Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  He parked outside the house and went down to the yard, fed the dogs, then went in and had his own tea of a gammon and a half, a couple of eggs, some boiled potatoes. His sister Majella was in fine form; she’d sold three engagement rings in two hours and Francie Lennon had told her she was in line for a proper bonus. She kept winding him up about Veronica, who she said he should really think about asking out. What was wrong with him? She was a pretty girl, and it wasn’t like he had them queuing up outside his fucken bedroom door. A little later, in the shower, he made his list. The bad: this weird raised redness round the mole on his thigh, and the length of the fence he had to bitumen tomorrow down by McAleer’s. The good: Portrush with the boys next Saturday night, and Damon’s uncle having that caravan they were going to crash in on the site behind Kelly’s nightclub. The crack would be mighty altogether. Altogether mighty. It would be something else again. And it also meant skipping Mass on Sunday. Oh, he could handle that!

  He got to the bar before Hugh turned up. It was unreal why Hugh insisted on him arriving at 6:30 p.m., when he himself never bothered showing up till a quarter to seven. If he wanted him to open up he would, he would be happy to, but he was fed up to the back teeth with sitting out in the car, watching an empty Tayto’s crisp bag scraping across the tarmac, waiting on Hugh to show his fucken face.

  Two of the barrels needed changing, which meant Seamus D hadn’t bothered closing up properly. Plus, the drip trays in the lounge bar hadn’t been washed out. It was best just to get on with it. Stickiness. Stickiness here by the Tennant’s mats. Stickiness here on the top of the mixers fridge. Lazy fuckers. He rolled a barrel of Tennant’s in from the store, then a barrel of Murphy’s. The band was to arrive at 7:30 p.m., and Hugh was mucking around with the lights for the stage. He flicked on the tap for the Tennant’s and heard the air whistling out, and then a low gurgle, and caught the splutter of foam with a pint glass.

  The Cotton Mountain Boys—Derek and Padraig and Alfie—had a combined age of two hundred and something, and they offset their different plaid lumberjack shirts with the same black leather waistcoats and bootlace ties. It was slow starting off, but around 8:00 p.m. or so a whole pile of customers arrived at once, and by 8:15 p.m. the place was packed. The Boys were doing “The Gambler” and the chorus had been gradually taken up by the customers, so when they got to “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” for the third time, the whole place joined in and you could feel it go through your body, the sound of it. Then they started on the one about the man who’s constantly sorry or something and Derek’s voice cut through the pub like a hot knife. The man could still hold a note, no doubt. Paddy was reaching up for a few empties on top of the quiz machine when it started, the shouting, and that sound like firecrackers. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and looked down to see the sleeve of his blue shirt gone dark with wet.

  CHAPTER 6

  It must be him. Short and severe with his hand held out. Unimpressive, Liz thought. Blotchy stonewashed jeans and a black fleece. She shook the hand and immediately afterwards swung the bag round on her shoulder and unzipped it, but a small dog did not poke its head out. She put her fingers in and stroked the skull until Atlantic gave a thin disgruntled moan and her squirrelly head arose, eyes half shut. Stephen, startled, laughed and cupped Atty’s head in his hands. Tattoos on his wrists. A gold signet ring.

  “Hello, och, who have we here?”

  Liz set the bag down and the dog hopped neatly out. Stretched her front legs, her back. When Stephen tried to pet her from above, she pushed her soft nose up into his fingers, pulled back, and looked at him a little formally, then gave the fingers a confirming swipe with her pink clean tongue.

  “They let you take him on the plane?”

  “Sort of.”

  As the dog began olfactory investigations of the column they stood beside, Stephen gave a little grimace of pain.

  “He’s not about to piss on that, is he?”

  “It’s a she. We should head outside.”

  Liz looked at his profile as they tramped down the corridor to the exit. The small sharp nose that reached from his small round face seemed permanently primed for smelling something foul in the atmosphere. There was a slight anxious squint to his whole aspect and an awful softness in the large brown eyes. Some neediness or base want. Alison always had a weakness for weakness. But Liz had nothing against him. That was the phrase she held up in her mind for Stephen. I have nothing against you. You seem fine. Your fingernails are short and clean. You wear an analog watch with a white face and a black leather strap. You seem like hundreds of men I might walk past: shrunken, tired, aligned to some faction that has suffered defeat.

  For his part Stephen noticed the sandals, the black nail varnish on the toes. It was none of his business. And he had nothing against her, no, nothing against her. Bit trendy, no doubt. And a bit smart in herself, definitely. And from all those stories Alison had told him, a bit of a loose cannon. But she was his fiancée’s sister, and would be treated well by him. He hadn’t expected the dog. And that rucksack had seen better days—as had she.

  —

  The light of Ulster traveled not by particle or wave but by indirection, hint, and rumor. A kind of light of no-light, emanating from a sun so swathed in clouds it was impossible to tell where it lurked in the sky.

