Alice was fairly sure she hadn’t asked. Marian had answered the door with the new baby over her shoulder and the toddler around her ankles. Now she was moving in a slow waltz over the kitchen tiles, a tea towel under her foot, mopping up baby-sick. With every turn, the baby dripped more vomit over her shoulder.
Through the patio doors to the garden, Alice could see sunlight dancing off the silver cover of the barbecue and warming the varnished oak decking. It highlighted the tasteful creams and taupes of the patio furniture and lingered among the late-summer flowers that bloomed in terra-cotta pots. Since Marian had married Eugene it was all “barbecues” and “suppers” and stainless steel patio heaters. Alice smoothed down her new sequined top and waited for Marian to admire it. But today Marian was missing her cues, fluffing her lines. She was more preoccupied than usual with the dribbled demands of the children.
“Issy good boy? Issy? Yessy issy!” Marian was hunched over the baby on the sofa, changing his nappy. “Toe-toes, toe-toes,” she said, putting the baby’s pink, dimpled foot to her lips, pretending to eat it. The baby wriggled in delight, gurgled, and Marian nibbled at his toes and laughed back at him. Alice boiled the kettle and searched the cupboard for a clean plate for the queen cakes. She began to arrange them in neat circles.
“Where do you keep the tea bags?”
Marian took the baby’s foot out of her mouth and looked around, disoriented. It was as if she had forgotten all about Alice. “Eugene won’t have them in the house,” she said. “Carcinogenic.”
“Tea bags?”
“Yes, even the organic ones. Would you believe it?”
Marian put the baby wriggling on his back in the playpen, then scooped the toddler off the floor and set him down next to the baby. She made a pot of loose-leaf tea and sat down opposite Alice.
“Thanks for the muffins.” It was always “muffins” with Marian these days. Marian never said “queen cakes” anymore, now that she was married to Eugene.
“Daddy’s away this week,” Alice said.
“I heard.”
“I thought I might as well do something.”
Marian picked up a carton of milk, splashed some in her tea. “Like what?”
Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. Meet someone.”
Marian sighed, mopped up cake crumbs with her finger, popped them in her mouth. “You mean a man?”
Alice nodded.
“The trouble with the men around here, Alice, is that they all know you.”
“I thought I might go up to Dublin,” Alice said.
Marian shook her head. “Too dangerous.”
“Speed dating?”
“Too many time wasters.”
Alice felt the morning’s hope begin to curdle in her stomach. She tried again. “I could go to a nightclub.”
“On your own?” Marian was talking with her mouth full. “There’s a lot expected of a girl nowadays.” She gave Alice a meaningful look. “Stuff you’ve never even heard of.”
Marian, Alice thought, was talking as if she were the only one in this town who ever had sex. Talking as if she knew all about Alice. Alice wanted to tell Marian that last night she had made love out in the back of the town hall to a sound engineer from somewhere foreign, tattoos all over his body. She hadn’t, of course. Last night Alice had fallen asleep in an armchair and had woken cold and cramped in the small hours, a mug of stale tea on the table beside her. The truth was that Alice had not slept with a man in four years. And Marian, like everybody else in this town, really did know all about Alice.
Alice had reached the bottom of her teacup. She was afraid to look in case a pattern might form among the leaves. She was afraid she might have the gift. Poor Mammy had the gift and much good it did her. Instead, she looked across the table at Marian, at the dark circles beneath her eyes, the greasy hair, the baby-sick on her cardigan. She saw with sudden clarity the desolate wasteland of her friend’s ruin and, just as clearly, saw it mirror her own. She felt the sun wane, felt the evening and the kitchen closing in.
A whole day had slipped away from her. “Does Eugene have any friends?” Alice felt a fragment of queen cake lodge in her throat at the mention of Eugene, that beige, insipid man. The children were wailing now and Marian was back at the playpen, a grizzling baby over her shoulder. The toddler began to choke, and Marian stooped to take a plastic cow from its mouth. When she straightened up again she said: “There’s a couple of new guys on the soccer team. They’re coming over tomorrow evening for a barbecue. You could drop by, see what happens.”
