, and she’s followed through.”

“In contrast to—?”

“Roisin St. Clair is one of those people with enthusiasms,” Constance explained. “A bit of a dabbler. I met her when we were setting up that integrated entrepreneurial support scheme with Father Mahon. Och, she threw herself into it with a right frenzy—late nights helping Catholics stuff teddy bears, Prods bottle mayonnaise. Then one day she disappeared.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose they broke up.”

“With Father Mahon—!”

“No, no, she and whoever gave her the idea. Roisin goes through phases, so she does—”

“You mean men.”

“I suppose the interest is genuine enough once it sparks. But your woman never lights her own fire.”

“Romantic history?”

“Nightmarish, protracted. She takes a long time to get the message.”

“Politics?”

“Reactive. Depends on whom she’s browned off with—and sooner or later, that’s everyone she’s ever laid eyes on. I’ve wondered if she’s carrying on with MacBride to spite her mother. She’d never tell her ma outright. But it might satisfy Roisin if the news slipped under the back door.”

“Republican?”

“You’re not getting the picture. Sure, stuck on the right boyfriend, she’d smuggle bazookas in her boot across the border with the best of them. With Angus I expect she’s stitching Union Jacks for the Apprentice Boys.”

“You don’t seem to think much of Miss St. Clair.”

“I’m getting catty. It isn’t attractive, is it?”

“No, it’s entertaining, but I’m beginning to wonder what MacBride sees in her besides the obvious. And the affair’s been on for a couple of years.”

“She is nice to look at. She’s no dozer once you get her intrigued. And with all that resentment, well—she can get scrappy in a corner. I imagine Angus likes a good fight.”

“As long as he can win.”

“Exactly. Besides, there’s a beguiling frailty to Roisin. One of those women who can spend all day in bed. I don’t know if she gets migraines, but she should. She makes you want to take care of her.”

“So far you’ve described a well-dressed rabbit.”

“That’s not fair,” Constance insisted, with discipline. “Roisin can be fractious, but when you smooth her back down she is sweet. And to see her thrive on the merest tidbit, that you like her blouse or her sofa—her childhood must have been appalling.”

“Aye,” Farrell murmured. “What’s sad is, she’s still looking for what the rest of us gave up on long ago.”

“Farrell O’Phelan, if you think you’ve given up on it, you’re fooling yourself.”

He put his arm around her shoulder, but absently. She liked it when he absorbed himself elsewhere so she could discreetly study his face. It never bored her. The eyes so deep-set, the nose so lumpy and Roman, those drastic bumps and hollows sculpture for the blind. She could see leading a pair of pale, unsighted hands to his head: Now, this is a face. This is a real face.

Because Farrell himself never bored her. And she knew everything—his distaste for red cabbage, his shirt size. Name a season and a year for the last forty-three and she could tell you precisely what he was doing and even when he got up in the morning—though a few years there were easy: at noon to drink till 5 a.m., like reporting for work. Yet there remained something insoluble about him; he was like Flann O’Brien’s infinite bureaus within bureaus, so that every time when you thought you had drawn his very self out of his own drawer there was one more inscrutable bit inside; she would have to pick out the next speck with tweezers, and would shortly be found scuffling the floor, having dropped him, the part she didn’t understand and therefore the only part that mattered, the clue.

Farrell stirred. “You’re cold,” said Constance. “Let’s head back. There’s a powerful lot of phone calls to return. And two boys from Turf Lodge rang up, with word they’re to be knee-capped. They want to spend the night in your office.”

“Check their story; only the outer room; no beer.”

“Then it’s time for Oscar’s, isn’t it? I know the food is desperate, but when you ignore them they’re hurt. They miss you.”

“What they miss is our sixty-quid checks. No, I’ve something on this evening.”

“Oh.” She did not know everything.

“I’ll ring you when I get home,” he offered.

“That would be lovely.”

“… We had dinner together last night,” said Farrell.

“Yes.”

“… and the night before.”

“Yes.”

“And lunch! And probably will dine tomorrow night as well!”

“Of course, if you like,” she said graciously. “If you’ve nothing else planned.”

“What do you bloody want, then?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to!”

Farrell scowled into the collar of his overcoat. They did not hold hands.

chapter three
The Green Door, or Everybody Likes Lancaster

The Green Door had no such thing. Caged across the front, the club was coiled with razor wire; even the little neon sign, burned out, was fenced in. The entrance wasn’t green but brown, its peephole rheumy.

“O’Phelan,” the guard at the door grunted. “Trouble himself.”

“I’ve gotten as many pillocks out of trouble as in. A good record, for this town.”

“Right you are, our own Captain Marvel. Though I hear tell, you don’t muck in as you used. Keep the nails clean and that.”

“Excuse me, but at eight o’clock,” Farrell towered, “I have a date in there with a curvaceous little glass of wine.”

“For you, O’Phelan, the glass is sure only as wee as a mate could do laps in.”

“I don’t swim.” Farrell made a move for the door.

“We’ve yet to explore,” the guard said grandly, barring the way, “what makes you feel so comfortable in these parts.”

“In the last ten years,” said Farrell calmly, “I’ve been credited as a Provo, a Stickie, an Irp, and a legman for branches of the IPLO you haven’t even heard of; as a propagandist for the UDA, eccentric fop for the SDLP, CIA agent, Special Branch hit man, British supergrass, and IDA occupational safety inspector. I imagine with those credentials I can waltz into any pub in town.”

“Och, you think it’s all a game, man.”

“Yes.”

After three separate grillings to get in, each more suspicious than the last, Farrell was bewildered why he bothered. He hated catering to their self-importance.

Inside Farrell shook his head—a whole city full of warm, intimate bars, the Crown, the Morning Star, the Rotterdam, and West Belfast crammed into these grotty drinking clubs. By what poor guidance or misfortune did the American drink here? For the Green Door was the worst: bare bulbs overhead, long, laminated tables, crumbling ceiling tiles. A wooden Armalite mounted like a marlin over the bar; a collection of plastic bullets on the counter, long, round, heavy boles fondled gray, like merchandise from a secondhand sex shop. The usual Gerry Adams posters and H-block brouhaha covered the walls: REMEMBER BLOODY SUNDAY!; DON’T FRATERNIZE! THIS BRIT COULD BE STANDING BESIDE YOU—WATCH WHAT YOU SAY; SOLDIERS ARE WE, WHOSE LIVES ARE PLEDGED FOR IRELAND; BRIT THUGS OUT; SS RUC … but Farrell had read these so many times before that they faded into so much wallpaper. The best thing about propaganda is its short shelf life—successfully familiar, it disappears.

“Hulloo, Farrell!” Though they hadn’t seen each other for five years, Duff hailed him as if that were just the other day—and in Duff’s way of thinking, Farrell supposed, it was. Time was like everything else in Duff’s life that he swallowed in quantity—Guinness, sausage rolls, other people’s stories. “How are you keeping?” As he pressed Farrell’s hand, Shearhoon’s eyes squeezed tight. Strange, for such an expansive character he had a nervousness, a flinch. Then, Farrell had spent enough time around rapacious politicians to enjoy the more leisurely ambitions of Shearhoon tonight. He was one of those affable men out to take over the world simply by consuming it. Duff’s steady advance on occupying space would make a pleasant low-budget horror film.

“Wasn’t I talking you up the other day, just. Remembering back in ’72 on the barricades, do you know? Brits lined up just outside the no-go all confused like, mothers and wains about, houses afire. Every wee soldier sure he’s tomorrow’s headline in the Irish News for shooting a toddler. It’s the lads! your women all cry. Make way for the lads! And if Farrell O’Phelan doesn’t climb on top of the burning bus like Moses, do you follow? Hair out to here and eyes out farther. Farrell, you missed your calling as a priest, so you did. You’d put the fear of hell in a bottle of Baby Cham.”

“So were you one of the lads?”

Farrell turned and didn’t recognize her at first: she was on the wrong side of the bar. Sweet Jesus, she worked here. Farrell felt immediately he’d made a mistake, and wondered why he’d come. Idle curiosity, he supposed, since this was the only plan for the evening whose sequence he couldn’t quite foretell, while Shearhoon’s tale here, for example, was strictly pub liturgy. He had liked that he couldn’t write her lines. But now he could fill them in easily enough—she was another one of those NORAID bims from Boston with Irish ancestors. How exciting, working in a Republican club with the hard men—

Farrell rubbed his face. “No, my dear, I was not one of the lads. Disappointed?”

“Hardly.”

Right answer; he would treat her at least to the story. “That was the day the British interned thirteen activists from the leadership of the PD. Dragged out of bed without time to wash their teeth. Searches all morning. The Falls was roiling. Whole families on the streets.”

“Sounds like quite a party,” said Estrin.

Of course it would to you, Farrell swiped, but had to admit, “It was. Though for me in ’72 every day was a party.”

“Meaning your youth, or the festivities?”

“Talisker!” cried Duff.

“Closer,” Farrell explained, “to a premature old age.”

Estrin shook her head. “A malt’s a waste on a bender.”

“Low as I ever sank, I never drank less. A matter of principle.”

“Style,” she corrected. “There’s a difference. So what possessed you to climb on top of that bus?”

“To tell the mothers not to go inside.”

“Why?”

“Strategy, my dear. Those soldiers had been trained for snipers, but were stymied by prams. They could plow up the barricade if it were manned by lads, but not if they were two years old. So I said, Bring up the prams! Best front line ever invented.”

“What happened?”

“I fell off the bus.”

“On a pram!” Shearhoon cried.

“You can imagine”—Farrell smiled—“this argued poorly for my strategy.”

Through their laughter Estrin asked, “Was it really funny? At the time?”

“No,” Farrell conceded. “Because if I’d been sober I could have changed what happened.”

“You do think a lot of yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think of myself,” he dismissed impatiently. “The point is, I was right. The Provies moved in, swaggering like Charles Bronson, and everyone bloody well ‘made way for the lads.’ Prams—better than armored tanks!—pulled into the estates, and the Falls went empty save these yokels with Armalites, who braced on the hip and opened fire. You should have seen those soldiers’ faces light up. They were delighted. Now they understood their parts: O.K. Corral. They burrowed down on the pavement and slipped behind buildings and trained their sights: hell, you’d seen this clip before, you could turn it off.”

“And where were you?”

“Curled by the bus, just waking up, luckily on the Falls side, and desperate to take a piss. That, my girl, is the stuff of real history.”

The club became crowded, and Estrin was busy at the taps. More of Farrell’s acquaintances—he would consider them no better; in fact, he thought of himself as having no friends—rabbled to the bar, gripping his shoulder, blattering out tales. Their favorites were from his drinking days, extolling a fame that amounted to a medical achievement. “Aye, and I watched him myself knock back five brandy-and-ports the next morning, and then, steady as you please, strolls into the UDA and asks for a calendar!” Duff Shearhoon was in his element, for as most people will who prefer spinning yarns to living more of them, Duff maintained his old favorites in impeccable detail, like a man who, unable to afford new clothes, keeps his small wardrobe freshly laundered.

Farrell fought back a yawn. It struck him, amid the bawdy back-clapping, red faces leaning to his stool, how he might have longed for such a scene at seventeen—lonely and gangling, turning from the Church but with nothing to replace it, inward and socially inept, not even much of a drinker yet; full of ideas he could only put in exalted and therefore ridiculous form; to others, unpleasantly adult. No—Farrell looked around—this was adulthood: porter spilling on the floor, the laughter half relief there was something, anything, to say tonight. Back then he’d have lapped it up, and why had none of these big rowdy men gathered around him in the days he had bad acne? How reliably, even when you did get what you wanted, it was hopelessly belated—parts on order years ago arriving only once you’d sold the car. Farrell’s whole life was too late; he pictured Jesus rattling his screen door calling, “Mr. O’Phelan! Sir! We’ve your serenity in, so sorry for the delay!” and Farrell doesn’t answer because he’s dead.

Serenity, uch, just as well.

Estrin returned with his wine, though she could barely find room for the glass among the complimentary whiskeys he didn’t want. Less arrogant, he might have prepared a look of embarrassment for when their eyes met, but Farrell being Farrell, he let his boredom show instead.

He followed her through the cracks in his retinue. The dogs-bodies were chatting her up. Most Americans weren’t much at banter, so he enjoyed the easy reflex with which she kicked remarks back, a goalie defending against an inferior team. He wondered which of these willicks she was fucking.

Farrell ducked out of his party; they could tell Farrell O’Phelan stories better without him. The obligations of accuracy only rained on their parade.

“You seem quite popular here,” he said in her ear.

“I know,” she said with a funny despair. “Listen, I’ve got to wash up some of these pints, because we’ve run out again and I’ve told Kieran, just buy some more, but no-o—I swear I could run this bar by myself if they just laid in more glasses, but instead they hire a second bartender every night—typical false economy. Anyway, want to run back with me? Malcolm!” she shrilled over the crowd as only an American could. “Cover the bar!”

They were both relieved at the brief quiet of the back kitchen.

“You know it’s funny, but I’m tired of people liking me? My boyfriend in Berlin, it drove him wild. We’d go to a party and he’d sulk in the back while I’d get on with his friends; they’d all switch to English just for me. Pretty soon he started thinking of excuses why we couldn’t go. Everybody likes Lancaster—he used to say that all the time. More and more caustic. Dieter didn’t like me himself; no, he detested me in the end …”

The rate at which she washed glasses was astounding, though this intimate a proximity to a dishrag made the sweat break out on Farrell’s hands.

“You prefer to be detested?”

“It’s more of an accomplishment. This liking business, it just seems a trick: make a few jokes, preferably at your own expense; be attentive, don’t talk too long; confide only to the extent that you flatter, but never, never ask for sympathy, for anything, act as if you don’t care if they like you, which is the key, but still just a gambit— Oh, there are plenty of methods, and—” She looked up from the sink. “I’m not employing any of them at the moment.”

“No, if I’m to find you despicable, you’ll have to do better than this.”

“But have you any idea the number of people who’ve liked me now, all over the world? My God, I’m getting so when I take the train down to Dublin I try to take up the seats around me with my luggage, not because I don’t want company exactly, but I don’t want to compulsively ingratiate myself one more time. It’s humiliating, it’s obsequious, and then they want to keep in touch and everything. The pockets of my jackets are filled with ticket stubs scribbled with the addresses of strangers; I don’t remember who half of them are. So I don’t find likableness a particularly likable quality anymore. It’s still an expression, if competent, of the desire to please. Me, I admire people who are obstreperous, inconsiderate, abusive, and nonplused. Card-carrying assholes.”

“Spot on,” said Farrell. “I’m your man.”

“Not so far. You’re fucking polite. Why don’t you tell me to shut up?”

“You’re amusing me.”

“See,” she went on, “I ask myself: How many of these fuckers would like me with running sores? Really, I ask that like a mantra now: Who’s going to like me with running sores? I’m serious and you’re laughing.”

“I can see how you got this job.”

“Why?”

“Because you are likable. It’s sad, you can’t help it.” He put his hand on her arm. “I like you. And I hadn’t intended to.”

