FANTASIES WERE ONE THING. But throughout months of frustration and with so much at stake, Irina had accepted beforehand that finally fucking Ramsey Acton would probably prove anticlimactic. She’d been braced for awkwardness, even a tragicomic wilting at the gates. Reared overhead at the Royal Bath, Ramsey himself had said drolly before taking the plunge, “This is what’s known in snooker, pet, as a ‘pressure pot.’” Moreover, at the risk of tautology, sex was only sex—it got only so good, lasted only so long, mattered only so much. You still fretted afterward that you were out of milk, or hastened to turn on the news.
Truth be told, fucking had always been a touch disappointing—like so many experiences in life generally of which much is made, from island holidays (with biting black flies) to $300 French dinners (rarely surpassing a cracking bowl of pasta). Losing her virginity in particular had failed to live up to its billing. A lanky guitarist in a garage band, with entrancing long blond hair, Chris had been her high school boyfriend throughout her junior year; he was solicitous, patient, and, if not a novice himself, no rake. But when the big afternoon arrived, his mother safely shopping in Jersey, Chris had trouble getting in, and the condom was gross—its lubrication slimy, its latex the color of molted snake skin. Once he’d inched inside with all the romanticism of a carpenter working a dowel into a snug hole with a slather of axle grease, her deflowering was over in short order, and left her sore. The experience of entry had been neither here nor there; it was bigger, but still a penis didn’t feel that different from a finger or a tampon. She’d anticipated a sensation more momentous, unimaginable. Not only did the real McCoy lie well within the realm of the known, but her imagination had done a more bang-up job. Having agreeably entertained herself in private, Irina had assumed that she would orgasm as a matter of course. No one had warned her that women had to learn how to come all over again—that for women coming through fucking was often work, sometimes so much work that the results didn’t merit the effort. But since fucking for men roughly approximated what they did with the bathroom door closed, Chris only suffered the typical teenage difficulty of coming a little soon. Irina felt cheated. The exercise dispatched, she hadn’t reclined in dreamy satisfaction, but had retreated up onto the pillows with sullen, barely disguised petulance. She’d been awaiting this for years, and now look: like so much else, sex was a sell.
Fair enough, she’d warmed to the pastime, systematically researching which positions accomplished at least a tiny amount of friction in the right place, abetting these calisthenics with sordid little stories in her head. The one upside of all this yeomanlike fucking was that she no longer brought unrealistic expectations to the erotic table. At best, sex with Ramsey would be nice. She hadn’t presumed that she would come. After all, even tried-and-true sex with Lawrence had never lost a trace of effortfulness, of having to expend quantities of energy and concentration for a marginal reward.
So had Irina placed a premium on validating her worldview—if she cared more about being right than being happy, and there are plenty of such people—she’d have been disgruntled. Lo and behold, sex with Ramsey failed to live down to her expectations. Dazed and dizzy in those thick linen sheets of the Royal Bath, as if recovering from a head-on collision, she had the distinct impression that she’d never really fucked before, leaving her to wonder what it was all those years that she’d been doing instead.
“Come to think of it,” Irina speculated in the crook of Ramsey’s arm on perhaps the third day in Bournemouth (it was hard to keep track of time, which had grown fat, sluggish, and lazy like an overfed cat), “before your birthday, I’d never fantasized about fucking. It’s always seemed, as an idea anyway, too permissible. Even when I was fucking, I was sneakily thinking about something else. Something more forbidden.”
“Like what?” asked Ramsey.
Strange, but no one had ever asked her that before. With trepidation, she ventured, “Oral sex, sometimes.”
“You mean, sucking cock,” he corrected.
She laughed. “Yes, sucking cock. Though with a twist. I like the idea of being forced. I don’t think women are supposed to admit things like that, but yes, forced—to drink it. In theory anyway. In my head. I don’t know if I’d like it in real life.”
“Oi, I had rape fancies for years,” he volunteered cheerfully. “Had one about you last week. I ravished you. Up against a wall. Put up a right good fight at first, but in the end you was begging for more dick.”
Emboldened, she went further. “For a while I found the idea of two men together exciting. Lately, with Lawrence… I shouldn’t tell you this, it’s too embarrassing.”
“There’s nothing you shouldn’t tell me. Never forget that.”
“All right. I’ve thought about women.”
“Eating pussy? What’s wrong with that? I think about eating pussy myself.”
“You’re a man. You’re supposed to think about that.”
