Estrin did feel sheepish, though less for her tirade than for having taken politics too lightly here—chicken retread, she had used it for one-liners and passing dinners with Farrell. Suddenly all her theories seemed irrelevant or, worse, indulgent, and tonight all she muttered was “Christ, this whole thing is fucking stupid.” Hardly profound, but Estrin was growing suspicious of profundity, so much pith for its own sake, those sonorous observations that existed more to be admired than to sort anything out. How much had any of her own pronouncements here made any difference? She remembered the packed attic of Linen Hall, lined with perfectly astute books, and so? Estrin promised herself to make no more proclamations, about overadaptation, identity; while a vow she would break, it would at least last the night. She did for the first time understand why so many Northerners left. Because there was nothing to say; because that never stopped you from saying it; because one day you walked in and Duff’s stool was empty and you felt humiliated, for yourself, for everyone. There is only so much embarrassment a citizen can withstand in a lifetime.
The members had difficulty keeping a properly subdued face on the evening. Like Estrin, no one bawled. Instead, they set to writing memorial notices for the Irish News—in one of the more barbaric traditions of the Province, composed in rhyming verse. The session rapidly grew animated, with cries of “Swoon! Croon! Would be to us a boon!” They might recall the cause of their mission and tamp down, only to get into a loud row two minutes later over whether it was acceptable to rhyme Duff and chuffed. The memorials, too, had a strange tendency to go off in the second stanza:
You left this earth before we’d told
How much to us you’re worth.
We’d love to say your weight in gold,
For countless nights of mirth.
But we’ll have to leave it weight in coal,
Or maybe only turf—
Cause all the Green Door’s on the dole;
We can’t afford your girth.
Finally they settled down in earnest to compose a ballad, entitled “The Pints of Shearhoon.”
National self-determination
Was dear to old Shearhoon,
So some noble organization
Set him dancing to its tune.
Sworn enemy of the army,
The brave bard from Andytown
Found the Britannic Lounge too smarmy,
But only loved The Crown.
A victim of the Struggle,
Our burly volunteer;
His package he did juggle,
But the bloody thing went queer.
While we’ll miss the big Republican,
Who surely had it rough,
There’s one still healthy publican
Relieved the job was duff.
A bollocks, do you follow?
For once it weren’t the Brits.
You may find it hard to swallow,
But no other story fits.
We’d yet buy Guinness for the bastard—
He didn’t have to die,
If he hadn’t of been plastered,
Or he’d only worn a tie.
chapter twenty-two
The Saint of Glengormley
It was Day Eighteen. Estrin sat herself squarely before her dingy morning maté and for once counted up a different calendar. She’d finished her last progesterone supplement four days before the fast, and it hadn’t worked. She had to face the fact that there was one other reason women did not menstruate than that their fat-muscle ratio was so very fierce.
Not that Estrin for a minute believed such an absurdity possible. The fast had obviously upset her chemical balance in every way. It was only from routine caution that she mobilized for the Royal Victoria. Besides, getting the test was something to do. Estrin could no longer manage to cut molding or refinish furniture; she could barely read; a slow walk around the corner would fill her afternoon.
In the courtyard, a forbidding bronze of Queen Victoria brandished a scepter in Estrin’s way, inflating its chins in disapproval that any institution bearing the Queen’s name would harbor that clinic on the third floor.
Inside, Estrin took an obscure pleasure in the place. The Royal was grim. The bright kindergarten daffodils of Farrell’s ward had disturbed her more than these yellowed corridors, for the mindless murals of City lied: they belied the corruption of the body, the horror stories the tower block disguised. City’s demeaning floral optimism painted over tragedy with decor like a great big get-well card for the terminally ill. Estrin preferred to stare ugly mortality in the face. The RVH suggested leeches, nuns, unanesthetized amputation. Its nurses wore buns, its doctors wore spectacles. A place where sickness was still unsightly, from which the healthy fled—why, the Royal Victoria was a real hospital.
