“Drama,” he corrected. “You Americans have the hardest time getting it through your heads this is not a TV show.”
“Spare my countrymen for an evening and just insult me.”
“I expect you to keep your mouth shut. Straight enough?”
“Quite. I’m suddenly remembering an appointment later tonight.”
“If you can’t take a little flak across a table, you should keep the date.”
“Ah—Farrell,” she sighed. Sometimes the best way to win is to quit; one hand clutched her napkin, a white flag. “Listen, this isn’t my country and I do put my foot in it. I actually asked a Catholic at the entrance to Sandy Row whether he sympathized with the Provos. The walk was crowded and he looked at me sidelong and said, Some other time. I felt like a twit. I don’t know the rules yet, and on a second dinner certainly don’t know yours. I’m sorry I used anyone’s name and I won’t again, but please don’t rub my nose in it or I really will go home. Because I try, but I slip and some days forget if Molyneaux is UUP or OUP, or especially why that matters. Some days I wake up, I can name the number of my house but not what continent it’s on, the day of the week but not the year. I have too much to remember and more to forget—I need a little leeway.”
“Tenderness,” Farrell corrected, taking one hand from her forehead, the napkin from the left.
“How,” she faltered, for Estrin routinely steadied herself by being inquisitive. “How did you learn to do it? Dismantle bombs?”
“By one of the oldest traditions in the world,” said Farrell. “I apprenticed myself.”
When Farrell paid his membership to Linen Hall, he hardly expected to check out The Beginner’s Guide to Bomb Disposal, but he had to start somewhere and had always taken refuge in libraries. Surprisingly, he did dig up The Anarchist’s Cookbook, full of detailed diagrams on how to construct a book trap, loose-floorboard trap, ballpoint-pen trap—mere doddles. Sure, for a price he could have scored an Explosive Ordnance Disposal manual from the Brits, but this was before Lieutenant Pim, and Farrell’s army connections were understandably slim; before Whitewells, and his pocketbook was slimmer. So his discovery of Device proved a promising, if aggravating, find. Its author, Corporal Porter Edwards Bream, was a veteran of the North Africa campaign from the Second World War, where he’d defused land mines for the Allies. Brutish things, they didn’t apply. But his last term of service was in Northern Ireland. Funny, though nearly brand new, in a few months the book had already achieved that paperweight quality most published works are destined for—the kind of volume used to prop up film projectors or balance the legs of tables. Farrell took it home, and in all the years since the library had never requested its return.
Porter Edwards Bream was of Anglo-Irish stock, one of those sonorous codgers, you could tell by the flyleaf, who never went by less than all three names. Device was an essay. Farrell bristled at Bream’s pretensions to philosophy, but had to admit that for a vanity press the writing was sharp. “A device is a device,” Porter Edwards began. “Remember: big presents come in small packages.” It was an odd ragbag of tidbits, stories, practical advice about the importance of paper clips. “Always be on the lookout for surprise,” he suggested, “but do not flatter yourself you will see it in time. If you did, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?” Porter Edwards saw bomb disposal as metaphor. In the end, he said, the trick was all internal. What would destroy you, as in any Greek tragedy, would be your own character. With booby-trapped bombs in the North, you would be hung by your own predictability—like the boys who were blown away by a pressure switch triggered by the ripping down of slanderous, anti-British posters on a gable wall. You had to overcome yourself, become larger, so you would cease to be manipulated by what you were like. And devices taught humility and respect. Farrell gagged. Whole chapters read like reruns of Kung Fu. “On Immortality and Arrogance” particularly got up his nose: “If you believe you’re immortal you probably think you’re special. You’re not,” Bream wrote flat. “You’re a dummy. Everyone thinks that. It’s only the rare fellows who grasp they can die who have a clue.”
Though by all indications Porter Edwards Bream was a whopping pain in the arse, Farrell needed tutelage, and traced Corporal Bream to the small Yorkshire town of Beverly. At the first pub he hit, Porter’s name worked a treat. “Watch yourself, now,” Farrell was forewarned. “Bream’s a touch of the second sight. Funny—creepy-funny. Might not like what he sees.”