“Ain’t no supposed to in this business.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m a dyke. I just—ran out of other ideas.”
“Only so many toys in the chest. I thought about blowing a bloke before.”
“Really?”
“Really. Not many blokes would admit as much, but I wager the notion’s not uncommon. Don’t mean you want to do it with some real-life smelly tosser, neither.”
“Thank you. That makes me feel better,” she said, resting her head on his chest. “Funny thing is, after your birthday? When we couldn’t? For the first time I fantasized about fucking. All the time. Every day. I started to feel a little crazy.”
“So what do you think about now, when we’re fucking for true?” asked Ramsey sleepily. It was early afternoon; he played his third-round match that night, and should have been at the practice table by now.
“I don’t think about anything,” she marveled. “With you, I don’t go elsewhere. If I fantasized when I’m fucking you, I’d fantasize that I’m fucking you. See, for the first time, fucking seems outrageous. You’re going to put that in there? And there’s something—primitive. So it doesn’t seem like something you’re supposed to do, but like something you have to do. As if I’m in heat. It’s like rutting.”
He chuckled, sliding a dry, tapered finger along her hip. “You’re an animal, know that? A bloody animal. You act so Girl Guide and that. You bake all them pies. Nobody’d ever guess it to look at you. Except me. I could see it, even if you couldn’t, pet. Keeping a beastie like you in the cupboard is a crime. Like them wankers who chain tigers in the back garden, and they get mangy and thin and depressed.”
“Should report it to PETA.”
“Peter?”
“Never mind.”
IT WASN’T ONLY SEX proper, either; it was everything. Sleeping, they had yet to hit on a position that wasn’t so sumptuously comfortable that she wanted to cry. Kissing was like going for a swim, a tireless, gliding breaststroke in a sheltered pool. His skin was always cool, with the texture of kid, an apt word since his person seemed cryogenically frozen in adolescence.
Long, narrow, hairless save for a soft sprout of light brown furze in the underarms and groin, his body was neat and unmarked, as if Ramsey had been saved for her, sealed from tarnish in cellophane like polished silver. Snooker fostering an indoors life, his skin was an even cream from head to toe, with no shadow sock-line at his ankles, nor stripe under his watch. He had one of those rare figures that looked completely normal naked—sound, right, whole—whereas men often look incongruous in the nude, embarrassing or not quite themselves. Stripped, he strode their hotel room like a creature in its natural environment, and no more called out for cladding than a stag in the woods. That burnt-sugar scent was bewitching, and sometimes she would nestle down for a distilled whiff at the base of his neck like sniffing a hot oven ajar.
Objectively, Ramsey Acton was not the most handsome man in the universe. His hair was turning; his face may have transformed readily from age to age, but one of its modes was careworn. True, he was one of those irritating people who could eat and drink as much as he liked and never gain an ounce, and who retained a taut, articulated musculature absent a single sit-up. Nevertheless, he didn’t display the bulkier masculinity vaunted in magazines. That was the point. He was not unbearably handsome to every woman; he was unbearably handsome to Irina. The slight curve of his buttocks, one of which would fit perfectly in the clasp of each hand, his attenuated toes and high arches and slender hips were all designed to satisfy Irina McGovern’s personal, quixotic aesthetic. Ramsey Acton was a custom job.
Yet one aspect of this made-to-order sticky-trap was rather horrible. Fucking Ramsey and kissing Ramsey and sleeping with Ramsey, watching Ramsey stride naked from the bed to the minibar and letting Ramsey carry her around the room over his head, just as he had lifted her that first night, their close brush with throwing all this away like carelessly leaving a suitcase of money behind on a railway platform—well. It was all she wanted to do. She didn’t want to eat, and she didn’t want to illustrate children’s books. She didn’t want to meet her friends in Indian restaurants. She didn’t want to watch Panorama expose how Her Majesty’s Government had tried to cover up the truth about mad cow. For that matter, Irina posited to herself, puzzled, a little frightened even, it was entirely possible she would never want to do anything else but slide in and out of bed with Ramsey Acton for the rest of her life. Since she had always considered herself a woman with broad interests, concern for world affairs, deep affections for a range of friends, and a driving ambition to pursue her own career, the discovery that apparently all she’d really wanted all along was to get laid by a particular snooker player was a little bit grim.
