by Nick Laird
“Ah now, I don’t know what we’d do without Trisha,” Spencer chimed in, grinning.
—
Upon their arrival, Alison and Stephen began a victory lap around the garden that lasted until Wee Neil clambered up on the garden bench and clapped his hands twice and shouted, “Ladies, gentlemen, and Stephen, the buffet is served—or as they say round here, ‘Yer tay’s waiting on ye.’”
—
Entering the wedding marquee, Liz ran into Cousin David. Bug-eyed, snub-nosed, prematurely portly, now married to an improbably cute adult woman called Cynthia, he remained frozen in Liz’s memory as the twelve-year-old who explained at great length that he’d heard a voice talking to him as he was falling asleep, and believed it was the call to dedicate his life to the Lord. Soon after he’d stood up at the Lighthouse and accepted Jesus Christ into his heart as his “personal savior.” Jesus wasn’t, Liz always thought, that personal a savior. It wasn’t like he was a personal trainer or a personal assistant. He’d save anyone, literally anyone who asked. Liz was not asking, though, and so David looked at her now, as he always did, with pity. Not married still? No children? David patted the heads of a couple of his own nearby children—he had five—and began speaking, as usual, of what was going on with him. Which was more of what he’d always been doing. Spreading God’s word to nations less fortunate and less white than Northern Ireland, where so much good had sprung from Christianity. Liz nodded and tried to smile as he finished “updating” her, all the time gripping her hand as if she was his very favorite sinner.
“And we just met your wee dog!” he enthused.
“She’s such a cutie!” Cynthia added. It was her turn to touch Liz and she took both of Liz’s hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “Is she your little baby?”
“Oh not really. She’s my dog.”
Liz took a dainty sip of wine, as if she were drinking it under duress.
“Oh, but sure you love her like a child!”
When you saw such relentless positivity up close, Liz assumed it had to be hiding something so unutterably sad, so dark, so tragic that she herself wished never to know it. Spencer was hovering behind David. It was one of her brother’s dearest wishes to wind David up so that he cussed or lost his Christian rag. He leaned in and whispered in his cousin’s ear, “D’you see they’ve discovered a gene which makes people more likely to believe in God, kind of a genetic weakness, like?
David wheeled round.
“I see you haven’t got any smaller.”
Liz spoke, “Actually, David, I wanted to ask you: Do you know anything about new religions? Specifically about Papua New Guinea?”
David’s beatific grin faltered.
“What’s a new religion? Like a sect?”
“I’m not sure—I’m off to investigate one at half seven tomorrow morning,” she added, with an involuntary smile, and the realization that she was probably drunk, and very definitely happy to be imminently free.
“I know there’s a lot of very good missionary work done in New Guinea. Our home church network raises a lot of money to send people and supplies out there. It’s a place that needs—”
“Here, and David,” Spencer interrupted, “d’ye see on the news they’ve done these studies now that show religious children are much meaner than normal ones?”
David gave an authentic laugh.
“It’s true. They want more severe punishments, and won’t share, and stuff like that,” Spencer continued.
“You’ve been saving these up for me.”
Spencer smiled and Liz thought he blushed a little.
“I just thought you’d be interested. I was listening to the news and I thought, now, David’ll want to know . . .”
David took his arm and started to steer him towards the marquee.
“You know where I get my news? It’s a big book that’s been passed down to us—”
“The dictionary?”
“Close—”
“The encyclopedia?”
“Almost.”
“Oh I know what one you mean,” Spencer said. “The Guinness Book of Records.”
—
“On behalf of my wife and I—”
A roar went up. Stephen grinned and let it die down.
“On behalf of my wife and I, I’d like to thank you all for coming today. I’m a lucky man. I know that. I’d like to thank Ken and Judith, who’ve been only kind and welcoming towards me, and also for putting on such a great day here, at their lovely house.
