“It was late ’76. Tarja was volunteering for the Peace People in their heyday. She was filled with that fire for reconciliation I so revile, but which in her impressed me for my mystifying inability to defile it.”
“Conviction.”
“Revolting in most people, but in Tarja it had a purity you had to respect. And in the atmosphere of the time it was a bit easier to flog, even to me … We’d have long rows, and after I’d ridiculed her gormless optimism and her wet friends, she laughed. A bit like you, my dingy, slitty-eyed despair, she didn’t buy it. She said I was golden.” He seemed to find this funny.
“Golden?”
“Yes. That in her dreams I was ten years younger and blond and that I ‘glowed.’ That I wasn’t the way I thought at all. That somewhere inside I was—jubilant.” Farrell’s laugh degenerated to phlegm. “But that was the way she talked, you see. Simple, eerily direct. I don’t expect it was weak English, but the way she thought. When I hurt her, she cried. When she was tired, she slept. She’d stop in the middle of an afternoon and say, ‘I don’t feel like wearing green,’ and change her shirt. She despised cruelty, admired self-sacrifice. Finland? She might have been from Mars.”
“Why did you marry her?”
Because, you eejit, I was in love with her, but Farrell declined to answer this, not just for strategic reasons, but because it wasn’t quite true. “We were living on an—extraordinary plane,” he suggested. “I couldn’t keep it up. I married her to crash it.”
“Which worked.”
“And how. Besides, I pulled one truly appalling stunt to bury us for good.”
“This is another warning,” Estrin groaned.
“Predictably, I was blootered from the moment I stubbed the ring on Tarja’s finger. Ten days after, I’m propped in the Crown and I spot a woman across the room. Winsome. Funnily enough, Tarja was much more lovely. Then, I think I liked the mildness of the attraction. I could take it or not.”
“You took it.”
“We tore off in a taxi after barely a banter. Ended up in Ardara, on the coast of Donegal. Holed up in a B & B for a full week, doing laps from Pat’s to Nancy’s and back to bed. She was married, seven years, three kids. And we told no one.”
“You just disappeared?”
“For a Catholic to vanish in Belfast in 1976 was an unusually malicious prank.”
“Ever go back to Tarja?”
“Had the taxi pull up to our tatty flat in the Holy Land. Strolled in the door and Tarja threw her arms around me and wept. Hadn’t eaten or slept, half undressed. Had spent the whole week on the phone to the RUC, the Royal, City—would have been roaming the Cave Hill for body parts by the weekend. She finally got around to asking where I’d been. I said I’d been on a tear. I said I’d been fucking another woman. Then I said I was going for a drink. I remember, I felt nothing. When I came back later she’d cleared out. Except from her lawyer, I never heard from her again.”
“Congratulations.”
“It is possible to destroy a woman’s love for you. With Tarja it took drastic artillery, but this was a direct hit.”
“Are you proud of that story?”
Farrell paused. “I must make a frightful impression.”
Estrin tufted at the half-dry paint on her shirt. “Sorry.”
“That was the most wicked thing I’ve ever done.”
Estrin looked back up again. “Then why”—she leaned forward—“do I like it?”
“Because you identify with the woman I ran off with,” he supplied. “And not with my wife.”
Farrell looked at Estrin in dismay: one more. Sometimes he was tempted to spy on families pramming by the Lagan, just to find out what they said, how on earth they spent their time. Because Farrell hadn’t a notion what to do with a woman once he’d got her besides break up.
Considering where they were from, Farrell enjoyed watching Estrin pick at the Bramley tarts by his bed. “What do you think of reconciliation groups?” she asked.
“Not much. Even peace movements need murdered children.”
“What about you? Whitewells, Panorama. You’re thriving off dead kids with the worst of them.”
“Oh, aye. But you should know me well enough by now: that brand of castigation only delights me. Which drove Tarja wild.”
“So,” she measured. “Supposing your conference flies, your power-sharing referendum passes, power devolves. After the expected, maybe even disappointingly flash-in-the-pan scuffle, the IRA simmers down to a few hardcore head cases, the Brits wheel off with a wave, and you’re left with the RUC, in their regular annoying policeman way, pulling you over for speeding when you’re already late for the theater. Mummy asks you for Sunday tea. What do you do?”
