Ordinary Decent Criminals

  It was pitch-dark now. Estrin went upstairs to change, but would not relinquish the blankets and slipped into running shorts under a wool tent. There was one other problem with Fantasies One and Two: there was no danger of facing Farrell over fish or Ballygowan so far. The conference had started, and for all eleven days he hadn’t called. Not once. Estrin dropped the blankets to her feet and drew a deep cold breath. So that was why she had to leave Northern Ireland, and soon. Why she had to leave Farrell O’Phelan. It was not simply habit, compulsive departure. It was not Fear of Intimacy, magazine. She would leave because she did not have him to give up.

  chapter twenty-one

  Chemical Irritation

  The Antrim Arms was bedlam.

  “Telephone for O’Phelan—O’Phelan—” rose above the din.

  “He’s not to be had. I’ll handle it.” Angus threaded the cord through the wilderness of spent drink. “Aye, your man’s in his bloody chambers, any message like?… Rosebud? For fuck’s sake, is that you?”

  The dial tone was the more annoying for his having to lurch back over the bar with the receiver for nothing, and in MacBride’s condition it was some trick to spare the glasses in his wake.

  If it wasn’t forty-five seconds before the phone rang again. “O’Phelan—!”

  Angus snagged the call once more. “Listen, lassie, if you’re checking up on me, you may as well ask for the thing itself—”

  “Farrell?”

  “Roisin?”

  A meaty pause, you could carve it. “Farrell …?”

  “No, love.” Sure he’d made a mistake. If he wasn’t bloody well hearing voices now. Maybe that thorny flower was getting to him more than he figured. “The boy’s embroiled. I’ll take your name, just?”

  “Is that Angus?”

  A Yank at that. This conference was making him jumpy. “Aye.”

  “We met at the distillery. About a year ago. You probably don’t remember.”

  “With the motorcycle!” He lit up, though (was it the connection?) the quavering voice on the other end he could hardly associate with that dark, determined powerhouse at the Pot Still Bar. “Who could forget those leather trousers? And haven’t we never met for a jar?”

  “Right.” She sounded curiously out of breath. “But Farrell isn’t, ah—”

  “Should I interrupt him now, you’d hardly want to speak to the dragon you got through to. But you’re still in Ulster? Or would you be calling it the Six Counties now?”

  “I’m not calling it anything.” She was whispering! “Printable.”

  “Still in the North, then.”

  The laugh was weak. “Barely.”

  “I’ll tell the wanker you rang?”

  “No, I—no. No, don’t, actually. Never mind.”

  It seemed she was ringing off, so he started to agonize back over the bar when he heard her say something more; he returned and she was gone—more awkwardness, and she’d been so smooth at Bushmills. Women: they could never keep it up.

  Not until midnight did he and O’Phelan find themselves in the same room. Angus was well on, but the spirey man’s proximity was still a splinter in his toe. Over in the corner, O’Phelan was bent over your man from the SDLP (the Stoop Down Low Party, as they were known in their own parts, and a wet lot), the bright spark who’d accused Farrell that afternoon of having led the Province “down the road of no return, and back again.” Everyone else in the hotel had loosened the odd collar, but there was O’Phelan still looking nicely turned out, thank you very much, with his wee glass of white wine. That was the final cod, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the Antrim Arms shipped in two cases of Chardonnay for the bastard, and wouldn’t they need more. The kid was fooling himself; he drank every bit as much as anyone in the room, just siphoned it down as wine and had to run to the bog. Angus preferred whiskey as more efficient.

