The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  The food arrived, in all its irrelevancy. Ramsey was barely touching his wine; maybe he’d realized it was time to cut down. Meantime, with the comings and goings of patrons, the restaurant heating system couldn’t keep up, and Irina kneaded her hands together in a gesture that must have made her appear even more anxious than she was. They looked at each other over the steaming ramekins, and it seemed to hit them at once: for the first time since they’d met, they were both free.

  “Your hands…?” he asked. Her mumble about having a “condition” was incoherent, but she did manage to get across that they were cold. He moved the dishes aside, and reached forward, sliding his long, dry, tapered fingers slowly from the tips of her fingers to her palms, then wrapping them around the oysters below the thumbs. That was when it happened: the three prongs stopped rattling on the plastic cover, slipped cleanly into the socket, and hit the mains.

  “You’re on the rebound, pet,” he murmured. His hands never stopped kneading, smoothing, squeezing, fingers sliding along the vulnerable undersides of her wrists. Should the effortless, inventive choreography of their hands be any indicator, they might make lovely partners on a dance floor. “Or after one day, I’d call it more of a ricochet.”

  “It hasn’t been only a day,” she said. Her hands were warmer now, slithering into valleys and slipping under overhangs like twin skates undulating across an ocean floor. “You remember when we went to Omen on your birthday, and we went back to your house? There was a moment over your snooker table, when you were teaching me to brace the cue. I’ve never been sure if you were aware of it. I was dying to kiss you. But I wanted to be good. I didn’t want to hurt Lawrence, or mess up my life. So I didn’t, and ran to the loo. Now—when I look back on that moment, I think I made a mistake.”

  His fingers ceased to circle the knobs of her knuckles, and gravely stilled. When she tried to slide her own hands up over his veiny metacarpi, he pinned them to the table; the skates had swum into a lobster trap. It was past time for him to say something.

  “If it’s truly over with Jude?” she carried on in the silence, like Wile E. Coyote churning off a cliff into thin air. As a rule, cartoon characters only fall when they look down, so she didn’t. “I’d like to come home with you.”

  With a last light squeeze, Ramsey’s hands withdrew.

  Irina thought she might cry out. The current cut off so abruptly that the lights of the shabby restaurant should have gone dark. The power outage set off the same implosion in her midsection as Lawrence’s admission night before last, and she couldn’t take two terrorist attacks in as many days.

  “I couldn’t be no use to you,” he said heavily. “You’re a beautiful bird. You could do better.”

  “Now, don’t you think that determination is up to me?”

  “No,” said Ramsey staunchly. “Never met a bird that knows what’s good for her.”

  She looked down at her vindaloo, forming a layer of congealed grease. “It was all in my head, wasn’t it? I thought it was mutual. I thought you wanted to kiss me, too.”

  To salvage her pride, he should have begged to differ, even if he had to lie. Instead he said, “At my snooker table all them years ago? You didn’t make no mistake. But I did, didn’t I? I ought to have paid the bill at Omen and drove you home.”

  “To the contrary,” she said. “That night was one of the highlights of my life.”

  “Look, pet.” He looked pained. She now felt badly, having so misapprehended the situation, and embarrassed him like this. Too little sleep and too much anguish had addled her judgment. “You’re better off with Anorak Man and no two ways about it.”

  “All very well,” she said, defeated. “Except that Anorak Man doesn’t seem to think he’s better off with me.”

  “My own advice, for what it’s worth, is you two patch things up. For donkey’s years I seen you was good together. I reckon what you just discovered is hard to square, ’cause when I were about the bloke was always dead sound. He can help you with your work and such like, where I don’t know no children’s book editors from pork pie. He’s took care of you, pet, and he’s clever, cleverer than me by a pole. He makes them clever political jokes I never get. Not half bad to look at. Always treats me proper as well, keeping up with all them stats like my centuries and that. Far as I could ever figure he loves you more than the world, even if he ain’t always brilliant at showing it.”

  “No, he apparently hasn’t been brilliant at showing it for the last five years,” she said wearily. “So that’s very sweet, your pushing me back on Lawrence as an act of noble self-sacrifice. But I would really rather you just take the compliment.” So long as she had already humiliated herself, she might as well go all the way. “I think I could fall in love with you. I think I almost did, on your birthday. Even if you’re not interested, that’s nice, isn’t it? I’d at least like you to feel flattered.”