“Bollocks,” said Farrell.
It took an hour to escape all the embellishments and cautions. Christ, the last thing anyone from Ulster hunted was another myth. And Farrell knew how to decode these fables by now: Porter Edwards Bream was an opinionated, abusive drunk. Locals indulged him from their own need, their pitiable internal poverty. Their awe was detestable. Their patience was detestable. They tolerated the corporal’s endless boozy blithering just to have someone to talk about.
He found Bream in a palatial house tended by two doting women whose relation to the man was obscure. An enormous, cigar-fogged old gout, he was not surprised by Farrell’s visit, or particularly curious. For a spindly Catholic to have sought him out all the way from Belfast seemed perfectly reasonable. He was dead senile, and through the afternoon kept falling asleep.
They despised each other straight off. “If there’s anything I can’t bear,” Porter announced not two minutes into their acquaintance, “it’s one more sod’s decided he’s self-destructive. Your sort’s problem: you’re not self-destructive enough! Little better at it and we’d be rid of you! Blast it, know how easy it is to die? If you can’t manage to stick your head in an oven, what kind of nincompoop are you?” Porter slammed down a full liter gauntlet of single malt, and the duel began.
“If we’re talking sorts,” Farrell started in, “why don’t we move on to yours: the fat, spoiled fraud. You fill out a bar. You rant through lulls in conversation, so the lot can lap their beer. Sure at the Rose and Crown didn’t they wax eloquent on Porter Edwards Bream. Naturally that delights you. But without you they’d find some other puppet. They use you—you’re to be wise, to be anecdotal, to be merciless. They make you wise, they feed you lines, they allow you to be merciless. Your audience demands it, all your orneriness and declarations and drink. A retired army corporal with stories. It’s trite. You’ll cough the same tales till you die, like phlegm. In the end, you’re their creature. And you think differently. That’s what’s so paltry and sad.”
“I don’t think in those terms at all, who is whose creature. You’re sick, man. You’ll do a lot of damage thrashing about if you don’t get hold of yourself. It’s always the, quote, self-destructive, do they ever so much as bump their own elbows? Anything but! Oh, the self-destructive, they go for the rest of the world at the throat. Look at you! Trying so hard to hurt my feelings there’s sweat in your hair.”
If so, Farrell hadn’t succeeded. Throwing insults at Porter Edwards Bream was like flinging Harp tins at a Saracen. Farrell could almost hear the clink, the harmless rattle down the street. He felt childish.
“I didn’t come here for sophistry,” Farrell dignified. “I suffered my share in your pretentious little volume, Kahlil Gibran Joins the Army. I need information, and about bombs, not about my soul.”
Porter’s smile spread like something spilled. “Liar. Besides, shaking out your grubby bathmat of a shadow is about all I can offer. The only thing an intelligent man wants to know about bombs is where they are, so he can arrange to be somewhere else. And the Confidential Telephone no longer rings on my desk, boyo.”
The bottle trickled down steadily as an hourglass. Farrell could not remember a more exhausting session before or since. “If you’re supposed to know so bloody much,” Farrell slurred, “see so bloody much, what can you see in me, fella? Mystic guru bomb man? Oh, X-ray vision ATO?”
“I have seen through pressboard.” Porter nodded; his eyes, for the all-seeing, had grown remarkably tiny. “I know what’s inside a bomb by lo
oking at it, though that took years. How they tick, people are easier. Come with instructions printed on the box.”
“And what have you told me, huh, fella? Codswallop.”
“Jesus God, you are desperate,” Porter whispered.
“Holding out? Don’t want to give away the big secret about O’Phelan? Know how many theories I inspire in Belfast? Think you’re the first shaman to come along? Dozens. Women. Dozens. They’re writing novels, some of them. Wanna write a book? About me? Better’n Device. Wick title. Wick book …”
“Go ahead, kick at me all you like. That’s safe. I should keep you here, harmless. Neutralized.”
“With all this revelation about my deep inner self, how could I ever leave?”
“All right …” Porter grumbled. “You want something? A tidbit, a morsel, proof? Why so anxious for what you already know? That you are a bully. That you’re bigger and stronger than you pretend. Asthmatic? Poser! And part of your power is getting people to feel sorry for you.”
