Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  Marcus gave a little shrug and took a chair next to mine. Now that he was closer, I saw that his jumper was worn at the elbows and had a hole at the front that was unraveling. He patted the chair on the other side of him and Cassie sat down. She placed the jar in front of her on the table, and I saw that the black things weren’t beads but a dozen or so dead wingless bluebottles. Marcus lifted the jar, put it on the floor beside Cassie’s chair. She followed the back-and-forth of his knife as he cut her ham into small pieces, then did the same with her tomato. He took a forkful of food from his own plate and, nodding at Cassie, put it in his mouth. As if it were a signal she’d been waiting for, she picked up her own fork and did the same.

  Marcus turned to me. “Which do you think you’ll prefer?” he said. “English or French?”

  And there it was again, another thing he knew about me. “English,” I said. “I don’t really like French.”

  He put down his knife and fork, regarded me with curiosity. “Why study it, then?”

  “My mother thought it would be useful to have a foreign language. For teaching.”

  “So you want to be a teacher?”

  Already I sensed it would be difficult to explain to Marcus how “want” had never been of much relevance in our house. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “I was a teacher once,” Lou Anne said. “I taught English for a year in Spain. The school was right by the sea.”

  “Valencia,” I said. “We have a postcard of it.” On my mother’s dressing table there was a dog-eared card slotted into the mirror, a scene of a ruined white-walled house surrounded by wild orange trees. It had been there for as long as I remembered, so long that I’d never inquired about who’d sent it.

  “I can’t believe your mother kept that,” Lou Anne said. “She was always too damn sentimental,” but I could tell that she was pleased.

  “A sentimentalist,” Marcus said, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

  I thought he was explaining for my sake and was offended, because I did know what the word meant, even if I couldn’t have expressed it in that way.

  “Marcus is studying philosophy at Trinity,” Lou Anne said. “We’re all the time reaping the benefits.”

  “That was Wilde, actually,” Marcus said.

  Now that Marcus had stopped eating, so had Cassie. She was fussing with her food, pushing pieces of ham to the edge of her plate, giggling when they toppled out onto the tablecloth. I waited for Lou Anne to correct her, but she didn’t. Marcus rapped his knife gently against Cassie’s plate—two sharp bell-like strikes as if he was about to make a speech—and she laughed. She picked up a piece of ham with her fingers and popped it into her mouth, continuing to giggle. She chewed with her mouth open, revealing a mess of pink masticated meat, so that we all looked to our own plates and the table grew quiet. Outside, a bus drew up, belched, hissed, and pulled away again, and as the last of the evening light settled upon the garden, I felt the first stirrings of a migraine.

  —

  MARCUS, I WOULD FIND out later, hadn’t been to lectures in over a year and was no longer enrolled as a student at the college, though he did go there from time to time, taking his satchel of books with him. He didn’t appear to have a job of any sort. The holed jumper had led me to believe his family was poor, but now I decided they were rich, the kind of rich where that sort of thing didn’t matter. He’d been living in the house for almost three years, and Cassie adored him. The Wednesday of that first week, I came home from college to find them at the side of the house, bouncing a ball against the gable wall. Someone had laid a patio—a botch job, my father would have called it, because a number of paving slabs were missing and others were loose. Cassie was in a long red skirt and white turtleneck. Her hair was free of the plaits and swung about her shoulders as she chased after the ball. Sometimes she caught it, but mostly it bounced on past. The weather was unusually warm and dry for early October, and every time the ball hit the ground it sent up a little explosion of dust.

  I slipped my rucksack from my back and, running over, positioned myself between Marcus and Cassie. The game grew faster, the smack of the ball against the wall louder, the clouds of dust thicker. Then Marcus launched the ball against the wall so hard that when it rebounded it flew past me, striking the fence behind, knocking over a terra-cotta planter. Cassie shrieked, clapped her hands to her face, then burst into laughter, and soon we were all laughing, staggering breathless around the garden. I stopped to wipe my eyes and, looking to the house, saw Lou Anne watching from a window set high in the gable wall. I looked at the smashed planter, split clean down the middle, the earth spilling out onto the grass. Lou Anne opened the window. “That fence is already on its last legs,” she said. “Best not hurry it along.” Marcus picked up his jumper from the grass and, without saying anything to either me or Cassie, went ahead of us into the house.

