Ordinary Decent Criminals

As he walked her back to Bedford Street, they discussed the Guilford Four. Approaching her bike, Farrell felt Estrin drag at his hand.

“Well, it’s been fun,” said Estrin defiantly.

“Yes” was all he said. He waited for her to remove the padlock, zip up, strap on her helmet, and actually turn the key. As she revved the motor, he slipped his hands in his pockets. She fed the engine more petrol than it needed; its revolutions grew louder and more shrill. He could feel her clutching through disappointment to disbelief to rage like gears, and he waited for the very last stage—ordinary pain—at which Estrin unexpectedly switched off the cycle and stared down at the tank. She looked up, her face not wobbly but impassive and open.

“This is it?”

“Not unless you prefer, my swallow. Myself, I’d like very much to see you again.”

“Then why don’t you take my fucking phone number?”

“Now, that’s a thought. You Americans are so well organized.”

The exchange done, she started the bike energetically; he squeezed her shoulder and leaned down to shout, “And it was more than fun!”

She tore out from under his hand, grazed his toe with her back wheel, and ripped past the BBC.

chapter six

Roisin’s Furniture Goes Funny

Now, why go to that confounded funeral, Roisin, when I’ve the afternoon free?”

“You know very well why. Didn’t you just go to McMichael’s? Even Seawright’s, and that was appalling.”

“What was appalling, love, was blowing up his car. The yob was a bigot, but last time I read up, that wasn’t a capital crime.”

“It should be,” she muttered.

“Sure we’d all be six foot under in no time.”

“Well, last time I read up, walking down the road on the border wasn’t a capital crime, either.”

“The soldier says himself, the gun went off by accident.”

“Angus, catch yourself on! I suppose Cromwell’s invasion was an accident, too.”

“Cromwell’s invasion was three hundred years ago, Christ! This Brigadoon drives me to distraction, always blattering on about Oliver and James and Billy, as if they were all on their way here to tea. MacAnespie will be investigated—”

“That’s rich. Just like the Birmingham Six?”

“The point is, you attend, at the end of the day it’s one more Nationalist demonstration.”

“And Seawright’s was a Loyalist one.”

“That funeral was part of my job. Your job is to stay home and find it all too painful to bear.”

“Even a poet needs to make political statements.”

“Bollocks, haven’t you had it up to your bake with political statements?”

“It’s more you have, and only with mine.”

“I’ll not get into the whole kit, since I said I’d an afternoon free and not the rest of my life. But I do wish you’d think things through a bit more, lass. You call yourself a Republican, but you’ve not a single decent word for the South. It’s the DUP fellows steam off to Donegal on holiday and say it’s brilliant. You, Rosebud, come back from Sligo raving. ‘Their veins run with Fairy Liquid!’ you says.”

Roisin laughed. “I said that?”

He snaked a finger down her arm, and Roisin shivered. “Aye, you’ve a right decent sense of humor, when you let it out. Loose a few more crackers instead of all this howl about creepy trees and menstruation, maybe I’d show at one of those do’s of yours.”

“Angus, you wouldn’t go to my readings if I tap-danced with Dame Edna.” Roisin struggled halfhearted toward the clock. “I’ll need to leave in twenty minutes.”

“I vote we have our own wee service.” He slipped his hand up under her blouse. “Why, this afternoon I personally volunteer to cross the sectarian divide.”

Angus MacBride was a vigorous, aggressive lover who didn’t fancy diddling about for hours trying to satisfy his woman but pleased himself. Roisin preferred this. She enjoyed being taken, even forced a little. Besides, a too solicitous lover made Roisin feel watched, and his attentions often backfired. She had difficulty coming anyway, and under pressure to perform, her excitement withered. She wondered how men, their pleasures so apparent, ever achieved an erection with a woman in the room. Chichi clitoral diligence had, like every fashion, hit Ireland ten years late, and arrived in Roisin’s life with her last boyfriend, Garrett. Roisin would find herself boated on a horizonless sexual sea, what had begun as a careless afternoon excursion darkening gradually to nightmare as the light began to fade and the bed rocked on. Frankly, the two- or three-hour fuck is highly overrated. Garrett had dutifully rubbed away until her vagina was raw, her labia numb. Once they’d endured a few of these sessions, she hadn’t the heart to admit to him that short of success after ten minutes the project was hopeless, so the marathons went on until Roisin began to dread going to bed. She tried cutting his efforts short by faking, but this only seemed to inspire Garrett to more, like a pinball player determined to rack a higher score. Further, he wouldn’t allow himself to enter her until she was “done,” by which time Garrett himself had wilted. So then Roisin would take the helm and dither, though she absolutely refused to put the thing in her mouth. Ironically, he seemed to have the same reaction she did to being conscientiously serviced, and if he did come, it was a nervous, exhausted spasm after more toil, and this from a man who had apologized at the beginning of their relationship that he had trouble with premature ejaculation.