Abruptly, Farrell cried. The charges slipped into a tiny hole in his side. “It’s not fair, is it?” he blubbered. “They do, they all feel sorry for me. Bugger, and every one of them’s worse off by far—debt, dead fathers, husbands in gaol … They think that’s all perfectly normal! Me, I’ve always had enough to eat. My mother probably bleeding loves me, even if I can’t admit it. And, Port old boy, I can’t explain it, but lately women fawn all over me. One more potted egocentric. You and I, we’re the same, and you revolt me.”
Farrell sniffled; Bream fell asleep.
It may have been an hour later that Porter roused himself from a snore. “My poor fanatic!” he sighed, air puttering from his fat lips. “Seared by the agony of the world.”
Farrell looked hard. Was he joking? But Porter went back to sleep with a little smile. This was the joke: that even myths need myths, or especially, and after years of soldiering on as one himself, Porter had knighted a Greatheart in his own study, a hero for heroes—now, Farrell lad, where would you get yours? It was a way of no longer taking Farrell seriously, for in an instant he transformed Farrell to a like-minded larger-than-life to adore or deplore, rather than one tall stranger on his doorstep with whom he might permit a smaller, more complex relationship that in the end is so much more flattering. Farrell was surprised to find his new title a demotion. He had been cursed: a Character.
So that last bit, it was nothing but meanness. But as for being a bully, Farrell subscribed. He didn’t change, mind you, but attended, how he enticed women with his own Troubles—now there was a capital T. The conceit was they wanted to cure him, but he discovered their sympathy was sicker than that: they thought his unhappiness was better than theirs. Incredibly, it was envy. The women saw themselves as merely neurotic, while Farrell O’Phelan was afflicted with the agony of the world—they could buy that? True, Farrell’s desolation was his pride and joy; all polished up, Estrin, it is my accomplishment. But the value of the dolor relied on mirrors; it was a magic show. Alone in a room, he knew it for a shabby thing: a worn top hat, a few cards, a rabbit. Farrell’s Troubles were just like theirs: his only access to the agony of the world was his own, one more private purgatory of billions, and this was the secret Porter wouldn’t tell and Farrell intended to keep.
Like Estrin’s monks, it was a circle: outsiders assumed Farrell was a saint; Farrell knew he was a shite; but, “The final irony,” Bream noted casually a few weeks later as they dissected the mercury tilt switch, “is you’re actually much nicer than you know.”
You never explained,” Estrin pursued, “what got you into bombs in the first place.”
“You like stories out of order. Why don’t we begin with why I quit.” He motioned for the check. “But first we will prop you on three fat pillows with a mug of hot chocolate. That is what you need, my swallow. For just taking your head off to the contrary, I learned from my work that I can be quite compassionate.” He sounded perplexed.
chapter eight
Big Presents Come in Small Packages
Even before it fell to him altogether, Farrell had unofficially headquartered in Whitewells, coopting upper rooms for the private hair-tearing of women sure they’d been followed from Turf Lodge. From early on, he and the hotel were fated for each other. Amid so many alienated factions, Farrell and this institution were alienated from every faction. Where the one solace of having enemies is having allies, where the one comfort of having parts of town you cannot go to is parts you can, Farrell operated alone, equally unwelcome everywhere, only in this lobby at home. They were exiled lovers, on an island made of islands a flagless galleon, precariously afloat; in their grandiosity and hauteur, both anachronistic and often disliked, for they would not apologize for having a little class in a city that exalted tatty wool caps and outdoor toilets as badges of socialist nobility. Technically Catholic, but declared by all sides open season, together they shipped an indiscriminate aversion in a place that recognized as valid any position but none.
