Kitabı oku: «Ordinary Decent Criminals»

chapter one
Hot Black Bush

Between them, pure alcohol coiled from the turned-back lid; the air curled with its distortion. Vaporous, the face stretched longer and thinner than the pillar it began. The shimmer off the vat worried his expression, tortured his eyebrows in the heat, further emphasizing a figure already overdrawn: too wild, too skinny, too tall.

As she stood on tiptoe to lean over the wooden tub, on the other side the tall man saw only the dark tremble of a girl’s unruly hair. He wondered at letting children tour a distillery. Then, why shouldn’t they be confirmed early, sip at the chalice—Bushmills was the real Church of Ireland, after all. Later, he would catch sight of her down the walk toward bottling and not recognize the grown woman in black leather bouncing the red motorcycle helmet against her thigh. Though she was barely over five feet, at any distance her slight proportions created the optical illusion that she was not small, rather, farther away.

The man did not need to clutch the rim, but leaned at the waist to inhale. When the girl looked up he saw she was not ten or twelve but at least twenty. Their glances met; both took a deep breath. The man reared back again, snapping upright; the woman went flat on her feet. Tears rose and noses began to run. The fumes went straight to the center, acupuncture. The staves of the cavernous room warped cozily around them. The man could no longer remember what had so concerned him moments ago; for the first time in months he felt his face relax. Across the tub, she watched the lines lift from him and decided he was not fifty, as she’d first thought, but thirty-two or -three. In fact, if she’d asked him just then how old he was, he might have claimed yes, he was thirty-three, because the last ten years had been trying and he could not remember anything trying while breathing over a washback with this pretty girl. Christ, he missed whiskey.

“Better than shots,” she admitted. “This is my second time through.”

The alcohol evaporated from his head. He recalled what he’d been sorting out, and returned to one and a half million paupers would never get a full vote in the EEC. Her twang was unmistakable: bloody hell, she was American.

Their group had moved on; the two treated themselves to one more inhalation of the wort, which roiled between them like whipped cream gone off, Guinness on a stove. Its surface churned and kneaded into itself, a little sickening, too brown. The American let down the wooden flat regretfully. “We’ll be missed.” As her boots echoed down the washbacks, she passed a beefy man at the door.

“Farrell, lad. A wee five-minute tour and you’re away.”

Farrell. She remembered his name.

Farrell waited, not wanting to walk with her. He’d no desire to violate the intimacy of their brief debauch with the disappointing whine of an American tourist. His head cleared, the last two minutes had encapsulated his life: the giddy rise and fall of it. Excessive indulgence to excessive discipline, and that was substances, though women the same—the clasping of hands over tables, the grappling in the back of taxis, the sweaty riot in the hotel, so quickly giving way to veiled excuses, impossible schedules, the dread cold quiet of a woman’s phone unrung. Increasingly, he had an eye outside the abandon, the desperate swings; all he could see was pattern, and in this way nothing changed. It was harder and harder to perceive anything at all as actually happening.

Estrin Lancaster was not the only American on this tour; the piping comments of just the couple she longed to escape had led her to bottling. The two were Northeasterners, though Estrin could no longer decode their accents into states. Abroad the better part of ten years now, Estrin was growing stupid about her own country, and had to admit that while she plowed her Moto Guzzi over the Middle East she hadn’t a clue what was going on in Pennsylvania; and that this, like any ignorance, was no claim to fame. Rather, she’d made a trade-off, a real important trade-off, because there was a way you could know the place you were born that you never got a crack at anywhere else, and Estrin didn’t have that chance anymore.

These years her access to U.S. news had been spotty, and lately, when Americans glommed onto her—a national characteristic—she didn’t get their jokes. She was currently following the Birmingham Six appeal, with all the unlikelihood of a British reversal—the more miserable the evidence on which the six Irishmen were convicted, the more certain the decision would remain, for didn’t people defend their weakest opinions with the most violence? Yet Estrin barely skimmed articles about presidential primaries in the States. She knew she was lost when in her Irish Times she no longer understood Doonesbury. The detachment had become disquieting.

“Did you notice all those L’s and R’s on people’s cars, Dale? Do you suppose that means Loyalist and Republican?”

Estrin flinched. The stickers meant Learner and Restricted, and she saw locals look to each other and smile. No one corrected the woman’s mistake. Estrin didn’t either. Simply, she didn’t want to be seen with them: sheer badness. Americans embarrassed her. They made no distinction between what came into their heads and what came out—an endless stream of petty desires and ill-examined impressions dribbling from a hole in the face, the affliction amounted to mental incontinence.

