Ordinary Decent Criminals

“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 (#ulink_dfea4403-2911-5d87-9b37-69d09b01e68a)

Constance Has Inner Beauty; About Farrell We Are Not So Sure (#ulink_dfea4403-2911-5d87-9b37-69d09b01e68a)

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.

Though her appearance pained her certain evenings in the loo, it was not her obsession; so she didn’t deny herself a pavlova or marshal two hours a day for the pool. Consequently she’d thickened a bit, and was showing every promise of a dumpy middle age. In her work this had proved an advantage, and Farrell seemed to treasure her ordinary looks as if she’d deliberately purchased a spy kit. The haggard pre-Jane Fonda generation of housewives in West Belfast was only skeptical of well-manicured single women of thirty-nine who’d rediscovered seamed nylons streeling up to their doors for information with skinny necks and tasteful pendants, refusing a biscuit with their tea. Constance always had at least two.

Further, she followed every City Council motion and had memorized a generation of sectarian debts. She could quote whole paragraphs of the Anglo-Irish Agreement verbatim, and knew the history of each civil rights and paramilitary group down to half the membership. She had swallowed the entire attic of the Linen Hall Library, and to Farrell O’Phelan she was indispensable.

Her ambition, to the word.

Constance considered Farrell the most perceptive man she had ever met. Unlike all their other colleagues, who would, opportunity given, take a snipe or two, from a little nail bomb of petty complaints to single high-caliber potshots (last week at the Peace People executive: He’s a cowboy. Fundamentally the man is irresponsible), Constance wouldn’t hear a word against him. She’d thought well of the man even in his gawky stage, before the hotel and the European suits. She’d first noticed him at a UUAL rally as a heckler, where she’d been protesting with NICRA on the sidelines. He’d been articulate and, though vicious, formally polite; it was the only time in Paisley’s public life she’d seen him paralyzed for an instant.

She was an intelligent woman. The nature of their relationship, well, it was perfectly clear, perfectly. Yet she was sufficiently accustomed to being depressed to still get up in the morning even if she expected things to be basically as dismal when she went to bed that night.

Depressed? Who said that? She did not consider herself depressed.

That’s how depressed she was.

No, it was all right, the days flapping with Fortnights, evenings with a fistful of toast as she stared out the window at the branches webbing over the panes like the veins in her eyes. She merely needed a polestar. Like the reference draftsmen use to give a landscape proper perspective, she needed a disappearing point. Farrell O’Phelan was a dot off her page.

Once more he had not asked her out exactly, but they were beyond that. Even Oscar’s didn’t bother with reservations anymore but routinely saved their table. And after a fourteen-hour workday she would let him pick up the tab tonight. With half an hour before his return, Constance luxuriated around the suite, a paler but softer place without him, still steeped in his presence but spared its pricklier forms. She loitered into his office and eyed the correspondence. Constance could be trusted implicitly around open bottles of expensive liquor, cold cash, but curvaceous addresses on envelopes flushed her with wild kleptomania. The artless girls in the Tissot prints arched their eyebrows, goody-goody.

She disciplined herself from the post, on a whim creaking instead into the closet to finger Farrell’s bomb disposal suit. A reek wafted from the hanger as if she were releasing something that wasn’t supposed to get out. The suit made her feel nostalgic; a little hurt; delivered. Constance had secured it for Farrell’s Christmas present that last year. It had taken plenty of finagling to pinch the suit from the British Army, the kind of project Constance could sink her teeth into. Though used, it was in good condition. Farrell had never worn it. Och, he had his reasons. It was heavy, sixty pounds or so, and limited mobility. Furthermore, it smelled ghastly, permeated not only with the acrid, almond tinge of explosives but permanently imbued with nervous sweat. Like breathing pure terror, he says. And sure he was a fastidious man, a fresh shirt every day, starched. As a child, grotty hands made him cry. As an adult, nothing had upset him more than the Dirty Protest; why, he was positively relieved when prisoners moved on to hunger strikes. Maggots in spoiled food, shite spread on the walls because it dried faster that way, less noxious than in a pile … Even reading about it now, he would agitate around the office and go back to biting his hands.

But the stench of the suit had been an excuse. He preferred pinstripe. And if a bomb had ever blown he’d wanted to go with it.

Farrell was himself thinking of Constance as he whistled up the walkway. He was sometimes concerned on her account, and wondered at how often this compassion expressed itself as rebuke. The problem was, he liked her too much. She was good-humored and bright, earthy but not crude, and, for all her community adventuring, essentially shy. As his hours in her company racked up, they only improved. However, if they had too good a time, the next day he’d be brisk and find something wrong with her work and disappear.

When he found her in his office—where she had no business—Constance was perched on his desk tugging at her stockings. As she whisked the skirt back down, Farrell couldn’t help but think, What heavy thighs. She seemed to see this in his face, and instead of boistering the incident away, she timmered to the other side of the room.

They didn’t talk. Farrell dialed. Constance scuffled by the closet. Sometimes he could not bear that she knew him so well. He might have preserved more of a private life, but he ended up telling Constance most of it just so she would tend to its aggravating logistics. So the rare times he was up to something that left her out, the air knotted like the roots of trees.

Farrell turned his back. He lowered his voice into the Little White Girl. He rested the receiver and waited a punitive beat. “I do not like to be listened to while I am making a personal call.”

Constance realized with confusion she’d been eavesdropping. There should be no such thing in this office. She knew everything. “You might’ve said.”

“I shouldn’t have to.”

Constance felt suddenly estranged. She didn’t know quite who she was or where. Rather than the disorientation seem odd, she was astonished she didn’t slip out of kilter more often. She was impressed with having negotiated so many ordinary moments of her life with such social grace in the past. She felt someone should commend her. “Sorry.”

“Likewise. This evening I am engaged.”

Constance remained still, as if for a long exposure. The shutter clicked; she had misunderstood engaged. Her very heart had stopped for the picture, and while the word returned to its routine usage, her pulse was sickening.

Farrell was surprised, expecting a scene. Her face was impassive. She looked nonplused. “Tomorrow,” he offered as reward. He tucked his red handkerchief into his pocket and poofed it out again, smoothed on gloves of tight cream suede. He pecked her cheek on his way out with an exaggerated Mwah! that was insulting.

He forgot she was still in the room and turned out the light. The smell of the bomb disposal suit lingered behind him. Standing in the dark, Constance felt as she had at three years old when she was first aware of her arms when walking and was mystified by how to hold her hands.

I’m aware that Americans compulsively ask what you do. I’ve restrained myself, but I can’t stand it any longer—what are you?”

They were back at 44, only the second time, but this established that to whatever degree there would be an always, they would always eat at this place.