  Ramsey took his time, tapping out and lighting a fag. “It’s dead nice,” he said, his tone as drained as his complexion. “I’m flattered, I am. But I’m a waster, pet. And about as sexy as a mealy banger on cold mash.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I do,” he said softly, spewing smoke. “I know about that.”

  “You seem to think so highly of Lawrence,” she said, trying to control the quaver in her voice. She’d put Ramsey in such an untenably awkward position that it really wouldn’t do to cry. “And I may know you only so well. But I do know this much: you’d never have betrayed me, like Lawrence. You’d never have deserted me.”

  “You reckon?” he said skeptically, tapping an ash into his chicken tikka. “I wager you’d have said the same thing about Anorak Man, three days ago.”

  “Maybe,” she begrudged.

  “Besides, sunshine,” he added quietly, touching her forehead. “There’s different sorts of betrayal. And, love, all manner of desertions.”

  The waiter asked if there was something wrong with their orders, and they demurred that they just weren’t hungry; he cleared the dishes and brought the bill. Though Ramsey would ordinarily whisk it up right away, the tab stayed untouched on the table. “Here, let me,” said Irina, reaching for it. “You’ve taken me out so many times.”

  “I might just take you up on that,” he said sheepishly.

  The tension was gone. If she’d made a fool of herself, so be it, and now they were able to sip the wine and catch up like the old friends they would apparently remain. She bummed a Gauloise. “It occurred to me after I rang this morning that you might be playing in the Masters this week,” she said. “But I haven’t seen you on the BBC once this season. Have I missed something?”

  “Missed the fact I retired. It were Jude’s idea, though I could see the merit. Go out on a high note, swan off into the sunset with that Crucible trophy. She’d notions about me commentating, or flogging some product on the telly. Can’t say I got the energy of late… But I could sure use the fees, like. Fact is, I’m a bit skint.”

  “You? Short of money?”

  He sighed. “I ain’t husbanded my resources, as they say. Jude, you know, she’s bloody high upkeep, and somehow that $50,000 she won in New York never made an appearance. So with all the travel in style to Spain and that, my winnings from the Crucible burnt up like autumn leaves by the end of the year.

  “But it’s queer,” he mused. “Talk about the way your mind keeps coming back to some turning point, like that moment of yours over my snooker table? I been known to place the odd wager on me own matches, see. And I were this close”—he held his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart—“to putting my last hundred grand on a flutter in that 2001 final. But me and Jude’d started up again by then, and that woman—well, you know how she feels about snooker. I figure she did a number on my head. I just couldn’t quite get up the confidence that I’d win. I got so far as to picking up the phone, but put it down again. Jesus wept! Would have cleaned up, at eight-to-one. I’d be taking you out tonight to the poshest joint in town, aft
er trousering eight hundred grand.”

  They walked together in silence to the end of Roman Road, where Irina would turn left toward the tube. It was depressing, the evening being yet so young that she needn’t worry about making the last train.

  Putting a hand on each of her shoulders, he turned her into the orange of the streetlight. “Irina, that night of my birthday”—burfday—“it weren’t all in your head. But timing is everything.”

  It is late. After eight p.m., or even nine. With no need to greet her returning warrior, no nightly obligation to provide freshly popped corn, pink pork escalopes, broccoli with orange sauce, she needn’t cut short her rambling constitutionals. These lunatic walkabouts have reached ever further afield these last two months—through Green, St. James, and Hyde Parks, on to Regent’s or, today, all the way to Hampstead Heath. She has traipsed without respite for five hours, and will return to Borough fatigued. Wearing herself out is the idea. Then, in those first weeks, wandering the city in an abstemious stupor had been purely about keeping herself from the liquor cabinet, the wine, the packet of fags she no longer has to hide.

