Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  “Down under,” Kenneth said. “You could go see your cousins in Sydney. Margaret Kingston, your grandfather’s sister’s daughter—her husband has a paper processing site.”

  “Yeah, I think it’s several hours on a plane to Australia, even from there, and the schedule’s pretty packed,” Liz said.

  “Just a suggestion.” The paper resumed its full eclipse.

  “Will you do it?” Alison asked, though Liz felt she had already made perfectly clear that she would. She plumped herself down beside Liz, and snatched Michael up from the rug, where he was pushing a small blue Lego brick into Atlantic’s ear canal.

  “Yes, I want to, it’s a very interesting subject. There’s a woman over there who’s started a new ‘cult,’ I suppose you’d call it—”

  “It’s not dangerous, is it?”

  “No. I mean, there’s malaria. And food poisoning.”

  “A lot of violence in these places,” her father said sadly. “A lot of trouble.”

  “Where are ‘these places’?” Liz asked, and noticed Alison glance at her mum.

  Kenneth lowered the newspaper and eyed Liz.

  “I’m not starting. Just wondering what you meant. What constitutes ‘these places’?”

  His eyes returned to the paper and a page of the Daily Telegraph was turned.

  Judith tried to intercede—“It’ll be great for your profile, keep your name out there”—but Liz persevered.

  “Ethnicity? Poverty? Race? It’s a genuine question.”

  The Telegraph came down again and Kenneth lowered his reading glasses to the tip of his nose, enabling him to peer with a tired kind of menace over them.

  “I’m not trying to annoy you,” Liz persisted. “Does it depend on distance from Ballyglass? What constitutes the foreign? It’s an interesting philosophical question—what comprises the Other?”

  Kenneth lowered his jaw slightly, and pushed his tongue to one side of his mouth. This was the face of sufferance, of a man who is set upon by life but stoically endures it.

  “Just forget about it.”

  “I didn’t mean to annoy you—”

  “I’m not annoyed. I’ll just keep quiet over here. In my little corner.”

  A car horn went. No one had noticed Spencer swing his A4 round the back of the house.

  (ii) Anthony Carson, 72

  Anthony spent the afternoon moving a wardrobe, or watching one being moved, as his nephew joked in the van on the way back. He knew it was a kindness for Jamesy to ask him along. Get a lonely man out of the house for a bit of a jaunt, let him feel useful. He didn’t feel patronized by it—he was grateful. It’s what family was meant to do. Afterwards, Jamesy came in to check the TV aerial for him while Anthony got them a bottle of stout each. These big, boxy sets were out, according to Jamesy, you had to get a sleek, flat one. They bantered for a while but then the inevitable moment came and Jamesy took his leave. People had their own lives to live, of course. Anthony fed the cats and put on a record and opened another bottle of Murphy’s. Mary had given him all these Bach concertos on vinyl for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and he sat at the table and drank and listened to the complicated celestial music. He lifted the deck of cards and dealt a hand of patience. After three failures, a game came out, and he stopped the record player and placed the fifth concerto back in its sleeve. He examined his shirt in the mirror for stains and decided to change it before heading up the lane to the Day’s End.

  There was no seat at the bar, but Paddy went out to the back to find a spare stool and they squashed him in at the end by Jonty McLellan, who was well on his way.

  “How’s young Anthony getting on out in Thailand, is it?”

  “Ach, very good indeed. He loves it. He has a wee boy now with a native.”

  “Oh very good. I’d say now there’s a few of them mixed children out there.”

  “There would be.”

  “Fish farm going well?”

  “I believe so.”

  There was a pause.

  “Now what exactly would the fish in a fish farm be eating?”

  “They feed them.”

  “Oh they do.”

  “They do.”

  “But now would they be eating each other’s feces and so on?” McLellan asked happily.

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Would they not be? So pellets, is it?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Like fish meal?”

  “That would be my understanding.”

  “You been out there?”

  “I have not.”