She sat down opposite Alice again with the baby on her knee. She stood the plastic cow, still glistening with spit, on the table between them. “These are young lads up from Limerick,” she said. Her eyes left the soft fuzz of the baby’s head for a moment and fixed on Alice. “They don’t know anyone around here.” She looked away then, out through the patio doors to the garden where a breeze was buffeting the flowers in the terra-cotta pots. “All I’m saying,” she said, “is play your cards right. There’s no need to go telling them your age. No need to go telling them anything.”
—
NOT COUNTING THE BABIES, there were six people at Marian’s barbecue. Marian and Eugene were on the deck, arguing over raw sausages. One of the lads from the soccer team had brought his girlfriend, a whippet-thin girl of about eighteen with a piercing in her lip. Alice sat at the patio table with a man called Jarlath, watching a wasp drown in a jam jar. Jarlath was in his late twenties, thirty at most. His hair was beginning an early retreat from his temples. He had no baggage, at least none that Alice had been able to establish. It was unlikely, as Poor Mammy might have said, that there had been any great rush on him. He was not the best-looking man in the world, nor the most eloquent. Still, he was broad shouldered and tall and Alice liked the way he blushed when he spoke to her.
“So,” Jarlath said. “Marian told me you used to be an Irish dancing teacher.”
Marian, Alice thought, had no sense. It might seem harmless enough, but Alice knew from experience that it was just a short hop, just a skitter of vowels and consonants, to why she was no longer a dancing teacher. Alice knew there was no bolt to slide across her past. The past was an open door and the best that could be done was to hurry by on the corridor. She sighed and dragged her chair closer to Jarlath’s so that their thighs brushed. “Enough about me,” she said.
Earlier that afternoon, Alice’s father had telephoned from West Cork to remind Alice to put the trash out and to sign for her dole, even though Alice had been unemployed for years now. At the end of the evening, Jarlath didn’t ask for her phone number, but Alice wrote it on a paper napkin and gave it to him anyway.
For the next two days, Alice sat in the kitchen, drank tea, and waited. Corpses of flies multiplied on the flypaper. She got a cloth and dusted her mother’s photograph. Poor Mammy. She had gone downhill very quickly while Alice was away; everyone had said so. Alice had come back to a straw woman. Pneumonia, it had said on the death cert. It might just as well have said “Alice.”
On Thursday afternoon, the phone rang. It was Alice’s father telling her to order a piece of back bacon from the butcher for Sunday, nothing too big and not too much fat. There was still no word from Jarlath. On Thursday evening, Alice put on blusher, lipstick, and her lowest cut sequined top and waited outside the soccer grounds. When Jarlath saw her he froze. For an excruciating moment it looked like he might keep walking, but instead he came over and stood silently in front of her, and Alice did the rest.
—
IN THE SEMIDARKNESS OF Jarlath’s bedroom, Alice lay on her back. She saw a large amoeba-shaped stain on the ceiling, and, on top of the wardrobe, an orange traffic cone. Downstairs, the two young men that Jarlath shared the house with had turned the music up louder. Jarlath lay next to her, his jeans still around his ankles. The music stopped downstairs and for a while there was silence except for the sound of a car going by on the street outside. Alice was overcome by a deadly urge to talk.
“I was away for a while.”
Jarlath’s fingers paused in their downward descent along her body and rose to wait in a holding pattern above her navel. “Holidays?”
Alice rolled onto her side to face him. “Jarlath,” she said, “have you ever done something you’ve really regretted?”
Jarlath shrugged and said nothing.
“Once,” Alice said, “when I was still a dancing teacher, I fell in love with the father of one of my pupils. He lived in one of those big houses across the river. His wife lives there still.”
The muffled sounds of late summer filtered through the curtains: the high-pitched barking of small dogs, the buzz of weed trimmers, the shrill mating calls of teenagers.
“I thought it was love,” Alice said. She laughed, but the laugh bounced off the walls of the bedroom and boomeranged back at her. “He took me to Barcelona once for a weekend.” She raised herself up on one elbow. “Have you ever been to Barcelona?”
