Ordinary Decent Criminals - Lionel Shriver

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wheedled away, but here Roisin folded her hands over her chest and could detect only the faint on-and-off hum of the refrigerator, her legs laid out like the dead’s. But she wasn’t dead! That was the secret. Under the slanted ceiling of the top floor, cozied by the faded blue wallpaper flowers and the shadows easing over them, Roisin could roam the moors of her head, heather purpling, grass bent, as a young girl with a long dress in a breeze. She wondered at the bustle of women in this town who always had to be a-doing, boys who tore off in stolen cars through checkpoints, even romantics who yearned for the days a lad could light off to sea. She didn’t see the scrabbling for adventure, when all you need do is pull a comforter to your breast. For there was always a ship waiting in Roisin’s port, with sails like skirts; her own breath blew the wind.

      Only when satisfied she could remain this way forever would Roisin get up. She dressed slowly and considered the match of colors as if someone would call, though she’d probably spend the evening padding the house, reading snatches of poetry, and washing the dishes just to feel the water on her hands. Roisin always dressed well, especially for herself. She chose purple and green, like the hillsides in her mind tonight, a soft sweater, low shoes. She tiptoed downstairs as if not wanting to wake herself up.

      She’d not combed her hair or made up her face—which she would also do, meticulously, whether or not she stepped out—so when the mirror in the dining room ambushed her she jumped. Especially the last five years, Roisin was mindful of mirrors and did not let them sneak up on her. And after each passing birthday it took a fraction of a second longer to prepare for them. What was required was nothing less than a mirror of her own to fight back, a careful preconception of a face to fend off heresy. As the two versions grew increasingly disparate, it took more energy to generate the gentler portrait, and Roisin marked the positions of store windows and bar glass like the mapmaking of the blind: she needed to anticipate them without seeing them, for a careless glance could ache up the back of her head for hours, like a baton clubbing from the peelers.

      Tonight, however, she braved the image, unprotected by eyeliner or inner vision: this was her face. In the droop of her cheeks she saw her mother. Otherwise, there was less of a slump than a shatter to it. Her tooth enamel, skin, and dry, separated hair all crackled like crazed celadon. Her eyes were green and men admired them, though tonight she noticed a twist in their center, a wringing—they wound you in at a curl. It seemed the face, she decided, of a woman who had once been very beautiful. More truthfully, it was the face of a woman who had always been almost beautiful: her looks required a leap of faith. The rub: one so many men had almost made. She was the kind of woman whom men date weekly, routinely, for years, whom they think they love and maybe even think they’ll marry, until overnight they find the “real thing” at Robinson’s and in two weeks’ time are off to Australia with a cropped blonde.

      Maybe that explained the twist, as if she were wincing from flattery unreceived. In her best dress she might earn “lovely,” but never “gorgeous,” and certainly not that rare adjective some women pull from even dull men that is so unusual and right that the remark achieves a beauty of its own, and rests beside her as a compliment in the best sense, a woman by a rose.

      As for the shatter in the face, that was easy: it was time and an inconceivable parade of disappointments. That she had recognized their pattern seemed not to free her but to doom her to it. Roisin went about her romances like any bad researcher who writes his conclusion before his experiment, so that long telephone sessions concurring with Constance Trower that she sought out abuse, that she could only admire a man who didn’t admire her, only inspired Roisin to ring off and march out to prove how very, very right they were.

      Looking herself in the eye for once set a tone for the night of uncommon bareness. The feeling downstairs wasn’t bleak exactly, but unadorned. Trinkets in the sitting room did not blur into a nest of comfort and civilization but remained discrete. China bird. Broken clock. Alabaster ashtray. A What Doesn’t Belong in This Picture? where the answer was that nothing did. More, the room was rife with futility. The empty Carolans tin on the mantel had seemed too handsome to throw out, good for sewing perhaps, but Roisin had a cabinet for that; or knitting, but she didn’t knit. Candy dishes proffered no chocolates, bowls no fruit. The alabaster ashtrays were too lustrous for cigarettes, so she smoked with saucers instead. Those napkins on the sideboard were far too dear to dab spaghetti sauce, so she would set her place with pyramids of peach linen and then run to the kitchen to wipe her mouth on a paper towel. Her antimacassars were so elegant that she sat forward in her chairs, to avoid soiling the lace that was there to protect the chair from her head in the first place. Nothing made any sense! Likewise, the furniture did not cohere—the sofa ignored its end tables; chairs sat back to back, not talking. The house hadn’t changed except that some artifice or optimism was removed, some essential squint that made the rooms more pleasing and sane. It was a house without lies, and it was frightening.

      As this quality only intensified, Roisin was unsurprised when a short while later she looked down at her kitchen table with the rude revelation: This is my life. For she not only touched up her face for a mirror but routinely prepared a version of her existence that did not include evenings like this one: a biscuit, crumbs of Cheshire, a leaf or two of lettuce; a book breaking its spine at a page of inexpressible boredom; stray lines on the back of a brown Telecom envelope, with a word crossed out, replaced, crossed again, and filled in with the first one. This was a poet’s life. What did others see in it? Why did the word sing? So her lover had taken her that afternoon; a poet was granted a lover, maybe even one taboo. Tonight, however, she conceded the larger problem was not his religion but his marriage. Roisin was having an affair with a married man; she was thirty-seven and it was nearly too late for children; she had poetry, but while she’d never admit this to Angus, Work only meant so much to her. Weeks and biscuits crumbled on; the shatter deepened; the twist took another half turn. What did she have but the blue-flowered wallpaper and the quiet of her own sinking ship, the slackening flap of her sails? Roisin St. Clair, one more gifted but sloppily understood poet reading on Thursdays at Queen’s about eerie weather and trembling leaves when the crowd was only itching to make it to the Common Room and toss a few before last call—

      She realized the phone had rung several times already, and rushed gratefully to the intrusion—why, every once in a while the outside world came through.

      “Miss St. Clair, I am a friend of Angus MacBride’s.”

      “Of whose?”

      “Please,” said the voice, pained. “I’m sure Angus appreciates your discretion. But I mean a close friend. I need to discuss a matter of our mutual concern. Best in person. At your convenience, of course.”

      “Kelly’s, then,” Roisin faltered. “Tomorrow, half-four. How will I know you, then?”

      “Your photo on the back of Known Facts is most striking. I could pick you out of the top stands at a hurley match. I’m sure to find you at a small bar.”

      A pause; a click. Roisin cocked her head. The voice had a caress in it. Despite the ominousness of the call, when she looked about the sitting room her objects were restored to meaning and memory, collusion, the useless at least pretty. The chairs were in earnest conversation. Back at the kitchen table, the Cheshire was dry as wine, brilliant white and tart. She poured sherry into cut crystal and picked up the book again, engrossed, jotting from time to time; and some of the lines on the Telecom envelope showed great promise.

      It was this particular hand on her shoulder from behind that spurred Roisin to think how some strangers touched you and made you angry, others only made you feel warm. Turning, she was tempted to decide easily that the difference was whether or not they were attractive, but she had liked the hand before she found the gaunt, tailored gentleman who belonged to it. She later theorized there was a class of men who filched at you, sliming for what they could get—a pickpocket job, their touch was theft. Others did you a favor: their touch was gift.

      “The Farrell O’Phelan?”

      “I don’t know, are you the Roisin St. Clair?”

      “I take a sorrier article, I’m afraid.”

      “A back booth, then, for two sorry articles.”

      “I

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