“Then why the hell did you come here?”

“Would you believe I needed a drink?”

“Frankly: no. You’re a cut above this crowd, aren’t you? Think I haven’t sorted out that the Green Door is the pit of West Belfast? But I had to take what I could get. And let’s not kid ourselves that I got the job because Kieran liked me. I got it because he wanted to fuck me. Which is, I’m afraid, how I get a lot of work.”

“And do you? Sleep with them?”

“Christ, no. And Kieran’s getting impatient, though by the time he figures out I’m a lost cause, he also won’t be able to run this place without me: mission accomplished. But you certainly do not get what you want by giving the other person what he wants. If you ever come through, what are they to hold on for? So, in answer to your question, no, I am not a whore. Not exactly. Would you take these into Malcolm? Thanks.”

The—the—dishwater was still damp on the glasses, and Farrell held them out from his coat.

“So don’t tell me”—Farrell returned, toweling his hands—“you’re writing a book.”

“The last thing this place needs is another book. Besides, I abhor authors, painters, and architects—their lame little efforts to make their marks. Me, I go for leaving things behind and throwing them away. I don’t mind losing stuff, even money, since that’s one more opportunity to discover I can live without it. I happily prop up my beach chair to watch valuable coastland rinse into the sea. I prefer my antique china dropped on the floor. I appreciate totaled cars, one-way plane tickets, and old people. Entropy and red giants; big fires. I like topsoil erosion and natural disasters, and nothing makes my blood run like a country whose government is losing its grip.”

“The North?”

“Not for a minute—here.” Balancing two glass towers of Pisa, Estrin handed him the shorter stack, and Farrell found himself trailing after her unpleasantly. “Mainland Britain may be more precarious, a race riot waiting to happen. This place is full of nice boys”—she smiled at the young bartender and handed him the jars—“who still buy flowers on Mother’s Day. And children may go on about the Orangies, but they’re incredibly well behaved.”

“What have you done?” the boy directed to Farrell. “Don’t get her started.”

“I have too many opinions,” Estrin admitted. “Which has turned into: one more opinion. No use.”

“For opinions, you’ve come to the right part of town,” Farrell suggested. “But West Belfast has a strict point of view. And they love to make ambassadors of Americans—”

“You say they,” she noted. “Not we.”

“I’m not sure I’ve used the first person plural in my life,” said Farrell. “But I’m advising you to get out from time to time. This neighborhood can be too cozy.”

“I told you before—the last thing I need to be reminded is to get out.”

“If it isn’t O’Phelan.”

Farrell turned and he was still holding these bloody glasses; he foisted them on the boy.

“Hardly see you in these parts now,” Michael Callaghan went on—a moist, pallid man who was forever pulling his trousers up over his belly. “Word’s out you’ve changed, mate. Too fine for us now. Ordering wine, is it.” He sauntered closer. “And take a geek at that suit, sure it’s from London, or is it New York? Farrell O’Phelan wouldn’t be caught out in Belfast rags, not even old Marks and Spark’s. Why, look at that weave, look at the quality!” Callaghan fingered Farrell’s lapel.

Farrell picked the man’s hand off his jacket like a speck of lint. “Don’t you dare touch my person again.”

“Your person! Lads, we’ve a person here! In this herd of West Belfast animals. We may remember old Farrell a liter under, but Mr. O’Phelan’s a star now, fancy! Seen him on our tellies, haven’t we, all done up in three pieces, shoes shining like a wee boy’s eyes on Christmas morning, hands crossed over his knee?”

Farrell let Callaghan go on, taking a seat impassively, for this was the first thing any of these gombeens had said all evening that actually interested him.

“You might explain to us, then,” Callaghan proceeded, “why we’re such sad wee folk, clinging all confused to some wet dream of a united Ireland, no longer able to think straight from the Brits bashing us too many times on the head. How we kick drogue bombs down the street ’cause we’re on the dole and haven’t a clue how else to spend our time? Then go on and explain how the UVF’s just a charity relief fund and poor Reverend Paisley’s merely got indigestion from a few too many Ulster fries—”

“If you’re referring to Panorama,” said Farrell calmly, “I don’t believe I mentioned Paisley at all. I spoke of a united Ireland long ago having lost any practical political connotations. National aspiration has achieved the same qualities as faith in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus—or perhaps something a bit more farfetched: the Catholic Church. Though don’t forget, I gave you credit. I said this showed a capacity for abstract thought that from people of your caliber, Callaghan, is astonishing.”

“You left out the part about how we’re still in our nappies and that.”

The club had gone quiet, the dynamic at the bar talk show: Farrell’s legs were crossed, Callaghan’s voice inquiring, mild.

“I said both Nationalism and Unionism, emotionally, are forms of arrested adolescence. Pre-adolescence. Unionists are still clutching on to mother’s skirt. Nationalists seem more traditionally rebellious, but the rebellion is traditional and therefore not rebellion at all. Foreigners”—he nodded to Estrin—“often see Republicanism as a radical ideology, and Sinn Feín invites this misperception with its latching on to the ANC, its quotes in An Phoblacht from Camilo Torres and Castro. However, handed from father to son, it is more accurately conservative, right-wing. Joining the Provisionals in West Belfast is the equivalent of working for Daddy’s law firm in America. No one in Ireland gets away from his parents; no one grows up.

“Furthermore—” The loathing in the club was narcotic. “So convinced that Britain is in control, the Nationalist community flatters the place: Britain is using the conflict to experiment with espionage techniques, to train troops. You reveal a childlike faith in order: there is a puppeteer; this is happening because someone up there is making it happen. You lack the intellectual sophistication to conceive of ordinary bollocks. You are too terrified to live in a world where no one is in control: there is no God; Mother is an ordinary selfish woman the neighbors dislike; Father drinks and can’t do your maths. In this world anything can happen and there is no resort; you can’t fix things by gaining control yourself, because there’s no such thing; you will be as utterly at sea in a united Ireland as in a partitioned one. So these proclamations about British might crushing the helpless Catholic waif is, perversely, a belief in Britain, loyalty to the Crown. In actual fact, Westminster is a tawdry has-been capital once victorious over the Spanish Armada, now reduced to claiming the midget Falkland Islands as a serious military coup—bloody hell, it makes you want to cry. Why, West Belfast is the last place on earth where the British Empire still exists.”

“But we’re missing a wee bit here,” said Callaghan, who seemed satisfied with Farrell’s performance. It was a regular holiday to find a wally who’d string himself up of his own accord. “That we’re non-starters.”

“Oh, aye,” said Farrell pleasantly. “I did explore the culture of victimhood, the culture of defeat. Your united Ireland Valhalla, for example, only serves its religious, symbolic function if it never comes to pass as a state. The South is obviously just one more crumpled patch of map trying to sell cheese to the EEC—which is why hard-line Republicanism has invalidated the Dublin government: it is of this earth, and therefore squalid, as any state has ever been. So you may aspire but you must not arrive: in short, you must not succeed. That suits this island, which is historically envious, resentful, and whiny. Likewise, the IRA can only exist so long as it fails. Fair play in ’69, as an instinctive, as you said yourself, animal reaction to attack. But as an institution it is not in the long-term interests of the organization to meet its own goals: the lot would be out of a job. To put this in language you can understand, Michael: you’re all witless gobshites.”

Callaghan moosed closer. “If I was you, O’Phelan—”

“You wish.”

“I’d steer clear of the Door. I hear your nine lives ran out about ’79. Besides, we’re a bit tatty for your tastes now. Try Whitewells. There you’ve lads to protect you when you say something ill-advised.”

Farrell stood and straightened his lapel. “I’ll go where I like, as I have my whole life.” Farrell may have been taller, but Callaghan had two stone on him; Farrell had better scoot. He thanked himself, since with two more glasses of wine that wouldn’t have glared nearly so apparent. Still, he needed one last slag, and his eyes panicked before finding an exit line. “Estrin”—Farrell’s voice rang over the club, and his mouth felt strange—he had never, it seems, said her name before. “Dinner?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”

“Bedford Street, 44.” As he turned, Farrell felt the bitterness glow behind him with all the tangible heat of a turf fire. It took restraint to keep from smiling.

“Sure you owe it to the girl to confess when you and Margaret be married!” shouted one of the boys, but it had taken him too long to come up with the quip, and Farrell was already out the door.

Estrin watched him go, wondering if he appreciated her collusion. She might jockey with them over politics, but she did have to contend with these customers five nights a week, and it was a queer choice to throw her lot in with the one character who clearly had it in him to alienate them to the man.

“They say he’s always breezing off to British Air,” said Callaghan, “reclining with a pile of papers full of waffle a mile high, white wine—and don’t you know Maggie takes him shopping down Oxford Street, all kisses.”

“What bleeding happened to the bugger?”

“Fuck all happened. He’s been scarce and you’ve forgotten. O’Phelan was a weedy, hostile creature from day one.”

Estrin would have chosen different adjectives, for in the last fifteen minutes Farrell had managed to be obstreperous, inconsiderate, abusive, and nonplused. It relieved her she was not the only one so consumed by the desire to please.

chapter four
Women on and off the Wall

She had been waiting and pretending she was not, reading The Use and Abuse of Emergency Legislation in Northern Ireland, but she tired of these games with herself, as they no longer worked: she was waiting. All night; so she designed a reason she had to talk to him with that proficiency that characterized everything she did, and rang herself. No answer. And later, again, with only rugby and snooker and Ulster Newstime on TV—another bomb in the city center. Twice more; she wondered was he off on a tear. She knew it was not her affair. Not her affair. Words were always turning on Constance.

Finally she replaced the receiver for the last time. Her concoction was only so urgent; it was after midnight, and her excuse had just turned into a pumpkin.

Farrell kept a small office off the Lisburn Road with no sign on the door. It was a suite of two rooms and a reception area but no secretary, which Constance had long ceased to consider herself. Nowhere, not on his stationery nor on a single card in his wallet, was there a title or the name of an organization.

Constance Trower had no official position. He had never told her what hours to keep, paid her whatever she asked for, and gave her no itemized responsibilities, which of course meant that she would arrive early and stay late, ask for far too little money in return, and take responsibility for everything.

He’d bristled at an office, but later liked having another territory, another key. Farrell collected them; rings jangled every suit pocket. (Though he’d forgotten what the keys were to, he wouldn’t throw them out. Farrell placed a high value on access.) “For security reasons” he didn’t keep regular hours himself, though Farrell, like the British government, found “security” a convenient umbrella under which to protect a variety of idiosyncrasies.

He did not, for example, own a car, instead hiring taxis as far as Derry and Armagh. Yet Constance was convinced he was less terrified of gelly wired to his chassis than of insurance forms. Besides, he liked taxis. He liked making the driver go where he wanted, being conveyed. He liked privacy and scorned petty details like changing buses in Portadown; he deliberately had no sense of direction. Train schedules were an imposition; why, he might not want to go to Dublin then. The only organized transport he did not resist was the airplane. The atmosphere of hurry and importance made up for meeting the timetables, if barely—he liked nothing more than whisking onto international flights with the door closing on his coattails. Airports are the last refuge of urgency in this world.

His most aggravating “security measure” had to do with his own house—wherever that was. And if he didn’t tell Constance where he lived, he clearly told no one. Farrell admitted parties here had probably found him out, but he was hardly going to make it easy for them by publishing in the directory. Once more, however, the nature of Belfast simply conformed to the nature of Farrell O’Phelan, as if he were not camouflaged for the city but the city for him. He would hardly be holding hoolies on his front yard every June if only he could afford to share his address with his many friends and neighbors, with their children and dogs.

As for the office, he had no interest in decor—and the number of things Farrell had no interest in by policy could grow irksome if you listed them out—and left the walls to Constance. Her original selection of, she thought, harmless travel posters underestimated the depth of Farrell’s loathing for his island: the rolling hills of Kerry, the thatched byre houses in Tyrone—from which, he claimed, he could “smell the sheep from across the room,” the craggy sprat fishermen of Antrim. (“Look at that face,” he had cried, “twisted with fifty years of spite. You realize he’s not fishing at all—which would be economically useful—but looking out for a boat of Kalashnikov AK-47s for the UDA!”) After two days Farrell had had his fun, and Aer Lingus had to go.

Those intervening weeks had been frustrating; she wanted to please him. And Farrell did have an aesthetic, even if he wouldn’t dirty his hands with carpet swatches. Whitewells and all that travel had refined him beyond Glengormley—he bought only the best in clothes, gadgets, presents when he remembered (with Constance, once). While the Best Of habit was lazy, the application of an easy rule that spared him individual decisions, inevitably he’d become rather starchy. No help, Farrell had less taste than distaste: he recognized what he didn’t want. Had a Unionist streak in him, Farrell did.

When they next went to London, then, between setting up his interviews, she scuttled into the Museum Shop at the Tate. She turned her mind off entirely and just went by feel, flipping the racks of prints, art by Braille. What she unrolled back at the hotel surprised her.

For had anyone asked before the Tate how Farrell’s preferences in art might run, she’d surely have answered the Futurists, full of tumult and flight; the nightmares of Surrealists, trapped in their own heads as he in his—contorted Dalís, absurd Magrittes; or dour Brueghels. She might have made a case for the Middle Ages, with the flat agony of those pigments, the gory, long-suffering crucifixions in which he’d recognize his own face, the plain, self-denying, racked penitence and flesh effacement of his childhood. Or perhaps, recognizing his stodgy side, she’d have said nothing modern—only classics, Da Vincis and Michelangelos, name brands, the way he bought everything, the Best. But none of these presentiments described what she spread on the bed that night.

Women. Not conflicted character portraits, either, but young, even virginal things, with red cheeks and languid fingers. Simple women, with water. Soft women—Whistler’s The Little White Girl; seaside Seurat; Degas. Shapely, sway-hipped Tissots, splayed nineteenth-century picnics by a pool, languid bites into apples with a demitasse, bustles curved at a pleasure-boat rail. Inshaw’s The Badminton Game, long hair in breeze, shuttlecock midair. April Love, the Lady of Shalott. Round women, drowsy women, beautiful women. And while some were dolorous—Matisse; Ophelia—the girls were never angry or scheming, filled with nothing so demanding as desire. No, these were guileless women, tender, and probably even stupid, not that he would value their stupidity, but what he would want from them had nothing to do with talk. Farrell might slop through every rank backroom in Belfast, but Farrell’s women were innocent.

When she hung the prints late one night and waited for Farrell to walk in the office that morning, Constance jittered, only pretending to scan papers as he strode pensively from one painting to the next, all nicely framed. He said nothing. He studied each one a long time. He went to his own office and shut the door. He’d not mentioned them then or since, but neither did he insist they come down. And just as she knew to choose them, Constance knew not to bring them up. She was not hurt; he was, a little. The paintings were an intrusion. By accident or instinct she had found his neighborhood. Whistler’s Little White Girl stuck to the wall by his desk like a pin on a map.

