Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  “We’re actually doing a thing . . . It’s for a special season on religion for the BBC—The State of Grace—we’re making a program about new religions. You know, what gives rise to them, that kind of thing. The show’s called The Latest of the Gods. At least at the moment it’s called that. These things have a habit of changing.”

  “Are you going to . . .” She leaned towards Liz and whispered, “You’re not going to film Belef, are you?”

  “That’s right.” Liz smiled. Sarah did not smile. She threw a glance beside her at the man, whose eyes were closed again, and whispered, “You should keep your voice down.”

  —

  They had three hours before the Australian, Hastings, flew them on to Slinga, and they lunched in the hotel, the Wapini Arms, where Stan Merriman, the writer of the original newspaper article about Belef’s cult, had arranged to meet them. In the center of the dining room a large wicker structure hosted a silent, balding, melancholy parakeet called Josephine. The lunch arrived in metal trays with warm cans of Coke, and they sat at a long canteen table eying each other.

  “Now this,” Stan explained cheerfully, lifting his fork, “is manioc, and this . . . is sweet potato . . . and this is rice.”

  “I know what rice is, Stan,” said Margo. She looked up from her laptop and saw his face and said, in a gentler tone, “So, you do fieldwork with kangaroos?”

  “Tree kangaroos. Actually they’re not related. Tree kangaroos are closer to large rodents, nocturnal, very cute, and I’ve been fitting radio collars to them to study—”

  “And it’s your sister who works in Sydney . . .”

  “She’s an editor at the Morning Herald.”

  “But you’re English.”

  “From Reading. Well, from a little village outside Reading called Checkendon. I’ve been here a couple of years. Gemma emigrated with her husband to Australia in 2011.”

  There was a long pause.

  “And how’s your pidgin?” Margo asked.

  “Pretty good. Not perfect.”

  “And where is Belef now?”

  “You know I’m not totally sure.”

  Margo stopped typing. Stan had his hands palms down on the table. His hair was decisively parted in the middle with styling gel and he’d put on a clean pink T-shirt for his first meeting with the BBC team. Liz could see he only wanted for things to go well, but was finding, if he was really to be honest with himself, that this was not happening.

  “Stan, we’re time-limited here. We did discuss this on e-mail. We need all our ducks in a row.”

  His smile kept coming. It was remorseless. Liz felt she had to look away.

  “No, no, sure, of course. It’s just—it’s quite hard to keep track of people in New Ulster. It’s not like they have phones. And sometimes she goes off to the forest to talk to the dead.”

  “To the dead?” Margo began tapping in her MacBook again, not looking up.

  “To speak to her dead relatives, get advice, that kind of thing . . . And sometimes she stays in her ancestral village. It’s several valleys over. But I’m sure she’ll be at Slinga now. There’s been a lot of activity to do with the Story.”

  “And how many followers would you say she now has?”

  “I mean, it’s hard to say. What constitutes a follower?”

  Stan tilted his hands upwards in query. Margo sighed. She’d pushed her laptop a few inches away from her and now she pulled it closer again, but didn’t type anything in.

  Her voice had a metallic tint to it: “Someone who follows her?”

  This got a small laugh from Paolo. Stan sat back slightly in his chair. She was probably just tired. If he felt awkward, well, the situation was awkward, but it would end soon. He just had to wait it out. He folded his arms and smiled harder.

  “You said in the Herald piece that she’d hundreds of disciples.”

  “Yes, sometimes when she speaks, there’re hundreds there, easily. They come from all round. But you know, it’s secret, a lot of it. Even in Wapini, you can get in trouble talking about her. The missionaries are very powerful here. So the locals want to stay in with the New Truth, but many of them are working her magic too.”

  “And porters? Where are we on that?” Margo asked.

  At the other end of the dining room, Malcolm—the hotelier—leaned across the polished wooden bar on his elbows, watching them, his gut hammocking beneath him and not entirely contained in the white polyester of his short-sleeved shirt. For some minutes he had been very involved in picking a fleck of something out of his teeth with a key, one of dozens he kept on a retractable clip attached to his cargo shorts. Now he roused himself and called over, “I’ve done that. There’ll be five at Slinga airstrip and they’ll cook and carry your stuff and”—he gave a brief piercing whistle—“we’ve got a bodyguard for you to take from here.”

  “OK, terrific. Thank you for organizing all of that.”

  Liz knew the implication from Margo was that Stan meanwhile had failed to sort out anything at all. It was growing apparent, though, that Stan was not alive to implications. Like a puppy now he looked happily from face to face, in no doubt someone had the ball. Malcolm’s waiter appeared in the doorway.

  “Go get Posingen.”

  “Working her magic?”

  It was the presenter lady, Liz, who had spoken. She had been mostly quiet so far, writing things down occasionally in a big red notebook and throwing Stan encouraging glances.

  “That’s what they call it. Or working her law. Doing her ceremonies. A lot of it is the old traditions, pagan dances and so on.”

  The waiter returned to the dining room, trailed by a tall, impassive, and very dark-skinned man in military fatigues, an AK-47 slung over one of his impressive shoulders.