  As they drove, Liz stared dully out the window. This hour was the strangest. The car functioned like a decompression chamber, adjusting the body to the new density surrounding it, to the element of Ireland. The rain that came in off three thousand miles of ocean left the land so verdant, so lush, that the light reflecting back into the sky took on aspects of the greenness, a deep virescent tinge. It was not raining, but it had been, and the land they drove through was waterlogged. One low field outside Antrim had a pair of swans riding across it as if on rails, cutting metallic wakes. This filter of light made the scenery seem a kind of memory, already heavy with nostalgia. She thought of the peeled, bare light of New York, its blues and yellows, its arctic sharpness and human geometries. Here the day was softened, dampened, deepened. The light was timeless—in the sense that midmorning might be midafternoon. Ten a.m. in May could be five p.m. in late November.

  “Great you were able to come back for the wedding.”

  “Aren’t I the good sister?”

  “Ah now you’re both good.”

  Liz hadn’t meant it as a comparison but now that he’d taken it that way, she didn’t much like his response. It gave him too much of a role in their lives. Who did he think he was? Who did he think she was?

  “Everyone’s good in their own way,” she replied. Which seemed petty, so she added solemnly, “Alison’s one of the best, really. She’s there with Mum and Dad at all times.”

  “Your dad seems a bit better.”

  “That’s good . . . How’re you getting on with all of them?”

  “Good. No, good, I think.”

  When Kenneth’s first stroke occurred four years ago, Liz had intended to fly back to Dublin to see him but had, in the end, skyped instead. There was not enough time before the heart surgery and she had no money, and was just starting her teaching load for the term, and no one could have expected her to drop everything. She sent him an e-card with a gif of a tree frog in a fez singing “I hope you’re feeling better, better, better” to a jazzy little break beat. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery, and she came home three months later for a long weekend. If he got his words wrong sometimes, if he moved with stiff languorous gestures, as if he were underwater, still he seemed all right, or mostly all right.

  Her father’s health was common ground and a safe area, but neither Stephen nor Liz could be bothered to pursue it. Kenneth himself never mentioned it, and if Liz asked him on the phone how he was doing she received a brusque, offended “Fine,” as if she’d questioned his sanity or his professional credentials.

  “Y
ou want a fag?”

  Obviously the answer to this query from Stephen should be no, but Liz felt that she was feeling, realistically, about as shitty as possible. Why not double down?

  Home was like climbing into a suit that was made of your own body, and it looked like you, and it smelled like you, and it moved its hand when you told it to, but it wasn’t you, not now.

  She flicked the finished fag out the window and closed her eyes and sleep overtook her. She woke on the dual carriageway into Ballyglass when her head bumped against the glass. There was Charlie McCord’s old petrol station, abandoned, the pumps chained and padlocked.

  “Sorry I was out that whole time.”

  “No bother. Good for you.”

  “Did I miss anything?”

  “Your wee dog snores.”

  “She does, yeah.”

  As they turned down Westland Road a woman in a plum-colored ski jacket and an orange bobble hat was hanging washing out on a rotary line.

  “She won’t be cold.”

  “She will not.”

  There was a pause and Stephen felt himself about to tell Liz something but stopped. He hadn’t thought of the house for a long time—it was that rotary line that did it. A neat enough wee bungalow on a few acres, pebbledashed, brown trim, with two concrete cockerels on the gate posts he could still see raising their necks about to crow—and a rotary line in the garden. When he was a lad of ten they’d left Londonderry to move there, just outside Limavady. He’d loved that house. Surrounded by animals: doltish sheep, cows, rabbits, sticklebacks in the wee stream and birds, always birds, in the trees trilling out their notes, flittering about. The rotary was in the garden by the side of the house, where it could be seen from the road, and his mother, with that indefatigable air she had, would hoist the plastic basket of washing outside and peg up the damp things for him and his siblings, the wee socks for their wee feet. But not his father’s shirts. His father’s shirts were dried in the bathroom, over the bath, though the question of why did not even occur to him until his mother picked him up one Monday evening from Scouts in Dungiven and asked him, with a queer edge in her voice, what had happened at school today.

  “Nothing, nothing really.”

  They were stopped by traffic lights at the courthouse, the huge stockade of barbed wire and guard posts and searchlights.

  She said, “Do you tell people what Daddy does?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What he does for a living?”

  “He’s a policeman.”

  “He’s a policeman, yes. But when people ask you, you should say he works for the council.”

  “Is Daddy OK?”

  “Some bad men attacked the police station today, honey. But your daddy’s OK.”

  He wanted to ask if someone was not OK, if someone would never be OK again, but he found that he couldn’t, that he was too scared to hear any more, and he sat in silence, his forehead pressed on the cold glass. Overhead there were a million stars; the dark branches of the trees sifted and released them. If there was a god, why was his purpose not to stop this?

  After a few minutes, as the road unfurled under the headlights, as they sped through the fields and hedges, his mother said, “You’re a good boy, Stephen.”

  Maybe everything led back to this exchange. Some small initial tilt in direction will cause, over time, a great distance to arise between the intended destination and the actual one. Certainly for days afterwards, it seemed to Stephen like someone had taken a kind of universal remote to his life and turned up the brightness and contrast, making everything sharp-edged and garish and strange. But his father was OK, until a few years later he wasn’t. Thirteen when his father was killed, shot twenty-six times by two men hiding in a ditch. There are clean deaths and messy deaths and this was the latter. Closed coffin.