  “Get yourself a wee squeeze, what? A wee honey.”

  “Ah well now, actually we were booked to go the year Mary died, but then, you know, Mary died.”

  “Now it’s a shame.”

  “It is.”

  “You haven’t had to seek your troubles.”

  “We all have crosses to bear.”

  In silence they looked down at their drinks and considered their crosses, then looked back up at the band going full throttle.

  “Not bad, this lot.”

  “Not bad at all.”

  “You like the rock and roll?”

  “I do.”

  “Me, now, I like two kinds of music myself. Country—”

  “That’s an old one.”

  “And Western.”

  “Look at these ould yahoos.”

  “An affront to come in like that and bang the door.”

  “Who do they think they are anyhow?”

  “Sure, they have the Halloween masks on. Now why in the name of God—”

  CHAPTER 9

  The shaker bottle fitted too well into the cup holder of the Audi. On the way to his viewing, before heading back to his parents’ house to see Liz, Spencer stopped at the light and tried to pull it out, but the bottle was stuck fast. The lid flopped back and spilled Vanilla Pro Performance AMP Amplified Mass protein shake—augmented with a handful of Quaker Oats, a dollop of extra-crunchy peanut butter, a few blueberries, and one banana—across his khaki Dockers. He wiped it off as best he could as the light changed, and almost immediately someone behind began beeping his horn. It was Ballyglass, for fuck’s sake. Where was the fire? He considered pulling the hand brake and getting out and having a go at whatever gipe was in the black car behind. He snapped the rearview mirror up to stop himself eyeballing the driver, and eased the car away from the green.

  At the next light by Molesworth, the same black motor had pulled up alongside him. It was only Hutchy, the idiot, in his 5 Series. Spencer waved and Hutch flipped him the bird, the cheeky fuck. They rolled their windows down.

  “You still on for golf on Sunday?” Hutch shouted.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Bring your fifty-pences.”

  “I won’t be needing them.”

  “Aw I think you will. I’ve got my new driver. It’s ti-TANE-ee-um.”

  Hutchy warbled the last word like the pop song, then winked and sunk the boot. The BMW purred off ahead. Spencer watched it crest Oldtown Hill and disappear, feeling the usual mix of guilt and grief and wild cheeriness that Ian Hutchinson triggered in him.

  Atop the Oldtown Hill, Spencer looked automatically downwards to see the field still sitting there, still empty. It sloped down from the car park behind the TV shop and the offices of the Mid-Ulster Mail. It was a large field, a hundred meters across and double that in length. When Spencer was growing up they’d played football in it after school—the agency was only across the road from the TV shop—and it was the only large empty piece of land in the center of Ballyglass. And it was what had broken Lynx Property, the company set up by Spencer and Ian Hutchinson.

  They were best friends. Spencer passed most of his childhood in the Hutchinsons’s tidy detached five-bed in the Oaks—
long since downsized in favor of a bungalow in Forthglen. The front room had a collection of porcelain ballet dancers in a corner display unit, and a pungent smell of potpourri, back when potpourri was a thing. Mrs. Hutch—Miriam—floated in and out of his infancy and adolescence with tea towels and traybakes, dispensing glasses of orange squash and optimistic multipurpose aphorisms, as all the while Ian rolled his eyes and told her they were hungry or thirsty or busy or bored. She loved Ian like he was a little prince, and it turned the cruel and funny boy into a witty narcissist. Anyone could see that Hutch had been too adored. Even Spencer, who’d been pretty adored himself, could see it. It was only natural for these two much-doted-on boys to go into business. Spencer—because he’d been working at his parents’ agency since he was sixteen—had access to the properties; Ian had the endless chutzpah.

  It was 2006 and the mood in the town, in the country, was wildly optimistic. A shop selling only mobile phone cases opened. A shop selling designer children’s clothes opened. There was an ice cream “shoppe.” There was a deli selling “organic produce.” The citizens of Ballyglass watched these developments with disbelief, amusement, anger, and finally despair. When the economy collapsed, the main feeling was one of vindication; it had always seemed ridiculous, fantastical, and so it had been proved. The town had been poor for all of its five hundred years, and by God it would be poor again. People had got “above themselves,” had been “carried away,” were all out gadding about living “beyond their means.” The inevitable reversion to a hardscrabble existence was accepted like a natural order returning, like water finding its own level. MacGill’s Delicatessen shut and was replaced by a Poundland. MobileCovers4U was boarded up and destroyed one night by fire. The town’s unwritten constitution—which was something like, “If it seems too good to be true, you’re not in Ballyglass”—was restored.

  But for those early years the mood was unstoppable as an avalanche. It was madness not to get involved. Townhouses were being built on the sites of the old factories and people would surely be found to buy them.

  Ian and Spencer were both nineteen when they bought their first house together with a loan—a two-up two-down out on the bypass; thirty-eight grand—and they rented it to Mrs. Montgomery, who wanted to be closer to her daughter. But they soon wanted to go bigger, better, higher. They set up Lynx Property—named after the scout patrol Ian had been sixer of and Spencer seconder—and by the time they turned twenty-one, they had five houses on the books.

  Time to develop. They heard from Simon Conway in the Railway Bar that the TV shop crowd might be willing to entertain offers for the field. They could buy it and go into partnership with Dennis Mahon to build thirty townhouses there. They bought it from Wilson Espie for eight hundred thousand pounds, not one pound of which they had. Spencer didn’t tell Kenneth until after they’d signed the deal on September 12, 2008; Lehman Brothers collapsed three days later. The interest payments on the loan amounted to thirty-seven thousand a month. They had to build immediately and make a lot of money. Dennis Mahon the builder announced he already had twenty-three houses he couldn’t sell in Omagh and fourteen in Magherafelt, and there was no way he was starting more.

  Going bankrupt was the kind of humiliation that makes you feel physically smaller, weaker. For three years after he turned twenty-two, Spencer had no bank account and was paid an allowance by his father again, as if he were twelve.

  —

  When he got to the house in question, a girl sat on the outside steps, head down in prayer to her smartphone; another peered in through the glass panel of the front door. He pulled up right outside and waved. Curt was the nod that came back from the steps. They could be very snappy, the foreigners.

  Ballyglass had got mostly Lithuanians and Portuguese. Nearly all the immigrants worked on assembly lines: cutting, boning, packing. There was the bacon factory, the cheese factory, the cement works. There was Moy Park, the big poultry plant over in Dungannon. He once sold two Korean chicken sexers a nice two-bed flat in Newmills. Then there were your Polish, your Romanians, Hungarians, Indonesians, a scattering of Africans. You saw these very black girls pushing prams up and down the main street. Brave new world. The new Café Ali on the corner of the Oldtown and Burn Road was filled with dwarfish, swarthy men—they were your Portuguese—hunched over tables or standing out front smoking. Never any women. Used to be you could walk the length of the town without seeing a soul you didn’t know by name, or know to see, but those days were long gone. There was, anyway, less fighting now between the RCs and the Prods; all the trouble at the weekends was between the migrants and the locals. So that was one thing they’d done for the community. And wasn’t it for the best, in the end? Adding a bit of color to the old two-tone, to the faded orange and the washed-out green? And if it was a shock to hear people speaking some funny tongue in the petrol station, well, it was only a shock once. And they were generally pretty good tenants. Quiet, punctual with rent. You might find there was an extra body or three sleeping there, but no, overall, not bad. Not too bad at all.

  “Spencer, nice to meet you.”

  The one at the door tripped down the steps to shake his hand.

  “Katarina.”

  Nose ring beneath the heavy-framed glasses, three ear cuffs on one ear, her lengthy black hair tied back and dyed inexpertly with purple streaks. She wore a black hoodie and was skinny up top with a very large lower half. Her elfin friend gave him a tepid smile as she tucked her phone into a little pocket on the strap of her backpack.

  “Now this place has just come on—let me get this open—but it’s not going to be on long.”

  Katarina liked the kitchen but disliked the hill you had to walk up to get to the house. Greta liked the hill because she loved this view from the kitchen of the fields and mountains—the Sperrins, Spencer clarified. Katarina liked the view but disliked the way the garden opened at the side onto the car park. It wouldn’t be difficult to put a gate up there, Spencer reassured them, gesturing with one hand to demonstrate how a gate might swing open and closed.

  “Would the landlord make that?” Katarina asked.

  “I’m sure that could be sorted out,” Spencer said, and added brightly, “So where are you girls from?”

  They looked at each other. Girls had been perhaps the wrong word.

  “I am Czech,” Katrina said.

  “Great football team, Czech Republic.”

  Spencer gave her a grin and got nothing back. Greta finished taking a picture of the kitchen units with her iPhone and slid it into the back pocket of her saggy jeans. She was not unattractive. Too skinny, but she had the face. Eyes like blue ice. Viking cheekbones.

  She gave a sigh of spiritual annihilation and announced flatly, “I come from Latvia originally.”

  “Latvia.”

  He was drawing a blank on that.

  “Lovely,” he added. “Ballyglass must be a big change.”

  Upstairs, Katarina fiddled with the cord of the window blind in the big front bedroom, and said that she liked this room. One of her rings was a silver skull with purple eyes. Greta said she liked it too, retrieving her iPhone.

  “You’ll have to draw straws.” Spencer smiled, and then, thinking this might be a little lexically complicated, added, “Or you could throw a coin, you know, flip it.” He noticed the little darting glance Greta threw at Katarina. They were a couple. He threw open the door of the hot press. Takes all sorts.

  After he waved the prospective tenants off, he lifted the post and piled the letters to a dead woman on the kitchen counter. The house had been cleared of most of Mrs. Shannon’s effects, though the stripped beds and a fairly inoffensive oatmeal sofa in the lounge had been left. The son was a radiologist in Glasgow, and he’d rung up to put the house on with them. He’d let Kenneth set the rent at 450 a month and told them anything left in the house should be donated to Cancer Research. Mrs. Shannon had been in a hospice in Belfa
st for months, but even so, it was quick in the end. And they had the house on the market before her body was cremated.

  But you couldn’t second-guess other people’s grief. You never knew. You couldn’t know. There was a hardening of circumstance. Spencer thought about his mother telling him to sit down one Sunday afternoon and drink his tea and then saying, “I have this swelling in my stomach.” And he’d been sick at heart, oh how he’d cried like a baby. But after a few weeks or so he’d begun to sleep again, could think of it without a hard knot forming in his own stomach. It was awful it was awful it was awful, but he was used to it. You could get used to anything. Wasn’t that the lesson?

  They didn’t sit around discussing it, not anymore. It had been three years since Judith’s “debulking,” the initial chemo, an infection that made her left leg swell up as hard and thick as a tree trunk. He’d driven with his dad every day to the Royal—and every day argued over whether to take the Boucher Road or the Westlink—and every day parked up on the top level of the rooftop car park, where she could see them from her window.

  Spencer stopped at the sunburst mirror in the hallway and adjusted his hair.

  He sat back down on the sofa and removed the tie that Kenneth in his wisdom still felt all estate agents should wear. His shoulders sagged in his boxy pin-striped suit. Impossible not to feel slightly wired after a showing. Game face. Real face. His left arm ached from a series of drop-set preacher curls he’d done in the gym last night. He tensed and let his fingers trace the swollen bunched cords of his bicep through the jacket and felt the reassurance of his own body, his capabilities. There was the familiar knock at the door. He let her in.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Where’d you park?” Spencer asked.

  “On the main street, down by Conway’s.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “When do you have to be back in the office?”

  “Before the hour. Your dad’s at Ray Mullens’s funeral, but I told Judith I’d be back at work by two.”