Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  He took one of the books from the floor beside his chair. It was one she hadn’t seen before, a hardback with a picture of an elaborately ornate Karyōbinga on the cover, and she looked away to spare herself seeing the price. They were all over the house, these books—and journals, too—little dog-eared towers of them in the bathroom and next to their bed, copies surfacing randomly on kitchen shelves and windowsills. They were about art, mostly: Oriental art, Japanese antiquities, Muromachi paintings, wooden carvings detailed with gold leaf and lacquer. They were the kind of books she might once have bought for herself, books she could still possibly take pleasure in were they not so hideously expensive.

  “It’s been almost a month,” she said. “He needs to go back to school. His suspension ended over a week ago.”

  Bill didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned a page with ceremonial reverence, lifting the glossy paper, letting it fall, smoothing a hand across a monotone print depicting a line of leafless trees fronting a temple. “I don’t think he’s ready,” he said. He gestured toward the garden, where Finn was leaning into the net, resting his weight on it, testing it. “Look at him. Isn’t he happy?”

  Her coat was on the back of her chair, and she took it, draped it across her shoulders. It was cold, this room, even in April, even with the chimney blocked up and insulating tape sealing the splintered frames of the sash windows—the original windows, as the auctioneer had pointed out, practically salivating at the sheer oldness of it all, as she had, too, back then. It was easier for Bill if Finn didn’t go to school, she thought—that way he didn’t have to walk with the child to the bus stop and then ride the bus with him into town, didn’t have to make his way back only to repeat the journey when school finished in the afternoon.

  “Astonishing, when you consider it,” he said. “The deep recession into space.”

  “Sorry?” she said, before realizing that he was talking about something in the book. He was off then, feeding her random pieces as he read, while she ate a slice of toast and drank her coffee. Above the table, a lead-crystal chandelier hung like a tree in winter, most of its pendants missing. She should take it down and be done with it, she thought. She should put it out in the shed with the rest of the rubbish and pick up something in IKEA. She’d imagined a life for the people who’d lived here before, had pieced it together from the things they’d left behind—the skeleton of a pony trap, its metal spine rusting at the back of the shed, the stone hot-water jars. But it occurred to her now that perhaps she’d gone about it wrong, that perhaps they were not to be known by what they left but by what they took, in which case she would never know them. Outside the window, Finn was throwing stones of varying size into the center of the net. “If you do decide to take him to school,” she said, “I found his school tie when I was tidying the playroom. It’s hanging in his wardrobe.”

  “Okay,” he said, without looking up, and she knew there would be no school for Finn today.

  —

  THIS IS WHAT SHE’D told Finn about the ducks: Yesterday, in Stephen’s Green, the ducks on one of the ponds had died, the smaller pond with the gunmetal green railings by the side exit to the shopping center—not one or two of the ducks but all of them. She’d seen them as she cut through the park on her way to the office, stopping where a small crowd had gathered. And Bill was right—it was no story for a child, especially not this child, so sensitive that sometimes she thought the very passage of air around him might strip the skin off him. But she’d arrived home late, and tired, and, on entering the kitchen and seeing them together in easy silence at the table, she’d felt a need to announce herself, to offer something that might allow access to their world. And so she’d unleashed it, the story of the ducks, how some were almost wholly submerged, just the tip of a wing or a tail feather breaking the surface of the water, while others lay on the muddy bank, their jeweled heads pressing beak-shaped indents into the silt. One had made it onto the grass and lay toppled beneath the spiked branches of a hawthorn bush, and she knew that if she touched it, it would still be warm. All the time she was talking, Finn was looking at her, and she could almost hear the thoughts whirring inside his head. Bill had raised an eyebrow as he dished out mashed potatoes and peas, the only dinner that Finn could be persuaded to eat. She’d looked toward the oven to see if perhaps he had cooked something else for her. He’d followed her gaze. “I could do you an egg if you like,” he’d said.

