Ordinary Decent Criminals by Lionel Shriver
I am starving. I rarely remember my dreams, but many of the bits I recall are greedy: of cakes, tarts, pots of jam. And in real-life restaurants the cart wheels by. I don’t eat desserts.
I can’t eat and I can’t feel and I can’t breathe. Now what the hell can I do?
Drink.
Oh, God, don’t laugh, it hurts. But let me tell you, I do love pain. I’d happily trade places with Nietzsche. They say he was in physical pain his whole life. And how much that explains. Well, that’s what I require. Pneumonia won’t do the trick; I need a condition. Something degenerative and incurable. Then I might cheer up, like. An excuse! Admit it, you shagging bastard, you want an excuse for spending all day, every day, in bed. Isn’t that the secret of the alarm clock? You refused to sleep in New York because if you slept at all you would have hibernated through March.
Fucking hell, that blood gas was brilliant. No bits, what? No wee parts talking to each other? For once we had our united Ireland. You think I’m sick, but the pain, that’s what’s mighty about it: all of you hurts. A blood gas will cauterize your seams.
This breathing, or not, I have worked on this a long time: asthma is my life. I keep two sad sacks on either side of my chest. They are nearly sealed tight. Someday the tiny leaks at the top will pinch closed and I will float over oceans with two balloons of still, stale air. I have never been a man who could breathe. Air is not my element; I feel lost in it. I am a worm. I would burrow warm, muddy gardens, secret and safe in the roots of your peas.
You know how you die in crucifixion? You suffocate. You get tired, see, having to hold yourself up. When you let go, you collapse on your esophagus. And Christ tired fast. That’s why he went first. He was already knackered, after holding himself up for years. Probably for the first time in his frigging life up there that he relaxed. And look at the consequences.
Do not imagine you can let up. It’s only pneumonia. With antibiotics, it will buy you maybe a week. Are you forgetting what it’s like here, with women and hospitals? How fast the gaggles fasten onto another opportunity to take care of you? To arrive with pastries and worry and poetry? Sure they’re already queued at the door! On your toes, man. Certain birds must be kept apart. Oh, bloody freaking hell, it’s back to work, is it? Oh, aye. It’s back to work.
Now, visiting hours at City are— Numbers bobbled, each the same as every other. And how long to get down the elevator, how long to get out of the parking lot? Or how about a different bird a day, like National Trust picture calendars?
Soon I will get in an airplane and fly to the Canary Islands. I will have lined up many appointments for which I will not show. I will not even tell Constance where I have gone. On the beach, I will speak to no one, and even with the ice cream vendor I will hold up one finger and hand him generous change. There will be no telephones. I will not read. I’ll feed crab salad to sandpipers—
If that five-foot-two Schwarzenegger is a swallow, what’s the other, a chickadee? A budgie?—A pigeon! Och, you are a vicious man. Why is it the only time I feel truly warmhearted toward you is when you’re nasty.
Pigeons will coo in your rafters, grovel the slates of your roof. They will dive in their own cages; you may hook the door on their tails. You can band their legs with cryptics they don’t understand. Easily ruffled, easily soothed; not beautiful, but then I am a fancier. Obedient birds, if not quite reputable, they may be summoned and sent.
But swallows sweep down when it amuses them—imperious, willful. And so small!
Besides, why waste an opportunity, the sweated bed, the listing head, the phlegm—the sympathy; admit it, you want them to see, all of them, look what you’ve done to me—somewhere in this is a terrible lie—I am so tired!
He had to—he needed—he could not remember. He was left only with urgency of some sort. He did not want the urgency. Please, please let me go. He felt his body sink into the stiff hospital sheets. They exuded the same optimistic smell of Estrin’s fresh plaster. Around him, his thoughts flapped like linen on a line: More than merely consultative but less than fully executive chimed with the incessant rhythm of a child’s rhyme. Poor canary, I’m contrary, a worm in your garden grows … Swallow. His throat bubbled and closed. Constitutional nationalism drawing on the threat of the unconstitutional circled without a predicate, a chicken without its head. Farrell hoped desperately he was losing his mind, but with his luck someone would find it and bring it back, like the time he ducked behind a Donegal bluff to detonate some dicey gelignite, only to have a boy run up behind him shouting helpfully, “Mister! Mister! You forgot your bag!”