Having phoned until midnight the night before, Constance knew it was ridiculous to feel injured. So he hadn’t rung himself, wouldn’t he see her the next morning? At the office she was unusually efficient—which is to say immeasurably efficient, frightening, perfect—and, as Farrell swept in and out, a little cold. As evening drew he ducked in the loo and reappeared, face washed, hair combed, tie freshly knotted, and smelling of cologne, his kerchief perking from his pocket. With no mention of Oscar’s, he kissed Constance officiously on the forehead and tripped, yes, ran, practically danced down the front stairs. Constance sat at her desk and typed an address. She didn’t cry or confide on the phone or go on a bout of irrational cleaning. She finished the letter and locked up, relieved to be such a practical person.

Estrin could not remember when she had last actually planned ahead of time what to wear to dinner. She picked the black silk blouse with a thin strip of Bedouin embroidery, pleased that no one could tell from the outside it was her favorite shirt. Otherwise it was back to full leathers, to remain thick-skinned.

How often had she thrown on anything hurriedly without even bothering to check her reflection, already annoyed at having agreed to go, already waiting for the meal to be over? It had been a bad, dry fall, and as such seasons will, it eclipsed all others, as if she’d only known evenings that rose with a bottle of wine, and fell as she finally looked across the table: he was smitten; she was bored.

Yet tonight Estrin did check the mirror, with despair. Ideally she saw herself as a tall Russian heroine, unpredictable and desperate, hollowed and harrowing, with high cheekbones and wide, lethal eyes. The real Estrin was consumptive. The real Estrin wore heavy hooded cloaks, under which she clutched a snickersnee; she had just done something dreadful. Estrin had read a lot of Dostoevsky when she was fifteen.

Instead, she was short. Her cheeks were round, her features even; if Tolstoy was correct, that a truly beautiful face always had something wrong with it, then Estrin was merely a pretty girl. And girl was the word, embarrassing at her age. The only aspect of her Russian heroine she sustained was the eyes: they crouched. They both took you in and threw you out. Estrin recognized that with satisfaction.

Otherwise there was a sweetness to her face she had tried to live down for years. No matter what she suffered, her face showed no trace of it. When she studied photos of Marla Hanson, the New York fashion model attacked by her landlord with a razor, the slash scars made Estrin envious. How much more fascinating Marla would look later, with the pencil of tragedy down her nose. Estrin looked nice. Of a full busload of passengers, Estrin was the one old ladies shook down for change. Panhandlers marked her from blocks away, crossing the street for her quarters; in India, “Baksheesh” could have been her name. And so long as she rode with an open visor, nowhere was this plaguesome Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farmishness more apparent than at checkpoints.

That’s right, even in Newry and Crossmaglen, when they were stopping every goddamned car, license, computer check, boot search, all soldiers ever did to Estrin was wave. Witness: Teeming the Guzzi to the city gates toward Bedford Street, Estrin slowed long enough for them to see that yes, that back compartment could pack enough Semtex to blow that new shopping center sky-high. But no. Three smiles and a “Happy Christmas.”

Banking around City Hall, a banquet of a building whose Beaux Arts façade now blinked with reindeer, Estrin noted the BELFAST SAYS NO banner had been amended. The DoE had told the City Council it could not post such a patently Unionist response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement on public property. So the Prods had soldered on an extra section of sign: -EL. Estrin laughed. She loved this fucking town.

“You look beautiful.”

Estrin felt a wild compulsion to comb her hair.

As he took her jacket and asked for a back table, Farrell displayed that curiously grave quality which characterized all his minor moments; he attended forward neatly from the waist and ushered Estrin before him with precision, even delicacy. He was a formal man, deft and considerate in all the ways that didn’t really matter—he would hold your chair out, pick up your napkin when you dropped it, pour your wine, and next week fail to show up altogether.

The gravity fell away as he began to chat about the assassination of George Seawright, when he became entirely light-hearted.

“Creepface!” recognized the waitress. “And here’s another one! Don’t I see him every week with one more lovely lass in tears.”

Farrell glared.

“You’ll pardon, but Mr. O’Phelan must be seated on the wall, eyes on all the windows and doors, isn’t that right, love? Usually the lady’s seat, but none seems to mind. Sure, she gets a handsome view whichever way she’s facing!” She patted Farrell’s cheek and delivered their menus.

“How lucky, Maire, we were seated in your section.”

“Och, I asked, love, I switched! Like following Coronation Street and earning your keep at the same time.”

She brought a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé without Farrell’s asking. “Sure we can skip the charade of having you taste it,” she announced, trickling Estrin’s glass halfway and glugging Farrell’s to the top. “Never known you to send a bottle back if it was turned enough to dress your salad. Now, should I bring the second right away, or would you like to wait and order it? A nice ceremony that, but as for the third, it’s just from the case in the icebox. You’ll have to hold your horses.”

Estrin ordered seafood. She always ordered seafood. It was a rule; fish was light. Estrin ran courses like track. She followed precepts, and not because she wasn’t a sensualist, but because she was and therefore couldn’t be trusted. In Estrin’s personal mythology, should she ever be set loose in a stocked kitchen to do as she really pleased, you would find her an hour later packed incoherent with raw beef and rolling on the floor in a melee of ice cream and apple pie.

As they had both ordered exactly the same thing, Estrin asked on an odd hunch, “Do you always order fish?”

“Or chicken.”

“Dessert?”

“Never.”

“Do you have a morbid fear of fried foods?”

He laughed. “I’ve never put it quite that way, but I avoid them.”

She inclined an inch more forward. “When do you get up in the morning?”

“Seven. Exactly.”

“Sundays, too,” she filled in. “And go to bed?”

“When I am finished. Ideally before seven. Not always.”

“When did you get up as a child? Say, twelve, thirteen?”

It was wonderful. His eyes whetted. “Five.”

She nodded victoriously. “But when did you go to school?”

“Not until 7:30. Why?”

“It was still dark,” said Estrin. “No one else was up. The house was yours. Most of the time you worked, read, wrote. But some mornings you got up only to think. For hours, watching the light gray out the windows. The birds here are exotic. And you still believed in God.”

“Did you, at thirteen?”

“No, by then I was a violent agnostic. But my father was a minister, so that speeded things up. My most remarkable precocity was early disaffection.”

“I meant, get up at five?”

“Naturally,” she dismissed. “But I’m not finished. Exercise?”

His face clouded. “I don’t have time now. I used to run—”

“All weather. All winter. Rain. In fact, you liked it when it rained. Other people were agog, when secretly the problem is keeping cool. The mizzle felt good on your face.”

Farrell did look amused. “And how far did I go?”

She licked her lips. “Ten miles. Every day.”

He laughed. “Only eight, and every odd. Still, you’re very good!”

“I’m very like you.”

The eyes unexpectedly brambled. “You know,” he said, attacking his lettuce with no dressing at all, “I think it’s time we had an ordinary conversation.”

So what are you doing here?”

“You asked me to dinner.”

He would not dignify her with a response.

“All right.” She put her hands flat on the table. “I travel. For the last ten years, I must have been out of the States for eight. I used to go back between trips; not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was living a fairy tale: that my real life was in the U.S. Every time I flew into Philadelphia late afternoon, I knew better by nightfall. The best safeguard against the rude news that you can’t go home again is to stop trying.”

“Don’t you miss your family?”

“Not precisely, though I am frightened my parents will die. Or get old, for that matter. I travel with an illusion of reverse relativity. I move at the speed of light and I age while everyone back home stays the same. In my head Philadelphia remains an impeccable diorama I can enter at will. But you know how you can leave for two weeks and come back and the furniture’s re-arranged, the mailboxes are repainted on your street? Try leaving for two years. Or twenty.”

“So now it’s twenty, is it?”

“Why not? I haven’t been back for three. And my parents will die; I’ll be in Pakistan. I’ll have to decide whether to go to the funeral, and it will cost a lot of money.”

“Would you? From Pakistan?”

“Right away,” said Estrin, with a lack of hesitation that surprised her. “Burning my way though a dozen Glenfiddiches and staying horribly sober anyway and hating myself, continent after continent, coming back too late. Years too late, not just a few days. Because if I had any integrity I’d book Lufthansa tomorrow and throw myself into my mother’s arms while I still have the chance.”

“You get along with your mother?”

“I don’t anything with my mother; we never see each other, thanks to me. She writes much more than I do. Chatty stuff, though sometimes— Well, my parents are liberal, urban, educated, but lately I get the same feeling from my mother that I would if she came from Dunmurry, you know? She’s sad like any mother, in an ordinary way. I’m not married. I have no children. I don’t even have a career. I have stories. Mothers don’t care about stories. She feels sorry for me. And maybe she should.”

“Meaning you feel sorry for yourself.”

“Sometimes,” she said defiantly. “Why not? Who else is going to?”

He tsk-tsked and leaned back. “Self-pity is indulgent.”

“I can stand some indulgence. I’m a good enough little soldier. I’m hardly frolicking across the continents with Daddy’s Visa card. It hasn’t been easy.”

Farrell gently flaked a forkful of sole and glanced up at her with a dance of a smile. “No, I’m sure it hasn’t been. How have you managed to support yourself now?”

Estrin smoothed her napkin in her lap. “No, the work hasn’t been that hard, or that’s not what’s been hard … I just keep going and going and I’m getting—”

“Tired.”

“Yes,” she said gratefully.

“I’d think you were beginning to run out of countries.”

“There’s something else you run out of well before countries,” she warned. “Though it’s been a good life. I’ve picked grapes in Champagne, lemons in Greece. I’ve made plastic ashtrays in Amsterdam, done interior carpentry in Ylivieska. I’ve bused trays in the Philippines under Marcos, manufactured waterproof boots in Israel, and counseled in a German drug-abuse clinic in West Berlin. Now I’m at the Green Door, and that’s just a sampling— I swear I’m not off target and it could be the best of lives forever if I were perfect, but I’m not and something is going wrong …”

As she drifted off, he touched her hand, and the question was intent: “How old are you?”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m thirty-two.”

“That is—incredible.”

“I know.”

“Then you’re past thumbing around Europe in patched jeans. What are you doing?”

“You mean, when am I going to settle down and do something? Product is slag. The only difference between my life and a foreign correspondent’s is I don’t write it down. Does that matter? Someone’s sure to cover the fall of Marcos without my help. I am my product.”

“You don’t want to accomplish anything?”

Estrin folded her arms. “I’m not convinced you believe in accomplishing anything yourself.”

“I try to keep my work—”

“Whatever that is.”

“Safe from my nihilism.”

“You mean you don’t allow what you believe to affect what you do.”

“I believe a number of things,” he hedged. “They’re not all comfortable sitting next to each other is all … Like certain women.”

“It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s dangerous as all fuck.”

“Suits me, then.”

She sighed. “I may be just making excuses. I always was a no-frills talent. I made ‘good grades,’ but at nothing in particular.”

“Are you running away?”

“From what? I didn’t leave my family behind in Pennsylvania sliced up with an electric carving knife. I don’t think I’m running away any more than I would in a Philadelphia condo with an answering machine and regular lunch dates. It doesn’t matter where I am, Farrell. So I might as well go as stay. And I like other countries. You—you’ve got a lot of spark, but you have this morose side. My autobiography doesn’t usually sound this depressing.”

“I depress you?”

“No, I must think torment will impress you.”

“I thought you didn’t care if people liked you.”

“I lied.” They toasted. The crystal sang.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she expanded. “I haven’t lived for ten years out of a backpack. Especially for the last five, I’ve stayed places—I move into houses and buy dustpans. Right now I have a dynamite house on Springfield Road. I buy flowers, I have a whisk! Because you have to put together something to leave before you go.”

“Is that what you’re doing tonight?”

She didn’t answer. She ordered brandy. Estrin had spilled out. This man had made her tense as no man had for months, but that was earlier, and now she felt herself break and spread over the restaurant like a neatly cracked egg, her eyes shining, double yolks. “So though I’m not ambitious, I do work hard, because I like the feeling. In Israel, I got up to pull boots at four, and it was loud and hot. I did overtime. Before I left Kiryat Shemona I ran the night shift, and was the only Gentile ever offered membership in that kibbutz. In Berlin, the clinic tried to send me to school in social work. In the Philippines, I was a hotel dishwasher, but when the head cook disappeared they put me in to pinch hit; found out I pickled a mean ceviche and kept me there. So I ran the kitchen for six months; while the busboys ambled in late afternoons the color of polished walnuts, I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day and turned the color of kiwi fruit.”

“You’re not complaining.”

“No,” she exhaled, remembering. “And today Kieran asked me to manage the Green Door.”

“How did you pull that off?”

“Damned if I know! It’s out of control! Everywhere I go I just want to be a schlemiel and somebody hands me a set of keys and the books, and before long I have employees and late hours and a lot of problems. It’s the curse of the crudest possible intelligence. The fact is, if you tell a hundred people, Put the chair in that corner, fully seventy-five of them will promptly hang it from the chandelier. Did you know that most of the world is made of fruitcakes?”

He laughed. “You get more American when you drink.”

“I can’t help it. I was born this way.”

“You don’t like being American?”

“I’ve learned to get by with it, like any handicap—harelip, paraplegia. Do you like being Irish?”

“What do you think?”

She eyed him. “That you abhor it. In short, Ireland suits you perfectly.”

She was getting swacked. Her voice was louder and higher; people were looking over at their table. She used her hands when she talked, and as her motions got wider Farrell eyed their tall goblets warily, though she always missed. Then, she knew her way around a landscape with glasses, that was clear. She had reached a phase he knew himself, marked not by sloppiness but by inordinate precision—her pronunciation was getting more rather than less correct. Her phrasing grew considered, her gestures semaphoric, crisp as air traffic control. When she rose to find the loo, he recognized the careful placement of her hand on the table, the excessively smooth ascent from her chair, the purposeful step-by-step glide around other diners—too exact, too concentrated. She had crossed the point where all these ordinary matters could be executed without thinking, and now to negotiate finding the ladies’, asking Maire coherently, remembering the directions and being able to follow them, took the full application of her powers.

Farrell enjoyed her absence. He kneaded his forehead. He had to admit he’d no idea what to make of her. The boasting had been a bit much; though if she really had washed dishes in the Philippines and made plastic boots in Galilee, he supposed she deserved a little airtime over dinner for work that had surely been excruciating after the first half hour. Farrell was tired. That was it, she was tiring. He wished she would just quiet down. He was sick of words. This whole island never shut up, and he wondered at how much people said was in such reliably inverse proportion to how much they had to say. If Farrell chose to lose any of his senses, he decided he’d go deaf.

Yet when Estrin returned it was as if something had happened. She seemed sad. He felt sure he could make one mean remark and she would cry.

“Are you married?” she asked straight up.

“You know when I woke up at thirteen, but you can’t tell if I’m that much of a shite?”

“That’s right,” she said calmly. “Only the incidentals of your life are apparent.”

When the bill came and Farrell went for his wallet, Estrin crumpled into her pocket for a wad of pound notes. “No, no.” He put a hand over her fist of cash. He flicked a card to Maire, allowing Estrin to catch that it was platinum.

