The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  He reemerged in navy slacks and an aquamarine button-down. Years of living with an artist hadn’t improved his sense of color. “Those blues clash,” she muttered.

  “Blues can’t clash,” he said resentfully.

  “I did the better part of a book in blue, and I assure you they can.”

  Lawrence powered toward Blackfriars Bridge, brow in a scowl, torso tilted as if fighting a heavy wind. His stride was short but his pace vigorous, and Irina had trouble keeping up on cobbles in heels.

  Seated in the dark restaurant, with its knurling arrangements of exotic blooms, Lawrence griped that their table was cramped by other diners—“Not very romantic.” Irina swallowed the advisement that a thriving romance could readily flourish at a lunch counter over corned beef hash. As she surveyed the extensive menu, her selection was hampered by apathy. When Lawrence suggested that they opt for the five course prix fixe with matching wines—an extravagant sixty quid a head that was sure to get them both pole-axed before the Grand Prix back home—Irina said sure just to spare herself the effort of ordering à la carte. Getting well oiled for their sports date also appealed. If she weren’t desperate to lay eyes on Ramsey Acton even on television, Irina would happily have drunk herself unconscious.

  Orders taken, Lawrence moved his champagne-and-armagnac cocktail out of the way and leaned forward over the table. “So,” he said intently. “How are you?”

  Irina recoiled as if from a loaded gun. “Okay,” she stonewalled. “The first illustrations for The Miss Ability Act seem to be coming out all right.”

  He stared her down a beat. Her expression was stolid. He leaned back. He sighed. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but when you were out with Betsy the other night, I sneaked a peek at your drawings. They’re pretty outrageous. Good outrageous, I mean. Still—don’t you think those illustrations are a little adult?”

  “How so?”

  “Well—sensual.”

  “Children have senses.”

  “The protagonist is a gimp in a magic wheelchair, right? Not a vamp.”

  “Nothing about being disabled means you can’t be beautiful.”

  “I thought characters in children’s books were more supposed to be cute.”

  “Sleeping Beauty? In the classics, female protagonists had breasts, and were woken with kisses. They were smitten with handsome princes, and wanted to get married. It’s only nowadays that children’s books have been purged of sex, and the principals are consumed with learning that little Somali children are just like them, or with putting away their toys.”

  “But your illustrations are for ‘nowadays.’”

  “I’m sorry you think my work is unprofessional.”

  “I didn’t say that. Just, what I glanced at seemed a little risqué.”

  “I didn’t show any terrible body parts.”

  “You didn’t have to. It’s something about the line, the feel. The look on the gimp’s face. I don’t know how else to say it—it’s lustful.”

  “I’m sure Puffin will let me know if they think my illustrations unacceptably lewd.”

  The white wine that accompanied the foie gras was late-harvest, the mournful, bittersweet color of a day’s end, that piercing golden bask over the landscape made all the more aching for the fact that it wouldn’t last. The undercooked goose liver lolled on a bramble of presentational sticks like one of Dali’s melting clocks. When Lawrence raised his glass, he couldn’t think of anything to salute, and their flutes clinked against each other to nothing in particular.

  “You know, this Asian financial crisis is galloping, and the baht is in freefall,” said Lawrence. “I’m a little worried about our investments, but there’s a bright side. Taking a holiday in Thailand in the next few months could be fantastically cheap.”

  “Why would we want to go to Thailand?”

  “Why not? We’ve never been there. The beaches are supposed to be great.”

  “You hate beaches. And since when do you want to go anywhere that doesn’t double as research? No terrorists in Thailand, are there?”

  “Now that you mention it, I had thought about taking a trip to Algeria.” He waited; no reaction. “That’s fine with you. If I go to Algeria.”

  Lawrence’s going anywhere would mean being able to see Ramsey with impunity, even at night. “Shouldn’t it be?”

  “It’s only one of the most dangerous countries in the world right now. In that Islamic raid on Sidi Rais in August, three hundred villagers were massacred with machetes.”

  “Oh?” Her eyes clouded. “I missed that.”

  “How could you miss that?”