What time is it?”
“Four.”
“And visiting hours start?”
Estrin cocked her head. “Three.”
Farrell’s breathing increased. He fussed with his pillow. “I’ve had no other visitors, then?”
“Not today.”
“What do you mean today, isn’t it Wednesday?”
“Friday.”
Farrell’s smile was strained. “The rest of my life should be dispatched so painlessly.”
“I don’t think it was painless.” Estrin had never seen him nervous. It made her more relaxed.
“So!” he chirped. “Anyone been in, then?”
“Sure. You’re a popular guy.”
“Caramel squares.” He scowled at his bedside.
“I met a friend of yours,” she volunteered languidly.
“Oh?”
“Woman.”
“Mmm.”
“I thought she was beautiful.”
Farrell paused, and dived in, patting her hand. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you two, actually.”
“Well, I hardly buy that.”
“Why ever not?”
“You’ve never meant to introduce me to anyone in your life, not anyone. I’m modular. I plug in and out. Don’t snow me about introductions just because they’ve already been made.”
“I can see you hardly inherited your father’s pastoral bedside manner.”
“She broke my heart.”
“… Did you like her?”
“Quite. And she liked me. That’s what was heartbreaking. She certainly didn’t want to.”
“She’s a kind person.”
“Horrifically. She made me want to give her chocolates, send her to Hawaii. Just to make up for what an unbelievable shit you’ve been.”
“I don’t think I’ve treated her so badly.”
“Well,” said Estrin, “that’s what’s so shitty, isn’t it?”
“What all did you talk about, for Christ’s sake?”
“You, of course.”
“And what did you decide?”
“That you were a prick. That we adored you. That there was something wrong with us. That she and I should run off and get married. What women always say to each other. But of course, by saying anything but. You’d have enjoyed it, actually. Your kind of fun.”
“You’re getting an attitude, my dear.”
“Yes,” she hissed.
“She’s a fine poet,” Farrell defended.
“That surprises me. She doesn’t seem like the type.”
“But you said you liked her.”
“Exactly. I don’t like poets. The very idea of strangers caring fuck-all about your daffodils and your kitty cat and your predictably hopeless romances—you know I find it laughable.”
“I wouldn’t single out the poets. I find everything laughable.”
“Oh, you do not. I am truly tired of your line about how you don’t believe in anything. You’re the first man I’ve met who rivals my own father’s putrid conviction. All the while claiming you’re caught in the jaws of the abyss. I don’t think I should let you have it both ways.”
Farrell smiled. “Dialectics.”
“In America we call it bullshit. And now you’re grinning because you’re relieved. Back to the abstract. Anything but face your responsibility for Constance Trower.”
Farrell looked vacant. “
“She makes you uncomfortable. And she should. She’s too good for you.”
“Yes …” he said slowly. “I’ve told her so for years.”
“You think I’m being harsh. But don’t imagine I’m going to feel sorry for you and your beloved pneumonia. I’d have more respect for you if you took a reputable vacation like normal people. Majorca. Because you did this to yourself. You got what you wanted. Touché.”
“I’d have preferred cancer,” he admitted.
“Better luck next time. Because that’s the ticket, isn’t it? You go: to stop.”
“Which I’m unlikely to deny. Such ironies are the tiny puff pastries of my life.”
She was drifting back to his side, which they both seemed to rue. “You like it when I’m pissed at you.”
“Yes.”
“When I show spunk.”
“My prickly pear.”
“You’re tired of women baking and sponging and rubbing your neck. Weepy, selfless pushovers who listen tirelessly to your stories of bombs and drink and self-laceration of which you yourself are sick to death. Gooey, gorgeous, ga-ga women enraptured by your contorted soul, eventually obsessed.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then, I know that.”
“Yes.”