“DO ME A FAVOR,” said Irina in the limo that night. “Don’t go in the stage entrance.” Frowning, Ramsey complied, though entering the conference center through the main doors cost him signing some twenty programs on the way in. “Put your arm around me.” A gratuitous directive; aside from hasty trips to the loo, they’d been in physical contact of some sort since that first embrace in the Royal Bath, from simply holding hands to such a complex interlocking of convex and concave parts that together they formed once of those coffee-table puzzle cubes that exasperate dinner guests. So in a double clasp, a neat jazz syncopation of three steps of Irina’s to Ramsey’s two, they sauntered past the ticket counter, where Irina met the eyes of that snooty booking agent. He nodded, finally with a properly shit-eating deference rather than the kind that was secretly insulting. “Thank you,” she whispered, flicking a slippery scarf of burgundy rayon back over the shoulder of the smart, slinky black frock Ramsey had also bought her that afternoon. “That made my night.”
“At last a bird what’s easy to please,” said Ramsey, and showed her to her seat in a special section for family, managers, and guests. The view of the table was peerless. “Wish me luck.” He kissed her long and deeply in open view. Others in the section cut sly, curious looks at the dark-haired woman in the first row.
Irina was apprehensive. They had taken too long shopping for her new wardrobe, leaving no time for Ramsey to warm up at the practice table. Although if he lost tonight she’d have Ramsey all to herself thereafter, she couldn’t bear responsibility for a defeat.
Ramsey’s opponent was John Parrott, a good-natured player from Liverpool who at thirty-three, chubby and moon-faced, with an aura of the two-car garage, seemed prematurely middle-aged. Thick black eyebrows forever shooting to his hairline in astonishment or plowing nose-ward in despair, his elastic expressions so broadcast every nuance of the game that he was effectively a commentator for the deaf. (The MC introduced Parrott by his ostensible nickname “The Entertainer,” though snooker was rife with fabricated sobriquets; flaks forced down the throats of fans improbable handles like “The Golden Boy” for Stephen Hendry or “The Darling of Dublin” for nice-guy Ken Doherty, which even an anorak wouldn’t employ with a gun to his head.) Ramsey said Parrott was a capital fellow, with a dry sense of humor and an appealing streak of self-deprecation.
Indeed, together Ramsey and Parrott epitomized their sport’s legendary decorum. Beyond a handful of raggedy debut shots, Ramsey’s lack of preparation didn’t seem to have done him much harm. In fact, she was pleased to note about his play a new ebullience. Hoping to prove a positive influence, Irina was relieved when at the interval he led by a frame.
During the break, a man in the row behind touched her arm. In his forties, he had a florid face creased from the overkill smile that he promptly unleashed, though his eyes didn’t smile with it. Slightly longer hair than suited his age betrayed a vanity, and his tie was so loud it hurt her eyes. “Anybody ever warn you, love,” he said, breath tinged with beer, “that our lad Ramsey is already married?”
Irina’s mouth parted, and despite herself her color may have dropped a shade.
Clapping her shoulder, the man laughed boisterously. “Only riding you, doll! Didn’t your face look a picture now! I meant to snooker, missy. Snooker’s his first wife, and make no mistake about it, snooker will be his last.” He stuck out his hand. “Jack Lance. Match-Makers. I’m something between Ramsey’s dogsbody and his mum.”
Irina shook the hand, whose fingers sprang dark hairs. Underslept, she was slow to sort out that this was Ramsey’s manager. Instinctive dislike battled the urge to make a good impression. “Pleased to meet you. Irina McGovern.”
“American!” he accused.
“A congenital birth defect,” she said. “It’s not polite to make fun.”
“So it ain’t!” Jack laughed too hard, as if in amazement that a Yank had managed a bit of banter. “Just visiting, then. Seeing the sights? Westminster Cathedral? Big Ben? Pick up some candy floss on the pier?”
“No, I live in London. From which you may assume that I visit Big Ben about as often as New Yorkers take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Like, never.”
Mercifully, Jack cut to the chase. “I didn’t see your man at the practice table these last three days. Now, I can see how an attractive lady like yourself might make for a formidable distraction. But we wouldn’t want our mutual friend to neglect his responsibilities, would we?”
She nodded toward the table. “He’s winning, isn’t he? What more do you want?”
“A piece of 350,000 quid.” The smile dropped.
“I had no idea the purse was that big.”
“You going to follow this sport with the pros, sweetie,” he advised, “those are the first stats you master. Fastest break, lifetime centuries—Web site filler for fans.”