Jarlath shook his head. He had moved almost imperceptibly away from her in the bed and had started to pull up his trousers.
“You should see it,” Alice said. “It’s beautiful.” She watched Jarlath struggling into his jeans, fumbling with the zipper. Earlier, during sex, she had surprised him with her vigor. Marian would have been impressed. “When he tried to end it,” Alice said, “I panicked. I told him I would tell his wife.”
It was getting late, the room edging closer to darkness. Jarlath sat on the bed, lacing up his boots. Every word that bubbled up onto Alice’s tongue seemed to swallow a little more of what light remained, but she could not help herself.
“Of course I would never have told his wife.” Her eyes followed Jarlath as he bent to pick his shirt up from the floor. “But he believed I would. He gave me ten grand to keep quiet.”
Jarlath stopped buttoning his shirt. “Ten grand?”
Alice nodded. “I took my mother to London to visit her brother, I changed the car, and I bought new linoleum for the kitchen. Then I asked him for more.”
“Did he pay?”
“He kept paying for two years, and then he went to the police.”
Jarlath was standing by the foot of the bed. Behind him on the wall was a ragged-edged poster of Radiohead, defaced with graffiti. Alice noticed how here in his bedroom, with his face flushed and his hair damp with sweat, he seemed much younger than he had at the barbecue.
“So what happened?”
“I went to jail,” Alice said. “It was all over the newspapers. Poor Mammy took it very badly; Poor Mammy thought I was still a virgin.”
Jarlath shuffled his feet on the carpet and looked away. Alice felt sorry for him.
“He left his wife anyway,” she said. “That first summer I was away, he disappeared with a Portuguese woman who came to work in the hotel.”
“Where did they go?”
Alice shrugged. “Someplace far away.”
Jarlath came round to the side of the bed and stooped to give her a hug. It was a safe, compassionate hug, the kind of hug her cousin, Olive, might give Alice’s father when she put him on the bus home Sunday morning. He touched her bare shoulder. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
Alice watched Jarlath putting on his jacket, getting ready to leave his own house. She knew that she had said too much, knew that Marian would roll her eyes and be furious, but there was no stopping now. She sat up in bed, clutching the sheets to her breasts. “I’m forty-five,” she said.
—
HER FATHER’S SUITCASE IS back in the hall, waiting to be unpacked and stored beneath the stairs for another year, or maybe another couple of years. Alice has taken down all the flypaper. “Tea, Daddy?” She pours a cup of tea for her father, sets it down in his saucer with a fistful of colored pills. But her father is on his feet, prowling the kitchen with a rolled-up newspaper. “Hoors,” he shouts. “Feckers.” There is a stirring in the folds of the curtains, a murmur in the clammy air of the kitchen. And all along the windowpanes, the bluebottles, dark and velvety, rise up in a last frantic salute to life and summer. And they buzz and ping and beat their gauzy wings against the glass.
He gripped the ice scraper in his gloved hands, pulled it back and forth across the windscreen. A mist of ice particles rose up, settled upon the car bonnet. It was dark yet, but the sun was beginning to rise, tingeing the white fields pink. All around him the land was hard and still, the ditch that separated their property from the farm next door brittle grassed and silver. In the distance he could see the line of trees that flanked the river, their branches dusted with a light powdering of snow. A heron stood beside the small ornamental pond, stabbing the frozen surface with its beak. The previous Saturday, Cathy had driven to the city and had returned with half a dozen koi, some of them bronze and tea colored, others gray. He had watched her release them, dazed and startled, into the pond. Dropping the ice scraper, he clapped his hands and the heron rose up and flew away.
The house was a dormer bungalow, facing south toward the river, set into a hollow in the field. From where he stood in the driveway, it looked like a Christmas ornament, frost clinging to the roof, condensation rounding the squares of light in the windows. He could see Cathy moving about the kitchen in her dressing gown, Gracie on her hip, preparing breakfast.