“So I’m just trying to appeal to you. And I’m not any different, in the end.”
He watched her go, the glaring red helmet swinging over her shoulder, before he answered, “No,” a little sadly.
Pronto, he demanded the phone and, aided by a scrumptious hack, arranged migrations. Easy: after seven the Swallow would have to be at the Green Door. He triumphed back to his pillow, hands clasped.
For there was only one place Farrell loved better than hotels, and that was hospitals. He had long romanced alcoholism and insanity for the institutions into whose hands they might deliver him—where someone else took over not only meals but everything in between. When he was interned, gaol had invigorated him with its regularity and rigor. The physical abuse had proved bracing; the only torture he couldn’t bear was the incessant blare of the TV.
So Farrell gave himself over to the ward’s keeping, to the dither of nurses, the lap of mashed carrots and strained peas, the blithe drizzle of antibiotics from his IV. He breathed for them. He spit for them. He let them lay the sweet cold orb of the stethoscope all over his chest. For Estrin was right: Farrell would assume so much of the burden of the world that he would finally force it to relieve him, and completely. He would filch every responsibility within reach, with a view not to power but to total, childlike dependency. Not only did he not want to solve the bollocks of Northern Ireland; he did not want to butter his own bread. He would gladly adjust the tilt of his bed, a little up, a little down, for the rest of his life. He was content with a regimen of regular meals and the vista of Belfast perking on without him from his panoramic window on the thirteenth floor. A toddle down the hall past the booby floral decor more than satisfied his need to explore. He befriended the terminal, eased conversation with tense visitors at the next bed, and waved bye-bye to little girls. He involved himself in petty intrigues, waiting for a roommate to head for surgery before really tinkering for peace for once and shorting out the TV. (He pulled the same stunt in Castlereagh one afternoon, but the level of electronic expertise among Republicans there had been understandably high; it was back on top volume within the hour. At City, the subterfuge bought him a full day of quiet.) Happily he harassed his nurses, crying, Pillows! Tea! Telegraph! For months he had given; now, with a vengeance, he would demand.
And he did not miss alcohol. Ah, the parental simplicity of No, you may not. No, he could not! Farrell may have become an obnoxious grownup, but he’d made an obsequious little boy.
When Estrin discovered him the next afternoon, Farrell was nested with the Belfast Telegraph, underlining and scribbling on a pad with kindergarten concentration. It was the first time she’d seen him read a paper with any pleasure—God, especially this paper, a monument to self-absorption, whose headline on the day John F. Kennedy was shot read, MAN FALLS INTO BELFAST LOUGH. It seems for once he was not clipping articles on Robert Russell’s extradition to the Maze, but was marking stray phrases in Eddie McIlwaine’s “Ulster Log.”
Eddie controlled the one page of the Telegraph from which the Troubles were more or less banished. Eddie catalogued the Ulster of pre-’68, so as the SAS gunned down three IRA suspects in Tyrone, McIlwaine’s headline read, COALISLAND CELEBRATES WITH DUCK RACE. Loyalist paramilitaries might riddle the Avenue Bar with AK-47’s; “An Ulster Log” would bemoan the increasing scarcity of the corncrake. The rest of the paper wrangled with what really happened in Gibraltar; Eddie printed the scandalous revelation that when Roy Rogers and Dale Evans came to Belfast for St. Pat’s Day in 1954, they were not really riding Trigger after all. Very well, a busload of soldiers in Ballygawley may be going up in flames, but McIlwaine would not have his readers forget the welcome return of the Chuckles Fun Band and a free class on Irish crochet.
“An Ulster Log,” then, chronicled not the roiling insoluble hotbed that had fascinated the international press for twenty years but a frumpy backwater, Northern Ireland sans petrol bombs and barricades, where no UPI man would be caught dead; a frumpy, brackish place whose protests over the closure of the Ormeau Baths would never lure a boom mike. Home of the indigestible potato cake and the handwoven sweater that came down to your knees, Eddie’s Ulster would never blacken your Nine o’Clock News. For Eddie’s Ulster was innocent. And naturally, Eddie’s Ulster was a bore.