  —

  The milk lorry was attempting to reverse. The sun had come out and the truck’s huge silver container tank caught the light. Stephen flicked down the visor and his license fell out, hitting the gear stick and landing in Liz’s footwell.

  “Oh sorry. Here, I’ll stick it back up here.”

  Liz lifted the license. The black-and-white photo showed Stephen with a side parting and a blank, slightly idiotic expression.

  “You’ve a bit more hair there.”

  “Aye a lot more. Here.”

  He reached over sharply and lifted it out of her hands, but not before she saw his name was printed on the pink plastic card as McLean, Andrew. He slipped it back into the sun visor and flipped it up.

  “Andrew?” she said involuntarily.

  “Oh that. It was my father’s name, but they always called me Stephen.”

  “Oh.”

  Here was the sign announcing YOU ARE LEAVING COUNTY LONDONDERRY—though since a republican had blacked out the LONDON, and a loyalist had come along and erased with blue paint the DERRY, and finally some misanthrope or reasonable man at the end of his tether had whitewashed the O and Y, and all of LEAVING except for the A—the sign now cheerfully explained that:

  YOU ARE A C UNT

  The unofficial but more typical greeting was the next sign, which had been there as long as Liz could remember, painted in foot-high letters in a mock Gothic font on the side of the gospel hall:

  The wages of sin are death: but the gift of God is eternal life.

  Romans 6:23

  This was a place of voices, they jostled and contested with one another—a small hard town with one long road leading to a mountain—but even now the sight of sunlight shifting on those distant slopes of bog and rock and gorse made Liz’s heart give a little shiver in her chest. They drove past the agency—Liz could see her father’s receptionist, Trish, standing behind the desk in a white blouse looking into her phone—then through Monrush, smoke rising straight up from a few chimneys on the council houses. And here another voice spoke—a new sign, roughly lettered in red, white, and blue on a sheet of plywood nailed to a telephone pole:

  In Texas murder gets you the electric chair. In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.

  She gestured up through the windscreen at the sign.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Oh, that Shinner Declan Keogh. The one who escaped from the Maze. It’s out of date now anyways.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, he’s now replaced wee Kieran Smith as our ‘local representative’ for Stormont. You know Kieran’s the new MP?”

  “That’s right.”

  Liz did not know, and when Liz did not know something she had found that “That’s right” was a usefully ambiguous formulation to reply with, particularly in the classroom. But that was in New York.

  In Northern Ireland, Stephen said, “What’s right?”

  “About the new MP.”

  “Yeah . . . I just said it was. Oh they look after their own. McGuinness handed it on to Smith, and the Unionist was a fella called Barrett. Now Barrett’s father was a caretaker at Springhill. Smith was the main suspect in his killing, they say.”

  “I heard that.”

  There was a long pause. Stephen shifted into third. They passed the new estates—dozens and dozens of white blocky constructions littering Morgan’s Hill; they’d been erected quickly in the years of madness and entitlement when everyone could buy everything and did. The houses had something childish and optimistic about them as they strained for a little grandeur; flanking each primary-colored front door were thick fluted Doric columns.

  “I’ll say this. It’s all one sided in any case. There’s no consultancies coming our way.”

  Our way? She wound the window down a few inches and let cool air into the car. There was the lancing smell of slurry. Our way. Our way or the highway. Press-ganged back into the caste, no questions asked. Impossible not to be picked for a side. If you tried to sit on the fence,
you came to realize that you couldn’t move, not an inch, for you would topple off and land on one side or the other, covered in bullshit. The north was thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. It would outlast us all. There was no way round it. What was the word? There was a French word. Uncontournable. There was no getting round it. For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.

  At university she wrote her master’s dissertation on the special kinship groups of Ulster. Her home province was a nightmare of disorder in which she tried to find an order. She became an anthropologist, she told herself and others, because her childhood in that province, state, statelet, made her search for reason in the most unreasonable of places. The work she loved—Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, even Foucault—shared the desire to tease new meaning from habituated reality. For how could you live here and not be sad? It was absurd: You didn’t “believe” in something if you were born into it. You accepted it, you acquiesced, you submitted, you lost—and you gave up the chance to become yourself, to come to conclusions of your own. One must be very naive or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

  “A mess. A complete mess. And that crowd at Stormont, sure they couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.”

  She pressed the tip of her index finger against the side of the pad of her thumb, shaping from her hand a triangle. She made the other match it, touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs to each other. Were there other triangles in a world of circles and squares? Was everyone a triangle pretending to squarehood or circledom? Who was Andrew McLean? The triangle, the circle, the square? Her hands looked like a mask. She wanted to ask him but didn’t. I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.

  “True enough.”

  They were through the roundabout.

  She was almost home and then she was.

  And here on the doorstep were her parents: her mother—elegant in black slacks and a caramel cashmere sweater—watering the dripping hanging baskets; and behind her Kenneth, directing, grayer and frailer and smaller than in the memory but now waving with both hands, and pleased to see his daughter. She could see that clearly now, the real pleasure that she brought to them both just by being in their world, at least at first.