When Garrett announced that he’d started seeing another woman, Roisin was sure he’d found a buxom, thick-armed Andytown wench who boiled potatoes whom he could throw down on the lino when he pleased, to blast away and zip up after five minutes, better than this overwrought, internationally famous poetess for whom he had far too much respect. Angus didn’t have enough, but then she’d do without if respect took the form of obsequious deference in bed.

So Angus plundered on, joyful and oblivious, with the rhythmic grunting Roisin trusted. It would never occur to Angus to fake excitement in a hundred million years. If he didn’t relish making love to her, he’d get up and do something else; for there is nothing so comforting as the obviously selfish person: he will take care of himself. Left to her own devices, then, Roisin relaxed and enjoyed some moderate success. This particular afternoon she preferred to lie back and watch, for finally, at the age of thirty-seven, Roisin had discerned that you didn’t come as a responsibility, a victory, or even as a compliment, but because you felt like it.

The timing of the ring was so perfect, and so close to perfectly bad, that they both had to laugh. Still panting, sweat streaming, Angus reached for the receiver with “’Loo?” in a could-be-anyone voice. While he didn’t want to be recognized, he liked the territorial implications of answering her phone.

Angus looked at the receiver like something with a bad smell and discarded it. “Fancy. Rung off. New boyfriend?”

Long after Angus had gone, Roisin lay on her back with her eyes open, the duvet up to her chin. Only the ebb of light and the beat of her body marked the passing of time. Roisin rarely listened to music. She found quiet a marvel. And she found doing nothing a marvel. How spectacular that you could simply lie here and the day would sift by. Roisin considered this her secret. On either side of the house, women rustled up tea—boiling, toasting, dragging children to the table. Tellies blared, papers flapped, electronic games wheedled away, but here Roisin folded her hands over her chest and could detect only the faint on-and-off hum of the refrigerator, her legs laid out like the dead’s. But she wasn’t dead! That was the secret. Under the slanted ceiling of the top floor, cozied by the faded blue wallpaper flowers and the shadows easing over them, Roisin could roam the moors of her head, heather purpling, grass bent, as a young girl with a long dress in a breeze. She wondered at the bustle of women in this town who always had to be a-doing, boys who tore off in stolen cars through checkpoints, even romantics who yearned for the days a lad could light off to sea. She didn’t see the scrabbling for adventure, when all you need do is pull a comforter to your breast. For there was always a ship waiting in Roisin’s port, with sails like skirts; her own breath blew the wind.

Only when satisfied she could remain this way forever would Roisin get up. She dressed slowly and considered the match of colors as if someone would call, though she’d probably spend the evening padding the house, reading snatches of poetry, and washing the dishes just to feel the water on her hands. Roisin always dressed well, especially for herself. She chose purple and green, like the hillsides in her mind tonight, a soft sweater, low shoes. She tiptoed downstairs as if not wanting to wake herself up.

She’d not combed her hair or made up her face—which she would also do, meticulously, whether or not she stepped out—so when the mirror in the dining room ambushed her she jumped. Especially the last five years, Roisin was mindful of mirrors and did not let them sneak up on her. And after each passing birthday it took a fraction of a second longer to prepare for them. What was required was nothing less than a mirror of her own to fight back, a careful preconception of a face to fend off heresy. As the two versions grew increasingly disparate, it took more energy to generate the gentler portrait, and Roisin marked the positions of store windows and bar glass like the mapmaking of the blind: she needed to anticipate them without seeing them, for a careless glance could ache up the back of her head for hours, like a baton clubbing from the peelers.

