The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Irina’s pulse accelerated. Clearly any moment now the door could open, even with Lawrence in Dubai. It would have been wise to skedaddle, but she had come all the way from the East End to bathe in the light of her old life streaming through those eight-foot windows. So instead she contrived a plausible alibi—“Terribly sorry to have startled you; I’m Lawrence’s ex, Irina, just dropping by to pick up a—pair of shoes!”—and settled into her rust-colored armchair to contemplate this revolutionary state of affairs.

  Jealousy under the circumstances was preposterous. Irina was the one who’d walked out, and if Lawrence had found a hand to hold a full three and a half years later, that was not only his right but his due. Presumably this turn of events might lift the burden of guilt that still weighed heavily when she conjured his lonely life. She continued to feel responsible for Lawrence; it was always hard to slip in here and not leave broccoli in the fridge. Yet she was not so selfish as to keep Lawrence eternally at her beck for occasional cups of coffee. While she was a little hurt that he’d not seen fit to inform her of a new woman in his life, technically it was none of her business. Nevertheless, when poking about the flat she’d felt for all the world like a little bear who cries, “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” and “Who’s been eating my porridge?”

  After an hour of reverie, Irina bestirred herself, and drew on her jacket. Maybe she’d be cured for good of this perverse pastime, now that Goldilocks might come barging in unannounced at any moment. Cautious to maintain her alibi all the way to the pavement, she rustled into her old wardrobe for a pair of pumps—shoved to the back, behind a line of whorish stilettos.

  She scurried downstairs and pulled the front door closed. Yet at the very point that she should have been able to breathe a sigh of relief, her heart stopped.

  On the curb, Ramsey stood propped against his opalescent-green Jaguar XKE, smoking a cigarette. The snapshot unerringly duplicated his appearance at her doorstep on his forty-seventh birthday—once again, leaning but perfectly straight, Ramsey himself resembled a cue stick set against the car—except that when he retrieved her for sushi that summer those cool, contemplative inhalations had been mesmerizing, while just now the same tableau made her want to throw up.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked in a strangled voice.

  “Funny, that. I were about to ask you the same thing.” There was no gracious ushering to the passenger seat, but a quick jerk of his head in its direction. “Get in.”

  Irina hung back. “I know how this looks. But he’s not up there. I could show you.”

  “Away from the table, I don’t fancy playing games. Your man hiding in the cupboard, or nipping out the back?”

  “Ramsey, please! Go upstairs with me! Let me show you that no one’s there!”

  “You humiliated me enough for one day, ducky, and I’ll not have this argy-bargy on the Queen’s highway. Get in.” He flipped his fag into the gutter, where it joined several other fresh butts, swung into the driver’s seat, and pushed open the passenger door. Glumly, Irina complied.

  The Jaguar plowed from the curb, Ramsey’s flinty gaze trained forward. He looked torturously attractive—slender wrists extending from the leather jacket as he gripped the wheel, the facets of his face all the more chiseled for being set in rigid fury. It was always like this, when he cut himself off from her, that she longed for him, physically longed for him, and she had to stop herself from slipping her hand into the taut, hot hollow of his inner thigh. Cutting her eyes nervously toward the driver’s seat, she thought in dull helplessness, I will always want to fuck him.

  Indeed, at that moment she was visited by the disconcerting vision of having gotten divorced, perhaps over the very sort of gross misunderstanding now under way in this car, and then running into her ex-husband by chance at a bar. She knew with perfect certainty that even with years of hostile impasse intervening, she would no sooner lay eyes on this gangly, achingly well-proportioned snooker player—pretending aloofness no doubt, feigning indifference to her arrival, pulling on a Gauloise and laughing collusively with his mates—than she would want to fuck him. Snugged forlornly apart in her bucket seat, Irina was reminded of one of her most dog-eared sexual fantasies, if hardly the stuff of Germaine Greer: getting down on her knees before those tall, neat black jeans and begging him, begging him please would he let her suck him off. Surely fantasies of self-abasement, while commonplace, were unhealthy, but that’s what she would do in that bar. She could see herself, perhaps not having crossed paths with the man for a decade, during which no cards, no e-mails, and no calls, falling to the floor and imploring him, would he please take it out, could she see it one more time, could she touch it and suck it and make it hard. Here all this time she’d been anxious over Betsy’s old admonishment that sexual infatuation never lasts, but no one had warned her against the equally wretched alternative whereby come what may you couldn’t get shed of the fixation, and it stuck to your fingers like tar.

