SARA MOSELEY KEPT track. She was not so pathologically tightfisted that she never picked up a dinner bill, but she would remember if she paid last time, and how much.
Sara didn’t want to remember tabs. The information would simply blip into her head unbidden, like a software update. In her defense, she did exercise social restraint. If, at the electric arrival of the lacquer tray, her companion placed a single tenner on a £26 lunch bill and then began routing intently about her bag for pound coins—despite the fact that the month previous Sara had put the whole £57 for their dinner on her Visa, and Maeve had merely left the tip—she kept her mouth shut and grubbed for her wallet, if with a pressed white rim around the lips. Well brought up, she never blurted in public, “But I only ordered a salad!”
Fundamentally, Sara expected other people to hold up their end; in exchange, she would hold up hers. Was that so terrible? This rigid sense of justice ought logically to have corresponded to a right-wing outlook—down on handouts, keen on mandatory prison sentences—but Sara had liberal, Bennington-educated parents, and theoretically endorsed the spread-the-goodies tenets of European social democracy. Had Sara ever been personally subject to the Continent’s horrendous upper-bracket tax rates, her politics might have lined up promptly with her more conservative inclinations in private life, an American sensibility that came down to covering your own ass.
Yet keeping track was not attractive, not even to Sara herself. Helplessly, she kept a lengthening mental ledger of trifling material grievances: Moira had never returned Sara’s bone-handled umbrella after that downpour. Despite fulsome promises at the time, Patrick had yet to replace the blue-and-white china platter he’d cracked at a raucous dinner party years ago; Sara hadn’t reminded him, but neither had she forgotten, and the friendship itself had suffered from a fine fissure ever since. After she’d splurged on a round-trip flight to Boston for his birthday, Brendan had returned the gesture on hers with a lone Terry’s Chocolate Orange once their romance had gone off the boil. But she knew her list was shameful, and its extent and incriminating detail were well-kept secrets.
Sara yearned for a visitation of grace. She envied insouciant sorts who flapped cash about in restaurants from an excess of sheer joie de vivre, who arrived at the door bearing boxed Pavlovas without a thought of payback in kind, who sprang for champagne when an unassuming Italian white would have more than sufficed. She couldn’t remember having met such people, but she was convinced they were out there, perhaps in droves; they simply didn’t gravitate toward ledger keepers and lunch-bill talliers like Sara Moseley. The trouble wasn’t that she was incapable of generosity, but that if she was generous then she remembered being generous, to-precisely-what-penny generous, and remembered generosity didn’t seem truly generous, quite.
Sara had been raised in a nest of recycled aluminum foil, where Kennedy half dollars glinted with exaggerated wealth not only to the child but also to her mother. Were she to lobby for animal crackers at a grocery checkout, Mom would deduct the cost of the impulse purchase from her weekly allowance of thirty-five cents. Apparently the gene for small-mindedness was passed down maternally like the one for hair loss. If on some private campaign to become a Better Person Sara stifled the host of grudges she bore, issuing a blanket forgiveness of picayune, antediluvian debts, her resentments subsided only to rage more virulently than ever in a few days’ time. Suddenly the whopping international phone bill that her sister ran up while quarreling with a boyfriend on a visit in 1991 would blister in Sara’s mind like a recrudescence of shingles. Besides, why fight it? A long memory for slights had lent Sara Moseley an intuitive grasp of Northern Irish politics.
AFTER EARNING HER journalism degree from Tufts, Sara had taken six years to work her way up from proofreading annual reports on Patriot missiles for the Raytheon corporation to writing up street fairs for the Brookline Newsletter. Unable to divine a clear path from documenting the rise of “slouch socks” to covering the civil war in El Salvador for the Boston Globe, she sold off the contents of her entire household in the summer of 1986—a fit of disencumbrance of which nowadays, a clatter of salad spinners and silver-plated serving spoons later, she was in slack-jawed awe. With the proceeds of her dispossession, she back-packed around Western Europe in a flight of youthful exuberance that, however commonplace, fortified in then-adventurous Sara Moseley a determination never to live in the dumpy old United States again.
Sara hadn’t moved to Belfast so much as run out there—run out of money, run out of wanderlust, run out of Europe. Waitressing with a master’s degree seemed less ignoble abroad, so Sara began slabbing up fabulously pneumatic lemon meringue pie, taller than it was wide, at the Queens’ Espresso on Botanic Avenue. That was shortly before the IRA bombed Enniskillen, in Northern Irish time; Ulsterfolk conventionally located personal cornerstones by their proximity to atrocities.
A virtual obligation of her new home, she soon fell in love with a voluble, abusive boozer with delusions of grandeur—or, as Sara soon learned to say, an arsehole. Said Arsehole was a working-class Protestant from the grimy, famously militant Shankill Road, where the failure rate at the Eleven Plus exam neared one hundred percent. (In recent years exclusive to Northern Ireland, the UK primary school test brutally separated brain surgeons from bank clerks before they were old enough to spell “social determinism.”) But Arsehole had bootstrapped himself to Cambridge (the real Cambridge). After sowing a few oats as a drummer in a one-hit-wonder rock band in London, he benevolently returned to his grubby Shankill roots to woo his dole-dependent, Carlsberg-hoovering mates from the misguided gore of violent paramilitary loyalism. (Granted, the predominant loyalist modus operandi at the time—getting roaring drunk and arbitrarily shooting any old Catholic in the head—left something to be desired in the political panache department. While loyalists claimed to be securing Ulster’s continued membership in the United Kingdom, these grisly acts of obeisance mysteriously failed to endear them to the motherland.) The real enemy, preached Sara’s temperamental new boyfriend, wasn’t the Taigs or the Provos but firebrand opportunists like Ian Paisley and even the soft-core Ulster Unionists, bent on deploying the cream of Protestant manhood to fight the IRA without bloodying the creases of their tidy bourgeois cuticles.
Having imagined previous to 1987 that Paisley was a pattern on ugly ties, unionists organized labor strikes, and Provo was the majority-Mormon hometown of the Osmonds, Sara plunged into a private crash course on the Troubles in her spare time—first to impress Arsehole, later to beat Arsehole at his own game. By the time she had digested an alphabet soup of paramilitary acronyms and could rattle off the casualty totals of pub bombings as she could once recite the Red Line’s timetable at Porter Square, she cared for neither impressing nor beating Arsehole, since it turned out that Arsehole was, well—an arsehole. But by that point she had a quirky flat, a blender that ran on European current, and an embryonic journalistic expertise. She saw no reason to pull up stakes.
Eleven years later at forty-one, Sara the Anglo-Cajun American no longer asked herself why she was still living in Belfast—a question that, on detecting an accent that had never quite gone native, taxi drivers and pub patrons asked her repeatedly. Eschewing the real story as undignified for an independent career woman (it had too much to do with a man), she had distilled a string of answers more plausible than true, and selection was a matter of mood: (1) She was “fascinated by the politics”—while to the same degree that she was fascinated, she was bored. By 1998, mention of decommissioning, parity of esteem, confidence-building measures, or cross-border bodies with executive powers smote her with the impotent claustrophobia of dreams in which she could not scream. (2) “The people are so warm and good hearted”—another half truth; that famous Ulster friendliness candy-coated a contempt for Americans to which Sara fancied herself inured, although hate mail snidely addressed to “Little Miss American Pie” still smarted. (3) In Belfast, she’d “found her journalistic niche.”
There was some accuracy buried in this last sop, though the niche was poorly paid and odd. Sara was a professional American. She wrote a Saturday column for the Belfast Telegraph called “Yankee Doodles,” in which she was expected either to convey the American slant on the latest local calamity, or to comment on current affairs in the States. Diatribes against capital punishment, permissive US gun laws, or the illicit funding of the IRA by Irish Americans through NORAID had proved abidingly popular. She recorded spots on Radio Ulster explaining the origins of Thanksgiving, or why nearly one percent of her countrymen lived behind bars. When in blessing an ill-fated IRA cease-fire in November 1995 Bill Clinton touched down in Air Force One to work the entire province into an evangelistic rapture—thousands lined Royal Avenue that day, waving inflated red, white, and blue baseball bats in the rain—Sara hustled between TV panels, radio appearances, and guest op-eds in a lucrative Rent-a-Yank stint whose proceeds saw her through Christmas.
Ironically, it was a lukewarm allegiance to Uncle Sam that had facilitated her expatriation in the first place. In fact, across the globe the foofaraw of nationalism left Sara indifferent, and she was sometimes puzzled by having adopted, of all places, a statelet where the clamor of rival national loyalties dominated local discourse. So for Sara to earn her crust explaining American customs and American politics and American viewpoints was perfectly ridiculous. Visiting estranged friends in Boston for a month every summer provided about the same exposure to contemporary American culture as regular trips to the cinema on the Dublin Road. She devoured both the Protestant Tele and the Catholic Irish News six days out of seven, but often left the issues of her father’s Atlantic gift subscription encased in cellophane. Sara Moseley’s expertise on how Americans really felt about the Monica Lewinsky scandal derived from BBC vox pops, and as a professional American she was a fraud. But Sara needed the money.
The Telegraph paid £100 per week. With occasional book reviews (of novels by American authors) for the Irish Independent or panel appearances on Radio Ulster meant to put folks straight on why American secondary school students got itchy trigger fingers during algebra, Sara got by, but only just—to the tune of about £600 per month, or barely $1,000. Granted, Sara’s £225 rent was modest even for Belfast, where by the mid-1990s flat rentals had soared perplexingly sky-high. Her budget had rarely to cover luxuries beyond a smart secondhand denim jacket from the Oxfam shop, a jar of Thai curry paste to throw on the same old steamed cabbage, and, of course, the occasional addition of another Michael Collins or William of Orange coffee mug to her burgeoning collection of Troubles ephemera. So in material terms her income was adequate. At once, it was not a grown-up income. Somehow a scraping by that was admirable in one’s twenties seemed eccentric or even lazy in one’s thirties, and Sara worried that a single woman this skint into her forties drifted inexorably to the social fringe. Maybe young, carefree bohemians aged into bog-standard poor people.
Or perhaps the problem wasn’t simply money. Maybe the problem—and Sara was only beginning to realize that there was a problem—was Belfast, whose people were developmentally stalled at about the age of thirteen and had made her commensurately juvenile. She’d been happy in this town, but that was a past-perfect determination facilitated by the fact that she was happy no longer. And it wasn’t really fair to blame Belfast when the problem wasn’t Belfast itself but the fact that Sara still lived there.
“I DON’T GET it,” Lenore said, leaning back at a skeptical slant on her big blue couch. “You look good—your eyes only crinkle when you smile. And you say please and thank you? So how come you’re still single?”
Dark, knurly haired, and busty, Lenore Feinstein was a former roommate from their grad school days with whom Sara kept up because the woman had tang. Yet as the three-year-old sleeping upstairs attested, Lenore had strong convictions about at what age one does what, which sometimes set them at odds. Sara was not following the Program.
Sara gazed through the wide picture window at the inviting wooden porch of Lenore’s newly purchased Somerville clapboard. She resisted relaxing into the maternal bath of Boston’s hot August air when she was headed right back to a chill, dimly lit drizzle in September. This Rorschach of sun through oak leaves put Sara on her guard. On average it rained in Northern Ireland over three hundred days a year, and she was used to it. She had to stay used to it.
“Oh, with locals in Belfast I always seem to hit a wall,” Sara speculated. “I’m a foreigner, which they like at first—I have novelty value—but that’s also in the end what they can’t stick. I’m unable to ‘share their pain.’ Besides, all the bright sparks in that town clear off. The men who stay put are losers. If I really wanted to marry a Northern Irish boyo with spunk, I’d move back to Boston.”
Sara’s argot was a confused hash of colloquialisms from both sides of the Atlantic. Some remaining American friends found her Ulsterisms charming; others the lingo annoyed.
“So why don’t you move back here? Sara, my lassie, you’re not even Irish.” Lenore the Ulsterisms annoyed.
Sara shrugged. Even a year ago, she might have put up a passionate defense of her adoptive town. Yet ever since this last April’s signing of the Good Friday Agreement, relentlessly lauded as “historic,” she’d been afflicted by the nutty impression that Belfast didn’t need her anymore. Though she’d done nothing but cheer the ostensible end of the Troubles from the sidelines in “Yankee Doodles,” the agreement felt idiotically like her own job well done, meaning that she was now obliged to pad barefoot into the sunset like David Carradine at the end of Kung Fu.
“I don’t feel quite at home in the States anymore.” Like the lifting Gaelic lilt at the end of her sentences, the claim would read to Lenore as another pretension. “I fall between the stools. I’m not Northern Irish, and I don’t try to be. But I’m not only American, so I’m not.” An Ulster tic, the reflexive syntax was a joke, but Lenore looked put out; she didn’t get it.
“What you are is stuck,” Lenore announced, palms on knees. “Okay, Ireland used to be interesting—”
Sara winced. She hated when Americans called where she lived Ireland, as if the island were all one country.
“But now you say yourself that the politics are old hat,” Lenore continued. “If coverage of that agreement thing in the Globe is anything to go by, the hatbox is wrapped up with a bow. Meanwhile you make no money. Your career is parked. No man, no kids. You’re getting older, and sooner or later you’re going to look it. Wake up. Go somewhere else. Belfast is over.”
Sara glowered. She didn’t like being lectured. Seeing each other only a few days a year, they couldn’t commiserate over daily travails—the scheming of Lenore’s colleagues in Lowell’s psych department, last week’s atrocious subediting of “Yankee Doodles”—but were obliged to discuss the Big Issues. The little issues were more fun.
Sara objected, “I know it’s hard for you to appreciate—”
“I came to visit you in ninety-two, remember? You were so proud of that place, as if it were your private discovery or little ward, your wee friend who’s a bit slow and needs a defender. Okay, that was sweet. But for me to humor you at this point wouldn’t do you any favors. Sara? Belfast is a dump.”
Taken aback—surprisingly offended—Sara could only correct, “You mean, a tip.”
Lenore plowed on. “The architecture is either sooty and morose, or tacky and plastic. The restaurants stink, and they’re larcenous. As for the local ‘cuisine’—fried potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, or potatoes stuffed with potatoes garnished with a little potato, and seasoned with a soupçon of potato flavoring.”
“Spud flavoring,” Sara contributed forlornly.
“There’s nothing to do in that frumpy burgh but watch American movies with assigned seating, or get shitfaced by noon. No wonder they blow the place up! You’d said up front that the one thing you couldn’t bear to do again with a houseguest was to rent a car and drive up the Antrim coast, but what did we do? Out of desperation? Rent a car and drive up the Antrim coast! And the hairpin turns made you carsick. Then there’s your friends. All they talked about for hours on end was whether the U-FDA was an illegal offshoot of the U-PLO, the U-NCAA, or the U-NAACP, or whether some poor schmuck got his knees shot off by the Provisional IRA, the Marginal IRA, the Not Ready for Prime Time IRA, the Mother’s Own IRA, or the Really, Truly, Absolutely the Genuine Article IRA—”
Despite herself, Sara laughed.
“Okay, I confess there’s some addictive thing going on with you and that jerkwater that’s beyond me,” Lenore admitted. “But I’m only quoting you back to yourself if I say that the romance is played out. You can get just as destructively hung up on a good-for-nothing town as on a no-account man, can’t you? I think you’re running away from your life, but if you get something out of this expat shtick, that’s your business. So at least dust off the passport, goyfriend. What about Bangkok?”
The suggestion was not out of left field. Their mutual friend Karen Banks had been working for an NGO in Thailand and was leaving on a one-year project to study the empowerment of women in South Korea. On the off chance that someone had itchy feet, Karen had emailed all her friends that her Bangkok flat was available for sublet.
“What would I do in Bangkok?” Sara slumped in the armchair, chin jammed to her clavicle.
“You’re a freelance journalist. The fall of the butt—or whatever their money’s called—just triggered the economic collapse of Southeast Asia. Why not cover that story? There’s more going on in Bangkok than Belfast. The deal is sealed in Ireland. The story is dead. Besides, you read that email. Karen’s apartment house has a pool and a tennis court. With the butt depressed, it still costs less than that worm-eaten Victorian attic you rent now. And it would be wa-a-a-rm …” Lenore cooed.
“You mean hot,” Sara said sullenly.
“That’s the other thing. Your garret in Belfast is fucking freezing.”
It was freezing. Her flat at the end of Notting Hill (a distant poor relation of London’s fashionable district) had no central heating, just a single clanky gas fire installed in each drafty, cavernous room. The gas had a dodgy smell, moldy and suspicious, to which Sara became accustomed over the winter, but after this trip to the States the odor was bound to bother her for a while in September.
