Ordinary Decent Criminals

  Do not say Armagh, Fermanagh. Do not even say Cork. What is your work? This is a gilt-framed picture where you limn what you like. Do you want to work? Yes! Do you care about anyone but yourself? He would like to find out. He would work to find out. Surely all those taxis to Derry were not simply panaceas for the fact that his mother never held his hand.

  All right, in lieu of the more original, South Africa. Not because the North is “solved,” but because it doesn’t want to be and you cannot force contentment on a belligerent people. He would leave them to their festering and seek conflict with substance. He is a fine negotiator, and his Irishness lends him suitable neutrality. He is useful. The homelands make him cry. Yesterday he had tea with Tutu. The man is astonishingly short.

  Because can it be so much more deadly dull to spend an evening with a woman in your pantry than with a Fortnight in your hotel? Why did it seem the dispatch of all adventure if at the end of the day a pretty motorcyclist rubbed your head? Wasn’t the irony of bomb disposal that even death defiance became ordinary, for wasn’t every thrill, over time, destined to feel the way anything that happens to you always feels? Though a Saracen mumbled by, he had seen so many of them for the last twenty years that it could have been a Ford Cordova. Farrell looked at the clouds instead and decided he had not paid enough attention to weather. He couldn’t tell if the day was about to turn floral or foul; while the army bored him, the sky infused with suspense; adventure was an attitude.

  But anything Farrell had ever learned, in Union Jackie’s, on Whitewells’ roof, with a gun to his temple in Newry, had been taken back. Clutching the bag from Anderson McAuley, with its drooping silver earrings when Estrin’s ears weren’t even pierced, was to be no exception. For epiphanies are lies, luring you with the illusion that the truth can be won in seconds, while anything worth knowing takes the whole of your life to earn. It was this revelation which bloomed in his colon as he spotted 133: that there was no making up for things, that you couldn’t go back and revise, that you had led your life limping from one bitter barb to the next unkind accusation, and that was the sum of it. There was no redemption, no transformation, no second chance, and anything you ever did understand would explode through your thick skull only because it was too late.

  epilogue:

  Boredom as Moral Achievement

  Farrell hadn’t returned home at Christmas for fifteen years, and in ’73 he’d been squiffed and called his mother a cow and knocked over the Christmas tree. Since then his family sent him some little token through Constance every year, which he promptly threw in the bin. He’d hardly replied in kind, either; I am like this. Being like this, he nearly killed his poor mother by showing up that morning on her doorstep bundled with packages. His sisters fell so over themselves that their gratitude backfired, and instead of making him feel the loving brother, he felt a shite. His mother, that leathery item, cried. At least his da was surly as ever, jabbing from his armchair: All very well now, but hasn’t Farrell been absent like for more Christmases than we care to count, and why dither especially over the one member of the family that hasn’t shown them a shred of loyalty his entire adult life? The man had a point.

  Children have short memories, however, and when the two girls unwrapped his meter-high stuffed hippos, Uncle Farrell’s previous boycott of their existence was forgotten. Farrell felt a bit sheepish, for the animals were seventy-five quid each, and shamed the hand puppets and wooden puzzle of the thirty-two counties from their parents.

  He made it well into the unwrapping carry-on before his asthma started up (amazing, bingo); as usual, it provided him the excuse to go, for Farrell feared that in one rash morning he was about to undo fifteen years of dedicated neglect; he could already feel their expectations for next Christmas breathing down his neck. He cut out before the meal.

  In the long walk from Glengormley, the Cave Hill gloomed beside him, assuming that commonly weary aspect of Irish countryside—washed, ragged, overdescribed. Too many writers had scribbled about these hillsides—an unremarkable, wind-beaten land, exhausted by metaphor, every poet’s bloody mother. The poor island couldn’t take it, depleted by the obsessions of son on son, soil planted with the same crop year after year, a too-tattered wasteground to bear the raking of so much neurosis; the tufts of its gorse scrabbled in the breeze like torn hair.

  He made the house by mid-afternoon. Funny, he was halfway there before he realized where he was headed.

