The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  She could always ring Betsy for refuge, but the purpose of this rash departure wasn’t to throw herself into an Ealing guest bed. Trying to be resourceful, she ducked into the newsagent for an Evening Standard, in which a small article in the sports section reported on the Acton-Hendry “upset” in Bournemouth. Why, Ramsey had beaten Hendry after all, in a closely fought contest that lasted four hours. She should have been there, clapping feverishly when he prevailed, toasting his achievement while tucked under his arm in a bar. Turning a blind eye to the article’s snide quip—“While Ramsey Acton is mooted to be staging a comeback, Swish has been ‘coming back’ for the last ten years and so might reasonably be expected to have got here by now”—she seized on the fact that Ramsey’s second round against Ronnie O’Sullivan was scheduled for tonight at seven-thirty. Even in a country passionate about sports, the Pakistani vendor may have been disconcerted by a customer moved to tears by snooker scores. She’d found him.

  Irina bought a flimsy umbrella and managed to break only three of its eight spines while battling the wind on the fifteen-minute walk to Waterloo Station. Frugality so ingrained, it never occurred to her to take a taxi.

  Struggling to decode a rapid-fire Cockney made all the more incomprehensible by sheer surliness, she gathered from the ticket seller that the next train to Bournemouth would leave an hour hence. Riddled with requests that the irritable man repeat himself, even this purchase left her dejected; it was just the sort of logistic that Lawrence always took care of. She retired to a hard bench, the high iron ribs of the railway station putting her in mind of having been swallowed by a whale, and breathed into her icy hands. Good Lord, she’d neglected to bring a pair of gloves, which for a woman with Raynaud’s disease in October was a damned sight more foolhardy than leaving the flat without her toothbrush.

  Now severed from the sustenance of one man and not yet entrusted to the safekeeping of another—for the moment, officially homeless—Irina was visited by a sensation both profoundly female and, for this day and age, deplorable. She felt unprotected. An independent income and separate bank account didn’t make a dent in this impression of mortifying vulnerability. That she felt deserted was inane; she had walked out on Lawrence herself. That she felt a rising petulance toward Ramsey for having his mobile switched off was irrational; he’d no reason to expect her call. In her younger days, she’d have found being thrown on her own wits in a European city exhilarating. Older, she was wiser to the woes that could fall abruptly from the sky like weather, and all that feminist brouhaha aside, a woman was safer—plain safer—when she made a survival pact with a male of the species. The feeling on that bench was animal, of having done something biologically stupid.

  It would have been sensible to ring Ramsey repeatedly until he answered. Yet she was low on change; ringing a mobile from a UK pay phone cost nearly a pound a minute. Besides, now she wanted to surprise him. Of course, underlying this impulse to “surprise” was fear—that Ramsey would not be pleasantly surprised. That he fancied her only so long as she remained unattainable. That his talk of marriage had been insincere, because that’s what he thought every girl would want to hear. That he really was a feckless (Lawrence’s word) sleazebag opportunist. That Irina had therefore just made the biggest mistake of her life.

  On the train, where she sacrificed the small succor of her wet jacket in order to pile it on the next seat and discourage company, Irina’s feeling of frailty gave way to a sense of security so sumptuous that she’d have been happy to never arrive anywhere, ever. She was cosseted on all sides by a snug rectangular box whose steady chug lulled her like a crib with rockers. Although in the pre-birthday world she’d sometimes squandered her solitude on concocting recipes that would employ wild garlic, right now her head swam with a great deal more than what to make for dinner.

  To her astonishment, on the heels of We have to talk, no torrent of recriminations had ensued. Rather than take her faithlessness to task, Lawrence had assumed all the blame for their relationship’s shortcomings—head bowed, shoulders humped, knees pressed, while slow, fat tears dropped on his crooked wrists. His gentle, inward collapse resembled those skillful demolitions of large derelict buildings, whose charges are set in such a way that the bricks cave inward; aside from accumulating an elegiac layer of dust, surrounding structures remain unharmed. Since most self-destruction of the personal variety sucks everything and everyone in the vicinity into the rubble, the spectacle on the sofa was not only terrible to witness, but wondrous: an implosion so complete, which yet left his onlooker unscathed.