Farrell didn’t hesitate. “Leave. There’s Chile, South Africa, the Middle East. I despise my mother’s Sunday tea.”
“I think,” Estrin announced, “this shambles will be sorted out by good sons who ask for seconds of potato puffs. Who switch off the news for Eastenders. You? You’re a troublemaker. Your motivation is weak.”
“I do, however, want to succeed. I can always find excitement in Burma.” It was rumored that Burma no longer had any government at all. There was no rice in the markets, and the streets were quiet only because the country had run out of petrol. In the last buildings held by President Maung Maung, there were soldiers with fixed bayonets in every room, including the ladies’ loo. When Farrell read accounts, he salivated. No danger of prams by the river in Rangoon!
“Farrell, if you can’t handle New York, how are you going to feel in Burma?”
“You think you’re the only one who can travel, my dear?”
“No, but—” Estrin stroked his damp hair. “Farrell, sweetheart, you’re stuck here, you’re hooked. You and your newspapers, you’re as bad as any Hausfrau addicted to daytime TV. And if the series ever closes, you will be lost.”
And how is himself, just?” Constance was locking up in the carpark.
“Ebullient,” said Estrin, once again having a hard time looking Constance in the eye. “Coughing, but improved. Sadly. So I’d skip the flowers and fruit. He’d much prefer a case of pancreatitis.”
“And what’s the crack? Has he the nurses knitting him mufflers?”
“The usual: solving the North’s problems to put off solving our own.”
“That order,” Constance observed, “hasn’t worked here for years. So you’re interested in the Troubles, love?”
“What else is interesting here?”
“What’s interesting anywhere?” Constance countered.
Estrin fidgeted with her helmet strap. They both seemed to want to talk to each other, and not. Constance would fuss with her keys, snap her handbag, shuffle one step toward the hospital, then edge back. There was a funny feeling that they weren’t supposed to be doing this; that whether or not their conversation broke a rule of etiquette, it most certainly broke a rule of Farrell O’Phelan’s.
“We talked about his wife.”
“Poor Tarja. They say she was quite a looker.”
“That’s not always enough.”
“It’s a start.” She smiled. “Sure it’s always been a requirement. But don’t you worry, love.” Constance patted Estrin’s arm. “Maybe the lad’s met his match, so he has. You’ve more of a sharpishness about you—”
“Than all the others?”
“Than Irish women. We still sit back in pubs and let them rabbit on like God’s gift. You Americans interrupt from time to time. Now, good luck to you, love,” she said hurriedly, cutting a glance to the far end of the carpark. “I’ve to bring his highness the post. Cheerio.”
Estrin paused to watch the puffy ankles stride briskly to the lobby, her expression at the door set in a brave, spiteless warmth. Oh, glasses, a square jaw, an excess of moles and pug nose, but gentle eyebrows and full cheeks—in Estrin’s book “a looker,” for were their lives reversed, Estrin could not have faced Section B with so little bitterness in a hundred
million years.
On to the Guzzi, Estrin passed a woman dabbing blush by her car; their eyes met in the compact. Estrin watched this specimen, too, glide into the hospital. Beguiling, if chilly. Mmm, nice clothes; why did Estrin always dress like crap? Not bothering to change from her painting shirt. And look at that, slim in a way Estrin, so short with muscled shoulders, never suggested—Estrin could seem small but never delicate, never so appealingly frail.
It was late afternoon, August; fog drifted in and out of sun. Estrin needed air and tore off down the Lisburn Road to the A1. Funny, only a mile or two out of Belfast and the countryside was travel poster. While often psychologically remote, there is nowhere in Northern Ireland you can’t get to in a couple of hours; in thirty-five minutes, she’d crossed to Tyrone. Whimsically she lunged the Guzzi off the main road, to arrive in a tiny town called Castlecaulfield. On its outskirts she slowed before a house. Estrin killed the engine. The cottage was old, whitewashed, thatched, with creepers up one side, baskets of brambles by the door, dahlias; coal smoke coiled from the chimney, and surely on the other side of that window pies cooled, salt cod soaked under a cloth. With its flagstone walkway and dog at the gate, the cottage might have seemed trite, but its walls had too specific a character for that, lumpy bone from which soothsaying fingers could divine a particular life. In the late-afternoon sun, golden, as Tarja would recognize, the cottage exuded that radiant clarity of a wheelbarrow, a rooster.
