The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

that as it may, Irina had only seen Ramsey play on TV, and in three dimensions the twelve-by-six-foot table yawned much larger than it appeared on screen. Up close, the accuracy of his shots, the surety of their selection, and the unearthly precision with which every pot set him up for the next ball seemed inhuman. As he swung from shot to shot, Ramsey’s black silk jacket wafted in the breeze from the open windows on the light well. The balls appeared to roll sweetly to their appointed pockets of their own accord, passing one another and missing by a hair, but never touching unless Ramsey planned to capitalize on the contact. The luminous balls as they swept the baize were mesmerizing; the colours seemed to pulse. The breeze lifted the fine hairs on Irina’s bare arms, the air once more neither warm nor cold. The marijuana resin seemed mild, and Irina wondered why she had let herself get so tied up in knots over the prospect of such a commonplace narcotic’s effects.

      Ramsey had racked up another frame and Irina had taken an abstemious sip from her snifter, when—something happened. The dope, it turned out, was not mild. After only two tokes, it was not mild by a mile. The neutrality of the air gave way, and under the plain white blouse her breasts began to heat, like seat-warmers in expensive cars. Irina rarely thought about her breasts. Lawrence had cheerfully admitted that he “wasn’t a tit man,” and since her de facto husband never lavished them with any attention—never even touched them to speak of—Irina saw no reason to pay them any especial mind herself. Now they seemed to be rebelling against the neglect, for an infrared of her body would portray them in the molten vermilion that earlier that evening had flamed in the windows of St. Paul’s. Aghast, Irina was half-convinced they had begun to glow, and wrapped her arms across her chest, as she had the night before when risking, “When we talk, I feel naked” in Russian to Ramsey on the phone.

      This feeling, of being wired with electric coils that some mischief-maker had switched on high, proceeded to spread. Her abdomen throbbed, sending waves of alarming warmth up to her diaphragm and down her thighs. Irina was chagrined. This was not a sensation that a decent woman had any business suffering in company. Though she conceded that her entire torso probably wasn’t blinking bright red like a railway crossing, she felt sure that her transformation from primly dressed illustrator to human torch would, in however insidious a fashion, begin to show.

      Irina slowly turned her head to face the snooker table with trepidation, since in her untoward condition it seemed safest not to move a hair. Yet Ramsey appeared oblivious. His face was suffused with such restful concentration that she wondered if she’d done him a disservice; it looked bad, of course, like showing off, but surely this was just what he did when he got stoned, headed downstairs and shot practice frames, and this is exactly what he’d have done had Irina declined to come back to the house. He had yet to flick her sly, covert glances after a dazzling shot, to confirm that she’d been paying attention. After all, Ramsey’s faultless cuing had been heaped with all manner of praise since he was about eight years old, and it was not for his snooker game that he craved admiration. Funny that it had taken until this very moment to notice—and not in that clinical sense in which she had detailed it to herself before, the way a witness describes particulars like hair colour and height to the police, but really notice-notice—that Ramsey Acton was a rather striking man.

      A quite striking man.

      In fact, he was devastatingly—vertiginously—attractive.

      It would not have been objectively apparent, although her eyes may have widened, bulged a bit, blackened in the centre. But however imperceptible its exterior manifestations, inside the turn she took was anything but subtle.

      If Ramsey didn’t kiss her, she was going to die.

      “Fancy trying a shot, to get the feel of it?” Ramsey proposed pleasantly, keeping the table between them. It was the first thing he’d said in half an hour.

      As a girl, Irina had been wary of surly schoolboy cliques lurking down hallways, certain to make callous remarks as she passed that she had a face like a donkey. She’d experienced her share of test anxiety all the way through to university, and often blanked on answers she knew. She had tended to get fretful when boyfriends drove over the speed limit. Ordinarily she would be able to recall, albeit not at this moment, her anxiety that Lawrence wouldn’t ring again after the first time they’d slept together. In her professional life, she was all too familiar with the inclination to put off opening a publisher’s envelope, which might contain a clipped request that she please collect the fruits of six months’ labour from their crowded offices without delay. In London, she had been through her share of IRA bomb scares in the tube, though after so many hoaxes the chances of blowing up then and there had always seemed distant.

      Point being, like most people, Irina was no stranger to fear. She knew what other people were referring to when they used the word. But until 2:35 on the sixth—nay, now the seventh—of July 1997, she may never before have been seized by raw, abject terror.

      Summoned, Irina obeyed. Her will had been disconnected, or at least the petty will, the small, bossy voice that made her put dirty clothing in the laundry basket or work an extra hour in her studio when she no longer felt like it. It was possible that there was another sort of will, an agency that wasn’t on top of her or beside her but that was her. If so, this larger volition had assumed control. So eclipsing was its nature that she was no longer able to make decisions per se. She didn’t decide to join Ramsey at the table; she simply rose.

      As she negotiated her way to Ramsey’s side, her sense that at any moment she might fall over did not seem to have been occasioned by high heels, hash, or cognac. The precariousness of her balance was in her head, like an inner-ear disorder. Apparently aircraft pilots can grow so discombobulated that they have no idea which direction is up or down. Especially before the advent of navigational instruments, many a pilot in a fog had turned his nose into a dive and ploughed straight into the ground. Even in today’s era of reliable altimeters, an amateur can still grow so convinced of his internal orientation that he defies the readout on his panel and flies into somebody’s house. When one cannot trust so primitive an intuition as which direction is up, surely one’s moral compass was equally capable of fatal malfunction.

      As she drew towards Ramsey—whose figure was now traced by a thin, white edge, as if scissored from a magazine—the whole evening snapped into place. He had taken deliberate advantage of the fact that Lawrence was out of town. He had dazzled her with fine dining, and slyly introduced racy, sexual stories from adolescence. He had got her drunk, for centuries a grammatical construction beloved of women who are loath to take responsibility for doing the drinking. In kind, he had got her stoned. He had lured her to his house, where he put on a display of prowess at his snooker table that she might be blinded by his celebrity status. And now this “fancy trying a shot?” gambit took the biscuit. Ramsey, naïve? It was Irina who was naïve, a flighty, airheaded fool who was dropping into her seducer’s arms like an apple from a tree.

      The revelation of Ramsey’s chicanery came too late. She couldn’t take her eyes from his mouth, and those grey-blue irises of a wolf, which Betsy had assured her that Ramsey was not. Standing sacrificially at his side, Irina presented herself for slaughter.

      He handed her a cue off the rack, saying, “I’ve set up a shot, that red to the centre pocket.” Irina thought, You’ve set something up, buster, that is for damned sure.

      Ramsey arranged her cue in her right hand. Leaning over the table, he demonstrated the proper position for sighting the shot. She did as she was told. As he murmured about how you had to “hit through the white” and not “pull back after contact,” she inhaled his breath, aromatic with brandy and toasted tobacco. When he reached behind her to adjust the angle of her cue, their fingers touched.

      Yet in defiance of his own instruction that you mustn’t “pull back after contact,” his hand reflexively recoiled. When he urged her to move her grip further down the butt, he declined the pedagogic option of shifting her hand with his own. Turning her face to his, Irina was startled to confront an expression of idiotic innocence.

      Irina finally twigged. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins? Ronnie “the Rocket” O’Sullivan? Jimmy “the Whirlwind” White? Without a doubt, many a snooker player was a rogue. They