“You’ve always told me,” Lenore said soberly, “that staying overseas turns your life into ‘one long adventure.’ Well, where’s the adventure in Belfast? You’ve been there eleven years. Your adventures lately must run to, like, taking out the garbage.”
“Rubbish,” Sara furnished with a wobbly smile.
“That’s enough for you? Swapping garbage for rubbish, that still gets you off?”
A trill from the foyer delivered Sara from this savage campaign that she abandon her only home. While Lenore answered the phone, Sara dismissed the Bangkok lark as physically impractical. Sara Moseley was clingy, hoarding, and cheap. She had no idea how she’d got up the antimaterial zeal to divest herself of everything she owned at twenty-nine, but she knew she didn’t have it in her to shimmy through the tag-sale striptease a second time. On the other hand, she wasn’t about to carton everything up and pay, what, hundreds, maybe thousands of quid to shift all her worldly goods to the other side of the world on a whim of Lenore’s. What if it didn’t work out? Another small fortune wasted on schlepping the chattel back again. Adventure was all very exhilarating so long as you were foisting it on someone else, and didn’t literally have to pay the freight.
“I do have her number there, but this month she’s in the States,” Sara overheard. “In fact, this week she’s staying with me. Would you like to speak to her?”
Lenore returned trailing the cord, and extended the receiver. “Friend of a friend,” she whispered. “Don’t know her.”
“Hello?”
“Sara.” The name sounded insistent, almost accusatory. “I’m very pleased to have found you,” a youngish female continued with disconcerting solemnity, as if playing grown-up. “I’m a friend of Evelyn McAuley, whom you may not know. Evelyn said her friend Lenore Feinstein knew someone who lived in Bel-fast. This must be fate, reaching you with one local call. I’d been prepared for overseas day rates.”
Sara would have thought the same thing, but wouldn’t have said it aloud. “So how can I help you?”
“My name is Emer Branagh. I’m on my way to Bel-fast next week, to stay for at least nine months. Since Evelyn said you’ve been over there a little while—”
“Eleven years,” Sara provided pointedly.
“I was hoping you might have a room to let. Or could suggest where else I might start looking.”
Sara shuddered inwardly at the vision of this notional flatmate, whose aggressively ethnic name implied another root-grubbing Irish American. Worse, the affected brand that stressed the second syllable of Bel-fast as a badge of authenticity. (Try this for truly authentic hair-splitting: Locals in Ba-al-fahst gently stressed the second syllable only when the city was preceded by a directional modifier, like “West Bal-fahst.”) The Yankee Bel-faster was a one-upsman. The gasping emphasis induced anxiety in compatriots that in referring to Bel-fast they’d made unwitting asses of themselves for years.
“Have you tried the internet?” Sara asked coolly.
“I was thinking more along the lines of personal connections. You see, I’m an author. I’m hoping to write a memoir about my experiences there.”
Good lord, not another My Year in Bel-FAST. Its dialogue would be riddled with apostrophes and quaint respellings like “Nor’n Iron,” its profiles of the writer’s overnight fast friends—all, by coincidence, Catholic—recounting for the umpteenth time the heroic struggle of the second-class citizen against the repressive occupation of the six counties by British Crown forces. Unfortunately for our budding memoirist, on the heels of the Good Friday Agreement ructions in the Old Sod were winding down, but that was part of being clueless: having no sense of timing.
Unkindly, she even resisted steering the girl toward the Belfast Telegraph’s classifieds. The Tele was Sara’s newspaper, both her local daily and her employer. She felt protective, jealous—jealous of what was already hers, but it’s funny how you can covet what you have.
Yet curiously, it was thinking about the Telegraph that occasioned a turn.
While on holiday, Sara filed “Yankee Doodles” from the States. The column was due Friday morning. It was Wednesday afternoon, and she’d yet to decide on a topic. A Monica Lewinsky reprise would backfire; Northerners refused to hear a word against Bill Clinton, because he came to visit. She’d lethargically considered this week’s anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bomb, but that peg was out, too. Tele subscribers would rather be bored witless by their own Troubles than concern themselves with anyone else’s. Sara had been writing “Yankee Doodles” for nearly nine years, and as of this day exactly, with no fore-warning, she had nothing more to say.
“Now that you mention it,” Sara supposed into the receiver, looking Lenore in the eye, “my flat may be available for sublet. I’m headed for Southeast Asia.”
DIZZY FROM HER mental plunge, Sara still insisted on taking Lenore and her husband, Caleb, out for dinner that evening. Though her one-child, two-income hosts were awash in cash, Sara was determined to express official thanks for being put up the previous week. Lenore had visited Belfast only that once, so balancing the scales by hosting her friend in return was unlikely. (Lenore protested that being spared even one more night in Belfast was compensation enough.) When Lenore remarked that they could always whip up some pasta and finding a sitter was kind of a hassle, Sara chose not to get the hint. Her rules of reciprocity were militant. She would be grateful over Lenore’s dead body.
For Sara was a stringently conscientious houseguest. Per custom, she’d shown up in Somerville with her own ground coffee, Melitta filters, pint of milk, and grease-spotted bag of cranberry scones. Rather than filch cold cuts, she skipped lunches, and for the odd nightcap didn’t mooch from Lenore’s crowded liquor cabinet, but scrounged through her carry-on for Drambuie miniatures squirreled away on British Airways. So scrupulously did she not impose—buying a whole bottle of shampoo for a few nights’ stay—that she may have disconcerted her benefactors, who’d never have begrudged her the Herbal Essences in the shower stall. In truth, she was guarding against the very disproportionate resentment she’d herself feel toward a freeloader who used up her coffee beans, cadged her shampoo, and expected lunch.
To celebrate that afternoon’s rash pronouncement, Sara opted for a Thai curry house. She reminded Lenore over lemongrass chicken that Karen’s flat in Bangkok might already be taken, half hoping that it was. After she swallowed a whole green chili in one bite, Sara’s forehead broke into a cold sweat. To what had she just committed herself? Had she the remotest qualifications to freelance about economic collapse? So over coffee, she regressed to more commodious subject matter: Emer Branagh.
“Most of these seeker types are so unsussed,” Sara despaired, “that they’re oblivious to being clichés. They’re always convinced they’re, like, Mayflower passengers in reverse, and no American has ever set foot on the shores of Antrim. I guess this makes them lucky, but they never notice that they’re objects of derision. Locals are sniggering into their pints, and meanwhile these memoirists think they’ve found their true home away from home and everybody loves them.” Sara had tried to leaven the diatribe with feigned sympathy, but the tirade came out acrid.
“Doesn’t that make you a cliché?” Caleb asked.
“Of course,” Sara concurred cheerfully. “Although contrary to convention, I’m a unionist, so I don’t hero-worship convicted murderers. And at least I know I’m a cliché—”
“Sara, what’s this girl to you?” Lenore broke in. “You’ve never even met her.”
Sara pulled up short from asserting You don’t understand—a regulation Northern refrain with foreigners, the better to shield a tawdry, quotidian bickering that, given opportunity, outsiders might understand all too horribly well.
“On the face of it, she’s a known quantity,” Sara said instead. “I’ve met stacks of Americans passing through that town: conflict junkies, reconciliation missionaries, human rights watchdogs, the odd genealogical quester whose, you know, third cousin five times removed hailed from Carrickfergus and who snaps a whole roll of prints when he finds ‘McErlean’ on a bakery sign. If they’re not naive or loud, they’re naive and loud, and the combination is desperate. Most visiting Americans have embarrassed me, or at least made me mad, since—when they know what one is—every single one, without exception, has turned out to be a nationalist. So I guess I’m prejudiced.”
“How can you be prejudiced against Americans,” Caleb exclaimed, consternated, “when you are one?”
“It’s more than possible,” Sara said, not backing down, “to be prejudiced against yourself. Still—Lenore’s right. I don’t know this Emer person, and I shouldn’t make harsh assumptions based on the thousand credulous eejits who preceded her.” For the rest of the evening Sara didn’t mention Emer again, though she was surprised by how much restraint the omission demanded.
KAREN NOT ONLY emailed that her flat was still available, but also offered to give her old friend a thumbs-up with the features editor at the Bangkok Post, a well-regarded English-language broadsheet looking for new voices. As a financial backstop Sara could also edit publications for the UN, which always needed native English speakers to catch second-language gaffes and to cull enough bureaucratic twaddle to make text faintly comprehensible. The reports were soul-destroyingly dull, Karen warned, but the pay was super. Thanks to the Asian economic crisis, both Korean Air and Thai Air were offering scandalously cut-rate fares. Sara’s whim took shape. It was doable.
Subsequently, other Boston running buddies of yore proved if anything too enthusiastic about this Bangkok caprice, betraying a wide-spread consensus that she’d been in a rut. Sara was abashed to discover to what extent she’d become the subject of her friends’ conspiratorial despair. But frankly, they were dead on. She’d started out such a world beater, game for anything new or anywhere fresh, which is how she ended up in Belfast to begin with. Unbeknownst to herself, she’d become as much of a stick-in-the-mud in Northern Ireland as she might have had she never left Medford. Why, knowing nothing about Bangkok was good reason to go there. Had she lost faith in her capacity to learn? She didn’t used to know a loyalist from a hole in the ground. What would stop her from mastering the causalities of Southeast Asian recession?
In binding herself to fragile intentions, Sara seized on logistics. Accordingly, Emer Branagh proved key. Sara could neither afford two rents nor shift kit and caboodle to Bangkok sight unseen. But subletting her Notting Hill flat had proved a tall order in the past. Sara inhabited the attic story of an older Scottish couple’s creaky Victorian manor, and a tenant was obliged to ascend by the central staircase of the main house. Whenever she’d tried to sublet to students from Queens for her summer stint in the US, they’d recoiled from the incursion on another family’s home. So she’d have to make nice with the bird in hand. Besides, if Sara didn’t act on this kooky impulse right away, she knew she’d go back to Belfast, dawdle over “Yankee Doodles,” churn daily on the stationary bicycle in the Windsor Lawn Tennis Club fitness suite, and mesmerized by her soporific routine would dismiss the whole Bangkok folly as temporary insanity. Clueless, maybe, but Emer was also a godsend.
Sara and Emer spoke perhaps three more times. Attempts to meet for coffee were scuppered by Emer’s preparations for her flight to Bel-fast on the evening of August fourteenth. Sara’s own ticket returned her to Bel-fast on September tenth. So she proposed to post Emer a duplicate key. Emer could move into the flat while Sara was still in Boston, locate a temporary room elsewhere for when Sara returned for perhaps three weeks to wrap up her affairs, then move back for the duration once Sara left for Thailand. The arrangement was cumbersome, but no doubt desirous of a place to lay her head on arrival in a strange city, Emer agreed.
In explaining the eccentricities of her abode, Sara took pains to ingratiate herself. Relating her waterless technique for cleaning the cast-iron skillet with heat and salt, she furnished a degree of detail that was deliberately comical. Tentatively identifying a few items that Emer might avoid using, she made light of her attachment to a gaudy Belgian beer glass lugged all over Europe. Yet through the smoke screen of self-ridicule Emer must surely have concluded she was a nut.
Sara was a nut. An honest catalog of the cherished items of which Emer should beware would include every bit of bric-a-brac in the flat. Sara was a passionate custodian of the lowliest appurtenance. All that she owned was implicitly cherished for the very fact that she owned it, helping define the vigorously defended boundary where the rest of the world stopped and Sara Moseley began. Arguably, it was the perfect impermeability of her own perimeter—that militant distinction between what was hers versus what was other people’s—that explained most profoundly why at forty-one Sara Moseley remained childless and unmarried, and why she might be attracted to a foreign polity whose consuming obsession was the Border.
Emer as well seemed eager to please—neither wanted the other to get away—although wont to endear herself with oppressive sincerity. She attended to prolix explanations about the skillet with grave patience, and no amount of Sara’s self-mockery could tempt her subletter into a shared chuckle. Dangling herself as a professional asset, Emer volunteered a host of do-gooder contacts in Southeast Asia whose causes “as a responsible independent journalist” Sara would have a moral obligation to promote. Over the phone, Sara would find herself jotting down the address of a pressure group that was campaigning to have the Khmer Rouge leadership brought to trial in Cambodia or the phone number of a little outfit that refurbished computers for underprivileged Thai schoolchildren. Once Emer rang off, Sara would look at the scribbles on her notepad, mutter What’s all this shite?, tear off the pages, and throw them away.
Sara knew the type. Emer sounded exactly like the American volunteers for the Peace People on the Lisburn Road, who organized lemonade and biscuits for cross-community day camps. The unmitigated earnestness of these virtuous summer interns always dumbfounded local pub patrons at the nearby Four in Hand, who after repeatedly fruitless attempts to engage the visitors in slag-for-slag banter would contrive the same pitying dispensation for the Yanks as they might have for the simpleminded.
Emer emphasized that she had written a memoir before. Attaching herself to a small international school run for the children of diplomats, she’d lived for a year in Burma. The resultant first-person account was published by a Vermont press of which Sara had never heard, “with very good distribution,” the girl stressed sternly.
Sara embellished. Young Emer’s involvement with the region doubtless hailed from some stimulating undergraduate foreign policy course at, say, Sarah Lawrence. The professor would have been a seductively unstable Vietnam vet with whom the smitten Emer conducted a torturous affair. After graduation, the girl had beelined for the most fucked-up country left in Southeast Asia—to impress Arsehole. Arsehole wasn’t impressed, since arseholes never are.
At least this much was not Sara’s invention: the girl was clearly in the heady throes of Newbie Author Syndrome. That is, an unimpeded life of letters seemed to have opened before her. One after another, she would tame trouble spots to the page. Sure, thought Sara grimly, it was a pretty picture—as yet unsullied by word processor chain-smoking, dismissive squib reviews, flyspecked remainder copies, copacetic editors exiled to genre imprints, demands for massive rewrites meant to presage outright rejection of whole commissioned manuscripts, the odd close-call brush with mortality that makes our heroine gun-shy since sometimes trouble spots weren’t merely theme parks but were actually dangerous, and joyless authorial alcoholism.
Cheerfully weaving the innocent’s threadbare future, Sara formed a vivid picture of Emer Branagh, whose lifeless chestnut hair would be shoulder length and straight. Bangs. Thin if physically weak, she would disguise a passable figure with dowdy liberal clothes: loose corduroy slacks, plaid flannel button-downs, and lace-up umber Timberlands with corrugated soles. The girl was certainly short. However even-featured, her face would lack the hint of subterfuge that might have made it sexy. She was bound to sport big doggy brown eyes, and perpetually to wear the trusting, how-can-I-help expression of a pre-burnout social worker.
The plain-Jane mind’s-eye portrait was satisfying, but Emer’s Burmese escapade gave Sara a pang. A brutal regime conferred cachet, just as the Troubles had laced the bracken of a wet, underpopulated island with belladonna. On the heels of the agreement, the only peril Ulster reliably afforded was a dander to the shops without an umbrella. And while violence made any boondocks exotic, the same could not be said of a bland, business-section recession. Momentarily, Sara faltered, nervous that rather than flying to Thailand she should really be booking for Iraq.
AT 2:45 P.M. on Saturday, August fifteenth, 1998, a fertilizer car bomb exploded in the town center of Omagh, County Tyrone, killing twenty-eight people outright, and injuring over three hundred; a twenty-ninth victim would die in hospital by September. The bomb would be claimed two days later by “the Real IRA,” the military wing of “the 32-County Sovereignty Committee”—both names that, owing to the scale of the casualties, countless television commentators would be forced to deliver on camera with a straight face. Though instigated after a formally brokered peace, the bombing of Omagh’s town center was the single most lethal atrocity in the history of the modern Northern Irish conflict.
Troubles maven Sara Moseley learned of the tragedy a full thirty-one hours after the fact. She and Lenore had gone on a weekend camping trip to the Cape, and had pitched their tent out of the range of newspapers, televisions, and satellite signals since the previous Friday evening. Only when fiddling with the car radio as Lenore drove back to Boston late Sunday afternoon did Sara tune into: “… including a young woman pregnant with twins. Northern Ireland’s first minister David Trimble has denounced …”
“Jesus, what’s happened?” Sara exclaimed, cranking up a John Hume interview full blast. “I’m away for one bloody fortnight, and the place goes to shite!”
“Turn your back for a minute, and the natives revert to savages?” Lenore asked, owing to the volume of the radio obliged to shout. The news moved on to Clinton’s impending testimony on Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury; Sara turned it down.
“It’s just, you sounded so, well, colonial,” Lenore said.
“It may seem as if bombs go off there all the time and what’s one more, but that high a body count is a big deal.”
“Are you worried that the casualties might include a friend of yours?”