“I don’t have any fancy speech prepared. I find myself a bit tongue-tied when it comes to Alison. As you can see, I’ve had a bit of luck here—meeting her and marrying her. Isn’t she beautiful? And Michael and Isobel, they’re little smashers. I hope that I’ll be able to deserve their love. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, Alison. And I’d like to thank her for agreeing to be my wife.”
There was a collective ooh from the female half of the audience, and Alison reached over and squeezed Stephen’s hand. She felt famous somehow, even more so than the first time because the story this time was so . . . uplifting. Alison’s had a hard time—she deserves some happiness. Alison’s been through the mill—but look at her now. It was almost like the stories on the front of the rags you bought at the supermarket checkout.
CHAPTER 15
The house was dead, locked in heavy, hungover slumber. She dressed hurriedly and gave Atlantic—still curled under the duvet—a valedictory tickle on the chin. Her taxi was already in the driveway and they drove in silence to the airport, ambushed by patches of low-lying mist and sudden clarity. Her head kept falling forward and waking her back up. She was through security and buying a bottle of water when she saw the newspaper. On the front page of the Sunday Life—the whole front page of the Sunday Life—Alison and Stephen on the doorstep of Ballyglass church, coming out from their wedding.
Murderous McLean’s Doves of Peace: Trick or Treat Killer Living Life to the Full . . . Unlike His Victims
Ruthless gunman Andrew McLean got married yesterday in a lavish wedding ceremony, celebrating the big day by donning a top hat and tails and releasing white turtledoves—despite the blood of five people on his hands. . . .
There was a description of the shootings, and details of the wedding, of the family, of the estate agency business, of the fact that Alison had two children from a previous marriage. . . . Comments from the local SDLP MLA for East Londonderry, who said she was “shocked” to hear of the marriage, and added that McLean could move on but his victims and their families would never have that luxury. A side column was headed: OUTRAGE OF PARENTS WHOSE CHILDREN SANG AT KILLER’S WEDDING. “I wouldn’t let my child perform at the wedding of a pedophile, why would I let my child be at the wedding of a cold-blooded killer?”
There were photos of the Day’s End pub after the massacre. Some of the bodies were covered with sheets. Stray limbs emerged. A bracelet on a dead wrist. Shoes on lifeless feet. Dark blotches on the dance floor were blood. She found she was sitting down on a bench. They were saying it was the last call for her flight to Heathrow.
—
Queuing for the gate she phoned home and Judith answered, slightly breathless.
“We heard. Your dad’s away now to buy it.”
“Did you know?”
“What?”
“Did you know he was wrapped up in that? Five people! Five people he killed!”
“Of course we didn’t. I can’t believe Alison had any—I mean, how could she have . . . If she’d known . . .”
Her mother trailed off, helpless.
“The plane’s boarding.”
There was the sound of her mother crying. Spencer came on the line. “You OK?”
“Yeah, I mean, what a fucking disaster.”
“It’s unreal.”
“Unreal.”
> —
Stephen was still asleep. His face all squashed against the hotel pillow. Her head was ringing. She slipped into the bathroom and found the Anadin. She washed them down with water from the tap and then, while she sat on the toilet, turned her phone on. It buzzed, and buzzed again. She opened the message from Liz:
You need to ring M&D.
More messages appeared. Texts from Spencer. Her mum. Liz again. Neil Taylor, the best man. A girl from work. Trisha Hutchinson. She opened one from Spencer:
All those people?
She felt the room, the town, the world turning away from her. She looked at herself in the mirror and found she looked guilty, terrified. There were three tiny flecks of toothpaste on the mirror and she scratched them off with her fake wedding nails. In the bedroom she pushed Stephen in the back to wake him from whatever dream they’d been living.
PART 2:
IN THE WAY THAT FIRE WANDERS
CHAPTER 16
Belfast. London. Hong Kong. Cairns. Port Moresby. Wae. Fifty-two hours. And they still had the flight to Wapini and then on to Slinga in front of them. It was a long time to spend traveling cheek by jowl with your crew—no matter how much you liked them. And Liz did like the cameraman Paolo: He seemed to her atypical for an Italian. He kept his cool always, did not fuss about the poor culinary pickings in the increasingly small airports, and when she was tired of talking he understood and fell silent himself. Margo, her producer, was more annoying—more fussy and more liable to complain—but she was a known quantity. Paolo had been the wild card. Now, as they all lay exhausted with their bags alongside the airstrip in Wae, their legs stretched out companionably in front of them, she felt grateful for Paolo and their friendly chemistry: It bode well.