The waiting room of the clinic was itself a form of contraception, since ten minutes of reading its posters and you would never have sex again: AIDS: PROTECT YOURSELF; RECOGNIZING HERPES; WOMEN: ARE YOU BEING PHYSICALLY OR MENTALLY ABUSED? CHLAMYDIA: WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW CAN HURT YOU … Patients stared straight ahead, hands protecting their laps, seated mute and immobile in every other chair.
Once Estrin delivered her urine sample, she was invited into an office. The woman was nice enough, and wouldn’t charge Estrin, though she shouldn’t have been covered by National Health. She asked about Estrin’s period, and Estrin felt irresponsible admitting she’d missed two. Just give me the fucking results. She did not want to tell this stranger about her “partners” or what she would do if the test was positive when the chances were so ridiculously thin—
But when the results came back Estrin felt calm. She did not say, “You’re kidding,” or ask the nurse to repeat herself. Estrin realized she had known from the start what the answer would be. Through that orgy of mince pies, she had gained enough weight to ovulate. She found she was smiling. Amiably, she allowed them to make a counseling appointment she would not keep. Really, she felt amused.
Leaving the hospital, she stroked her chin. She waved goodbye to Queen Victoria.
For now that the unthinkable had occurred she was impressed. Estrin felt more part of the human race than she had for years. Functionally infertile since fifteen, she was tired of being the exception. And though she had no intention of Francis Hughesing herself beyond two more days, at this moment on Day Nineteen Estrin Lancaster was dying, and she admired that inside this shriveled, moribund host another animal thrived, like lichen on a felled tree, flowers blooming in radioactive Hiroshima—
My relationship to sex is apocalyptic/Most people don’t think of children as the end of the world.
Only now, a block up the Falls, did she think of the father. Estrin’s laugh was not very nice.
She surveyed the prams wheeling along the footpath, so many women younger than herself rustling out of shops with whole families, the eldest old enough to pour petrol bombs. For the first time she felt envious. Fine, the ladies looked plenty haggard—they lived on chips and never had a minute’s peace to themselves. But Estrin had a bit too much peace to herself. And while she’d seen their worlds as tiny, confined to this island and often to a single neighborhood, Estrin’s world was smaller still, a portable universe of one. These women, too, had left the Royal’s third-floor clinic and returned to a husband, of all things, with what they regarded as good news. Estrin recalled all the sappy fifties movies of her childhood, where the woman cries and the man hugs her and gets her a chair and won’t let her carry the groceries. Crap, a load of crap; why, Estrin could not remember one time watching a sit-com where a pregnant woman totters back from a clinic after eating nothing for almost three weeks, dreading calling the father, who is off drinking with a load of paramilitaries on the Antrim coast, the mother not proud but apologetic: Don’t worry, fuck you, I’ll take care of it.
Well, he was good for the abortion anyway, and it would be expensive, entailing a shuttle ticket to London as well as non-resident medical fees. Since in Northern Ireland you could blow eleven Prods in Enniskil
len to kingdom come but you couldn’t scrape a tadpole from between your legs—
And wouldn’t the bastard kidnap this misfortune for his own anguish, wouldn’t he coopt her suffering if he could? Well, she wouldn’t allow it. All he would have to do is pay. She would carry her own groceries: herbal tea.
Bitter. Back home, the house a shambles, teacups everywhere, tea, tea, tea, fucking tea … No reason this altered the fast. Estrin sat and tried to feel pregnant. With only a few more days, she wanted to know what it was like.
That night the club was humming with the next day’s Border Poll. At the last minute the SDLP had endorsed the referendum—Estrin felt the shadow of O’Phelan cross the club. News of the conference had been hitting the press; even the Green Door had heard of it. MacBride had been winking and nodding up a storm on Ulster Newstime, and it annoyed Estrin to see how he took full credit for the negotiations when she had watched Farrell drag himself out of bed with four hours’ sleep for a full year.