“Oh, that’s unlikely.” Sara detested bystanders and hangers-on who milked atrocities for secondhand pathos. “Omagh’s a ways from Belfast. Still, this bomb is bad news for the agreement. In the assembly, the UUP has a pro-agreement majority of only two seats. This one republican up-yours could push a few crucial UUP assemblymen into the No camp. They don’t trust Sinn Fein; the idea of going into government with pond scum already makes them gag. Also, whoever did this—and money down that it’ll be disowned as a mistake—the Provisionals are sure to get the blame at first. On the other hand, that statement from Gerry Adams was gobsmacking. Did you hear that? He’s ‘totally horrified by this action,’ and ‘condemns it without equivocation’? I mean, knock me over with a feather!”
Lenore had failed to insert the grunts of someone at least pretending to listen. Sure, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Lowell had no reason to grasp how dumbfounding it was that the man the dogs in the street knew was the leader of the Provisional IRA had actually denounced a republican bombing, as journalists had ritually begged Adams to do for decades. But Sara was frustrated. She yearned for a convocation of chums in her drafty Belfast sitting room, where they could tease out Omagh’s intricate political implications like patiently working snarls from windblown hair. The caucus would have been nostalgic. Ever since the signing of the agreement in April, Sara and her coconspirators (largely Catholic unionists—to republicans, Irish Uncle Toms; to Sara, unflinching freethinkers who refused to walk in lockstep with corner-boy fascists) had found themselves at a loss for material, and her dinner parties wound down before midnight. But after turns of the wheel this sharp, such evenings always ran boisterously into the small hours.
By contrast, here in Massachusetts she and Lenore spent the early evening searching three separate minimarts for Diet Peach Snapple iced tea. On the last leg to Somerville, silence fell between the two women, leaving Sara to her thoughts.
These were embarrassing thoughts. Abstractly, Sara was sorrowful. Yet mourning the death of strangers is a blunted, butter knife experience, bearing no resemblance to the slicing, machete-like bereavement of losing someone you know. Hence Sara was left to brood on more peripheral considerations, all obscenely selfish.
First, Sara felt left out. It wasn’t fair. She sticks over a decade of weeklong downpours and winters when the sun sets midafternoon until the biggest cataclysm to hit Northern Ireland in thirty years goes down, and Sara is sunning on Cape Cod.
Second, she feared for her own sense of narrative resolution. Beginning with the death of eleven civilians around Enniskillen’s cenotaph on Remembrance Day 1987, Sara had loyally turned the pages of Ulster’s turgid multigenerational saga, of which the Good Friday Agreement had appeared to constitute a happily-ever-after last chapter. Because she’d been as addicted to the serial as any nineteenth-century Dickens fan, certainty that in the main the story was a wrap had made it vastly much easier for Sara to contemplate departure for Bangkok. But Omagh could very well mark the end of the Provisional IRA cease-fire. Were there to be an extended epilogue or, heaven forbid, a sequel, getting herself to quit Northern Ireland altogether could prove impossible.
Third, it was bad enough that nine days earlier the US embassy bombs in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had gone off fractionally too late for Sara to repeg her Belfast Telegraph column for the following Saturday; thus at the same time other American journalists were finally taking terrorism seriously, Sara Moseley was filling out eight hundred words about the hokey faux Irish pubs off Harvard Square. But after Omagh’s catastrophe, yesterday’s “Yankee Doodles”—a bit of belletristic fluff on pretentious Americans who say “Bel-fast”—would have scanned to her aghast readership as beyond crass.
These matters aside, what throbbed uppermost in Sara Moseley’s mind was the fact that yesterday was August fifteenth, on whose very morning Emer Branagh was to have assumed the Notting Hill flat. Sara accepted that her resentment was absurd, and she’d be hard-pressed to justify this impression of having been cheated. Hazily, her consternation was of a piece with that ruling compulsion to keep track. The bitterness was all bound up with her meticulous accounting of credits and debts, with her vigilant policing of the frontier between her personal province and the province of the world at large, and even with her fierce grip on bagatelle, for Sara clutched a skillet or a beer glass with the ferocity of a toddler with a stuffed bunny.
So it was childish. But now Emer Branagh could boast to all her little Irish American friends that she arrived in Belfast on the day of the worst bombing in the history of the Troubles, after paying for this claim to fame with a single morning of bleary unpacking. But if Omagh justly belonged to any foreign interloper it belonged to Sara, who had purchased wholesale anything faintly interesting in Northern Ireland with eleven draining years—for it is no mean effort to become exercised on a daily basis about other people’s problems. Along with other mis-appropriations like the bone-handled parasol, Omagh had been stolen from her. Omagh got added to the List.
TAKING THE AIRBUS from Belfast International the morning of September tenth, Sara bobbed against the window. Sheep on passing hill-sides jittered with the electric jolt characteristic of having missed a night’s sleep. The sumptuous sunlight in which these storybook fields basked was duplicitous, a Tourist Board scam to lure her away from Bangkok. It rained here all day, every day, and that was why the pastureland gleamed such a seductive green. Priming herself for Asia, Sara encouraged her own weariness with the desolate residential architecture: stark white pebble-dashed boxes with dark-stained window frames. Still, as Belfast Lough curled on the horizon, the sight of Samson and Goliath, the two massive Harland and Wolff shipping cranes stapling the skyline, made her heart leap. However unaccountably, this was home.
To the indigenous she’d always be a foreigner, and that was an ineluctable fact, which Sara tried never to fight. But deferential guest-of-the-nation status couldn’t dull an imperialistic glint in Sara’s eye as the Airbus puttered down Royal Avenue and the wedding-cake dome of Belfast’s pompous city hall hove into view. To all appearances, her possessions were few. She didn’t own a microwave or washer. Her computer was a dinosaur, with an E that had started to stick. On the other hand, she did own all of Northern Ireland.
Which might have come as a surprise to the other people who lived there. Yet recognition that her personal deed to Ulster was ludicrous didn’t compromise the sensation in the slightest. Ownership is as much state of mind as legal entitlement. For that matter, absence of birthright made Sara’s title to the province possible. She wasn’t vying for the North with locals, who seemed to possess their own country in a different dimension. In Sara’s parallel universe, her only real competition for Ulster’s sheep-strewn acreage was other Americans.
Mindful that this turf war was insensible and potentially all in her head, for her first several years here Sara made a concerted, compensatory effort to be, if not quite warm, at least cordial whenever she encountered her countrymen in Belfast. Yet other visiting Americans had repeatedly acted aloof in return, whereas the rare fellow expat full-timer had proved positively icy. Rearing back at the Crown Bar, compatriots would refer blithely to IRA contacts as if name-dropping rock stars. They booby-trapped their conversation with tests: Sara had seen, hadn’t she, the latest Committee on the Administration of Justice report on the RUC? So a tacit rivalry between American political hobbyists in respect to territory that wasn’t theirs to fight over was not purely the product of her private neurosis. Most nationals clung gratefully to one another abroad, but Americans in Northern Ireland seemed at once drawn to one another, and repelled.
Maybe deep down they made one another feel ashamed. Theater requires an audience, and this raunchy cabaret had run for three decades. Throw in the professional Peeping Toms—from CNN, Le Monde—and the statelet had staged a noteworthy portion of its seamy antics to titillate the overseas voyeur. Which made them all enablers.
So these days, Sara preferred simple avoidance to good manners. Take that rumpled late-thirties chap sitting at the front of the Airbus who’d boarded ahead of her, remarking to the driver in a strong Texas accent that the price of a return to Glengall Street had gone up. (Academic horn-rims, tweedy sports coat: Austin, Sara concluded. They had a conflict studies department. Open collar, nubby jumper, funky leather luggage: left-leaning, in the States. Translate: nationalist.) Of course she’d noticed him, while taking local passengers for granted as part of the scenery, like more sheep. Yet Sara had seated herself in the back, as far from the fellow as she could get. In truth, Sara was standoffish not so much because she was afraid that she might not like the man, but because she was afraid that she might not like herself.
For had she sat next to him, he’d have tossed off the name of the peace institute that sent him on this junket, perhaps proceeding to share his street smarts. You wouldn’t believe it, but Belfast is pretty safe. All the same, watch your back in republican estates like Twinbrook or Poleglass, where if the Provies aren’t looking the joyriders will boost anything that moves … Within ninety seconds he’d apprise his seatmate that he’d been here several times before. After all, that was the sole aim of his remark to the bus driver, who hardly needed to be apprised that the fare had increased.
Sara would mention how long she’d lived in Belfast herself not as a point of information but purely to gain social advantage. She’d reference Chuckies and culchies to show off her fluency in the regional idiom, and exaggerate the contamination of her vowels, pronouncing house as hyse. She would cluck-cluck over the Omagh bombing in order to insinuate her nuanced grasp of this autumn’s delicate political state of play. The worse for this notional encounter, piercing American voices carry uncannily in small spaces. So throughout the genteel antagonism, every passenger on this bus would be eavesdropping. Sara had learned the hard way from an onslaught of anonymous hate mail forwarded by the Tele: no matter how erudite, subtle, and insightful about the North they might sound to themselves, the silent verdict of their audience would be devastating.
Thus Sara had refrained from speaking to the Texan at all, because the fact that this who-knows-whom, who-knows-what, who’s-been-where-when-what-blew-up combat between foreign-born Troubles fanciers was unendurably gross never seemed to prevent Sara from throwing herself into the humiliating competition for all she was worth. Geographically, Ulster was little larger than Connecticut, a state that provided for more than three million Americans with relative grace. Yet apparently Northern Ireland wasn’t big enough to accommodate more than one.
The complex anthropology of the political parasite went some distance toward explaining why, as the Airbus drew nearer to the hideous Europa Hotel and thus a taxi ride away from a flat now installed with a compatriot’s what-all, Sara bridled. She resolved to eradicate the least remnant of her tenant on arrival.
AS HER BLACK taxi wound to the top of the rise, arriving at a majestic if ramshackle manor at the road’s end, Sara’s proprietary sensation crested as well. Never mind that she merely let the top floor; this was her house. The fact that the deed was not filed in her name was a technicality, nay, an economy. It saved on taxes. The driver was suitably awed by the four-gabled grandeur of her residence. “Fair play to you, pet. Not many of these big old girls left in these parts, so there aren’t.”
However increasingly ambivalent about Belfast—eleven-year residence at a dead-end menaced with metaphor—Sara was always happy to return to the hyse itself. Her grounds scraggly with wildflower gardens, her wings attended by stately cedars like loyal footmen, the “old girl” had character. The posture of the house on the hill was drawn up, bosom high, like a turn-of-the-century dowager a few too many cream teas on. Though decrepit, she was vain into her dotage. Cosmetic restorations—the newer, lighter-hued slates patched ineffectually over a rotting roof, or the freshly applied magnolia paint already flaking from damp—blazed self-deceit, like foundation slathered over a once alluring face. While nowadays greatly reduced in circumstances, no. 19 retained the haughty reserve of old money, and from her elevated perch shot withering looks at the garish nouveaux riches monstrosities and dinky bourgeois bungalows that had replaced the august relatives of her own generation. The Miss Havisham of Notting Hill exuded a musty redolence of mortality and decay that sometimes frightened small children. She was indeed a house better let than owned, since the cantankerous old biddy hoovered money by the bin-full, which was why her guardians were forced to rent her top floor. Yet she sucked up the kind of cash that never made one’s day-to-day any better, but merely ensured that life for her inhabitants deteriorated at a somewhat slower pace.
As a tenant, Sara ordinarily embraced this crumbling hulk with the devotion of a niece, a sentimental relation who didn’t have to pay auntie’s medical bills or clean up the messes of an incontinent. Today, however, a thread of foreboding tangled Sara’s homecoming. Emer Branagh would have been nesting in no. 19’s attic for four weeks. While the kid had promised to make herself scarce as of earlier this morning, Sara had encouraged her subletter to leave a few things behind if necessary, a companionable offer that she now regretted.
Forbiddingly, too, there was more than one way to take over. As a teenager Sara had mocked her mother’s possessive exclamation, “You’ve tracked mud all over my clean floor!” What’s this “my floor,” Sara had jeered to herself. It’s Dad who bought it. At last after keeping her rented Notting Hill garret in impeccable order year after year, she understood. You could own something just by taking care of it. If you swept it, and mopped it, and waxed it, the linoleum was de facto your floor. Yet a host of wife beaters and IRA bombers had shrewdly detected a shady corollary. You could also own something through violation. If you abused it, and disfigured it, and ruined it for everybody else, it was yours, too.
As the driver hefted her bag up the porch steps, Sara reflected uneasily that she didn’t have the constitution for subletting, which routinely entailed wear and tear. You needed to grasp that if few objects were perfectly fungible, most objects were loosely fungible. You had to register the fact that your territory on the most profound level could never be measured in square feet. You required a sense of proportion from which Sara had never suffered, and you had to be able to let little things go.
Sara counted out the exact metered fare. (A Belfast cabby didn’t expect a tip, so an extra quid would have seemed gauchely American.) Inside, she bumped her heavy suitcase up the stairs; it was bulging from coffee beans, sports socks, and printer cartridges, all cheaper in the States. So big deal, Sara reasoned, she’d have to live with a stranger’s sack of clothes (corduroy slacks, flannel shirts, stumpy shoes). She was mostly dreading those tiny, creepy markers of invasion: brown hairs in the drain, maybe the lingering whiff of a misfortune with fresh sardines.
Pushing the bag through the entry to her own lair on the upper floor with her bladder bursting, Sara hustled urgently to the loo. She noticed that the toilet roll was down to cardboard only when it was too late. The spare rolls that Sara always kept on hand in dread of this very calamity were evidenced only by more cardboard in the wastebasket. Irked at being so stranded in her own home, Sara searched her pockets, at last tearing open the airline overnight kit. Finally one of those flimsy gray bed socks served a purpose.
Washing her hands, Sara found only a sliver of soap, magenta, like the fat bar she’d left in August. On a hunch, she ducked into the bath next door. Sure enough, her shampoo and conditioner were down to a drizzle, and someone had opened her new bag of safety razors. So far, this homecoming was evincing a distinctly Three Bears texture.
Lugging her suitcase up the final flight of stairs, she naturally expected to confront her extensive poster montage of Goons with Guns on the landing’s wall. The IRA and the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters were equally represented, as Sara’s contempt for terrorists was non-sectarian. The montage was for grins. Eyes beady behind his ski mask, AK trained on an invisible foe, each fierce patriot of Ireland or Britannia looked like a little boy playing army whose overprotective mother feared for colds.
Of some twenty posters, only pinholes and Blu Tack remained. Well, if that wasn’t a bit of nerve. Sure enough, those patronizing Brits were right: at least some Americans had “no sense of irony.” Maybe a new-comer to this carnival whose sensibilities were still delicate wouldn’t want to come home every day to losers with their heads in socks pointing automatics at her forehead. But that array had taken years to accrue, and time to put up. Couldn’t the girl have waited until Sara was in Bangkok?
Abandoning her luggage, Sara ventured warily into the adjoining study. She’d figured Emer for a save-the-whales type who’d bequeath her landlady a few bottles for recycling, but who would otherwise leave the flat shit-eatingly shipshape, a lone suitcase cowering in one corner, a jam jar of daffodils propping a welcome-home note …
The study was a wreck. The carpet was grotty, what little you could see of it. The floor was ankle deep in papers and splayed books from Sara’s library. Crumby plates and scummy glasses punctuated every surface. Desk drawers coughed open, as if the place had been burgled.
Which it had been, rather. Half a ream of A4 was missing. An alien laptop was connected to Sara’s inkjet, poised to deplete Sara’s cartridge. Printout underfoot was cheerful with Sara’s parti-colored paper clips. Long faxes curled lavishly over the carpet like white chocolate on gateau, so no wonder the machine was out of paper. The scattered felt tips—capless—had once been stored in a “Reservoir Prods” mug, which was now—oh, no!—absent from the desktop. Sara whiffled in an adenoidal panic before discovering the rare evidence of Protestant wit—the mug’s tough-guy silhouettes of Mr. Orangeman, Mr. Union, and Mr. Boyne pointing revolvers in dark glasses—decorously obscured with a hankie.
Numerous pages of the Black ’n’ Red hardback notebook bought in July for the next volume of Sara’s journal (£4.95!) were looped in a conniving cursive. This country is like a mirror, a stray entry began, from which gazes back at us our own reflection. Yet the mirror is warped, and what we see is distorted, a fun-house contortion of either what we wish to see, or what we fear …
Oh, for fuck’s sake, what horseshit.