  “Where are we going?” she asked after several awful minutes of silence.

  “Sheffield,” he said. “In case you forgot, which it seems you have done, I’m playing the championship final tomorrow.”

  “But I haven’t packed a bag.” She looked at the plastic holdall in her lap, wondering how she’d explain the shoes.

  “Worse things happen at sea,” he said sourly.

  “I seem to recall getting it in the neck a few years back for not packing a bag.”

  “Bournemouth, ducky, were a mere difference of opinion. I’ll show you getting it in the neck.”

  Irina closed her eyes. “How did you know I was there?”

  “I followed you, didn’t I?”

  She turned to him in incredulity. “You’re supposed to be in Sheffield. You came all the way down to London to lurk outside your own door, and follow your wife, wherever she happened to be going? What if I’d been going to Safeway? Wouldn’t that have dug up a lot of dirt—scandal, she’s still buying yellow-tag vegetables! My God! Do you distrust me that much?”

  “Turns out I don’t distrust you near enough.”

  “It’s not easy to tail a pedestrian in a car. Are you that lazy, or did you like the challenge?”

  “Look, I drive down to give you a lift up to Sheffield, so you don’t have to take the train. It’s meant to be a surprise. Just when I rock up, I see you leave the house. So I’m—curious, like.”

  “You weren’t curious. You were paranoid.”

  “Paranoia, darling, is fear what ain’t warranted. In this case, seems not.”

  “Ramsey. I am not having an affair with Lawrence.” The assertion sat there uselessly, like the shoes in her lap, which didn’t even match her outfit.

  “Just saying the same thing over and over don’t make it so.”

  “I’ve only said it once. And I’m only going to say it once, too.” Irina had a sick feeling that she’d repeat herself plenty by the time this was through.

  “Fair enough. What was you doing in his flat, then? Having tea?”

  Irina glanced defeatedly at the shoes; she’d never fob off on Ramsey the implausible excuse she’d concocted for Goldilocks. Besides, maybe, just maybe, this was an opportunity for her husband to understand her better. “I go there … once in a while. When Lawrence won’t be home. I like to … walk around. I sit in my old chair. Sometimes I read the paper. That’s all.”

  As an argumentative tool the truth was overrated. Ramsey grunted Uh-huh with disgust, as if she might have made more of an effort. “And why d’you do that, then?”

  She gazed out the window. “I love you, but—sometimes I feel a tug. Of my old life. Almost as if it’s still running alongside this one. It’s not that I exactly regret leaving Lawrence, but I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if I’d stayed. You and I have a wonderful life together. But it’s fractious, you have to admit… You’re gone for weeks, and then when you’re home we keep bizarre hours and drink too much… So there are things about life with Lawre
nce that I miss. The order. The simplicity. The peace. I like to visit. It connects me with my past, and makes me feel more like myself.”

  “His dick in your cunt must make you feel like yourself as well.”

  Irina pressed two fingers to her forehead. “As for what else I miss, Lawrence never said ugly things like that to me, ever.”

  “Should have, shouldn’t he? Wasn’t you messing about with me?” “So now I’m just a slag. Because I fell in love with you.”

  “You don’t exactly regret leaving Anorak Man. Now, there’s reassurance a bloke can well hold on to.” As Ramsey took out his wrath on his fellow drivers, for once Irina wasn’t relaxed by faith that his snooker skills transferred to the road. Suddenly small colored balls bore no resemblance to two-ton vehicles whatsoever.