What struck Estrin about the house in Castlecaulfield was that she did not live there. That she had never lived there. That she would never live there and would never try. Not that she couldn’t, for there were plenty of like houses she could rent or buy, rising mornings at the twitter of corncrakes, to milk the goat, throw coal on the fire, and round up a fresh loaf of barm brack. Now, it was not 1800 and she’d certainly own a VCR, to curl up nights with Lawrence of Arabia one more time, but late afternoons with this light she would doubtless be reduced to poetry. A little boy cringed shyly in the doorway, and Estrin smiled.
She noted that even in this pastorale she was by herself, and tried to add the child; a husband. The pastiche curdled. Better not push it too far. The point was, the cottage was lovely, and pitched on one of the most pristine, luxuriant islands left in Europe, Estrin lived on Springfield Road. Further, she had refused Castlecaulfields all over the world. Surely she’d left the Philippines because the weather was too pleasant.
Because after two weeks in Castlecaulfield Estrin would lose her mind.
The dog had begun to bark with the hostility the woman in black leather deserved. She did not belong here, and tore off from all that quaintness and quiet back to the main road, comfortably agrunt with Pigs and Saracens, soldiers at their sites. You could tell the Catholic towns because the signposts were painted red and scratched with UVF. Right, you call Castlecaulfield quiet, but it’s halfway between Ballygawley and Loughgall. Nicely balanced: eight obliterated British soldiers on one side, six assassinated Republicans on the other. Easily she could open her Irish News tomorrow and Castlecaulfield, like Ballygawley, Loughgall, Drumnakilly, Enniskillen, would be one more catchword for atrocity.
For as a break from pneumonia, Farrell’s barbarous betrayal in Ardara, and Constance Trower’s staunch, masochistic kindness in parking lots, Estrin had gunned off in search of a blown-up bus: an expedition of tacky voyeurism she rarely indulged herself in, but no one was watching. Unless news reports were running old footage, the remnants of the bus carrying thirty-six Brits returning from leave which the Provos had quite expertly exploded in Ballygawley had not yet been cleared away. Sure enough, making her way through several checkpoints—at one she did have to take off her helmet and let her hair tumble innocently over her shoulders, but not one soldier asked a single question, not even the UDR—soon the carcass grinned around the corner, cordoned by white tape, dotted with wreaths and cards from Protestant strangers. Estrin parked the Guzzi and shot the posted soldier a smile to buy her five minutes without being run off. The crumpled black frame was tilted up on the grass, like most wreckage emanating calm rather than tragedy, a peacefulness not unlike creeper fluttering on whitewash. Estrin wondered what she expected to find here, what she hoped to feel—anger, frustration, grief? A mere wisp of mystification curled from the mangle, like smoke from thatch. She did not understand blowing up those soldiers. And she did not understand the house in Castlecaulfield, either, flower gardens and finnan haddie and three-year-old boys. She did not understand anything, and she’d been all over the world.
Estrin met the soldier’s eyes again and this smile was wan; he shrugged. She thought he was handsome. Like Estrin, he seemed less angry than disconcerted, a little bored; glad for a glimpse of a pretty girl.
“How’d you get stuck here?” Estrin called.
“The bus, you mean?” A Scot.
“Ireland.”
“Pulled a few strings.”
“Come again?”
“Takes a bit of work. Most of us ask to get sent over. Everywhere else, it’s press-ups in cold streams; here it’s the real thing. Now, best take yourself off, lassie. I’m not to chat.”
With a last glance at the Real Thing, Estrin plowed back toward Belfast. The sunset was sooty, the horizon plumed with charcoal clouds; nearer to home, the air choked with the smell of burning rubber. Banking to Divis Street, she mocked herself, going sixty miles out to find a burned-up bus when there was one still smoldering just down the road from her house. Beside it at the exit from the M1, a gang of ten-year-olds with sticks and balaclavas had crowded a sedan; they pounded the vehicle and crunched in a windshield before the driver cracked open the window and seemed to answer the committee to its satisfaction; the boys let him go.
