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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.
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.
Hence the saving of the hotel over and over, for Farrell would not have Whitewells taken from his world. He imagined that the bomb that got away would crumble him worst if he remained behind. In his nightmares he never dissolved in a flash of white heat, but was left kicking through another rubble in the city center, as he’d once scuffed through Smithfield Market, finding caps of Crested Ten, shards of snifters, spoons, melted picture frames, smoking tufts of brocade, breathing the stink of materials you’d never think would burn. Maybe it was warped to feel so deeply for a building, but Farrell did understand the affection designed into the neutron bomb. Still, it would take him several of these rescues and a last night to feel the same protective passion for his own life.
Bream taught Farrell all he knew, which is not to say they grew fond of one another. Farrell battled for hardcore information about how to neutralize a trembling fuse through a barrage of philosophy. Though the hemorrhaged corporal made an unlikely mystic, every switch had its tract, like the Salvation Army, where you had to sit through “Rock of Ages” to earn your soup. Even the way Bream referred to bombs suggested religious awe, rarely pronouncing B-O-M-B, but euphemizing, the thing, the device, what you’re dealing with, as the Orthodox avoid the real word for Jehovah. “Remember, no matter how many times you’ve seen the same box, the same size, the same switch, treat every device as a stranger.”
“I treat my own mother as a stranger,” Farrell quipped. “It shouldn’t be so hard with a crate.”
“On