The Post-Birthday World (21 page)

snooker stories.
”
“I listen to you talk about Algeria. What’s the difference?”
“Nothing short of enormous is what’s the difference. You’re an intelligent woman! You’re used to being around people who care about the world and who read the newspaper. Think
Swish
has bought a broadsheet in the last
five years
? He probably thinks ‘BSE’ is an honorary award from the Queen! Before he dropped out of school altogether, he skipped most of his classes. Don’t ask me, ask him—because he’s proud of it! Sneaking off to that Clapham snooker club instead of learning to spell D-O-G. Truth is, I’m not even sure he knows how to
read.
I bet if you gave him one of those tests for whether you’re compos mentis—who’s the president of the United States and can you count backwards from one hundred— that chump would fail hands-down without the benefit of Alzheimer’s! Irina—the guy is a
fucking idiot
!”
“He may not have a PhD from Columbia, but he is naturally bright.” Some meager defense of the man she loved seemed an obligation; later she could tell herself she tried.
“His head is full of little red balls, Irina. And
that’s all.
”
“I thought you liked him,” she mumbled.
“Liked. Yes. Past tense. If I ever see that bastard again, he’s toast. He’s taller than I am, but scrawny and weak.” Lawrence formed a circle the diameter of a quarter. “His wrists are about this big around. I could deck him in three seconds.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said wearily, robotically making coffee.
“I
like
our Pakistani newsagent. That doesn’t mean I’d want to spend night after night listening to the guy tell me about the exciting magazines he sold today. A little Ramsey goes a long way. Couple times a year has been plenty. One solid week of you-wouldn’t-believe-the-angle-Igot-on-the-blue and he’s going to bore you under the table.”
The milk steamer gagged, its barrage of obliterating white noise only driving Lawrence to further raise his voice. “Know anything about what snooker players’ lives are like? How much they’re on the road? How many broads they plug? How much coke they snort? How much they smoke? How much they gamble? How much they
drink
?”
“Ramsey is pretty moderate, in context,” she submitted numbly.
“Know anything about the ‘context’? Jimmy White disappears on his wife for weeks on end going on benders in Ireland. Alex Higgins is so dissipated that he’s reduced to suing tobacco companies over his throat cancer. Far from being the millionaire he ought to be, Higgins mooches off his few remaining friends for handouts, hustles amateurs in backstreet snooker clubs—and half the time still
loses
—and now has no fixed address!”
This went on for
hours.
It was clearly Lawrence’s intention to wear her down, to convince her of the folly of her affections with what were, in fact, well-conceived debating points. But this was not a battle that could be won with argument. He might as well have been thwapping a rubber ball relentlessly against a squash court in the expectation of knocking down the wall. By the end he wilted back onto the sofa in the exhaustion of having played a marathon match. The wall was still standing.

When Irina emerged from the cocoon of her carriage in Bournemouth it was already dark and closing on six-thirty p.m. In no mood to boldly make her way forth on foot with a skeletal map from railway information, Irina sprang for a taxi. When she named her destination, the chatty driver asked if she was off to the Grand Prix.

“Of course.” Like lovers everywhere who cannot say the name of their beloved enough times, she volunteered, “Ramsey Acton is playing Ronnie O’Sullivan tonight.”

“Swish has seen better days, ain’t he?” said the cabbie. “But he’s old guard, and it’s bloody amazing the boy’s still at the table. And his form’s come on of late. I missed it ’cos I had a shift, but they say the showdown with Hendry last night was cracking. Ramsey snapped those balls like a whip, he did. To make your ears ring.”

“I’m afraid I missed most of it, too,” she said wistfully. “Which is too bad, because Ramsey’s—a friend of mine.”

“That the truth? Them snooker blokes got a fair number of friends, I wager.”
“Actually, Ramsey’s not all that social.”
The cabbie compressed sure -you -know -Ramsey - Acton -and -theQueen-herself-is-coming-round-to-my-flat-for-tea into a politic grunt. “The Rocket—now, that pup is cut from the same cloth as your Ramsey Acton. They say he’s inherited the same touch. A momentum player as well. But the way the kid carries on, sure he didn’t inherit the class. Swish is nothing if not a gentleman, and you never hear him question a call. But at the weekend you should have heard O’Sullivan go on about the state of the baize. Raised Cain with the ref over whether his toe left the floor on a long red. I wager the fella gets a right smart fine for the ruckus from the Association—not that he can’t afford it. We all give the kid a break of course, his father in prison and all. Hard cheese. But you don’t get a free pass on that excuse forever. Whole country’s waiting for that lad to grow up.”
“Ramsey says that O’Sullivan has unprecedented natural talent, but if he doesn’t become more self-possessed as a person he’ll never exploit it to the full.” Irina was practicing. This brand of banter was apparently the conversational bread and butter of her new life. Moreover, she should grow accustomed to the eccentricities of her paramour being up for knowing discussion among several million people.
“Seems to me I heard him say the same thing,” said the driver. “On the telly.”
She kept her inside track to herself for the remainder of the short ride.