“How you doing, P?”
Paolo made a little—impossibly Italian!—pout and let a puff of air out of his lips: “Oh, I am doing.” Across the tarmac the slubby Australian approached them again: They were to shift on out to the tarmac now. The plane—an eighteen-seater twin-prop Cessna—was ready and up the little stairs they went.
On board, a high-Afroed man in a beige colonial suit sat in the front row clutching a brown leather briefcase to his chest, and stood up to greet them when they got on. His curt bow was formal, his smile deeply intended. It seemed someone once had told him a firm handshake was the mark of authenticity and he’d taken the advice to heart. Liz’s fingers hurt. Without lowering the briefcase from his chest, this Mr. Kent Raula, vice-prefect of Odango Province, insisted they were most welcome to New Ulster, that they had chosen a fine time to visit. He assured them the country was really nowhere near as violent as people claimed.
They sat behind a native family in old acrylic, patterned jumpers with string bags full of cans on their laps. Creamed corn. Peaches. After Liz and Margo and Paolo settled in their seats, the same face on different people kept turning round to look at them: deep-set friendly eyes, prominent cheekbones, a very dark complexion. Father, son, daughter, another son. Only the mother, light-skinned, moonfaced, ignored them. She was reading a Bible bound with yellow flock wallpaper, running a fingertip under the words. Across the aisle from Liz a white girl sat, a tall strong-looking teenager dressed in an old-fashioned school uniform—white blouse, plaid kilt—utterly inappropriate for the weather. Her face was heart shaped and hopeful behind pink-framed nerd-specs. She read a thick hardback novel. On the far side of the girl sat a small man in an old blue baseball cap. His eyes were closed and his head tilted back. There was something martyred in his sleeping expression; he could have been a little Christ carved out of ebony. On his T-shirt was a faded portrait of Britney Spears.
“That’s some nail varnish.”
The girl smiled, rearranging freckles. She held her hand up, fingers fanned out.
“Sonic Boom Blue.”
She pulled the bottle of nail varnish from a pink furry pencil case and offered it to Liz.
“They won’t let us wear it at school. So, you know. . . .”
“Where’re you at school?”
“I board in Port Moresby. Mission kid. My parents work for the New Truth. Sarah.”
“Liz. What’s the New Truth?”
“Oh, a Christian mission. I thought everyone knew it round here. We’ve been out here in PNG for over forty years, but my dad opened the Slinga station himself, eight years ago. Before that we were in the Philippines for two years.”
“Wow.”
The girl nodded bravely.
“I only get out here for holidays. Like, I’ve three months now, and I’ll look after my little sister and two brothers.”
“You must miss them.”
“In September Esther—she’s ten now—is coming back with me to school. They won’t know what’s hit them. My mom teaches her now, and she just lets her run around outside, smashing things with a pole.”
“Sounds like you’ll have a long summer.”
The disheveled Australian appeared in the doorway of the plane and looked the passengers over.
“You.” He pointed at Paolo. “Can you sit in the corner there? Someone give him a poke.”
Paolo opened up the drawstring hood he’d closed tightly round his face, looked out, moved two seats across, and promptly pulled the drawstring closed again.
“I’m going to teach the local kids how to play softball. They’re all into soccer, but I bought a bat and a ball from Kennings, that’s my school.”
“That’s a good idea.”
The girl beamed.
“It’s about rules, you know. They don’t even know what rules are really.”
She looked across at the man beside her; his eyes were still closed. She lowered her voice.
“They really have nothing. They’re so far behind, it can be hard to get them to accept Jesus into their hearts.”