  There was a morning, not long after, when the door of Cassie’s room, usually kept closed, was open. Lou Anne was pulling sheets from the bed. “The district nurse is coming,” she said, when she saw me in the doorway. “I wasn’t expecting her until tomorrow but she rang to say her roster’s changed.” She looked drained. “Can I help?” I said. I expected her to say no, but she must have been especially tired, because she considered for a moment and said, “You could make the bed, I suppose.” She pointed to a pile of folded clean linen. “Two sheets at least, and tuck them in properly, otherwise she’ll only kick them off.” Marcus had gone out earlier. From downstairs I could hear the blare of the TV, Cassie watching her cartoons at full volume. When Lou Anne went to let the nurse in, I took a quick look about the room. It was a mess, clothes stuffed untidily into a laundry basket, shelves upon shelves crammed with old biscuit tins, shoe boxes, jars full of mismatched beads and copper coins and buttons. Lou Anne, I’d discovered, had a high tolerance for disorder. Her own bedroom downstairs had once been part of the kitchen, and her belongings were constantly migrating from behind the makeshift partition: tights draped over the backs of chairs, hairbrushes with clumps of red hair left beside the stove.

  The nurse was round cheeked and blushing. “From the country,” Lou Anne whispered as we watched her lead Cassie away to be weighed on the bathroom scales. “She knows your mother’s aunts from Claremorris.” I’d finished dressing the bed, and, as I squeezed past Lou Anne to leave the room, I brushed against a tin on a lower shelf. The lid sprung open when it hit the floor, depositing a foul-smelling, ashlike substance onto the carpet. I bent to examine it and saw that it was the remains of dead insects, dozens and dozens of them, shriveled and desiccated. They could have been butterflies, or perhaps moths, because there were translucent slivers of what might once have been wings. Someone had pinned a number of specimens to a piece of board covered in green fabric, though only the furred barrels of their bellies remained.

  “Quick,” Lou Anne said, “before Cassie sees,” and she dropped to her knees and began to scoop everything back into the tin. I joined in, but we weren’t fast enough. Already the nurse and Cassie were returning from the bathroom, arms linked. Cassie gave a little wail. She pulled away from the nurse and, rushing forward, caught me by the shoulder. I toppled backward onto the carpet and then she was on top of me, pounding, pummeling, grabbing my hair. She took a fistful of the gritty powder and mashed it into my face, forcing it past my lips and in between my teeth. Lou Anne and the nurse were shouting and pulling at her, but she was stronger than either of them. Only when she shifted her weight did I manage to free one of my hands, and then I slapped her, hard, across the face. She stopped instantly, frozen. She stared at me in dismay, and then, as if all the rage had gone out of her, she collapsed onto my chest, hugging me and crying loudly.

  Lou Anne and the nurse lifted her off me and sat her on the bed. She was still crying, and Lou Anne held her, tried to calm her, humming a verse of a song she liked, stroking her hair. I jumped up and ran to the bathroom. I spat in the sink, rinsed
my mouth out under the tap, and spat again. I got my toothbrush and scrubbed my teeth, my tongue, the crevices at the back of my gums, until my spit turned pink and the inside of my mouth felt raw. When I’d finished, I realized that I was shaking, and I held on to the sink to steady myself. I heard Lou Anne and the nurse come out onto the landing, talking in low voices: “It’s only going to get worse,” the nurse said. “She’s getting stronger all the time. How will you manage?”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if my other lodger was here,” Lou Anne said. “He’s very good with her, but he has to go to lectures on Wednesdays.” I wondered why she bothered to lie to the nurse about Marcus, because what difference could it possibly make to the nurse if Marcus was at lectures or not? And then her voice dropped lower, but not low enough, and I heard her say: “She’s been out of sorts lately, since”—and here she paused—“since the change in our living arrangements.”

