Ordinary Decent Criminals

“Frankly: no. You’re a cut above this crowd, aren’t you? Think I haven’t sorted out that the Green Door is the pit of West Belfast? But I had to take what I could get. And let’s not kid ourselves that I got the job because Kieran liked me. I got it because he wanted to fuck me. Which is, I’m afraid, how I get a lot of work.”

“And do you? Sleep with them?”

“Christ, no. And Kieran’s getting impatient, though by the time he figures out I’m a lost cause, he also won’t be able to run this place without me: mission accomplished. But you certainly do not get what you want by giving the other person what he wants. If you ever come through, what are they to hold on for? So, in answer to your question, no, I am not a whore. Not exactly. Would you take these into Malcolm? Thanks.”

The—the—dishwater was still damp on the glasses, and Farrell held them out from his coat.

“So don’t tell me”—Farrell returned, toweling his hands—“you’re writing a book.”

“The last thing this place needs is another book. Besides, I abhor authors, painters, and architects—their lame little efforts to make their marks. Me, I go for leaving things behind and throwing them away. I don’t mind losing stuff, even money, since that’s one more opportunity to discover I can live without it. I happily prop up my beach chair to watch valuable coastland rinse into the sea. I prefer my antique china dropped on the floor. I appreciate totaled cars, one-way plane tickets, and old people. Entropy and red giants; big fires. I like topsoil erosion and natural disasters, and nothing makes my blood run like a country whose government is losing its grip.”

“The North?”

“Not for a minute—here.” Balancing two glass towers of Pisa, Estrin handed him the shorter stack, and Farrell found himself trailing after her unpleasantly. “Mainland Britain may be more precarious, a race riot waiting to happen. This place is full of nice boys”—she smiled at the young bartender and handed him the jars—“who still buy flowers on Mother’s Day. And children may go on about the Orangies, but they’re incredibly well behaved.”

“What have you done?” the boy directed to Farrell. “Don’t get her started.”

“I have too many opinions,” Estrin admitted. “Which has turned into: one more opinion. No use.”

“For opinions, you’ve come to the right part of town,” Farrell suggested. “But West Belfast has a strict point of view. And they love to make ambassadors of Americans—”

“You say they,” she noted. “Not we.”

“I’m not sure I’ve used the first person plural in my life,” said Farrell. “But I’m advising you to get out from time to time. This neighborhood can be too cozy.”

“I told you before—the last thing I need to be reminded is to get out.”

“If it isn’t O’Phelan.”

Farrell turned and he was still holding these bloody glasses; he foisted them on the boy.

“Hardly see you in these parts now,” Michael Callaghan went on—a moist, pallid man who was forever pulling his trousers up over his belly. “Word’s out you’ve changed, mate. Too fine for us now. Ordering wine, is it.” He sauntered closer. “And take a geek at that suit, sure it’s from London, or is it New York? Farrell O’Phelan wouldn’t be caught out in Belfast rags, not even old Marks and Spark’s. Why, look at that weave, look at the quality!” Callaghan fingered Farrell’s lapel.

Farrell picked the man’s hand off his jacket like a speck of lint. “Don’t you dare touch my person again.”

“Your person! Lads, we’ve a person here! In this herd of West Belfast animals. We may remember old Farrell a liter under, but Mr. O’Phelan’s a star now, fancy! Seen him on our tellies, haven’t we, all done up in three pieces, shoes shining like a wee boy’s eyes on Christmas morning, hands crossed over his knee?”

Farrell let Callaghan go on, taking a seat impassively, for this was the first thing any of these gombeens had said all evening that actually interested him.

“You might explain to us, then,” Callaghan proceeded, “why we’re such sad wee folk, clinging all confused to some wet dream of a united Ireland, no longer able to think straight from the Brits bashing us too many times on the head. How we kick drogue bombs down the street ’cause we’re on the dole and haven’t a clue how else to spend our time? Then go on and explain how the UVF’s just a charity relief fund and poor Reverend Paisley’s merely got indigestion from a few too many Ulster fries—”

“If you’re referring to Panorama,” said Farrell calmly, “I don’t believe I mentioned Paisley at all. I spoke of a united Ireland long ago having lost any practical political connotations. National aspiration has achieved the same qualities as faith in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus—or perhaps something a bit more farfetched: the Catholic Church. Though don’t forget, I gave you credit. I said this showed a capacity for abstract thought that from people of your caliber, Callaghan, is astonishing.”