  “It’s not my business to follow that sort of thing, it’s yours.”

  “The rest of the world is everybody’s business! You used to take an interest.”

  “Algeria is no safer if I personally keep up with how dangerous it is.”

  “Anyway, I wasn’t serious, about Algiers. I was serious about Bangkok.”

  As for demurring, I don’t think we should be making any plans, because I may be leaving you within days, she wasn’t there yet. “Maybe,” she said dubiously. His disappointment was palpable.

  His agenda for their evening having inspired such little uptake, Lawrence fell back on his stock default: terrorism. It was a fascination she couldn’t fathom. Lawrence had had little or no experience of being victimized by terrorists himself. He hadn’t lost his mother in Lockerbie. He couldn’t trace his lineage back to Belfast. They’d occasionally been ejected from the tube over a scare, but nothing in their vicinity had ever blown up. His professional interests exhibited a curious arbitrariness; they came from nowhere, had no organic roots. Maybe having made himself up, rejecting the tat and anti-intellectualism of Las Vegas, lent his adult incarnation an inevitable artifice. On the other hand, maybe having lived for months with a woman whose head was roiling with God knows what, whose behavior had utterly transformed, and none for the better, due to no transgression of his own that he could identify, whose comings and goings were so overtly suspicious as to encourage his darkest imaginings to run rampant, and—most importantly—whom he could no longer trust to be truthful, or even nice—well, maybe that was something like being terrorized.

  “This decision to invite Sinn Fein into talks, not a month after the IRA ceasefire was reinstated”—he attacked his scallops as if they had delivered a personal insult—“I think it’s hasty. They don’t get punished for Canary Wharf and Birmingham, they get rewarded. Oh, sure, we’ll take you back into the fold, never mind you broke the last ceasefire with no warning and caused millions of pounds in commercial damage! It’s undignified, and overeager. Blair is sucking Sinn Fein’s ass, and it looks bad.”

  “You don’t think there’s a place for forgiveness? For drawing a line and saying, never mind the past, let’s start here, clean?”

  “People who have acted in bad faith before are likely to act in bad faith again. You don’t do yourself any favors by acting credulous.”

  “By that reasoning, you don’t negotiate with terrorists, period.”

  “You probably shouldn’t. You probably have to. But at the very least, a long probationary period makes sense. When you can’t trust someone’s word, make them prove themselves with what they do.”

  THEY STAGGERED THROUGH THE last three courses as if dragging themselves around the final laps of a demanding jog. The meal was a waste. Lawrence was trying so hard, and wanted so badly to conduct a joyful, energetic evening, one that confirmed that Irina had simply been going through a moody, difficult period now emphatically over. Irina made an effort as well, she truly did, smiling during lulls, admiring each dish, racking her brain for topics, but they all seemed booby-trapped; even her speculation about Betsy’s “business partnership” marriage felt laden with allusion. Somehow their incapacity to match the theater of dining with theater of their own revealed the whole restaurant business as a swindle. The cost of this meal could have kept a child alive in East Africa for a year, and the
y might have derived the same sustenance from a Big Mac.

  Their separate bank accounts enabled Lawrence to pick up the tab. “Thank you so much for dinner,” she said formally. “I had a lovely time.”

  “Yeah, it was great!” Lawrence exclaimed. “We should do this more often.”

  Thus they conspired: they had had a lovely time. Surely with so many good intentions applied on both their parts, so much high finance applied to the purpose as well, the occasion could not conceivably have come off as dumpy.

  They hustled home, for the most perverse of postprandial entertainments.

  LAWRENCE SWITCHED ON THE TV just as the announcer introduced the players. Ramsey’s loyal cult following screamed Ram-see! Ram-see! when he walked on. “You know, this we-try-harder Avis thing that Ramsey’s got going,” said Lawrence, bombing to the couch. “I wonder if it hasn’t made him more popular. I bet that audience wouldn’t go nearly as ape-shit if he’d won those six championships instead.”

  Riveted by that face, Irina merely grunted. The camera panned eight men in black T-shirts, each printed with one letter of G-O-R-A-M-S-E-Y on the front.