  Farrell stood before the gate, once more off its hinges, and toed a bit of broken footpath, clasping his hands; would have taken off his hat but wasn’t wearing one. He had that formal feeling like minutes of memorial silence after Enniskillen through which children giggled and shuffled and opened their eyes. He felt like one such child. Even at his own ceremony, his instinct was to defile it.

  Though he recognized the odd corner of new molding, a face of freshly painted plaster, a few sticks of varnished table legs, otherwise the place looked basically the way it had when she’d moved in. Well, there it was: you built it up; you tore it down. What the human race had been doing from the year dot. Just now he had no opinion about the cycle either; or even about the vicious-looking boys breaking up Estrin’s four-legged Victorian bathtub with lead pipes. Pipes she’d never connected, anyway—that tub had never held more than paint cans, so why get sentimental? And better not to cross the lads. No more than twelve, but could put a nail bomb together quicker than any thirty-two-county puzzle. And he was not so ghoulish as to shoo them off and scavenge for earplugs, pink pebbles, leftovers of salmon steak.

  No matter where he looked he had no opinions. It was quite wonderful. He was left with impassive interestedness. No one looked more attractive than anyone else. The army helicopter overhead could have been a magpie, the big Gerry Adams mural a billboard for Harp. Most of all, when he looked at 133 he could summon neither anger nor remorse. An event had simply: occurred.

  Or had it? Well, there wasn’t much to do; he hadn’t planned anything mawkish, wreath-laying or prayer. Still, he had hoped the return would kick something in, and it wasn’t working. Last week he’d phoned in a dinner reservation, and had to ring back. Sorry, that’s only a table for one. He knew himself, of course—this was delay rather than denial. The bomb hadn’t gone off yet. It might never.

  The visit hadn’t taken long. Farrell shook himself and moved on, with a quirk of a smile—he’d warned her not to put in those windows.

  You sorry article.” Constance had laid her hand on his cheek. “All these years you’ve told the rest of the world to stay out of your business. We’ve stayed out. You’ve had your privacy. And now you can’t get shed of it.”

  “Do you want me to confide in you or not?”

  “Aye. But you might have better come to me before it was past time I could give you advice.”

  “I detest advice. And nothing could have happened otherwise. But I must say,” he’d considered more gently, “it’s a queer business to fall in love with a woman only after she’s dead.”

  Now that had sounded poignant enough, but walking back from Springfield Road to the comforting anonymity of his hotel room, Farrell conceded the conceit, one more of his high-flown romantic declarations which cost him so little; for he might more accurately have said, “Isn’t it cushy to fall in love with a woman when she’s dead? How little it requires of you.” Because what made him feel worst was not feeling all that bad, really. He had liked telling the story. Why, Constance was the one who cried. He liked having a murdered lover; it fit. My swallow, he confessed that night, I am so much more a swine than you imagined. Do I have an easier time talking to you dead? Farrell had experienced a failure of adjacency his whole life. He was one of those infants born allergic to everything, whom women poked and waved at from the other side of his plastic tent.

  Estrin herself had touched on it with Shearhoon, that one of the great taboos of mourning is admitting how little you feel—what he hadn’t told Constance, dreaded telling himself. Then, there are o
ther things to do besides feel, aren’t there? Grief never filled a calendar. And he wasn’t about to kill himself, not over a girl. Farrell lived beside people. Some of them fell away. If he ever committed suicide, it would have no relation to anyone but would only be a gesture of purified self-loathing.

  Farrell wasn’t much of a fantasist, but there was one story he preferred to the murdered-girlfriend, and occasionally he indulged a rewrite: where Farrell, say, skips Anderson McAuley and arrives at 133, just after DHL. He recognizes straight off there is something wrong with the delivery and orders Estrin from the house. Rolling up his sleeves, a fork in one hand and a spackling knife in the other, he feels the old acuity return. With seconds to go, our hero prizes the detonator from its explosive, which he carts out back at arm’s length like bad meat. Well after the dirty work is done, the ATOs arrive, impressed; Lieutenant Pim introduces “the mad genius” to the squad—

  Is it at this point or a little earlier that Farrell starts laughing?