She collected the books from the floor. Emer hadn’t seized sensibly on hard-nosed references like W. D. Flackes’s Northern Ireland: A Political Directory or Malcolm Sutton’s An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland. Instead, she’d been drawn to the poetry (Ulster’s poets outnumbered its poetry readers by ten to one) and gentle volumes like Dervla Murphy’s sweet but damp-eyed account of a Northern cycling trip, A Place Apart, or yet another Yanks-in-the-bog memoir, O Come Ye Back to Ireland: Our First Year in County Clare (a review copy—Sara had slammed it).
Enough. Time to case the rest of the flat, which, if she didn’t miss her guess, was lacking that jam jar of daffodils. Funny. Emer had sounded so tidy over the phone.
In the kitchen, her precious Belgian beer glass, which Emer had promised to store safely out of harm’s way, was pulpy with orange juice, and tilted by the sink against a mound of potato peelings. The sink itself was crammed with encrusted crockery. From among Sara’s trove of Troubles coffee mugs, the rather prosaic one from the SDLP (good Catholics: no goons, no guns) poked from the sludge. Soaking at the very bottom, rimmed with rust, was the cast-iron skillet. Apparently those water-free heat-and-salt directions had been difficult to follow.
Shoes kissing the sticky lino, Sara surveyed her larder, whose inventory as of early August, from a lifetime of keeping track, she recalled to the bean. The comestibles had been pilfered wholesale. Five formerly unopened bags of pasta were reduced to stray shells. Apropos of the Three Bears, a family-size bag of muesli was down to a handful; Emer had literally been eating her porridge! The six missing tins of tomatoes must have contributed to the industrial-size vat of what looked like vomit in the fridge—a pinkish slop clotted with curdled bits that she theorized from a safe distance was tofu spaghetti sauce. Multiple unopened jars—green olives, dill pickles, gooseberry jam—were now stored in the refrigerator door, in anticipation of many complementary culinary delights to come. The subletter had splurged on her own liter of milk. But the only sign of Emer’s having bought any nonperishables for herself was a single shaker of sea salt.
Eyes slit and jaw set, Sara picked the green olives, dill pickles, and gooseberry jam out of the refrigerator door, thank you very much, and slid the jars back into their cabinet.
Sara dragged her case down the long center room, where dozens of cassette tapes littered the bookcase, out of their cases. It’s altogether feasible to disdain a stranger’s taste in your own music. Emer had been playing Loreena McKennitt, Clannad, and Natalie Merchant—the wick, edgeless singers from Sara’s morose period after breaking up with Arsehole. In the columns of unmolested tapes, the labels of We Hate the IRA and the two-bigotries-with-one-stone classic The Pope’s a Darkie had been turned to the wall. “Sense of humor bypass,” Sara announced aloud.
She stuck her head into the sitting room, hopeful that in the vaulting, underfurnished expanse, with its comely round-topped dormer window, sloped ceiling, and comforting pigeon warble overhead, she might locate her customary serenity.
Pigeons, certainly. Serenity, not quite. More books, everywhere—pulled from the shelves where they’d once been alphabetized by author. But Sara saw red only when she glanced at the far wall, where more precisely she saw nothing.
The dozens of photographs that documented her eleven years in Belfast had all been taken down, and were strewn carelessly on the guest bed: an Irish News clipping in which Sara’s indistinct head at an IRA funeral was circled in highlighter; Sara and Arsehole; Sara at a meeting of the Belfast City Council; Sara aglow at her first loyalist bonfire; Sara’s much younger face smiling alongside her debut “Yankee Doodles” column, yellowed in its frame. At a glance, none of the archive looked damaged, so she was a little at a loss to explain the flash of rage. This was subletting. Still, where would the harm be, keeping that collage in place?
But maybe the bedroom took the prize. Oh, by now she wasn’t surprised to come upon what might have been the aftermath of the famous wire hanger scene in Mommie Dearest—although unnervingly the clothes flung onto every available surface featured not corduroy and flannel, but rayon and silk. The bedclothes snarled in a heap seemed par for the course; after sloshing through that wading pool of stationery in the study, Sara hadn’t envisaged the sheets fresh, the spread smoothed, the pillows plumped. But she had not been prepared for completely rearranged furniture (pushed beside the window, the bed blocked the closet door—now, that made sense). And she had not been prepared for the shrine.
Or whatever it was. On the dresser, a peaked wooden cabinet was faced with two brass-knobbed doors. Ceramic incense holders bristled burnt joss sticks. Strings of fragrant cedar beads looped each knob of the mirror, while around its frame seasonally premature Christmas lights winked in a variety of merry colors. The Cranshaw melon looked like an offering of sorts, circled as it was by candles, which had drooled red wax on the bureau’s veneer.
“Bloody hell,” Sara mumbled. “Not only is she a slob, a cheapskate, and a sponger. She’s a fruitcake.”
The churchy aura of the assemblage made Sara superstitious, and she let it be. But she saw no reason to abide Emer’s launderette decor, and beavered about the room whisking up kimonos, lacy underthings, and posh angora jumpers. Amid one armful, Sara identified her own denim jacket and hand-knit cardigan from Dublin (IR £119). Cheeky bitch! Retrieving the loaners, Sara heaped the rest unceremoniously into the interloper’s open-mawed suitcase. How odd. When moving out for at least three weeks, why hadn’t Emer seen fit to pack it and take some of this frippery with her? For that matter, Sara had yet to come across some scrap scrawled with Emer’s new temporary address. She hoped the girl would ring, since she was planning to give the kid what for.
Collapsed onto the unmade bed—in front of the closet—the rightful owner of 19 Notting Hill grappled with an emerging dilemma. She still needed a subletter, and waiting until she found a more docile, respectful neat freak could terminally delay the trip to Bangkok. Retaining Emer but giving her a hard time about the state of the place would be dangerous; you don’t want anyone staying in your home in your absence who bears you a grudge. The flat had been left in poor enough condition when Emer had, tangibly at least, nothing against her.
Furthermore, the office supplies, the grub, the toiletries and cleaning products—in their totality these moochings constituted a significant financial drain, and together they betokened a rank opportunism. The resourceful Emer Branagh had purchased nothing that she could scavenge from Sara’s flat instead. Yet item by item, each presumption was trivial. What was Sara to do, chew Emer out for using her paper clips? Betray to another living soul a mentality so small change that it detected in a bedside box of coins a significantly lower proportion of 50P pieces?
As for the slovenliness: yes, the carpet was tatty, the lino sticky. There were the clothes, the tapes out of cases, the books in piles. But now that relief was already in sight in the bedroom, she had to admit that the mess was superficial.
As for the disassembled poster and photo montages—the erasure of Sara’s twisted sense of humor and political tourism was well within Emer’s rights. Excepting these few weeks, the girl had moved in for nine months or more, and quite reasonably wanted to make the flat her own. And hadn’t she, just. The girl couldn’t have arrived with many possessions, so their having been deployed to maximum effect suggested, as Lenore might say, colonial intent. The systematic effacement of Sara Moseley from her own home implied a decontamination, and the perfect absence of any homage to the primary tenant—like, when she’s due home you at least do the dishes—was defiant.
Well, she would efface Emer Branagh right back. Weaving with exhaustion, Sara put a shoulder to the stead and began to shimmy the heavy double bed back where it belonged.
“Sara? I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Sara was startled, all right. While the intruder could only be Emer Branagh, the woman in the doorway didn’t look like Emer Branagh.
In most cases, a fragile preconception is instantly banished by the overbearing materialization of the real McCoy, but Sara clung so to her fantasy subletter that she might have introduced the figment to the figure before her and asked them to shake hands. For one sustained moment Sara insisted stolidly to herself that plain, dowdily dressed, doggy-eyed telephone Emer was her real subletter, and this slippery, sidling item was an impostor.
The pretender sported hair not a shy brown, but jet black. If anything, she had a couple of inches on Sara, who herself measured a respectable five six. Indeed, the only thing about actual Emer that was short, stylishly so, was that hair, clipped designer-close, with pin curls lifting before pierced ears. Her build was less thin than sleek. While she wasn’t dressed up, she was dressed chic—snug black jeans, low-heeled black boots buffed to a sultry luster, an oversize jumper of the sort imported from South America of late, a weave of bright yellow, red, and green against a black ground—vivid and intense without, somehow, looking loud. Eyeliner, and touches of tasteful jewelry that looked like presents. Presents from men. She had the kind of alabaster skin that might bring pallor back into fashion, treacherously sharp cheekbones, and guarded gray eyes—in all, a face that contained well more than the mere hint of subterfuge that made a woman sexy. A woman. That was the other surprise. This wasn’t a girl.
“I—I’m sorry,” Sara stuttered, nodding to the bed. For Sara, this impulse was typical, compulsively furnishing an apology to someone who owed her one, and obscurely of a piece with her other inane habit of fending off panhandlers in Boston with No, thank you. “I just thought—with the bed here, you can’t get into the closet.”
“I don’t need to get into the closet,” Emer said evenly.
That’s because you keep all your clothes on the floor. Pity—all Sara’s best lines were wasted because she hadn’t the audacity to act on what were in all other respects the splendid natural instincts of a harridan.
“I may need to,” Sara said, furious with herself for this persistent tone of beseechment. Why, in her own flat, when she was moving her own bed to where she preferred to sleep, did she feel as if she’d been caught at something naughty?
“I had this idea you were coming back a different day.” Emer’s own tone was one of quizzical bemusement.
Regarding the shambles, the rampant plunder, the fact that there wasn’t even any fucking loo roll, the most minimal contrition was not forthcoming. As for having got the date wrong, the ploy was inspired. Prepared, Emer might have tidied the flat, but now we’ll never know, will we? Meanwhile all this crap planted in every room like flags on Everest had an excuse, which may have been why a mild little smile now danced on a face that could otherwise appear rather hard to read.
“That’s strange,” Sara said. “Didn’t you email me only three days ago to confirm my plans?” Having skirted as close as she dared to you lying sack of shit, she veered abruptly: “If I’m going to stay awake, I have to make some coffee.”
Sara left the bed in the middle of the room, halfway between where it had been and where it was going, a limbo giving physical expression to an identically neither-here-nor-there uncertainty in the air as to who was in whose flat. As she burrowed into her luggage for a pound of french vanilla roast, Sara swallowed the impolitic lambaste she had entertained earlier, but the voice inside her head was not so easily quieted: What are you doing here, woman? You’re meant to have cleared off. Can’t you see I’m knackered? That I just want to unpack, finish cleaning up your grot so this flat feels like mine again, and zone out with a glass of sherry in front of the Channel Four News? So could we please save this getting-to-know-you carry-on for another time?
When Emer failed utterly to (a) leave, or even (b) fill the conversational void—really, the least she could do as the only person in the room sufficiently well rested to string together a grammatical sentence—Sara solicited with all the decency she could muster, “Is the flat working out for you?”
“It’s quite acceptable.” As Sara swept past, Emer pivoted so reluctantly from the doorway that Sara brushed the South American sweater. The woman seemed put out at having to shift her backside at all in—
In her own flat. Not quite sure of its dimensions, Sara was nagged by the impression of a developing situation here.
“Ach, I tried to warn you over the phone that the place was falling to bits,” Sara prattled after Emer trailed her to the kitchen. “The plaster’s crumbling, and splinters of frame come off in your hands if you’re not gentle with the windows. You must have noticed that evil black fungus on the sitting room ceiling—it wipes off, but comes back. Damp … And the decor is desperate really,” Sara blithered over the coffee grinder after Emer contributed nothing. “This floral wallpaper looks like a dog’s breakfast, and the furniture is shite …”
At last Emer submitted soberly, “I don’t care about any of that.”
Springing to the defense of a flat Sara adored this was not. She would have to do the honors herself. “I guess I mustn’t either, because the place suits me down to the ground. Quirky, offbeat. Quiet, a good place to write. I like the skewing of right angles with the slanted ceilings …”
They both seemed to notice at once that Sara was making only one cup of coffee. The mere two tablespoons of dark roast, the smaller-sized Melitta cone propped over a single An Phoblacht mug—in Sara’s own book, this was the height of rudeness, the very sort of slight that, in Emer’s place, she herself would have added to the List: Wouldn’t Even Offer Me a Cup of Coffee.
Accepted: she was being horrid. And make no mistake. Under ordinary circumstances, Sara would spare anyone, a plumber, a cup of coffee. But just here and now, the last few shells of pasta seemed to rustle in their ravaged bags, restless for retribution. A muffled rattle exuded from the cabinet behind her, where the green olives, dill pickles, and gooseberry jam trembled like newly sprung kidnapping victims. And when Sara had scrounged through the breadbox for Melitta filters—there were three left, out of a nearly full box of forty—one of the subletter’s sole contributions to the Notting Hill larder had crackled inimically against her hand: a cello bag labeled Muesli Extender.
Specifically, it was the muesli extender that ensured Sara would grind no more than two tablespoons of french vanilla roast this afternoon, for the premeditation its purchase implied had evaporated her very last modicum of hospitality. Forget a groggy mumble the Sunday after Omagh’s town center exploded along the lines of, Dear me, nothing to eat but that nice Sara Moseley’s cereal. Maybe she wouldn’t mind if I made myself free this one time—gosh, I’ll try and remember to replace it when I’m out and about … Oh, no. We see Emer Branagh stalking the aisles of Framar Health plotting how to make her landlady’s unopened two-kilo bag of Marks & Spencer Luxury Almond and Apricot Muesli stretch to an extra fortnight. Having already been taken soup to nuts, Sara could not, absolutely could not bring herself to be taken for another coffee bean more.
Once Emer noticed that the welcome wagon was not being rolled out, rather than (a) leave, or (b) at least make a little headway on that mountain of smelly dishes, the subletter reached for Sara’s tin of Twinings Earl Grey, in which a handful of tea bags had survived. Since the lithe young memoirist’s punctuational punctiliousness appeared less powerful than her aversion to washing up, she gave the scummy SDLP mug in the sink a miss for the clean ulster say’s no one, into which she ladled three teaspoons of Sara’s demerara sugar with a feline smile. Helping herself to water from the electric kettle, she glided to the fridge, shook the Dale Farms carton at her ear, whitened her tea, and flipped the carton in the bin.
Sara took her coffee with milk. But the benefits of handing off a kitchen did not, apparently, work both ways. Coffee black, mood blacker, she launched to the sitting room to dispatch this impromptu klatch as expeditiously as possible.
IF EMER’S MANNER was dominated by a single quality, it was indiscriminate gravity. A contemplative lag seemed to precede anything the woman did or said. Hence only after two minutes’ reflection did she decide on the weighty matter of taking her refreshment in the sitting room, too. Meanwhile, anxious to mark out the most rudimentary of territory, Sara had successfully staked claim to her usual cream-colored armchair, whose left-hand arm had gone a satisfying gray from propping a balanced representation of Protestant and Catholic newspapers.
Emer assumed the matching armchair opposite, knees together, ankles demurely crossed, one hand laid funereally on the other in her lap, back straight, head bowed—not so much in shyness as in reproof. Composed and reserved, she quaffed her Earl Grey with the solemn, sedate sips of a Japanese tea ceremony. Sara had the sick-making suspicion that this was not a woman who intended to go anywhere any time soon.
“Sorry to displace you like this.” Taking a slurp, Sara winced; the coffee was bitter, and she had just apologized again. “But I should be buying that plane ticket to Bangkok within the week, which will give you a firm date by which you can have the flat back.”
“Yes. That would be helpful.”
Emer spoke oddly, but it was mostly what she didn’t say that seemed bizarre. For instance, she did not say, Really, it’s no trouble, or I don’t mind, which you’re supposed to claim even if you mind fantastically—especially then. Despite the palpable awkwardness, she’d still not yakked nervously to bridge a conversational chasm, a refusal to pull her weight altogether of a piece with a refusal to buy her own food. Nor had Emer delivered any of those costless compliments that one contrives in another person’s home—admiration of some trinket, a passing ooh-ah over the expanse of the place for the price—whose sincerity is immaterial. Most strikingly, Emer hadn’t expressed an iota of curiosity about the woman among whose possessions she’d been living for four weeks.
“I noticed—an arrangement, in the bedroom.” Sara might as well have been giving meeting-a-stranger lessons: this is how you show interest in someone else’s life. “The candles, incense, Christmas lights? I wondered, not to pry, but—”
“I’m a Buddhist.”
“Ah, I see.” She didn’t. “Funny, I’d have thought, with your name—”
“My family is Irish Catholic.”
Big surprise. “How long have you—?”
“Since Burma.”
“That’s unusual.” That’s pretentious. “I wouldn’t think you’d find many fellow travelers around here.”
Emer’s stern, uninflected set-piece response finally connected this arch, snobbish woman with the sexless wooly do-gooder who’d spoken on the phone: “There are approximately one hundred Buddhists in Ireland. About forty of them live north of the border. It’s a small but closely knit community. Many Buddhists here find respite in Zen from the demand to choose sides of the sectarian divide. We meet in each other’s houses. If you were interested, I could find you some literature.”