  “Oh, man!” Lawrence cried when Ramsey’s opponent was introduced. “What a rough draw. Stephen Hendry in the first round!”

  The world’s #1 was greeted with a lackluster patter of polite applause.

  “It’s a real study, isn’t it?” Lawrence continued. “Hendry’s universally considered the best all-round snooker player in history. But listen to that crowd—they don’t give a rat’s ass! The better Hendry plays, the more the fans can’t stand him. Maybe it’s a working-class thing, that love of the fatal flaw. Most snooker fans are paunchy, hard-drinking wife-beater types who buy tickets every week but never win the lottery. I bet they can’t identify with someone like Hendry, who hardly misses a shot. Where Ramsey makes a great poster-boy for the downtrodden—with that tragic inability to consolidate, I coulda been a contendah.”

  Suppressing her impatience with this incessant chatter, Irina said, “I don’t know about all that. Hendry’s trouble is he’s not sexy.”

  Lawrence looked over. “You think Ramsey is sexy?”

  Irina shrugged, eyes to the screen. “I don’t know. That’s his reputation.” She scrambled for safe territory. “At least he’s not a killjoy. Hendry isn’t only boring for being perfect. He’s a boring person.”

  Indeed, according to Ramsey, dreary excellence was only part of Hendry’s problem. Away from the table, he was not a Great Character. A family man nearing thirty, Hendry had personally ushered in a well-behaved, biddable era of snooker in the 90s of going to bed early and eating all your vegetables, and so might be accused of single-handedly halving the popularity of the game overnight. His build was medium, his plain brown hair cut short. The expression on his doughy face remained strangely blank even after those rare shots he botched. His skin was pocked, his posture sway-backed, his buttocks protuberant. In interviews, he was well mannered, always giving his opponents credit for their skill. Hendry was a no-frills player, and the only thing he brought to the game was the game itself. He just happened to have won the same number of World Championship finals that Ramsey had lost. He’d racked up more than twice as many “centuries,” or breaks over one hundred, as anyone in the history of the sport, and he collected titles like flannel did lint. Who gave a toss. Not this crowd, none of whose members had bothered to get T-shirts specially silk-screened to spell G-O-S-T-E-P-H-E-N.

  Of course, Irina had no interest in Stephen Hendry, except insofar as he presented a barrier to her view of Ramsey’s face, and she chafed whenever the camera wandered to Hendry’s wooden countenance. She only had eyes for the tall, severe-looking character in his signature pearl-colored waistcoat. When he found his opening in the first frame, he built his break with swift, cleanly cornered moves that earned the tribute from Clive Everton, “He doesn’t hang about, Ramsey Acton!” It was like hearing voices. Everton seemed to be advising Irina personally that Mr. Acton would not wait on her verdict beyond this week.

  As she leaned forward in her armchair, Irina’s anxiety mounted with every pot. When Ramsey sank a spectacular long red, and then the white followed it agonizingly into the pocket for an “in-off,” or scratch, she groaned so audibly that Lawrence looked over in perplexity. “Now, that is unfortunate,” tsked the commentator.

  “Notice how suck-ass shots are always unfortunate or unlucky?” said Lawrence. “The commentators are so decorous. Unfortunate is a euphemism for incredibly stupid.”

  A sound and even interesting observation, save for the fact that Lawrence had made it. Irina pressed her lips. Why couldn’t he keep a lid on it and watch the match?

  The second commentator, Dennis Taylor, intoned, “You can’t afford mistakes like that, for you’re letting another man in. Not when that other man is Stephen Hendry.”

  Snooker was all about taking advantage of opportunities that may never come your way again, providing it some romantic application. Thus Hendry began to demonstrate that a real champion needs only one chance. Ramsey’s break of fifty-seven was respectable, but with seventy-five points left on the table, the frame was still up for grabs. Alas, Ramsey’s penultimate pot had cannoned the white into the pack, and the reds were spread like cherries for the picking.

