Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  A long pause as Paolo came panning round the side of her face as she watched Belef.

  “Did you get her lips moving? Can you move down there and do one more tracking shot where you get her lips?”

  Margo wore a headscarf close over her skull, decorated with nautical motifs; it gave her a piratical if vaguely cancerous look. The orange laces on her hiking boots bounced as she stamped from decision to decision, cheered today by progress, by getting “shots in the can.”

  “Lizzie, let’s do that long speech now. Just come in when you’re ready.”

  Liz placed one hand a little awkwardly on the tree trunk and looked meaningfully at the lens.

  “Again and again we find particular objects repeating in Belef’s iconography—certain things that are good to think with. Some objects fulfill metaphysical needs with their physicality, so you get trees”—Liz knocked her knuckles on the tree trunk—“which exist both above and below ground. You get pools of water, running water, mountains, unusual natural phenomena—the shape of some rocks, the habits of certain animals. These are ways of doubling the world. There’s no distinction, really, in Belef’s worldview between the natural and the supernatural.”

  “Terrific—but can you go from ‘These are ways of doubling’? I think you rushed that last sentence.”

  There was a pleasure, Liz was finding, to trailing along in Margo’s wake, being told to face this way, to look up, to say that. Margo ducked and shielded the viewfinder to watch the take. It had to be done again. And then again. Part of the reason she sped through some words and fluffed others was that every PTC was simultaneously a piece to Paolo. They were a little shy with each other. Nothing had been mentioned about the night before. After they finished filming she crouched down beside him—he was cleaning a battery pack with a soft cloth—and asked, “Everything all right?” and he barely looked up.

  “Have you seen the bubble wrap for my SLR lenses?”

  “Isn’t there a case?”

  “The case fell out of a helicopter in Cuzco last month.”

  “Right. I haven’t seen it. You sleep all right?”

  “It was in this bag.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  He stopped then and looked at her directly. “I slept well.”

  He smiled. It was an unexpected smile; it bestowed a kind of blessing. She wanted to see it again.

  As they tramped back to the village from the telephone tree, Belef and Liz walked abreast for a while. Even Liz felt tall and angular next to her. Belef was one of those women who consisted of a series of circles: round face, round eyes, round cheeks, plump bosom. She carried a thick walking stick, which she didn’t need. Her stride was purposeful, low slung, and it took no effort for her to avoid roots, rocks, marshy patches—everything Liz stumbled on or tripped over or squelched in.

  “Can I ask what you talked about on the telephone today?”

  Belef gave her a sly look.

  “Mothers in the earth. Mothers in the earth who need to be straightened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stan turned to look at Liz and Belef, and then dropped back to join them.

  “There were many dongen underground and they all were talking at me.”

  “The ghosts of widows who were killed,” Stan added.

  “They killed widows?”

  “They broke their necks.”

  “When?”

  “Up till thirty, forty years ago.”

  Belef swung her snakehead stick to lop the heavy curling head off a fern.

  “They said to me, ‘Pikinini, I want to know why we of the underground were killed by all of youse. We of the underground were killed for what reason?’”

  “Why were they killed?” Liz found her voice was quiet. “Was it a question of resources—”

  “They said to me, ‘Why was it that all the men worked at killing us? You must talk about its meaning, what was the reason?’ And I said I knew about this law, but I do not know about these times. I will ask the men and the men will give their answer to youse.”

  Belef swung her stick again, cutting a swathe through a patch of grass.

  “I am the new God now and we do not kill them. I told my mother that. She was crying. ‘Why they kill me? Why? What the reason?’”

  —

  In the evening, Liz and Margo sat outside their rest house, eating manioc from enamel tin bowls, and Margo made an attempt to gather the experiences of the day into a neat and simple explanatory package, tied with a bow. It reminded Liz somehow of her own sister. “It’s plainly grief,” Margo said. “It makes people mad.”

  “Do you think she’s mad?” Liz asked.

  “You don’t?”

  “She seems very sane. She just seems pissed off. It’s a resistance movement, really. And she’s negotiating how to deal with the dead, how to listen to them, how to keep them close.”

  “Hmm,” Margo said, standing up. “I think you’re taking it all a bit seriously.” She threw the rest of the white slop in her bowl into the trees.

  CHAPTER 23

  “That’s a heavy-looking sky.”

  “Do you want to stop at McElhinneys?”

  “Have we time?”

  “I mean afterwards.”

  “On the way back up?”

