Ordinary Decent Criminals

  Estrin, however, suffered a domestic terror of a lower order, for when he suggested breakfast downtown she preferred to eat in. And fair play to her—the eggs were loose, the oranges Israeli; he could have sliced his coffee with a knife and fork. “You should try short order,” he commended.

  “I have.”

  “Is there any work you’ve not done?”

  “Sure. Anything important. And anything for a long time.” She hugged her coffee and eyed him from behind her wayward hair. “Are you feeling better?”

  “I feel nothing. Is that better?”

  She gathered shirttails to her lap. “I’ve never seen you like that.”

  “I’ve never been like that.” Or so he assumed, though he could no longer remember last night, exactly. It had been cartoned up; he couldn’t get at it. He was left with information. It was already a story he could tell. “I do feel,” he amended, “disappointed.”

  “With yourself.”

  “Oh, aye. But with the event as well. It was tinny. Someone threatened to kill me and the experience still felt—”

  “Fake,” she finished for him.

  Farrell was surprised. Tentatively, he confided about Clint Eastwood.

  “I have an older brother,” Estrin began, not changing the subject. “Dropped out of school at fourteen, ran away from home, hitchhiked. Mime and Stoppard, mescaline, Jefferson Airplane. I’ve always admired him, though don’t imagine it works in the other direction. Billy started his own construction business, self-taught. I must have been ten when he first asked me, ‘So when are you going to experience real life?’ This became his litany. Ever since, I’ve been trying to be real. Sometimes I wonder if I travel just to impress my older brother.”

  “Do you think you could go back now and he’d say anything different?”

  “Of course not. Especially, the more places I go he hasn’t been, the more I’ll be a piddler. I’m the velveteen rabbit who will always have a bit too much fur. The Philippines wouldn’t count because I cooked, which was girl’s work, the hotel was upper class, so I obviously couldn’t consort with real Filipinos, and didn’t I get a lot of sun? It was all very well to counsel drug addicts in Berlin, but that was no substitute for being one. I’ve begun to understand that real to Billy Lancaster means being Billy Lancaster, a disaster I wouldn’t wish on anyone but himself.”

  “How’s he sorted out now?”

  “Moved to Allentown. Business fluctuates wildly. In the black it’s steak and cognac, in the red cornflakes and cognac. Sometimes I think he uses Rémy instead of milk.” She paused. “I lie. Lately he’s skipping the cereal altogether.”

  “Your brother has a problem?”

  “My brother is a festival of problems. If that’s reality, Billy’s real as sin. In the middle of a divorce, which gives him the convenient excuse to pickle himself just exactly as much as he would if he were still married … I’m sorry, this depresses me.”

  “Maybe not enough.”

  “No, I hate seeing him fall apart. It’s hard to find people to admire. I like tall men, don’t I? I like looking up.” She reached for a crust on Farrell’s plate, having eating nothing herself; it saddened him to see her eat scraps. Her diet suggested poor nourishment of larger proportions. “I’ll probably try to debunk you,” she added. “Don’t let me succeed.”

  “I don’t want your admiration.”

  “Oh, I forgot. You’re a worm.” She leaned over and kissed him, a critical caution clearly wasted.