  Moreover, Farrell rehearsed his caprice of tea and Gorbachev on her birthday. He nudged himself. What would have happened even a day or two later, really? He knew this dance: what came after the one step forward? What were the chances that an old dog of forty-four would learn a new jig?

  On the other hand, he witnessed two tiny aberrant behaviors. The old dog of 44 kept a matchbox from that restaurant in his pocket. Though he didn’t smoke or light burners, Farrell switched it from suit to suit with his keys. Second, he kept the Phillips screwdriver she had left at Whitewells on his desk. Cleaned his nails with it once in a while, but otherwise Farrell was no Mr. Fix-It. He challenged himself to toss the tool in the bin, irritated with totemism, the morbid souvenir. But something else always came up, the phone rang … And he would twist mean little holes in the wood with its tip while Constance informed him of canceled appointments.

  It was Farrell who had to contact Estrin’s parents. The father got confused. “She wrote us it wasn’t as bad as they said,” he objected. “She said she was safer than in Philadelphia.”

  “That depends on who your friends are,” said Farrell. “And where is safe?”

  Estrin might have been the source of quite a row in the States if her father hadn’t Gordon Wilsoned the story; and in America forgiveness only makes the C section. Still, he wondered if she’d be pleased, for once, to make good copy; he should send clippings to her brother in Allentown. Finally something happened to you, my swallow. Wasn’t that the sure cure for negaphobia? Afraid you don’t exist? Behold, you do not. Relax.

  Much as he’d have liked to Throw Himself into His Work, in the months following his Border Poll the violence was positively festive, and moved to the mainland again. Britain got cold feet. Thatcher decided the turnout was marginal enough to ignore, and as the season of good cheer persisted through March and April, Westminster did nothing, zero, zip. At best the army shot a few more Provos in iffy circumstances. But they did not withdraw so much as a rusty M-16, a single nineteen-year-old private with the flu. Not a move to schedule assembly elections, not a peep of the Phase Twos, Threes, and Fours Farrell had negotiated to the footnote all year. Himself, Farrell got escorted to shabbier London bistros by lowlier civil servants; demoted from dinner to lunch, he was well on his way to coffee—instant, with whitener—by the time he got the message. So before they started Farrell-whoing him off the steps of Parliament, he stopped shuttling to England altogether. If the British were talking, it was to someone else. Rumor had it “Molehill” was trying to arrange a Provisional cease-fire—again—

  Surprisingly, he couldn’t be arsed about the results of the referendum. Like everyone else on this island, he cared about winning all right, but he did not care what he won. A kind of irrationality, that. To work so hard for something for the work, not for the something. Motion toward; inability to arrive—Farrell thought these phrases and even wrote articles with them, but it was only a naming; they did not change what he was like.

  “And so the nationalist entrancement with aspiration,” he dictated to Constance: “an advance to victory, oblivious to both the prize and the means by which it is secured—” an ugly combination, for you are left only with appetite, like MacBride, voracious discontent. Once you are no longer hungry and you still move on to your third biscuit, you will finish the package and ravage the cupboards for more; you are Estrin Lancaster buying knickers until they tumble over the top of her basket; you are Farrell O’Phelan on his third bottle asking for the wine list. When you are doing the wrong thing, you can do it indefinitely. Twenty years was nothing.

  Besides, the whole idea of “power sharing” was rubbish. You chose your sides, or not even. That’s why Ulster so captivated international imagination, a paradigm: you couldn’t share power. One group had it, one didn’t. As for sides, you were stuck. Like it or not, Farrell was a Northern Irish Catholic. Estrin was a dead American. It was all over at the start. You could fight, aye, but you couldn’t fight the fighting, because then you still were. Everything whole Farrell ever understood used the same word a number of times. This made for lousy prose, and the articles he sent Fortnight were rejected.

  Fine. Farrell wouldn’t have read them himself. Farrell was bored. He began to realize, for example, the reason he bought ten papers was that otherwise he wouldn’t read one. To discriminate was to eliminate the lot. For this wasn’t the old impatient, irascible boredom, stimulating, edgy. This boredom ached through his bones like a permanent dose of the cold. Not the subtlest or most perverse observation about the North could tickle a hair on his head. A monument of a boredom, it amounted to a moral achievement.