  “It’s okay,” she’d said. “This is fine.” She would like to know how exactly Bill passed his days, but this mystery was as unfathomable to her as the lives of the house’s previous inhabitants. It was not as if he spent much time on home maintenance. He’d had business cards printed advertising his services as a financial consultant, but thus far no clients had materialized. She’d taken a seat opposite Finn at the kitchen table and watched him eat his food the way he always did: peas first, one by one, then the potatoes, all the time his small brow furrowed with such intensity that she imagined the ducks resurrected inside his head, waddling crookedly, beating their wings against the walls.

  —

  SHE SLIPPED HER ARMS into her coat, took her briefcase from the hall, and went outside to where her car was parked in front of the house. “Bye, Finn,” she called, and raised her hand in a wave. He waved back, then returned to the task of untying one of the strings. Setting down her briefcase, she crossed the lawn, the heels of her shoes sinking into the damp ground, and stopped beside the net. For a moment, she considered what it might be like to climb onto it, to close her eyes, to sleep. Finn had managed to work the string loose, and now he was circling the tree with it again, but at a point higher up, round and round, preparing to refasten it. He stopped when it would go no farther, and began to tie a knot. “Here,” she said, “let me do that.”

  “It has to be a pipe-hitch knot,” he said. “Can you do a pipe hitch?”

  She shook her head. “I’d better leave you to it, then,” she said. Sheets of paper were spread out on the grass. Stooping to get a better look, she saw that they were covered in complex, intricate diagrams, the margins scribbled with words like “plague” and “apocalypse” and little hand-drawn pictures of birds, small, fat-bellied things with disproportionately long legs and large feet. Among the drawings was a copy of a magazine, a publication brought to the house from time to time by a preacher woman. She was one of the few people who braved the muddy lane to visit them or, more precisely, to visit Bill and Finn, because she always called in the daytime.

  “Was the preacher here?” she said, picking up the magazine.

  “You mean Molly?”

  Since when was he on first-name terms with the preacher woman? “Is that what she’s called?”

  “Yes.” He’d completed the knot and was tugging on the ends to see if it would hold.

  “So when was Molly here?”

  “Yesterday. But she couldn’t stay long. She had to go visit a woman who’s come all the way from Virginia to live up by the lake.” Satisfied with the knot, he turned to his mother. “Virginia is a girl’s name,” he said, “but it’s also a place in America. The first peanuts ever grown in America were grown in Virginia, but now the people of Virginia mostly grow tobacco, which is immoral and also causes plagues.”

  “What’s Molly like?” she said, conscious that she should be on the road already. Delay would be paid for at an extortionate rate; ten minutes could cost her an hour if she hit the M50 at the wrong time.

  Finn considered for a moment. “You know Sally, the horse trainer on Blue Mountain?”

  “Blue Mountain? Where’s that?”

  “It’s a TV program.”

  When she shook her head, he tried again. “You know Princess Karla from The Jupiter Gang?”

  What on earth were these programs that Bill was letting him watch? She would book a day off next month, she decided; even a half day would do. She would make an appointment with the school principal, she would ring a child psychologist, she would return the calls
of that woman from the bank. There was no longer any reason to hope Bill might do these things.

  Finn had his eyes screwed up, concentrating. “You know Angelina Jolie?” he said.

  Goodness, she thought, this Evangelical was not what she had in mind. What she had in mind—an image she knew to be stereotypical, ridiculous—was a middle-aged matronly woman in homely dress, nineteenth-century Mormon meets Catholic nun, with gray hair in a bun and mannish lace-up shoes. “Yes,” she said. “I know Angelina Jolie. Is that who she’s like?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “She’s got hair like her, and eyes like her, but she’s not as tall. And her skin is more tanned.”

  It was nonsensical to be jealous of a woman who had made it her life’s purpose to decry pride and vanity and sins of the flesh, to decry most things, if the magazines she brought were anything to go by. She went to put the magazine in her briefcase, but the boy snatched it from her and, going a little distance away, settled himself cross-legged in the grass. She watched him as he read: such a serious child; serious, fervent, and, though it pained her to admit it, strange. She went over and stood beside him.

