Ordinary Decent Criminals

  ONE: Finally, forcing it, you did come, in a little loveless squirt, an excuse for an orgasm, its only pleasure that the fiasco was over and you could at last light out to Wellington Park for soup or make it to Simpsons before they ran out of the Irish Times. While no more than a puddle on the sheet, the squirt was still vital, since, sheepish though the two of you might feel inside at what a bollocks you’d made of the afternoon, it still satisfied pride: zip up, you’d done your job and it was over.

  Yet this solution, a pale, symbolic conclusion, was difficult to organize. Certainly this whole last six months, with Enniskillen, Seawright, McMichael, Stalker, the Birmingham Six decision, Gibraltar, Milltown, the Andytown and Avenue Bar massacres, there was a sense that things were coming to a head. But how many times had it seemed like that here? Wasn’t it just like when the sweat was flying and you were flaunting every which way about the mattress and you couldn’t believe you weren’t climaxing, but you weren’t? When somehow the more flamboyant you got, the more likely you never would? Once exploding eleven civilians at a memorial service or riddling an open bar with automatics only constitutes one more thrust, how could you tell coming from a passing shudder? The more that happened here, the more every “atrocity” listed to ordinary wanking away. Even the word atrocity (now, now he remembered who the woman was) had fallen to the sound of box or weather, like the word come itself, which camouflaged so demurely in the scrub of go and stay.

  TWO: You looked each other in the eye and confessed; with the right woman, you laughed, though that was rare. Bag it, pack it in, hang it up, we’re tired and this is not happening, no way. We’re dead bored. We’re sore. Let’s get dressed. It’s still light out, and we could walk by the Lagan. Farrell would never forget a particular woman about ten years ago who had feverishly lavished herself on top of him for half an hour. They’d both seemed content, in the middle levels of excitement; the endless shifting of position as the clock ticked on had not yet set in. And just exactly as the first fear filtered through his head that he was not climbing but had reached a plateau, she stopped, cold. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she’d said, and he was so uninsulted he replied, “Neither do I.” She slipped off, though he was still perfectly hard, and sat cross-legged on the floor with the paper, cheerfully checking cinema listings. She would not be trapped by form, the rules of pride. She would not fuck just because she had started. A deeper, private pride prevented her from humping on when she had tired. In short, she knew how to quit. A whole province of such people could turn off the Troubles like a switch.

  Then, how likely was that? How many women had resigned so gracefully, and had Farrell himself bailed out of anything, ever? Didn’t he particularly remember that afternoon? Sure he’d met single remarkable cheek-turners here, quitters of the best sort, Gordon Wilsons, even if I forgive the men who murdered my daughter had, as Farrell predicted, become a cliché. But one and a half million people were suddenly to become so self-possessed, nonreactive, smart, perfect? And then the Kingdom would descend, he supposed. Right. If the Bible taught you one thing, it was not to hold out for the Second Coming if you couldn’t even manage the first one.

  THREE: You petered off. There are limits. Over the hours a man would gradually grow spongy. In one more experiment with nooky over or under or to another side, the implement would slip and refuse to go back in—not out of conviction, but only: I cannot, I cannot go on. Even if I think I should, I’m raw and slackened; I’m not unwilling, but I cannot. A simple organic failure. Was that the answer: to let the fuck squeegee on until unavoidable sogginess set in, the bog steeped in its own juices and sank, unable to rise to one more occasion, so finally on hearing of another rooftop snipe-shoot, another agricultural show blown to hell outside the exhibit on supercows, no one has any response whatsoever? Not because they will not—but because they cannot? Weren’t there plenty of fatigued Hard Men in West Belfast whose erections had died?

  But what if it was possible to hand the lay of the land on to the next man: Here, you, fuck her fresh, my balls are blue? On to young boys for whom all pleasure is new, with priapic hard-ons like plastic bullets? To sixteen-year-olds filling cider bottles with petrol, smashing toilets of abandoned houses with slabs of chassis from burned Ulsterbuses smoking in front of Divis Flats? These are the fuckers you expect to get tired?