Farrell gave her a hand up, pressed gently at her waist between tables; opening the door, he slipped his fingers under a shock of hair still beneath the jacket and pulled it free; she paused to let him finish, and a little longer still for the back of his hand to rest at her collar. As a result, by the time they were outside they had run through all the routine moves of the gambit like speed chess. Then, she was thirty-two, he forty-three; openings had become so easy. Perhaps the very definition of adulthood is a fascination with the middle parts of games.

“I have my bike,” she said.

“It’s safe?”

“Locked, anyway. I suppose.”

“Leave it, then. We haven’t far.”

Estrin shot her motorcycle a mournful look. “Where to?” she asked, in tow.

“My hotel.”

“You live in a hotel?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“It’s safer.” To Estrin’s grunt of incomprehension, he simply replied, “Never mind.” He put his arm around her shoulders, though at Estrin’s height that was less like holding a person than resting on a banister.

“The swallow,” he told her as if beginning a bedtime story, “takes off when it’s young and flies all around the world. For up to four years it never lands, sailing over South America, Africa, Australia—thousands of miles, the circumference of the earth several times.”

“Does it mate in the air?”

“No, after sowing wild oats in Tierra del Fuego, the swallow settles down to raise a family. Buys a station wagon and gets fat.”

“Thanks,” said Estrin.

While no longer rolled up by dark as it once was, central Belfast was deserted after the pubs closed; their heels rang down the walk.

“Another parable,” said the American, whose voice, cowed by quiet, had gone soft. “A few years ago back in Philadelphia I decided I was sick of my ratty underwear—it was stained, the elastic shot. So I treated myself to, like, the best—in one store, silk, maroon, black lace; as my stack piled down the rack, other customers began to stare at me sidelong. I bought thirty pairs. When I got home I spread them out and not only felt insane, I felt deprived. All I could think about was going out and buying more.”

“You’re obsessive.”

“Not so simple. It’s greed. The same thing happens when I’m not halfway through a meal and I start thinking about a second helping. Or a cassette’s not nearly over and I decide to play it again. It’s a hunger like C. S. Lewis’s magic Turkish delight: the more you eat, the more you want, because you didn’t taste what you had before. When I decide in the middle to play a song again, I stop hearing it the first time. I have a problem with wanting what I’ve already got.

“Anyway, that’s what happens with me and maps,” she explained. “I spread them on the floor like underwear. I no sooner get my butt to Belfast than I start frantic plans to fly to the Soviet Union.”

“Still have the silk drawers?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Nope. After the shopping binge I stopped wearing underwear altogether.”

She couldn’t match his stride, and kept trying different rhythmic combinations, 3:2, 5:3, like solving an equation, and now tangibly hung back. “Listen,” she fumbled. “I don’t do this sort of thing much anymore.”

He stopped and kissed her hair. “Now, what sort of thing might that be?”

“I guess that’s my question.”

“Always in such a rush. Don’t we need something to discuss before we can discuss it?”

“Sorry. You make me nervous. I don’t know why.”

He liked her for the confession. He took her hand, swinging it a little, feeling … content. A mysterious sensation.

chapter five
Cape Canaveral on York Street

Estrin was pleased he led her to Whitewells, old Belfast, one of the last monuments downtown to an era largely expunged in the last twenty years blast by blast. At the corner of Royal Avenue and York Street, its Edwardian opulence put the rest of the town center to shame. The “Belfast Is Buzzing” campaign proudly celebrated a commercial reincarnation not unlike having been born a prince and coming back a sow. The lines of shoe stores and garish plastic marquees may have made locals proud, but they made Estrin feel temporary, trivial; she might have preferred the atmosphere had the shops remained bombed out. Yet only a few chipped stones on the hotel suggested nearby explosions; more than its architecture, what impressed Estrin most as they walked in was that Whitewells was still here.

Not that they got far. Two steps in, they were met by a security façade more imposing than at most airports. While the doorman respectfully recognized “Mr. O’Phelan,” even Farrell laid his jacket on the X-ray belt, walked through the metal detector, and raised his arms to be searched. For the first time in this Province, Estrin’s adorable round cheeks didn’t roll her past the guards. They impounded her can of Mace, and a far more than perfunctory frisk recovered a Phillips screwdriver Estrin had rummaged for all week. They took that, too.

“Jesus,” Estrin exclaimed when they were through. “I’d hate to see what they do to suitcases.”

“Something between homogenization and genetic engineering. If Watson hadn’t discovered DNA, Whitewells would have found it at the door. Best security in all of Europe.” He clapped her delightedly on the shoulder and left for the key.

Estrin sank across the carpet. Security curtained away, only formidable Old World appointments presented themselves. Whitewells was a bulwark of a building, with that airless quiet of a bomb shelter or a bank vault. Even the decor was safe, with conservative furniture, all dark, woody, and green. While oceans crushed the rocks of this island, the fountain here purled coyly: surely water would only wash your face. In Whitewells every element was contained: the fire would never pop beyond its grate, and whatever the powers of earth in this place, they were marshaled entirely for your protection. Estrin was reminded of the feeling of the world when she was a small child, when everything seemed oversized, looming, more real than you. The tables were long and steady, the chairs sturdy and stable, with fat, affectionate arms. Upholstery skirted their formidable square chassés to the floor, like RUC Land Rovers. Wainscoting was so thick you could run into it; the ceilings were corniced, the paintings mostly framed. Grandfather clocks, above ordinary time, were stopped at twelve.

Grazing the lobby, Estrin’s eyes struck Farrell by accident: a few deft strokes from a distance, more sketch than sculpture. And she’d never seen a man whose apparent age could shift so. Joking with the receptionist, he could have been her brother; turning, her father. Both versions were striking, though Farrell had that quality rare in men of not seeming to know how attractive he was.

Joining him in the lift, she could tell they were watched by the way the staff deliberately looked elsewhere.

Later she would notice the lovely room, with no smeary seascapes or little broken coffee machines; for now Estrin could attend only to the bed, rising at her with its big white spread. Despite her nervousness, she felt simple. Hanging her coat, she didn’t mind having nothing to say. She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her boots; allowing her hair to drape on either side of her face, she looked up and smiled.

Farrell slipped off his shoes and stretched on the bed to its foot. He did not reach for her, but closed his eyes and rubbed his face. Estrin massaged his temples. He rested his arms and didn’t touch.

“You know, if you’d like to just sleep, that would be all right,” Estrin offered.

Farrell kept his eyes closed as her fingers moved into his scalp. “Don’t think the old man has it in him?”

“I think you’re tired.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling her closer. “I am shattered.” He was an angular man, but the kiss was acquiescent; he was shaking.

For all her avaricious crackling of maps, at last Estrin Lancaster paused in her gorging of whole foreign countries to remain in a single room, really a small room, in one odd city with one difficult character, but as a result something paradoxical happened and, instead of feeling hemmed in, Estrin found the world of Whitewells and this man on its bed the source of infinite, patient fascination. As the universe shrank ever further to two patches of face, Farrell’s mouth opened into a cavernous place, large enough to walk around in, get lost in, take the underground. Her passage echoed down his throat. Farrell had swallowed the world, and all that ever was could be found there—the Taj Mahal, the Eiger, the Ganges, Cape Canaveral, the Smithsonian Institution, and Estrin’s favorite U.S. Out of Nicaragua coffee cup back on Springfield Road.

She actually forgot about the sex, since she was not waiting to get on with something else. Sometimes she forced herself to pull away from him so she could enjoy going back, each time to visit new tourist attractions—the Pyramids, St. Stephen’s Green, the Roman Catacombs. They were luxurious kisses and, while soft, not that disturbing invertebrate bleah, where the tongue dissolves into a pool of gelatinous mouth-flesh, like lapping at soup with no bowl, kisses without rim. No, even as their tongues wrapped, Henry Moore, one form into the other, these were kisses with structure and purpose, like good sculpture always turning, one plane leading endlessly into another, until you are back where you started, with no sense of having been there before.

Farrell held her neck and pressed her deeper. The farther they tunneled down each other’s throat, the more it seemed unfair to be kept so far apart. Even if the evening was one-off, he was a slime, this was a pickup, Estrin was ready to offer money or favors or flattery, anything at all if he would only keep her in his bed the whole night.

“No, don’t.” Estrin stopped his wrangling with her silk. “I can’t stand being undressed. And you’d never have a chance with these leather pants, they would take you hours.”

This next business was also simple, without the zip by button hassle Estrin had grown so weary of, but with the neater, practiced efficiency with which people can take off their own clothes. She did not want to think about clothes.

Without them he was just as long, but even more narrow. So meager and unmuscled, his body looked easy to draw, though you would need a ruler. As a result, though hard to read at dinner, here he printed legible right angles, undivisive, direct. His skin, surprisingly tender for a man his age, pimpled with a dot-matrix of chenille. His legs dangled off the mattress, the wan, desperate sticks with knobbled knees that crowd Save the Children posters. Even his penis, though long, was unusually slim, and less bullying than most, a limb more of grace than aggression, smooth and abstract like the rest: Giacometti.

Be that as it may, Estrin looked in his eyes as she hadn’t for a few minutes and remembered his name; remembered other people saying it, the way they said it—with an inching away. She recognized his face as the same from yesterday: stony, blasé, You’re all witless gobshites. As he slid into her easy as you please, like popping in an open back door, she recalled that only a few minutes before she’d have knelt on the floor for one more kiss—from a stranger, whose powers of affection she knew little but whose powers of disdain had already shown themselves to be monumental. In fact, Estrin had risen in the ranks of menials all over the world because she was reliable, but once in a while even Estrin slipped, and flat on her back now, she had that feeling of having been trusted and suddenly remembering she did not lock up.

It felt better than she remembered, but she hadn’t remembered because she didn’t want to. Estrin twisted underneath. She avoided seeing his face now because she already cared what it was thinking, and this could be a nothing, a fuck, she didn’t know him— Get out! She managed not to say this out loud, and kissed him as if stuffing a towel in her mouth. Farrell was whipping more quickly and screeing like seabirds, but Estrin only whimpered. She’d put her life together and made do. She had a job now and a house and coffee filters and always bought milk for the morning the night before. She belonged to a gym and her running time was good; the phone rang when she came home. The Guzzi was tuned and she loved spending her free days by herself blasting across the island—to Bushmills— Estrin was in fine form, often excited by this new city, even Provo poppycock, Ulster slang—stocious, legless, half-tore, as many words for drunk as the Eskimos had for snow— For once in a country that spoke English, with more mountains and comically crummy food—bangers and chips, pizza and chips, chips and chips— It had all been enough without this—

His fingers on her shoulders bit flesh. Below him, Estrin put up feeble resistance: she would not come. A traveler may be excited, but never satisfied. Besides, can’t you understand that pleasure is grotesque? What can possibly happen next but that someone will take it away?

Farrell immediately reached over to shake down his overcoat and didn’t explain. He located an inhaler, which he sucked on, sitting up. This was not romantic.

He slept on the far side of the bed in a ball. A small person with the rest of it, Estrin lay bereft on the wide white sheet. She tossed, always hot or cold, pulling up the blankets, throwing them off. She felt deserted, and irrationally offended that he could sleep.

Yet by morning she, too, was deep in, and it was Farrell who roused her into his arms with a remark about feeling neglected.

Farrell eyed her from the safety of his Unionist tabloid. He had barricaded himself at the breakfast table with ten different papers, even for Farrell generous. He never knew what to say to women mornings. He watched her smarm her mug over her forehead, against her temple, down her cheek. She had a warmth with objects, he’d noticed in 44, the way she tapered over her fork, smeared the flat of the knife, traced the flute of her plate—she seemed to savor the setting more than the food.

As he walked her back to Bedford Street, they discussed the Guilford Four. Approaching her bike, Farrell felt Estrin drag at his hand.

“Well, it’s been fun,” said Estrin defiantly.

“Yes” was all he said. He waited for her to remove the padlock, zip up, strap on her helmet, and actually turn the key. As she revved the motor, he slipped his hands in his pockets. She fed the engine more petrol than it needed; its revolutions grew louder and more shrill. He could feel her clutching through disappointment to disbelief to rage like gears, and he waited for the very last stage—ordinary pain—at which Estrin unexpectedly switched off the cycle and stared down at the tank. She looked up, her face not wobbly but impassive and open.

“This is it?”

“Not unless you prefer, my swallow. Myself, I’d like very much to see you again.”

“Then why don’t you take my fucking phone number?”

“Now, that’s a thought. You Americans are so well organized.”

The exchange done, she started the bike energetically; he squeezed her shoulder and leaned down to shout, “And it was more than fun!”

She tore out from under his hand, grazed his toe with her back wheel, and ripped past the BBC.

chapter six
Roisin’s Furniture Goes Funny

Now, why go to that confounded funeral, Roisin, when I’ve the afternoon free?”

“You know very well why. Didn’t you just go to McMichael’s? Even Seawright’s, and that was appalling.”

“What was appalling, love, was blowing up his car. The yob was a bigot, but last time I read up, that wasn’t a capital crime.”

“It should be,” she muttered.

“Sure we’d all be six foot under in no time.”

“Well, last time I read up, walking down the road on the border wasn’t a capital crime, either.”

“The soldier says himself, the gun went off by accident.”

“Angus, catch yourself on! I suppose Cromwell’s invasion was an accident, too.”

“Cromwell’s invasion was three hundred years ago, Christ! This Brigadoon drives me to distraction, always blattering on about Oliver and James and Billy, as if they were all on their way here to tea. MacAnespie will be investigated—”

“That’s rich. Just like the Birmingham Six?”

“The point is, you attend, at the end of the day it’s one more Nationalist demonstration.”

“And Seawright’s was a Loyalist one.”

“That funeral was part of my job. Your job is to stay home and find it all too painful to bear.”

“Even a poet needs to make political statements.”

“Bollocks, haven’t you had it up to your bake with political statements?”

“It’s more you have, and only with mine.”

“I’ll not get into the whole kit, since I said I’d an afternoon free and not the rest of my life. But I do wish you’d think things through a bit more, lass. You call yourself a Republican, but you’ve not a single decent word for the South. It’s the DUP fellows steam off to Donegal on holiday and say it’s brilliant. You, Rosebud, come back from Sligo raving. ‘Their veins run with Fairy Liquid!’ you says.”

Roisin laughed. “I said that?”

He snaked a finger down her arm, and Roisin shivered. “Aye, you’ve a right decent sense of humor, when you let it out. Loose a few more crackers instead of all this howl about creepy trees and menstruation, maybe I’d show at one of those do’s of yours.”

“Angus, you wouldn’t go to my readings if I tap-danced with Dame Edna.” Roisin struggled halfhearted toward the clock. “I’ll need to leave in twenty minutes.”

“I vote we have our own wee service.” He slipped his hand up under her blouse. “Why, this afternoon I personally volunteer to cross the sectarian divide.”