“I’ll work on it.” Clipping her voice, she turned to face forward again.
“You work on Ramsey first,” said Jack to her back.
“Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” said the attractive brunette to Irina’s right, in the spirit of coming to her rescue. “You’re Ramsey’s friend, right?”
“Yes. Irina McGovern.”
“I’m afraid we’re backing different horses! I’m Karen Parrott. But John thinks so highly of Ramsey. Says it’s gobsmacking that he’s never won the World.”
“Yes, I wish it didn’t matter to Ramsey so much.”
“Oh, it’s all they care about,” said Karen. “The Crucible, the Crucible. Almost has a religious ring, you reckon?”
“Yes, the Crucible sounds like a church, doesn’t it?”
Karen glanced behind her; Jack Lance had left the section. “Sorry about Jack,” she said quietly. “He’s not a bad sort. But the managers either see the women as the enemy, or get matey on you and try to enlist you on the team. Either way, they’re mighty proprietary.”
“True, he didn’t seem too happy about Ramsey’s having found a companion. I guess he thinks he’s made an investment, and that earns him a controlling interest. As you said, the players are like racehorses.”
“Actually, it’s more like a manager’s got part-ownership of a trained seal.”
Spotting Jack again, Irina asked brightly, “Do you come to all John’s matches?”
“Crikey, not on your life! But this week I figured the kids would enjoy a trip to the seaside before it gets too nippy. Sorry to be a nosey Parker, but have you been Ramsey’s—friend very long?”
“No, not long. Funny, I used to find snooker a little dull. But now I’m starting to get it. It’s like a cross between ballet and chess.”
“Throw in the Battle of Waterloo, and you’ve got something.”
“It seemed like such a low-key sport at first—soothing. But sometimes it’s incredibly exciting.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” said Karen noncommittally.
“So how often do you go see John play a tournament?”
“Oh, some years I’ll go to Sheffield for the World. And maybe if he’s in a final of a ranking event. Three times a year? Something like that.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, it’s not quite like when you’ve seen one game you’ve seen them all, but… You’ll see.”
“So wives and girlfriends don’t usually come along on the tour?”
“Sometimes,” Karen said cautiously. “For a little while. Actually—a real little while. It’s hard. There’s no room for you. Boys, you know. Drink. And snooker. Buckets of snooker. It’s all they talk about. Maybe you’ll—feel differently,” she added with gracious optimism. “But, uh, most of the girls burn out.”
As the lights dropped for the second session, a small indentation dimpled between Irina’s eyes. She hadn’t thought things through. Vaguely, she’d envisioned accompanying Ramsey on his travels to a cornucopia of other lavish hotels; with equal vagueness, she’d pictured a comfortable domestic routine on Victoria Park Road, more or less a facsimile of her life with Lawrence, with better sex. Moreover, she had her own commitments that she was already neglecting. Oh, well. How much time could he spend on the road per year anyway?
THE DEBRIEFING IN THE Royal Bath bar after Ramsey’s narrow victory over John Parrott was jovial enough. His colleagues were all curious about how Irina knew Ramsey; “We’ve both been divorced from the same woman” made a convenient shorthand. The while, Ramsey ensured that she always had a fresh drink (everyone was getting hammered), and that some part of his body was always touching hers (the barest contact sent her whole body humming like a toaster), although his grip on Denise in the opposite hand was discernably tighter. When John Parrott told the terrible tale of having the cue with which he had won the 1991 World Championship stolen from his car at Heathrow, Ramsey rejoined, “Serves you right, you tosser! I’d sooner lock a live dog in the boot than leave the cue behind in a car park.” “Aye!” cried John Higgins, “sooner leave the wife in the boot!” and Karen chided with a biff, “Don’t give him ideas!” Much merriment was derived from one of Ramsey’s attacking pots that evening, after which the cluster had miraculously settled to leave a clear path for the pink to the corner pocket, “like the parting of the Red Sea!” Granted, after the third retelling Irina was unable to muster more than a polite smile. If it was one of those I-guess-you-had-to-be-theres, she had been there, and it didn’t help.