  FOUR: You took a little turn; she touched just the right place down at the root of you, and even after all this creaky seesaw geriatrics you really start to fuck, for true—how could you not have been doing this before? The position of course no longer matters, but only the abandon. You are all-out, driving home, until you come from the whole lower half of your body, you come from the magazine, a mortar load of a come, a bazooka come, and you blast her to bits, to hell—

  Aye? Line up the rocket launchers? Isn’t that what everyone wants, anyway? We’ll all die at the end of the day, right, and who wants to cut out with cancer of the colon? Why not die shooting your wad all over the whole bloody island? Why not close your eyes and throw yourself into one blind, gushy, sloshy last screw? For even the odd facile visitor had suggested the simple solution of civil war.

  Now, nearing Newry, in the drafty black taxi Farrell was sweating. His pictures might have solved nothing, but they were the right pictures. Farrell’s people were fucking each other. That’s what was wrong with so much of the day-old-bread political analysis dusting up in Linen Hall: it wasn’t slick and viscous enough. Those Cambridge prats were too well schooled to loosen their ties, trace the insides of their thighs with the tips of their pencils, and scratch, Right, Northern Ireland is a bad fuck. They’re still getting off on it, but they can’t come. And it took more and more stimulation for either partner to feel anything at all.

  After prolonged, pointed flappings of the peephole, the door opened to confirm the worst Farrell had heard about these people: good Lord, they had sunk as low as Callaghan. The two men said nothing. Farrell nodded in a more dignified greeting than the man deserved. Callaghan returned with the squeezed smile of a baby messing its nappies.

  So the RIP had resorted to mucking out the Green Door. Wasn’t that the rub: you didn’t need a license to found a paramilitary organization, did you? For the recently formed Rest In Pieces broke all the rules. They blew up far too many pensioners splurging home with jam tarts. And the Rips had not been briefed about pet death. In their most famous incident, they had bombed a children’s birthday party in Carryduff, maiming two miniature ponies. Farrell had actually admired the job, for the bomb was the cake, wired to connect when the steel knife sliced two sheets of foil layered into the icing—great stuff, popped balloons, screeching kiddies, horsie-spattered wrapping paper, earning the RIP headlines tall and black as the magician’s top hat.

  To the Provos this was a massive PR hemorrhage, for in the last ten years the Provisionals had pursued a deliberate strategy of targeting Brits and peelers as opposed to real human beings. Civilians were “mistakes,” occasionally blown to hell because, gosh, they just wouldn’t get out of the way.

  But Rips claimed their difference with the Provisionals was ideological. They cheerfully admitted, for example, to being sectarian. This was a war against the Brits and the Prods. And if the whole concept of an Armed Struggle was to “make Northern Ireland ungovernable,” then you just had to wreak havoc, full stop. The more gruesome the deed, the better the copy. They had a point—Rips got marvelous press, of which, they charged, the Provos were jealous.

  Bollocks, the Provos told Farrell. A Rip wouldn’t know an idea if it sat on his face. They hit on old ladies because, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the army had guns! Just as Loyalists had given up hunger striking for the Five Demands because they got hungry, the RIP didn’t go after security forces because someone might get hurt.

  Now they did anyway. The RIP ratio of own goals to successful operations resembled that of divorces to successful marriages in the United States. And while these wayward hobby kits in Newry basements had the advantage of t
hinning RIP ranks in a pleasant natural selection—every people should be so designed that below a certain IQ they spontaneously combust—the Provos were annoyed that freelance incompetence was reflecting on established Republicans. They had worked hard to earn their reputation for discipline and technical sophistication, and prized more than any single trophy in the conflict the word sifted back from NIHQ that the ATOs had “tremendous respect” for the IRA. They were not about to return to the days of joke butt because of a small clueless fringe that didn’t know the difference between Cordtex and jump rope.