Angus MacBride was a vigorous, aggressive lover who didn’t fancy diddling about for hours trying to satisfy his woman but pleased himself. Roisin preferred this. She enjoyed being taken, even forced a little. Besides, a too solicitous lover made Roisin feel watched, and his attentions often backfired. She had difficulty coming anyway, and under pressure to perform, her excitement withered. She wondered how men, their pleasures so apparent, ever achieved an erection with a woman in the room. Chichi clitoral diligence had, like every fashion, hit Ireland ten years late, and arrived in Roisin’s life with her last boyfriend, Garrett. Roisin would find herself boated on a horizonless sexual sea, what had begun as a careless afternoon excursion darkening gradually to nightmare as the light began to fade and the bed rocked on. Frankly, the two- or three-hour fuck is highly overrated. Garrett had dutifully rubbed away until her vagina was raw, her labia numb. Once they’d endured a few of these sessions, she hadn’t the heart to admit to him that short of success after ten minutes the project was hopeless, so the marathons went on until Roisin began to dread going to bed. She tried cutting his efforts short by faking, but this only seemed to inspire Garrett to more, like a pinball player determined to rack a higher score. Further, he wouldn’t allow himself to enter her until she was “done,” by which time Garrett himself had wilted. So then Roisin would take the helm and dither, though she absolutely refused to put the thing in her mouth. Ironically, he seemed to have the same reaction she did to being conscientiously serviced, and if he did come, it was a nervous, exhausted spasm after more toil, and this from a man who had apologized at the beginning of their relationship that he had trouble with premature ejaculation.

When Garrett announced that he’d started seeing another woman, Roisin was sure he’d found a buxom, thick-armed Andytown wench who boiled potatoes whom he could throw down on the lino when he pleased, to blast away and zip up after five minutes, better than this overwrought, internationally famous poetess for whom he had far too much respect. Angus didn’t have enough, but then she’d do without if respect took the form of obsequious deference in bed.

So Angus plundered on, joyful and oblivious, with the rhythmic grunting Roisin trusted. It would never occur to Angus to fake excitement in a hundred million years. If he didn’t relish making love to her, he’d get up and do something else; for there is nothing so comforting as the obviously selfish person: he will take care of himself. Left to her own devices, then, Roisin relaxed and enjoyed some moderate success. This particular afternoon she preferred to lie back and watch, for finally, at the age of thirty-seven, Roisin had discerned that you didn’t come as a responsibility, a victory, or even as a compliment, but because you felt like it.

The timing of the ring was so perfect, and so close to perfectly bad, that they both had to laugh. Still panting, sweat streaming, Angus reached for the receiver with “’Loo?” in a could-be-anyone voice. While he didn’t want to be recognized, he liked the territorial implications of answering her phone.

Angus looked at the receiver like something with a bad smell and discarded it. “Fancy. Rung off. New boyfriend?”

Long after Angus had gone, Roisin lay on her back with her eyes open, the duvet up to her chin. Only the ebb of light and the beat of her body marked the passing of time. Roisin rarely listened to music. She found quiet a marvel. And she found doing nothing a marvel. How spectacular that you could simply lie here and the day would sift by. Roisin considered this her secret. On either side of the house, women rustled up tea—boiling, toasting, dragging children to the table. Tellies blared, papers flapped, electronic games wheedled away, but here Roisin folded her hands over her chest and could detect only the faint on-and-off hum of the refrigerator, her legs laid out like the dead’s. But she wasn’t dead! That was the secret. Under the slanted ceiling of the top floor, cozied by the faded blue wallpaper flowers and the shadows easing over them, Roisin could roam the moors of her head, heather purpling, grass bent, as a young girl with a long dress in a breeze. She wondered at the bustle of women in this town who always had to be a-doing, boys who tore off in stolen cars through checkpoints, even romantics who yearned for the days a lad could light off to sea. She didn’t see the scrabbling for adventure, when all you need do is pull a comforter to your breast. For there was always a ship waiting in Roisin’s port, with sails like skirts; her own breath blew the wind.

Only when satisfied she could remain this way forever would Roisin get up. She dressed slowly and considered the match of colors as if someone would call, though she’d probably spend the evening padding the house, reading snatches of poetry, and washing the dishes just to feel the water on her hands. Roisin always dressed well, especially for herself. She chose purple and green, like the hillsides in her mind tonight, a soft sweater, low shoes. She tiptoed downstairs as if not wanting to wake herself up.

She’d not combed her hair or made up her face—which she would also do, meticulously, whether or not she stepped out—so when the mirror in the dining room ambushed her she jumped. Especially the last five years, Roisin was mindful of mirrors and did not let them sneak up on her. And after each passing birthday it took a fraction of a second longer to prepare for them. What was required was nothing less than a mirror of her own to fight back, a careful preconception of a face to fend off heresy. As the two versions grew increasingly disparate, it took more energy to generate the gentler portrait, and Roisin marked the positions of store windows and bar glass like the mapmaking of the blind: she needed to anticipate them without seeing them, for a careless glance could ache up the back of her head for hours, like a baton clubbing from the peelers.

Tonight, however, she braved the image, unprotected by eyeliner or inner vision: this was her face. In the droop of her cheeks she saw her mother. Otherwise, there was less of a slump than a shatter to it. Her tooth enamel, skin, and dry, separated hair all crackled like crazed celadon. Her eyes were green and men admired them, though tonight she noticed a twist in their center, a wringing—they wound you in at a curl. It seemed the face, she decided, of a woman who had once been very beautiful. More truthfully, it was the face of a woman who had always been almost beautiful: her looks required a leap of faith. The rub: one so many men had almost made. She was the kind of woman whom men date weekly, routinely, for years, whom they think they love and maybe even think they’ll marry, until overnight they find the “real thing” at Robinson’s and in two weeks’ time are off to Australia with a cropped blonde.

Maybe that explained the twist, as if she were wincing from flattery unreceived. In her best dress she might earn “lovely,” but never “gorgeous,” and certainly not that rare adjective some women pull from even dull men that is so unusual and right that the remark achieves a beauty of its own, and rests beside her as a compliment in the best sense, a woman by a rose.

As for the shatter in the face, that was easy: it was time and an inconceivable parade of disappointments. That she had recognized their pattern seemed not to free her but to doom her to it. Roisin went about her romances like any bad researcher who writes his conclusion before his experiment, so that long telephone sessions concurring with Constance Trower that she sought out abuse, that she could only admire a man who didn’t admire her, only inspired Roisin to ring off and march out to prove how very, very right they were.

Looking herself in the eye for once set a tone for the night of uncommon bareness. The feeling downstairs wasn’t bleak exactly, but unadorned. Trinkets in the sitting room did not blur into a nest of comfort and civilization but remained discrete. China bird. Broken clock. Alabaster ashtray. A What Doesn’t Belong in This Picture? where the answer was that nothing did. More, the room was rife with futility. The empty Carolans tin on the mantel had seemed too handsome to throw out, good for sewing perhaps, but Roisin had a cabinet for that; or knitting, but she didn’t knit. Candy dishes proffered no chocolates, bowls no fruit. The alabaster ashtrays were too lustrous for cigarettes, so she smoked with saucers instead. Those napkins on the sideboard were far too dear to dab spaghetti sauce, so she would set her place with pyramids of peach linen and then run to the kitchen to wipe her mouth on a paper towel. Her antimacassars were so elegant that she sat forward in her chairs, to avoid soiling the lace that was there to protect the chair from her head in the first place. Nothing made any sense! Likewise, the furniture did not cohere—the sofa ignored its end tables; chairs sat back to back, not talking. The house hadn’t changed except that some artifice or optimism was removed, some essential squint that made the rooms more pleasing and sane. It was a house without lies, and it was frightening.

As this quality only intensified, Roisin was unsurprised when a short while later she looked down at her kitchen table with the rude revelation: This is my life. For she not only touched up her face for a mirror but routinely prepared a version of her existence that did not include evenings like this one: a biscuit, crumbs of Cheshire, a leaf or two of lettuce; a book breaking its spine at a page of inexpressible boredom; stray lines on the back of a brown Telecom envelope, with a word crossed out, replaced, crossed again, and filled in with the first one. This was a poet’s life. What did others see in it? Why did the word sing? So her lover had taken her that afternoon; a poet was granted a lover, maybe even one taboo. Tonight, however, she conceded the larger problem was not his religion but his marriage. Roisin was having an affair with a married man; she was thirty-seven and it was nearly too late for children; she had poetry, but while she’d never admit this to Angus, Work only meant so much to her. Weeks and biscuits crumbled on; the shatter deepened; the twist took another half turn. What did she have but the blue-flowered wallpaper and the quiet of her own sinking ship, the slackening flap of her sails? Roisin St. Clair, one more gifted but sloppily understood poet reading on Thursdays at Queen’s about eerie weather and trembling leaves when the crowd was only itching to make it to the Common Room and toss a few before last call—

She realized the phone had rung several times already, and rushed gratefully to the intrusion—why, every once in a while the outside world came through.

“Miss St. Clair, I am a friend of Angus MacBride’s.”

“Of whose?”

“Please,” said the voice, pained. “I’m sure Angus appreciates your discretion. But I mean a close friend. I need to discuss a matter of our mutual concern. Best in person. At your convenience, of course.”

“Kelly’s, then,” Roisin faltered. “Tomorrow, half-four. How will I know you, then?”

“Your photo on the back of Known Facts is most striking. I could pick you out of the top stands at a hurley match. I’m sure to find you at a small bar.”

A pause; a click. Roisin cocked her head. The voice had a caress in it. Despite the ominousness of the call, when she looked about the sitting room her objects were restored to meaning and memory, collusion, the useless at least pretty. The chairs were in earnest conversation. Back at the kitchen table, the Cheshire was dry as wine, brilliant white and tart. She poured sherry into cut crystal and picked up the book again, engrossed, jotting from time to time; and some of the lines on the Telecom envelope showed great promise.

It was this particular hand on her shoulder from behind that spurred Roisin to think how some strangers touched you and made you angry, others only made you feel warm. Turning, she was tempted to decide easily that the difference was whether or not they were attractive, but she had liked the hand before she found the gaunt, tailored gentleman who belonged to it. She later theorized there was a class of men who filched at you, sliming for what they could get—a pickpocket job, their touch was theft. Others did you a favor: their touch was gift.

“The Farrell O’Phelan?”

“I don’t know, are you the Roisin St. Clair?”

“I take a sorrier article, I’m afraid.”

“A back booth, then, for two sorry articles.”

“I never believed you were real! More like the Lone Ranger or Robin Hood.”

When he ordered coffee rather than a drink, she trusted him better, for no good reason. “As Robin Hood I have resigned. I asked you here over an issue partly political, but largely personal.”

“Politics is always personal here.”

“And how. So you understand: alliances are not simply to positions but to people. As such, our friend Angus MacBride is irreplaceable. For years he’s managed to conceal from the Prods that he’s intelligent. And he’s one of those rare fellows who can pat you on the back and turn a phrase with the latest idiom, and only later in bed might you realize what he said was anathema to you, if then. That he’s reasonable and open-minded about solutions to this situation is known only to his closest associates like you and me. To the rest he plays the part of a hardheaded holdout to perfection. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. And sure I don’t need to tell you, either, that his drinking is out of control.”

Roisin inhaled. Anyone’s confidence hit up her sinuses like eucalyptus. “You fancy?”

“He is drinking not only after political functions but before. And are you aware that the glass he keeps beside him at press conferences is filled with vodka?”

“Angus has always been well oiled, Mr. O’Phelan.”

“Have you ever added up how many quarts that engine takes?”

“I suppose about half a bottle a day.”

“I will infer you are not talking Beaujolais. And Miss St. Clair, that’s the liquor you know about. Even so, that’s hardly well oiled, my dear, it’s pickled. Now, a friend of mine in the SDLP is your man’s physician. I’ve glimpsed the reports. I will spare you the details, but the outlook is grim.”

She gasped and pressed for specifics, but he was not forthcoming.

“So you see, I’d be leery of intruding on your privacy without cause. Angus speaks highly of you, though rarely, as he ought. I’ve come to believe you exert considerable influence on the man. As his friend and supporter, I appeal to you.”

“To do what?”

Farrell spread his hands. “Haven’t a clue. Mind you, for several years drink was more my own speciality than politics. Like most such experts, however, I’m a better source on how to get in than out.”

“How did you”—she nodded to his coffee—“get out?”

“I’m not, entirely,” he admitted. “Otherwise,” he patted her hand, “a long story. I turned a corner. I hadn’t a woman to help me. And little good she’d have done me if I had. I was a spiteful drunk.”

“Are you still spiteful?”

“Perverse. Telling me I’d had enough was the fastest way to get me to kill the bottle. Angus is more adult. I sense in him more of a—desire to please.” Retreating from the border of insult, he added, “And wisely he might please such a lovely lady.” Farrell broke his gaze and withdrew his hands to his lap.

“I’ll think about it. I can’t promise anything.”

“I can give you one piece of advice. Angus and I have a complex relationship. With your concern, he might behave himself. Had he an inkling I cautioned you, he’d booze himself to death inside the week.”

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

“Why should I?”

He laughed. “What is it you’ve heard about me?”

“That no one knows whose side you’re on.”

“Seems you’ve done a bit of line crossing yourself.”

Roisin fumbled with her jumper.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. Still, it must be difficult for you,” he ventured, “not being able to pour your heart out to girlfriends on the phone.”

Her eyes shot up, but he only looked sympathetic. “Yes, it’s claustrophobic.”

“Then”—he looked off—“I can’t remember the last time I ‘poured my heart out’ to a living soul. Sometimes I’m afraid there’s nothing to pour. Like Talisker at the end of the day—you know, I used to drain a bit of water in and rinse it about just to get the last drops out?”

“Sad picture,” said Roisin.

“Only thing more depressing than a drunk jarred is a drunk sober.”

“I meant the one of your heart.”

“I did want to mention”—he changed the subject—“I’m an admirer of your work. Especially Bare Limbs on Basalt. Though I imagine Neighbors Who Watch the Shore has received more critical acclaim.”

“Yes. Basalt is out of print.”

“Unforgivable! I know some editors at Blackstaff; we’ll see what we can do.”

“Och, you needn’t. Please don’t.”

He laughed. “You mean, please do. I heard an Irish comedian claim the other day that it was a stiff shock to go to the Continent and discover that there when they asked if you wanted a cup of tea and you said no you didn’t get one. But it’s no trouble, and that volume deserves to be on the shelves. Does that collection include ‘Stibnite Crystals with Druzy Quartz’?”

“No.” She looked at him in amazement. “That was only published once, in The Honest Ulsterman, three years ago. It’s unimaginable you remember.”

“Hardly. I quote a few lines from ‘Stibnite’ in one of my speeches. Since I repeat myself appallingly, that means I must have recited them two dozen times.”

“What lines?” She leaned forward. Her tea had gotten cold.

chapter seven
Constance Has Inner Beauty; About Farrell We Are Not So Sure

Though accustomed to shenanigans, Constance had found her assignment to dig up all of Roisin St. Clair’s published poems unaccountably disturbing.