So the banter was lively, but whenever being amusing escalated from option to obligation Irina grew dull-witted. Dazed by the superficial spangle of wordplay and silly stories, she began to crave substance, if not gravity. Talking to these people was like eating cotton candy, until she didn’t want more sugar but a steak. Midway through a fascinating twenty-minute debate over whether a draft in Purbeck Hall had made the top cushions too springy, Irina reflected that Ramsey’s profession had little or no moral content. Oh, there were occasional issues of honor (calling the ref’s attention to your own foul) or humility (that apologetic tip of the head when you fluke a pot). But in the main, snooker was about excellence for its own sake. The game’s beauty, its limitation as well, was that it didn’t matter. It didn’t save Tutsis in Rwanda, or a farmer’s beloved cattle from mad cow. Some nights Irina was sure to find relief in a world outside the news; on others she feared that she was bound to find the pageant frivolous and empty.
During a lull, she even resorted to Princess Di. While she’d been sad at first, a bit abstractly, as she would have been over the untimely demise of any young woman she didn’t know, after weeks of mawkish public mourning Irina had reluctantly come to share Lawrence’s view that the nationwide hair-tearing, breast-beating, and rending of garments was an exercise in mass hysteria, and that rather than represent a salutary emotional catharsis it demonstrated that the British had lost a grip—that there were, effectively, no real English people left. Yet as soon as the hallowed subject was raised in the bar, the company in unison composed their faces in stricken solemnity, leaving Irina to reconsider uttering the adjectives maudlin and bathetic.
A mention that her mother was born in the Soviet Union went nowhere; presumably, then, Russians didn’t play much snooker. For any conversational tendril that curled beyond the purview of the snooker circuit died on the vine. While these characters had played across the globe from Hong Kong to Dubai, a typical international anecdote involved Alex Higgins playing drunk and shirtless in Bombay. Parrott regaled the bar with a tale about Zimbabwe, where the local butcher had stapled the cloth to the table; “You could see the staples jutting out!” collapsed the company into gales of laughter. By this point, Irina knew better than to press Parrott for his take on Robert Mugabe’s plan to confiscate white farmland. Like Anne Tyler characters, these accidental tourists traveled in a hermetic capsule all done up in green baize.
So maybe it wasn’t so surprising. But once she slid onto the brocade spread in the suite, one conspicuous omission came home: no one, not once, had ever asked what she did for a living herself.
IT WAS OFFICIAL: LATER that week, the fact that Ramsey Acton had hooked up with “a sultry Russian beauty” was published in Snooker Scene. The trashy little snippet got everything about “Irina McGavin” all wrong, but she cherished her copy as a keepsake.
Ramsey rolled on to conquer all the way through the semis. If his game had previously been missing some intangible final ingredient, Irina’s arrival in Ramsey’s life must have added that last half-teaspoon of cayenne that makes a dish sing. How often Irina herself had battled with a sauce as Ramsey had wrangled for thirty years with his snooker game, only at the last minute lighting upon the smidgen from her overflowing spice rack that suddenly bound a dissonant jumble of penultimate flavors into a triumphant melange. At forty-seven, Ramsey Acton appeared to have discovered love and mastery in a fell swoop.
When the winner of the other semi was a freak success, a weedy, green young player named Dominic Dale ranked #54, Ramsey regarded the final as a mere formality. Having once himself been a young, unproven player subject to blithe condescension from old hands, he should have known better. But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain—which is why Dominic Dale and his ilk would eternally capitalize on the underestimation of their “betters.”
After the final they dined at Oscar’s, their planned celebration now downgraded to a quiet tête-à-tête for the licking of wounds. By now, she and Ramsey had established a ritual twin order of scallops with saffron cream, wild bass with morels, and a side of spinach.
“It stands to reason,” Irina said over the starter, “that if winning the Grand Prix would mean something, then coming second in the Grand Prix means something, too.”
Ramsey mashed a scallop vengefully with his fork. “It means I lost.”
Irina rolled her eyes. “Inability to take satisfaction in anything short of total victory is a formula for a miserable life. When do you ever achieve total victory?”
“When you win the World at the Crucible,” said Ramsey promptly.
“I think we should talk about something else besides snooker.”
“What else is there?”
She examined his face. He wasn’t joking.
During his winning streak, dinnertime conversation had ranged their lives like a great heath, stopping to examine every little copse and pool: Ramsey’s growing concern that to break the standoff with his parents someone would have to die first; Irina’s reasons for demurring from fine art; her sister’s gushy manner as overcompensation for resentment (“Killing with kindness,” she’d noted, “is still murder”); her ambition to finally visit Russia, and her odd regret that now she’d never experience the grisly Soviet Union proper; the comical lengths to which certain female fans had gone—sometimes dogging him from town to town for whole seasons—to get Ramsey into bed. Although there was one gloomy grove that Irina was prone to avoid—her anguish over how Lawrence was managing her desertion—in the main these rhetorical ambles had been bracing and far-flung. Now that Dominic Dale had, it was said, “played above himself” (a curious concept, in Irina’s view—that you could ever play better than you knew how), Ramsey had fallen in a hole.
