Ordinary Decent Criminals

  For now, however, he was not through testing, and sang on determinedly to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands”:

  Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?

  Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?

  Would you like a chicken supper,

  You skinny Fenian fucker,

  Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?

  No one seemed to find his selections inconsistent. Farrell quit. The North was a tiny, exclusive hell: only one and a half million people on earth would get your jokes. If you ever really belonged in the Province it would never let you go; conversely, if like Farrell you felt furiously you didn’t belong there, it had roped you as well. Loathing for his island trapped him perfectly as love. And that explained why Farrell wandered one of the greatest cities in the world in limbo, for here it was meaningless to hate Ireland—why not hate Portugal, the color blue, Monday mornings, his coat.

  Passing Keshcarrigan, he spent a hundred dollars on the very books he could get in Belfast, Blackstaff and Poolbeg. They even had an old copy of Bare Limbs on Basalt, which he bought on an odd whim. In Zabar’s, he searched the shelves of brandied plums and satay for oatcakes and soda bread. At the White Horse—there was also a White Horse at the docks—he ordered Guinness, and he didn’t even like Guinness.

  “Haven’t a baldy.”

  Farrell’s ears picked up.

  “Och, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

  The barkeep. Farrell made a beeline. Carrickfergus. Turned out the boy was only over this year, and though he may have been a Prod half Farrell’s age, and back in Antrim would have precious little to say to any Taig renegade, here they knocked each other’s shoulders and the kid slid him a free pint. On hearing “O’Phelan,” his stance and eyes changed; Farrell shifted in return, standing more at his old angle, his voice cutting with conviction and disgust. The lad had the lowdown on Lisburn, and the two of them bantered on until three.

  Back at the Algonquin, Farrell stacked his books by the bed. Strange to have bought that anthology. He experimented with keeping the volume on top, and burying it between Violence and the Sacred and Writings from Portlaoise. Still, from anywhere in the room he could sense its presence, like an unpaid bill on a desk. Over the TV blaring back-to-back reruns of Mary Tyler Moore, the book accused him from the stack with a quiet that pierced both Rhoda’s nightmarish blind date and the day Mary ran the newsroom.

  The sting of mum reproof reminded Farrell of his mother. She’d never thrown tantrums, but clammed up. Silverware rattled in the scullery. His sisters had muffled into pillows, trying not to laugh. Farrell had never been inclined to. With the air too thick to breathe, he would wheeze in his room, stifling himself over his glass inhaler since bidding for attention with asthma seemed too obvious a ploy. This went on for hours, and finally he would weep and implore her to stop slamming cupboards and pressing her lips white, to kiss his cheek, to forgive him, though he would rarely know what he had done or whether he was the one who did it. Farrell was born into total responsibility for everything and total incapacity to make anything right.

  As an adult, Farrell had thrown great drunken rages: See, Mother? This is how it’s done. What I would have given to hear you scream. How I would have eaten off oilcloth to see you smash all our crockery of an evening. As a child, Farrell yearned to be beaten. In her cruelty, his mother never raised a hand.

  At last the silent suffering on the bedside table became too familiar to bear. He groaned and gave in, reading a few pages. He tried to decide if she was good. While he found plenty of weak lines, O.T.T., there were others, harder to dismiss; these he resisted. He was being unfair. He wanted her to be a bad poet, and wondered why. He tried to be open-minded. Yet beginning with optimism or disdain, he could not decide. Apparently he had to find her brilliant or abysmal. Those were his categories, there were no in betweens. Though he’d always cherished it, maybe his extremity was callow. Maybe she was neither a genius nor a charlatan. Maybe there was such a thing as middle-level talent. Maybe that’s all there was: absolutes are abstractions. Maybe his inability to see shades amounted to a lack of subtlety, or worse. Maybe he was an idiot. And maybe the chiaroscuro of his own portrait was equally misguided. Maybe Farrell, too, was middling like the rest of them; the severity of his own character—the travel and insomnia, the forty-eight pairs of identical socks, the same swordfish steak in the same restaurant for two years straight—pretension or a lie …

  Farrell quickly rang room service for wine. It hardly helped, rather made the point again: the fumé blanc as well was neither good nor bad.

