Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  Now that Isobel, Alison’s daughter, stayed with them all the time, in the little box room called “Izzy’s room,” the bathroom too had reverted to its old name, its first name.

  Judith tugged on the light and the extractor fan ticked awake, too loud. It wouldn’t rouse Kenneth unless she plucked it from the wall and dropped it on his head, but its whirring was too loud for the night. There was no place for the mechanized in this darkness pulled up like a coverlet over the fields and the woods and Ballinderry River, over the garden and the hillside beyond it, its gorse and bare rocks and tussocks, and over the house, the middle one of three on the lane, that she stood in now, breathing very lightly. She tugged the bulb off and stepped into the guest room, turned on the bedside lamp and carried it to the bathroom, setting it on the lowered lid of the toilet. The plastic Tesco’s bag full of bath toys in the sink she moved to the low shelf of the wicker unit. She ran the hot tap and used her fingernails to clean Izzy’s hardened red toothpaste off the smooth enamel.

  Things, being things, always wore out. They wore down. They got dirty and needed cleaning. They wanted bleaching. Over the years, the grouting in the shower had turned from white to this mouse gray. She needed to spray it first, really, with a peroxide-based cleaner, and then leave it for half an hour. It would need to be scrubbed fairly gently not to take the grouting off. Wire wool would be too harsh. A nailbrush. Even a toothbrush.

  She opened the cupboard under the sink. Cleaning products were always named to make it sound like cleaning took no time at all. In a jiff. In a flash. Everyone was so concerned with time. So worried about spending it the right way. And how much more pressing was it now. Life-limited. The phrase Dr. Boyers used. The limited life. But wasn’t everyone’s?

  She spritzed the grouting until all the tiles ran with little foamy rivulets, and the chemical smell nauseated her. When she opened the window the night air came in like a cold hand on her neck. There was a smell of cut grass, manure. She’d leave the liquid to soak for a while, and go and have a look at the attic. It would need to be cleared at some point.

  She found herself sitting on the bed in the guest room, staring into the deep-pile carpet, a striped affair of red and cream, and then at the curtains, a heavy red damask.

  Liz had said, after her first night in here after it was decorated, that she’d felt like she was sleeping inside someone’s womb. Now what slept in Judith’s womb was monstrous. Awful.

  Hello, the Voice said. Are you referring to me?

  Of course it could be beaten. It was unlikely, very unlikely, but who knows what could happen? Who knows what miracles science might yet come up with?

  People would say to her sometimes there are good things about getting a diagnosis, and she would smile and say, “Oh yes,” and think, How dare you. But it was true that the fact of the thing had freed her, for a bit. She’d moved into the center of their lives, hers and Ken’s, and found herself appreciated—like an ornament gathering dust in the back of a cabinet unexpectedly appraised at some fantastic value, and brought out to the light of the mantelpiece. But here too the dust alighted.

  Four years, two months, and seventeen days ago she’d noticed that she couldn’t close the button of her good navy slacks. She had carried three children and now this lump. It could be benign, a benign cyst. Why not? What was the point in mentioning it to Kenneth? He had enough going on. He was making a good recovery from his surgery, and his speech was pretty good, considering the way it had been six months before. It was a Saturday night and she didn’t sleep well at all, even after several G&Ts. The next day she’d made a roast chicken for lunch and Ken’s brother Sidney came round, and told them in his halting way a long story about Lynn’s horse being stolen from a field outside Markethill and her friend Sean buying said horse back from a man in a pub in Dundalk, but she was too distracted to follow all the details, and when she tried to lift the bowls of trifle before Kenneth and Sidney had finished eating, her husband looked at her like she had two heads and said, “What’s got into you?”

  I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t know what’s got into me or how it got there or how to get it out. But instead she smiled and said, “Och, I didn’t sleep last night. I’m dead tired.”