  “Look,” she said, “I know my explanation sounded strange. But you’re in the final tomorrow. For the sake of your own concentration, you have to put this aside—”

  “How considerate. For my sake, I’m to sweep the fact you’re shagging another bloke right under the carpet.”

  “I am being considerate, you idiot! Isn’t winning the World what you’ve worked toward since you were seven? You don’t need all this aggro! You need a nice meal, and a pleasant evening with your wife, and a good sleep.”

  Alas, the harmonious scenario could not have sounded more far­fetched.

  “YOUR MAN,” WHISPERED IN Irina’s ear once she had hastily settled in the Crucible’s guest section, “has looked in better nick.”

  She shot a sharp glance over her shoulder at Jack Lance. “He’s here, isn’t he.”

  “By a whisker. You wouldn’t think, now, that a geezer with a ranking of thirty-two would play quite so fast and loose with a championship final. Had us all on tenterhooks, he did. Whiff of the prima donna, sashaying in here with thirty seconds to spare. And fancy, without even bothering to comb his hair.”

  “Ramsey’s ablutions,” she said stiffly, facing forward again, “ran a little behind.”

  “Had a pretty hard night of it yourself, love, from the looks of you.” Jack’s breath was hot on the nape of her neck.

  “Thank you for your concern.” She hated Jack Lance. It wasn’t just that he was greasy and hated her, too. When Ramsey slipped from the Top 16, all the little gestures of flowers and champagne and room-service sushi were cut off with the same abruptness with which a smile would drop from the manager’s face. Now that, in defiance of anyone’s expectation, Ramsey Acton was back in the final, Jack was once again brownnosing up a storm, as if he hadn’t given Ramsey the bum’s rush for two solid years. Although the manager had a point—for every twenty minutes, late-comers were docked a frame—it was only thanks to Irina’s shaking and fetching and phoning, Jack, that Ramsey’s inert body wasn’t still cutting a diagonal across their hotel mattress.

  Lights down. To rousing acclaim, the MC introduced Ronnie O’Sullivan: the heir apparent, the bête noire. Though the dickie-bow rule had now been relaxed, O’Sullivan had respectfully donned one anyway, along with a traditional white shirt and black waistcoat; he had traded the ponytail of his bad-boy youth for a cropped, conservative cut. After taking the cure in posh adult summer camps, he’d not even coldcocked any WSBA officials for a couple of years. Striding to his chair, at the ripe old age of twenty-five Ronnie exuded a new seriousness, his demure smile to the crowd flashing the turned leaf of a Reformed Character.

  When the MC introduced his opponent, Ramsey Acton also appeared a changed man, but in the only manner that a player with a lifelong reputation for grace, sportsmanship, and stately deportment could transform: for the worse. His bow tie slanted at a seasick angle, and unfortunately a heavily starched white shirt holds not only planes but creases. Unshaven stubble glinted in the stage lights. Before locating his chair, Ramsey stood with a slight weave squinting at the crowd, as if astonished to find himself in a snooker tournament when he thought he was on the way to the launderette.

  Irina put a hand to her head. The night before, he’d ordered a bottle of Remy from room service, and over her protests dialed for a second around sunrise. She’d been petrified that he’d be hungover for the final, but hadn’t thought to worry about an eventuality far more dire: that he would still be drunk.

  Snooker was rife with the myth of drink, but myth it was. Even Alex Higgins, who famously performed three sheets to the wind, had never exactly benefited from not being able to see the cue ball. More, however larger-than-life the legendary Hurricane’s inebriated lurchings about the table may have sounded in recounting, at the time those sessions must have fostered in his audience only an embarrassed cringe. Ramsey himself had never bought into that bunk about booze begetting inspiration, claiming that Higgins underachieved his whole career for the very fact of playing rat-arsed.

  Irina did not understand why Ramsey kept groping about his person, nor did she understand when instead of beginning the frame he shuffled over to confer with the referee. Much less did she understand when the ref announced, “Frame, Ronnie O’Sullivan,” when neither player had taken a shot.

  Jack slipped out, returning to whisper furiously, “Your man forgot his chalk.”