For it was inexplicable how either Whitewells or O’Phelan had persisted. When the first rumors circulated of Farrell’s one-man bomb disposal and dirty-tricks squad, locals laughed and acted surprised when they met him alive at the end of the week. Likewise, Whitewells, festooned up there on Royal Avenue, about the only truly splendid architectural enormity left in all of Belfast besides City Hall itself, had about as good a chance of surviving twenty years of bombings as a Methodist all kitted out in his orange sash pounding a Lambeg drum down the back streets of Ardoyne. With the Provos, the Stickies, the Irps, and a whole smattering of Loyalist paramilitaries from the UFF to the Shankill Butchers on the one side, and Farrell, six four maybe, but a Bergen-Belsen 155, and a ten-floor Baroque bull’s-eye on the other, any shrewd bookie would give O’Phelan and his ridiculous hotel fifty to one. Yet despite the odds, Whitewells had still not been intimidated into the loose chippings and landfill of more acquiescent buildings; and Farrell continued to gangle into her lobby without a gun. Farrell and Whitewells recognized each other as being equally implausible.
Besides, the bar served Farrell after hours and didn’t turf him out when he became—ah—expansive. Brandy and port came in snifters large enough for Farrell’s attenuated fingers, where down the road they’d pour VSOP in a water glass, and when a drink looks like swill it could as well be. As for wine, they didn’t stock the whites you could pour over ice cream. But it was whiskey Whitewells understood best, not just Black Bush but Crested Ten and Jameson’s 1780; Islay malts, Bowmore, The Macallan, Laphroaig. When they made it hot, they warmed the glass and dissolved not too much sugar, pressed cloves neatly into the zest, and squeezed the lemon, and as for proportions, they seemed to understand that the charm of the drink did not rest in its hot water.
Then, the generous character of Whitewells was a credit to Eachann Massey, a man whose problems were matched only by his patience in their wake, one of those exemplars who serve as veritable advertisements for suffering: surely if pain produced such grace it was underrated. His wife had walked into the wrong grocery back in ’71 and inadvertently become one of the vegetables—no, you see, this is just the kind of joke Eachann had been easy with himself. Eachann’s life might have been better off with a few more pounds of explosive under that counter, for she lived three more years propped in the kitchen by the radio, spud eyes, her hands moist and flaccid like overdone cabbage. Berghetta had been a lively, sarky woman, with a bit of a sally to her, a wide turn-of-the-century sway to her hips; it had been a fine marriage, and her death dragged out for months in anguish. Yet though the bomb was Provo, it made no impression on Eachann’s politics. He’d told her not to shop the Shankill anymore, but the stores were cheaper and close by and no one told Berghetta where to go. Besides, she’d not liked what was happening, and Berghetta was one of those people convinced enough of her own world that she was sure if she proceeded as if things were as she wished the universe would conform. If she shopped the Shankill as if it were safe, it would be safe. In a
way she was right—if the whole Province refused to acknowledge the lines of battle, they would not exist.
However, they did exist for Eachann, who chose a position before or beyond disgust; Farrell respected such people, admired their ability to take a stand, however flawed, take responsibility for the consequences of that position, even as he loathed the rhetoric and closed-mindedness certainty implied. The shrapnel in his wife’s head had not fractured Eachann’s politics, because they were not reactive. He’d maintained an opposition to the British Empire that was thoughtful and impervious, and he never feared anything would happen to challenge his perspective. As a result, he’d been relaxed and relaxing, for he did not have to constantly flog his ideas to other people in order to sell them to himself.
For what the copious flow of foreign Experts so regularly failed to grasp here was the essential integrity of nearly every point of view. Each party had assembled a puzzle that fit together. The North as object was an ingenious curio which from one side appeared an ostrich; another, a postman; another, a washing machine. That’s why arguments never went anywhere: each picture was true. (In fact, the terror of completely looking at anything from another person’s perspective is that he is always right.) However, in the logical reasoning out of these positions, little girls’ scalps plastered to the sides of houses, kneecaps shattered into their cartilage, a great Victorian market mangled and gave way to slapped-up, slick-bricked shops with no memory of high hats and fine, tiny-handled tea sets but only of polyester knits and Tupperware and destruction. From these reasonable positions sprang unreasonable children, who threw petrol bombs not because they were Republican but because they were bored. Though Farrell may have relinquished the satisfactions of surety, he did cling to one vision: that here the cost of conviction had risen too high, and he refused to have its price exacted from his island.