Liz lifted the license. The black-and-white photo showed Stephen with a side parting and a blank, slightly idiotic expression.
“You’ve a bit more hair there.”
“Aye a lot more. Here.”
He reached over sharply and lifted it out of her hands, but not before she saw his name was printed on the pink plastic card as McLean, Andrew. He slipped it back into the sun visor and flipped it up.
“Andrew?” she said involuntarily.
“Oh that. It was my father’s name, but they always called me Stephen.”
“Oh.”
Here was the sign announcing YOU ARE LEAVING COUNTY LONDONDERRY—though since a republican had blacked out the LONDON, and a loyalist had come along and erased with blue paint the DERRY, and finally some misanthrope or reasonable man at the end of his tether had whitewashed the O and Y, and all of LEAVING except for the A—the sign now cheerfully explained that:
YOU ARE A C UNT
The unofficial but more typical greeting was the next sign, which had been there as long as Liz could remember, painted in foot-high letters in a mock Gothic font on the side of the gospel hall:
The wages of sin are death: but the gift of God is eternal life.
Romans 6:23
This was a place of voices, they jostled and contested with one another—a small hard town with one long road leading to a mountain—but even now the sight of sunlight shifting on those distant slopes of bog and rock and gorse made Liz’s heart give a little shiver in her chest. They drove past the agency—Liz could see her father’s receptionist, Trish, standing behind the desk in a white blouse looking into her phone—then through Monrush, smoke rising straight up from a few chimneys on the council houses. And here another voice spoke—a new sign, roughly lettered in red, white, and blue on a sheet of plywood nailed to a telephone pole:
In Texas murder gets you the electric chair. In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.
She gestured up through the windscreen at the sign.
“What’s that about?”
“Oh, that Shinner Declan Keogh. The one who escaped from the Maze. It’s out of date now anyways.”
“How come?”
“Well, he’s now replaced wee Kieran Smith as our ‘local representative’ for Stormont. You know Kieran’s the new MP?”
“That’s right.”
Liz did not know, and when Liz did not know something she had found that “That’s right” was a usefully ambiguous formulation to reply with, particularly in the classroom. But that was in New York.
In Northern Ireland, Stephen said, “What’s right?”
“About the new MP.”
“Yeah … I just said it was. Oh they look after their own. McGuinness handed it on to Smith, and the Unionist was a fella called Barrett. Now Barrett’s father was a caretaker at Springhill. Smith was the main suspect in his killing, they say.”
“I heard that.”
There was a long pause. Stephen shifted into third. They passed the new estates—dozens and dozens of white blocky constructions littering Morgan’s Hill; they’d been erected quickly in the years of madness and entitlement when everyone could buy everything and did. The houses had something childish and optimistic about them as they strained for a little grandeur; flanking each primary-colored front door were thick fluted Doric columns.
“I’ll say this. It’s all one sided in any case. There’s no consultancies coming our way.”
Our way? She wound the window down a few inches and let cool air into the car. There was the lancing smell of slurry. Our way. Our way or the highway. Press-ganged back into the caste, no questions asked. Impossible not to be picked for a side. If you tried to sit on the fence, you came to realize that you couldn’t move, not an inch, for you would topple off and land on one side or the other, covered in bullshit. The north was thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. It would outlast us all. There was no way round it. What was the word? There was a French word. Uncontournable. There was no getting round it. For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
At university she wrote her master’s dissertation on the special kinship groups of Ulster. Her home province was a nightmare of disorder in which she tried to find an order. She became an anthropologist, she told herself and others, because her childhood in that province, state, statelet, made her search for reason in the most unreasonable of places. The work she loved—Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, even Foucault—shared the desire to tease new meaning from habituated reality. For how could you live here and not be sad? It was absurd: You didn’t “believe” in something if you were born into it. You accepted it, you acquiesced, you submitted, you lost—and you gave up the chance to become yourself, to come to conclusions of your own. One must be very naive or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.
“A mess. A complete mess. And that crowd at Stormont, sure they couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.”
She pressed the tip of her index finger against the side of the pad of her thumb, shaping from her hand a triangle. She made the other match it, touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs to each other. Were there other triangles in a world of circles and squares? Was everyone a triangle pretending to squarehood or circledom? Who was Andrew McLean? The triangle, the circle, the square? Her hands looked like a mask. She wanted to ask him but didn’t. I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.
“True enough.”
They were through the roundabout.
She was almost home and then she was.
And here on the doorstep were her parents: her mother—elegant in black slacks and a caramel cashmere sweater—watering the dripping hanging baskets; and behind her Kenneth, directing, grayer and frailer and smaller than in the memory but now waving with both hands, and pleased to see his daughter. She could see that clearly now, the real pleasure that she brought to them both just by being in their world, at least at first.
As she hugged her mother, Stephen carried her rucksack into the hallway and her father commented on the rain holding off. Then he looked down and said, “Now what in God’s name is that?”
The dog was jumping up at her knees. She stooped and picked her up.
“Atlantic. You remember me telling you about the dog?”
“I do, yes. I didn’t know you were bringing it over.”
“Her.”
Atlantic gave Liz’s ear an explorative lick and Kenneth grimaced.
“I found her on a subway platform.”
Judith said to Stephen, “Will you sit and have a cup of tea? Or coffee? We have a new machine.”
“I really should fly on, actually. I have to be in Tandragree by twelve.” Stephen felt the little extra silence Judith greeted this with, and said, “Maybe a quick coffee.”
“It’s very good of you to go and pick this one up,” Judith continued, to Stephen, who did not disguise in his face the fact that he thought it was good of him too.
“Well, Alison’s off to a fitting there for the dress, isn’t she, and I know you guys have enough to be getting on with.”
“I