“You left out the part about how we’re still in our nappies and that.”

The club had gone quiet, the dynamic at the bar talk show: Farrell’s legs were crossed, Callaghan’s voice inquiring, mild.

“I said both Nationalism and Unionism, emotionally, are forms of arrested adolescence. Pre-adolescence. Unionists are still clutching on to mother’s skirt. Nationalists seem more traditionally rebellious, but the rebellion is traditional and therefore not rebellion at all. Foreigners”—he nodded to Estrin—“often see Republicanism as a radical ideology, and Sinn Feín invites this misperception with its latching on to the ANC, its quotes in An Phoblacht from Camilo Torres and Castro. However, handed from father to son, it is more accurately conservative, right-wing. Joining the Provisionals in West Belfast is the equivalent of working for Daddy’s law firm in America. No one in Ireland gets away from his parents; no one grows up.

“Furthermore—” The loathing in the club was narcotic. “So convinced that Britain is in control, the Nationalist community flatters the place: Britain is using the conflict to experiment with espionage techniques, to train troops. You reveal a childlike faith in order: there is a puppeteer; this is happening because someone up there is making it happen. You lack the intellectual sophistication to conceive of ordinary bollocks. You are too terrified to live in a world where no one is in control: there is no God; Mother is an ordinary selfish woman the neighbors dislike; Father drinks and can’t do your maths. In this world anything can happen and there is no resort; you can’t fix things by gaining control yourself, because there’s no such thing; you will be as utterly at sea in a united Ireland as in a partitioned one. So these proclamations about British might crushing the helpless Catholic waif is, perversely, a belief in Britain, loyalty to the Crown. In actual fact, Westminster is a tawdry has-been capital once victorious over the Spanish Armada, now reduced to claiming the midget Falkland Islands as a serious military coup—bloody hell, it makes you want to cry. Why, West Belfast is the last place on earth where the British Empire still exists.”

“But we’re missing a wee bit here,” said Callaghan, who seemed satisfied with Farrell’s performance. It was a regular holiday to find a wally who’d string himself up of his own accord. “That we’re non-starters.”

“Oh, aye,” said Farrell pleasantly. “I did explore the culture of victimhood, the culture of defeat. Your united Ireland Valhalla, for example, only serves its religious, symbolic function if it never comes to pass as a state. The South is obviously just one more crumpled patch of map trying to sell cheese to the EEC—which is why hard-line Republicanism has invalidated the Dublin government: it is of this earth, and therefore squalid, as any state has ever been. So you may aspire but you must not arrive: in short, you must not succeed. That suits this island, which is historically envious, resentful, and whiny. Likewise, the IRA can only exist so long as it fails. Fair play in ’69, as an instinctive, as you said yourself, animal reaction to attack. But as an institution it is not in the long-term interests of the organization to meet its own goals: the lot would be out of a job. To put this in language you can understand, Michael: you’re all witless gobshites.”

Callaghan moosed closer. “If I was you, O’Phelan—”

“You wish.”

“I’d steer clear of the Door. I hear your nine lives ran out about ’79. Besides, we’re a bit tatty for your tastes now. Try Whitewells. There you’ve lads to protect you when you say something ill-advised.”

Farrell stood and straightened his lapel. “I’ll go where I like, as I have my whole life.” Farrell may have been taller, but Callaghan had two stone on him; Farrell had better scoot. He thanked himself, since with two more glasses of wine that wouldn’t have glared nearly so apparent. Still, he needed one last slag, and his eyes panicked before finding an exit line. “Estrin”—Farrell’s voice rang over the club, and his mouth felt strange—he had never, it seems, said her name before. “Dinner?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”

“Bedford Street, 44.” As he turned, Farrell felt the bitterness glow behind him with all the tangible heat of a turf fire. It took restraint to keep from smiling.

“Sure you owe it to the girl to confess when you and Margaret be married!” shouted one of the boys, but it had taken him too long to come up with the quip, and Farrell was already out the door.