  On the subject of mediocrity, wasn’t it impossible to avoid his father? Farrell disliked thinking of his father. His mother may have seemed petty and sharp to her neighbors, but Farrell knew her to be an awesome woman and could study her endlessly late nights in hotels. However, he refused to flatter his father as having afflicted him whatsoever: blame was credit. But didn’t he resemble the geezer in the end, with that rancid contempt for Taigs and Prods alike, his paltry boycott of one? The way Farrell had lowered at the marches in ’69, mocking legless from the sidelines, as if the whole of the PD was frantic for his leadership and he was holding out? Or even earlier, the way he used to hide in the linen closet for hours, bruised and brooding, until he gradually admitted no one noticed he was gone? Farrell always refusing to participate, when who wanted him to, who cared? With the useless defiance of his whole life, wasn’t Farrell O’Phelan the original abstentionist; why, had he ever held a legitimate job? And where did he scoff the whole sniffy hard-done-by if not straight from his da?

  Grievance was his birthright. Ruairi O’Phelan was deprived, though would have been just as deprived in Switzerland or Japan, born as binman or prince, for deprivation is a point of view. Ruairi was one of the lucky ones, with real complaints: in ’68, he suddenly couldn’t wire Protestant houses, and the Catholic jobs were sorrier and didn’t pay; he never had a chance at a city contract. He could hardly run for office, and that he didn’t want to never stopped him from whining at being shut out. Because the one thing Ruairi O’Phelan loved over anything he wanted was not being able to get it.

  For the most rancorous of his gripes was not having quite enough of them. Some months were tight, but he didn’t have the solace of unemployment. He had a job, he merely despised it. And he would despise any job, revile the most perfect family. Older, Farrell learned not to take the hatred personally: his father would loathe any old son. For don’t imagine Ruairi nursed the least illusion he might achieve through his children. The evening Farrell announced he’d won a place at grammar school was the worst of his childhood. No, there was expressly no consolation. In what you could only admire as resourcefulness, Ruairi had wrung joy from his suffering, but you could not have that and joy from joy. Business breaks and unbigoted Presbyterians embittered his heart. But watching news clips of Burntollet, he jumped from his chair, eyes shining, his fist pounding into his hand, for all the world like another B-special with a truncheon. At last the black bastards had shown their claws! All that Republican jaw supplied a vocabulary for his larger feeling of being shafted: he was a Catholic but did not believe in life after death. This was his only chance and it had gone badly. His politics expressed his larger disappointment at this one mingy life, where every passing stranger was a man he would not be, who would see what he would not see on turning the corner. In the end Farrell supposed he admired the old sod, for the envy was a form of imagination. Here this cabbage could be coulibiac; now could be two hundred years ago, before anyone repaired a toaster; I might have been born smarter and more handsome, in France.

  “I was a bright spark,” Ruairi would grumble. “I was one bright spark, a fair sight brighter than you.” So every impeccable brown-nosing report Farrell brought home dripped with pools of sloshed Carlsberg by nightfall. On through the pints, his father would rip his son’s chessboards, one reason Farrell switched to wood. And all
that time Farrell wanted nothing more than to wire a kitchen in front of his father and have the refrigerator come on.

  While thirty-page wine lists seduced his finer side, Farrell often grabbed a hot pretzel off street vendors in preference to the Four Seasons. In fact, much longer here would surely drive him to the monasticism of fifteen, to butterless toast and sugarless tea. In Belfast, good taste was an eccentricity, in New York an obsession. He was tempted to find the town frivolous. New Yorkers seemed to care mostly about film festivals; they would go on at length about novels, having read only the reviews; and they talked incessantly about food. While Nelson Mandela turned seventy in jail, Haiti fell to the military, and the U.S. Navy shot down 290 Iranian civilians by mistake, New Yorkers appeared far more fussed by the death of the casual screw. (Served them right—if they couldn’t walk to the edge and look over, they didn’t deserve to reproduce. Farrell had come of age in Ireland, where sex meant playing the odds—you needed nerve to take a woman in those days. Apologies to Estrin Lancaster, but birth control was ruinous. Fair enough, plague surpassed pregnancy, for as far as Farrell was concerned, HIV restored to sex its proper sense of peril.)