  “Anyway, I’ve decided this complex isn’t exclusive to me. Like, I come from an ill country, but not sick the way foreigners think. Sure it’s the land of graniti makers and soda streamers, but give us a little spiritual credit—I’ve never met a single American who claimed if he could only upgrade to a multisystem VCR he’d be happy. Stuff becomes part of the problem: the more bother it saves us, the less we’ve got to do; the better our recording equipment, the more abundantly clear that the music stinks. Because this fear I grew up with, it’s infected the whole population like botulism, and a little goes a long way: we’re not sure we exist. It makes us dangerous, because we could end up making trouble, like pinching ourselves to check we’re still here. I dislike scapegoating TV, but it is true that my country watches too much. That sensation of looking at a screen, it’s easy to keep feeling that way when you look out the window. I think that’s why we overeat and obsess over sex: we’re dying to get something inside. The real reason Americans buy so much is it’s one of the only national habits that’s participatory: it requires you to make decisions, if only between the blue one and the red one. In any larger sphere, we don’t perceive ourselves agents. That’s why we don’t vote, not because we’re cynical: we can’t conceive of having any effect. In the meantime, what you were saying: we hire a handful from Hollywood to live for us, and they’re only faking. So nothing actually occurs. Little wonder we elect an actor for President, we don’t think we have a real President. You know how envious my friends are of my life the last ten years? And not because they’re interested in Zaire. They think I’m real now.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not a chance. I call this negaphobia, and it only gets worse. It’s an affliction of middles—the middle class, the middle child. Between the wars. This feeling as if you’re encased in plastic. The world bounces off, you’re lifeproof. Triumphs and tragedies happen only to people in books. Serious arguments start when you leave the room; at dinner parties, you catch snippets of a lively discussion about population control in Kenya while you’re stuck chatting about spider mites. Feuds, floods, and famines on every front page and no one invites you. Mommy didn’t sit you on electric burners as a child, Daddy never made incestuous advances. Empires rise and fall while you make sure not to run out of toilet paper. All of North America could go up in flames, and that would be the morning you slept late. It’s a sensation of being left out or artificial. Your experience is invalidated as being legitimate because it’s your experience. Why did I go to Milltown Cemetery for the Gibraltar funerals? Of course I hoped for violence. I got it, and it didn’t matter. All right, Michael Stone missed me with his automatic, but never in the thick of the poof-poof did I believe he could shoot me. Everyone ran but Estrin. I swear, something in me’s been waiting years now to get raped, held up at knife point, taken hostage in the Middle East, though I know full well none of that would be real if it happened to me. Like Milltown, I walk dangerous neighborhoods—East Jerusalem, Mathare Valley, Smoky Mountain; I camp on the West Bank. It’s frustrating, Farrell—nobody ever fucks with me. So when I get a letter from my mother imploring me to stay clear of Beirut, it’s not out of line.”

  “Instead: Belfast.”

  “Right, but of course when I get here it’s obvious I missed the party—Burntollet, Bloody Sunday, the barricades; the snipe shoots, the hunger strikes. You can imagine I’m tired of listening to locals coo about how this is nothing compared to ’72. Car bombs and murders every night. Okay, maybe it was hairy at the time, but behind the tsk-tsking I can hear their possessive satisfaction: Boy, did you miss out on the heavy shit. And it works! I feel deflated. Like when Marcos fled the Philippines I had to rustle lunch at the Coral Reef, 150 seafood terrines to prepare for a conference of Moonies the next day. I was peeling shrimp while everyone else was trying on Imelda’s shoes.”

  “I think you’ve arrived here at an interesting time,” said Farrell.

  “You’re right,” Estrin agreed. “Because negaphobia is what’s interesting. And you wouldn’t think so, but Northern Ireland is rife with it.”

  “Am I?”

  “The worst.”

  “And your brother?”

  She laughed, her head ajar. “Come to think of it, Billy is terrified that any moment he will vanish.”

  Turning old tables seemed to cheer her. She showed him the house. The shell was 150 years old; Estrin aimed to restore the interior to its original style. In the foyer, tile stacked on rubbled marble, by bags of grouting; heav
y scrolled doors propped in the halls, half-planed, with leaded glass. Insane, for upstairs beside the ship’s cabin the ceiling was caved in, the shredded walls rotting with damp; windows were boarded. Only the back-yard loo worked; in the upper one, the big footed tub was filled with tins of paint. Farrell fought a rising panic that he could not bathe.

  “I shower at the gym,” she explained. “And the circumstances I’ve lived in? Just a working telephone brings tears to my eyes.”

  Out the back door scrabbled the Peace Line, which fenced Catholic from Protestant West Belfast. It was never clear which side it was protecting, unless both from the worst of themselves. Sure something there was that did love a wall in this town, for rather than campaign for its destruction, both Estrin’s neighborhood and the Prods on the other side had recently applied to the City Council to please heighten the fence three more feet. The one cause that reliably brought the two sects together was keeping apart.

  “There’s a strange post-Holocaust feel to the back some days,” she rambled, squinting into the gray. “Peace Line may be ironic, but at times it does seem peaceful, like today. As if everything is over.”