  “This is Posingen. He’ll make sure you’re safe.”

  Liz looked over at Margo; she was nodding as if to reassure herself that everything was completely and totally and absolutely fine.

  —

  There was no Wi-Fi. Malcolm directed Liz to a superannuated Dell in the lobby. She assumed the unforgiving wooden chair and examined the patch of blistered damp on the flock wallpaper as she waited for the heavy machinery to boot up. It groaned, hummed, gave a low whistle, hummed in a slightly lower key, made a series of breathless clicks before the screen seemed to enlarge slightly as it turned from black to gray, and then to a screenshot of Malcolm standing in front of his hotel, looking a couple of stones lighter and a couple of decades younger. Internet Explorer. Among the junk mail and phishing scams was an e-mail from Spence. He never bothered with a salutation:

  The in-law’s an outlaw! Can you credit this cunt? I thought he seemed a bit *mild* . . . Think Alison knew? I texted her but silence. And she’s not taking calls. I knew there was something weird about him. And I don’t mean to be a dick about it, but do you think it’s all right that he’s with the kids all the time? Is he legally a psychopath? What about Bill? And how are Mum and Dad going to face the golf club quiz—

  Liz signed out and shut the computer down.

  —

  Margo and Paolo sat at the bar of the hotel, bottles of Big Island beer in their hands, their laptops and battery packs and mobiles arranged around the room, attached to various adaptors, replenishing themselves. Hastings the pilot was playing pool with Stan; a local girl of about seventeen stood silently near them. She stared at Liz with a perfectly empty face, as if Liz were a picture on a TV screen and not a real person in the room with her.

  “Hey, BBC,” Hastings called across. “Want to join us?”

  The girl was called Vali and introduced as Hastings’s “friend.” Stan and Liz against Hastings and her. The balls were racked. Liz broke and unaccountably one of the reds went in. Hastings gave an appreciative nod and chalked his cue. She tried for the blue and missed.

  “Bugger,” she said, and Ha
stings laughed. “Bugger,” he repeated. “You Brits got the best slang.”

  “Did you ever come across Belef?” she asked.

  The pilot gave a terse nod, and waited for Stan to take his shot before he answered. “I did. And I hear she’s getting a bit of a tailwind behind her.”

  “You know we’re here to make a film about the Story.”

  “She’ll like that. That girl with you on the plane?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Yeah. Belef was her nanny. Worked for the family.”

  “Really?”

  Hastings leaned over Vali as she bent to take her shot.

  “You want to get right down.”

  He pushed the back of her head down towards her cue, not gently, and his stubby fingers disappeared into the tight black curls. Stan looked away. Vali’s face remained unwritten, clear of expression; she was used to this. Hastings must be at least fifty. He lifted his hand off and she kept her head lowered and took the shot.

  “Way too soft.” He gestured to show where the ball should have gone. “I saw it happen with the Catholics, I saw it happen with the Lutherans, I saw it happen with the Independence crowd. But this one, the Story—it’s got wheels I think. Depends how the administration plays it.”

  “Saw what happen?”

  Stan potted a red, then moved quickly round and potted the black. He was surprisingly adept.

  “They come in promising everything, so long as the locals do what they say. Stop doing this. Start doing that. They promise things’ll change, that they’ll get their reward, and the natives do what they tell them, but what do you know—nothing comes. Then what?”

  Stan potted another red, sending it in off a cushion.

  “That was a fluke. Or this guy’s a fucking hustler. Look, they all want what the priest has, what the minister has, what the big man has. Not God or independence or whatever. A generator, a fridge, a radio.”

  The girl, Vali, spoke for the first time. “For music.”

  “Right, for music. And you know, Belef has had enough of waiting. More power to her!”

  Stan missed and Hastings efficiently potted a red, a green, the last red.

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t she? You know how it started? The leaf?”

  Liz shook her head.

  “I’ll let her tell you then. But I will tell you something. I was flying back round the Suvla Pass and I saw that someone’s made a start on clearing a sort of landing strip on the slopes. You might want to ask her about that.”

  Hastings missed the black but left her snookered on the green.

  “A landing strip?” Liz asked.

  “Means they think the cargo’s on its way.”

  Liz played a shot—the cue ball struck all four cushions and managed to miss the green, and all the other balls, before spinning to its rest.

  Vali said, “Painim six natings.”

  Hastings laughed. “That’s what they say for getting fuck all. It’s from snooker. You missed six pockets. You got six nothings.”

  Emboldened by Hastings’s laughter, Vali moved close to Liz and touched her blue thumbnail where she held the snooker cue.

  “This color is fun,” she murmured.

  “Oh thanks.”

  “I can make some?”

  “Oh, I don’t have it, I’m afraid. The girl on the plane . . .”

  Vali nodded: She didn’t believe her but she wasn’t surprised.

  —

  The hotelier Malcolm drove them back to the airport himself. Margo in the front seat, Stan, Liz, and Paolo crushed in the back. Their gear followed behind, strapped onto a small flatbed truck. Wapini might have known grandeur but not for some time. Faded pastel clapboard houses with verandahs in poor repair, a few red and squat brick buildings, one of which read WAPINI POLICE STATION in yellow tile across its forehead. Its blinds were pulled—perhaps forever or perhaps against the sun. The whole town appeared to have given in to the heat and light, gone inside to lie on its bed. And behind the settlement, waiting in the rising distance, the dark jungle with its waves of green, its encroaching tendrils and creepers.