  For a rare moment unentangled from snarls of conversation, Angus paused to inhale the piquant smog of smoke-clogged air, boozy breath, brash proclamations, and insincere laughter—no doubt about it, MacBride was happier than a pig in shite. Angus enjoyed corruption. He liked puzzles where all the pieces were queered but somehow fit together. He liked legal tax evasion and dodgy investment schemes and lying to his wife. In short, Angus MacBride loved Northern Irish politics. And not since Sunningdale had he felt more perfectly squirreled to the very center, a screw without which the whole table fell apart. At Sunningdale, too, he’d been ancillary, young. Youth was overrated. He might not goal a football as he used to, but now he could clout the DUP in the teeth. And just with a bit of a phrase, mind you, a bit of a phrase. A wee reference to the Ayatollah. (Had to qualify your metaphors in this place, where, if an MP vowed to murder you in the next election, he meant with the Browning in his belt. Angus was the only real politician in this hotel. With the rest toadies and slugs, the conference was a regular camping trip on the banks of Lough Neagh.) Tired of hearing about Sunningdale, anyway. Everyone afraid of a reprise, when what? Those poor Orange geriatrics were going to stage another general strike? Half the lot couldn’t make it to Finaghy on the Twelfth anymore without a lift up. Sure, they’d barricade Great Victoria with wheelchairs. No lads, the hard-liners have had it, they priced themselves out of a province long ago. It was Angus MacBride’s back yard now. Why, he liked to think of Ulster as one big family farm.

  This Border Poll was a snorter, but all the better to win his Nobel Prize. Looked dicey but possible. In the meantime, this conference was the best crack he’d had in years. And he liked the Antrim Arms. A bit tatty, but you could put your feet up, and no lass dashed out with a rag when you upset a bit of lager on the carpet. Whitewells was too starchy. Wave your arm to make a point and before you knew it you were two hundred quid in the hole from knocking over some godawful Chinese vase. And every time he walked in that place he got angry. The ease with which the hotel had fallen in that character’s lap. And its pretension! Very Catholic, very Irish: always slagging on the British, but wanting nothing more than to be wee landed English lords every one, down to the ascots and snuff. This was a town where everyone imitated the sort they hated: the Protestant paramilitaries aped the IRA, the Provos the British Army. No wonder at the end of the day nobody knew who they were, except the same. That’s what none of them could stick. Sure there were differences with the mainland, the South, but here there were no “two communities,” their “separate traditions,” like classes of ’63 and ’64. The Northern Irish fought this hard from being so hopelessly homogeneous they could drown.

  “Your girlfriend rang.”

  Farrell turned, and it was a funny little moment where Angus, maybe for the first time, did not like that O’Phelan was the taller. He looked down. “Which one?”

  “You never mentioned you hauled in the wee Yank. It’s not like you when you’ve plucked a bird not to stick the feather in your cap.”

  “What do you know what’s like me, fella?” Farrell may have kept his tie on, but your man was half tore. “You’ve never known who I was. You’ve never known what I was capable of—”

  Lord, the spit would be flying in no time. “Your motorcyclist, now,” Angus interrupted genially. “I’ve always found American women most generous, most open-minded. A progressive people. You find that so?”

  “Throw your mind at a wall, MacBride, and it would stick. A woman’s just a pair of knickers with a post box.”

  “Oh, aye,” Angus agreed. “But you, my boy, care about what’s inside. You and your American discuss the issues of the day. You solicit her opinion about your work. You go to openings at the Federesky Gallery and sip Beaujolais. Your fingers intermingle, and you discuss over cappuccinos whether you’re ready—”

  “We fuck,” Farrell cut him off.

  MacBride smiled. It wasn’t often he found himself the more sober of the two; he slid his Bush on top of the piano.

  “She’s pretty,” Farrell added.

  MacBride stepped back; the p was a spritzer. “Oh, indeed. And you can imagine how im
pressed I am that you’ve managed to attract such a lovely woman. Intimidated, even. I feel small. I look to you with an extra awe, wanting your secret. I think, Angus, best keep any lady you fancy far from O’Phelan’s charms.”

  Farrell leered. “How I’ve fouled myself for you, MacBride, you’ll never know. What I’ve crawled through to wipe your nose makes the blanketmen look like dental hygienists.”

  “Spare me, O’Phelan, nothing makes me more nervous than your bleeding favors.”

  “Och no, Angus, I owe you so much. For your dogged friendship with such a pimply schoolboy. For your tutelage in chess. Propping me up and brewing me a cup of coffee when I was down the neck of a bottle and such an embarrassment to your C of I upper Malone T-T’s—”

  “Aye, and I never would have guessed all that’d be held against me, like.”