  She took him out front to show off her new grille gate; Farrell immediately thought what a perfect detonator trip it would make, with a latch convenient for fishing line.

  “Funny, I’m losing a sense of conventional ugliness,” she went on. “Like the Jews found Arab sectors squalid, not me—crumbling Jerusalem stone, rugs hung out windows to air, markets full of yellow fava beans and parallelograms of baklava … dusty feet. Soft. Biblical. More the new hotels in Tel Aviv that got to me. And here. Even rows of bombed-out houses—they can be soft, too. Smoked on the edges like charcoal sketches. Clonard exists in black and white; only the mountains have color. Then, starkness has its beauty, so does disrepair. Some of the most lyrical houses I’ve seen have been in the middle of forests—abandoned and overgrown, vines through bedsteads, nests of blue jays in the sink.”

  It was not a beautiful area for Farrell; once more he felt an urge to wash. Across the street, the wide lot was vacant, covered in nothing so lively as weeds—strips of tire, tufts of charred upholstery. Down the road, the usual flagging array of drinking clubs and bingo parlors. He conceded that most locals were cheerful, and in his experience they didn’t mind the ghettos, on either side of the line; few tried to shift out. But, Lord, it would take a foreigner to find it pretty.

  He looked back at Estrin’s house. A larger building than the part she occupied, both side sections of the red brick structure were condemned, their once bay windows sealed with breeze blocks. Between these dead wings, Estrin’s central rooms flaunted their vitality, with lace curtains in the windows, a newly furbished 133 all shined up in brass, a glowing red door, an ivy planter. With this moment of cleanliness and care beneath shocks of rumpled beams, its blank gray upper windows staring out at the vacant lot, the house suggested a blind old man whose mind remained young. However perversely, someone was still home.

  “Now I remember,” said Farrell. “June ’81. Four trim corpses into the hunger strikes. There was a blue van parked by the barracks there. The army dragged it down the way and the eejits did a controlled explosion.”

  “So I heard. But I understand it was bigger than they expected.”

  “It was a thousand pounds! You do not shoot into a thousand pounds! And they should have bloody well known better. That van would have been riding as close to the ground as a fat grandma without her stiff drawers. What did they think it was carrying, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers annual picnic?”

  “You were just pissed off they didn’t call you.”

  “Aggrieved. It was a plum of a bomb.”

  “I talked to the family that lived here. They were sitting downstairs when they saw the engine of the van plow through the front window, sail past their noses, through the kitchen, and out the back door. Like a cartoon.”

  “They weren’t evacuated?”

  “The army knocked, told them to go. But it was morning. They were tired.”

  Aye, that was West Belfast by ’81. There’s a bomb across the street, Sean. Another rasher. Dear, there’s a van engine flying through the sitting room. Would you fancy another cup of tea?

  “Anyway, 133 pretty much imploded from the blast. The Housing Executive was going to condemn the property; I convinced them to sell it to me, and for zip. I said I’d fix it up and leave. They seemed keen on the arrangement.”

  “Just don’t put in good windows.”

  “I’ve been warned.”

  Farrell’s need to wash was now overwhelming. He went for his coat.

  “I’m reluctant to let you go,” said Estrin. “After last night. You think you’re all right. You’re not.”

  “Have I ever been? My dear, I’ve been through dozens of these dramas. I’m still waiting for the traumas. My emotional life works on a delay long enough that I may be dead before the results come in. Unlike your Americans, I’ve had plenty of experiences; they simply don’t affect me.”

  “My point earlier, I guess,” said Estrin. “That no matter how many bombs either of us survives, we may never be able to equal the eventfulness certain miraculous people feel when they walk to the end of their drive to get the mail. A new bird at the feeder. The irises peaking. A postcard from Belgium and a magazine.”

  But it was like that for Farrell, this moment. The sound of her voice more than her point—the lovely throwaway casualness of it; her face against Black Mountain, the sleeves of the big shirt trailing past her hands like a small girl’s exploring her father’s closet. Funny, Farrell had an inkling then that the truly earthshaking news eluded his pile of morning papers, and he felt jealous not, as usual, of the turmoil of Sikhs in Pakistani riots, the brave protesters in South Africa, but of those old men with bird feeders, delighted toddlers with buttered crumpets, anyone who had pierced the world like a needle while he was stalking Brown Thomas bags; he felt left out just as he had in the early seventies in Belfast, except now he was excluded not from conspiracy and arms deals but from listening to girls by gates.