“Thanks, I’d like that,” Sara lied, hastily rewriting Emer’s memoir—The Northern Irish Conflict: A Buddhist Perspective. International bestseller.
Yet Sara felt soiled by the company of her own cattiness, even in her thoughts. The violent black coffee was giving her heartburn; to stay awake, she’d have to go buy some milk. It was possible that this woman was not the most annoying person she had ever met, but if so that happy discovery would have to wait for another day.
“So!” Sara said, getting down to business. “Where have you found to stay while I’m back?”
Emer didn’t flinch. “I haven’t.”
Sara’s anger since arriving home had been sustained at such a draining pitch that she did not grow angrier still; she went blank. “Sorry?”
“I haven’t,” Emer repeated dutifully. She had not understood that Sorry? meant not I didn’t hear you, but I’m going to give you a chance to say something else.
“What went wrong? Did some opportunity fall through at the last minute?” Sara felt her face sting; it must be turning red.
“No,” Emer said lightly. “I made inquiries. Hotels are out of the question. Even a B&B—I can’t afford one.” For once Emer’s usually guileful, opaque expression shone with the translucence of truth. Read: cheap, messy, bonkers, and broke.
“What about youth hostels?”
“They limit length of stay. And I’m thirty-five, top price bracket. IYH is more expensive than you might think. More than here,” Emer noted, “for example.”
“But there are plenty of independent hostels, whose rules are more lax.”
“Too lax,” Emer purred. “I couldn’t leave my computer at such places during the day.”
“Did you ring those accommodations offices, at Queens, Jordans-town, and Stranmillis?” Sara charged hotly. “Did you check the Saturday Telegraph? Or outside the Common Room, where lecturers post lets for their holidays? The term doesn’t begin at Queens until October, and I gave you very detailed directions for finding the notice board.”
“Mm … I don’t remember. In any case, nothing turned up.”
That’s when Sara realized that Emer had made no “inquiries” whatsoever.
“Where are you proposing to stay, then?” Sara asked. Aggressive stupidity can be a serviceable, even inspired tactic, but in this instance it amounted only to delay.
“This is a large flat”—Emer gestured toward the corner—“with a spare bed. And we can split the rent.”
“I’m a little old,” Sara growled, “for a flatmate.”
“What are you, forty-four, forty-five?” Emer chided. “That’s not so old.”
Sara was a petite woman with excitable strawberry blond hair. A persistent pouty petulance gave her what she preferred to think was a childlike aura, as opposed to childish. Over a decade of ghastly Irish weather had protected a creamy, lightly freckled complexion. Thus even when trying for accuracy over flattery, strangers customarily underestimated Sara’s age by six or seven years. Emer, who looked nowhere near thirty-five herself, would be habituated to the same mistake. Notwithstanding her wholesale incuriosity, the subtenant may have understood her landlady ominously well.
Sara tried the sympathy angle, though it was late for that. “I’m leaving a place that means a great deal to me, and heading to a part of the world where I’ve never been. I could use some solitude, some time for meditation, which a Buddhist should appreciate. If I’d wanted to share the flat, wouldn’t I have proposed that you stay on to begin with?”
“That being the simplest solution, I thought it was strange that you didn’t propose it.” Emer punctuated the rebuke with a censorious frown. Though the younger of the two, she had a schoolmarmish side, and delivered this verdict as if administering a hard, disagreeable lesson that Sara was bound to see later was for her own good.
“This isn’t what we planned before you moved in.”
“What you planned was to put me to considerable inconvenience and expense,” Emer said. “It was not practicable.”
“But you agreed to it.”
Tame for most folks in the face of impudence, but for Sara this was holding her own with amazing tenacity. Indeed, she may have been fascinated by conflicts like Northern Ireland’s out of covetousness. Hell-raisers had something Sara wanted. She didn’t think of herself as timid, and her stridency in print had put numerous noses out of joint. But that was on paper about politics, not face-to-face about gooseberry jam. Regarding matters of personal importance, Sara was all too often a doormat. Were she ever to have overcome her fear of duking it out, she might have diminished her coterie of friends, but would assuredly have secured the return of her bone-handled umbrella, the replacement of her blue-and-white platter, and most crucially a reduction of fatiguing resentments on the List, each of which extracted a fractional emotional debit per month, as if she were compelled to rent them storage space in her head.
Sara’s expat-at-home-in-a-rough-town toughness was all surface. In truth, her feelings were readily hurt. Since most opponents struck her at the outset as less bruisable, battle presented itself as synonymous with defeat. Furthermore, while she was a very selfish person, Sara was uneasy about that fact, and consequently uncomfortable with the naked defense of her own interests for the sole reason that they were her interests. She thought it looked bad, which of course it did. But then, wily combatants embraced their own ugliness. To scrap well, you had to give up on getting your antagonists to like you, and get them to bend over instead. Pugilistically, a woman’s classic Achilles’s heel was her horror of appearing unattractive, since you couldn’t come out swinging and seem like a nice person at the same time.
Emer didn’t suffer from this complaint. She wasn’t above endearing herself, but only to a purpose. In Boston, she had sucked up to Sara to get into Sara’s flat. This insinuation accomplished, she dropped the charm. Her chin opposite jutted at the truculent what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it tilt with which a man would project physical threat.
For that matter, Emer’s passive occupation of 19 Notting Hill amounted to physical intimidation of a kind. Her things were installed in the flat. She had a key to the downstairs door. What’s more, she was quiet, or at least she had the presence to make a distinction between what she said and what she felt—a distinction that was oddly un-American, come to think of it—which had provided her ample opportunity to observe her talkative quarry. She would have already concluded that Sara Moseley was not the type to turf silk blouses out an upstairs window or to sling a grown woman over her shoulders and dump the trespasser like a sack of potatoes on the porch.
So the wrap-up was a formality. “What about bulletin boards in the Egg, the Bot, and the Elms?” Sara asked glumly. “Students are always letting an extra room.”
Emer sighed with regret. “A room really wouldn’t do. An artist needs space to dream, don’t you think?” Over the phone in Boston, the assertion would have sounded naff, but in person, with that coy, pressed smile, it came across as mocking.
Standing with her cold black coffee and not looking Emer in the eye, Sara said, “Well, fait accompli, then.” But she meant coup d’état. As she hustled feverishly from her flat like a refugee, Sara had never been more grateful to need milk.
WHEN SARA PUT the carton away, the green olives, dill pickles, and gooseberry jam were stored once again in the refrigerator door, the jars sweaty from temperature tug-of-war. Sara lifted the jars out, and slid them back in the cabinet.
She went to unpack, only to discover her case zipped up and propped outside the bedroom door, which was shut. A susurrating hum emitted from inside. Sara rapped a perfunctory warning, and walked in.
Emer’s clothes were folded righteously into an open dresser drawer, its previous contents stuffed into a plastic bag alongside. The bed was back blocking the closet. The candles were lit and dribbling, while incense fugged the room with unconvincing gardenia. Mumbling hocus-pocus before her shrine, Emer was pretzeled into a lotus, hands palm-upward on her knees, thumbs and middle fingers pinched, eyes closed, face raised to bask in the sunshine of enlightenment.
For once Sara restrained herself from apologizing. “Emer, this is my bedroom,” she said flatly.
More mumbo-jumbo.
“Emer, not to put too fine a point on it, get out.” Eleven years in Ulster should be good for something; if the woman refused to budge, Sara could always blow her up.
Emer took a deep breath and opened her eyes with a flutter. “Excuse me, what did you say? Because it really would be best if we talked another time.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Were Emer to provide opportunity for much more invigorating practice like this, she might justifiably bill her landlady for assertiveness training.
“What seems to be the trouble now? My dear Sara, I thought you said you were tired!”
“That’s why I want my bedroom back. Please.”
“There’s no cause to be snippy—”
“I did say please.”
“We have a problem, then. This is my bedroom, too.”
“Not anymore it isn’t.” At last Sara clocked why some people not only fought their corner, but sought corners to fight. This joust was exhilarating.
“Let’s discuss this rationally before you get in a twitter,” Emer admonished with a condescension that appeared habitual. “You’re only here for a couple of weeks. Your things are already in a suitcase—”
“My dirty things are in a suitcase.”
“Mine are put away in the dresser—”
“My dresser.”
“And I’ve already set up my altar here—”
“Which you can move.”
Emer clasped her hands and bowed her head. “There’s only one bedroom in this flat. And you will also, I assume, work in the study?”
“In my study.”
Emer shot Sara a reproachful look, as if there were a Buddhist edict against the deployment of possessive pronouns. “Then I should pay less than half the rent.”
If this was victory, Sara didn’t trust it. “Like how much less?” she asked warily.
“I’d be willing to pay fifteen pounds a week.” The figure was prepared.
Sara paused to estimate that a full half share was closer to £28/week. For the next three weeks or so, what mattered was her privacy. “Fine, fifteen quid. Just make like a tree, okay? Please?” This time the imprecation was genuinely pleading.
Emer lifted a foot off each thigh and blew out the candles. Red wax spattered the looking glass. “Sara, you seem like someone who’s done some interesting things in her life, and I’m sure you have a lot to offer. But I do wish you’d make a little more effort to be neighborly. This time will be more enjoyable if we try to get along, don’t you think?”
Repressing the urge to slam it, Sara shut the door behind her subletter and plopped onto the bed, which she couldn’t be bothered to shift again. It had seemed so narcotic at first, standing up for her rights. But she’d just been bamboozled into buying her own bedroom.
THE NEXT MORNING Sara lay abed until she could no longer hear banging and footsteps. Before making coffee, she padded trepidatiously about the flat, confirming that Emer was out. In the kitchen, the empty muesli bag garnished the rubbish, along with the empty carton of Sara’s milk. Another dirty bowl, slopped with excess milk, crested the dishes in the sink.
Sara couldn’t stand the mess, and did the dishes. Subsequently, she scavenged the flat for anything belonging to Emer Branagh, and deposited the lot on the sitting room’s now-unmade spare bed. In gleeful acceptance of her own immaturity, Sara tacked her most bellicose paramilitary posters back on the landing’s wall. She’d planned to ring some bucket shops in London to track down a cheap ticket to Bangkok, but by the time she remembered, the day had been swallowed by household restoration, and the bucket shops would be closed. It was Saturday; that meant an extra day’s delay.
Emer returned around dinnertime flashing a perky Father Knows Best hello and no groceries. Putting the kettle on, she reached blithely for the SDLP mug, which had magically cleaned itself for all the mention the washing up appeared to merit. Idly dunking the last Earl Grey tea bag, she inquired by the by, “Don’t you find that some of your guests are offended by those posters? Or maybe you don’t have visitors much.”
“I have any number of friends,” Sara said, pouring herself a sherry. “But they can all take a joke.”
Leaving the used tea bag to leak on the counter, Emer turned to face Sara for emphasis. “Thousands of innocents have died in this country. Many more thousands have been injured—maimed, crippled, blinded. Children have been orphaned, families often multiply bereaved. It dismays me how you could regard so much anguish as funny.”
“That so?” Sara said. “Your loss.” She scooped up her sherry and strode to the sitting room, where she applied herself to the Tele. For as long as she could engross herself in the opposite page, Sara held the paper with “Yankee Doodles”—filed minutes before her ride to Logan Airport—facing out, byline bold.
But Emer didn’t drift in for another half an hour, at which time she assumed what was now her chair with a pair of chopsticks and a huge bowl of pasta. Sara recognized a potpourri of shells, rotelli, and elbows as the bag dregs in the cabinet. The sauce, oily and pale, smelled distinctly like Sara’s last jar of marinated artichoke hearts.
“Would you like some?” offered Miss Hospitality 1998. “There’s more in the pot.”
“Yes, I bet there is,” Sara said tightly. “But my appetite has gone off the boil.”
“Must be jet lag.”
“You like sherry with pasta? I wouldn’t think they’d quite go.”
“They do,” Emer said. “You should try it.”
Sara couldn’t contain herself, and muttered over an Irish News op-ed urging contributions to the Omagh bombing fund, “In that case, I’d have to buy more pasta.”
“Yes, I meant to mention,” said Emer. “You’re almost out.”
EMER WAS GONE most of the following Sunday and Monday. While Sara was relieved, she was also jealous. Since the subletter was not forthcoming about what she got up to, Sara supposed that Emer’s schedule was filled with the offbeat excursions Sara herself had contrived on arrival in Belfast, when the province was still otherworldly, even a little frightening—when keeping her conversational head above water in pubs was an athletic feat, and from context she’d strain to infer the meanings of own goal, Stickie, or gob. That was 1987–88—not an era about which she was strictly nostalgic. She’d often felt out of her depth, self-conscious about being “the wee Yank,” famously easy pickings for hard-up Lotharios at last call. The rhythms of banter were rapid; while every self-appointed wag wasn’t clever, they were all fast. Groping for words in the skirling back and forth, Sara was often slagged off within her hearing as “a dose” who wasn’t even sure whose side she was on. Why, these days political uncertainty was the least of her problems—closed-mindedness and sanctimony more like it, just like her neighbors—and she gave pubs like Lavery’s a miss most weekends for sherry and films on TV. Anything but sip glaze-eyed through one more poleaxed account of Bloody Sunday from a student who’d been four years old at the time.
For in one respect Sara had gone native. Locals didn’t attend prolix lectures comparing Northern Ireland to South Africa at the Europa, and they’d eagerly pay the entry fee of three quid not to sit through a daylong conference on “Protestant identity.” No one from outside cliquish West Belfast attended IRA funerals, black flags flapping on lampposts in the churn of low-flying army choppers. Solid citizens of the unionist community, of which Sara now counted as an honorary member, wouldn’t be caught dead browsing the Republican Press Centre bookshop on the Falls Road (though it sold the best selection of Troubles coffee mugs in town). Rubbernecking blackened bombsites was frowned upon as ghoulish, and the middle class of both stripes universally regarded the Orange Order’s marching season as the time to book for Majorca. So Sara no longer partook of Ulster’s demented Disney World, either.
Was it middle-aged complacency that had turned her such a shut-in? Curled in her newsprint-smudged armchair that Monday night, having progressed only three pages into the section on Thailand in Let’s Go Southeast Asia, Sara conceded that few of those diversions back in the day had been exactly fun. While at length republicans’ hypocritical blend of thuggishness and faux-liberal indignation put her off even more than the drunken, flagrantly pathetic murderousness of their loyalist counterparts, fundamentally her factional predilections came down to competing aversions. By throwing in her lot with the stodgy, rectitudinous, law-and-order Prods, she might as well have joined forces with Sunday-go-to-meeting evangelicals in Iowa. Plenty of Protestant unionists were perfectly pleasant people, but they were also a big drag.
To be more candid still, Sara had never quite located the backslapping, more-the-merrier animation that was ostensibly so Irish, and definitive of Belfast’s holy grail of “good crack.” Perhaps the renowned boisterousness and loquacity that attracted American tourists to the island was a myth; sure Sara’s sampling of pub life was duller and meaner than cliché would have it. Then again, Sara herself was a little tight of temperament, and didn’t care for crowds. Maybe pub patrons were mean around Sara because they wanted her to go away. Maybe matey, Guinness-guzzling abandon was out there in buckets, but Sara couldn’t raise the silver-tongued high spirits to jump in.
For all Sara knew, Emer Branagh had the goods. To date, the subletter had proved cool, shut off, and po-faced, but one of the great frustrations of this mortal coil was that you could rarely know what someone else was like without you in the room. With no love lost between the two, Emer might have generated a dead mask of sobriety exclusively for Sara’s benefit, thereby disguising a whole other frolicsome side of herself, some wild Irish rose that bloomed in the smoky fiddle-dee-dee pubs by the harbor.
For that matter, maybe this very night, while Sara stewed with this stupid guidebook feeling too torpid to get up and flip the Van Morrison cassette, Emer was down at the Rotterdam. A traditionally bunged, underlit bar that brought in live bands of tin whistles, Uilleann pipes, and bodhrans, the Rotterdam had proved too much a schlep from Notting Hill for burnt-out Iri-phobe Sara Moseley for donkey’s years. But Emer was new here; a four-mile trip would still seem short. Maybe Emer had a fine fluty voice that lilted above the clink of glasses a cappella; maybe she knew all the words to “Galway Bay.” Or maybe her very reticence, so un-American, would challenge the boyos to bid for biographical titbits with beer.