  As Hendry proceeded to clear the table with the dutifulness of one of those model children’s book characters tidying up after dinner, Lawrence narrated. “You take these paragons for granted when they’re in their prime. Oh, yeah, Stephen Hendry, Mr. Perfect, clinching another frame. And I’m rooting for Ramsey I guess, since he’s our friend. But man, he really can’t hold a candle to Hendry. There’s never been a player like him, and may not be again. It’s only when these perfect people begin to falter that everybody starts to appreciate them in retrospect. Like, gosh, I guess they really used to be fantastic; weren’t those the days. Like, you never know how good you had it until it’s gone.”

  Shut up, thought Irina uncontrollably as Hendry, in accordance with good snooker etiquette, left the final black on the table. Just shut up.

  As the second frame commenced, Irina scrutinized Ramsey’s comportment for clues to his frame of mind. Playing with unusual ferocity, he emitted a repressed fury, like the superficially normal-looking but secretly twitchy sort of character whom you bump against on the tube, and who before you can say pardon me will whip out a switchblade. He wore the same steely expression as when delivering his ultimatum that she had until the end of this tournament to make her decision. She wondered if he thought she was watching.

  In accordance with this pent-up, explosive quality, Ramsey took on a ludicrous diagonal long-shot, and fired the white with such pace at the opposite corner that it not only knocked in the far red with a resounding crack but ricocheted higgledy-piggledy around the table, disturbing several other balls and banging three separate cushions.

  Everton exclaimed, “No holding back on that one!” while Taylor chimed in, “Gave that some abuse!” Yet this was rash, uncalculated play of which seasoned commentators sternly disapproved. Everton grunted, “Some of the pots this man takes on I think are outrageous.” When he added, “But you can’t criticize when they go in,” he meant that you can, too, criticize—that for a snooker purist, expedient ends never justify slapdash means.

  “Has he been fortunate?” Taylor wondered as the white settled. Lawrence was right, of course, that snooker commentators wielded terms to do with good or bad fortune in a judgmental manner, one indicating that this sport, when properly played—the odd speck of chalk notwithstanding—should have nothing whatsoever to do with luck. To be fortunate was to get away with something that should properly have been punished.

  In this instance Ramsey’s reckless display of aggression had been punished. His position on the next shot left disgracefully to chance, lo, the route to the only color available was solidly blocked by a stray red. He had, eponymously, snookered himself.

  But as Irina gazed with yearning at the comely
man trapped on the opposite side of the screen like one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia visitors banished to the other side of the wardrobe, and meanwhile Lawrence chided from the couch about what an unprofessional shot that was—honestly, what did we have commentators for, when we had Lawrence to endlessly chip in his two cents from the peanut gallery—the concept of the snooker took on a larger significance. The term referenced a configuration whereby an obstruction you don’t want to hit—cannot hit, by the rules—stands between you and your object. Accordingly, Irina as well had snookered herself. Ramsey escaped his predicament by hitting an extravagant swerve shot. Yet she couldn’t imagine any metaphorical equivalent to the swerve shot, a course of action that would put her back in contact with Ramsey Acton without smashing headlong into that innocently irritating fellow spectator on the couch.

  “Well, he got out of that with panache,” said Lawrence, “but he’s not on a red—”

  “Would you please?” Irina cried at last.

  “Please what?”

  “Just—keep it down, so I can follow this!”

  “You usually sit there and sew or something,” said Lawrence. “Since when did you get so involved in a snooker match?”

  “It’s snooker!” she exclaimed. “Not snucker! You’ve lived here for seven years, it’s a British game, and if you’re going to be a snooooker fan you should at least learn to PRONOUNCE it!”

  Granted, Brits rhymed the game with lucre, whereas Americans, who employed the word primarily in the metaphorical sense that Irina had so recently appreciated, rhymed the game with looker. A minor distinction. What was not minor was her tone of voice, and on an evening they had resolved to spend as warmly together as possible. Irina was bang out of order.

  Lawrence’s expression fluctuated between injured, angry, and stunned. Irina dropped her head in shame. She might have cared passionately whether Ramsey took the second frame a moment before, but now the soft, polite commentary emitting from the television merely underscored the contrasting incivility of her outburst. Heavily, Irina did the honors, and switched off the TV.