  The following Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. she stood at the back door of the clinic at the Westland Road waiting for someone to arrive and open up. Once inside, Judith did what she was told. It was a relief to follow instructions, to enter a system and just sit and look at a poster telling people—especially old people and children, who were apparently particularly at risk—to get flu shots, and just to sit and wait and wait and sit and know that the process, whatever it turned out to be, had started. A relief it was to pass the problem of herself to other people. They would sort it. They would know. They would do what they could.

  —

  The attic was accessed by a half-sized door—an Alice-in-wunnerland door, Izzy called it—in the wall of the small bedroom. Judith stooped and entered and tugged the light pull. Even with her slippers and terry-cloth dressing gown, the coldness felt cautionary. She was still too warm-blooded to be standing here among lifeless junk, the abandoned clothes and pictures and games and books. Heaped in the corners, hanging from makeshift rafters, filling cardboard boxes and shelves and plastic-lidded stacked bins, the grave goods. A foot away from her head, a spider, her host, shinned down its twisting filament and twirled and reconsidered and hauled itself back up.

  Look at all this crap, she thought. Look at all this crap.

  All the many hundred accumulated products of marriage and children. They could open a Museum of Late-Twentieth-Century Life. The History of Board Games, of Soft Toys, of Side Lamps, of Winter Coats. Maybe Isobel and Michael would want some of it. But she never showed any interest in making things, Isobel. Judith couldn’t get her to touch the Lego or jigsaws. She was all about dolls. Girls liked things with faces; no matter what the feminists thought, it was true.

  She pulled out a broad hanger from which a maroon suit bag hung. A transparent window in the bag revealed thick brown fur. It was so heavy. When they’d gotten engaged over a bag of chips in Morans’ Café on Lower Merrion, Kenneth had said they would have four children, a house with a river that ran through the grounds, where he could fish—and she would have a fur coat. They’d managed three children. That took ten years. The coat took twelve . . . Life was both slower and faster than you expected. You saved up and worked towards . . . Must have been 1982. They were living in the wee Iveagh estate up in Prehen on the Waterside in Londonderry and she was working in the City Shirt Factory, in Personnel. Kenneth traveled for a while from Dublin and then got a job with Kennedy Collins estate agency, which had just opened a branch in Derry, up at the diamond.

  She unzipped the bag and a great rush of soft fur escaped from the plastic. She ran her hand down it, and static made the fur twitch as if it were alive.

  She found herself reluctant to try it on. It was a different Judith who’d worn it. She smoothed a hand down the collar of the coat, with the nap and then against it. It looked dark brown this way, then black the other. It all depended. She thought of pushing her face into it for a second but didn’t. Mink? It was mink, wasn’t it? What was mink? Like an otter? More ferocious. Like a ferret. How many minks? You got a coat like this from ten, twelve animals, she thought, checking the pockets automatically. Nothing.

  The things they’d done in this coat! She slipped it on and sunk her hands into the pockets lined with satin. She gave a little curtsy for no reason, and noticed in the corner another rail of clothes balanced between a rafter and the housing for the water tank. She hadn’t looked at those in years. Among the trench coats and sheepskin jackets and leather skirts, she came to a plastic bag on a wooden hanger, filled with exercise books. She worked the bag off the metal hook of the hanger and pulled out the tired orange and blue exercise books.

  Liz Donnelly. P.4 English. P.4 Geog
raphy. P.4 Maths. P.4 History.

  Judith opened the English book to a story written by the eight-year-old Liz from the point of view of the town of Ballyglass. Such imagination!

  Each step round the chimney took her further into the past. Boxes of their own wedding presents from forty-two years ago were stacked here, and boxes of books and crockery from Kenneth’s parents’ house in Ballyshannon. There was too much of it. It overwhelmed. She moved back into the lit part of the attic, pushed with her slippered foot a plastic crate of old candles and Christmas decorations under the eaves, making a passable trail from the door to the chimney stack. The bookshelf leaning against it held all the books in the house. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland. Dick Francis. That was Kenneth’s, and unread. Jeffrey Archer. He turned out to be a shyster, didn’t he? His poor wife. What were those boxes? Oh, the Hummel plates—they’d bought one a year for the first twenty years of their marriage. History of Hummel Plates, circa 1972 to 1994.