  She is wearing the faded blue polo neck. A faint golden ghost still haunts the left breast. She refuses to toss the shirt in the rag bag. Lawrence had scrubbed at the curry stain for ten minutes with pre-treatment over the sink. She has every reason to have soured on such memories. But who could wring acrimony from any partner, ex or otherwise, having labored to rescue a tattered top because he loves it, or loves it because he loves her? Once loved her. As for the pretty red scarf at her neck, it was a present from Indonesia, which he brought back after a conference in Jakarta. While doubtless he’d been on the junket with her, she cannot shred it in a rage. To the contrary, the trove of this and every other gift that populates the flat, freshly finite, has grown more precious.

  As she trudges the last leg home along the Thames, the lights of the South Bank across the river glimmer with the Shakespeare and Pinter that Lawrence would never make time for. Unencumbered by a workaholic, she could now attend all the theater that she likes. She doesn’t like. Climbing the slope of Blackfriars Bridge, she feels Hampstead Heath in her knees. Why, she’s walked fifteen miles today, if not twenty.

  A waste of time. She should be getting started on the new illustrations. The commercial success of Ivan has increased the pressure to produce—and isn’t that the way. Not long ago, no one gave two hoots about Irina Mc-Govern’s next children’s book, and she’d have given her right arm to be in the position she’s in today. Now that she has the audience, she wishes it would go away. If Ramsey’s humiliating thanks-but-no-thanks when she threw herself at the poor man in February is any guide, there must be some rule of the universe that says, “All right, you can have what you want, but not while you still want it.” Circumstances reversed, Lawrence would take refuge in his work—in its dryness, its coldness, its dullness even. Yet she isn’t able to bury herself blindly in a drawing in the same spirit. The darkest, most morbid of artwork still draws on a vitality that she cannot rouse.

  Nearing the flat, she surveys the heavy postindustrial neighborhood with its Victorian remnants of red brick. She searches for her former sense of satisfied ownership, of having annexed a brave new world far from Brighton Beach, where her mother makes her feel clumsy and plain. Instead she feels like a foreigner again, and wonders what she’s doing here. It was Lawrence’s job at Blue Sky that had brought them to Britain. Now rather than savor the flavorful local expressions—“a bit of a dust-up”; “that knocks the competition into a cocked hat”—Britain just seems like any old somewhere else, somewhere she doesn’t belong. The city is awash with Americans anyway, and, latterly, with nouveau riche Russians on package holidays, who speak in a savvy, post-Soviet slang she can’t decipher. She doesn’t feel special. Worse, she feels abandoned, as if having deplaned during a layover, only for the flight to take off without her. Maybe shipping back to the US would keep at bay this confusing sensation she has almost nightly: an overweening ache to go “home” when she’s already there.

  At the door of the flat, she fumbles with her keys. The stairwell’s timer-light is out. She hasn’t been on top of things lately; she never remembers to ring the management company during office hours. The flat too is dark. Lately she keeps the drapes drawn during the day. She gropes for the switch. It is killingly silent. Ironically, she had joined her neighbors in a ten-year campaign to have Trinity Street gated down the middle to block through traffic. A shortcut to a major route south, the narrow, historic road had choked bumper-to-bumper during rush hours. For years, she had railed from these windows at the drivers, who were loud and rude. Within days of Lawrence’s departure, Southwark Council had come through. Now that she has what she wished for, the stillness outside is oppressive. She misses the rev of engines and irritable honk of horns, which might have provided a reassuring sense of human bustle nearby.

  To the surprise of her former self, she turns on the TV. After battling Lawrence for years over telly OD, now she, too, keeps it yammering the whole night through. Well, television is a creditable substitute for heavy traffic, and she’s not going to play Scrabble alone.

  BBC2 announces the upcoming broadcast of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. She hastens to change the channel. She won’t torture herself. It’s not only that Ramsey has retired.

  He rang up not long after her botched propositioning of the poor fellow at Best of India, to make sure that she was all right. She suggested, awkwardly, that maybe they could be friends. Grown-ups don’t usually tender friendship so baldly, and she’d sounded like little Ivan in her own unaward-winning book. Ramsey hemmed and hawed. Finally he must have feared that he was hurting her feelings, and came clean.

