Ordinary Decent Criminals. Lionel Shriver

       chapter one

       Hot Black Bush

      Between them, pure alcohol coiled from the turned-back lid; the air curled with its distortion. Vaporous, the face stretched longer and thinner than the pillar it began. The shimmer off the vat worried his expression, tortured his eyebrows in the heat, further emphasizing a figure already overdrawn: too wild, too skinny, too tall.

      As she stood on tiptoe to lean over the wooden tub, on the other side the tall man saw only the dark tremble of a girl’s unruly hair. He wondered at letting children tour a distillery. Then, why shouldn’t they be confirmed early, sip at the chalice—Bushmills was the real Church of Ireland, after all. Later, he would catch sight of her down the walk toward bottling and not recognize the grown woman in black leather bouncing the red motorcycle helmet against her thigh. Though she was barely over five feet, at any distance her slight proportions created the optical illusion that she was not small, rather, farther away.

      The man did not need to clutch the rim, but leaned at the waist to inhale. When the girl looked up he saw she was not ten or twelve but at least twenty. Their glances met; both took a deep breath. The man reared back again, snapping upright; the woman went flat on her feet. Tears rose and noses began to run. The fumes went straight to the center, acupuncture. The staves of the cavernous room warped cozily around them. The man could no longer remember what had so concerned him moments ago; for the first time in months he felt his face relax. Across the tub, she watched the lines lift from him and decided he was not fifty, as she’d first thought, but thirty-two or -three. In fact, if she’d asked him just then how old he was, he might have claimed yes, he was thirty-three, because the last ten years had been trying and he could not remember anything trying while breathing over a washback with this pretty girl. Christ, he missed whiskey.

      “Better than shots,” she admitted. “This is my second time through.”

      The alcohol evaporated from his head. He recalled what he’d been sorting out, and returned to one and a half million paupers would never get a full vote in the EEC. Her twang was unmistakable: bloody hell, she was American.

      Their group had moved on; the two treated themselves to one more inhalation of the wort, which roiled between them like whipped cream gone off, Guinness on a stove. Its surface churned and kneaded into itself, a little sickening, too brown. The American let down the wooden flat regretfully. “We’ll be missed.” As her boots echoed down the washbacks, she passed a beefy man at the door.

      “Farrell, lad. A wee five-minute tour and you’re away.”

      Farrell. She remembered his name.

      Farrell waited, not wanting to walk with her. He’d no desire to violate the intimacy of their brief debauch with the disappointing whine of an American tourist. His head cleared, the last two minutes had encapsulated his life: the giddy rise and fall of it. Excessive indulgence to excessive discipline, and that was substances, though women the same—the clasping of hands over tables, the grappling in the back of taxis, the sweaty riot in the hotel, so quickly giving way to veiled excuses, impossible schedules, the dread cold quiet of a woman’s phone unrung. Increasingly, he had an eye outside the abandon, the desperate swings; all he could see was pattern, and in this way nothing changed. It was harder and harder to perceive anything at all as actually happening.

      Estrin Lancaster was not the only American on this tour; the piping comments of just the couple she longed to escape had led her to bottling. The two were Northeasterners, though Estrin could no longer decode their accents into states. Abroad the better part of ten years now, Estrin was growing stupid about her own country, and had to admit that while she plowed her Moto Guzzi over the Middle East she hadn’t a clue what was going on in Pennsylvania; and that this, like any ignorance, was no claim to fame. Rather, she’d made a trade-off, a real important trade-off, because there was a way you could know the place you were born that you never got a crack at anywhere else, and Estrin didn’t have that chance anymore.

      These years her access to U.S. news had been spotty, and lately, when Americans glommed onto her—a national characteristic—she didn’t get their jokes. She was currently following the Birmingham Six appeal, with all the unlikelihood of a British reversal—the more miserable the evidence on which the six Irishmen were convicted, the more certain the decision would remain, for didn’t people defend their weakest opinions with the most violence? Yet Estrin barely skimmed articles about presidential primaries in the States. She knew she was lost when in her Irish Times she no longer understood Doonesbury. The detachment had become disquieting.

      “Did you notice all those L’s and R’s on people’s cars, Dale? Do you suppose that means Loyalist and Republican?”

      Estrin flinched. The stickers meant Learner and Restricted, and she saw locals look to each other and smile. No one corrected the woman’s mistake. Estrin didn’t either. Simply, she didn’t want to be seen with them: sheer badness. Americans embarrassed her. They made no distinction between what came into their heads and what came out—an endless stream of petty desires and ill-examined impressions dribbling from a hole in the face, the affliction amounted to mental incontinence.

      Better you’re not seen running after me, MacBride,” said Farrell coldly to the man in the doorway.

      “Only tourists. That was the idea.”

      “We