Liz concentrated on sweeping the little brush over her left thumbnail, leaving it a few shades brighter than the sky outside the window. She held it up to the girl, who nodded approval.
“Doesn’t it make it easier—for the mission—if they have nothing?”
“What do you mean?”
The Australian—now sitting in the pilot’s seat—shouted over his shoulder, “Fasten those seatbelts. This baby’s got the gliding angle of a brick!”
“Just that . . . you know, if people lack all sorts of basic things, food, health care, schools . . .” Liz trailed off. Something bright and defensive had risen in the girl’s face.
“We help them live Christian lives.”
The plane shuddered into life and it was astonishingly loud—like sitting in the bag of a hoover. Conversation was impossible. Liz smiled at Sarah, who smiled tightly back and opened her novel again. Part of Liz felt vaguely abashed: Why was she trying to convert a schoolgirl to her way of thinking? What was wrong with her? Why did she always have to be right? She gripped the arms of the seat as they rattled down the runway and miraculously ascended. The great shimmering bay rose into view—little white pleats appeared and unpleated on the dark metallic surface. The plane banked and turned inland and climbed. The city spilling down the hillside was fast replaced by jungle. Deep-piled, invariable, bright green. Peak and vale, peak and vale, though here and there the verdancy gave way to a sluggish muddy river uncoiling in great oxbows along a valley floor. Gardens, stubbly cultivated patches, could be seen on the lower reaches of the mountains out to their right.
The man with Britney Spears on his T-shirt came to life and said something to Sarah, who began to pick at her nail varnish unhappily. She took out a bottle of nail varnish remover and cotton pads from the pink pencil case and began undoing all that she had so far achieved. Liz read—pretended to read—the shooting script off her laptop. She was having an attack of nerves about the entire undertaking. The smell of nail varnish remover wasn’t helping. The farther she traveled from home, the more unqualified and ridiculous she bec
ame. At the back of her mind came the thought of her sister’s shame, her family’s shame, the shame of her brother-in-law . . . At Heathrow’s Gate 23D, after vowing not to mention what had just happened with Stephen and the newspaper, she blurted the whole sorry tale out to her producer. When she started to cry, Margo’d held her hand and said, “I wish someone would explain Northern Ireland to me,” and Liz replied, “Me too.” Paolo returned with three coffees to find them both drying their eyes. At Hong Kong’s futuristic techno airport she googled his crime and saved the pages. Now she flicked between her script and these notes on terror—reading the autopsies, reading the criminal case recounted in some decision on the tariff, whatever that meant. It meant Stephen walked into a bar in 1993, along with his fellow Ulster Freedom Fighter Lenny McAteer, and shot dead five people. There was a boy of nineteen, Patrick Creighton, the barman; a married middle-aged woman, Moira Sheehy; Moira Sheehy’s daughter, Janine McFadden; an old man called Anthony Carson—the list went on. The barman was struck by three bullets. One entered the front of his abdomen and passed to the left, lacerating the liver, the stomach, the spleen, and the left kidney before exiting through the left flank. Another bullet entered the right side of the back and passed upwards, lacerating the right lung before exiting through the front of the right shoulder. The combined effect of these injuries caused his rapid death. A further bullet passed through the left arm, fracturing the bone. However, this injury was less severe and so would not have accelerated death to any material extent. . . .
Wapini appeared in the distance. Out of the green came a long silver torsion of waterfall, the black slice of rock face it tumbled down. An extensive jumble of red-tiled or green-corrugated structures had gathered and multiplied where the water fell. A huge whitewashed pile with a Gothic turret—it must be the hotel—perched on a rise and a few jeeps and vans were parked about the earthen lanes like bright counters in a complicated board game. There the river escaped the town, and there a single dirt road wound down the mountainside, and there a pale grass runway was cut like a scar into the saddle below, the one horizontal among the slopes. The plane hurtled towards it and landed and bumped back up and landed again. When they finally stopped, Sarah, pinching a little stack of cotton pads stained with blue, said, “Are you filming the birds of paradise?”