  Farrell resisted this vision, its quiet, its repose. Was his frenzy mere distraction, a busyness not unlike imitating his father as a child, when he would play at being an electrician, self-importantly pack blunted screwdrivers and bent resistors, pretending to have calls to pay? Because Farrell did not have the courage to face whatever all those bombs and lectures and backroom palaver distracted him from. He felt he was frantically working with his back to something, too frightened to turn around and see if it was a cathedral or a sheer drop.

  In response, Farrell turned up the dials. He reduced his sleep from four hours to three; his meals from two to one; his pleasures, to Estrin.

  He would sneak the American, treat himself to her. She became clandestine, forbidden. He appeared at all times of night. He would phone, drunken and spent, at four, his voice dying off the ends of his sentences like a shout from a falling body.

  He rang her once in a particularly indulgent humor. “Swallow,” he whispered.

  “Yes?” She’d been asleep; her voice was childlike.

  “I love you.” It was easy.

  “What’s that?”

  “I love you.”

  “I’m sorry, Farrell, but I can’t understand, what did you say?”

  “I love you!” he repeated in exasperation.

  After a muddled silence she stuttered forlornly, “Your accent, and—the connection, I—still didn’t—”

  “Forget it!” He clumped the receiver down with the annoyance of a drama coach whose recalcitrant student has refused to learn her lines.

  chapter fifteen

  Ireland, and Other Hospitals

  The conference, the conference. It did not have a name, suggesting it was of many. There was only one, and the ground waters of the Province rippled with it. Everyone who was not supposed to know about it knew—as they were supposed to. Finally something would give, the deadlock of this tiny country with no
government would break. And the world had been watching for twenty years, Nobels and Pulitzers poised for the occasion. In the endless onion of local politics, insiders outside insiders outside insiders, the conference was at the center, the destination of every secret, a hard core of inclusion beyond which you could not peel. At long last Farrell did not have his finger on the pulse; he was the pulse. MPs felt his wrist when they shook his hand.

  In the very middle, where Farrell and Angus were pressed up against each other, the last two layers of the bulb, there was one spine of information even Angus did not have—wan and willowy, easily bent. Farrell nursed the toothpick between his teeth.

  Given half a chance the parties would participate by refusing to. In the North the most common use of hard-won power was to defy its employ. The triumph of Gerry Adams’s election to Parliament was that he would not take his seat; Unionist response to the bombing of Enniskillen was for months to boycott their own council meetings. The strategy struck no one as peculiar. 1981, of course, was the peak of Irish self-destruction: after the Blanket Protest, when prisoners shattered their own windows to chatter, naked bundles in cells bare of the furniture they’d smashed, the Dirty Protest, when blanketmen smeared their cells with their own excrement in an orgy of maggots and stench that years later broke Farrell into a cold sweat, knowing the difference then, that he had never, would never believe in anything that much, ten Republicans, consumed by their own indignation, starved themselves to death. In fact, that oft-repeated ambition of the IRA to “make Northern Ireland ungovernable” meant in more down-to-earth terms no less than If you won’t let us have this country we’re going to blow it up piece by piece, expressing the juvenile illogic with which a child will break a toy he has to share. Farrell marveled there was a man walking the land whose spited face still had a nose.

  Likewise, the Border Poll for which the conference was designed to marshal consensus threatened at all points to turn into a tiny Alliance Party bake sale. Nationalists had largely boycotted the poll in ’73, and threatened to do so once more; the SDLP was none too keen on an internal solution of any sort, and claimed power sharing had already been tried and failed with Sunningdale. Unionists would refuse, without Angus MacBride’s constant cajoling, to proceed with “the way forward” as long as the Anglo-Irish Agreement remained in place, and the referendum seemed to offer a tempting context in which to hammer this weary point home. And should either side neglect the poll in force, Britain would ignore it. Back to the drawing board.