  Why, at the start he’d been so loath to reproach her for straying that she was abashed, for it was never her intention to get off scot-free. But Lawrence insisted that their incremental alienation was all his fault. He loved her more than his life, but how could she appreciate the scale of his feelings, with the perfunctory expression he gave them? Long ago he should have asked her to marry him, and that was his fault, too. He knew he was too tight, too regimented—obsessed with order and control, with doing the same thing the same way day after day—and he had allowed them to get into a rut. They should have taken more trips together, hopped the Eurostar to Paris. He shouldn’t have imposed so on her graciousness in the kitchen, and ought to have taken her out to dinner more often.

  “But I loved making you dinner,” she’d objected. “That wasn’t the problem.” Horribly, she was already speaking of their relationship in the past tense.

  “What is it, then?”

  “You stopped kissing me.”

  She had surprised herself. For months she’d been compiling cruel mental lists of her partner’s deficits: he was harsh with other people, watched too much television, dwelt excessively on the cold externals of life like politics at the expense of the spirit. She was startled to discover that all along only one deficiency had mattered. One so seemingly slight, so remediable as well. Were Lawrence to lean to her lips, could she forget about Ramsey, would all be well? Except for the stark, dumb fact that she no longer wanted to kiss Lawrence. She wanted to kiss Ramsey.

  Lawrence did not dismiss her lone complaint as minor. His parents, he explained, were never physically demonstrative, not with their children, not with each other. When prodded, he’d tried to remember to kiss her more often, and he wasn’t sure why he never kept it up, because he liked it. But he’d grown shy. Strong emotion embarrassed him, and maybe frightened him a little. It made him feel weak. It didn’t seem manly.

  “Passion,” said Irina, “is the manliest thing on the planet.”

  This was exactly the kind of conversation that the two of them should have been having, and could have been having, and that might have prevented her from closing those fateful few inches over Ramsey’s snooker table in July. Now that they’d finally learned to talk to each other, it was too late.

  Prepared for an onslaught of rage and vilification, instead Irina had been showered with generosity and remorse. By two a.m., it had seemed only natural that they go to bed together. Though there’d been no question of sex, they slept naked in each other’s arms, Lawrence never once complaining that he was hot.

  Thus she woke in a state of complacency. She’d been braced for the worst, and now the worst—in its way, unexpectedly moving and lovely—was over.

  Not so fast.

  The night before, Lawrence had never asked the identity of his rival, though she’d been willing to reveal it. Perhaps Lawrence wasn’t ready, and had to take his poison in small sips. But that morning he rose from the pillow in a single rearing motion that somehow recalled that oftquoted I fear we have awoken a sleeping giant metaphor about the United States after Pearl Harbor.

  “All right,” he snarled. “Who is it.”

  Irina pulled the sheets to her breasts. The name weighed so heavily in her mind, but when she croaked the syllables aloud it sounded flimsy.

  “Ramsey Acton?” Lawrence employed the same tone of appalled incredulity as Betsy in Best of India. Twice didn’t quite make a pattern, b
ut the symmetry was forbidding. He bundled furiously out of bed. “Are you out of your mind?”

  This morning, there would be no regrets that he hadn’t taken her to Paris.

  She’d sworn the night before, truthfully, that she and The Other had never had sex. Yet despite Lawrence’s standard-issue masculinity, this formal rectitude made no difference to him. Her legalistic chastity had served only to make her feel better but protected Lawrence not a whit. Thus whipping on his jeans he growled, “Christ, you shoulda let him drill you a few times and gotten it out of your system. I thought maybe you’d found a credible alternative, and not some loser. This hare-brained infatuation won’t last five minutes! He’s not bad-looking, and he has a greasy, superficial charm. But Irina! You have absolutely nothing in common with the guy!”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” she said quietly, drawing on her clothes.

