The Post-Birthday World (51 page)

The murder of Irina’s rival had the one merit of releasing all the tension from the room. The very air seemed to slacken, the ticking of the clock over the Aga cooker to grow more sluggish. The sun had risen, its streams through the curtains mockingly bright.

Irina dragged from her chair to make coffee, wincing as the grinder let loose its banshee wail, as if mourning the demise of a fellow inanimate object. She discovered that they were out of milk.

“I can’t drink straight espresso on an empty stomach,” she said leadenly. “I’m going to head out for a few things. Do you want anything?”

The halves of his splintered cue clutched in each hand, Ramsey shook his head. Thank heavens he made no bid to come along.
When Irina walked outside into the crisp morning air, she went into shock that there
was
an outside. Yet it wasn’t the great outdoors that produced this sense of relief, but getting away from Ramsey.
When she checked out at Safeway, the familiar clerk didn’t meet her eyes. Par for the course in commercial exchanges these days—so it was more curious that, after gathering herself, the clerk
did
meet Irina’s eyes, soulfully full-bore. She placed the change in Irina’s hand with solemnity, the way one pressed a coin into a child’s moist outstretched palm in the days when kids were still awed by a quarter. “Cor,” said the girl, “I’m awful sorry, like. I reckon I don’t know what else to say.”
Baffled, Irina didn’t know what else to say, either. Perhaps the change was incorrect, but she’d already plunged it into the pile in her pocket. How badly could she have been cheated if she’d only given the girl a pound? She shrugged, and a mutter of “No harm done” seemed to cover the bases. Or it should have, but the peculiar look the girl shot her in return was piercing.
The open-air market on Roman Road was already under way, and Irina was in no hurry to return to the kitchen where Ramsey would be still holding the two halves of his life in each hand. So she headed for her regular vegetable seller, and picked out some runner beans. Smiling at the merchant, she thought her face might crack; her lips hadn’t curved upward for days.
When Irina had first strolled Roman Road on Ramsey’s arm, locals were cool; the East Enders were resentful about ceding the neighborhood’s national treasure to an American. But she didn’t trade on her status, and gradually they had seemed to warm. Nevertheless, when she presented her basket of produce to the beefy man behind the cart, he, too, looked her searchingly in the eyes with an intensity that was unnerving. “Blimey,” he said. “Terrible thing, innit?”
Maybe there’d been an accident or fire nearby, but honestly she was so depleted, so underslept, and so increasingly tortured by the implications of that splintered stick of ash back in the kitchen, that she hadn’t the energy to care about some strangers’ misfortune. It wasn’t pretty, but on days like this the whole world could go to hell and she couldn’t be bothered.
No harm done
wouldn’t work this time, so she settled for a neutral
mmm.
“Here now, you take that,” said the vegetable seller, selecting three enormous navel oranges and putting them in her bag.
“Oh, but you needn’t—”
He added an avocado. She thanked him, and though she’d been pleased with herself for gaining acceptance in the area, she hadn’t realized her progress had been so considerable as to extend to free fruit. Touched, she had ambled halfway back down the road before, as an afterthought, she ducked into a newsagent to pick up a
Telegraph.
Standing before the row of broadsheets, Irina, already pale, went paler. It is possible she began to weave; she certainly felt faint, though not from lack of sleep.
Catatonic at the kitchen table, Ramsey still clutched his shattered cue. In silence, she slid the stack of newspapers onto the table, pushing his ashtray slagged with cigarette butts out of the way. In the photo on the uppermost front page, angled gray beams resembled the ashy fagends in close-up. Irina bowed her head. Tears—the only ones worth shedding amid a septic tank of wastewater spilled these last two days—spattered the photograph.
“I have never—” Her breath caught. “I have never—” She tried again. “I have never been
so ashamed.
”

�

It was at Irina’s urging that she and Lawrence watched the 2001 championship final between Ramsey and Ronnie O’Sullivan, for her partner’s romance with snooker seemed permanently to have waned. Granted, they’d not seen Ramsey for three and a half years, and he probably qualified as no more than someone they used to know. As they watched the first evening session, she wondered if Ramsey had found another woman yet, and couldn’t shake the hope, both absurd and unkind, that he hadn’t. Ramsey had become a funny mental dependency, as if another life were running alongside this one, perhaps no better or worse but certainly different, and she liked to reach out and touch it from time to time, like dipping her hand into the river from a canoe.