Sara could envision the subletter enthroned at one of the big front tables, surrounded by brimming pints with which half a dozen suitors have curried her enigmatic favors. In the swirl of fiddle music, at last a Mona Lisa smile creeps across the comely countenance aglow in lamp-light, as stout is hoisted high—“Slainte, mates! Here’s to the luscious lass from Boston, Mass, God love her! Long may your woman dander the docks of Belfast City!” This is Ireland. Arms raised, patrons leap toe to knee. A dashing rogue, rugged, older than the rest, pulls the bonny American lady to her feet. Keeps to herself surely, but aye, she can turn a pretty jig. Look at those wee boots fly! Yet your man’s eyes glint with a bitter business, about which our young visitor best be left in the dark. Ach, youse can never be sure who you’re meetin’ in our dark town, who in a crowd has shook hands with the devil hisself … This is Belfast.
Sara had to stop because she was going to hurl. She had clearly lifted the scene from a Carlsberg advert. Still, it wasn’t incredible that while Sara was bored with this burgh Emer could be having a wonderful time, or that Sara was bored with Belfast not because Belfast was boring but because Sara was boring. And bollocks, she had forgotten, again, to ring those London bucket shops! Tomorrow, she would get that ticket out of here. But already the resolution had the hollow ring in her ears of those self-deceiving provincials in The Three Sisters who were still plaintively pining, “To Moscow!” in the last act.
SARA HATED GRAND schemers who were all talk, so the following morning she rang her editor at the Tele. When David Featherstone said squarely, “So you’re leaving us, then?” her gut stabbed.
“For a few months,” she hedged, though she’d promised Karen to sublet the Bangkok flat for a full year. Still, the notion of burning this of all bridges was more than Sara could bear. As she’d rehearsed a dozen times before picking up the phone, she threw herself a lifeline. “In fact, while I’m in Thailand—naturally traveling to lots of other interesting places like Vietnam, Laos, maybe even Burma—I wondered if you might like me to keep filing ‘Yankee Doodles.’ You know, the miracle of modern technology and all. And it might add a cosmopolitan touch—”
“Sara, Sara,” Featherstone cut her off. “The Tele’s come a long way. We run the odd full-page comment from Adams now. We even carry stories from the South. But that’s the south of Ireland, kid. Not south of Asia.”
“David, you’re always publishing interviews with some Northerner who’s back from Tangiers—”
“Right you are, we’d interview a native son of Ballynafeigh who took a day-trip to Doncaster. But you’re an American, just.” He broke the news gently.
“Even though I’ve lived here for eleven years—?” Sara was trying not to whine.
“For the Belfast Telegraph, a Yank who lives in Timbuktu just isn’t, ah—”
“In the picture,” Sara finished heavily for him.
“Tell you what,” Featherstone said, and for a moment his tone of concession raised Sara’s hopes. “You must be at sixes and sevens, getting ready to head off. So let’s stand you down as of this week. No need to get your knickers in a twist doing a dozen things at once—”
“Don’t you at least want me to write a farewell column?” Her voice caught. “I wouldn’t want my readers to think I just got, like, sick of them or something.” Though wasn’t that close to the truth?
“Only if you’ve time, so. I’ve another American girl—new arrival—might be interested in your slot. Fresh perspective—stranger in a strange land sort of thing, all wide eyed and what’s-this. So don’t think you’re leaving me high and dry, just. That do us? Bon voyage, then. Send us a card, will you, Sara? That’s a good girl. Ta.”
Sara held the receiver out from her body like a dead fish. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t blink. Finally she inhaled, and shuddered.
Who else would it be? That thieving bitch wanted to assume Sara’s whole life, like those bioengineering thrillers in which an evil clone replaces the original twin, now buried in the garden. It all made sense now! In eating Sara’s very food, Emer Branagh was practicing being Sara Moseley.
Given her state of shock, it was asking too much of herself to ring those bucket shops, and Sara made no more headway on her plans. Instead she worked up a hot, resentful sweat in the deserted Windsor Lawn Tennis Club fitness suite, stamping furiously on the StairMaster. What does Emer bloody Branagh know about Northern Irish politics? Sara fumed half-aloud, having jacked the random-climbing program to level 12. Could she detail off the top of her head the Byzantine decision-making rules of Stormont’s new assembly? What do you want to bet that she thinks “D’Hondt mechanism” has something to do with digital TV? Besides, Featherstone, you’ll never get any finished copy from that bleeding heart. She’ll sag over her computer harrowed by the anguish of it all, and short out the keyboard by busting into tears!
Later that afternoon, Sara made a stab at a farewell column for “Yankee Doodles.” In the first version, she let fly all the scathing derogations of this conceited, inward-looking statelet that she had stifled as counterproductive these many years. She accused the Northern Irish of being misshapen as much by self-pity as by violence. Catholics and Protestants alike had been pandered to and fawned over, for with its plethora of initiatives, commissions, subventions, and peace funds the whole province was spoilt. She used words like navel gazing, precious, and overblown. She decried the thousands of novels, documentaries, miniseries, movies, and rock songs that had fetishistically elevated into an insoluble impasse of mythic proportions a down-and-dirty, small-minded brawl. Regarding the tiny extent to which she herself had helped inflate the North’s vanity with her own attentions, she expressed profound remorse. It was a scandal that a dispute over the border between two virtually indistinguishable democracies in the EU had led to the slaughter of so much as a stray cat. Thousands had died here all right, but the ultimate tragedy was that each and every one had died for nothing over nothing.
Getting the diatribe out of her system was cleansing, but on review she could see that it backfired. The repudiation misleadingly implied that she’d had a terrible time here; that, perhaps having been wounded in some fashion, she was gunning for payback. Ulsterfolk didn’t seem nasty; she did.
In the second draft of her swan song, Sara confessed that leaving Belfast presented the biggest challenge of her adulthood. She said that especially in an intellectual sense she’d grown up here, and that the North had provided a richer, more nuanced political education than she might have received at Harvard’s School of International Affairs. As for her take on the conflict after all this time, again she reached for the word small-minded, but qualified it with seemingly—going on to explain that she herself was a “remembering person,” who had difficulty dismissing so much an unreturned umbrella. The grudge she might bear over an unreturned husband or sister staggered her imagination. Finally, she conceded that though she had always been mindful of her place, respectful of the fact that she wasn’t born here, during her tenure Northerners had gone out of their way to make her feel welcome, down to including her in the exchange of ideas in this very newspaper. It was trite, of course, for Americans to extol the friendliness of the Irish, but Sara accepted the risk of cliché. She’d never encountered a people as a whole who had a warmer, lighter touch in the doings of daily life, and far more than the adrenal rush of bombs downtown or eleventh-hour intrigue at Stormont Castle she would miss good-natured banter with her neighbors when she idled down the road for soda bread.
By Tuesday evening, it was Sara who sagged over her keyboard, and it was Sara who burst into tears.
FOR THE REST of the week the two women negotiated one another’s proximity with the wary caution of two paramilitary antagonists on mutual cease-fire. Nothing Emer ever said was precisely rude, but she continued to project a monolithic lack of interest in Sara’s life. The indifference offered protection of a kind—when she went out, Sara needn’t worry about rifled journals, steamed-open post, or browsed floppy files—but the very safety of these documents felt like an insult.
Frustrated, Sara began to fling herself before her subletter with a brash immodesty that with a man would have come across as slutty. If the phone rang while the two were reading—at each other—in the sitting room, Sara would conduct the conversation at full voice. “So now that the Real IRA has declared a cease-fire,” she might posit caustically to a friend at Radio Ulster, who shared her indignation that the agreement provided for the wholesale release of paramilitary prisoners, “does that mean the lowlifes behind Omagh get off with a year and a half inside? … I’m serious! The Good Friday Agreement is potentially one big kill-one, get-one-free sale! Coin yourself a paramilitary outfit—make the name really moronic sounding, so they know you’re legit. Mow down anybody who gets on your tits. Call a cease-fire, give yourself up, and bingo, you’re out the door by May 2000!”
Every time she rang off, she’d feel sheepish. They’d both know she was showing off.
Yet clips of “Yankee Doodles” left pointedly in plain view never tempted the subletter even to peer at the lead. Flatteringly vitriolic hate mail was left untouched. The only belongings of Sara’s that excited Emer’s curiosity were her groceries.
Alas, Sara could not pretend to indifference in return. But with Emer so guarded, asking flat out whether she had indeed applied for Sara’s “Yankee Doodles” slot seemed prohibitively degrading. While phone calls for Emer were few, she always took them in the study with the door closed. The one line from these calls that Sara had ever made out when she just happened to be passing by was, “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
As far as Sara could discern, Emer had disliked her well before they met. A self-styled free spirit wouldn’t have fancied picking up where another loudmouthed American left off. When Sara fomented over the papers (as she did even when no one was there), Emer looked as if she were playing deafening music in her head, lest this strident claptrap corrupt the clean white pages of her virgin memoir.
More personally, Emer was doubtless annoyed that Sara was presentable. Women were more at ease with one another when there was no contest in the looks department, and Sara adjudged the two as running at a dead heat. Sara may have been the elder, but good gene stock and dedication at the gym had kept her slight and compact. While her loose strawberry hair contrasted with Emer’s jet-black crop, they both had the sharp, shifting features at which men and women alike looked twice. Presumably Emer might have taken a shine to her readily enough if only Sara were fat.
Emer was as fastidious about her appearance as she was slovenly about everything else. She hogged the bath like a teenager, and the sitting room cum boudoir was eternally scalloped with clothesline laden with handwashing. She was never to be caught slumping about the flat in stained gray sweats with a face covered in cold cream.
Sara was slovenly about her appearance, and fastidious about everything else. Yet by the end of their first week sharing the flat, Sara was rinsing musty blouses from the back of her closet and ironing in secret. After grossly mismanaging a pimple into a pulsing goiter, she spent ten minutes in the lav meticulously doctoring the mangle with concealer before she caught herself on: she wasn’t going anywhere for the rest of the evening besides upstairs. Her relationship with the subletter seemed to be degenerating into a miasmic admixture of antipathy and a schoolgirl crush.
As for the Buddhist palaver, the religion seemed harmless enough, though if we are indeed ceaselessly reincarnated as we climb the ladder of enlightenment, Sara was bound to be returned relentlessly to earth until she got subletting right. (Perhaps she was already trapped in a hellish Groundhog Day loop whereby in her forty-first year an Emer Branagh cognate sponges gooseberry jam in ever-larger quantities as grudge-bearing Sara Moseley makes spiritual progress by the tiniest of increments.) At least Emer’s flitting from hot spot to hot spot, shedding mercy and sagacity on the suffering of strangers, was pedantically consistent with the Buddhist concept of merit. Still: priggishly removing Sara’s dribs of Stoli and Jameson to a far corner, Emer had reestablished her altar on the sitting room’s ad hoc liquor cabinet, and whenever she passed the melon offerings and Christmas lights, she made a deep, pietistic bow—palms together, eyes closed. Sara refused to believe that Emer went through this folderol when no one else was home.
Sara continued to treat the sitting room as shared living space. At fifteen pounds per week, Emer wasn’t letting more than a mattress. Emer hadn’t got her nose in a sling about the matter, perhaps having calculated that, apropos of the kitchen, porous borders served her larger interests.
The source of Emer’s income was mysterious. Evasive about whether her Ulster memoir was under contract, she was surely writing it on spec. Yet her clothes and jewelry were expensive. Rich family? Sugar daddy? For Emer’s affected casualness about who-bought-what worked only one way. While Sara was obsessed with getting accounts to balance, Emer was equally obsessed with coming out ahead. In sum, Emer was a taker. Everywhere she went she would siphon off a little more than she gave back. The Emers of this world were levied on the whole species, like a tax. She pulled the pickpocketing off partly by being attractive, but also by being arty and passionate. She was dedicating her life to justice, empathy, and lamentation. The least the philistine ruck could do in return was to take up her logistical slack.
It was amazing, too, what you could get away with so long as you made a habit of it. Since repetition transformed the one-off impertinence to convention, Emer’s tax on no. 19’s larder was now routine. Surmounting her outrage, Sara began to indulge in the scientific fascination that drives clinical experiments on small animals. With crafted insouciance on their second weekend, she called as Emer started down the stairs, “You know, the mayo is down to scrapings. Could you pick up a jar on your way home? And I’m not usually brand conscious, but Hellmann’s is worth the few extra P.”
When Emer returned she’d forgotten, but Sara wouldn’t let the matter drop. After two more reminders, Emer came home swinging a plastic bag for the very first time, in which nestled a single jar—the small size, but to give the woman credit, not the very smallest—of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Sara felt the same burst of triumph that must buoy pet owners when kitty finally poops in the litter box, until Emer mentioned in the spirit of afterthought, “Oh, that mayo was one pound sixty.”
Sara’s mouth dropped. “Sorry?”
“I’m glad to run an errand,” Emer said with grave goodwill, surveying the shrinking stash of tins in the kitchen cabinet. “But this project is on a tight budget, and I will need to be reimbursed.”
Sara stared. They called it stones in Boston, chutzpah in Israel, co-jones in Mexico, cheek in England, and chancing your arm in Ulster, but Sara decided that motherfucking gall would do nicely.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any change,” Sara stonewalled, resolved to fasten upon this ploy for the duration: politely request that Emer pick up groceries, never have cash at ready hand, feign the same maturity about piddly this-and-that with which the leech concealed her own unremitting larceny, and forget all about it.
“No problem,” Emer said at Sara’s back. “I can just deduct the mayo from this week’s rent. Oh, and would you like an olive?” She walked out, nibbling a pit. “Though I’m afraid they’re not cold.”
SARA TOLD HERSELF that it wasn’t the olives themselves. It was the principle of the olives. Respect for another person’s property, no matter how paltry, emblemizes respect for its owner, and no one likes to be fleeced. Yet at bottom she knew better. It was the olives. It was the olives, at one pound ten.
In regard to a single quantity was Emer Branagh the soul of generosity. That would be edification. She was quite the authority on how to augment Sara’s Thai curry paste with lime leaf and galangal, ingredients unavailable in Belfast, without which a stir-fry was destitute. She delivered set piece anthropological lessons about her previous port of call—the Burmese prize celibacy; they don’t have surnames—with the overpatience of a schoolteacher reviewing a unit before a test.
But one Burmese did have a surname: the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Brave, virtuous, self-sacrificing, and pretty, the Nobel Prize–winning dissident was Emer Branagh’s idol, whose name she couldn’t mention enough times, showily rattling off the whole mouthful, which Sara could never remember. (Defiantly, Sara would refer to “Dawn Ann Sally Sukiyaki,” “Susie Sun Myung Moon,” or “Molly Moo-goo-gai-pan,” grimly satisfied that Emer took offense.) When speaking mournfully about Sukiyaki’s difficulty meeting up with her critically ill English husband in Britain before he died, Emer might have been one of those Midlands tabloid readers still torn up about Dodi Fayed and Princess Di. Since American liberals took it for granted that any new acquaintance was one of us, Emer presumed that Sara, too, agonized over oppression in the martial state, and would not rest until its newly elected president Dawn Ann Sally Sukiyaki beamed from the cover of People magazine in a knockout new dress.
Though she’d no time for tyrants, Sara’s working herself into righteous lather in her Belfast sitting room wasn’t going to spring a single prisoner of conscience in the opposite hemisphere. (Her own diatribes against the IRA had never spared a single RUC reservist a sniper’s bullet, either. But then, political consternation was like sex: arousing to partake in, embarrassing to watch.) A purely practical reluctance to get exercised to no effect must have read to Emer as callousness. When the subject of Burma arose after ten days or so, the subletter’s eyes burned with contempt.
Up to a point, Sara was interested in Emer’s expertise on Southeast Asia, whose tap water she would soon be avoiding herself. She might have welcomed reminders to keep your mouth closed in the shower and not to order salads in restaurants, if only she’d been allowed to pay for the advice with her own. But Sara couldn’t even tell Emer the location of the nearest public library. Emer would cut her off flatly, “I’m already a member at the Linen Hall.” Well, excuuuuuse me.
Moreover, Emer stymied any attempt to find common ground. When Sara once alluded to “Myanmar” (hoping to impress), Emer upbraided her that Burma’s official name implied sympathy with its military government.
“Just like Northern Ireland,” Sara said gamely. “Whatever you call the place, you give your politics away …”
Emer’s eyes drifted to the book in her lap, Grief in the Gorse (or whatever).
Sara got the message and put a lid on it. Oh, she could have produced a handy little cheat sheet on which of a panoply of names for this blighted bog corresponded with which affiliations. Yet the adroitness with which Emer dodged using any of these terms suggested a surprising shrewdness. She’d obviously never cite the baldly Protestant Ulster, but she also never employed the gutless nationalist appellation, the North of Ireland, either. Why, she’d not once referenced the moderately impartial Northern Ireland. She was more wont to nod passingly at “here,” wherever that was.