  So Farrell had been asked to negotiate; though he had enough on his hands with the conference and the referendum only eight months away, this headache was right up his street. Because the Provos were rapidly reaching the end of their fuse, threatening to march in and wipe the RIP off the face of their earth, as they’d nearly done with the Officials in the early seventies. Before taking drastic measures, however, they had empowered Farrell, grudgingly, to offer the RIP membership in the PIRA, though everyone knew perfectly well the RIP would never be asked to do more than make trips to Busy Bee for carry-out coffee. Farrell felt uncomfortably as he followed Callaghan that this wasn’t much of a chip to bargain with. Rips were sulky, unruly children. They had either been rejected out of hand from the IRA—which was now about as hard to get into as the Malone Golf Club; things were hard all over—or had been laid off when the organization more than halved its people in converting to a cell structure for tighter security in ’77. Paramilitary redundancies, the RIP were an embittered lot, and on some level their strikes on pensioners were aimed less at Prods than at Big Daddy Provo, who wasn’t going to tell them what to do.

  So while quietly recoiling at the sight of Callaghan’s backside—the tight beige shirt rode up his spare tire, trousers slumped down the crease of his bum—Farrell recited to himself all the advantages of the RIP coming under Provisional wing: better munitions, access to explosive experts, extensive network of safe houses, reliable escape routes to the South; established reputation, sound funding; smarter than you are, better crack, and from the look of that sorry Whyte and Mackay on the table there, pricier whiskey by far; why the Army Council never serves less than Jameson’s—

  Farrell smiled: after so much effort at dismantling the things, to be selling one organization to another because the larger one made better bombs.

  There was something about the setup from the start that Farrell didn’t like. There were five people in the room, and somehow that was one too many; and they were all men. With no female at hand he felt he had no one to appeal to.

  Further, the house itself was an unending aesthetic assault. The curtains were nailed up, the pink carpet balded, the furniture bunched with sheets. There were jars. Everywhere, with bits, shells, short pencils written down to the eraser, a plastic swizzle stick with a whistle on the end, rocks that probably looked pretty wet on the beach but, dry, looked like driveway gravel. A single Judy Collins album, warped, Judy looking woeful; two paperbacks: Serpico and Wildflowers of Antrim. Not even bad taste, just no taste at all. The room did not cohere; like Ulster, it did not know what it was.

  Further, it was a place without care: a petrified bouquet in black water. A calendar from 1982; a Yellow Pages from 1979; an unplugged digital clock stuck at 20:58, significantly. One dirty fork. And Farrell knew that fork. It had been there long enough to have become The Dirty Fork by the Brown Chair, and no one would ever move it or clean it because now it belonged there.

  Farrell was hard-pressed to finger why the house disturbed him so, except that it seemed too perfectly his image of what would happen to his mother if his father died; or, if he was not to hide behind the woman’s skirts for once, of his own life if he ever climbed fully inside a bottle of Talisker. He could see himself living here, and it was the queer tug of the place more than its tattiness that repulsed him.

  More practically, it bothered Farrell that the owners of the house were not present. There was a dress on the sofa, photos of pimply children on the mantel—a woman did live here, if a bit depressed. How had the RIP gotten the house? And what had they done with its tenants?

  However, he needn’t have worried about the hostess. And he needn’t even have worried about the impending Provy extermination of the RIP. It was time for Farrell O’Phelan’s world to shrink perfectly to the size of Farrell O’Phelan. Because Michael Callaghan had a gun.

  “Pull up a chair,” invited Callaghan.

  Farrell descended to the straight-back slowly. Callaghan rested the barrel against Farrell’s temple, nesting it in the thick shock of gilt gray hair, of which Callaghan, with his own weedy remnants, must have been jealous.

  It was one of those moments Farrell had heard others rerun, claiming how they never felt more alive, they never knew more clearly they didn’t want to die … But tonight in no way repeated the Brown Thomas bag clicking pristinely on the roof. Farrell was far more overcome by a sensation of unreality: the gun looked a toy. It had such a deceptively simple feeling; the solid cold metal felt nice. He was reminded of the way Estrin always nestled her snifter by her eye, the way candlelight glinted through the cognac and threw amber patches on her cheek.

  It was a salvatory vision, benevolent, golden, and he wrested himself from it, tempted by rounding himself into her globe, hiding under the dark curls, and sinking into a bath of Courvoisier up to his chin. He had to remind himself that the object at his head was lethal, for in Belfast you got inured to these things; Farrell had frequently ordered himself on the street to notice soldiers casually swinging their SLRs: Remember what they’re for? Those aren’t hurley sticks, boyo. And this was no cool glass of expensive brandy in his hair.