  “We Catholics are ungrateful. Ask Maggie. She sends in the army to take care of us and we only snipe at them. And every time she whirls in here, she coos about how many leisure centers we’ve got. Why do you need the IRA when you can play squash?”

  “You sound just like your da,” Angus swiped, and effectively shut Farrell up. Dead on. Because Lord, had that geezer ever driven Angus wild. Blocked half the night and typical Taig, professional victim, a string of excuses long as your arm. Never once heard the bastard take the blame for so much as his own cut finger. Once, tentatively, Angus had corrected your man’s usage of “hegemony,” and hadn’t the ghett lit into a song and dance about how his language had been “robbed,” how he was forced to express himself in a “foreign tongue,” as if he hadn’t been raised speaking English every bit as much as any poor Orange fourth-former. A dried-up, wicked scarecrow, Ruairi O’Phelan, who would jab, jab, jab at MacBride’s chest, nailing the family’s token Prod, the one sixteen-year-old scapegoat the electrician could get his hands on. Sometimes MacBride caught Farrell’s face in a certain light and the resemblance depressed him.

  A message from the Swallow was at least a relief from the regular spattering from the Pigeon, ill disguised, coy. One was worried; the other browned-off. An interesting difference, their defaults. When the Pigeon didn’t hear from him, she assumed he’d been shot. The Swallow assumed he’d been an asshole. While the concern of the first was flattering, the suspicion of the second had proved more technically correct.

  He rang the one, delayed the other. He did not quite understand what he wished to put off.

  Farrell gave the conference an afternoon free, and though what they surely needed a break from was less politics than drink, the nearest diversion in Bushmills was the distillery. Farrell accompanied the rowdies with some reluctance. He’d not been back since that meeting over a year ago, and wondered if maybe he’d like to keep the memory clean. Sentimental. Best to go and keep his ears open for the casual, hungover aside that so often told all. The SDLP was the nugget, and they were making him sweat.

  The distillery was in a dead phase of its production. The massive mash tun, last time filled with steaming grist and threshed with a ten-foot blade, was empty and still. Its room, toasty then, was cold. The guide hurried their group, for the conferees weren’t interested in the process but only the results—and these were the men to sort out the North? For sure it was the bar at the Antrim Arms lured most of this crowd through seminars all day.

  Farrell looked forward to a good whiff off the washbacks, but these, too, were empty. Farrell opened the lids on each vat to make sure, and in every barrel the inside was chill and dry, with a wisp of wort off the wood like an afternoon you can’t quite remember. Farrell pulled his coat tight and shivered. He was sober, but he’d had no sleep two nights running; the washbacks jumped. He kept starting, checking corners—there, darting through the door, tripping down the stairs, bouncing across the walkway: a tousle of dark hair, the gleam of a red helmet. He turned at the clop of boots (a cooper), the twang of American sarcasm (a tourist). He had awaited the big-breasted pot stills, but that room was closed entirely and their group went straight to the bar. The tour had taken ten minutes, and the conferees, glasses in hand, could not have been happier. But Farrell only wanted to leave. He wondered what he could have conceivably found interesting in the distillery before.

  He did not phone until four in the morning. Estrin had just gotten to sleep. She’d been thrashing for hours, tormented with feathery visions of dill sauce. She repeatedly checked her pulse, until the hyperawareness of her heartbeat seemed to imply how imminently it would stop.

  He was incoherent. Something about booze, which she could infer, and lack of sleep, hard work … How often had she sympathized with this bullshit. But for once she would not caution, Farrell, don’t push yourself, you have limits, your lungs, get some rest, but drawled laconically, “Well, it’s your choice, isn’t it?” which she followed with pitiless silence. He inquired vaguely into how she was, and she said, “Fine,” immediately furious he did not know what she refused to tell. It was Day Fourteen.

  Estrin woke again at 7:30 and groaned. Sleep had become arduous, like everything else. Her dreams could no longer carry a plot or maintain a location, but frittered in a delirium of empty glasses, cleared plates, banished lovers. She never dreamt of eating, she never dreamt of sex. Only of strangers and stadiums and big, unfurnished flats; parties to which she was not invited.