Right. The South had just extradited Robert Russell over the border today, and it was a perfect excuse for a party. Proceeding slowly up the Falls, then, she knew basically what to expect, for after twenty years celebrations of this nature were routine in West Belfast. Closing on the welcome wagon, she gunned the engine and downshifted; Estrin was in no mood for interviews. The kids waved their sticks and took advantage of their anonymity to shout, “Show us your snatch!” and thrust their fingers in the air. But Estrin recognized two boys from Clonard despite the masks, and called them by name; she’d given them both rides on the Guzzi in July. They gave her the high sign, and waved her on. Considering they were only ten, the extent of her relief seemed absurd.
Up the Falls, hijacked vehicles smoked on the curb every hundred feet, until Estrin reached the barricade, a double row of lorries, buses, and vans sealing off the road. Only black taxis were being allowed through by cutting over on the footpath; Estrin followed one of these.
The barricade was too magnificent to pass up; Estrin parked. One lorry had recently ignited, its tires liquifying onto the pavement. As one fuel tank and then another exploded, Estrin inhaled—it was beautiful. Petrol stung the air. In all, ten vehicles crumpled across the road in various stages of cremation, their smoke velvet, flames licking the last bits of upholstery and fiberglass clean. She had come upon the remains of a successful urban safari, cavities split open, cabs lolling off their trailers, trophy heads, the faces of young hunters lit with a lust for gasoline. What a shame the cramp of local housing prevented mounting whole trucks on the wall. Maybe they saved the horns.
The atmosphere was festive. Families with prams strolled down the center of the Falls for their evening walk, as in a pedestrian shopping mall, obligingly closed to traffic by local community groups. Malcolm Dunlea and his friends barbecued whole chickens on steering columns over the City Bus, now nicely burned down to coals; propped outside Mackin’s, now doing a brisk trade in crisps and ice cream, Duff Shearhoon spread his shortleg on an An Phoblacht. Face bright red, he was down to a T-shirt and suspenders in the heat, West Belfast’s Tweedledee. With the fitz of beer tabs and children chuckling, the atmosphere was Fourth of July.
“Lancaster!” cried Malcolm. “Where’ve you been, you’ve missed
half the crack! Dark meat or breast?”
Estrin’s drumstick left a smeary residue on her tongue. “You should publish this,” she noted. “Chicken Retread. ‘Hijack one large, untrussed postal lorry—’”
“Roast vehicle until crispy—”
“Season with RUC—”
They concocted a Republican cuisine, using all local ingredients: Bonnet-fried Onions on Blackened Capris; Scampi à Petrol; Pork Interflora; Beef Balaclava; Cortinas of Veal with Hatchbacked Potatoes, and a selection of sweets: Ford Flambé, Muffler Pudding, and Paint-Blister Pie.
Sailbheaster had stationed himself erectly by the barricade, and kept aloof from the picnic. His boots were shined for the occasion, the turtleneck depilled. When Malcolm offered him a wing, Sailbheaster stiffened with contempt, but when Malcolm’s back was turned, the eyes inside the little round holes of the hood went soulful.
Clive Barclay was sulking on the bumper of a well-done Granada, snapping a few dispirited slides. He had just shot an entire roll chronicling the rise and fall of the Turf Lodge City Bus; in his eagerness, he’d opened the camera without rewinding and exposed the film. He’d begged the boys to hijack another lorry or two, as this lot here were well past their glory, but the hijackers were all anxious to get home in time to catch their barricade on the BBC. Malcolm offered to take the Iowan’s picture in front of the crackling post van, and Clive begged Sailbheaster’s balaclava for the shot; waving a plastic tricolor in one hand, a tailpipe in the other, he planned to send the photo home to Coralville to his mother.
It seems Clive had interviewed a few hijackers, but he couldn’t get any of them to talk about Robert Russell; he got more than one “Robert who?” In the end Clive clung to the Green Door crowd, which now a little better than tolerated him, with that hair-tousling benevolence they tendered Sailbheaster. Then, the distinction any member maintained between his own form of the ridiculous and anyone else’s was more or less arbitrary. Everyone at the Green Door was a mascot.