Irina entered the mammoth red-brick structure with a stab of disappointment. On television, snooker matches looked so intimate— the tables aglow in the dark, the balls pulsing with the warmth and vibrancy of an Edward Hopper. Though snooker had come into its own in the 80s as a high-stakes national sport, the game had gestated in a host of smoke-fogged local clubs in down-at-the-heel towns like Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool. These grungy bolt-holes were magnets not only for boys mitching school but for men dodging wives, their fingers stained from hand-rolled fags, veins burst from liquid suppers, complexions pasty from curry-chip carryouts when the hall finally booted them out on the streets at two a.m. The sport’s dark hint of deviance had given rise to the aphorism that a good snooker game is a “sign of a misspent youth.” To Irina, snooker was old-world: funky, close, and low-lit. It was the Britain of flat, room-temperature bitter, threadbare velvet bar stools, greasy pork pasties, and thick, indecipherable accents.

Yet the cavernous Bournemouth International Centre was the stuff of Tony Blair’s slick new ad campaign “Cool Britannia,” which promoted the UK not as a poky empire in retreat, but as an MBA model of efficiency and progress. “Cool Britannia” bannered the island’s impersonal chrome-clad wine bars, its thriving information-technology sector, its chichi restaurant fare of lemongrass Chilean sea bass. Bournemouth International was shiny and spanking new. Under glaring overheads, the lobby’s floor was polished crushed marble, its ten-foot windows exposing the black expanse of Bournemouth Bay. At jarring odds with snooker’s cozy, storied character, this venue had no memory, and no soul.

Irina bustled to the booking desk, only to learn that the evening match was sold out.

“Is there any way you can contact Ramsey Acton in his dressing room?” she asked. “I’m sure he could get me a seat if he tried.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it, madam,” said the man. His brittle politeness made a mockery of good manners; the British often use decorum as a weapon. “But the players go on in a matter of minutes. You wouldn’t want to disturb your man as he collects his thoughts.”
Your man
was only an expression, and Irina had to stop herself from insisting,
You don’t understand, he really
is
“my man.”
She struggled to keep her voice level. “I think you’ll find that if you do contact Mr. Acton, he’ll be very, very grateful that you alerted him to my presence. He’s not expecting me, but he would be very pleased to learn I was able to make the match after all. The name is Irina. Irina McGovern.”
Face set in stone, the ticket seller neglected to jot down her name. “I’m sure that
Mr. Acton
is grateful to be playing to a full house,” he said, “and sorry that any number of punters in addition to yourself have been turned away.”
Alas, her voice grew shrill. “
Mr. Acton
will be very, very cross to learn that you refused to apprise him of my arrival, and if you don’t at least sell me a ticket—you
know
you have a few in reserve—I’m afraid you could get into BIG TROUBLE.”
“Is that so,” he said flintily. “I’m touched by your concern. But I reckon I’ll take my chances, madam. Next?”
Threatening the man had been a mistake. Exiled from the counter, Irina began to sob. If it wasn’t her habit to weep in public, she hardly made it a habit either of walking out on perfectly marvelous men and throwing herself at snooker players. Making a spectacle of herself was the least of her problems.
“Sorry—” The portly character with barbarously short hair looked like a bouncer, but his touch on her sleeve was gentle. “Couldn’t help but overhear in the queue. As it happens, me mate was poorly this evening, and I’ve a ticket only bound for the bin. Would you take it? Never could bear to see a lady cry.”
Irina wiped her eyes and accepted the proffered ticket. “Oh, thank you so much! You’ve no idea how important this is. You’ve saved my life. Can I pay you for it?”
“No, I won’t take your money. Just chuffed it won’t go to waste, like.”
“Oh, it won’t be wasted. I’m not just anyone, whatever that ticket agent thought.” Unable to contain herself, she blurted, “Ramsey, you see—I’m in love with him!”
Her benefactor shot her a sad smile. “Wouldn’t be the first one, sweetheart.”
Irina chided herself: of course the man would mistake her for one more smitten fan. But then, according to Lawrence, that’s precisely what she’d become.