  I spent most of the day in my room, expecting Lou Anne to come looking for me. That was what my mother did when she and I fought, and I knew, without fully understanding how it had come about, that Lou Anne and I were fighting. Midafternoon I went downstairs to make a sandwich. I heard the crackle of Lou Anne’s radio coming from behind the draped fabric that separated her bedroom from the rest of the kitchen. I boiled the kettle and rattled the lid of the bread bin to let her know I was there, but she didn’t come out, and I took my sandwich back upstairs. Sometime after nine P.M. that evening the doorbell rang and there was the usual clamor of bolts. I’d dozed off, and now I sat up and smoothed down my hair, arranged myself into what I imagined to be a more graceful pose. I heard Marcus and Lou Anne talking first in the hall, then their voices fading as they moved to the living room. After a while, I heard footsteps on the stairs, then a knock on my door. “Come in,” I said.

  Marcus came in and stood beside my bed. For once, he wasn’t wearing the green jumper, but a red and blue checked shirt that smelled of smoke. He picked up the book I’d been reading, one from my college syllabus, and turned it over to look at the cover. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Rhys. What do you think of her?”

  “She’s good,” I said, carefully. There was more I could have said: how all week I couldn’t shift from my head the images of Coulibri gone wild, the smell of dead flowers mingling with living ones; a poisoned horse beneath a tree, its eyes black with flies. But I’d learned to be wary when discussing books with Marcus. When I didn’t say more, he sighed and closed the book, settled himself on the edge of the bed. “Lou Anne told me you hit Cassie today.”

  “She was on top of me,” I said, “she was hurting me, and—”

  He held up a hand. “You must never do that again,” he said. “Never under any circumstances. Do you hear?”

  “She could have killed me.”

  “It makes no difference what she does. You must never hit her.”

  All day I’d imagined the ways in which he might comfort me. Aggrieved by the unfairness of it all, I swung my legs over the other side of the bed and faced away from him. He reached across and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Listen,” he said. “This is important. It mustn’t happen again. Do you understand?”

  I nodded without looking at him.

  “Could you apologize, do you think?”

  The idea didn’t appeal to me. “She’s asleep,” I said.

  “I meant would you apologize to Lou Anne.”

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed and got up, ran a hand through his hair. “All right,” he said. “But can I at least tell her it won’t happen again?”

  “Tell her this,” I said. I lifted my blouse and pointed to a circle of bruised skin just below my ribs which, to my satisfaction, was already darkening to purple. He came round to my side of the bed and, swearing under his breath, stooped to inspect it. I saw that his hair and the collar of his shirt were damp, and thought that he must have walked from the city center and that was why he was late. He went as if to touch the bruise, but pulled back. “I’m damned if I need any of this,” he said, straightening up, and, without saying anything more, he walked out of the bedroom. After he’d gone, I tried to read a little more of my book, but couldn’t. I switched off the light and climbed fully clothed into bed. I pulled the sheets over my face, frightened for the first time of the moths that at night crashed headlong into the hot bulb of my bedroom lamp, their blackened stumps scattered across the floor in the mornings.

  —

  THE NEXT EVENING I ate in the college canteen and came home as late as I dared. Even though I was being perfectly quiet, Lou Anne put a finger to her lips as she let me in and said, “Shh, she’s asleep,” as she secured the door. The bolts, Marcus had explained, were on account of Cassie, who sometimes wandered downstairs at night and had once made her way onto the street. I presumed Lou Anne and I were still fighting, but once she’d finished with the door she said, “I’ll make some tea,” and disappeared into the kitchen. I went into the living room and sat at the table. “Goodness,” Lou Anne said, arriving back with a tray. “It’s almost dark.” She put down the tray and moved about the room, switching on lamps. Her cheeks were flushed and I noticed that as well as the tea things, the tray held a small bottle of whiskey. She sat across from me at the table and poured tea into two mugs—the delicate china of that first evening had never again materialized. “Where’s Marcus?” I said.

