“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 “Belfast”—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 misappropriations 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 hillsides 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-thenation 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 Commi
ttee 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 nonsectarian. 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 newcomer 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.
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