“Did you get any sleep?” he had asked earlier.
“Yes,” she said, “plenty,” but he had felt her slip from their bed during the night, had heard her feet on the floorboards as she went downstairs. He knew she would be on the phone to Martha, her sister, who lived in Castleisland. What Martha made of these late-night phone calls, he didn’t know. Martha spoke to him only when matters concerning Cathy or Gracie required it, grudgingly even then, and once a month she posted a check for the daycare fees.
He finished the windscreen, leaving the engine running so the car might heat up, and went back into the house. In the hall he removed his wet gloves and put them to dry on the radiator. He could hear his wife and daughter in the kitchen singing “Incy Wincy Spider.” He watched them through the door, their forms distorted by the patterned glass. Cathy was making porridge. She balanced the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot and shimmied low to the floor, her dressing gown enfolding Gracie like a tent. Gracie screamed and wriggled out, then immediately crawled back in again, pulling the dressing gown tight about her. She poked her face through a gap between buttons and giggled. And as he entered the room, he felt something seep away, like the slow hiss of air from a puncture.
Cathy stepped over her daughter and crossed the kitchen to kiss him on the cheek. There were dark circles under her eyes. She took both his hands in hers and rubbed them gently, frowning at their coldness.
“Is it bad?” she said, inclining her head toward the window.
“Bad enough. You’ll need to be careful going to daycare later.”
“It’ll have thawed by then. Do you want coffee?”
He shook his head. “I’ll get some at the office.”
Gracie toddled across the kitchen to reclaim her mother. Cathy scooped her up and she clung, limpet-like, to her neck. Over on the burner, the porridge spluttered in its pot. “I’ll do that,” he said, as he saw Cathy turn. “You sit down.”
He poured porridge into two bowls and carried them to the table. Cathy lowered Gracie, kicking and protesting, into her high chair and fastened the straps. “Martha’s asked us to go stay with her for a few days,” she said.
He pulled out a chair beside her. “When?”
“She thought next week might be good. There’s a festival on, and a few of the cousins will be around.” She stirred some milk into the porridge, and blew gently on a spoonful before putting it to Gracie’s lips. He watched the child clamp her mouth shut, contort her small body so she was facing the other direction.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I worry about you being there on your own.”
“We won’t be on our own. We’ll be with Martha.” She took Gracie’s chin in her hand and gently tur
ned it back toward the spoon. “You could come down on the weekend, stay for a few days.”
“Did Martha say that?” He knew how Martha felt about him. It was the same way he felt about Martha.
“You know she’s always asking us to visit.”
You, he thought. She’s always asking you to visit, but just then Gracie released a mouthful of porridge she had quarantined in her cheek. He watched Cathy’s hand dart out and catch it on the spoon. Her own porridge was untouched, solidifying into a cold gray disc.
“Here,” he said, reaching for the spoon. “Let me feed her. You eat your breakfast.” But she shook her head.
“I can manage,” she said. “Anyway, you need to get to work.”
He got up from his chair and went over to the window. Outside, light was spreading from the east. The garden was spiky with the stalks of leafless plants, and a mound of fermented lawn cuttings leaned, white-capped, against the fence. Gracie’s tricycle, left out overnight, was frosted, too, snatches of purple breaking through here and there.
It was on a morning like this, white with a hush upon the fields, that they had found the site. They had traveled from Dublin the evening before, the only accommodation a B&B in a village ten miles away where he had made cautious love to Cathy beneath thin sheets and wiry blankets. She was in the early stages of pregnancy and he had moved inside her with a new restraint, terrified that he might harm the baby, not understanding how very safe his daughter was then, how very protected. The next morning, they met the auctioneer at the field, the farmland all around them in folds of white hills like a bridal gown, jeweled with frost. Small dark birds, feathers puffed against the cold, darted in and out of hedgerows.
“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Cathy had whispered. “It’s like Narnia.”
“Do you think you could live here?” he remembered asking, as they walked behind the auctioneer to where their car was parked in the lane. “Yes,” she had answered. “Yes, I think I could.”
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 4