Ramsey was, as ever, impeccably turned out—closely shaven, not a hair out of place, his gear pressed, his pert dickie-bow in perfect parallel with the floor. The loutish-featured O’Sullivan may have been touted as a Reformed Character, but even in biddably traditional attire couldn’t help but look in comparison like a slob. Ramsey’s motions at the table were sure, smooth, and steady, and while they both played fast, Ramsey seemed brisk, O’Sullivan impatient. Ramsey sank superb pots, but never at the sacrifice of position, whereas Ronnie couldn’t resist spectacular shots designed to impress that netted him a single point. Though O’Sullivan was never overtly rude, the older player’s exquisite deportment—Ramsey always tapped the rail appreciatively whenever his opponent racked up a fine clearance—seemed to drive the younger man to a contrasting churlishness. In his chair, the Rocket slouched, allowing his expression to wash with boredom or annoyance. He spent one of Ramsey’s more stylish clearances with a towel draped over his face—presumably to retain concentration, but more likely to keep from having to watch. Though Clive Everton observed that Ramsey’s ranking had progressively deteriorated over the last three years, Irina had a gut sense that their old friend had finally arrived at his day in the sun.

“I think he’s going to win,” Irina predicted at the end of the first night, with Ramsey up ten frames to six. For Irina, the commercial success of

Ivan and the Terribles
had issued in a sumptuous era of well-wishing and optimism on others’ accounts.

“No way,” said Lawrence, whose brief newscast celebrity around the Good Friday Agreement had effected no such transformation. “The poor bastard’s cursed. And how old is the guy now? Has to be past fifty. It’s over.”

The bookies agreed with Lawrence, and before the final had put the odds of Ramsey’s victory at eight to one. Yet Ramsey held his lead the next afternoon, and went into the fourth session fourteen frames to ten.

She cajoled Lawrence into watching the last session together the following night. O’Sullivan wasn’t being a baby for once, and as Everton said “dug down deep”; before the interval, he narrowed Ramsey’s advantage to fifteen-thirteen. Not conventionally engaged by sport of any description, Irina was now so excited that she couldn’t sit still, bouncing up from her armchair to pace the carpet with leonine restiveness. Once the score notched to sixteen-fifteen, and then drew even at sixteen apiece, she became so agitated that the game was almost too painful to watch.

“What’s with you?” asked Lawrence from his sofa. “It’s only a snooker match.”