  She apologized for not noticing in the restaurant, because she had been too absorbed in her own devastation. Now that she has stopped by Hackney several times, she finds that Ramsey’s illness provides them a common quality of convalescence—if she is to indulge the conceit that Ramsey is getting better. Some afternoons she intersects with visiting snooker stars. Stephen Hendry and, more surprisingly, Ronnie O’Sullivan are especially attentive, and she feels sheepish about ever having dismissed Hendry as boring, or O’Sullivan as uncouth. In person, Hendry has a sly sense of humor, O’Sullivan a heart. She brings the odd shepherd’s pie or rice pudding, which she doubts that Ramsey eats. They are not close enough—yet, anyway—for her to help him with what he really requires: sponge baths, or assistance with the bedpan. Of course, he does have a day nurse from the NHS, a terribly possessive middle-aged Irishwoman who is obviously a snooker fan, and who is always trying to get visitors to cut it short. Upstairs, she teases Ramsey that the nurse fancies him like mad. Frail and preternaturally aged, he finds the joke much funnier than she intends. Despite the sadness of it all, she is relieved to have found someone else to care for. When he urges her to go live her own life, she assures him that he is doing her the favor, and she means it.

  Mercifully, the electricity has never returned; the prongs no longer even clatter against the socket. Timing is everything.

  On her own account, she has resolved to eat proper meals with vegetables. Yet so far by the time she gnaws through some crackers and cheese, she can’t get it together to steam broccoli. (After these insane walkabouts, she’s losing weight. But if she’s honest, she makes up for plenty of lost calories with alcohol.) As she stands over the cutting board to catch the crumbs, her eyes roam the rows of spices beside the stove: juniper berries, wild thyme, onion seeds. Now that she has no one to cook for, the spices will stale. The oils in the exotic condiments will go rancid—aubergine pickle, Thai satay.

  The time may come soon that she’ll have to go through all this crap, because the flat is too large and dear for a single tenant. A second month in a row, on April 1 the rent was quietly deducted from Lawrence’s current account. She can’t allow him to keep paying her expenses if he doesn’t live here. He should have canceled all the direct debits weeks ago—the TV
license, the council tax bill. She resolves, weakly, to pay him back. Nevertheless, a gnawing anxiety of her abrupt single life is money. Maybe it’s a girl thing. She has salted away over a hundred grand of her own. But no nest-egg could be large enough to make her feel as safe as she did for fifteen years, most of them with little in the bank—yet with a strong, capable, resourceful man as her protector.

  She has learned the hard way that there is no safety. That there never was any safety. So it is the illusion of safety that she misses, nothing more. Ruefully, she conjures what has long been her touchstone, the apotheosis of refuge—that tent holding its own against the elements in Talbot Park when she was fourteen. In the end, it was a token of false security, really, of the dangers of ever allowing yourself to imagine that you’ll be okay. Because she should have sealed the seams. By three a.m., the tiny drops along the stitching had joined to streams. A dark line of waterlog was crawling from the feet of their sleeping bags predatorily toward the necks, and the girls got cold. Shaking and drenched, they had huddled down the muddy path to a pay phone outside the office, which was closed. But now there was no one to ring, like Sarah’s mother, to take her home.

  She uncorks a Montepulciano. She will dispatch the bottle by self-deceivingly small measures. Thank God the vodka is finished. She has not allowed herself to replace it. She flops into the rust-colored armchair. She has yet, after more than two months, to splay on his green sofa. She lights a fag, her third of the day, one of the dubious privileges of solitude. She is free to kill herself by degrees without being hounded. But she misses his castigation. The voice in her own head is tinnier, and merely whispers that she will quit altogether “soon” or “next month.” During those first few weeks, she got up to a pack a day. She didn’t care. She has clawed that back to half. Still, the carpet has begun to exude the telltale reek of a smoker’s lair. A real smoker.

  The drags are contemplative. It’s nice here. But she despairs that she made all the decorating decisions herself, which leaves her surrounded with only her own purchases, her own tastes. He lived so lightly here. Rather than feel tormented by numerous reminders, she wishes that he’d left more behind. His coffee glass—she bought even that. His clothes—stowed; she would have to open drawers and wardrobes to go looking for her own sadness. There had been some laundry, but that was tenderly folded weeks ago, and now if she presses those flannel shirts to her face they smell only of Persil.