Farrell had discovered Eddie McIlwaine today and was determined to pervert him. Chuckles Fun Band? You think you can get away, don’t you? We’re massacring each other and you can still write to us about birdies? No Troubles? Anathema! Farrell coughed with gusto as he flourished off his last line and handed the pad to Estrin.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AND UNDER NOT ELIGIBLE TO ENTER
A seven-day tour of Northern Ireland,
with free entertainment in the evening thrown in:
a kidnapped boy hidden in a monastery,
a bit of a battering—stirring stuff.
I get myself invited to the weekly mistakes,
more forbidding.
Scottish visitors pour into Larne for the experience,
for there is to be a repeat of the
slow, slow, quick, quick,
slow action in the autumn—
though you should make alternative plans,
just in case.
What intrigues me about the ticket isn’t the price;
it’s the mature outlook:
you could agonize for hours.
Their pet subjects:
“It isn’t even a political thing”;
“Really nothing in religious terms today.”
Wearies of Americans may feign a pounding,
but in your heart you know how flimsy.
You feel nostalgic;
you’re totally nonplused.
Remember Belfast when the city was opening up?
When group efforts paid off.
A blaze of publicity, a big picture to packed houses;
bus trips, Rotary lunches;
escape by stratagem, every kind of answer—
rare old times.
Some may not be as honest with themselves
as you are.
“Your decrying of poetry immediately made me want to write it,” Farrell explained. “Besides, this method appeals to my sense of anarchy.”
Every phrase had been compiled from the following innocuous sources: Eddie’s “Tenner Tours of Yesteryear,” about bargain bus trips of yore; “Lighting Up the Silver Screen,” about grand bygone cinemas; a revival of the quickstep, slow waltz, and moonlight saunter; the Across clues in the crossword, and Farrell’s own Scorpio horoscope. The title was culled from the advert for Bing-all! For Farrell, the project seemed to expose poetry and McIlwaine both. Poetry was found out as a load of arbitrary shi
Estrin had never seen Farrell so jovial, playful, affectionate. The austere, apostolic gown suited him better than button-downs. Hands behind his head, feet dangling off the bed, with bare ankles and little brown slippers, he told anecdotes; the IV swung and squeaked on its hook. He touched her shoulder. He asked when was the last time she wrote home. This finicky maven of warm salads and soft-shell crabs cleaned his squares of gray cauliflower and stringy chicken and licked his fingers. He asked after Duff, Malcolm, Clive. He said something generous about MacBride. She’d not seen this man more relaxed after three bottles of wine. A prime time to pry.
“You know, you’ve never said much about your wife,” Estrin ventured, propping her muddy boots on the bedding with pleasant presumption.
“When you were only married to the young lady for seventeen days, she’s unlikely to come up in conversation.”
“Seventeen days can be a long time.”
The ward was quiet; the sky out the window a seamless gray; no other visitors were due for hours. “Tarja,” he began, the a stretched, “was Finnish,” which explained the reluctance of the name—Finnish lingers. “A hard, clear, passionate people. Like vodka. Like crystal. But with a warm wooden underside, like a coaster for your glass.”
“Drink metaphors.”
“Oh, aye. Those days were pre-reformation. And Tarja”—he touched Estrin’s chin—“could drink even you, my swallow, under the table and down the stairs. A bottle of Absolut down her throat was no more than a quart of antifreeze in her car; she just ran smoother in the cold.”
“Meaning your company?”
“Not at first. In the beginning it was—intense,” Farrell shortened lamely, for one of the reasons he withheld such stories was he felt compelled to leave out the good part. He was constitutionally unable to exhort one woman to another—it made them edgy. Oh, they would listen endlessly to what was wrong with your ex-wife. But there was nothing wrong with Tarja; who wanted to hear that? Because if you left out the good part—that ice-blue stare with glacial splinters, that hair like hard winter sun—the story didn’t make any sense. He married her! Still, he was going to hard-winter-sun Estrin? Come on.