  “There’s the vice-prefect with the iron handshake,” Margo said.

  “Raula, you met him?”

  He sat outside the bank on a bench, smoking a cigarette. On the other side of the entrance a queue of maybe thirty people had formed.

  “They’re waiting for the money he just brought in to be distributed. . . . You see that fig tree where those old boys are sat? That’s the tree they used to hang prisoners from. The last kiap, the district officer, he lived over there in the yellow house, and would hang a man for stealing a loaf of bread, before breakfast. Wouldn’t cost him a second thought. Raula’d love to do that. He’s a genuine piece of shit. Excuse my French.”

  —

  Deeper and deeper inland the plane flew, towards the blank heart of the island, over the endless mountainous jungle so vivid and monotonous. Sarah and her friend in the Britney Spears T-shirt had reappeared, but were now sat—as per Hastings’s barked instructions—in the back, and their seats taken by two sturdy foresters whose brute chainsaws were stowed in the belly of the plane. The Cessna banked and pure blue filled the windows. They were descending again and fast. The little plane made contact with the earth and rattled and whined and whinnied quickly to a stop. Outside Liz’s window a little posy of children waved to them from where the long grass started. All their mouths moved in unison; they were singing. They got off and stood, a little lost, by the plane as it continued to tick and whirred into silence. A much more sticky heat, and the foliage around the edge of the runway so dense and sinuous it looked like it would wrap itself around your limbs if you stood still too long, entangling and entrapping you. Liz watched one of the foresters hand over a few parcels wrapped in newspaper to a waiting villager.

  “Tobacco,” Stan said at her shoulder. “They’re crazy about it.”

  Liz waved Sarah and her minder Usai off. Sarah had promised her it was an easy hike, thirty minutes tops, and she wanted to wait for them, but Usai—who kept looking at the BBC crew with open hostility—insisted they get going. Now Liz needed a wee and there was no clear procedure. Margo was happily berating and directing four of the five promised porters Mal had arranged: small wiry bow-legged men who loaded bags onto each other. Paolo was smoking his vaporizer and letting Stan point various things out to him on the horizon. Liz crept off into the edge of the forest and squatted down among the ferns with one hand on a tree trunk to keep her balance, the relief of emptying her bladder tempered by the fear of wetting the jeans gathered round her ankles. Someone giggled close by, and she waddled round to see three of the children watching her from behind a clump of ferns.

  “Shoo, shoo.”

  They did not. One, the boy, made an unexpectedly vicious hissing sound.

  “Yes, that’s what urine sounds like,” Liz replied. “Well done.”

  They followed her back across the runway, and stood about twenty feet away, watching, until Paolo got out his smaller camera and began filming them. They came closer then and the boy began to mug into the lens and the girls danced, the larger one twirling the smaller around as she screamed with delight. Then the youngest put her hand out and said, “Some dollar please.”

  —

  She sat on a log—they were waiting for the missing porter—and took her folder out of her bag and started to leaf through it in preparation for meeting . . . who exactly? A prophet? A god? An ex-nanny? An independence leader? There wasn’t much to go on. Apart from a few newspaper articles, she wasn’t mentioned in any of the literature, though there were certainly precedents. Liz had pored over the essays Margo had the researchers photocopy from the British Library. They were from journals called things like Oceania and Human Organization and Anthropology Matters. Liz had highlighted paragraph after paragraph—she was at heart stil
l the conscientious scholar, the head girl—and as she flicked through them now her eye picked out words she’d underlined: rebellion, revival, time, language, civilizing, reclamation, the Other. Three times in red biro she’d underlined “the Other.” “Phenomenology” she’d drawn a box around in green, but she had no idea what phenomenology meant. She used to know what it meant. How had she forgotten? It was suddenly incredibly important to know what phenomenology meant.

  “Have you bars on your phone?”

  Paolo shook his head. Margo had none either.

  She set her folder across her very white knees. The sixth page of her notes, the last page, consisted in its entirety of:

  Fusing the MAGIC of contacting the DEAD with the power and knowledge of WHITES.

  Her phone gave a little buzz and she hurriedly tugged it out of her shorts but found it was only a low battery warning.

  They began the walk, and in their little single-file caravan she followed Stan. He had done a PhD in zoology at Bristol, and had been here for almost eighteen months, attaching radio collars to tree kangaroos and playing a lot of football with the children. She kept him chatting because it was important to her, she realized, to normalize the situation. The porters’ chanting and the sudden rustlings—birds, probably, though the foliage was so thick it was impossible to make them out—all of it unnerved her, and she knew that if she didn’t distract herself then the strangeness of the scenario would make her retreat inward, and that couldn’t happen. She was a TV presenter, thus upbeat and capable and calm, in possession of exceptionally normal cognitive function. Also, almost immediately, her new hiking boots had started to rub on her left heel.