  “Then I will! You have no interest in snooker whatsoever! Do you just like latching onto a celebrity? Because if so, you could’ve done better. He’s a has-been! You saw the way he played last night. He used to be considered daring, and now he’s just reckless. Banging the cue ball around the table like demolition derby—”

  “He wasn’t himself. He knows I’ve been trying to decide what to do, and I think the situation’s got him rattled.”

  “How flattering,” said Lawrence. “But even if he keeps a hand in, how long will you be able to stand watching frame after frame? You know he’s going to expect you to be all ga-ga and follow his every pot. Forget having your own life as an illustrator. You’ll be his groupie! Is that what you want?”

  “I guess I’d expect to keep up with his progress—”

  “Progress?” Lawrence railed. “Try ‘decline’! Do you have any idea what you’re getting into? That man is vain. He used to be a star, and he’ll expect you to treat him as if he’s still a star. Not only will you become a portable brass band, but you’ll have to collude in his self-delusion! He’s a rampant narcissist, and you’re looking at a lifetime of long-winded, backward-looking snooker stories.”

  “I listen to you talk about Algeria. What’s the difference?”

  “Nothing short of enormous is what’s the difference. You’re an intelligent woman! You’re used to being around people who care about the world and who read the newspaper. Think Swish has bought a broadsheet in the last five years? He probably thinks ‘BSE’ is an honorary award from the Queen! Before he dropped out of school altogether, he skipped most of his classes. Don’t ask me, ask him—because he’s proud of it! Sneaking off to that Clapham snooker club instead of learning to spell D-O-G. Truth is, I’m not even sure he knows how to read. I bet if you gave him one of those tests for whether you’re compos mentis—who’s the president of the United States and can you count backwards from one hundred—that chump would fail hands-down without the benefit of Alzheimer’s! Irina—the guy is a fucking idiot!”

  “He may not have a PhD from Columbia, but he is naturally bright.” Some meager defense of the man she loved seemed an obligation; later she could tell herself she tried.

  “His head is full of little red balls, Irina. And that’s all.”

  “I thought you liked him,” she mumbled.

  “Liked. Yes. Past tense. If I ever see that bastard again, he’s toast. He’s taller than I am, but scrawny and weak.” Lawrence formed a circle the diameter of a quarter. “His wrists are about this big around. I could deck him in three seconds.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said wearily, robotically making coffee.

  “I like our Pakistani newsagent. That doesn’t mean I’d want to spend night after night listening to the guy tell me about the exciting magazines he sold today. A little Ramsey goes a long way. Couple times a year has been plenty. One solid week of you-wouldn’t-believe-the-angle-I-got-on-the-blue and he’s going to bore you under the table.”

  The milk steamer gagged, its barrage of obliterating white noise only driving Lawrence to further raise his voice. “Know anything about what snooker players’ lives are like? How much they’re on the road? How many broads they plug? How much coke they snort? How much they smoke? How much they gamble? How much they drink?”

  “Ramsey is pretty moderate, in context,” she submitted numbly.

  “Know anything about the ‘context’? Jimmy White disappears on his wife for weeks on end going on benders in Ireland. Alex Higgins is so dissipated that he’s reduced to suing tobacco companies over his throat cancer. Far from being the millionaire he ought to be, Higgins mooches off his few remaining friends for handouts, hustles amateurs in backstreet snooker clubs—and half the time still loses—and now has no fixed address!”

  This went on for hours. It was clearly Lawrence’s intention to wear her down, to convince her of the folly of her affections with what were, in fact, well-conceived debating points. But this was not a battle that could be won with argument. He might as well have been thwapping a rubber ball relentlessly against a squash court in the expectation of knocking down the wall. By the end he wilted back onto the sofa in the exhaustion of having played a marathon match. The wall was still standing.