Tonight, however, she braved the image, unprotected by eyeliner or inner vision: this was her face. In the droop of her cheeks she saw her mother. Otherwise, there was less of a slump than a shatter to it. Her tooth enamel, skin, and dry, separated hair all crackled like crazed celadon. Her eyes were green and men admired them, though tonight she noticed a twist in their center, a wringing—they wound you in at a curl. It seemed the face, she decided, of a woman who had once been very beautiful. More truthfully, it was the face of a woman who had always been almost beautiful: her looks required a leap of faith. The rub: one so many men had almost made. She was the kind of woman whom men date weekly, routinely, for years, whom they think they love and maybe even think they’ll marry, until overnight they find the “real thing” at Robinson’s and in two weeks’ time are off to Australia with a cropped blonde.

Maybe that explained the twist, as if she were wincing from flattery unreceived. In her best dress she might earn “lovely,” but never “gorgeous,” and certainly not that rare adjective some women pull from even dull men that is so unusual and right that the remark achieves a beauty of its own, and rests beside her as a compliment in the best sense, a woman by a rose.

As for the shatter in the face, that was easy: it was time and an inconceivable parade of disappointments. That she had recognized their pattern seemed not to free her but to doom her to it. Roisin went about her romances like any bad researcher who writes his conclusion before his experiment, so that long telephone sessions concurring with Constance Trower that she sought out abuse, that she could only admire a man who didn’t admire her, only inspired Roisin to ring off and march out to prove how very, very right they were.

Looking herself in the eye for once set a tone for the night of uncommon bareness. The feeling downstairs wasn’t bleak exactly, but unadorned. Trinkets in the sitting room did not blur into a nest of comfort and civilization but remained discrete. China bird. Broken clock. Alabaster ashtray. A What Doesn’t Belong in This Picture? where the answer was that nothing did. More, the room was rife with futility. The empty Carolans tin on the mantel had seemed too handsome to throw out, good for sewing perhaps, but Roisin had a cabinet for that; or knitting, but she didn’t knit. Candy dishes proffered no chocolates, bowls no fruit. The alabaster ashtrays were too lustrous for cigarettes, so she smoked with saucers instead. Those napkins on the sideboard were far too dear to dab spaghetti sauce, so she would set her place with pyramids of peach linen and then run to the kitchen to wipe her mouth on a paper towel. Her antimacassars were so elegant that she sat forward in her chairs, to avoid soiling the lace that was there to protect the chair from her head in the first place. Nothing made any sense! Likewise, the furniture did not cohere—the sofa ignored its end tables; chairs sat back to back, not talking. The house hadn’t changed except that some artifice or optimism was removed, some essential squint that made the rooms more pleasing and sane. It was a house without lies, and it was frightening.

As this quality only intensified, Roisin was unsurprised when a short while later she looked down at her kitchen table with the rude revelation: This is my life. For she not only touched up her face for a mirror but routinely prepared a version of her existence that did not include evenings like this one: a biscuit, crumbs of Cheshire, a leaf or two of lettuce; a book breaking its spine at a page of inexpressible boredom; stray lines on the back of a brown Telecom envelope, with a word crossed out, replaced, crossed again, and filled in with the first one. This was a poet’s life. What did others see in it? Why did the word sing? So her lover had taken her that afternoon; a poet was granted a lover, maybe even one taboo. Tonight, however, she conceded the larger problem was not his religion but his marriage. Roisin was having an affair with a married man; she was thirty-seven and it was nearly too late for children; she had poetry, but while she’d never admit this to Angus, Work only meant so much to her. Weeks and biscuits crumbled on; the shatter deepened; the twist took another half turn. What did she have but the blue-flowered wallpaper and the quiet of her own sinking ship, the slackening flap of her sails? Roisin St. Clair, one more gifted but sloppily understood poet reading on Thursdays at Queen’s about eerie weather and trembling leaves when the crowd was only itching to make it to the Common Room and toss a few before last call—

She realized the phone had rung several times already, and rushed gratefully to the intrusion—why, every once in a while the outside world came through.

“Miss St. Clair, I am a friend of Angus MacBride’s.”

“Of whose?”