  She spent the morning throwing up (now routine, and subsiding after the third cup of tea), picking up a paintbrush and putting it down again, and watching the flowers on the wallpaper grow hairy vines. That afternoon she finished Ten Men Dead. Probably the book depressed her, but just now it made her livid, since everything did.

  It wasn’t exactly flattering now, was it, that the son of a bitch called, since she’d traced him herself and spent plenty of time at it, too, not that he’d call and tell her where he was, mind you, so she had to stop by fucking Whitewells, where they always acted as if they’d never seen her before, never so much as a nod of recognition, stony, every damn one, and no, they hadn’t a clue where Farrell was—liars—so she had to call Constance, who was embarrassed and wasn’t supposed to tell but did anyway, because Estrin sounded so pathetic. And now it was time to go to the Green Fucking Door. She couldn’t find her fucking right boot and then the fucking Guzzi took forever to start and the light at the Falls must be jammed because she’d been at this intersection a fucking half hour, until Estrin actually shouted, “Fucking change!” and people stared.

  Estrin had a name for this, it was Chemical Irritation, rage that heightened her life with an almost hallucinogenic intensity, except instead of the colors getting brighter they merely grew more annoying. In fact, what colors, since it was dark practically all day and of course it was raining, of course—NORMAL people traveled to Bali and got suntans and Estrin had to fly to Belfucking-fast, dreary, dank, and obsessed with its turgid, ineffably boring little conflict—NORMAL women ate breakfast, and lunch, and supper, with dessert and brandy, and then watched movies on TV huddled up to some reasonable excuse for a man. But no-oo, Estrin had to make for repressed religious countries and then find the ugliest part of the ugliest city and live there and starve. Estrin had to find a “boyfriend” who rather than hold her hand through the trials of her own barmy fanaticism was up in Bushmills pickling the last few brain cells functioning on this island. As Estrin whipped past graffitti with the rain needling her face, every scrawl of the I-fucking-R-fucking-A ground a whole layer of enamel off her molars. And all down the road, if every local wasn’t dressed like a dog’s dinner—

  Do not imagine that when Estrin got to work her mood improved.

  When she arrived, Clive had finally gotten an interview with some Sinn Feín menial who was making quite a to-do about not wanting to be recorded. Seated at the bar, Clive seemed to acquiesce, and slipped his tiny S911 into his breast pocket. He must have thought himself quite the sly fox depressing the Record button, and might have gotten away with it had the cassette not gone haywire; for midway through the interview the tape began curling out
from behind his lapel. The Republican marched off in a huff.

  Ordinarily Estrin might have found this funny, but the joke cost an hour of Clive’s disconsolate blithering about how other people got away with things and he always got caught. For the rest of the night, too, Clive was unraveling the tape all over the bar, fussing when Estrin tried to wipe down the counter lest the recording get wet, and later asking Estrin to untangle a particularly nuggy morass. She gave it a go, but it turned out that threading quarter-inch microcassette tape through itself was the perfectly wrong task for Estrin Lancaster this evening; after five minutes, her breathing sibilated. Clive almost noticed the crimped fingers and dangerous little growl in time, but just as he assured her he could do it himself, she crushed it. Splintering that plastic casing, wadding up the tape, and throwing the lot at Clive Barclay was the only thing that gave her satisfaction all night.

  Because everyone was in top form. Sailbheaster was whistling a medley of “My Favorite Things,” “My Little Armalite,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Callaghan was gooning at the bar in his best beige, lager dripping from his mustache, repeating everything Estrin said in a broad, twangy attempt at an American accent.

  Malcolm kept at her heels all night. He had a surprise, he said. Take a few minutes and come see his surprise. But the club was a-scurry with the all-important business of getting soused one more night, and she put him off.

  “Aye, the Six Counties has gone twee,” Callaghan was be-moaning to Duff. “Walk down Royal Avenue, look sharp lest you get mown over by a riot of housewives storming Anderson McAuley for pâté molds.”

  “Time was we knew how to riot proper, d’you know?” Duff concurred. “Waved a tricolor instead of a linen napkin. But these days a boy buys a round, it’s down his throat in an hour, when a ways back a lad would save for the kind you served to British soldiers. And they’d not come back for seconds, d’you follow?”