The Post-Birthday World (31 page)

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was not a salutary event in Irina’s life. Yet it was certainly salutary for Lawrence Trainer, which the media moguls of the BBC and CNN were not about to let her forget. As a recognized expert at ready hand to London TV stations, Lawrence was

everywhere.
For days she couldn’t switch on the set without confronting her ex, who pierced her with an expression that she interpreted as chiding. Lawrence was ambitious. Lawrence was well regarded. Lawrence was doing his job. Lawrence didn’t drink too much and Lawrence didn’t smoke too much—at all—and Lawrence didn’t trot along in accordance with someone else’s schedule and thereby demote himself from player to fan.

He looked handsome, the brown suit he wore in interviews bringing out the warmth of his umber eyes. His delivery was so self-assured that she had to wonder if he was doing better without her than she’d have expected—which was good, of course, very, very good, so why did his fine form make her feel forlorn? Quoting verbatim, he seemed to have memorized the entire document, and was ready with an opinion on its every aspect. That old dinner-table scorn emerged whenever the interviewer raised the issue of the agreement’s wholesale release of paramilitary prisoners, a “get-out-of-jail-free card” with which Lawrence was utterly disgusted. “This means a raft of convicted killers,” he told Jeremy Paxman on BBC2, “will end up serving a shorter sentence than they would for an outstanding parking ticket. But anything for

peace,
right? Justice is expendable.”

Lawrence was popular with the media as the sole Cassandra in a chorus of Pollyannas. In their eagerness to see the back of all that mayhem, most commentators showered the agreement with flowers, and didn’t examine the fine print. Only Lawrence noted that the supermajority required for passage of politically significant legislation in the assembly was a formula for deadlock, and that the biggest sticking-points in negotiations— revamping of the police force and paramilitary disarmament—hadn’t been resolved but put off for a very rainy day indeed. His lone voice of forewarning was drowned by drunken high spirits from every other corner, but seemed only the braver for flying in the face of prevailing winds. Whether or not he was right, she was proud of him.

Yet Irina had a sixth sense that it would really be better, wouldn’t it—

anything for
peace,
right?
—if Ramsey were to miss altogether these appearances of his predecessor. Such premonitions descended often these days, leading her to elude any line of conversation in which Lawrence’s name might possibly crop up. But since she thought about Lawrence often—how could she not?—and most of her stories from the last decade involved him in some way, that meant eradicating from her discourse many of the very confidences that drew her close to her husband. Perhaps too much caution was dangerous.

Since Ramsey was no more interested in the Good Friday Agreement than in the migration patterns of caribou, it had been fairly easy to deprive him of these newscasts, although on a couple of evenings she barely got the set off as he was inserting his pass key. One night when he was safely at the practice table, with Lawrence once more holding forth on ITV, she was overcome with such a melting tenderness that, though she knew it was silly, and self-dramatizing like her mother, she rested her cheek against the screen.

Her timing was poor. The remote was back on the bed when Ramsey walked in the door. Irina sprang from the tube, searched in vain for the power button that she’d never used, and grabbed a sock. “The screen was dusty,” she said, hastily wiping it down. She got her hands on the remote, but too late.

“That’s Anorak Man.”

“You know, you’re right!” she said brightly.
“You ain’t telling me you hear the voice of the bloke what you used to

live with, and see his face big as life on the telly, and you don’t recognize the git.”