Better you’re not seen running after me, MacBride,” said Farrell coldly to the man in the doorway.

“Only tourists. That was the idea.”

“We were to run into each other. You’re getting sloppy.”

“Successful. Seen off with Farrell O’Phelan, I’ll survive. You’re such a chameleon, I paint you the color I like. More harm done you, I’d think.”

“On the contrary, one of my accomplishments—”

“One of the many,” said MacBride pleasantly.

“—is I can be seen with whomever I like.”

“Everyone knows we were mates back.”

“Everyone was everyone’s mate back,” said Farrell. “What makes this place so sordid.”

“Quite a lolly passed me at the door,” MacBride observed, moving on to more interesting business. “All that black leather, wouldn’t have to dress her up, like.”

“Young for you,” said Farrell distractedly.

“Looks old enough to know how.”

“Haven’t you your hands full with—”

“Ah-ah.” MacBride raised a finger as they drew within earshot of the group. “Now that is sloppy.”

Estrin knew Bad Work, so she recognized the strain in their guide’s patter. He injected his information with artificial enthusiasm, like pumping adrenaline into a corpse. If he kept the job he would have to give over, and not simply to boredom, for there are states far beyond that, where you no longer recognize that at 2:45 there is any alternative to repeating “Our water rises in peaty ground” one more time. It’s relaxing, actually, a sacrifice to other forces. Minutes stretch out so wide and meaningless there is no more time, there are no more questions. Beyond interpretation or struggle, the advanced stages of Bad Work amount to a religious conversion. Also to being dead. She assessed the guide: Estrin would have quit by now.

She swung between the pot stills towering fifteen feet overhead, shining Hershey’s Kisses. Bushmills kept the copper polished—now, that was the job she would keep. Estrin loved metal—its resistance, its arrogance, its hostility. She could see herself arriving weekly with chamois in every pocket, to rub down the curves, the stills now looking less like wrapped chocolate than firm upright breasts.

NO MATCHES OR NAKED FIRE.

It was the sign between them. Estrin, once more lost in her own world, which she was always mistaking for the world at large, had almost run into him. The tall man shot her a weary smile. He did not seem very interested in the distillery.

“We’re honored, sir.” The guide hustled over to Farrell’s friend. “What brings you?”

“Tired of single-handedly supporting the shop short by short. Thought I’d save a few quid to come buy the lot of it.”

The guide laughed. Farrell sighed.

Through the warehouse, where whiskeys married in boundless sherry casks, Estrin hung back to inhale. She tucked away stray jargon—cooper, blend vat, spirit safe—souvenir knickknacks. Pretty and useless, they packed well. Best of all she pocketed the smell, for Bushmills steeped the Antrim coast for miles around with a must of rising bread, liquor, and ripe manure, evoking pictures of a stout woman baking while her fagged-out husband rests his dung-crusted boots on the hearth and slowly gets pissed.

At the end of the tour, downstairs for her sample, Estrin felt sorry for the harried bartender and held back—the woman had to keep smiling and ask, “Hot, black, regular, or malt?” over and over in a happy voice, explaining slowly to Germans what goes into a toddy, fighting back disdain for Americans, who could easily afford a case, still so eager for their free drink. Estrin had the same problem in restaurants, where, whether or not her order was wrong or cold or late, she identified with the waiter rather than herself; in shops she sympathized with rattled salesmen, not clientele; in high-rises she allied herself with reception, janitors; and even in the restroom her heart went out to the lady with the towels. From a well-established Philadelphia family, Estrin Lancaster had downwardly mobile aspirations.

Farrell cast about the crowd, goaded by those sanctimonious poppies on every staff lapel. Thank God, it was Remembrance Day, after which the Somme would once more be over for another good eleven months. Farrell supposed dully that there was nothing wrong per se with mourning your war dead, though of course every gesture was subverted here and that wasn’t what the poppies connoted at all. Those are OUR wars. Those are OUR dead. Take ’em, thought Farrell, childish bastards. Little matter that plenty of Catholics had died in both world wars; fact had never contaminated anyone’s politics in Ireland. (The fiction was wick, since who needed it? We’ve got history.) No, ceremonies were divvied up and the Prods had picked Remembrance Day, the Twelfth, and probably Christmas, since they’d more cash. The Taigs got Easter, Internment Day, and for twenty years a whole smattering of, ah, unscheduled celebrations all across the calendar. Let the Prods have their sorry paper poppies and weepy parades to cenotaphs, it was only fair.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This left Farrell in a conflicted position—Catholics didn’t wear poppies and Prods did, but if Farrell were Protestant, being Farrell, he would refuse to wear a poppy, so to express this alienation in Catholic terms should he wear one instead? For his own people had excluded him as well, or he’d excluded himself; each had leapt to disown the other. Farrell despised groups of all kinds and made sure they despised him in return; then he needed the backs of crowds to feel wholly, spitefully himself. He was no different from the rest of this tip, where you loved your enemy all right, but not quite the way Christ had in mind—loved him precisely for being your enemy, for obliging you with something outside your own mirror to revile.

