The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver
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“Jude got ideas of things,” he speculated. “When real life didn’t come across she kept trying to yank reality round to the idea ’stead of the other way round. Know what I’m saying? Snooker trains you out of that. After every shot, it’s a whole new frame. You live with the balls the way they lay, and not the way they were a minute ago when you had the whole break planned out. She’d an idea of what it would be like to write children’s books, which didn’t include rejections or crap sales or having to compromise with illustrators like you. You know, she pictured touring libraries and reading aloud to gobsmacked six-year-olds, all big-eyed with chins in their hands. Fucking hell, she should have played snooker, if that’s the sort of crowd she wanted. For that matter, I’m afraid she started out with a right unrealistic picture of living with a snooker player. The lonely humdrum of me being on the tour most of the year was a shock. So she rides me to come back to London between tournaments, meantime having worked up this notion of me, this airbrushed photo like, and then when I do what she asks and Actual Ramsey rocks up, she just acts ticked off.
“I reckon the short of it is,” he said, ordering a fourth round of sake, “it’s got to be perfect, or I’m not interested. Like you and Lawrence.”
For years Irina had imagined that only the presence of Jude and Lawrence had made it possible for her to while away so much as ten minutes at table with Ramsey Acton. Yet apparently since 1992 those two hadn’t been facilitating Irina’s tentative relationship to Ramsey. They’d been getting in the way.
Thus by their shared dish of green-tea ice cream, the occasion had taken on the quality of a school holiday. Lawrence would be appalled. If Lawrence were here, he’d have been nursing his single Kirin beer through his chicken teriyaki (he hated raw fish), frowning at Irina’s second sake, and by her third publicly abjuring that she had had enough; a fourth he’d not merely have discouraged but would have vetoed outright. He’d have been disgusted that she accepted an unfiltered Gauloise at the end of the meal, waving the smoke from his face and later recoiling from her breath in their minicab home—“You smell like an ash can!”—as if, had she forgone the fag, he would ever think to kiss her in the back of a taxi. It was nearly one, and he’d long before have pulled back his chair and stretched with theatrical exhaustion because it was time to leave. He wasn’t obsessed with germs, but she had a funny feeling he wouldn’t have liked the fact that she and Ramsey were sharing the same bowl of ice cream. Of this much she was certain: were Ramsey to propose to them both, as he did to Irina while she regretfully stubbed out her Gauloise, that they head back to his house on Victoria Park Road to get stoned, Lawrence would have dismissed the notion as preposterous. He might have smoked a bit back in the day, but Lawrence was a grown-up now, Lawrence didn’t do drugs of any description any longer, and that meant, ipso facto, that Irina didn’t do drugs, either.
Then again, Lawrence wasn’t here, was he? That was the holiday.
So what if she said yes, and then confessed to Lawrence on his return from Sarajevo that she had stumbled off to Ramsey’s to get stoned? He’d rebuke her for acting “juvenile.” He’d remind her that she always clammed up when she got high—recalling the last time they’d tried marijuana back in ’89 on 104th Street, when she’d gawked silently at the paisley wallpaper for three hours. Curiously, the one thing Lawrence would fail to observe would be that she was (or so it was said) a handsome woman; that while Irina was married in all but law, Ramsey had been divorced for eighteen months and had made a point of the fact that he was available; that going back to his house at this hour, to smoke dope no less, could therefore be dangerously misconstrued. Why was that the one thing that Lawrence would never say? Because it was the main thing. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.
Nonetheless, an acceptance of Ramsey’s outré invitation would emphatically entail keeping the end of their evening a secret from Lawrence. Though Irina had always considered secrets between partners perfect poison, she nursed a competing theory about small secrets. She may have sneaked a cigarette or two not so much because she enjoyed the nicotine rush itself, but because she enjoyed the secret. She wondered if you didn’t need to keep a few bits and pieces to yourself even in the closest of relationships—especially in the closest, which otherwise threatened to subsume you into a conjoined twin (who did not take drugs) that defied surgical separation. The odd fag in his absence confirmed for her that when Lawrence walked out the door she did not simply vanish, and preserved within her a covert capacity for badness that she had treasured in herself since adolescence, when she’d occasionally flouted her straight-A persona by cutting school with the most unsavory elements that she could find.
“Sure, why not?”
As she negotiated the steps from their nook in high heels, each stair took such acute concentration that putting one foot before the other was like reciting a little poem. Again, that hand hovered at the small of her back, not touching.
Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it—the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.
They strode the pavement a few millimetres closer than was quite the form. Fault, maybe nothing that evening had had anything to do with fault, but as for that short stroll down Charing Cross, she would feel sure in recollection that she was the one who’d walked fractionally too close to him.
Yet by the time the attendant retrieved the Jaguar, Irina was flustered. The easy flow of conversation in Omen had gagged to a dribble, their former awkwardness with each other restored in force. This was nuts. She’d had too much to drink (that was four large sakes). She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to get stoned, which precluded wanting to. She’d left the rhubarb-creams cooling on the counter, and needed to get the pies in the fridge. She was tired—or ought to be. Lawrence might ring; with no answer at two, he’d imagine something terrible had happened. Yet last-minute extrication would seem cowardly, and conclude Ramsey’s birthday on a note of rejection. Well, she could tell Lawrence if he rang that they’d hit one of those ludicrous traffic jams you found in London at the most improbable hours. Sometimes when you make a mistake, you just have to go with it.
The mood in the car was sombre. Rather than jaunting off to party, Irina might have been one of those rigid British kids of yore being dragged off to sit the eleven-plus, which could determine whether she ended up conducting heart-bypass surgery or scrubbing public toilets.
Most of Ramsey’s colleagues were raised in down-and-dirty enclaves like East Belfast, or the rougher bits of Glasgow. When snooker players from dodgy parts began to pull in winnings, the first thing they did was move out. But Ramsey was raised in Clapham, then properly rough-and-ready, but now a fatuous, self-congratulatory area full of pokey but surprisingly expensive terraced housing that would merit the label “twee.” Perhaps to maintain his proletarian street cred, once Ramsey had taken a few titles, the first thing he did was move to the working-class heartland of the Cockney East End.