  Lou Anne frowned. “How should I know?” she said. “He’s a young man. I expect he’s off doing whatever it is that young men do. Why should you or I worry our heads about him?” She leaned closer. “That’s what women do,” she said. “They do it all the time; they worry about men. We did it, your mother and I, we were fools for men.” She splashed some whiskey into her tea, seemed to consider for a moment before offering me the bottle. When I shook my head, she dribbled a little more into her own cup. “You know what you need to do?” she said. “You need to make some friends instead of hanging out here every evening. You’re young. This is your chance to have fun. If your mother was here, that’s what she’d tell you.”

  I doubted this very much, but before I could say anything, Lou Anne got up and rummaged in a chest of drawers, tut-tutting in exasperation as she pushed aside old catalogs and oddments of fabric. She brought out a photo album. “I want to show you something,” she said. Thumbing through the pages, she stopped at a photo. It took me a moment to realize it was of herself and my mother. It must have been taken in the years before my parents were married, because my mother was in a short skirt and was smoking a cigarette. “You’re the image of her,” Lou Anne said, and, putting a finger to my chin, she tilted my face first one way then the other. “That day you arrived on my doorstep, it was like an apparition.” She sighed and turned the page to another photo. This one was of Cassie when she was younger, standing with her hand outstretched. Spread across her palm, covering it almost entirely, was a red-and-blue butterfly, an enormous jewel of a thing, circles of silver dotted along the perimeter of its wings, a golden fuzz on its belly.

  “Daddy ordered it through a catalog,” Lou Anne said. “It came all the way from the Philippines. The stamps were almost as beautiful as the butterfly. I have them still.”

  I stared at the butterfly, imagined it plucked from the teeming colors of a rain forest, killed, boxed, and transported to a damp, muted house in Drumcondra.

  “Cassie was very fond of Daddy,” Lou Anne said. “He was always helping her with the butterflies. She misses him terribly.”

  Marcus arrived home just then. Lou Anne undid the bolts and let him in, and as soon as he entered the room I could tell that he’d been drinking. Lou Anne must have noticed, too, but she just poured some whiskey into a glass she took from the top of the dresser, a little gold-rimmed sherry glass, and handed it to him. He drank it back in one go, then, taking the bottle, poured himself another. He switched on the television and threw himself into an armchair. It was a motor-sports program, and the room filled with the waspish drone of racing cars. Lou Anne walke
d over to the TV and switched it off. “Give me a hand with this,” she said, gesturing to the piano. I didn’t know if she meant me or Marcus, but Marcus didn’t stir, so I got up and began to help her move things. A jug I’d presumed empty turned out to contain stagnant water and the mulchy remnants of petals that sloshed over the sides when I lifted it. “Careful,” Lou Anne said. “That piano’s worth twenty grand.” I froze, the jug in my hand, brown slime dripping onto the dark wood of the lid. From his armchair, Marcus began to laugh. I saw Lou Anne struggling to keep a straight face, then she laughed, too. “Don’t you think I’d sell it if it was worth that?” she said, seating herself at the piano stool. “Look around you. Do you think there’s anything here that I wouldn’t sell if I could?”

  “If I had money I’d go to Argentina,” Marcus said. “A man from our town did that. You can get a thousand acres in Patagonia for the price of a hundred here. I’d never come back.”

  Lou Anne muttered something under her breath. She swept the last of the clutter from the piano onto the floor and raised the lid. I returned to the table. I didn’t know enough to say whether her playing was any good; the piano was likely out of tune, and this may have been the reason for the brutish, slightly mutinous, notes. I did know that she couldn’t sing: She struggled through a Bonnie Tyler song and a number of others I didn’t recognize that were also beyond her capabilities. And then she stopped. She stood up without looking at either Marcus or me and carefully closed the lid before leaving the room. I heard her crossing the hall and going into the kitchen, and from there the footsteps fading as she went through to her bedroom.