“Please,” said the voice, pained. “I’m sure Angus appreciates your discretion. But I mean a close friend. I need to discuss a matter of our mutual concern. Best in person. At your convenience, of course.”

“Kelly’s, then,” Roisin faltered. “Tomorrow, half-four. How will I know you, then?”

“Your photo on the back of Known Facts is most striking. I could pick you out of the top stands at a hurley match. I’m sure to find you at a small bar.”

A pause; a click. Roisin cocked her head. The voice had a caress in it. Despite the ominousness of the call, when she looked about the sitting room her objects were restored to meaning and memory, collusion, the useless at least pretty. The chairs were in earnest conversation. Back at the kitchen table, the Cheshire was dry as wine, brilliant white and tart. She poured sherry into cut crystal and picked up the book again, engrossed, jotting from time to time; and some of the lines on the Telecom envelope showed great promise.

It was this particular hand on her shoulder from behind that spurred Roisin to think how some strangers touched you and made you angry, others only made you feel warm. Turning, she was tempted to decide easily that the difference was whether or not they were attractive, but she had liked the hand before she found the gaunt, tailored gentleman who belonged to it. She later theorized there was a class of men who filched at you, sliming for what they could get—a pickpocket job, their touch was theft. Others did you a favor: their touch was gift.

“The Farrell O’Phelan?”

“I don’t know, are you the Roisin St. Clair?”

“I take a sorrier article, I’m afraid.”

“A back booth, then, for two sorry articles.”

“I never believed you were real! More like the Lone Ranger or Robin Hood.”

When he ordered coffee rather than a drink, she trusted him better, for no good reason. “As Robin Hood I have resigned. I asked you here over an issue partly political, but largely personal.”

“Politics is always personal here.”

“And how. So you understand: alliances are not simply to positions but to people. As such, our friend Angus MacBride is irreplaceable. For years he’s managed to conceal from the Prods that he’s intelligent. And he’s one of those rare fellows who can pat you on the back and turn a phrase with the latest idiom, and only later in bed might you realize what he said was anathema to you, if then. That he’s reasonable and open-minded about solutions to this situation is known only to his closest associates like you and me. To the rest he plays the part of a hardheaded holdout to perfection. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. And sure I don’t need to tell you, either, that his drinking is out of control.”

Roisin inhaled. Anyone’s confidence hit up her sinuses like eucalyptus. “You fancy?”

“He is drinking not only after political functions but before. And are you aware that the glass he keeps beside him at press conferences is filled with vodka?”

“Angus has always been well oiled, Mr. O’Phelan.”

“Have you ever added up how many quarts that engine takes?”

“I suppose about half a bottle a day.”

“I will infer you are not talking Beaujolais. And Miss St. Clair, that’s the liquor you know about. Even so, that’s hardly well oiled, my dear, it’s pickled. Now, a friend of mine in the SDLP is your man’s physician. I’ve glimpsed the reports. I will spare you the details, but the outlook is grim.”

She gasped and pressed for specifics, but he was not forthcoming.

“So you see, I’d be leery of intruding on your privacy without cause. Angus speaks highly of you, though rarely, as he ought. I’ve come to believe you exert considerable influence on the man. As his friend and supporter, I appeal to you.”

“To do what?”

Farrell spread his hands. “Haven’t a clue. Mind you, for several years drink was more my own speciality than politics. Like most such experts, however, I’m a better source on how to get in than out.”

“How did you”—she nodded to his coffee—“get out?”

“I’m not, entirely,” he admitted. “Otherwise,” he patted her hand, “a long story. I turned a corner. I hadn’t a woman to help me. And little good she’d have done me if I had. I was a spiteful drunk.”

“Are you still spiteful?”

“Perverse. Telling me I’d had enough was the fastest way to get me to kill the bottle. Angus is more adult. I sense in him more of a—desire to please.” Retreating from the border of insult, he added, “And wisely he might please such a lovely lady.” Farrell broke his gaze and withdrew his hands to his lap.

“I’ll think about it. I can’t promise anything.”

“I can give you one piece of advice. Angus and I have a complex relationship. With your concern, he might behave himself. Had he an inkling I cautioned you, he’d booze himself to death inside the week.”

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

“Why should I?”

He laughed. “What is it you’ve heard about me?”