Irina followed the signs to Purbeck Hall, outside of which bookies had scrawled the odds for this match on a white board in felt-tip marker. Ramsey Acton paid five to one. (How awful, to have other people’s lack of faith in you put in such brutal numerical terms.) Delightfully, she was directed to the second row, albeit right next to the burly young man who’d bequeathed her the ticket. She should have reasoned before she made a fool of herself that of course if he had a pair of tickets she’d be sitting beside the man for hours. She tried to shoot him the cordial smile of a normal person.

With game-show brassiness, an MC announced that the Rocket “needed no introduction” and proceeded to introduce him. Irina was familiar with the statistics. O’Sullivan had broken the very records— fastest maximum break, fastest clearance, youngest winner of a ranking tournament—that Ramsey had set.

Ronnie emerged from the curtain, raising his cue high to his rowdy fans. In his early twenties, he was coarsely handsome, though not pretty. Pale with black, longish locks that were probably washed every day but somehow managed to look greasy, he had a loutish aspect, his face roughly hewn, his eyebrows lowering, every feature a tad too thick.

By now, Irina was well familiar with the Rocket. His background was colorful: O’Sullivan’s parents ran a porn shop, until his father was put inside for cold-cocking a black pub patron and his mother was incarcerated for tax evasion. While both porn and tax evasion paid well, his accent was impeccably proletarian; in post-match interviews, he asserted the likes of, “I shou-ah known beh-ah.” (One of the luxuries of which the underprivileged were deprived in the United Kingdom was consonants.) As for Ronnie’s game, it was swift, aggressive, and—when he was on form, which he wasn’t always—impossibly perfect.

Lawrence detested him. Ronnie’s tendency to boo-hoo when he lost a match, to go before the cameras in a state of crestfallen dejection and to forswear playing snooker ever again in his entire life in the spirit of taking his marbles and going home, was in Lawrence’s view the conduct of a consummate baby. The ultimate unforgivable to Lawrence, Ronnie was an inarticulate yob, an

idiot savant
—“emphasis on the
idiot.
”

Ramsey’s fatherly concern that the boy would never exploit his potential unless he shored up his all-or-nothing ego (Ronnie was either bloated on adulation like a succulent, or as wilted and bruised as a crushed petunia) was more complex. Famously gallant, Ramsey was averse to admitting to rancorous emotions like resentment, envy, or bitterness. But these would be apt. That taxi driver had iterated the collective consensus: in terms of technique if not temperament, Ronnie O’Sullivan was Ramsey Acton resurrected. As many a parent is ambivalent over a child’s success, Ramsey was uneasy recognizing his own younger self sprinting around the table firing colors into pockets like mortars into enemy dugouts. Nobody likes to be replaced.

The MC introduced Ramsey “Swish” Acton; always being described as merely a “finalist” in six World Championships must have smarted. As the curtain parted, cheers rose from older members of the audience. In comparison to the roar from O’Sullivan’s boosters, the duration of applause was noticeably shorter.

Nevertheless, Irina’s heart melted. Crudely handsome maybe, but Ronnie O’Sullivan couldn’t hold a candle to Ramsey Acton. In equine terms, Ronnie was a dray, while Ramsey was a racehorse—long legs lean as well-bred fetlocks, the edgy, pitched vibration that emanated from his figure that of a high-strung handicapper on tight rein. There was a classical refinement to his elongated face and an elegant, vertical grace to his bearing that O’Sullivan’s vulgar and swaggering presence couldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Irina’s ferocious clapping failed to attract Ramsey’s attention. She wasn’t sure if she should be trying to catch his eye or not, for she was nervous of distracting him from the task at hand. The one thing that would never endear her to the man was damaging in the slightest his chances of winning a snooker match.

The lights dimmed, the crowd quieted, and the game commenced. Ronnie broke, dislodging a single red marginally pottable from the balk cushion. Rashly, Ramsey took it on. Rash and brave are kissing cousins, and the red went in. Ramsey built a splendid break of fifty-six, although not quite ample enough to take the frame. Alas, once Ronnie returned to the table, he hogged it like a fatty at an all-you-can-eat buffet. After clinching the frame at seventy-fifty-six, the Rocket sank the final black, ricocheting the white around three cushions just to show off. Bad form, if typical.