  “So?” she whispered back. “Couldn’t someone lend him some?”

  “That ain’t the point. It’s a penalty. One frame. One whole bloody frame.”

  Starting one down without O’Sullivan having potted a single miserable red, Ramsey took the first break-off. He clutched the rail to steady himself, and the wild stroke (“Foul, and a miss!”) failed to contact the white altogether. Previously in pin-drop form, the crowd rumbled in astonishment, drawing a stern “Settle down, please!” from the ref.

  Was Ramsey’s disreputable condition all his wife’s fault? From their arrival in Sheffield Irina had tried to get it through his thick skull that for her to carry on with the very man she’d left for Ramsey would make no sense. After a triathlon of weeping and screaming and barricading in the loo, punctuated by door-rapping reprimands from hotel management and wall-pounding from next-door guests, finally he had seemed to believe her, but by then it was morning. Though he’d dressed for the final with time to spare, the arc of falling out to falling in again was still not complete, and they’d clutched into bed—hence the unkempt condition of Ramsey’s gear. She’d hoped fucking would make him feel better, but now that the results were on display before millions of BBC viewers it seemed that their desperate morning grapple had further exhausted the man. Besides, there’s a big universe out there that is beyond fault, in which whoever is to blame is of no consequence—in which all that matters is what happens.

  What happened was awful.

  For O’Sullivan’s part, his opponent’s reek of eighty-proof may have objectified the less estimable moments of his own career. Likewise Ramsey’s missing sitters that the poor bastard would have potted the first time he picked up a cue at age seven might have reminded Ronnie of frames he himself had thrown away in fits of petulant defeatism. Perhaps he was aghast at having a mirror held up to his younger self, or to the disheveled has-been he, too, might become on rounding fifty. In any event, the more carelessly Swish banged balls every which way except in the pockets, the more meticulously the Rocket cleaned up the mess that Ramsey had left behind. Indeed, the spectacle was gastronomic, like watching a clumsy restaurant patron litter his setting with dinner-roll crusts, and a nimble waiter arrive between courses with one of those clever scrapers to politely clear the table of every crumb.

  Familiar from previous tournaments, the eight fans whose black T-shirts spelled out G-O-R-A-M-S-E-Y had ebulliently stationed themselves in a middle row at the start of the match. After the interval, the A, M, S, and E never returned. G-O-R-Y passed comment on a massacre.

  When the afternoon session concluded with Ramsey whitewashed eight-nil, Irina rose from her seat only to have Jack admonish her, “Done enough damage for one day, love. You let me at him first.” She stewed just long enough for Jack to report back that “his royal highness” w
as refusing to open his dressing-room door. Sure enough, when Irina herself pleaded and cajoled, the lock remained bolted, the only sound from behind the clinking of glass. She retired disconsolately to their hotel room.

  When she hunched back into her seat for the evening session, Jack wasn’t speaking to her, which she supposed was a blessing. While the Crucible crackled with electricity, the audience didn’t display the excitement generated by the impending grand contest between two greats of the game so much as the bawdy leering and elbow-jabbing that precedes a striptease.

  Ramsey did deliver a song and dance. Since he’d been barricaded in his dressing room for hours, the fact that his hair remained wild, his chin scraggly, his clothing so crumpled that it might have been used to scrub the floor bespoke the same willful up-yours for which Alex Higgins had made a reputation twenty years before.

  For that matter, Irina had seen the videos, and the antics on stage studiedly duplicated Alex’s most egregious displays of shit-faced contempt. When sitting out, Ramsey slouched with legs extended and feet splayed, his face washing with waves of boredom or annoyance. At the table, he indulged the splashy trick shots that he’d exhibited at the Ooty Club. Many of these four-and five-cushion spectaculars did indeed pot the object ball, but he’d have given no consideration to position thereafter, and the flamboyance reliably netted a single point. Rather than try to disguise his condition, Ramsey flaunted it, negotiating from table to chair with an exaggerated sway, and knocking back the liquid in his Highland Spring bottle with gasping gusto, as if it held something far more invigorating than mineral water.