“That no one knows whose side you’re on.”

“Seems you’ve done a bit of line crossing yourself.”

Roisin fumbled with her jumper.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. Still, it must be difficult for you,” he ventured, “not being able to pour your heart out to girlfriends on the phone.”

Her eyes shot up, but he only looked sympathetic. “Yes, it’s claustrophobic.”

“Then”—he looked off—“I can’t remember the last time I ‘poured my heart out’ to a living soul. Sometimes I’m afraid there’s nothing to pour. Like Talisker at the end of the day—you know, I used to drain a bit of water in and rinse it about just to get the last drops out?”

“Sad picture,” said Roisin.

“Only thing more depressing than a drunk jarred is a drunk sober.”

“I meant the one of your heart.”

“I did want to mention”—he changed the subject—“I’m an admirer of your work. Especially Bare Limbs on Basalt. Though I imagine Neighbors Who Watch the Shore has received more critical acclaim.”

“Yes. Basalt is out of print.”

“Unforgivable! I know some editors at Blackstaff; we’ll see what we can do.”

“Och, you needn’t. Please don’t.”

He laughed. “You mean, please do. I heard an Irish comedian claim the other day that it was a stiff shock to go to the Continent and discover that there when they asked if you wanted a cup of tea and you said no you didn’t get one. But it’s no trouble, and that volume deserves to be on the shelves. Does that collection include ‘Stibnite Crystals with Druzy Quartz’?”

“No.” She looked at him in amazement. “That was only published once, in The Honest Ulsterman, three years ago. It’s unimaginable you remember.”

“Hardly. I quote a few lines from ‘Stibnite’ in one of my speeches. Since I repeat myself appallingly, that means I must have recited them two dozen times.”

“What lines?” She leaned forward. Her tea had gotten cold.

chapter seven

Constance Has Inner Beauty; About Farrell We Are Not So Sure

Though accustomed to shenanigans, Constance had found her assignment to dig up all of Roisin St. Clair’s published poems unaccountably disturbing.

Still, she found every damn one. If anything, Constance was competent. In the UWC strike of ’74 she knew where to get you milk. She was a wizard with maps, a seamstress with itineraries. She negotiated library stacks the way most women ranged confidently through Co-op. She was unintimidated by computers. She remembered post codes, account numbers, train schedules, hotel rates. Traveling, she packed dresses that didn’t wrinkle, and never forgot her toothpaste. She knew the best and cheapest shops for anything from light bulbs to woolens, and unlike Farrell would never buy top of the line unless it represented fair value; yet she never shopped for pleasure and stocked huge boxes of detergent and froze family packs of chicken to save trips. She could spell out any of the maze of acronyms in Northern Ireland and the complete title of governmental applications. She could get carpenters on the dole or file compensation claims with the NIO. As a result, she had imbued countless other women with that particular modern bravery, bureaucratic courage.

For Constance believed goodness was practical. So she would watch your bicycle while you ran in the smoke shop for a paper. She would give you clear directions to the bus station. She might not routinely shell out spare change to bad buskers—not to encourage a poor choice of careers—but she would recognize honest embarrassment in a checkout line and fill out your bill the pound three you came up short, all with a brusque officiousness that eased accepting her money. She arranged funerals while everyone else was weeping on dales, amid even her own tragedy making sure you had bread with your broth, a lift home. She remembered birthdays; if her gifts were dull, they were at least handy. And because she understood kindness as concrete, that Farrell had saved specific people by removing real wires from gelignite continued to impress her far more than all his talk and referendums now.

While Constance roistered through her workday with arguably masculine zeal, she was perfectly feminine; she simply wasn’t pretty. Her homeliness did not spring from an overindulgence in crisps or an inability to rouse herself to the swimming pool, for no amount of slimming or breaststroke would sort out the slight squarishness of her head, the meaty Dietrich thighs unlikely to return to fashion in her lifetime, eyes a wee bit small, a wee bit close together—or was it far apart? The subtlety of good looks astounded Constance herself. There had been times in a public bath when she had stared at a handsome woman in a way that made the other uncomfortably assume Constance was—no, it wasn’t that. She was riveted by beauty because it would have taken such a tiny realignment of her own features for Constance to be beautiful, too.