Still, she found every damn one. If anything, Constance was competent. In the UWC strike of ’74 she knew where to get you milk. She was a wizard with maps, a seamstress with itineraries. She negotiated library stacks the way most women ranged confidently through Co-op. She was unintimidated by computers. She remembered post codes, account numbers, train schedules, hotel rates. Traveling, she packed dresses that didn’t wrinkle, and never forgot her toothpaste. She knew the best and cheapest shops for anything from light bulbs to woolens, and unlike Farrell would never buy top of the line unless it represented fair value; yet she never shopped for pleasure and stocked huge boxes of detergent and froze family packs of chicken to save trips. She could spell out any of the maze of acronyms in Northern Ireland and the complete title of governmental applications. She could get carpenters on the dole or file compensation claims with the NIO. As a result, she had imbued countless other women with that particular modern bravery, bureaucratic courage.

For Constance believed goodness was practical. So she would watch your bicycle while you ran in the smoke shop for a paper. She would give you clear directions to the bus station. She might not routinely shell out spare change to bad buskers—not to encourage a poor choice of careers—but she would recognize honest embarrassment in a checkout line and fill out your bill the pound three you came up short, all with a brusque officiousness that eased accepting her money. She arranged funerals while everyone else was weeping on dales, amid even her own tragedy making sure you had bread with your broth, a lift home. She remembered birthdays; if her gifts were dull, they were at least handy. And because she understood kindness as concrete, that Farrell had saved specific people by removing real wires from gelignite continued to impress her far more than all his talk and referendums now.

While Constance roistered through her workday with arguably masculine zeal, she was perfectly feminine; she simply wasn’t pretty. Her homeliness did not spring from an overindulgence in crisps or an inability to rouse herself to the swimming pool, for no amount of slimming or breaststroke would sort out the slight squarishness of her head, the meaty Dietrich thighs unlikely to return to fashion in her lifetime, eyes a wee bit small, a wee bit close together—or was it far apart? The subtlety of good looks astounded Constance herself. There had been times in a public bath when she had stared at a handsome woman in a way that made the other uncomfortably assume Constance was—no, it wasn’t that. She was riveted by beauty because it would have taken such a tiny realignment of her own features for Constance to be beautiful, too.

Though her appearance pained her certain evenings in the loo, it was not her obsession; so she didn’t deny herself a pavlova or marshal two hours a day for the pool. Consequently she’d thickened a bit, and was showing every promise of a dumpy middle age. In her work this had proved an advantage, and Farrell seemed to treasure her ordinary looks as if she’d deliberately purchased a spy kit. The haggard pre-Jane Fonda generation of housewives in West Belfast was only skeptical of well-manicured single women of thirty-nine who’d rediscovered seamed nylons streeling up to their doors for information with skinny necks and tasteful pendants, refusing a biscuit with their tea. Constance always had at least two.

Further, she followed every City Council motion and had memorized a generation of sectarian debts. She could quote whole paragraphs of the Anglo-Irish Agreement verbatim, and knew the history of each civil rights and paramilitary group down to half the membership. She had swallowed the entire attic of the Linen Hall Library, and to Farrell O’Phelan she was indispensable.

Her ambition, to the word.

Constance considered Farrell the most perceptive man she had ever met. Unlike all their other colleagues, who would, opportunity given, take a snipe or two, from a little nail bomb of petty complaints to single high-caliber potshots (last week at the Peace People executive: He’s a cowboy. Fundamentally the man is irresponsible), Constance wouldn’t hear a word against him. She’d thought well of the man even in his gawky stage, before the hotel and the European suits. She’d first noticed him at a UUAL rally as a heckler, where she’d been protesting with NICRA on the sidelines. He’d been articulate and, though vicious, formally polite; it was the only time in Paisley’s public life she’d seen him paralyzed for an instant.

She was an intelligent woman. The nature of their relationship, well, it was perfectly clear, perfectly. Yet she was sufficiently accustomed to being depressed to still get up in the morning even if she expected things to be basically as dismal when she went to bed that night.

Depressed? Who said that? She did not consider herself depressed.

That’s how depressed she was.

No, it was all right, the days flapping with Fortnights, evenings with a fistful of toast as she stared out the window at the branches webbing over the panes like the veins in her eyes. She merely needed a polestar. Like the reference draftsmen use to give a landscape proper perspective, she needed a disappearing point. Farrell O’Phelan was a dot off her page.

Once more he had not asked her out exactly, but they were beyond that. Even Oscar’s didn’t bother with reservations anymore but routinely saved their table. And after a fourteen-hour workday she would let him pick up the tab tonight. With half an hour before his return, Constance luxuriated around the suite, a paler but softer place without him, still steeped in his presence but spared its pricklier forms. She loitered into his office and eyed the correspondence. Constance could be trusted implicitly around open bottles of expensive liquor, cold cash, but curvaceous addresses on envelopes flushed her with wild kleptomania. The artless girls in the Tissot prints arched their eyebrows, goody-goody.

She disciplined herself from the post, on a whim creaking instead into the closet to finger Farrell’s bomb disposal suit. A reek wafted from the hanger as if she were releasing something that wasn’t supposed to get out. The suit made her feel nostalgic; a little hurt; delivered. Constance had secured it for Farrell’s Christmas present that last year. It had taken plenty of finagling to pinch the suit from the British Army, the kind of project Constance could sink her teeth into. Though used, it was in good condition. Farrell had never worn it. Och, he had his reasons. It was heavy, sixty pounds or so, and limited mobility. Furthermore, it smelled ghastly, permeated not only with the acrid, almond tinge of explosives but permanently imbued with nervous sweat. Like breathing pure terror, he says. And sure he was a fastidious man, a fresh shirt every day, starched. As a child, grotty hands made him cry. As an adult, nothing had upset him more than the Dirty Protest; why, he was positively relieved when prisoners moved on to hunger strikes. Maggots in spoiled food, shite spread on the walls because it dried faster that way, less noxious than in a pile … Even reading about it now, he would agitate around the office and go back to biting his hands.

But the stench of the suit had been an excuse. He preferred pinstripe. And if a bomb had ever blown he’d wanted to go with it.

Farrell was himself thinking of Constance as he whistled up the walkway. He was sometimes concerned on her account, and wondered at how often this compassion expressed itself as rebuke. The problem was, he liked her too much. She was good-humored and bright, earthy but not crude, and, for all her community adventuring, essentially shy. As his hours in her company racked up, they only improved. However, if they had too good a time, the next day he’d be brisk and find something wrong with her work and disappear.

When he found her in his office—where she had no business—Constance was perched on his desk tugging at her stockings. As she whisked the skirt back down, Farrell couldn’t help but think, What heavy thighs. She seemed to see this in his face, and instead of boistering the incident away, she timmered to the other side of the room.

They didn’t talk. Farrell dialed. Constance scuffled by the closet. Sometimes he could not bear that she knew him so well. He might have preserved more of a private life, but he ended up telling Constance most of it just so she would tend to its aggravating logistics. So the rare times he was up to something that left her out, the air knotted like the roots of trees.

Farrell turned his back. He lowered his voice into the Little White Girl. He rested the receiver and waited a punitive beat. “I do not like to be listened to while I am making a personal call.”

Constance realized with confusion she’d been eavesdropping. There should be no such thing in this office. She knew everything. “You might’ve said.”

“I shouldn’t have to.”

Constance felt suddenly estranged. She didn’t know quite who she was or where. Rather than the disorientation seem odd, she was astonished she didn’t slip out of kilter more often. She was impressed with having negotiated so many ordinary moments of her life with such social grace in the past. She felt someone should commend her. “Sorry.”

“Likewise. This evening I am engaged.”

Constance remained still, as if for a long exposure. The shutter clicked; she had misunderstood engaged. Her very heart had stopped for the picture, and while the word returned to its routine usage, her pulse was sickening.

Farrell was surprised, expecting a scene. Her face was impassive. She looked nonplused. “Tomorrow,” he offered as reward. He tucked his red handkerchief into his pocket and poofed it out again, smoothed on gloves of tight cream suede. He pecked her cheek on his way out with an exaggerated Mwah! that was insulting.

He forgot she was still in the room and turned out the light. The smell of the bomb disposal suit lingered behind him. Standing in the dark, Constance felt as she had at three years old when she was first aware of her arms when walking and was mystified by how to hold her hands.

I’m aware that Americans compulsively ask what you do. I’ve restrained myself, but I can’t stand it any longer—what are you?”

They were back at 44, only the second time, but this established that to whatever degree there would be an always, they would always eat at this place.

“This is Ireland. We should begin with what I was.”

“Sixty-nine?”

“A drunk.”

“Seventy?”

“Keep going.”

“Drink is all you did?”

“It’s a full-time job!”

“Until?”

“Well into my twenties. I lived at home. My father lambasted me, my mother sighed and left St. Patrick’s medals dangling inside my overcoat. It was quite satisfying. Might have continued indefinitely but for the Troubles. I lived in Glengormley, a mixed neighborhood that has yet, even now, to see many tiffs. Horrifically, people get along. Watching news reports, you Americans must have assumed the whole Province was smoking. But swaths grazed on placid as sheep. We watched that footage just as you did. And the peace pockets were the hellholes. Och, sure I ended up in the odd fracas on the Falls, a good place to find drink after hours. But I didn’t spend every Friday out rioting with the rest. I wasn’t invited. I began to feel left out.”

“You’re included now?”

“Of course not. Exclusion is an emotion; you don’t live it down. I was a sickly child. I couldn’t play football. Later, when the boys around me were nipping off to smoke on Sundays, I was still an altar boy, fasting, writing religious sonnets, forswearing sugar in my tea.”

“And you promised yourself every night you wouldn’t wank under the covers. It didn’t work.”

Farrell’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Please.”

“You have a prim side.”

“I prefer the word discreet.”

She trailed a nail down the heartline of his palm and kissed the pulp of his fingertip, like sucking the oyster from a quail. “I don’t often meet men I can embarrass.”

“You can be one smutty item, I must say.”

“See? When was the last time I heard smutty? Ireland. The last bastion of real sex. Real sex is disgusting. Real sex is repressed. Mash down on anything that hard and it just spurts out higher somewhere else. Because every night you plonked away despite yourself, right? And it was great. It’s never been that great since. I’m telling you, all that Catholicism did you a world of good.”

“I thought at one time of becoming a priest.”

“Naturally! Walking around with a hard-on sixteen hours a day, what else was there to do but become a priest?”

Farrell wiped his chin, following Estrin’s hands as she ran them over her arms and bare shoulders. He liked watching a woman touch her own body. “We’re still on the starter,” he pointed out. “I can’t imagine how we’ll make it to coffee without getting arrested.”

“Still, you’re no priest, with that American Express card.”

He shrugged. “Whitewells.”

“The hotel?”

“My hotel.”

Estrin sat back. “How did you come into that?”

“I saved its life so many times, it thinks I’m its mother.”

“Say what?”

“The man who owned Whitewells, Eachann Massey, was a Catholic. But even Republican sympathies and a son in the Officials couldn’t protect the hotel. Once the Provos and Stickies started feuding, the son was a fair liability. Whitewells has always housed plenty of journalists and foreign politicos, and makes an attractively high-profile target.”

“Oh,” Estrin sighed, “I would hate to see that place blown up.” Locals felt the same way, for Belfast’s notoriety was often priced with simple disappointment: just, Och, no. My parents honeymooned in that hotel; they still tell stories about the fruit. We couldn’t afford to stay there ourselves, but some days it’s worth a few extra p to take the weight off in those enormous chairs downstairs and have coffee with whipped cream and scones with wee jars of black currant conserve—And then someday you’re shopping downtown and the pressure changes in your ears; all the windows in Anderson McAuley rattle. You feel nervous, excited, and stretch with everyone else who knows nothing as the peelers cordon off Royal Avenue with white tape. But the excitement dies down and the klaxons leave off until it’s next Saturday and there’s nowhere for coffee but the top floor of C & A or dingy old Kelly’s, where it’s weak as water, and freaking hell, you’d just as well go home.

“I’d hate that, too,” said Farrell. “Why I’ve taken measures downstairs.”

“The security is new?”

“The place was wide open in the seventies. Threats, car bombs out front every month. But Eachann’s IRA connections and Republican politics made it awkward to call the army. So he called me, several times—’81, his sons picked off, one by the Provos, one by the UFF, wife long gone, middle of the hunger strikes Eachann dies, of all things, from natural causes. He left the hotel to me. Claimed if it hadn’t been for O’Phelan there’d be nothing but a carpark to leave.”

“Why had he called you in for bomb scares?”

Farrell looked pained, for he liked to tell his stories systematically. Conversations with Estrin didn’t work that way. “For five years I was an independent bomb disposal man.”

“Independent? Why didn’t you just work for the army?”

“If you’re going to pretend to know me so instinctively, my dear, you’re going to have to ask better questions.”

“No, I can see you in the military. An officer. Shaving in the desert with two tablespoons of water, and no one understands where you keep finding a clean shirt. Brilliant but unorthodox campaign, blind dedication of the men …”

“T. E. Lawrence. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“I guess I was observing: they do.”

He smiled. “All the same, you’re hardly describing any of those poor grubby bastards stationed in these hinterlands. And I’m Catholic; as an Ammunitions Technical Officer I’d likely be shot by my ‘own people.’ Mark the inverted commas, please.”

“Who are your people?”

“I am affiliated with no one. Which has driven the entire Province to distraction.”

“And more than a few women,” Estrin hazarded.

“You have a terrible time staying on politics for more than fifteen seconds.”

“Not really.” She would not be ruffled. “I just don’t see politics as separate. More stuff.”

“How adroitly put,” he said sourly. “At any rate, it took effort to keep the business from growing. Countless eejits wanted to join. I said no. I worked alone. I refused to become one more woolly do-gooder coalition. Mother of God, look at the Peace People: in no time, a snarl of hostile camps scuffling over their constitution, while every streetcorner busybody sniffed about Betty’s mink coat. Envious, divided, a model of the conflict more than a solution to it. I aimed to avoid that.

“At first, I’d do anything to save a life, a knee, or property I happened to like—Whitewells. Anything to take the mickey out of a load of rubbish. I’ve snipped up Gerry Adams’s sound system. I’ve bribed an army helicopter pilot to hover over an Ian Paisley rally close enough that no one could make out a word and women lost their hats. I ran my own dirty-tricks squad. It was all supremely down-to-earth, if sometimes adolescent.”

“Why are you still alive?”

“Good question. You’re getting the knack of this place.”

“Yes,” she said dryly. “So I don’t need to be congratulated every time I seem to realize the IRA is not an Individual Retirement Account.”

“Sorry?”

“You were saying: why you’re not dead.”

“I took care to be a thorn of equal length in everyone’s side. If I dismantled a Provo gelly bomb in a hijacked oil tanker, I’d be sure to loose an angry ram on a Save Ulster from Sodomy rally on the weekend. A balancing act of impartial disruption. I convinced each faction that I was a sufficient liability to its adversaries to keep about.”

“Were you ever interned?”

“Oh, aye. In the first instance, I was pleased. There was a time in West Belfast no one would trust you if you hadn’t been in the Kesh at least seven days. The second and third instances I could have skipped. Face-offs in a white room and a single mattress chained to the floor. A chair if you were lucky. Sleep if you were lucky. Water if you were lucky. I wasn’t lucky.”