  “We are living in the last of days,” he said, without looking up. “Soon, the armies of the Beast will come and there will be pestilence and lakes of fire.”

  “Give me that,” she said, reaching for the magazine, but he was too quick for her. Jumping up, he took off to the far end of the garden, pages fluttering in his hand as he ran. She looked at her watch: There was no time to go after him. “I’ll see you this evening,” she called as she walked back across the grass to her car.

  She drove down the avenue, swerving around the deepest of the potholes, slowing through the shallower ones. On her right, in contrast to the mossy stone wall, a crude post-and-rail fence separated their property from the wasteland next door, which had once formed part of the house’s extensive grounds. A developer, having no use for the house itself, had fenced it off and sold it, together with an acre of garden. When she and Bill had first viewed it, there had been a pair of tall wrought-iron gates at the end of the avenue, but by the time they moved in, the gates were gone, taken, she’d learned later, by a creditor of the builder. The wasteland was meant to be Phase 2 of a development of three-bed semis. Last winter, a storm had felled the advertising hoardings along the perimeter and now they lay half buried in the grass, their peeling fragments of swings and smiling lovers and flower beds like remnants of an ancient mosaic. Phase 1 was a field distant, a ghost estate already sliding into dereliction. She’d heard that a few of the houses were occupied, despite being without plumbing or electricity, and once, when she’d crossed the wasteland to peer through the fence, she’d seen a van parked outside one and a mound of garbage bags outside another.

  Three weeks ago, during geography class, Finn had struck the boy who sat beside him full square on the mouth. “For no apparent reason,” according to the headmaster, though it later transpired that the boy had put his hand on Finn’s arm to stop him jigging it up and down. “That constituted assault,” Bill said. “Finn was acting in self-defense.”

  “They’re nine-year-old boys,” she’d said. “Can we stop talking about them like they’re on indictment?” There had, apparently, been a lot of blood, a degree of panic, and a lost tooth, though it turned out that the tooth was a milk tooth and would have been lost anyway. “Hardly the point,” the headmaster had said when Bill offered this, and she couldn’t help thinking that the suspension might have been one week rather than two had she gone on her own.

  —

  AT MIDDAY SHE TOOK her lunch to the park. The day was cool, with barely any sun, and there were plenty of benches free. She chose one beneath a tree and unwrapped her sandwich. A van from the Parks Department pulled up beside the small pond and reversed onto the grass. A warden got out and, going around to the back of the van, unbolted the doors and let down the ramp. From where she sat, she could hear him making a series of cooing, coaxing noises. Eventually, a duck plodded out, dazedly, as if the van were a hard-shelled futuristic egg from which it had just hatched. It stood, bemused, on the ramp for a moment, and then suddenly there were more ducks behind it, pushing and jostling, and it was too late for it to turn back. A dozen of them, maybe more, descended onto the grass, a mix of lustrous greens and blues and mottled browns, and as the warden herded them toward the water, a child began to throw bread, striking one of them on the head. The warden shooed them onward, and they were wading in now, swimming, moving in tight little circles before broadening their orbit.

  They should have made her happy, but they didn’t. They were indistinguishable from the ducks that had died the day before. If she hadn’t cut through the park yesterday morning, if she hadn’t taken lunch here today, she might even have thought, next time she visited, that they were the same ducks. There was trickery of a sort at work, a sleight of hand that suggested that the first ducks had never existed, and only she alone, in silent witness, knew better. She put the remainder of her sandwich in the trash bin and, leaving the park, made her way back to her office. Later, at her computer, she typed “Stephen’s Green ducks dead” into a search engine, but her inquiry yielded nothing of relevance.