  Walking back to the Algonquin late his last night, the strike over and his step light, he chose a dubious course and found himself square in Hell’s Kitchen. He recognized this variety of quiet from curfew. Most of the streetlights were smashed. His loud gritty stride seemed to advertise new, expensive cordovans. In the shadows, groups of black boys slumped on hydrants, and it took Farrell blocks to realize the language they slurred to each other in was English.

  Thinking, Scintillating maybe, but enough is enough, Farrell swung determinedly east on Forty-ninth Street, and nearly ran into something hanging on a drainpipe. What he mostly remembered were its eyes—Farrell apologized for the pronoun, but his was beyond overgenerous to incorrect. Terribly, they were every bit as intelligent as they were alien. I knife you, they said, for a quarter. No symbols. No flaggy-wavy. No we call it Ulster you call it the Six Counties, let’s fight. I don’t care you call Hell’s Kitchen Timbuktu. And you can go home and write all the sociological this, psychological that you like, point is, you go home at all, you’re lucky. This whole city say I’m zip, but a flick of my wrist say I’m the most important man you meet your whole life. And the last—” The teeth flashed, Cheshire on the pipe.

  The only reason Farrell didn’t run was for fear of inviting chase. People were killing each other here and it didn’t mean anything. They would do you not because you were Catholic but because you were there. Around him a city churned with the nausea of insignificant violence. There was a war on in New York all right, but fought on all fours. It made Northern Ireland look like a fife-blowing, drum-rolling Napoleonic tea party. For once the dismissive term troubles seemed fair.

  That night Farrell had no problem staying awake. Burning with raw, bare-bulbed anxiety, at last he suffered legitimate insomnia, no help from Boots. Because a walk through Hell’s Kitchen made West Belfast seem cute.

  On the plane back, Farrell drank red wine. Meaty, it warmed him. Every mile the pilot closed between Farrell and his wretched island warmed him more. He missed its ugly coziness, rank and sweet, like this cheap Beaujolais. Farrell’s relationship with his city was that sick, incestuous intimacy of two people who have made each other suffer. It was the sour, helpless love you feel for a brother who has run amok.

  Then, there was a perverse prestige to a bum brother, and New York had unsettled Farrell’s contented partnership with the black sheep. He was briefly concerned whether Northern Ireland was important. Come on, Farrell had worked with explosives. He had brokered with the IRA. Belfast, too, murdered its citizens indiscriminately, thank you very much. They have drugs; well, we have bombs! Beat that! Carnage and destruction! Mindless meanness and corruption! Farrell laughed; people in D through H looked over. Truth was, he felt competitive with New Yorkers over whose people were the more barbarous.

  Farrell basked under the lemon-yellow sign in Heathrow: BELFAST PASSENGERS ONLY. There was a hard gleam off the plastic, selecting him from all the other simpering destinations BA flew more decorative travelers. The very sound of the place had a gasp to it, an exultation. Hadn’t he little use for the New Yorkers who’d toured his town and chirped up in bars, Why, it’s not nearly so bad as you’re led to believe, who described bakeries and record shops and normal cups of coffee. For fuck’s sake, we’ve been through hell and back, he’d wanted to return. Sure we deserve a bloody cup of coffee. Stride lengthening, briefcase swinging, Farrell advanced on Gate 49 with the jaunty territorial pride with which he’d swaggered into his father’s electronics shop as a child, pocketing bits of wire, climbing the desk chair, propping his feet up: mine.

  On the shuttle Farrell congratulated himself. Through the impromptu holiday he’d tabulated shy of twenty hours’ sleep in six nights. And he was satisfied to note that he was coughing, rather badly. With any luck, by the end of the flight he’d be running a vigorous fever.

  chapter sixteen

  The House in Castlecaulfield

  Had Farrell been a product, Estrin would have returned him.

  “I’ve never seen you turn down a glass of wine,” she observed dolefully. He reached constantly for his inhaler, but it wasn’t helping; the cough was worse than ever, his handkerchief heavy and yellow. His forehead trickled like the windowpanes outside, and it was pouring.