  The one glorious side to the Border Poll fizzle was perfect revenge on Angus MacBride. The British didn’t replace Tom King exactly, but fobbed Angus off on a second-in-command spot. Instead of a Nobel lecture tour, Angus opened aerobics rooms in leisure centers, spoke to the Northern Ireland Agoraphobia Society about the joys of the out-of-doors, made guest appearances at Overeaters Anonymous and the Dog Training Club, and MC’ed the Motor Trade Ball. He accumulated all the perks of high office: free vegetarian cooking classes, junkets to Newtownards, matinee tickets to Sinbad and the Pirates. Angus knew he’d had it when that spring he was approached for an interview by Eddie McIlwaine.

  Not long after that, the Sunday World broke the story that MacBride was philandering, and with a Catholic—not even Roisin, another one. Funnily enough, the rumor did no apparent damage to MacBride’s standing in the UUU. It turns out everyone pretty much knew he was a rascal, and preferred him that way.

  Farrell had dreaded running into Roisin, and of course eventually he did and she was snuffy. But nothing happened. He was a little insulted she didn’t seem more upset.

  Still, in a world where the Zambian government shoots over a hundred people for complaining about the price of mealie meal, Farrell’s insincere handholding was so terrible? Give over.

  In April, tinkering with his emotions as once he had with bombs, Farrell returned for the first and only time to the Green Door. Littered with the odd layabout that afternoon, the club would crowd at night—Duff and Estrin had improved its reputation, for nothing picked up business like a renowned fatality or two. Habitually, Farrell scanned for Shearhoon anyway, who once occluded a good eight-bottle stretch of bar.

  Instead, he found Clive Barclay, who had assumed Duff’s old stool, and seemed to be working on the breadth as well—his bum now spread down the sides of his seat like icing on a cake. Farrell asked how the thesis was coming, but Clive only enthused about having joined the staff poker game at Linen Hall. Clive “let” Farrell buy him a drink, and Farrell inquired when the student was headed back to Iowa.

  “Och …” Clive clouded. “The work’s taking a wee bit longer than I thought, like.”

  Farrell clapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe you should stick around. You’re beginning to fit right in.”

  “Aye, you fancy?” Clive beamed.

  “What’ll it be?”

  Malcolm was
growing up fast, nearly tall as Farrell himself, and, by the terse sound of that voice, already getting hard.

  Farrell ordered Ballygowan, and didn’t bother to drink it. “I thought you’d be off to America by now. You’re about that age. Packing?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said, wiping under the plastic bullets briskly. “But Est said I should stay. She said someone’s to tend to this country. That when you start leaving you keep leaving and it takes too much of your time. Better to stay put, she says, so you don’t have to keep buying dish drainers.” He smiled, a little.

  “Or corkscrews,” Farrell remembered. “But plugging to stay put doesn’t sound like the lady’s line.”

  “You were hardly underfoot those last few weeks. Estrin started saying different things. Estrin changed. You didn’t notice.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want her to change.”

  “Maybe you didn’t care fuck-all.”

  The hostility made Farrell feel more comfortable. “Best not to comment on affairs of which you know so splendidly little.”

  “Hardly. Of the two of us and ignorance, I’d say yous take the prize.”

  Farrell’s fist closed; he felt the same unadmirable desire to crush the boy as he had when they played chess. “Meaning?”

  Malcolm’s chin rose high. “Like, did you know she was pregnant?”

  Farrell didn’t move.

  “Right,” said Malcolm, going back to drying glasses. “I didn’t think so.”

  This time there was no poking at himself or plunking himself before bombed-out houses to rouse some meager reaction. He couldn’t talk for a week. He couldn’t buy newspapers. Why, he couldn’t even drink.

  And so began a different Farrell O’Phelan: he read novels; he rang his mother. He minded his nieces when their mother left for Dublin, and was surprised to enjoy the girls, their invention and easy affection. He insisted Constance work nine to five, and stopped asking her to buy his sheets.