The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online Page A

which didn’t include rejections or crap sales or having to compromise with illustrators like you. You know, she pictured touring libraries and reading aloud to gobsmacked six-year-olds, all big-eyed with chins in their hands. Fucking hell, she should have played snooker, if that’s the sort of crowd she wanted. For that matter, I’m afraid she started out with a right unrealistic picture of living with a snooker player. The lonely humdrum of me being on the tour most of the year was a shock. So she rides me to come back to London between tournaments, meantime having worked up this notion of me, this airbrushed photo like, and then when I do what she asks and Actual Ramsey rocks up, she just acts ticked off.
“I reckon the short of it is,” he said, ordering a fourth round of sake, “it’s got to be perfect, or I ain’t interested. Like you and Lawrence.”
    For years Irina had imagined that only the presence of Jude and Lawrence had made it possible for her to while away so much as ten minutes at table with Ramsey Acton. Yet apparently since 1992 those two hadn’t been facilitating Irina’s tentative relationship to Ramsey. They’d been getting in the way.
    Thus by their shared dish of green-tea ice cream, the occasion had taken on the quality of a school holiday. Lawrence would be appalled. If Lawrence were here, he’d have been nursing his single Kirin beer through his chicken teriyaki (he hated raw fish), frowning at Irina’s second sake, and by her third publicly abjuring that she had had enough; a fourth he’d not merely have discouraged but would have vetoed outright. He’d have been disgusted that she accepted an unfiltered Gauloise at the end of the meal, waving the smoke from his face and later recoiling from her breath in their minicab home—“You smell like an ash can!”—as if, had she forgone the fag, he would ever think to kiss her in the back of a taxi. It was nearly one a.m., and he’d long before have pulled back his chair and stretched with theatrical exhaustion because it was time to leave. He wasn’t obsessed with germs, but she had a funny feeling he wouldn’t have liked the fact that she and Ramsey were sharing the same bowl of ice cream. Of this much she was certain: were Ramsey to propose to them both, as he did to Irina while she regretfully stubbed out her Gauloise, that they head back to his house on Victoria Park Road to get stoned, Lawrence would have dismissed the notion as preposterous. He might have smoked a bit back in the day, but Lawrence was a grown-up now, Lawrence didn’t do drugs of any description any longer, and that meant, ipso facto, that Irina didn’t do drugs, either.
    Then again, Lawrence wasn’t here, was he? That was the holiday. So what if she said yes, and then confessed to Lawrence on his return from Sarajevo that she had stumbled off to Ramsey’s to get stoned? He’d rebuke her for acting “juvenile.” He’d remind her that she always clammed up when she got high—recalling the last time they’d tried marijuana back in ’89 on 104th Street, when she’d gawked silently at the paisley wallpaper for three hours. Curiously, the one thing Lawrence would fail to observe would be that she was (or so it was said) a handsome woman; that while Irina was married in all but law, Ramsey had been divorced for eighteen months and had made a point of the fact that he was available; that going back to his house at this hour, to smoke dope no less, could therefore be dangerously misconstrued. Why was that the one thing that Lawrence would never say? Because it was the main thing. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.
     
    Nonetheless, an acceptance of Ramsey’s outré invitation would emphatically entail keeping the