For what most frustrated Sara about the dratted woman was the elusiveness of exactly where on the finely gradated spectrum of Northern politics the subletter put herself. As best Sara could guess, Emer belonged to the finds-it-all-too-painful-to-bear set whose prissy nonalignment implied that to choose sides was to become part of the problem.
But hatred was not a spectator sport. To understand this squishy mire, you had to sample firsthand the fuel that powered the Troubles’ perpetual-emotion machine, and that meant coming to detest, detest and abhor, at least one of its factions, without equivocation, to your very marrow. Accordingly, Sara Moseley hated IRA-supporting republicans, hated them with a factual simplicity that was almost elegant. While she’d nothing against Catholics per se (some of her best friends—well, they were!), she also plainly disliked Northern nationalists with an expansive, elective abandon that made it the more interesting prejudice.
For Sara, the Northern Irish nationalist had transcended political classification to character type. Although by local definition a nationalist aspired to a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means, Sara had met the Northern nationalist, in a temperamental sense, all over the world, and many samples of the species would mistake Michael Collins for a mixed drink. Indeed, the disposition increasingly dominated discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, and not via sheer numbers, but by hitting a distinctively shrill rhetorical register, like those high frequencies broadcast outside convenience stores that drive young people insane. The ilk was technically nonviolent, but squealing that people will do almost anything to get to stop amounted to terrorism of a kind.
A nationalist is a Moaning Minnie, a bellyacher. He’s hard done by; he’s been abused and deserves recompense. Yet no matter how many concessions you shovel him, they will never suffice, for all penance is paltry, any attempt at reparation an affront. Like a bunny in a briar patch, he glories in violation. He feels sorry for himself, of course, but this self-pity is competitive; it bristles around rival brands. And it is triumphalist self-pity. A nationalist uses his suffering as a cudgel to beat you over the head. He never does anything wrong himself. And he never shuts up.
While brandishing his minority status, the nationalist runs in packs. Drunk on Dutch courage from his mob, a nationalist is a bully. But he’s never satisfied with merely getting his way; it has to be achieved at your expense. A nationalist is never happy unless he’s making someone else miserable. That said, he’s never happy. The happy nationalist is an oxymoron.
Accordingly, the worst thing you can do with a nationalist is to attempt to give him whatever he claims to want. He may love his children, his parents, his dog—nationalists are people, too—but the one thing that a nationalist loves above all else is his grievance. Any effort to fulfill a nationalist’s ostensible agenda will read as malicious: you are trying to take his grievance away. A nationalist will bite the hand that feeds him.
Nationalists, in this metaphorical sense, were everywhere. As a temperamental class, they weren’t necessarily predisposed toward devotion to kin and country, and a goodly proportion of the genus had never set foot in Northern Ireland. Nationalists were determined to ban fox hunting in Britain, and the average nationalist over a lifetime of dinner parties would lavish hundreds of times more indignation on vulpine anxiety than on genocide in Rwanda. Nationalists trampled seedlings of genetically modified crops. Nationalists campaigned for prayer in the schools; nationalists campaigned against prayer in the schools. Nationalists insisted on special degree courses in Inuit Studies. Nationalists were book burners; nationalists decried book burning. Nationalists were into “power walking,” and nationalists wrote letters to the editor to complain about cyclists who run traffic lights. Nationalists sponsored referendums to require that creationism be taught alongside evolution as an equally credible scientific theory. Nationalists had nut allergies; it was thanks to nationalists that you could no longer get a proper packet of peanuts on airplanes, but only chalky pretzels. Nationalists demanded untimed SATs for students with Attention Deficit Disorder. Nationalists wouldn’t let you use the word retarded, even in reference to yourself. Nationalists murdered abortion doctors out of dedication to the sanctity of human life. Nationalists boycotted products developed through animal testing, and nationalists bombed cancer labs full of researchers and hamsters out of love for all creatures great and small. Nationalists were vegetarian, and nationalists would never rest until you were vegetarian, too.
Was Emer Branagh a nationalist? Spoiling for a showdown, Sara resolved to lure her subletter out into the open.
“CHECK THIS OUT,” Sara commended in the sitting room, and read from the Irish News in her lap: “‘A Belfast hospital has come under fire for flying a Union flag over its grounds.’ Shockers. A Union Jack. Which so happens to be the flag of this country.”
No reaction, save a slight shift in the facing armchair, perhaps the suggestion of a prim sigh.
“Now, Ranger fans are Protestant, Celtic fans Catholic, right?”
“Of course,” Emer said tightly.
“‘An irate caller to the Irish News also claimed a security guard directing traffic into the car park at the Ulster hospital in the mainly loyalist Dundonald area was wearing a Rangers hat.’ Can you credit it?” Sara glanced up. Emer was looking twitchy. “‘“It was a disgrace,” said father-of-four from Portadown. “I felt intimidated going into the hospital grounds. You’d think that a hospital would be a safe haven from sectarianism.”’ And get this: Sinn Fein Councilman Alex Maskey has raised the issue of football caps on hospital parking attendants with the British Secretary of State, who has promised to look into it. Tell me this place is not Romper Room. Tell me, Emer, that it’s not funny.”
Slowly Emer lowered her book, and looked at Sara with pained parental disappointment. “You’re being rather insensitive, don’t you think?” The gentle castigation, don’t you think? was Emer’s favorite phrase, its coercive inclusivity calling Sara to her nobler self. “After living in Bel-fast for so many years, you must have learned the significance of symbolism in this place. I have to say, you surprise me, Sara.” Emer’s scolding way with her flatmate’s Christian name made Sara want to snatch it away from her.
“After living in Bel-fast for so many years,” Sara returned, “I have learned that these people get up in the morning to be offended. Now, they can fill my newspaper with nonsense, but they can’t force me within the privacy of my own home to take their trumped-up grudges on board as anything but calculated nuisance. I hate to pull rank, but if you think this sorry father-of-four whinge-bag in Dundonald is doing anything but yank Mo Mowlam’s chain you haven’t been here long enough. It’s all wink-and-nod, Emer. They know what they’re doing. And dig deep enough under every brown-nosing British concession to rename their streets ‘Oglaigh na hEireann Avenue,’ and paint ‘Bruscar’ instead of ‘Rubbish’ on their wheely bins, and reroute yet another Orange march around their delicate cultural sensibilities, and you’ll find a gun. The Brits are piss-in-their-pants terrified of these people, and Sinn Fein is making the limies dance. It is funny. But it ain’t pretty.”
“These people, as you call them, have suffered greatly,” Emer said. “I worry that you forget that.”
“Please,” Sara implored, “don’t lose any sleep over the state of my soul.”
Emer closed the book in her lap slowly and placed her palm on the cover as if on a Bible in the dock. “Maybe you should lose sleep over your soul. Sara,” Emer remonstrated, nodding at Sara’s newspaper. “Is Bel-fast anything to you but entertainment? Does it exist to you, as a city that people live and die in, or is it only an amusement park?”
“Right, sure, it’s an amusement park,” Sara returned, glaring, and the meniscus that had been bulging from the drip-drip of Emer’s confounding condescension finally broke. “After eleven years here, my friends are still cardboard cutouts—toys, paper dolls—and I care nothing about their health and safety. So it’s a matter of supreme indifference to me if the shops they shop in—and, incidentally, I shop in—sporadically explode. In fact, if anything terrible happened to the people I live among every day, I’d be happy! More amusement. The Good Friday Agreement, since it’s shut down the fun fair for now, is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me here, and I can’t wait for the whole thing to fall apart so the fireworks can start back up—you know, body parts flying through the air, maybe an arm or a leg of someone I know but—being such an awful person—don’t give a damn about. As for the politics I’ve written about every week for nine years, they’re a mere ha-ha to me, and I cynically manufacture a straight face on paper to reap my big fat hundred pound fee on Saturdays. You, on the other hand, have been here an entire six weeks, and so of course you’ve already learned to weep when Belfast weeps. I just hope you’re in my flat long enough for some of your large-hearted, sober-sided compassion to rub off on my mean—shallow—callow—insensitive character.”
After a pacifistic moment of silence, Emer replied stonily, “I see no need to be unpleasant.” Again with that remote, rising-above refusal to get her hands dirty, she went back to her book.
Burrowing masochistically into her Irish News, Sara blackly tallied the clues: sense-of-humor lobotomy, moral superiority, entitlement complex that extends to everything from my shampoo to my very home … Nationalist! Whatever her tortuous position on the Border, Emer Branagh had tipped her constitutional hand.
SARA HAD PLENTY to do. She had to write Karen and get the email address of the features editor at the Bangkok Post, then introduce herself to the guy and get the professional ball rolling. She should photocopy a batch of her best clips. For running her laptop and epilator, she should investigate Thai voltage and the configuration of Thai plugs, buying converters and adapters as necessary. She had to change the billing address on her credit cards. She ought to pick up mosquito repellent, since Let’s Go said malaria was still a problem outside Bangkok. She needed to make an appointment for hepatitis and yellow fever inoculations, as well as for tetanus and polio boosters. She should check out travelers’ health insurance. On the assumption that this expedition was not to be a complete damp squib, she should stop by Dunluce Health Centre and get a new diaphragm and fresh spermicide; piquantly, her lone tube of Ortho-Gynol was past its sell-by date. She had to find out if AOL serviced Thailand, and if not, how to get online with another provider. Nuts, and did she need a visa? She probably needed a visa! More expense, perhaps more delay. And what about these other “interesting countries” she planned to explore? Vietnam, Laos—the third world always demanded visas, since they’re nice little earners. And how the hell did you get into Burma, through pleading, bribery, or prayer? The prospect of asking Emer was intolerable.
But Sara could concentrate only on the wrong end of her expedition. She agonized over how to avoid paying monthly dues at Windsor Lawn Tennis Club in her absence without canceling her membership; they had a waiting list, and it could be difficult to get back in. She debated whether to cut off the phone—maintaining the same account would leave her vulnerable to an unpaid bill on return—although what tormented her was not the meanness of making Emer pay to reconnect, but the potentially permanent sacrifice of a phone number to which she was sentimentally attached. She searched out a foolproof hiding place for her cast-iron skillet and systematically depleted what little food remained in the kitchen, since a few preventive measures might keep the List from growing like knotweed.
Compared with the daunting task of controlling one’s mind, controlling one’s mere behavior was child’s play. Regarding the latter, Sara was if anything too proficient. Each morning Emer poured another bowl of muesli from Sara’s new bag (Tesco Finest this time, the cheap kind with sultanas but no nuts). The only signals of Sara’s simmering fury were a clipped tone of voice while she talked about something else and a shadowy poppling from the rhythmic clenching of jaw muscles. But Sara purchased the surface civility of their relations with pitched internal apoplexy.
If Sara was to continue to indulge her habit of talking to herself, she could at least have been rehearsing a few Thai expressions from her new phrasebook—like mai pen rai (“you’re welcome, never mind”), pen kan ehng (“take it easy, make yourself at home”), jai yen (calm, or “cold spirit”), and arai kadai (“it doesn’t matter”)—whose implicit heedlessness might have proved therapeutic. Instead Sara stomped down Notting Hill muttering, I slice up half my bunch of broccoli, using the stem, which I don’t much like, to make it last another night, and the next day I find all the fleurettes hacked off this amputated STUMP! So unabated had her bitterness become that it triggered the cerebral equivalent of acid reflux.
Sara tormented herself with visions of Emer Branagh flouncing around her flat in silks after nasty, Troubles-know-it-all Sara Moseley was gone for good, perhaps “accidentally” breaking a few of the vulgar coffee mugs that celebrated Goons with Guns. But even more insufferable than turning over to a nemesis her beloved tumbledown digs was the imminent handover of Northern Ireland itself.
Despite the agreement’s afterglow, no sheaf of paper could sort out in a single stroke decades of partisan antipathy; the average Northern citizen carried a mental list of grievances every bit as lengthy and specific as Sara’s own. Nevertheless, earlier that summer Ulster’s political future had seemed largely to comprise tedious mop-up chores, the civic analogues of picking up beer cans and taking down risers at the end of an unruly rock concert. For the spectator, it had seemed time to go.
But Ulster’s woes had never seemed more exquisitely intractable as they had in the last three weeks! In the wake of Omagh, both communities had talked big about overcoming their differences to end this madness, but the feel-good unanimity wouldn’t last. The row over the decommissioning of paramilitary weaponry was heating up fast. Chris Patten’s report on reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, due next summer, was certain to raise a ruckus if it so much as recommended a change of the force’s name. And with the agreement under belt, this year Northern politicians were sure to snag the Nobel Peace Prize! Blair and Ahern, or maybe Hume and Trimble, but would they include Adams? Would Oslo be that out of touch, to award the man responsible for 1974’s Bloody Friday a peace prize because this year he declined to mastermind twenty-six criminal explosions in one day? A travesty, but opportunity for a bang-up column in “Yankee Doodles” … Sara kicked herself. She’d resigned.
Meanwhile, Karen had mailed several back issues of the Bangkok Post. Thus Sara had the means at her disposal to concern herself with endemic corruption in the Thai construction industry, the extraordinary cost overruns of Bangkok’s Sky Train mass-transit system and its controversially poor provisions for disabled travelers, and rejuvenated devotion to Buddhism amongst a Thai middle class disillusioned with capitalist materialism following the collapse of the baht. But Sara had only skimmed the Post’s front pages, rapidly abandoning these alien talking points for the familiar annoyance of the Irish News. She could hardly be expected to read about Buddhism, a topic that invariably drew her mind to decapitated broccoli.
To make matters worse, the North was experiencing one of those rare blushes of Indian summer, and the weather was maliciously beautiful. When she met with her BBC pals for a farewell dinner at Patrick’s house, Sara lost all memory of the fractured blue-and-white platter in a gush of precognitive nostalgia. The good crack never ran dry, and she realized that after eleven years of practice she could keep pace with Northern banter as easily as holding her own in a round of “Row Your Boat.” The booze was abundant and the spuds were al dente and she wove home blubbering.
IT WAS FOUR weeks into this sour marriage, and the two reluctant flatmates were faced off in their traditional sitting room armchairs. Sara peeked round the Telegraph’s “international” section (one article about a flood—the only stories the paper covered beyond the Irish Sea had to do with weather). As ever, Emer looked smashing, all decked out in creams: linen slacks, sisal flats, a loosely woven Chinese-collar vest over a sleeveless ivory blouse; fucking hell, she even matched the upholstery. Sara looked forward to winter. Gales would whistle through the rickety window frames and flap the drooping corners of mottled wallpaper panels. For sheer survival, Emer would have to smother those shapely bare arms in a plump, bunchy duvet leaking chicken feathers.
“Sara,” Emer chided. “Have you bought your ticket to Bangkok yet? I would like that firm date.”
Concerned by Sara’s unresponsiveness, Karen had emailed that morning that she was readying for Seoul, and needed a solid commitment. Another friend would take her apartment if Sara wasn’t interested after all. The email was stiff with the same sternness of Emer’s reminder, and Sara felt that sheepishness of being called on in third grade when she hadn’t done her homework.
“I have some temporary reservations, with a courtesy hold, but I haven’t bought the ticket,” Sara said evasively, engrossed in the paper. “The fare isn’t great, and one agent said I might do better to wait …”
In truth, she had rung two bucket shops. One of the numbers was engaged. The other agent took down her particulars and promised to get back to her, then didn’t. Sara had neglected to ring again. But to stand on semantics, she hadn’t been lying. She did have reservations.
“Wait how long?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Sara snapped. “There’s some date soon when the airlines announce a whole new schedule of fares for off-season, okay?”
“I thought we had an understanding,” Emer admonished.
“We also had an understanding that you’d stay somewhere else when I came home. We’re talking a difference of hundreds of dollars to me, so maybe you could show the same flexibility I’ve shown you.” Sara was aware that her stroppiness was all out of proportion to a perfectly reasonable question.
“But I’ve been under the impression that you don’t like sharing the flat.”
“Got that right,” Sara mumbled.
“So I’m surprised you’re not more anxious to be off.”
This was the closest they’d come to acknowledging that they despised each other.
“I am and I’m not. I have a lot on my mind.” Like olives, shampoo, pasta, and broccoli.
Emer went back to reading Paul Muldoon. More poetry. Incredibly for a memoirist in this of all places, Sara had never seen the woman read a newspaper—as if, by scorning the Tele and the Irish News for Michael Longley and Medbh McGuckian, she was drinking the conflict’s surging groundwater, while Sara lapped at evaporating puddles. How Emer would take over a topical column like “Yankee Doodles” as such a purist was anyone’s guess.
Emer looked back up with a crafty squint. “I meant to tell you, an acquaintance of yours says hello.”
