A Novella
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 backpacked 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.”
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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 illfated 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? O
ut 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.”
Property Page 27