“We could talk about the fact that, while this is a very nice hotel, I’m looking forward to going home.”
Ramsey looked up sharply. “To Lawrence?”
“No, silly. To Victoria Park Road. Remember that quaint establishment? It’s called your house.”
“And when do you figure that would be?”
“Tomorrow, I assume.”
“The Benson and Hedges Championship starts in Malvern tomorrow.”
Irina’s fork drooped. “Malvern. Where the hell is Malvern.”
“Don’t you worry about where Malvern is. Jack’s made all the arrangements.”
“How long does that last?” she asked limply.
“Twelve days.”
“Oh,” she said. The saffron sauce didn’t seem as lively tonight; maybe she was getting tired of it. “What’s after—Malvern?”
“The Liverpool Victoria UK Championship in Preston, of course.”
“Of course,” she said faintly. “And how much time is there between this Malvern thing and the Liverpool what’s-it?”
“Mmm,” he said, massacring his last scallop. “Between the B&H final and the first round in Preston? Three, four days. Have to check the schedule. Ask Jack.”
“When do you take some time off?”
“Let’s see,” he reflected. “There’s a week between the Liverpool Victoria and the German Open in Bingen am Rhein. Good fortnight at Christmas. And we haven’t decided whether to enter the China Open this year.”
“Tell me that the China Open is played in Leicester Square.”
“Shanghai,” he said breezily. “If we give it a miss, there’s a handful of days to put our feet up at the end of February. But if we do go for Shanghai, it’d be daft not to do the Thailand Masters in Bangkok straight after.”
“Maybe I’m missing something, but when is all this time off?”
“In May. After the World.”
“May,” she said heavily. “It’s now October.”
“There’s the exhibition circuit after the tour’s done, but that’s up to me.”
“Ramsey. I can’t go with you to all these tournaments. I have work to do.” Though he professed to adore her illustrations, Ramsey never seemed to take her occupation seriously as an activity as well as a product. Yet despite herself, she remembered with relief that she’d left her passport carelessly in her handbag ever since the last trip to Brighton Beach.
“Oi, but you got to!” he cried. “I’ll not play for shite without you there!”
“You played for shite for thirty years without me there.”
“If you must do, take the work along, then. We’ve loads of down-time.”
Which they had thus far spent fucking, talking, drinking, and—well, fucking. Little wonder that Irina was skeptical of making time for long hours of drawing in hotel rooms. “Maybe,” she said dubiously. “Do you always play this hard?”
“You should know. You and me’s played powerful hard upstairs.” He reached across the table for her hands. “See, when I leave for Bournemouth I haven’t a baldy if I’ll ever see you again. I reckon on balance, what with Lawrence being a decent, clever chap what’s never raised a hand to you, why would you bolt for a ne’er-do-well snooker player? So I tell Jack to enter me in the whole calendar. I figure I’ll need something to take my mind off you something desperate.
“Now I’m on the play lists. But that ain’t necessarily so terrible. I done this circuit all on my own since I were eleven years old. My parents thought a snooker player a bare notch above juvenile delinquent, and I’d to raise the entry fee for junior tournaments hustling middle-aged tossers at Rackers in Clapham. Got more than one hiding when they was none too pleased to lose a fiver to a cocky sprog as well. It’s been a lonely life, whatever you read in them snooker rags. I never had nobody. Jude got so she hated snooker, hated snooker players, not to mention me, and sure as fuck hated parking her bum at any snooker tournament. I can’t make you come with me, and I’ll understand if you don’t. But if there’s any fairness in this life, I must finally be owed a bird what will raise a glass with me after six hours on the bounce at the table.”
“I have a life, too,” she said gently.
“Sure you do, pet.” An offhand tone belied that he understood anything of the sort. “Take it one tournament at a time. But at least come with me to Malvern.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly. “But only Malvern.”
SPIRITED FROM THE ROYAL Bath in another limousine while she was a little hungover, Irina never did sort out where Malvern was—aside from being somewhere in Worcestershire, of which she saw little enough during their play-all-night, sleep-all-day schedule that in her mind it remained not a county but a steak sauce.