Estrin watched him go, wondering if he appreciated her collusion. She might jockey with them over politics, but she did have to contend with these customers five nights a week, and it was a queer choice to throw her lot in with the one character who clearly had it in him to alienate them to the man.

“They say he’s always breezing off to British Air,” said Callaghan, “reclining with a pile of papers full of waffle a mile high, white wine—and don’t you know Maggie takes him shopping down Oxford Street, all kisses.”

“What bleeding happened to the bugger?”

“Fuck all happened. He’s been scarce and you’ve forgotten. O’Phelan was a weedy, hostile creature from day one.”

Estrin would have chosen different adjectives, for in the last fifteen minutes Farrell had managed to be obstreperous, inconsiderate, abusive, and nonplused. It relieved her she was not the only one so consumed by the desire to please.

chapter four (#ulink_0d880d8b-60e5-52a6-bdb8-5da9b0b3337e)

Women on and off the Wall (#ulink_0d880d8b-60e5-52a6-bdb8-5da9b0b3337e)

She had been waiting and pretending she was not, reading The Use and Abuse of Emergency Legislation in Northern Ireland, but she tired of these games with herself, as they no longer worked: she was waiting. All night; so she designed a reason she had to talk to him with that proficiency that characterized everything she did, and rang herself. No answer. And later, again, with only rugby and snooker and Ulster Newstime on TV—another bomb in the city center. Twice more; she wondered was he off on a tear. She knew it was not her affair. Not her affair. Words were always turning on Constance.

Finally she replaced the receiver for the last time. Her concoction was only so urgent; it was after midnight, and her excuse had just turned into a pumpkin.

Farrell kept a small office off the Lisburn Road with no sign on the door. It was a suite of two rooms and a reception area but no secretary, which Constance had long ceased to consider herself. Nowhere, not on his stationery nor on a single card in his wallet, was there a title or the name of an organization.

Constance Trower had no official position. He had never told her what hours to keep, paid her whatever she asked for, and gave her no itemized responsibilities, which of course meant that she would arrive early and stay late, ask for far too little money in return, and take responsibility for everything.

He’d bristled at an office, but later liked having another territory, another key. Farrell collected them; rings jangled every suit pocket. (Though he’d forgotten what the keys were to, he wouldn’t throw them out. Farrell placed a high value on access.) “For security reasons” he didn’t keep regular hours himself, though Farrell, like the British government, found “security” a convenient umbrella under which to protect a variety of idiosyncrasies.

He did not, for example, own a car, instead hiring taxis as far as Derry and Armagh. Yet Constance was convinced he was less terrified of gelly wired to his chassis than of insurance forms. Besides, he liked taxis. He liked making the driver go where he wanted, being conveyed. He liked privacy and scorned petty details like changing buses in Portadown; he deliberately had no sense of direction. Train schedules were an imposition; why, he might not want to go to Dublin then. The only organized transport he did not resist was the airplane. The atmosphere of hurry and importance made up for meeting the timetables, if barely—he liked nothing more than whisking onto international flights with the door closing on his coattails. Airports are the last refuge of urgency in this world.

His most aggravating “security measure” had to do with his own house—wherever that was. And if he didn’t tell Constance where he lived, he clearly told no one. Farrell admitted parties here had probably found him out, but he was hardly going to make it easy for them by publishing in the directory. Once more, however, the nature of Belfast simply conformed to the nature of Farrell O’Phelan, as if he were not camouflaged for the city but the city for him. He would hardly be holding hoolies on his front yard every June if only he could afford to share his address with his many friends and neighbors, with their children and dogs.

As for the office, he had no interest in decor—and the number of things Farrell had no interest in by policy could grow irksome if you listed them out—and left the walls to Constance. Her original selection of, she thought, harmless travel posters underestimated the depth of Farrell’s loathing for his island: the rolling hills of Kerry, the thatched byre houses in Tyrone—from which, he claimed, he could “smell the sheep from across the room,” the craggy sprat fishermen of Antrim. (“Look at that face,” he had cried, “twisted with fifty years of spite. You realize he’s not fishing at all—which would be economically useful—but looking out for a boat of Kalashnikov AK-47s for the UDA!”) After two days Farrell had had his fun, and Aer Lingus had to go.