“Do you still get harassed?”

“A certain Lieutenant Pim from Thiepval arrived on the scene of a rather wicked job I had already finished; he was charmed. That poor pillock actually did try to get me to join the army. He wanted to work with me. He liked me. He wanted to be my friend.”

“So?”

“I didn’t oblige, but Pim did. He fixed my computer file. Whenever I’m stopped at checkpoints now, they go back to their Land Rover. They come back smiling, and nervous. They shake my hand. They tell me, Safe home. They hope the delay hasn’t caused me any inconvenience.”

“What does it say?”

“Haven’t a baldy.”

Estrin eyed him critically. “I bet you loved being interned.”

“Answering the same question fifty times? Spread-eagled against a wall for six hours?” He considered. “Oh, aye. Those were some of the great moments of my life.”

“As opposed to now?”

His face shadowed, its parallels listed. “I came to realize I was entirely motivated by self-glorification.”

“You’re not anymore?”

“I have made repeated efforts at becoming a butterfly. Sure I’m as much of a worm as ever.”

“Does anyone do anything for anyone else ever?”

“I’ve seen it,” he admitted. “Singed passersby combing into McGrady’s for more survivors as the bar burned after the blast. But most heroism can be explained away as extended self-interest. To make allegiances is to preserve the race, the Catholics, your own family; however your lines are drawn. In which case I am biologically flawed. I do not ally. And I not only refuse to defend my people, but I’m out to destroy myself. I’m a failed mutation, a danger to the species which fortunately has not reproduced. I am a rocky, hostile island. Don’t wreck your ship on my shore.”

But the warning turned on itself. I am so wonderful that I know what’s wrong with me. Estrin was reminded of medieval monks who would whip themselves, feel righteous for whipping themselves, whip themselves for feeling righteous, only to feel righteous all the more and whip themselves again—an endless spiral of shame lapped by self-congratulation. In Ireland to run yourself down was to prove what a fine fellow you really were. “Self-criticism,” she observed, “is a form of preening.”

“You then, my swallow? Are you the world’s helpmate?”

“It’s all I can manage to avoid being a flat-out shithead. And people bungle so much doing ‘good,’ I figure it’s safest to do zip. I don’t hit children; I don’t litter; I also don’t work for the Peace Corps in Zaire. I try to have no effect on my environment whatsoever.”

“But doing nothing often has a great deal of effect. And I get restless. I have to do something even if at any distance I find myself comical.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I’m not nearly so colorful a character, I’m afraid. I’ve gone from prankster to community handyman. At the moment I’m negotiating for the release of two boys held at Secretary of State’s Pleasure. Rather than finagling whirlybirds to descend, I’m trying to get them up again; a woman in Armagh with a house near the heliport is losing her nerves. I’ve helped the area around my office organize against the rebuilding of an RUC station there, since the last thing that keeps you safe in this town is the proximity of the police. And we got blown up last time; it’s someone else’s turn.

“As for the disposal business, I have moved from defusing bombs to politicians. I set the North before myself like a chess problem: As long as the Brits are kicking doors in up the Falls at 6 a.m., firing after eleven-year-old joyriders, and tossing the odd innocent in the Crum without charge, the IRA will flourish; as long as the IRA flourishes, so will the UVF, UFF, and everything else beginning with U. As long as paramilitaries thrive, the troops stay; as long as the troops stay, paramilitaries thrive: a perpetual-motion machine that slows only from the physics of exhaustion.”

“I have never been anywhere with such a plethora of neat formulations about itself.”

“How to get the troops out without leaving behind a month of Bloody Sundays? Next to the North, chess is Snakes and Ladders.”

“So this is the game you play now with Angus MacBride.”

She thought he’d be pleased she’d recognized his friend at the distillery, for they’d not been introduced. Instead, he snapped, “In reference to my current work, you are not to mention anyone’s name in public under any circumstances. Understood?”

Estrin rolled her eyes. “Melodrama.”

“Drama,” he corrected. “You Americans have the hardest time getting it through your heads this is not a TV show.”

“Spare my countrymen for an evening and just insult me.”

“I expect you to keep your mouth shut. Straight enough?”

“Quite. I’m suddenly remembering an appointment later tonight.”

“If you can’t take a little flak across a table, you should keep the date.”

“Ah—Farrell,” she sighed. Sometimes the best way to win is to quit; one hand clutched her napkin, a white flag. “Listen, this isn’t my country and I do put my foot in it. I actually asked a Catholic at the entrance to Sandy Row whether he sympathized with the Provos. The walk was crowded and he looked at me sidelong and said, Some other time. I felt like a twit. I don’t know the rules yet, and on a second dinner certainly don’t know yours. I’m sorry I used anyone’s name and I won’t again, but please don’t rub my nose in it or I really will go home. Because I try, but I slip and some days forget if Molyneaux is UUP or OUP, or especially why that matters. Some days I wake up, I can name the number of my house but not what continent it’s on, the day of the week but not the year. I have too much to remember and more to forget—I need a little leeway.”

“Tenderness,” Farrell corrected, taking one hand from her forehead, the napkin from the left.

“How,” she faltered, for Estrin routinely steadied herself by being inquisitive. “How did you learn to do it? Dismantle bombs?”

“By one of the oldest traditions in the world,” said Farrell. “I apprenticed myself.”

When Farrell paid his membership to Linen Hall, he hardly expected to check out The Beginner’s Guide to Bomb Disposal, but he had to start somewhere and had always taken refuge in libraries. Surprisingly, he did dig up The Anarchist’s Cookbook, full of detailed diagrams on how to construct a book trap, loose-floorboard trap, ballpoint-pen trap—mere doddles. Sure, for a price he could have scored an Explosive Ordnance Disposal manual from the Brits, but this was before Lieutenant Pim, and Farrell’s army connections were understandably slim; before Whitewells, and his pocketbook was slimmer. So his discovery of Device proved a promising, if aggravating, find. Its author, Corporal Porter Edwards Bream, was a veteran of the North Africa campaign from the Second World War, where he’d defused land mines for the Allies. Brutish things, they didn’t apply. But his last term of service was in Northern Ireland. Funny, though nearly brand new, in a few months the book had already achieved that paperweight quality most published works are destined for—the kind of volume used to prop up film projectors or balance the legs of tables. Farrell took it home, and in all the years since the library had never requested its return.

Porter Edwards Bream was of Anglo-Irish stock, one of those sonorous codgers, you could tell by the flyleaf, who never went by less than all three names. Device was an essay. Farrell bristled at Bream’s pretensions to philosophy, but had to admit that for a vanity press the writing was sharp. “A device is a device,” Porter Edwards began. “Remember: big presents come in small packages.” It was an odd ragbag of tidbits, stories, practical advice about the importance of paper clips. “Always be on the lookout for surprise,” he suggested, “but do not flatter yourself you will see it in time. If you did, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?” Porter Edwards saw bomb disposal as metaphor. In the end, he said, the trick was all internal. What would destroy you, as in any Greek tragedy, would be your own character. With booby-trapped bombs in the North, you would be hung by your own predictability—like the boys who were blown away by a pressure switch triggered by the ripping down of slanderous, anti-British posters on a gable wall. You had to overcome yourself, become larger, so you would cease to be manipulated by what you were like. And devices taught humility and respect. Farrell gagged. Whole chapters read like reruns of Kung Fu. “On Immortality and Arrogance” particularly got up his nose: “If you believe you’re immortal you probably think you’re special. You’re not,” Bream wrote flat. “You’re a dummy. Everyone thinks that. It’s only the rare fellows who grasp they can die who have a clue.”

Though by all indications Porter Edwards Bream was a whopping pain in the arse, Farrell needed tutelage, and traced Corporal Bream to the small Yorkshire town of Beverly. At the first pub he hit, Porter’s name worked a treat. “Watch yourself, now,” Farrell was forewarned. “Bream’s a touch of the second sight. Funny—creepy-funny. Might not like what he sees.”

“Bollocks,” said Farrell.

It took an hour to escape all the embellishments and cautions. Christ, the last thing anyone from Ulster hunted was another myth. And Farrell knew how to decode these fables by now: Porter Edwards Bream was an opinionated, abusive drunk. Locals indulged him from their own need, their pitiable internal poverty. Their awe was detestable. Their patience was detestable. They tolerated the corporal’s endless boozy blithering just to have someone to talk about.

He found Bream in a palatial house tended by two doting women whose relation to the man was obscure. An enormous, cigar-fogged old gout, he was not surprised by Farrell’s visit, or particularly curious. For a spindly Catholic to have sought him out all the way from Belfast seemed perfectly reasonable. He was dead senile, and through the afternoon kept falling asleep.

They despised each other straight off. “If there’s anything I can’t bear,” Porter announced not two minutes into their acquaintance, “it’s one more sod’s decided he’s self-destructive. Your sort’s problem: you’re not self-destructive enough! Little better at it and we’d be rid of you! Blast it, know how easy it is to die? If you can’t manage to stick your head in an oven, what kind of nincompoop are you?” Porter slammed down a full liter gauntlet of single malt, and the duel began.

“If we’re talking sorts,” Farrell started in, “why don’t we move on to yours: the fat, spoiled fraud. You fill out a bar. You rant through lulls in conversation, so the lot can lap their beer. Sure at the Rose and Crown didn’t they wax eloquent on Porter Edwards Bream. Naturally that delights you. But without you they’d find some other puppet. They use you—you’re to be wise, to be anecdotal, to be merciless. They make you wise, they feed you lines, they allow you to be merciless. Your audience demands it, all your orneriness and declarations and drink. A retired army corporal with stories. It’s trite. You’ll cough the same tales till you die, like phlegm. In the end, you’re their creature. And you think differently. That’s what’s so paltry and sad.”

“I don’t think in those terms at all, who is whose creature. You’re sick, man. You’ll do a lot of damage thrashing about if you don’t get hold of yourself. It’s always the, quote, self-destructive, do they ever so much as bump their own elbows? Anything but! Oh, the self-destructive, they go for the rest of the world at the throat. Look at you! Trying so hard to hurt my feelings there’s sweat in your hair.”

If so, Farrell hadn’t succeeded. Throwing insults at Porter Edwards Bream was like flinging Harp tins at a Saracen. Farrell could almost hear the clink, the harmless rattle down the street. He felt childish.

“I didn’t come here for sophistry,” Farrell dignified. “I suffered my share in your pretentious little volume, Kahlil Gibran Joins the Army. I need information, and about bombs, not about my soul.”

Porter’s smile spread like something spilled. “Liar. Besides, shaking out your grubby bathmat of a shadow is about all I can offer. The only thing an intelligent man wants to know about bombs is where they are, so he can arrange to be somewhere else. And the Confidential Telephone no longer rings on my desk, boyo.”

The bottle trickled down steadily as an hourglass. Farrell could not remember a more exhausting session before or since. “If you’re supposed to know so bloody much,” Farrell slurred, “see so bloody much, what can you see in me, fella? Mystic guru bomb man? Oh, X-ray vision ATO?”

“I have seen through pressboard.” Porter nodded; his eyes, for the all-seeing, had grown remarkably tiny. “I know what’s inside a bomb by looking at it, though that took years. How they tick, people are easier. Come with instructions printed on the box.”

“And what have you told me, huh, fella? Codswallop.”

“Jesus God, you are desperate,” Porter whispered.

“Holding out? Don’t want to give away the big secret about O’Phelan? Know how many theories I inspire in Belfast? Think you’re the first shaman to come along? Dozens. Women. Dozens. They’re writing novels, some of them. Wanna write a book? About me? Better’n Device. Wick title. Wick book …”

“Go ahead, kick at me all you like. That’s safe. I should keep you here, harmless. Neutralized.”

“With all this revelation about my deep inner self, how could I ever leave?”

“All right …” Porter grumbled. “You want something? A tidbit, a morsel, proof? Why so anxious for what you already know? That you are a bully. That you’re bigger and stronger than you pretend. Asthmatic? Poser! And part of your power is getting people to feel sorry for you.”

Abruptly, Farrell cried. The charges slipped into a tiny hole in his side. “It’s not fair, is it?” he blubbered. “They do, they all feel sorry for me. Bugger, and every one of them’s worse off by far—debt, dead fathers, husbands in gaol … They think that’s all perfectly normal! Me, I’ve always had enough to eat. My mother probably bleeding loves me, even if I can’t admit it. And, Port old boy, I can’t explain it, but lately women fawn all over me. One more potted egocentric. You and I, we’re the same, and you revolt me.”

Farrell sniffled; Bream fell asleep.

It may have been an hour later that Porter roused himself from a snore. “My poor fanatic!” he sighed, air puttering from his fat lips. “Seared by the agony of the world.”

Farrell looked hard. Was he joking? But Porter went back to sleep with a little smile. This was the joke: that even myths need myths, or especially, and after years of soldiering on as one himself, Porter had knighted a Greatheart in his own study, a hero for heroes—now, Farrell lad, where would you get yours? It was a way of no longer taking Farrell seriously, for in an instant he transformed Farrell to a like-minded larger-than-life to adore or deplore, rather than one tall stranger on his doorstep with whom he might permit a smaller, more complex relationship that in the end is so much more flattering. Farrell was surprised to find his new title a demotion. He had been cursed: a Character.

So that last bit, it was nothing but meanness. But as for being a bully, Farrell subscribed. He didn’t change, mind you, but attended, how he enticed women with his own Troubles—now there was a capital T. The conceit was they wanted to cure him, but he discovered their sympathy was sicker than that: they thought his unhappiness was better than theirs. Incredibly, it was envy. The women saw themselves as merely neurotic, while Farrell O’Phelan was afflicted with the agony of the world—they could buy that? True, Farrell’s desolation was his pride and joy; all polished up, Estrin, it is my accomplishment. But the value of the dolor relied on mirrors; it was a magic show. Alone in a room, he knew it for a shabby thing: a worn top hat, a few cards, a rabbit. Farrell’s Troubles were just like theirs: his only access to the agony of the world was his own, one more private purgatory of billions, and this was the secret Porter wouldn’t tell and Farrell intended to keep.

Like Estrin’s monks, it was a circle: outsiders assumed Farrell was a saint; Farrell knew he was a shite; but, “The final irony,” Bream noted casually a few weeks later as they dissected the mercury tilt switch, “is you’re actually much nicer than you know.”

You never explained,” Estrin pursued, “what got you into bombs in the first place.”

“You like stories out of order. Why don’t we begin with why I quit.” He motioned for the check. “But first we will prop you on three fat pillows with a mug of hot chocolate. That is what you need, my swallow. For just taking your head off to the contrary, I learned from my work that I can be quite compassionate.” He sounded perplexed.

chapter eight
Big Presents Come in Small Packages

Even before it fell to him altogether, Farrell had unofficially headquartered in Whitewells, coopting upper rooms for the private hair-tearing of women sure they’d been followed from Turf Lodge. From early on, he and the hotel were fated for each other. Amid so many alienated factions, Farrell and this institution were alienated from every faction. Where the one solace of having enemies is having allies, where the one comfort of having parts of town you cannot go to is parts you can, Farrell operated alone, equally unwelcome everywhere, only in this lobby at home. They were exiled lovers, on an island made of islands a flagless galleon, precariously afloat; in their grandiosity and hauteur, both anachronistic and often disliked, for they would not apologize for having a little class in a city that exalted tatty wool caps and outdoor toilets as badges of socialist nobility. Technically Catholic, but declared by all sides open season, together they shipped an indiscriminate aversion in a place that recognized as valid any position but none.