Though she couldn’t recall agreeing to accompany him to the UK Championship per se, she next found herself manifested in Preston as if by Star Trek transporter room. Nightly after the matches were played, Irina reported for duty at Squares, the massive bar around the corner from the Guildhall; apparently three or four rounds with the lads were included in her job description. She liked to think she was getting a bit better at snooker shop talk, but still found it draining. So she retired from one such session toward the end of the first week with equal parts self-congratulation and relief.
Yet on return to their hotel room, Ramsey began ominously, “You know, ducky. Speaking to the opposition, you got to watch your tongue. They may seem all very hail-fellow-well-met, but them’s the competition as well. Best you never forget that.”
“What did I say,” said Irina guardedly, swallowing this time.
“This palaver about the World.”
“That you’ve lost six World Championship finals is a fact. It’s not a deep dark private secret, but a detail on which Clive Everton comments every time you play.”
“Coming from you, it means something different.”
“Since you were eavesdropping on my conversation, did you hear what I said?”
“I weren’t eavesdropping. I overheard.”
“I said it was common to interpret those six losses as clutching, as wanting it too much, or wanting it not enough, as collapsing under the ultimate pressure. In sum, as a character flaw. I said to the contrary you lost each of those matches for different reasons, and the impression of pattern is an illusion. I said sometimes you just don’t make a shot because you don’t make a shot, period. It doesn’t mean that your mother didn’t love you or you hate yourself or you’re suffering from fear of success. Since what I said was distilled from listening to you go on at length over countless bottles of wine, I thought you’d appreciate my efforts.”
“Nice try, ducky, but too sophisticated by half for this lot. All they hear is Ramsey Acton’s own bird thinks he’s washed up. It’s like you was running me down.”
“I wasn’t running you down!” Irina wondered what happened when people who perceived imaginary slights on every corner were insulted for real. Nevertheless, hypersensitivity was ingenious as a tactic. An outraged reaction to the most harmless remark suggested that nothing short of apocalypse would ensue after a proper put-down, helping to ensure that before criticizing him sincerely she would think twice.
“The point is, you was focusing on the negative,” said Ramsey. “On what I’ve not won. I might add, the only tournament I’ve not won. You got to understand, this game is half mind-fuck. When them blokes come to the table, I don’t want them thinking, Oi, Ramsey Acton, that old-timer, this’ll be a cakewalk. I want them dropping their trousers in fear. I want them remembering, this geezer’s won near every ranking tournament known to man. If I’m intimidating that gives me the edge. They talk to the bird and she shovels out the excuses—like there’s something what needs excusing—I lose the edge. I know you didn’t mean to. But you done me a powerful lot of damage tonight.”
“I was trying to be sociable,” she mumbled. “I don’t know these people. I don’t know much about snooker. I was trying to get on. I want you to be proud of me. I never intended to embarrass you.”
“I didn’t say you embarrassed me. I said you damaged me.” This was classic. He would press an advantage one step further than seemed necessary or kind—thereby, as the Brits might say, over-egging the pudding. Of a habit anything but sweet, Americans would describe it more brutally as putting the boot in.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Though I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.”
“That’d be a right wick apology, then.”
Ramsey continued to stand aloof, several feet from the bed. Already a trademark of their relationship, there was either not a fag paper between them, or they were light-years apart. There was no in-between. With Lawrence, there’d been nothing but in-between, and this new inch-as-good-as-a-mile was difficult to adapt to. She was reminded of the game of trust popular in the 60s, in which you extended both arms and fell dead-weight backwards, expressing blind faith that your partner would catch you. Either Ramsey was right there, not allowing her to drop a half-inch, or he turned heel and she slammed smack on the floor.
“What am I supposed to say to these people?” she asked dismally. “I’ll say whatever you want.”
“That my form’s coming on. That you never seen me play better.”
“That sounds like something your friend Jack would put out in a press release.”
“Fair enough. Then tell them I got a really, really big dick.”
She looked up. He was smiling. His zip was down. He did have a big dick.
One flying lunge from six feet, and the confrontation was over. Her release from his displeasure was like finally being allowed to go and play after sitting in the corner in a dunce cap. For much like the unwritten etiquette of the telephone, whereby it is the caller’s implicit prerogative to wrap it up, only Ramsey could end what Ramsey had started. Since Irina never started anything, that left Ramsey as the sole gatekeeper of their garden, from which she was cruelly exiled and into which she was graciously readmitted, at his whim.