  His body knew what a gun was. Already pressed wool creases clung in damp wrinkles to his thighs. Farrell had to stop himself from loosening his collar. His heart pulsed in his teeth; the jars with shells and pencils bulged forward with every beat. Whistles on swizzle sticks began to trill. Faded prints gorged with the unhealthy color of overripe fruit. Spotting the crusty fork, Farrell felt sick.

  He wondered later at the deluge, the earthquake, the nausea tonight, when he had approached so many ominous packages in the face of which these symptoms had been mild. But somehow no matter how sinister a box or milk churn or oil tanker could appear, however he might anthropomorphize its intentions to get him, these objects had never crossed into the animate, quite. He’d always felt he had the better of them; so far he’d been right. No bag, deadly as its contents, can conceivably equal another man flicking off the safety catch.

  “What is your name?” asked Callaghan.

  “You know my name,” Farrell whispered.

  “What is your name?” The barrel nudged.

  Farrell felt his face flush. He didn’t answer.

  Callaghan went down on one knee. It was hard to say if he was smiling, but his eyes were bright. “I didn’t catch that.”

  This time the voice sounded different, and Farrell realized that Callaghan would shoot.

  Now it was clear why the gun had seemed “unreal.” He’d seen this scene before. Farrell lived in an era when two dimensions had overtaken three. Real life was subordinated to wide screen, the very inventor of “real life”—for before the talkies, what other kind of life was there? The phrase itself suggested a lack of confidence, as if the audience suspected time between tickets amounted to a long advert. And here he was for once in this truly filmworthy tableau, and it didn’t measure up.

  CALLAGHAN (increasingly threatening)

  I didn’t catch that.

  CAMERA SLOWLY MOVES IN on O’PHELAN’S face, his eyes moist with a hint of breakdown; O’PHELAN’S P.O.V.: pan of tawdry hijacked two-up-two-down; CLOSE-UP on woman’s dress on the sofa. He glimpses his reflection in the photographs and is immediately steadied by it. CAMERA PULLS BACK; beside O’PHELAN, CALLAGHAN seems shabby and small. Suddenly we feel that the man with the weapon is not the one with the power at all.

  O’PHELAN (steely, ur
bane)

  Unable to even write the line, Farrell was overcome with incoherent, helpless fury. What a load of shite he’d been fed. The camera retreats six more feet; cables trail in the foreground, a pretty girlfriend paints her nails off set. Right. And if the line doesn’t come off quite cool enough, they can shoot the scene again. What a sell. Because nothing Farrell had ever seen in a theater had prepared him for the banality of a Thursday night, filthy carpet, old calendars, and some greasy pillock who had Farrell suddenly and truly at his mercy and on whom Farrell would never necessarily turn the tables before the credits rolled. What is your name? Not an inch of celluloid had ever taught him what to say back. Because no one was actually going to shoot Clint Eastwood in the head.

  Farrell looked at his lap. “Farrell O’Phelan.”

  Now it didn’t matter to be seen loosening his collar. Callaghan was at last clearly smiling. “What is your name?”

  “Farrell O’Phelan.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Farrell O’Phelan.”

  “I seem to have forgotten your name, now.”

  The rest of the room had begun to laugh. Farrell lost count of the number of times they asked him. The others took turns. Once or twice he didn’t respond, but any resistance was pointless after answering at all; and though somewhere around the twentieth time he raised his voice in exasperation, on into the thirties he grew patient, dully prepared to repeat himself all night. While the interviewers varied their question a bit to avoid this, Farrell, in ceaselessly repeating the same syllables, began to trip over the words. This amused his audience no end.

  It was the ultimate desecration, when your own name no longer sounds familiar, when there no longer seems any reason the Far comes before the rell, or the lan after the Phe—and where to fit the O’? Anywhere, anywhere at all, and why not add other letters, which he did, generously, D’s and S’s galore, until the answer to What is your name? was truly I don’t know.