After hours, Estrin lured Malcolm into lingering. He assumed she needed to talk about Duff, but she didn’t bring Shearhoon up at all, instead ambling off on a queer tack about how she had no interest in deluding herself about sacrificing for a whole country, but she could stand to do something once in a while for even one other person besides herself: “I mean, I’m sick to death of lifting weights, but I wouldn’t mind pushing some stranger’s car up a hill. I’m bored with running, but I’d gladly help you move—I’d carry books up three flights of stairs. And I’m fucking tired of skipping dessert to stay thin, but I wouldn’t mind going hungry for a kid—I read Famine the other day, with all these mothers starving so their children could eat and I salivated with envy.”
“Est.” Malcolm took her hand with that paternal softness of his so remarkable in a young boy. “Stop waffling. What’s biting your bum?”
“I’m pregnant.” It was the first time she’d said it out loud. She enjoyed the sound of it.
Malcolm rather enjoyed it, too. “O’Phelan?”
“Aye,” she said, and laughed, catching herself—it was the first time she’d ever said aye. Must be the kid. He was half Irish.
“What’s he say, like?”
“Not much lately. He doesn’t know.”
“You clued me in before the father?”
She sighed. “Tells you something, doesn’t it.”
“Are you going to get married?”
“Oh, Malcolm. All these guns and you people still live in the House at Pooh Corner.”
“You wouldn’t have it on your own?”
“No, Malcolm. I won’t have it, period.”
“Est!” Malcolm drew away. “Bloody hell, that’s a sin!”
“Yes,” she considered. “It may be.” Estrin was interested. She had no previous qualms about abortion. It seems her qualms were only about this one. “Anyway, I’ll have to fly to England. If you could cover for me at the club …”
Malcolm didn’t respond.
“Boy, I should write my brother.” She stretched. “Dear Billy: You will be relieved to hear I have finally experienced Real Life. I will promptly slaughter it, but I thought you’d be proud of me, for a day or two.”
They stayed late. He massaged her temples, his touch subtly painful, the wrong fingers.
She walked home; in the last days of the fast, she couldn’t bear the roar of the motorcycle. Her steps were short, an old woman’s. Home, with tea, she stared into the coals of her fire.
(“Are you going to get married?”)
Stop it. He would never. You would never. Estrin apologized to herself: It’s the child. These kids start trying to survive you early; they know they have to fight, even at the size of a pea. And I am tired of fighting. I know you think that’s because I’m a girl. Very well, I am a girl. And fine, I won’t marry or have children. All the same, there’s a waiting in me and there’s the tiredness and there’s all this running, away more than toward, and I don’t see what’s going to get warmer or closer. There is no luxury in my life. There is no leaning or holding, no enclosure, no shore. I can see myself older and I’m scatty. The eccentric aunt who never eats a meal. Thin and scrappy and spilling stories no one cares to hear. Well traveled and full of voices—old voices—Farrell’s in the morning— “This orange juice is gorgeous!”
At 4 a.m. it struck her that, though Farrell had called her often enough at this hour, she had never dared ring him past twelve. This was the last wild night of the conference and he was surely legless, but for once his politics dwarfed—the Real Life filled her with quiet power. So she rang and rang the Antrim Arms and would not stop hassling the bartender and other strangers until they finally roused Farrell O’Phelan himself to the phone.
There is a Chekhov short story called “The Bet.” A facile banker wagers two million rubles that his friend will never succeed in a self-imposed imprisonment for fifteen years. Accepting the challenge, the friend condemns himself to a single room. Years pass. The prisoner spends most of his time reading. Meanwhile, the banker suffers a failing of fortunes, and an idle wager turns ruinous. He appears at the end of the fifteen years in a sweat. His friend has been strictly adhering to the terms of their agreement. So on the last day the banker is astonished to discover an empty cell, and a letter. The document recounts a growing existential disenchantment. In his exile, having read so much philosophy, his friend has grown contemptuous. As an expression of this disdain, he has left his room precisely one day before he could justly collect his money.
Estrin had always liked this story. The letter had been preachy but the gesture pure. She was never quite sure what it meant until the early hours of Day Twenty, cradling her tea.