  Reading him as a man who would balk at hospitals, she was alarmed when he didn’t put up a fight. At a glance he looked seventy-five. With no raincoat, Estrin draped the old man in a tarp; clutching the streaked sheet to his middle and cowling his damp gray hair, Farrell looked biblical, but out of those new-fangled churches with banners and teak—a modern-day Jesus in plastic and slapdash slashes of paint. Only the face was Middle Ages—flat, white, and harrowing. The eyes were empty. When she moved him outside he went soft and obedient in her hands; it was gross.

  When he whimpered where were they going and Estrin said the Royal, just around the corner, she could as well have said plague hospital. “City!” Farrell gasped, and though City was a longer ride, she wouldn’t argue. She propped him on the bike and said hold on, but hadn’t meant like that; Farrell squeezed her chest until they both couldn’t breathe.

  “O’Phelan!”

  Nurses scurried. Estrin had prepared herself for the six-hour wait of U.S. emergency rooms, but they took care of everyone in short order and Farrell right away. Estrin stood trailing the tarp, feeling that hopeful uselessness particular to waiting rooms. She importuned to stick with him; surprisingly they said yes.

  His temperature was 104. A nurse said she was sorry but they’d have to take a blood gas, and Estrin didn’t understand why the woman apologized until the needle went in his wrist and for the first time in hours Farrell returned to his eyes. They shot black. He inhaled quickly and clogged. That was all. The nurse stood back with her syringe full, nodding at Farrell appreciatively. “Haven’t I seen stagers bawl like babies. He’s a hard one, your man.”

  Estrin was grateful for “your man,” even if it was only an expression.

  Farrell was careened into X-ray in an oxygen mask. Presently a doctor called Estrin in to view the film—both lobes were overcast. The lungs looked so small, translucent wings darkened by storm cloud. Oddly, she recognized him. Farrell was so thin that even under radiation he didn’t look much different. And she’d know those close, sharp shoulders anywhere. There was something about his sheer narrowness that melted her, a boy hunched in the back of a classroom, hoping not to be called on.

  “Overdoing it as usual?”

  Farrell rasped, sucking a last sip through a straw.

  “There’s no doubt you should have kicked it, old boy.” The doctor slapped Farrell’s shoulder like the withers of a sturdy horse. “But sure we’ll prop you up one more time. Pneumonia again.”

  When Farrell heard the word pneumonia, he nestled his wiry head of hair into the pillow with the finality of
So. It’s bad enough. He laid his hands on his chest and closed his yellow eyes. With the webbed corners of his mouth serenely upturned, why, Estrin swore that she had never seen him happier.

  Pneumonia’s called the “old man’s friend,” and for true, I do feel old, too. Everyone whinged about getting old, but Farrell thought dotage must be spot on. What a relief to have done what you had to do—or not. To have bleeding well not done it, and it didn’t matter and to know that, flat out. It was that perfect, placid, bored wisdom he was aiming for.

  As for friend, he’d never had one; maybe a disease would do. Now, that’s intimacy, isn’t it? Better than washing your own socks. You and your germs, locked in loving, dependent embrace.

  MacBride? If a disease is a friend, maybe Angus fit the bill at that. They were both out to slaughter him.

  Otherwise there had only been women. Even there, had a single woman affected him in his life? In regard to his emotions, Farrell was increasingly convinced he hadn’t any. He thought of himself as an alien from outer space landed here by mistake—in Northern Ireland, of all the unlucky places—who was desperately trying to pass as a human being. He had studied the bereaved at Mass, noting what they did with their hands. He had pondered the expressions of happy couples in engagement photographs, with the clinical curiosity of a biologist examining cell reproduction under a microscope.

  Remember the Swallow asking how you felt when you heard your own voice on “Good Morning, Ulster”? I feel nothing. You said it hard, a slap; she went quiet. That’s right, I can be brutal. I like being brutal. There’s a feeling: I like being brutal.

  Because there’s a way the meanness is against yourself. I felt that slap. When I shut the door in women’s faces, I sense their cheeks burning on the other side. I like to make women suffer so that I feel their suffering as well—they are the host body. I like it when they fall in love with me because that’s as close as I get to the experience. The creature from outer space feeds off human emotion, needs the proximity of lacerating, unrequited love to survive. Now there’s a film for you: an alien stalking the heath who sucks hearts dry. Then, by now in Northern Ireland a creature who ate feelings would starve …