For it was inexplicable how either Whitewells or O’Phelan had persisted. When the first rumors circulated of Farrell’s one-man bomb disposal and dirty-tricks squad, locals laughed and acted surprised when they met him alive at the end of the week. Likewise, Whitewells, festooned up there on Royal Avenue, about the only truly splendid architectural enormity left in all of Belfast besides City Hall itself, had about as good a chance of surviving twenty years of bombings as a Methodist all kitted out in his orange sash pounding a Lambeg drum down the back streets of Ardoyne. With the Provos, the Stickies, the Irps, and a whole smattering of Loyalist paramilitaries from the UFF to the Shankill Butchers on the one side, and Farrell, six four maybe, but a Bergen-Belsen 155, and a ten-floor Baroque bull’s-eye on the other, any shrewd bookie would give O’Phelan and his ridiculous hotel fifty to one. Yet despite the odds, Whitewells had still not been intimidated into the loose chippings and landfill of more acquiescent buildings; and Farrell continued to gangle into her lobby without a gun. Farrell and Whitewells recognized each other as being equally implausible.

Besides, the bar served Farrell after hours and didn’t turf him out when he became—ah—expansive. Brandy and port came in snifters large enough for Farrell’s attenuated fingers, where down the road they’d pour VSOP in a water glass, and when a drink looks like swill it could as well be. As for wine, they didn’t stock the whites you could pour over ice cream. But it was whiskey Whitewells understood best, not just Black Bush but Crested Ten and Jameson’s 1780; Islay malts, Bowmore, The Macallan, Laphroaig. When they made it hot, they warmed the glass and dissolved not too much sugar, pressed cloves neatly into the zest, and squeezed the lemon, and as for proportions, they seemed to understand that the charm of the drink did not rest in its hot water.

Then, the generous character of Whitewells was a credit to Eachann Massey, a man whose problems were matched only by his patience in their wake, one of those exemplars who serve as veritable advertisements for suffering: surely if pain produced such grace it was underrated. His wife had walked into the wrong grocery back in ’71 and inadvertently become one of the vegetables—no, you see, this is just the kind of joke Eachann had been easy with himself. Eachann’s life might have been better off with a few more pounds of explosive under that counter, for she lived three more years propped in the kitchen by the radio, spud eyes, her hands moist and flaccid like overdone cabbage. Berghetta had been a lively, sarky woman, with a bit of a sally to her, a wide turn-of-the-century sway to her hips; it had been a fine marriage, and her death dragged out for months in anguish. Yet though the bomb was Provo, it made no impression on Eachann’s politics. He’d told her not to shop the Shankill anymore, but the stores were cheaper and close by and no one told Berghetta where to go. Besides, she’d not liked what was happening, and Berghetta was one of those people convinced enough of her own world that she was sure if she proceeded as if things were as she wished the universe would conform. If she shopped the Shankill as if it were safe, it would be safe. In a way she was right—if the whole Province refused to acknowledge the lines of battle, they would not exist.

However, they did exist for Eachann, who chose a position before or beyond disgust; Farrell respected such people, admired their ability to take a stand, however flawed, take responsibility for the consequences of that position, even as he loathed the rhetoric and closed-mindedness certainty implied. The shrapnel in his wife’s head had not fractured Eachann’s politics, because they were not reactive. He’d maintained an opposition to the British Empire that was thoughtful and impervious, and he never feared anything would happen to challenge his perspective. As a result, he’d been relaxed and relaxing, for he did not have to constantly flog his ideas to other people in order to sell them to himself.

For what the copious flow of foreign Experts so regularly failed to grasp here was the essential integrity of nearly every point of view. Each party had assembled a puzzle that fit together. The North as object was an ingenious curio which from one side appeared an ostrich; another, a postman; another, a washing machine. That’s why arguments never went anywhere: each picture was true. (In fact, the terror of completely looking at anything from another person’s perspective is that he is always right.) However, in the logical reasoning out of these positions, little girls’ scalps plastered to the sides of houses, kneecaps shattered into their cartilage, a great Victorian market mangled and gave way to slapped-up, slick-bricked shops with no memory of high hats and fine, tiny-handled tea sets but only of polyester knits and Tupperware and destruction. From these reasonable positions sprang unreasonable children, who threw petrol bombs not because they were Republican but because they were bored. Though Farrell may have relinquished the satisfactions of surety, he did cling to one vision: that here the cost of conviction had risen too high, and he refused to have its price exacted from his island.

Hence the saving of the hotel over and over, for Farrell would not have Whitewells taken from his world. He imagined that the bomb that got away would crumble him worst if he remained behind. In his nightmares he never dissolved in a flash of white heat, but was left kicking through another rubble in the city center, as he’d once scuffed through Smithfield Market, finding caps of Crested Ten, shards of snifters, spoons, melted picture frames, smoking tufts of brocade, breathing the stink of materials you’d never think would burn. Maybe it was warped to feel so deeply for a building, but Farrell did understand the affection designed into the neutron bomb. Still, it would take him several of these rescues and a last night to feel the same protective passion for his own life.

Bream taught Farrell all he knew, which is not to say they grew fond of one another. Farrell battled for hardcore information about how to neutralize a trembling fuse through a barrage of philosophy. Though the hemorrhaged corporal made an unlikely mystic, every switch had its tract, like the Salvation Army, where you had to sit through “Rock of Ages” to earn your soup. Even the way Bream referred to bombs suggested religious awe, rarely pronouncing B-O-M-B, but euphemizing, the thing, the device, what you’re dealing with, as the Orthodox avoid the real word for Jehovah. “Remember, no matter how many times you’ve seen the same box, the same size, the same switch, treat every device as a stranger.”

“I treat my own mother as a stranger,” Farrell quipped. “It shouldn’t be so hard with a crate.”

“On the contrary,” said Bream. “It’s bastards like you can get quite matey with crates.”

They worked late, and Farrell was not allowed any whiskey until eight—when Porter would intone, Ye-et I wi-ill be me-e-e-e-erry! like the end of Ramadan. Porter himself wouldn’t touch the stuff before the dot of noon.

“Who’s to say,” Farrell commented two weeks in, “I’m not in the IRA? In which case you’re a right eejit.”

“But you’re not.”

“No—”

“So I’m not.”

End of story.

“Besides,” Bream added the next week, picking up the way they did now, all conversations going on at once. “If you were a Provo, you might have had the courtesy to offer me a few quid.”

Farrell shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

“You’re a taker.”

This was true. He sozzled Bream’s whiskey every night and never once replenished the cabinet. He sat down to meals and didn’t offer to wash up, didn’t question that the two women prepared them, and didn’t even learn their names. Odd, fresh from such a guilty childhood. But Farrell had indexed the population according to how comfortable they were taking, and how much. The more you took, the more you got. Farrell accepted what was given him not because he’d been a spoiled little boy but because he was clever.

Porter was a regular anthology of grim fairy tales, but Farrell didn’t always find these instructive—like the time Porter leaned over a clock and found the long hand actually touching the contact. The corporal ran. Nothing happened. Later he found that a blob of luminescent paint on the hand had insulated the metal from completing the circuit.

“So?” asked Farrell, annoyed. “You were lucky. Save the pointless anecdotes for the Rose and Crown.”

“There is a point. Never reduce yourself to luck. I shouldn’t have been bending over any clock.”

“Then get a desk job,” Farrell muttered.

“You have GOT to concede to operate remote!”

“I am tired of operating remote!” and though this was one more running argument, the cry came from so deep inside the Catholic that Porter retreated.

When Farrell left Beverly, Bream handed him a package of army pigsticks, all tied up like a pencil box for Farrell’s first day of school. There was no smooching, no promises that Farrell would be in touch. Farrell did hear, not much later, that Porter had snuffed it. His off-license, the Rose and Crown, even the taxi company that slopped the corporal into the back seat evenings—all sent flowers. Farrell didn’t. He felt no more grief over the old man’s death than he would have over his own.

Besides, in Belfast Farrell had his hands full, with a lot to learn. Bream was right, the technology was always evolving; you had to keep pace with the state of the art. “Irish, don’t study history for once!” Bream opined, warning that most of what he’d taught Farrell was outdated. “And every device captured alive is an informant.” For neutralized bombs weren’t simply triumphs but tiny universities you could take back home.

Farrell spent the evenings he was not out on call reconstructing the latest ingenuity, so when the circuit connected a light bulb went on. Good practice, lousy symbolism: explosion as bright idea. His homework grew more demanding by the day. The Provos were getting crafty at packaging, scrambling their tokens of affection with irrelevant wiring, so that radiograms looked like the scribbling of disturbed children. Some of these boxes, too, were so rife with anti-handling devices that getting inside was a Houdini demonstration in reverse, all locked with chains and ropes and handcuffs with a clock ticking.

Still, those were the days, when disposal had a little variety. Lately all you heard was Semtex, Semtex, Semtex—Coca-Cola to British Telecom, every product line suffered monopoly over time. In the latter seventies, you found Frangex, Gelamex, Quarrex, and piquant blends of HME, from the sharp diesel of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to the fragrant marzipan of nitrobenzene. (ANNI made you dizzy, and Farrell knew British operators who could no longer eat certain Christmas cakes, since the smell of almonds made them sick. Farrell, on the other hand, would walk in bakeries just to breathe. The smell was nostalgic.) Back then commercial was scarce and the opposition was resourceful. “I can walk into any kitchen and make a hole in the room,” Porter had declared. “Soap suds, flour, seltzer; throat lozenges, sugar, cream of tartar, even dried bananas: add ten minutes of education and stir.” Dead on, for Farrell dismantled bombs made of anything from fermented garbage to Styrofoam coffee cups, in casings from a tampon incinerator to a stuffed toy bear.

As a result Farrell’s relationship to ordinary objects electrified. Piles of shoe boxes, a pocketbook by an empty chair, sacks of rice delivered to Chinese restaurants all shivered with menace; mailings from the Ulster Museum threatened more than harassment for checks. Not to mention cars. Farrell couldn’t walk down the street without noting whether the Cortina there was riding low, or pass pubs without knocking on arriving barrels of Tennants, confirming by the cong that they were only full of beer. They weren’t always, either. Farrell’s whole world anthropomorphized. Call it paranoia, insanity, but for Farrell, whose environment had more the ugly tendency to go numb, in whose former life people had become objects rather than the other way around, the animation was delightful, like living in a cartoon where clocks danced, refrigerators talked, the cow jumped over the moon. So did Farrell, if he wasn’t careful.

Those days, too, the business was surprisingly personal, if sometimes infantile—like the wine case left in Whitewells Magic Markered in three-inch-high letters, IRA on one side, TE-HEE, HE-HEE, HO-HO, HA-HA! on the other. He grew to recognize the style of particular bombmakers, each with their explosives of choice, a distinctive twist to their connections, pet booby traps. He gave them names, too: Rat, Mole, Toad, and Mr. Badger. Farrell had favorites. Irrationally, he preferred the better-made bombs. He scorned sloppy wiring. Inaccurate switches made of clothespins and rubber bands filled him with the same disdain he felt toward incompetence anywhere. Elegant devices filled him with admiration. He had to remind himself they were intended to spread old ladies on Fountain Street like sour cream, because prizing open a carton all neatly layered with Semtex and fresh herring, Farrell wanted to shake somebody’s hand.

Farrell had run his private bomb disposal service for five years. However inconceivably, he was still alive and that made him cocky. They had been far more active years than he’d ever have predicted, for potty as locals considered his project at first Farrell found he filled a need. In the mid-seventies, Provisional bombings of other Catholics were not so rare. Weary of the dole, the odd Taig would join the army or RUC, double targets for being Crown forces and turncoats. “Known” informers could consider themselves fertilizer. For a time, Catholic bakers, lorry drivers, even binmen who served the army would sometimes notice fishing line over the gates to their walkways. (The Provos had a faddish side—for a while there, fishing-line trip switches were all the rage, and Farrell would constantly reach into his suit pockets to find stray lengths of nylon tangled with his change.)

Furthermore, in the absence of police protection for large parts of West Belfast, the Provos had assumed law enforcement; their courts were quick, their sentences simple, since—well, you could hardly blame them—they couldn’t maintain a private Long Kesh of their own. Robbery on behalf of the IRA was respectable, but the organization looked askance at lads who asked chip shops for donations to more obscure causes. As a result, Farrell had rescued more than one lowlife hood the world was surely better without, but O’Phelan’s service was ever distinguished by its indiscrimination.

For Farrell’s clients were by no means all Catholic. While at first none too eager to call in a papish bomb man, plenty of Prods were even less anxious to call in the army to complain those Provy wankers had hit their brothel, their unlicensed bookie joint, their cache of Kalashnikovs. Uncooperative victims of Loyalist protection rackets had often preferred Farrell to the RUC likely to press for names, and it was healthier not to turn in these civil servants on either side of the divide. Protestant businessmen sometimes planted bombs on their own premises to collect government compensation; Farrell had twice been asked to disassemble devices by next-door shopkeepers unwilling to inform, but equally unenthusiastic about getting in on the scheme. Besides, as far as the Prods were concerned, why not a Catholic bomb man? The thing goes off, one less Taig.

Just practically, it was sometimes simpler to drag that lanky bastard in, with an unclaimed package on a shoemaker’s bench that could as well be cakes as Togel. The army would ship the whole block up the road and divert traffic and string that bloody white plastic cordon everywhere, all very well if the whole panto was still interesting, which it wasn’t the third time in a week. O’Phelan was sure enough a wog, some even claimed not the full shilling, but he worked well and fast and alone and didn’t fuck about, just sent you down the way, and by the time you’d scoffed a pack of fags he was done, like. The army would tinker for hours with their wretched robot, which never seemed to work, and send it into the shoemaker’s from half a mile away, all for three sticky buns. O’Phelan? He looked in the bag. Took a bite. You bought him a drink, and that was that.

While the Provos were none too delighted to have their gratuities waylaid, they could only applaud Farrell’s undermining of Orange racketeering and compensation fraud, and they took particular pleasure, being themselves keen for panache, in some of O’Phelan’s more outlandish pranks, particularly the ones involving cattle—Paisley’s ram, or the bull he rented for the Apprentice Boys parade. More than one pint was raised up Andytown Road after the Great Bonfire Sabotage of ’79. No one ever figured out what exactly got sprayed or sprinkled or nested into the piles of planks and tires and shipping flats compiled over the months to celebrate William of Orange’s tired old triumph over James at the Battle of the Boyne, but once those monsters went up, this unbelievable reek rose over the whole of the Shankill, to drift in a noxious cloud all the way to City Hall, with a smell so censorious it amounted to political commentary.

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