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.
<
br /> “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-b
lank, 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 shithead, 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.”
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