Wake up, you willick, or you’ll sleep through till the polls close!”
“I don’t vote.” It was a principle. Farrell slammed down the phone. Christ, the thing never stopped ringing, and hadn’t this place wrung enough from him for three weeks—one party always stomping out and having to be enticed softy-softy back to the table, night after night half the lot soggy with drink before tea, the other half, Sinners and Paisleyites (they had so much in common), scowling in the back of the room sipping pure orange … Three solid weeks of a headache smack between the eyes, his sinuses drying in cigarette smoke like flaps of hung haddock, his back creaky from soliciting aggressive short people … And it took them a bit, but the crowd had warmed to the performance, the DUP spraying Sinners with Roachguard to eliminate “insects,” sonorous readings of the OED entry on scum pitched against an equally loud appeal for the support of Gaelic football in Irish—bad Irish; the Union Jacks and tricolors sneaked up in the dining room early mornings, the ritual rippings down, the obligatory punch-ups, and then last night, inconceivably, the maudlin singsong around the piano as, unable to agree on “Say Hello to the Provos,” “God Save the Queen,” or “The Pope’s a Darkie,” they finally converged on “Barbara Allen,” with the Sinners, DUP, UUU, and SDLP in four-part harmony, dripping on each other’s shoulders and bawling on the refrain. Now Farrell could rest in peace, because he had obviously seen everything.
But no, MacBride had to harass him, and here it was still pitch-dark—what—eight—Didn’t he go to bed at eight? Ah, p.m. Farrell rolled over. Fine. He’d wondered what he would do today, and now he’d done it. And thank fuck, he had spared himself megaphones pouring MacBride’s syrupy voice down the streets of Antrim. How fitting to spend election day instead sleeping off three liters of white wine.
The sheet wrapped around his legs; Farrell declined to struggle. This was the kind of bondage he could get into: being tied to a bedstead, full stop. Had he ever loved a woman as much as a real feather pillow? Quiet sifted the room like dust. Curtains drawn to the dark, phone jack pulled; Farrell considered seriously if this was the finest moment of his life. Even in the disposal days he had never worked harder than this last year. The conference itself had been a marathon; now it was over. Across the Province votes were cast, and how delightful, whichever way they went, to
be able to affect them no more. And for the first time since he was delirious with pneumonia he could not think of a single thing he had to do.
A memory squirmed. He did not know if he’d dreamt this. Yet on the notepad there, a scrawl, E-8, like a chess notation. She did ring, after all. Tea, she said. Never more insistent. Had something to tell him. Jesus God, when these women “had something to say” he suddenly remembered an appointment—in Venezuela! And she couldn’t put it off one bloody day, had to be tomorrow night. With the election party starting that afternoon, he could tell already he’d be late.
Farrell sat up. No, no, no, he did not want this moment to be over. For a hospital, my kingdom for a hospital. Alas, he felt down his chest and inhaled, and it seemed he was in perfect health.
Braced with a shower, in a freshly cleaned suit, Farrell decided to enjoy the evening, what was left of it. Downstairs in the dining room he found a handful of other conferees who, after a devoted session that had lasted through to morning, would not be bullied by their parties to spend election day on knock-ups, shillying pensioners to the polls. Though the kitchen would close for the night in an hour, the table was laid in one stage or another of breakfast. It was the respectful, wry repast of the hungover: jokes were carefully not too funny, mention of alcohol was no go. Gentlemanly speculation over coffee and brown bread: even with the SDLP’s grudging endorsement, the poll’s turnout would be dicey. Shared incredulity that the constitutional nationalists actually swung round on an internal solution. General concession that the Provos would put up a ruckus, that it was best the next few days to avoid central Belfast. Farrell was surprised to discover he liked some of these codgers. The North attracted a different breed of politician than elsewhere. They had character, even if it was bad. He was further surprised that the men liked him, too. As they retired to the lounge, they gave Farrell a tiny standing ovation—pat-pat-pat—not too loud.