  It hadn’t been easy. God knows. They’d fought and fought. She’d moved out once, moved into the flat above the agency for a night, and taken one of the girls with her. He was a terrible thorny old bastard sometimes, no doubt about that. Things you think you’ll always love you don’t. You really don’t. She’d wanted a nice home with nice things. On the farm there was never enough of anything. Except for work. There was enough of that.

  She didn’t want the children to have to go through the boxes—she’d done it with her own mother’s things, few though they were. All her mother’s clothes had fitted in two bin bags. She found she was hugging herself now, hugging her fur-coated body. She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end.

  Liz would be home in nine hours—eight. She must remember to cut some hydrangea from the garden and set a vase of it in her room. She lifted Liz’s exercise book and tugged off the attic light. Back in the guest room she sat on the bed and read:

  As towns go, I’m not the best looking. My spine is one big wide street running along for over a mile, dead straight. I have shops all down me and you can tell how well the shop owner did a hundred years ago by the highnesses of the building. I sit at the foot of a mountain, Slieve Gallion, which wears its white cap in winter and in summer time is brown. I was born in 1645 as a marketplace, a meeting place for all the peeple to come and buy and sell vegtables and animals, cows and pigs and horses. I was burnt down and built bak up, and burnt down and built back up. My name is also An Corr Crea, from the Irish for Boundry Hill.

  There has been a lot of fighting. Everybody wants me. My MPs have been UNions and Shin Fein—the people who walk all over me are both Protesants and Roman Catholics. There are the same amounts of people of both kinds. I have nearly ten thousand people living on me like little nits in my hair.

  My synbol is made up from the synbol of the county and three fish. The synbol of the county is the red hand and it comes from the story of when Ulster had no proper ruler. The men agreed that a boat race would happen and who’s hand was first to touch the shore of Ireland, would be the owner of the place. Many boats were in the race and a man called O’Neill saw that he was losing so he got a sword and chop off his hand and lifted it and threw it and it reached the shore first. O’Neill was made the king and he lives at Tullyhog fort outside the town near Christine’s house.

  The family Donnelly live in the south part of me, on the Lissan road. They are a happy family and there are five of them. Mummy and Daddy and Liz and Alison and little baby Spencer. The mummy makes rice krispy buns and cherry scones. The Daddy sells houses to people who need places to live. Alison and Spencer are OK.

  My businnesses are to make cement out at the Cement works and to make sausages at the Bacon Factory. Sometimes out in the playgground of the primary school you hear the pigs squealing in the factory as they’re being brought in or put down. They cut their throats, but quick so it doesn’t hurt. And sometimes there is a bad smell from the factory sweet and rotten both.

  CHAPTER 4

  She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.

  She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart. Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.

  Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?

  Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.

  She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.

  She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?

  The reply came after a minute.

  Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.

  Liz considered for a second, and replied:

  Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.

  She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered whether this conversation would make her feel better or worse. Liz always felt like the black sheep; her mother and father and brother and sister were their own club, and Liz was invariably outside the circle. But there was nothing more rewarding, in some lights, than a conversation with her sister. If Liz were a plaintiff in the court of some anecdote, Alison would quickly side with her and adopt on her behalf the prosecutor’s wrath. She was loyal as a pit bull, but then you don’t want a pit bull in the house, ideally. In phone conversations Alison would frequently crown a line offered by her elder sister with a stinging, cryptic, catchall phrase: Well, that’s typical of you. Or: You’re never going to grow up, are you? And once, astonishingly: That’s what you get for crying wolf your whole life.

  She pressed the TALK key.
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br />   At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.

  She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”

  The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.

  Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”

  An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families . . . Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one. . . . Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.