“Well, of course, now that I’m paying attention, I
recognize
him . . .”
“You knew he’d be on the telly, didn’t you. That’s why you pushed me to go and practice. It’s called
appointment TV.
”
“But Ramsey—Lawrence has been on every channel for a week!”
Error.
“That so. And you been a faithful viewer. Funny you ain’t mentioned you seen him and that. Not once.”
“Why would I? He’s talking about the Good Friday Agreement, which puts you to sleep.”
“’Cause I ain’t
intellectual.
I don’t care about
world affairs.
All I care about is
snooker.
”
That’s right
would not exhibit the height of diplomacy. “You can’t begrudge him a few days in the sun. Experts on
Northern Ireland
don’t get many. And think about it—he must have to see your face pop up on television all the time.”
“He don’t have to watch
you
watching me on the telly, does he now?”
“No,” she said. “He has to watch, in his imagination anyway, me fucking you blind every night instead. Who’s got the better deal?”
Of course, that was only the beginning, and, like so many knockdown-drag-outs before it, this one carried on into the wee-smalls. But this time what stayed with her afterwards wasn’t another self-admonition to conduct her life with Ramsey as if Lawrence Trainer had never been born, but the haunting image of those deep-set brown eyes, harrowing from the screen with reproach. What was she doing in Plymouth? Since when was her solution to too much time on her hands to jack up her consumption of
cigarettes
? For that matter, since when did she have time on
her hands? Didn’t she once have a horror of being idle? Puffin had been
decent enough about giving her an extra six months to deliver
The Miss
for “personal reasons,” but shouldn’t she save begging such
Ability Act
indulgence for illness or emergency? Had she lined up her next job yet?
Didn’t she used to make sure there was always another project in the
pipeline? And didn’t she miss those feverish afternoons, when she was so
consumed by an illustration that she forgot to eat? Nothing wrong with
having a good time on occasion, but wasn’t such absorption once, more
than drinking and fucking and bantering about next to nothing with
snooker players, her very definition of a good time? Somehow Lawrence
had morphed from ex to alter ego, her good angel, the voice of her
straight-A self.
His transformation was not altogether in her head. Maybe taking advantage of her carte-blanche access to Ramsey’s laptop (which he mostly
used for responding to fan mail on his own Web site) for this purpose was
scurrilous, but Irina had established tentative e-mail contact with her
former partner. She was careful to pursue the correspondence only when
Ramsey was certain not to walk in; superstitiously, she changed the password on her Yahoo! account every week. Her notes were discreet, allusions to frequent “differences of opinion” arising in her new life left
opaque. She kept from Lawrence just how debauched her average evening
had grown, and to how many tournaments—like, all of them—she had
accompanied Ramsey this season.
Of course, to regale Lawrence with the high times would have been
cruel—the raucous songfests in bars, the amniotic oblivion of waking in
Ramsey’s arms. But what she most protected him from would have been
far more hurtful. In defiance of Lawrence’s bleak forecast that a life with
Ramsey promised only dreary reruns of the same old snooker stories, what
reliably kept the pair up until four in the morning was less often sex than
talk.
Ramsey listened; Lawrence had waited for her to finish. So driven
was Ramsey to dissect
the main thing
that he might have learned the occasional value of the unsaid.
By contrast, discussions with Lawrence had always a strange tendency
to truncate. When appraising an acquaintance, he would slap a hasty label on the subject of their speculation—“He’s a fool”—like pasting an address on a parcel at the post office.
Whoosh,
it was down the chute; there was nothing more to say. With Ramsey, conversation only took off—and could wend on wing for hours—at the very point at which, with Lawrence, their earthbound craft had sputtered to a halt. Regarding other people, Ramsey was as fascinated by the
fine points
as Lawrence was by the minutiae of the Good Friday Agreement. So long as she steered her husband gently away from snooker, like guiding him around an open manhole, he displayed remarkably keen instincts about, say, her father, who, he noted, clearly hid behind foreign accents because he had lost touch with the sound of his own voice. Or Irina would remember how, when she was twelve, her mother had kneeled solicitously at the dentist’s, murmuring tenderly that she’d never have conceded to these bothersome braces for cosmetic reasons, but only because Irina’s dentist claimed that they were a “medical necessity.” Ramsey exclaimed, “What a cow! Your mum would keep you from getting your teeth fixed if it was
only
so you’d be pretty?” Funny, Irina had never considered that snippet appalling before.
And while it was true that Northern Ireland plunged Ramsey into a coma, in relation to many other issues of the day he could profitably apply the same natural intuition about what made people tick, even if he had trouble keeping the facts straight. Lawrence had kept nothing but facts straight. Lawrence focused on the
what,
Ramsey on the
who.
For Ramsey, politics was about particular, barmy people getting up to no good. He said Milosevic had a face “like a baby what’s just soiled his nappies—and is right pleased you’ve to clean up the mess.” When two boys murdered several fellow students with their grandfather’s shotguns in Arkansas, Irina was mystified; Ramsey said, “Well, in your country, they ain’t going to impress their girlfriends by getting high marks in English, are they?” Clinton’s apology for slavery on a trip to Africa elicited a snort. “What’s the use in apologizing for something you didn’t do? Sanctimonious git—he’s busting with pride! When you’re really sorry, you’re ashamed of yourself.” And a casual stroll by the television news could occasion comments surprising astute. “Sounds like Marvel Comics, don’t it? Can you believe your president and the PM both say ‘weapons of mass destruction’ with a straight face?”
But then, the very,
very
last thing she would ever tell Lawrence was that even discussions of current events with Ramsey were funnier and more reflective than Lawrence’s terse lectures while washing dishes, so her e-mails tended to be short. Lawrence’s e-mails were even shorter. He did sometimes indulge in a savage diatribe on the subject of Ramsey. (Although out of spousal loyalty she probably should have told him to keep his disagreeable thoughts on her husband to himself, somehow she could never quite bring herself to disclose to Lawrence that she and Ramsey had married.) Yet his dominant running theme was that at all costs she must return to her work. He was right. Lawrence knew her so well. Like prodding her with clues to a word on the tip of her tongue—
It begins with I
—Lawrence could remind her who she was.