“Time was you’d never have said
only
a snooker match,
milyi.
Besides, this is electrifying as personal drama. Ramsey must have been playing this game for over thirty years. It’s his life’s dream to win this tournament. Now he’s within two frames . . . One frame! It’s seventeen-sixteen! Can you believe this?”
Irina was literally jumping up and down, and the television audience was doing the same. Ramsey’s boosters may have reduced in number over the years, but every snooker fan knew the story of Ramsey the RunnerUp. Like Lawrence, most accepted the myth that he could never win this
title, that he was cursed. The prospect of Swish breaking the spell, like
Sleeping Beauty discovering the alarm clock, produced a groundswell of
exhilaration even among the members of the audience wearing “Rotherham for the Rocket!” T-shirts.
Along with the crowd, Irina groaned and covered her face with her
hands when Ramsey missed an easy red, and let O’Sullivan in. This was
exactly the kind of sudden, inexplicable lapse under pressure that had lost
him six finals before. As O’Sullivan cleaned up to level the match again,
Lawrence chided, “I’m telling you, Ramsey can’t do it. Something in him
must not want to. His whole identity is wrapped around being this notquite. If he ever took the championship, he’d wake up the next morning
having no idea who he was. Just you watch. He’ll botch it.” “Wanna bet?” said Irina. “A thousand dollars.”
“Get out.”
“One large.”
That ample advance on
Ivan and the Terribles,
with another
six-figure contract in the pipeline, was teaching her the heady joys of
profligacy.
“Okay!” said Lawrence. “But you’ll be sorry.”
Irina was already not sorry. Even if Ramsey did bollix the deciding
frame, marshaling such fierce belief in their old friend felt splendid, and
seemed to improve his karmic odds.
“Now, that is
unfortunate
!” intoned Clive Everton. O’Sullivan was feeling the pressure himself, and his heavy-handed break-off had left a red
available to the corner pocket. He sulked back to his chair, where it was
best he got comfortable, for Ramsey not only potted that red, but proceeded to pick its little friends off the pack as if denuding a cluster of
grapes on a summer afternoon.
For the spectator, there are two kinds of sportsmen: those you trust,
and those you don’t. It is likely the divide correlates with whether the
sportsman trusts himself, but in any event watching a player in whom
you have imperfect faith fosters anxiety. Watching the kind who has it,
whatever
it
is, and knows he has it, is relaxing. Indeed, certain characters
so consistently engender an unswerving confidence in their audience that
all the tension leaves the game, and they attain a reputation as dull. Given his history, Irina would have classified Ramsey Acton, in this situation, as the kind of player who made you nervous.
Yet with $1,000 riding on his performance, as the break built to forty, forty-one, forty-eight, Irina resumed a comfortable loll in her armchair. As he approached the magic number at which O’Sullivan would need snookers, her apprehension should have been building unbearably; yet at sixty-four, sixty-five, and seventy-two Irina felt only more languidly at her ease. At seventy-three, Ramsey needed one more color to have victory assured, and he potted it. Just like that. Just as she knew he would. It was the easiest grand she’d ever trousered.
The crowd clapped wildly. Irina smiled serenely at Lawrence. The referee hushed the audience. Its result may have been conclusive, but the frame wasn’t over.
“I say,” said Clive Everton. “Ramsey Acton may have a chance at a 147!”
Snooker’s Holy Grail, unusual at the practice table and supremely rare under tournament conditions, a 147, or
maximum,
is the highest score it is possible to rack up on a single break. Indeed, Ramsey had played off the black for the entire visit so far, and meanwhile the remaining reds were spread like a whore’s legs. Thus Ramsey Acton purled around the table with the luxuriousness of having already won, and once he exceeded 100 the audience went bananas. O’Sullivan’s fans had forsaken their idol wholesale; the largely working-class crowd had abandoned the sport’s hushed, courtly conceit and reverted to type. The referee seemed to have resigned himself that hounding this rough-and-tumble rabble into silence would be like trying to shove a pit bull into a dress. Oh, a 147 was just icing on the cake; it wasn’t necessary. But then, neither was snooker.
When the last black went in to complete the maximum, the crowd erupted, and the cheers and catcalls lasted two or three minutes. The news had been dominated for months by awful public barbecues to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, whole herds crisping on hillsides while stalwart Yorkshire farmers wept like babies and rural suicides mounted; how rarely these days did anything lovely air on television.
“I wonder if it isn’t a little bit of a letdown,” Irina mused. “Getting just what you’ve always wanted.”
“Losing would be more of a letdown,” said Lawrence. “Ask me. I just lost a thousand bucks.”
“Donate it to the charity of your choice. There must be some fund for retired snooker players down on their luck. . . . Look at him! It’s so touching. He’s not blubbing, and he’s doing a good job of holding them back—but I swear he has tears in his eyes.”
Academically, she recognized how important it would be for Ramsey to have a woman with whom to share the crowning achievement of his career. But when in the hubbub following the trophy presentation no lithe, glowing little number threw her arms around that lean race-horse neck, Irina was privately pleased.

The attainment of any life’s dream was doubtless seeded with an insidious emptiness, a now-what? sensation sufficiently unpleasant as to induce a retarded nostalgia for the days when you were still tantalized by what you thought you wanted. Yet Ramsey surely preferred contending with the fact that the silver urn he clutched that night at the Crucible was just a cold, useless hunk of metal to the alternative whereby the useless hunk of metal belonged to someone else. In kind, even if in the moment the accolade might feel no more rewarding than the “moon ring” at the bottom of Cap’n Crunch, Irina herself had always yearned to win a prize. The longing felt childish. It was childish. In fact, it was the very grade-school nature of the yen—like Spacer’s pining to win a blue ribbon in his sack race—that made it so tenacious.

So when the call came in from her editor at Transworld an afternoon in latter May informing her that

Ivan and the Terribles
had been shortlisted for the Lewis Carroll Medal, Irina acted like a ten-year-old. She twirled around her studio. She cried, “Oh, rah, rah, rah!” and did not care if the neighbors could hear. But none of this gallivanting was doing it for her; the experience still wasn’t quite
happening.
The news would only arrive in a profound sense once she delivered it to Lawrence.