  WHEN IRINA EMERGED FROM the cocoon of her carriage in Bournemouth it was already dark and closing on six-thirty p.m. In no mood to boldly make her way forth on foot with a skeletal map from railway information, Irina sprang for a taxi. When she named her destination, the chatty driver asked if she was off to the Grand Prix.

  “Of course.” Like lovers everywhere who cannot say the name of their beloved enough times, she volunteered, “Ramsey Acton is playing Ronnie O’Sullivan tonight.”

  “Swish has seen better days, ain’t he?” said the cabbie. “But he’s old guard, and it’s bloody amazing the boy’s still at the table. And his form’s come on of late. I missed it ’cos I had a shift, but they say the showdown with Hendry last night was cracking. Ramsey snapped those balls like a whip, he did. To make your ears ring.”

  “I’m afraid I missed most of it, too,” she said wistfully. “Which is too bad, because Ramsey’s—a friend of mine.”

  “That the truth? Them snooker blokes got a fair number of friends, I wager.”

  “Actually, Ramsey’s not all that social.”

  The cabbie compressed sure-you-know-Ramsey-Acton-and-the-Queen-herself-is-coming-round-to-my-flat-for-tea into a politic grunt. “The Rocket—now, that pup is cut from the same cloth as your Ramsey Acton. They say he’s inherited the same touch. A momentum player as well. But the way the kid carries on, sure he didn’t inherit the class. Swish is nothing if not a gentleman, and you never hear him question a call. But at the weekend you should have heard O’Sullivan go on about the state of the baize. Raised Cain with the ref over whether his toe left the floor on a long red. I wager the fella gets a right smart fine for the ruckus from the Association—not that he can’t afford it. We all give the kid a break of course, his father in prison and all. Hard cheese. But you don’t get a free pass on that excuse forever. Whole country’s waiting for that lad to grow up.”

  “Ramsey says that O’Sullivan has unprecedented natural talent, but if he doesn’t become more self-possessed as a person he’ll never exploit it to the full.” Irina was practicing. This brand of banter was apparently the conversational bread and butter of her new life. Moreover, she should grow accustomed to the eccentricities of her paramour being up for knowing discussion among several million people.

  “Seems to me I heard him say the same thing,” said the driver. “On the telly.”

  She kept her inside track to herself for the remainder of the short ride.

  IRINA ENTERED THE MAMMOTH red-brick structure with a stab of disappointment. On television, snooker matches looked so intimate—the tables aglow in the dark, the balls pulsing with the warmth and vibrancy of an Edward Hopper. Though snooker had come into its own in the 80s as a high-stakes national sport, the game had gestated in a host of smoke-fogged local clubs in down-at-the-heel towns like Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool. These grungy bolt-holes
were magnets not only for boys mitching school but for men dodging wives, their fingers stained from hand-rolled fags, veins burst from liquid suppers, complexions pasty from curry-chip carryouts when the hall finally booted them out on the streets at two a.m. The sport’s dark hint of deviance had given rise to the aphorism that a good snooker game is a “sign of a misspent youth.” To Irina, snooker was old-world: funky, close, and low-lit. It was the Britain of flat, room-temperature bitter, threadbare velvet bar stools, greasy pork pasties, and thick, indecipherable accents.

  Yet the cavernous Bournemouth International Centre was the stuff of Tony Blair’s slick new ad campaign “Cool Britannia,” which promoted the UK not as a poky empire in retreat, but as an MBA model of efficiency and progress. “Cool Britannia” bannered the island’s impersonal chrome-clad wine bars, its thriving information-technology sector, its chichi restaurant fare of lemongrass Chilean sea bass. Bournemouth International was shiny and spanking new. Under glaring overheads, the lobby’s floor was polished crushed marble, its ten-foot windows exposing the black expanse of Bournemouth Bay. At jarring odds with snooker’s cozy, storied character, this venue had no memory, and no soul.

  Irina bustled to the booking desk, only to learn that the evening match was sold out.

  “Is there any way you can contact Ramsey Acton in his dressing room?” she asked. “I’m sure he could get me a seat if he tried.”