  Ken didn’t reply. The implication was too obvious: Wasn’t that what “afterwards” meant? Where else would they be going but back up to Ballyglass from Mullingar? He shifted gear down to second with undisguised impatience, and pulled up behind a van going through the tollgate. Judith looked out the window at the low green fields, the tall metallic sky. A rainbow arced faintly out to the west and she kept it to herself.

  “You got the two euros?”

  “I just gave them to you.”

  “Did you speak to Alison?”

  “She texted this morning.”

  “And?”

  “She’s OK.”

  “Did she ask about the kids?”

  “Of course. I told her Trisha was happy to take them for the day.”

  “I don’t know how she can stand it.”

  Judith said nothing.

  Ken continued, “Don’t you ever think . . . Don’t you ever think that if a man like that knew what destruction he had brought—I mean really brought to people, how he’d ruined them—”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I’m agreeing with you.”

  “I haven’t finished.”

  “Sorry.”

  “If he knew what he’d really done, he wouldn’t be able to live.”

  —

  It was a wee estate on the outskirts of Mullingar. The semi-detached was pebbledashed and Ken pushed the doorbell. Hugh Treacy was tall, bald, overweight, and possessed of less than the regulation number of upper teeth. A benign ogre in a navy velour tracksuit, he talked and talked as he ushered them into his small hot living room, where turf crackled in the grate and the blinds were shut.

  “The cross was my grandmother’s and before that I don’t know. I don’t think it’s particularly old, though. Will you have tea?”

  “Not for me, thank you. We stopped outside Louth and had a coffee.”

  “Oh very good.”

  Judith’s heart had a kind of twisted energy in it now. She set her bag down on the little side table; it was covered with a lacy tablecloth, galactic swirls of crochet. It was yellow and Judith couldn’t decide if it was age or dirt or meant to be yellow. She noticed that every surface in the room was covered with drapes, materials, fringes.

  “My wife had a brain tumor and she prayed on it,” said Hugh Treacy, without preamble.

  “And how is she now?” asked Ken.

  “Ach, she’s dead. She died, unfortunately.”

  Judith looked at Ken, who was staring
hard at the fire. She could see his determination to keep his temper; it was in the set of his mouth, the clasp of his hands.

  “Sit yourselves down. I’m just going to get it.”

  Hugh disappeared, and a cushion came alive in the depths of the sofa, stretched itself, and walked along the sofa arm.

  “Hello, puss puss,” said Kenneth and scratched the cat’s neck.

  Judith perched on the edge of a rickety wooden seat by the little drop-leafed dining table. A pack of cards—branded with Benson & Hedges—sat by a folded up Irish News with a half-completed quick crossword. A little vista of the lonely days of Hugh Treacy unfolded itself before her.

  “I see you met Buster. Aw he’s a terror.”

  Hugh stood in the doorway, cradling the cross, his smooth brown eyes shining. It was maybe eighteen inches tall, and he set it on the coffee table in front of them. Old carved dark bogwood, naked, no Jesus. It had a circular copper base. He pulled a prayer card from a bookshelf stuffed with John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell novels.

  “Ken?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, don’t stand up. Now I want Judith—if you could place both your hands on the cross here.”

  Hugh held his white puffy hands out and Judith leaned forward and rested her own hands on the cross’s bar. Ken saw the nervousness in the pools of his wife’s eyes, and it made him straighten his back and square his shoulders and give her a little supportive smile. Her own shoulders were hunched forward in sorrow and apology. Hugh moved around them, arranging. He set the prayer card beside the cross.

  “And if you read this prayer out three times while Judith holds the cross. I’m going to leave you to it now.”

  Hugh held the door to the kitchen open for Buster, who gave one bored clean yawn and paraded out first, steered by his tail.

  They sat facing each other now across the coffee table. Their eyes made contact—for the millionth time in the forty-four years they’d shared—and Judith raised her eyebrows. Like all long marriages, theirs had been sustained by many forms of surrender and deceit and kindness, but in all those forty-four years they had never prayed together. Ken again tried to reassure her by widening and brightening his glance back at her.

  “Shall I start?”

  “Yes.”

  “I should turn my phone off.”

  “Yes.”

  He did that and then picked up the card and read out the prayer.

  “Lord, we ask that you look upon the sick with eyes of mercy. May your healing hand be set upon us. May your life-giving powers flow into every cell of our bodies and into the depths of our souls, cleansing, purifying, and restoring us to wholeness and strength for service in your kingdom. Though we cannot see a way, Lord, we are sure that you can. Amen.”