Sara felt instantly leery. It wasn’t like Emer to volunteer information about what she did during the day, or whom she met. “Oh?”
Emer’s delivery of the name was pregnant with the full knowledge that this character was well more than an acquaintance.
Arsehole!
“He’s doing terribly well,” Emer added with smarmy familiarity. “There’s a fair packet of dosh on offer from the EU these days, to shore up the peace—”
“I know,” Sara said. Packet of dosh indeed! Sara had earned her own eclectic lexicon with eleven years’ apprenticeship. A mere eight-week stay didn’t grant Emer the right to lift the end of her sentences, to applaud dead on! or to call everything in sight from a midge to a Mourne mountain wee. For Sara’s cadence and vernacular to have warped was only to be expected; for Emer already to be mimicking a faint Irish brogue was ridiculous.
“He’s won a sizable grant to work with released loyalist prisoners and help them integrate back into the community. And I’m chuffed to report that he’s stopped drinking.” Chuffed? Perhaps Emer might further enlarge her vocabulary to encompass prat, gobshite, and poser.
Though Sara and Arsehole had formally parted on amicable terms, their relationship had been too sexual to round off into friendship. Residual attraction rapidly mutated into prickliness, and when they met—seldom, and only by happenstance—Arsehole always managed to slag off “Yankee Doodles,” whose stewardship Sara had assumed consonant with their breakup. He would dismiss a recent column as “glib,” or despair that she had no insight into the Protestants for whom she claimed to vouch, recommending kindly that she was really better off sticking to “the American carry-on.” Sara would needle him about “showing a bit of scalp there,” when in his rock band days he’d been so proud of his waist-length hair. The two didn’t quite dislike each other, but they came close, because any appreciable temperance of their antagonism might have necessitated starting up the whole torturous entanglement all over again.
Sara could not imagine a worse fate. She harbored no more wistfulness about her infatuation with this histrionic megalomaniac than she would about a case of the flu. All the same …
The story of Arsehole was a hefty chapter in her history, even if it was closed. He had crucially contributed to the greater legend of Sara in Ulsterland. As such, he lay on the near side of Sara’s personal border. Though she had long before got past the humiliations he’d inflicted—the pub gatherings at which he’d shown off how badly he could treat his Yankee arm candy to his yobbish, tattooed friends, the gourmet dinners carbon-dating in the oven while he got poleaxed with some adoring French TV presenter in the Europa bar—she still begrudged him the right to walk and talk and live his life outside the perimeter of her own. Arsehole was insulting and pompous and misogynistic and maybe even the Antichrist, but quite above and beyond all that, Arsehole was hers.
“He has quit drinking, or he told you that he’s quit drinking?” Sara asked rigidly. “There’s a difference.”
“He’s looking very healthy,” Emer said.
“Watch your back,” Sara warned. Though Emer recoiled from the smallest scrap of advice, the woman was really missing a trick here if she didn’t take this one. “He’s very manipulative.”
“People change,” Emer said breezily, turning a page with a polished fingernail. “I was given to understand you two haven’t run into one another in donkey’s years.”
“Some people”—Sara leaned forward over her crackling newspaper—“never change.” She collapsed back into the chair as if coining the simple maxim had sapped her.
Emer was reading again, but her expression was perceptibly victorious.
“Do you like him?” Sara asked limply.
“Sorry—like whom?”
“Do you like him?” Sara thrust out helplessly, unwilling to repeat the name.
“Oh. ‘Like’ him. I’m not sure I’d choose that word. He’s a very interesting man. Complicated. Don’t you think?”
Sara snorted. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Interesting, that was death, that was. Nice men whom you liked, they were safe as houses. But complexity would be a sticky trap for the likes of Emer, who would inevitably fall for Arsehole’s mawkish self-pity disguised as sympathy for the downtrodden, and for the contradictions in his bio that covered for the ordinary fact that he didn’t know who he was. As for Arsehole, he’d be all over Emer Branagh like a cheap suit. Not only did she look good, but she’d make him look good, which was always more the point.
Somehow this tipped the balance.
They would shag in Notting Hill’s bed and get spunk stains on the Notting Hill sheets. Arsehole would lounge in this very armchair, from which he’d hitherto been banished. As the night’s main event, they could uproariously take the Mickey out of aging, spinsterish, and spotty Sara Moseley.
Well, think again, cupcake, Sara steamed.
“Emer, I really owe it to you to tell you before anyone else.” Sara blurted, “I’m not going.”
“What do you mean, you’re ‘not going’—not going where?” Emer’s shockingly everyday tone—offhand, and aggravated in a commonplace fashion, the way you get aggravated by a hole in your sock and not by the proliferation of nuclear weapons—revealed how coifed, how pin curled and teased and trimmed and blow dried had been every other sentiment to which she’d given voice since her arrival. Her accent was unadulteratedly American, and she sounded like a regular, defensibly peevish person whose plans had just been spannered.
Sara took a breath. She didn’t feel rancorous anymore, or angry, and she even remembered that she no longer gave a fig about Arsehole, whom he nailed, or where. “I’m not going to Bangkok.”
“Why not?”
Sara knew that she should concoct something—say, an irresistible journalistic opportunity that made her seem indispensable to Belfast’s scintillating intellectual circles. But fabrication seemed too fatiguing, and she resorted to the truth out of laziness.
“I just can’t. Can’t bring myself. I’m too attached. To Belfast.”
It hadn’t been fair to accuse Emer of being “walled off.” Sara had raised a barrier as well, as tall and razor wired as West Belfast’s notorious Peace Line between Prods and Taigs. Tentatively, she clambered over her own menacing private fence.
“When I first came to this town, I didn’t intend to move to Belfast. I just ended up here,” Sara went on. “And for a long while I thought I was still on the road. In fact, maybe I’ve thought of myself as a bit of a vagabond until this very moment. And I thought of myself as young—don’t we all? So Northern Ireland seemed like just one more way station of many. A lot like you: You want to go places, difficult places, strange places. And you’re greedy, greedy in a good way, aware that there’s not much time and there are so many countries.
“That’s why I thought Bangkok made sense. I’d dawdled here long enough, and it was time to get a move on—to take on a whole new city, make a new set of friends, learn a whole new set of politics, and stay up late haggling with my lively adoptive coterie over, I don’t know, structural adjustment? Kind of hard to picture.
“It was an appealing fantasy, and maybe you can pull it off. But I haven’t. I’m not like that. I’m a nester. My family was always moving—my father was an academic, but he never got tenure—and I’ve always wanted a real home. I make fun of Irish Americans digging for their roots, or I give other Troubles groupies a hard time because they so obviously need to belong. But the truth is, I’m not any different. I like this place because I belong here—or I think I do, and if that’s funny, I guess I’m a bit of a joke around town myself. I can handle that, though. I probably am funny.
“The thing is, I’m no Jack Kerouac. I’m not someone who’s destined to go to a long string of exotic places. I’ve gone to one place. My life is dumpier than I realized. I can’t head off to Bangkok, because I’m scared. I’m afraid I’ll get disoriented. And lonely, and not give a damn about Thailand because caring is too much effort or I don’t know how. I mean, hats off to you for living in Rangoon. I’m impressed. I bet that wasn’t easy. And maybe you’ll have a great time here, too. I hope you do. I have, in spots. I admit Belfast isn’t fresh to me anymore, but then nowhere is after a while, so why not skip straight to the boredom and stay put? It’s more efficient.
“Anyway, you will have to find another flat. I really, really apologize for pulling the rug out from under you like this. It’s all my fault, and I haven’t been playing games here. It’s just taken me a few weeks to know my own mind. Maybe after you’ve found another place we could, I don’t know”—it was well too late to propose long, giggly dinners with cocktails—“have a cup of coffee once in a while.”
Emer may or may not have been grateful for the confidences, but suddenly being obliged to find another place to live had to have dominated her mind more than being passingly chuffed that some near stranger had spilled her guts, and she looked a little sullen. Sara would feel put out in Emer’s place herself. They were hardly going to become fast friends simply because for three minutes Sara had stopped acting pissy.
“Well, I’ll get on it tomorrow,” Emer said with a sigh. “But for now, I’m beat, and I might like to turn in early. Would you mind?”
The unadorned selfishness, from Emer, was a relief, and Sara vacated the sitting room posthaste. While the subletter brushed her teeth downstairs, Sara composed a maundering, overly explanatory email to Karen Banks, declining the Bangkok apartment and encouraging Karen to give it to that friend who was next in line. As her modem hummed the message away to the electronic ether of Southeast Asia, Sara almost exclaimed aloud, “Come back!”—as if her alternative future were a lover, to whom harsh words had been spoken in the heat of the moment, and who had just driven out of range of her forlorn cry.
TO GIVE THE woman her due, when Emer did move, she moved fast. Two days later, she gave notice that she would be shifting from the flat in another two days hence. She spent most of this intervening period out, or on the phone with the study door closed, and the two women talked only in passing. Sara invited Emer to share a pasta supper before she moved out, but the subletter couldn’t spare an evening and begged off. Sara was surprisingly disappointed; she yearned to provide her tenant a single bowlful of rotelli that she didn’t begrudge. During this sudden denouement, Emer’s small-scale impositions paled before one stark, ugly fact: Sara had been unwelcoming.
For years she had clung to a distinction between “having a problem with pettiness” and being an outright petty person. In the four days during which Sara was left to contemplate her sins—most of her unkindness had taken place in the confines of her own mind, but there might indeed be such a thing as thought crime—she worried that either there was no functional difference between being plagued by pettiness and being the very embodiment of pettiness, or that during Emer’s tenancy she had made the leap.
Still, it was the second week of October, and Emer had yet to furnish even the meager fifteen pounds per week for September’s rent that she had promised; Sara noted compulsively that for the first ten days of that month Emer was responsible for the full rent. That first third came neatly to seventy-five pounds, or a total of £120. Then there was rent for part of October, gas and electricity, the phone; when the subletter retired to the study for those protracted calls, Sara grew restive, glancing at clocks. She supposed she could square the phone bill once it arrived, but that involved a trust she didn’t quite enjoy. After living with Emer Branagh for a solid month, she didn’t really know the woman at all.
Obviously, the intelligent approach to these debts would have been to raise the matter point-blank, but Sara kept putting it off. The time never seemed right.
Hence as the two women lingered awkwardly on the landing by Emer’s luggage as she waited for her cab, Sara had yet to prod the subletter to cough up some cash. In a strictly financial sense, she could afford to take the hit, but not, perhaps, in a spiritual one. She knew herself. She might demur from asking for the money, but as usual she would remember the debt, to the penny, for the rest of her life. Sara was haunted by her own disheartening aphorism: “Some people—never change.”
“So,” Sara began as Emer fussed with zips. “Maybe you should leave me your address, telephone? In case someone rings, I mean. Or you have post.”
“I don’t know what my address and number will be just yet. I’ll send you a postcard.”
“From across town?” Sara smiled. “Have I been that much of a shit-head, that you can’t stick ringing up?”
“I won’t be across town,”Emer said, with her usual sobriety. “I’ve been offered a post teaching English at an institute in Petersburg. A friend—never mind, it’s convoluted. But the package is attractive. They’re willing to fly me over, and cover any other travel expenses, as well as provide accommodation when I get there. So I’m taking the shuttle to Heathrow in three hours. Tonight, I’m on Aeroflot’s red-eye to Moscow.”
“Saint Petersburg!” Sara exclaimed in dismay. To cover the Pavlovian thought, Now I’ll never get my money, she added inanely, “But what about ‘Yankee Doodles’?”
“Excuse me?” Emer looked sincerely baffled. “What’s ‘Yankee Doodles’?”
Sara pinkened. “I mean, what about your memoir? My Year in Northern Ireland, all that?”
Emer checked her watch, and seemed, as ever, to be weighing something up. Maybe in the end she reckoned that after that gush of humility—not to mention humanity—from her erstwhile flatmate, Sara was owed a moment of ingenuousness in return.
“When you and I first spoke in Boston,” she explained, “this project seemed to be falling into place so gracefully that I thought it was preordained. But since I got here, everything’s been …” She left it. “Well, I decided I’d been misled. I don’t think this is the right place for me. Burma was so lush, and despite the regime the people are full of life, always smiling. They have so little, their lives are so primitive, and with the junta they live under a continual cloud of fear. But they’re still joyful, and amazingly unstinting. Here—if you must know, I find it depressing. Heavy. Gray. I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I don’t quite understand what you see in this town.”
“And you think Russia will be any less heavy and gray?” Sara laughed. “God, you must really think Belfast is a horror show!”
“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. Just a little poky. You can have it.”
“Knowing what I do,” Sara said, “I’m not sure I should thank you.”
The taxi tooted in the drive below.
“Russia might suit you at that,” Sara added with a glint in her eye. “Plenty of suffering.”
For once, Emer cracked a half smile. “There’s only one kind of suffering I really can’t abide,” she admitted. “Mine.”
Sara helped with the luggage, her stomach doughy. She hoped the sensation was regret about something larger than outstanding rent. She was just vowing with all the born-again resolution she could muster that this time she’d forgive and forget when Emer stopped on the landlords’ ground floor.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been so distracted.” The apology was Emer’s first in their acquaintance. “I meant to leave you some money.” She rustled into her carry-on, and hastily counted out a pile of twenties.
Sara accepted the wad with embarrassment, but did a double take when it proved so thick. “But Emer,” she said, shuffling the notes. “This must be, what, close to four hundred quid! That’s way too much.”
Emer ignored the ten twenties that Sara proffered back, and shouldered her bags again. “Oh, I don’t know, there’s the rent, utilities. I made a couple of calls to Petersburg. And, you know, I used a few of your groceries and stuff. Keep the change.”
Helping bundle the baggage into the Fone-a-Cab, Sara wished her subletter luck, and meant it.
Once the taxi had wended down the drive, Sara ambled back up to the flat, counting the notes again in astonishment: £460, all told. This was not the Emer Branagh of yore, who expected reimbursement for mayonnaise. Whether the woman had experienced a change of heart or merely a change of circumstances was impossible to say. Maybe the lavish overpayment was intended to shame Sara for having kept such exacting mental accounts, though how would Emer know? Or maybe it was Sara’s reward for having been a tolerable flatmate for four whole days. In allowing that she was “impressed” by Emer’s trip to Burma, she had said one thing nice; in confessing that she was too scared and stuck in her ways to go to Bangkok, she had said something modest; and she had offered Emer a bowl of pasta. If the wages of common decency had proved excessive, this fat roll of twenties delivered a downright Buddhist lesson about karma. That is, “keeping track” might assure just the compensation you were due, or somewhat shy. Generosity could boomerang back to you with dividends.
Standing at the middle room’s tall front window, Sara gazed out at the hazy hump of Black Mountain on the horizon. The sky was low and dull. Ulster’s brief Indian summer was abruptly at an end, and it had started to bucket. The weather could easily remain this unremittingly dim, wet, and dreary through to next May. Saint Petersburg! The city’s architecture was supposed to be entrancing, and like Burma’s the problems faced by post-Soviet Russia made Northern Ireland’s seem small beer.
Sara tidied the flat, having anticipated this moment as one of triumphant reclamation. Yet her mood was unaccountably doleful. Once the dishes were done, the carpets hoovered, Emer’s bedclothes tossed in the hamper, the flat still looked tatty. She couldn’t help but keep noticing that the plaster was cracked, that the gas-fire flames had left dark smudges on the walls, and that the furry black mold on the sitting room ceiling, so recently wiped down, was growing back apace. The air was clammy with a biting chill, and when she lit the fire in the sitting room it smelled chemical and tainted, measurably more nauseating than the faint residue of gardenia incense it overcame. For once she looked at the garish floral wallpaper and didn’t hate it with affection, but simply hated it.
A phone call to her editor was short but not sweet. Diffidently, she informed him that her “plans had changed,” and she’d like to take her column back. Ach, after we printed such a pretty farewell? Featherstone chided. In short order, she was close to begging. You’ve had a good run, pet. What’s it been? Ten years? Only nine, Sara corrected mournfully. Maybe we both need a change, don’t you figger?
Plunked in her usual chair, Sara treated herself to a sherry a little early. Listlessly she rifled the Telegraph. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine how decommissioning could have seemed scintillating for an instant. The truth was that she had stopped attending IRA funerals and Orange marches not because she was getting old, but because the Troubles were getting old. Like it or not, she had outgrown them.
There was still, of course, the good crack, the friendly banter with her neighbors when dandering out for wheaten bread and a chunk of Coleraine cheddar. But with Emer Branagh off to down piroshki and caviar with shots of frozen vodka, Sara felt swindled. Sure any old bog could seem priceless so long as some other patsy was willing to fight you for it.