WHEN THE PROMISED FORTNIGHT break finally arrived around Christmas, after Bingen am Rhein, Ramsey wheedled her into a getaway holiday in Cornwall—though by this point what she really needed to get away from was more holiday.
Their first afternoon on the rocky, desolate southwest coast, Ramsey led her to their rental car, and wouldn’t explain. He drove to Penzance—as in pirates of—to a poky municipal building. Although she did remember signing something preliminary during a giddy three a.m. tussle in November, only when she read the placard did she realize what he was up to. “But I look a dog’s dinner!” He said she looked beautiful, as always. “But I haven’t bought you a ring!” Ramsey frowned, patting his pockets, then spotted a bit of flotsam in the gutter. He pressed her palm with a round piece of discolored steel with two blunt prongs. “I reckon it’s a radiator hose-clip,” he explained.
“Ramsey, I can’t marry you with some car-part off the street!”
“Pet, you can marry me with a twist-tie, or a knackered rubber band. Look here”—he demonstrated—“fits just right. I’ll never take it off, promise.”
The official inside was irritable, perhaps having hoped to make it a short day and do some Christmas shopping; to Ramsey’s obvious annoyance, the short, plump woman with bad teeth didn’t seem to recognize who’d walked in. They filled out some forms. It was over in ten minutes. Ramsey had bought a ring; he assured her it wasn’t at all expensive, and he was probably lying.
Although Irina hadn’t dreamt of white tulle and three-tier cakes, this “wedding” had been no-frills by the most modest of standards. On the other hand, maybe it was the medium course that was squalid—having a cake but not an especially tasty one, springing for a dress but off the rack. She could see the merit in either blowing £20,000 on five hundred of your closest friends, or tying the knot on a rainy afternoon with a radiator hose-clip. Indeed, the latter approach had the benefit of focusing not on a single day, but on the rest of your life. Ramsey wasn’t keen on getting married, but he was keen on being married, ultimately the greater compliment.
Irina walked out in a daze. She and Ramsey were married. They’d been together for less than two months.
After following her “husband”—it would take time to ease into the word—to the Regal Welsh Open in Newport, the B&H Masters at Wembley, and the Regal Scottish Open in Aberdeen, she would have been judicious to have resisted Ramsey’s imprecations to keep tagging along and to have knuckled down to her own work. But he begged her so winningly. She was touched by his fervid gratitude to at last have company in a life that she could now appreciate had been grueling and lonely. Colleagues were also rivals, and you could never be wholehearted friends with your structural foe. The connection between the two of them was so total, but also so fragile—on or off like a switch—that she feared inserting whole fortnights of insulating separation into their idyll. Besides. She had never been to China.
Outwardly, Irina appeared a hopeless girlie pushover, standing by her man; in truth she was driven by the selfish, insatiable greed of an irretrievable junkie. She was shooting up with Ramsey Acton twice a day, and the prospect of going cold turkey for the length of an entire tournament was too desolate to contemplate.
Yet as many an addict must, she found that a floating, disconnected vagueness began to fog her head, especially on the rare afternoons that Ramsey tore himself away to hone his game. Alone, she no longer understood what to do with herself or quite who she was. Thus over Ramsey’s protests she demurred from taking his surname, not from feminist zeal but because she could not afford it; the appellation Irina Acton would make official the very vanishing act at which she was already getting too much practice. She flapped magazines instead of reading books, sometimes poured a wine miniature from the minibar rather earlier than she should have, and awaited Ramsey’s return with a jittery impatience peculiar for a freelance artist accustomed to working long hours on her own. Growing ever more adept at snooker banter—and at keeping her remarks sufficiently anodyne that she did not get it in the neck later in the hotel—should have been gratifying; it was actually disquieting. Her new expertise was grafted on, artificial. She was learning to talk energetically and at length when addressing a subject about which she cared little. Or she cared about snooker only because she cared about Ramsey, and the transitive relationship was weak. He’d been generous to include her so utterly in his world, but inclusion could slyly morph to occlusion. Some days this warm envelopment into the snooker fold seemed a guise under which she was being steadily colonized, consumed, co-opted. Irina Mc-Gavin, famed new consort of snooker legend Ramsey Acton, was coming along great guns. Irina McGovern, illustrator of gentle enough success never to have made it into a gossip column spelled correctly, was in mortal danger.