He was easy to locate, thick platinum hair curling over the crowd. The large crown and high forehead bent toward his boisterous companion. While Estrin found Irishmen a frumpy crew, given to bundling—they wore sweaters with their suits, jackets binding and short in the arm—Farrell’s dark wool three-piece was impeccably tailored, European; his crimson tie, silk handkerchief, and long Dickensian overcoat suggested a kind of style she’d not seen on this island—that is: style.

And, she observed on the way over, he was a drinker, since in this deluge of a country whiskey was the only force of nature that gave the national complexion any color at all. So she was surprised on arriving at their corner to find his measure clear.

“Hot water,” he explained.

“You don’t drink?”

“Wine. After eight.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“I sleep little enough to lose the distinction.”

Estrin raised her malt. “I like to break my rules from time to time.”

“You can afford to,” he said severely. “You’re still young.”

“Not that young,” said Estrin with a trace of irritation. “And I can’t afford not to. Too many rules and too much obedience are just as dangerous as going off the deep end.”

“Don’t you worry now,” said the heavier man, slapping his friend on the back. “Farrell O’Phelan’s in no danger of being too obedient a boy, or too faint a drinker, either. Knows how to impress the ladies with a cup of hot water at tourist draws, is all.” He laughed, though Farrell didn’t, exactly, join in.

“You brought me here to torture me,” said Farrell, and meant it; the smell was beginning to get to him. How happy it would make MacBride if he strode up to the bar and threw back a double. And how it firmed his resolution, to deny Angus that joy.

“Now, it was damned decent of Bushmills to open today. And I could hardly meet you at the cenotaph this morning,” MacBride muttered. “Sure you’d hum ‘The Battle of the Bogside’ all through the two minutes’ silence.”

Farrell was about to quip that he was more likely to hum Polish polkas than some whimper of Irish resistance, when he noticed the American’s eyes had sharpened; most foreigners here were clueless, but he did not like the way she looked from one to the other and he did not like the way she looked at MacBride. He shut up. He did not want to be understood. That was the first thing women didn’t understand.

“The fumes off that wort were something, what?” recalled the girl. “Ripped in thirty seconds. Like sniffing glue, and the end of the tube is six feet wide.”

“You sniff glue?” asked Farrell.

“Putting together balsa Sopwith Camels at eight or nine? We breathed too much, they didn’t fly so hot, but we’d had a good time. My life has had to do with airplanes from way back.”

“How so?”

“I’m tempted to return-address envelopes, ‘Window seat. Nonsmoking.’ Though I don’t send so many letters anymore … Lufthansa,” she commended.

He clucked. “Free cocktails, but frozen salad.”

“You travel much?”

“Same address, but on the aisle.”

“Long legs.”

“I like to be the first off the plane.”

“I like to look out the window. Flying into Belfast I was pressed so close to the pane that the man next to me asked if this was my first flight.”

“And you said?”

“Always. I never get bored with flying. Though I am sympathetic to the aisle seat,” she noted. “My mother claims I used to stand in my crib and plead through the bars: Ah wan ow. She was impressed that I started talking in a whole sentence. But I’m impressed what it meant.”

“Which was?”

“I want out.”

“And have you? Gotten out?”

She seemed to consider this more seriously than the facile question required. “Maybe not.” Abruptly she accused him, “I have it on good authority that locals never touch this place. You don’t even drink whiskey. What are you doing here?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Are you used to being interrogated?”

Farrell faltered, and wondered momentarily if she knew who he was—ridiculous. “Just—a diverting opening.”

“You play chess?”

“Aye, and you?”

“No. I wouldn’t have wanted to learn unless I was great. And I don’t quite have that kind of brain. So instead of being second-rate, I just don’t play.”

“Then you do have that kind of brain,” Farrell observed. “Abstention is a strategy.”

“Never will forget that first game,” MacBride nosed in again. “This sorry scarecrow teetering to the board. I shook his hand and nearly crushed it—a sickly sort, this one. But ten moves later, who’d have guessed he had it in him? Loopy, I thought, the boy’s in a fever!”