  —

  SHE WAS DRIVING HOME shortly after six P.M., with the radio set to a music station. She liked this stretch of the commute, the city traffic behind her, the winding country roads that led into Portlaoise then out of it again. There was a particular house that drew her eye each evening, a house of the same period and style as their own early nineteenth-century Georgian, but better tended. In winter, candles in glass jars hung from holly trees, and now, in late spring, daffodils bloomed on either side of the long avenue. This evening as she drove past, she felt not inspired but admonished. If it was still light by the time they finished dinner, she would attempt a cleanup of the beehives in the southwest corner of their property. She would ask Finn to help her; it might take his mind off all things dead. They could paint the hives different colors, use them as planting boxes; she had no desire to keep bees. Items of beekeeping equipment—a suit, a veiled hat, a smoker—had been among the things left behind in the shed, and she’d taken this as evidence that the people who had lived here before were beekeepers, but perhaps it was better evidence that they were not; that they were, at best, failed beekeepers. And for no reason that she could point to, she knew the beekeeping paraphernalia hadn’t belonged to the same person who owned the pony trap; these things, she was sure, were the leavings of two different people, the discarded parings of two separate lives.

  It had rained earlier in the afternoon, a light drizzle, and the three steps that led to the front door were slippery. Above the door, just below the box that housed the burglar alarm, was a domed copper bell. The rope pull was missing, but the metal tongue remained, and she was still startled occasionally, in strong winds, by a shrill, high note. Letting herself into the hall, she thought she detected the smell of something cooking, something other than potatoes and peas. Bill came out of the kitchen to greet her. “Guess what?” he said. “I’ve got an interview.”

  “That’s great,” she said, trying not to look too surprised, because she’d begun to suspect that he no longer applied for jobs. “What’s it for?”

  “A position at the museum in Athy.”

  “The museum?” she said, puzzled. “You mean in the accounts department?”

  “It’s more hands-on,” he said. “Cataloging exhibits, working on the archives, that sort of thing.”

  Careful, she warned herself, careful how you play this. Mentally, she had already begun to calculate the cost of his return bus fare, adding to it the cost of new work clothes, the cost of paying someone to mind their son. To buy a little time, she busied herself with hanging her coat on a peg and then, turning to him again, said: “Where’s Finn?”

  “He’s in the kitchen,” Bill said, “worrying about ducks.” He began to walk back down the hall, and she followed him. “So how much does the job pay?” she asked, do
ing her best to sound casual.

  “They said we can discuss salary at the interview.”

  “But they do actually pay?”

  “Of course.” He halted in the doorway of the kitchen and frowned. “You could try to sound more pleased,” he said. “You wanted me to get a job. Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

  She felt like telling him that this had nothing to do with want—that what either of them might have wanted had stopped being relevant a long time ago. “Sorry,” she said, “I just…you know…when is the interview?”

  “Tomorrow at four. Which means I’ll need to leave here just after three.”

  “But who will look after Finn?”

  “I thought you could take the afternoon off.”

  “I have appointments,” she said. “If I’d had more notice…” She saw then that Finn was sitting at the kitchen table, and that the thing he had on a plate in front of him, which at first glance she’d taken for a soft toy, was in fact a dead bird. Easy does it, she told herself, Deep breaths. She went over and stood beside him. He looked up from poking the bird with a fork, and smiled. It was small and dark, with black and brown feathers, its pinkish claws curled. “Did you catch it in your net?” she said. She pictured it dropping from the sky, the taut bounce as it rose only to fall back again.

  “No,” he said. “I found it by the river.”

  She watched as he plucked a feather from the bird’s belly. “What are you doing?” she said. “It might be diseased.”

  “It is diseased,” he said. “It’s got plague.” He was pulling out feathers in swift sharp yanks, leaving a clearing of pink-hued skin bubbled with goosebumps. He picked up a knife and prodded the cleared patch as if about to make an incision. “Okay,” she said. “That’s enough, get it off the table right now.” Behind her, Bill was taking something from the oven. It was the first time he had cooked properly in weeks. She watched as he peeled the foil cover from a roasting tin, and when the rush of steam dispersed, she saw that it was a chicken.