Just as Irina was working up to a firm resolve to rededicate herself to her own occupation, the next tournament on the calendar would have to be the World Championship—the one tournament that Ramsey might most reasonably expect her to attend. Hence Irina acceded, but for the first time begrudged the gesture as a bridge too far.

In such hushed tones did players and commentators alike speak of “the Crucible” in Sheffield that she had pictured the venue for the championship as old and gilded, garlanded on its grand façade with stonecarved olive branches and cornered with gargoyles, its theater ornate with velvet-lined boxes and glittering chandeliers. What a disappointment! The real thing was a hulking concrete affair harkening back no further than the architecturally inaugust 1960s. Its lino was gritty, its carpeting thin, the interior’s overall atmosphere that of a failing public high school. So even the building put Irina in a foul mood.

Now, by this time Irina had seen an awful lot of snooker. She had learned most of the fiddly rules, how a perfectly tied score was resolved by a “respotted black.” Furthermore, when watching Ramsey himself Irina was implicitly invested in the results. Victory or defeat would determine whether later that night Ramsey would carouse in manic elation, throwing her in the air and jigging around their suite to Charlie Parker, or would brood through a room-service dinner and pick a quarrel. Nonetheless, a whole back-to-back snooker season involved

thousands
of frames. As fully as Irina might now appreciate the fact that no frame is ever perfectly repeated, after seven months of snooker OD they had started to look mighty goddamned similar to her. Slumping through the first few rounds of the World, she had to admit that she was bored. Not just a little bored, either. Unrelentingly bored, jump-out-of-her-skin bored, so bored that she wanted to kill.

Ramsey made it all the way to the final again this year, to Irina’s exasperation, for in the privacy of her head she was now unapologetically chafing for him to drop out early so that they could please, finally go home. Be that as it may, when at the end of the match Ramsey extended his hand in congratulations to John Higgins and then accepted the seventh runner-up trophy of his career—not an elegant silver urn, but yet another clunky glass plate—no amount of grace could disguise a devastation that any decent wife would find anguishing in her own husband’s face.

Here she was married to a man with a singular talent, the stuff of fanzine profiles and interviews on the BBC; strangers badgered him on the street. The whole world was entranced with Ramsey Acton’s snooker game, with the notable exception of his wife. These days, rather than be captivated by his uncanny long pots, ingenious doubles, and dazzling plants, she reliably watched Ramsey’s matches with eyes at half-mast. What most distinguished the man to others had become the very excellence that she not only took for granted, but could no longer see. As she threaded guiltily from the guests-and-family section to console him, a line from that seminal birthday dinner returned: