Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  “It’s not up to me to forgive him, is it,” Alison said. “It’s up to God.”

  Gifford smiled, as one might smile at a small relentless child, and said, “And those who suffered at his hands.”

  —

  They sat in the car and before he’d even started the engine, Alison said, “I don’t even want to know. I don’t even want to know the details. What happened. Or where. Or why. It’s in the past. Let’s leave it there.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “You wearing that?” asked Kenneth.

  Liz looked down at the navy shift dress she’d put on. She’d tied a navy and white scarf round her neck and parted her hair neatly to the side. She had, in other words, made an effort, a conspicuous effort, to dress for a wedding.

  “I was going to. Is it not all right?”

  Liz never could find her proper voice to talk to her father; it went up an octave.

  “It’s fine.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  Kenneth filled the water tank of the new Nespresso machine, and then turned the rack of the coffee capsules, looking for his Chococino. Much of the enjoyment he got from using the machine was due to the fact he could complain, each time, that it wasn’t quite hot enough.

  “Well, obviously something’s wrong with it or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  If Judith had been in the room, Liz would have let it go. She would have been able to meet her mother’s eye and exchange a look of sympathy and exasperation. But Judith was at Alison’s, helping her and Isobel and Trisha get ready. They had to be at the church at 11:00 a.m. and it wasn’t even 10:00 yet. Plenty of time for an argument.

  “I think it’s pretty clear I’m not wearing pajamas. What else would I have on? An intermediate outfit?”

  “Jesus Christ! I just asked you were you wearing that. Is that a crime?”

  Her father closed the cutlery drawer with double the force needed.

  “But why? To undermine my confidence? To make me feel bad about myself? I thought I looked nice. But now I don’t think that.”

  Her father, steering his way out of the kitchen, stopped and turned. The expression on his face was one of curious hurt.

  “You do look nice. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.”

  In Liz’s memory, her father had never—ever—apologized for anything, and in shock, she followed him through to the living room, watching as he set his cup on a coaster and lowered himself into his seat.

  “Are you OK?” she said.

  “I don’t want to argue,” he answered in a very small voice.

  “Me neither. I’m sorry too. Everyone’s stressed. . . . I was thinking this morning about the rituals of marriage. Something old and something new, something borrowed, something blue.” She sat on the arm of the sofa, babbling, trying to prolong this intimate moment. “It’s about continuity, and novelty, your old life and family and your new one—and the borrowed must be about the necessity of community, about relying on the network—but what’s the blue one about?”

  Her father picked up the remote control.

  “Rhymes with new, I suppose.”

  —

  The church door opened and thirty-four heads swiveled as Ruth Johnston—the alcoholic organist—took the cue to plunge ahead a little frantically with Mendelssohn’s dreary march. With her head bowed slightly, Alison entered, looking up from under thickened lashes. Down the aisle she advanced like a large pale pupa being dragged by another insect, this one dark and a little stiff-legged in his morning suit, the tails of which hung behind like folded wings.

  Kenneth’s face maintained a grave, momentous expression, although he winked almost continually at various people, excepting Liz. What was the deal with her father? When he was ten he’d won a scholarship to a boys boarding school in Dublin, and been sent away from the butcher’s shop in Ramelton, Donegal. He was the youngest of seven, and had always been spoilt, but that all-male environment had broken something in him; he had no way to reach the emotional content of his life. He couldn’t quite enjoy the company of women. He needed to mock whatever undertaking he was engaged in. He needed a jokey competitive level of conversation—the way boys talk in a locker room or dormitory. He couldn’t tell you how he felt—only wanted to assure you that he felt the way any normal man would feel, and why would you think otherwise?

  Alison stared forward, concentrating on keeping her head still, her hair elevated, and on not showing too overtly the pleasure that she felt. When she reached the second pew she turned to her family and widened her eyes at them as if to say, Can you believe this?

  Liz could believe it. The bad, boxy cut of Stephen’s hired jacket, how pale he looked. She watched wee Neil, the best man, beaming at Alison, his round face freshly scrubbed and the color of cooked gammon. He also belonged to the prosaic, believable world. The church was cavernous and cool, but even so Stephen wiped sweat away from his forehead. The Rev. Gifford stood on the step and waited for Alison to arrive, gently nodding his head to show he approved of all he surveyed.

  Kenneth handed her over to Stephen. Though Liz knew the transference of the woman from one registered keeper to another—like a car—suggested that the female would live with the husband’s group, in this instance the husband appeared to have no group, or at least no local group. His side of the church was filled up with friends of the Donnellys. She tried to think of it in academic terms; she hunted for the word—“uxorilocal,” was it?—when the newly wed couple shacked up near the wife’s group. It was textbook endogamy; she was marrying within the tribe. Stephen’s group, if there was such a group, was part of the larger tribe of Protestantism—one of the two moieties, say, that lived in the area.

  During the vows, the Rev. Gifford read out Stephen’s name as Andrew McLean, and added, “known as Stephen,” and Liz felt she was the only one who found this odd. Known as Stephen?

  Though as it was, if she could pick a name different to her father’s, she would. Who’d be a Donnelly? Who’d be Kenny Donnelly’s little girl, the elder one, the dark and prickly one, the one with brains to burn but still unmarried, and wasn’t it sad?

  Alison swallowed hard and concentrated and bit her lip and wiped the tears away, but the contagion spread, and Judith and Liz began snuffling and crying. She wanted her sister to be happy, and if marrying this skinny unprepossessing bald man who wore a signet ring and said “Scuse I” when he burped and whose eyes looked wet and dead was what made her happy, then she should go for it. He was kind to her, and Bill had never been kind. Judith passed a Kleenex for her along the row.

  Up in the pulpit Reverend Gifford beamed at the happy couple and praised the dress, praised little Isobel the flower girl and the lovely flowers, praised the “clement” weather—and then began to sermonize as if leading the congregation into battle. A marriage had to be “protected,” it “needed securing,” one must “keep others out of it to guarantee that it stays strong.” One needed “to hold it close and defend it,” needed to be “watchful,” “vigilant,” “wary.” The mood was somber as they stood to sing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

  Hadn’t Lear in “The Owl and the Pussycat” got the analogy down pat? Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling the ring at the end of your nose, your nose? Marriage was, as Lévi-Strauss remarked, an economic institution, not an erotic one. Except that watching the ring slide—not entirely smoothly—onto Alison’s finger, it occurred to Liz that the symbology was as much about penetration as possession, that they were always intertwined.

  At least they’d taken out “obey,” even here, in Ballyglass. It was time for her reading. Ecclesiastes. A time for this, a time for that, a time to read, a time to stop reading, a time to sit back in her seat and feel the burn of other people’s attention only lift when the next hymn began.

  Be thou my vision oh lord
of my heart

  nought be all else to me save that thou art

  Be thou my saviour

  —

  When they went out to sign the register, the Ballyglass Primary School choir trooped in, arranged themselves, and began a Westlife medley. Liz was very close to crying again. It was to do with the passage of time, the relentless forwardness of the serious enterprise of living. Liz was middle-aged. Was thirty-four middle-aged? Her parents were definitively old. The church, the wooden struts and beams above, the tapestried cushions for kneeling—stayed the same. But she aged, her parents aged, her brother and Alison aged. Everything around them would outlast them. This hymnal in her hand would be here long after she was dust. What would she outlast? Atlantic, possibly.

  After the choir filed back out into the vestry, there was a surprised silence when the congregation found they’d been left to their own devices. Silently, diligently, Spencer plowed through the levels of Candy Crush on his iPhone.

  Next to her, in his pin-striped suit, her Uncle Sidney smelled of carbolic soap. It was binary; if he didn’t smell of pigs he smelt of soap. He was scratching amicably with his fingernail at a dried stain on his tie. Even now, at seventy-two, Sidney looked more than capable of hoicking a calf up onto his back or plugging a sheep under either arm or flinging a bale up into the hayloft. The Sperrins’s elements had tempered his face, polishing and coarsening the skin. Thick tentacular hairs emerged from his nostrils and his ear canals, probing the atmosphere. There was a gentle wryness to him caused by negotiating with the earth on a daily basis. Now his eyes closed and his huge hands moved to his lap, the fingertips touched—a structure representing this church they sat in. And here are the people, the lost tribe of Ulster Protestants. Along the whitewashed walls were affixed brass and marble plaques for the war dead—the Great War, the Second World War, policemen and soldiers murdered in the Troubles—all the men who had been turned to names, to sounds. Not even first names—initials, surnames. One of the plaques had space left at the bottom, in anticipation of more dead. Everywhere imagery of sacrifice and offering, memorials and altars—but even while disguised as just the opposite, a sanctuary from materialism, the church functioned as a marketplace of cold transactions. For it was here that all the contracts were proposed, signed, enacted. Right from birth the Ulster Protestant was steeped in metaphors of hardship and reward, of temporal disadvantage and eternal compensation. Portrait of the Christian as a stakeholder, as a shrewd and patient small investor.

  This was the same pew she’d sat in for the first fourteen years of her life, until her parents agreed that if she got confirmed she wouldn’t have to come to church again. And so it had gone. She’d last been in here for Bill and Alison’s wedding. Or no, it must have been Isobel’s christening. The church was unchanged; the lectern had the same gold eagle with its wings spread in the act of taking flight, though never actually flying.

  Her mother stood up and she heard her give a little moan of effort. She looked at her and understood. She touched her hand and said, “Are you sick again?”

  She could see Judith considering a lie but then she nodded and squeezed her arm.

  —

  The many-headed snake of the congregation shuffled down the aisle—well wishing, swapping niceties—out into bright sunlight. Confetti was not allowed in the church grounds but rice was fine. Maybe the birds dealt with the tidy-up of rice. They waited for the bride and groom to exit. The road was twenty feet away and passersby had stopped to have a nosey. Liz stood beside a tall, soberly besuited man and a tiny woman in a brown tweed twinset with pearls, both in their seventies. He was watching the proceedings through his thick glasses with a lugubrious air. His wife unsnapped the clasp of her handbag and fished out two toffees. When she saw Liz watching her unwrapping them, she offered her one.

  “I won’t, you know. They get stuck in my teeth. But thanks.”

  “And mine,” the man said forlornly.

  “It was a lovely service,” offered Liz. “Bride or groom?”

  “We’re Andrew’s aunt and uncle,” the man answered.

  “Stephen’s,” the woman corrected him.

  “Stephen’s.”

  “Ach, right, I didn’t realize he’d got relatives here.”

  “Just us two, I think,” the lady said, looking around.

  “And we can’t stay.”

  “You won’t come out to the house? Just for a cup of tea?”

  “We’ve got to get back to Belfast, love.”

  “It’s sad about his family.”

  “Well, they don’t really see him, after everything. They moved to England, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Oh yes, they’re in Shrewsbury. He’s a carpet fitter.”

  “Who is?”

  “The brother, James.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  “He wasn’t when I spoke to him last week,” the man observed equably and unwrapped his toffee.

  And just then Alison and Stephen appeared in the Gothic arch, laughing and ducking the handfuls of long-grain and saffron as the photographer Bob Buchanan directed them this way and that. They all had their phones out, and there was another man, whom Liz didn’t know, snapping away with a big professional camera. Wee Neil stuffed a handful of rice down the back of Stephen’s shirt and got a boxed ear for his trouble. Kenneth stood on the first step of the church, swollen with success, glad-handing, laughing. Judith moved among the crowd, shaking hands and thanking people. A cardboard box covered with gold foil sat on a folding picnic table on the church lawn, and Alison and Stephen pulled the red ribbon off it together, and one white turtledove came flying out and alighted on the topmost strut of a telegraph pole. He wore a jaunty purple bow tie around his neck. As for the other, there was no sign so Stephen gave the box a little shake until it emerged and hopped up onto the rim, ruffled and guilty looking. It jerked its head round at the circling onlookers then unsteadily took off, only to land on the top of the open church door, where it proceeded to defecate copiously, leaving a stringy white streak down the burnished oak.

  (v) Moira Sheehy, 52

  The door to the lounge bar banged and she saw them, the two men, coming in wearing masks. She knew right away. One waved a pistol round his head and the other, the one with the vampire mask, was pointing one of those big automatic rifles at everyone. There was the crackling sound. Moira put her arms around her daughter’s back—her lovely daughter, her only daughter—and the same bullet went through them both.

  CHAPTER 14

  Liz found that if she offered to take the gifts from the arriving horde in order to “set them somewhere safe” (one of the desks in the study), she could curtail every little interrogation (Not married? No children?) with a semblance of basic courtesy. She surveyed the landscape of wrapped shapes. Ulster—a gift-based culture. You received, you returned, you passed it on. The statelet ran on quid pro quo, on tit for tat—and the rules applied as much as to toasters given at weddings as sectarian slaughter. These spoils were functional reciprocation for the dozens and dozens of bamboo salad servers and Cartier stationery sets and Waterford decanters and Belleek fruit bowls that Judith and Kenneth had bestowed over the years. Where was Alison going to put all this shit? The sight of so much pointless excess made Liz almost giddy. All these gifts evidenced the kula ring—the exchange system—that ruled Ulster life as much as it ruled any Melanesian people. There were rules for guest and rules for host, and they were nonnegotiable. Liz thought sometimes of writing something on the tribal aspects of life in Northern Ireland—how it resembled, like all cultures infected by violence, an older, atavistic way of life. (For wasn’t the typical state permanent war? Weren’t all the cities of antiquity walled?) A society that worked on the process of peace was a relatively new invention, and not just in Ulster.

  But sooner or later she had to emerge from the room of gifts into the
party itself. A maiden aunt—a spinster aunt!—had certain duties to fulfill: Liz fetched Isobel a glass of Shloer and wiped Michael’s nose, then used the few survivors of a bag of Jelly Babies to lead them down the lawn. The three of them sat on folding chairs in the little shed-cum-sunroom at the very far corner of the garden and surveyed the mania unfolding. Judith came fluttering across the grass, leaning forward oddly to stop her heels sinking into earth. Her face appeared serene, but the eyes told a different story. She put her head around the door.

  “Liz, we could use you in the house.”

  “I was just looking after these ones. I think Michael needs a change, but I wasn’t sure where the nappies were.”

  Judith tightened the drawstring of her mouth, swooped on Michael, and bore him away.

  “Granny’s cross with you,” Isobel offered thoughtfully when the door swung closed.

  —

  She was taking refuge in the kitchen, downing a glass of wine, when Spencer came in, followed by Trisha Hutchinson from the office, who looked a little disarrayed and carried a trifle in a large glass bowl. She still wore her lilac maid-of-honor dress. The cream of the trifle was studded with circles of maraschino cherries.

  “I’m sorry this is so late. I’d left it in the back of Ian’s car but sure I forgot all about it. I thought it might be useful for your mum, you know, with having you all home.”

  There was so much food, the fridge was so full, there were going to be leftovers for weeks, but better that than arrive, as they said in Ballyglass, with your two arms the one length. Liz found a space for it on the windowsill of the utility room.

  “How long have you been in the office, Trish? Must be ten years.”

  “Almost twelve,” Trisha blushed. “I know. It’s hard to believe.”

  “They were lucky to find you,” Liz said, and meant it. Trish was famously—within the family—“good” with Kenneth. It was an uncommon and discrete quality, like being sickle celled or double jointed.