  —

  Hugh must have been listening at the door. As soon as Ken had finished reading the prayer the third time—his voice getting stronger each time—he pushed the door open, and smiled at them.

  “All done?”

  “All done.”

  “Now you’re more than welcome to come back any time you like.”

  “Ah, well, it’s a long enough drive.”

  “You’re Ballyglass, aren’t you?”

  “We are.”

  “Do you know O’Neill’s Butchers? Declan would be a cousin of my mother.”

  “Oh very good.”

  Kenneth stood and put his sports jacket back on. Judith was already by the door.

  She said, “Can we pay you for your time?”

  “Ah, well, I can’t take any money for myself, obviously. But if you want to leave me fifty euros, say, I’ll give it to a charity.”

  Ken slid his wallet out of his jacket and plucked a note from it. He laid it carefully on the table by the pack of cards.

  —

  It was a relief to get back out to the pale light of afternoon, the cold air. Judith felt curiously weightless, almost floated to the car.

  “Thanks for coming down with me. I’m sure it was all a waste of time.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Wave to him. He’s stood at the doorway.”

  Both of them waved.

  “The house was so hot and dark,” noted Ken.

  “I feel I should try everything,” said his wife very quietly, hardly aiming to be heard. “Might as well.”

  “Which charity do you think the money’ll go to? The Hugh Treacy Memorial Fund?”

  “Shall we stop at McElhinneys?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I think about it sometimes. About when it began to grow and I never noticed.”

  She felt the warmth of the prayer, of the blessing, fade out as he started the car.

  He held his hand to the key a long time and looked stoically out of the windscreen. “Just one of those things.”

  “Do you think it was there the summer Isobel was born?”

  Ken didn’t reply.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

  Ken stayed silent. He pulled out of the estate and onto the N14. The steering wheel passed under his hands smoothly, the car swallowed the tarmac.

  “I don’t see what the point is,” he said eventually.

  “I want to talk about it,” Judith said quickly. “That’s the point. Don’t I get to talk about it if I want to?”

  “Of course,” Ken said softly.

  “It’s inside me, not you.”

  She had the sudden sense that in all their years together she had failed utterly to get a single point across. If they dovetailed together, if they fitted, it was only because she had deformed and shaped herself out of all recognition. Where was that glossy, hopeful little girl with the navy book bag and the hairclip with red butterflies on it?

  CHAPTER 24

  “This is the second most holy place of the Story. Do you see the rocks over there?”

  Five rocks poked up out of the water.

  “I see them. Are they engines?”

  Belef gave Liz a saddened look and said, “The first is the Gold stone. This is where all the money come from on the last day. The next one, the sharp one, is the Power stone and help us make the new law. On the last day it make the country level and easy to work, easy to plant. These other three stones are the Story of the old times. The pointed one is the tries of our first parents to make the white man’s life. It failed us. The flat one means the tries of our last parents, but it also failed. And this stone—the last, the largest—it means us, the Story. And it will not fail.”

  “And where did you learn this?”

  “The Big Boss told me in my sleep.”

  “And what happens here?”

  “You will see.”

  “What will we see?”

  “What happens here.”

  Margo nodded to tell Liz to keep on.

  “Can you tell us about how the Story explains the world? How did the world come to be?”

  “The pool holds the spirits of the ancestors, and when we chant here and dance the ancestors hear us. The frogs cry back, the birds make answer, the fish jumps from the water.”

  “But who made this place?”

  Belef nodded, preparing to explain. She held out one calloused hand, palm up.

  “This is Dodo, the creator. He sent his son Manup”—the other hand came up—“to Sydney and Manup built the city for the white kanaka. He wanted to come here, to New Ulster, but the whites tricked him. He died in Sydney and became the ghost who entered Mary, and was reborn as Jesus. But the Jews didn’t want to share the cargo. They captured Jesus to stop him getting to New Ulster and killed him.” She put two fingers to her throat and pressed. “They killed the Black Jesus who was coming to save us.”

  She spoke factually, without much emotion, but her eyes burned bright and clear. Liz felt the gaze
pushing against her person. She shifted on the rock and asked, “And do you believe in a Second Coming?”

  “We believe He will come again—Amulmul has told us—and when the new Jesus comes he will give us what is ours.”

  Margo gave her the thumbs-up and Liz let the look linger between them.

  “And cut. Great. Belef, if you come off the rock. Liz, can you talk about what that means—let’s move you round to face this way—”

  Belef slipped off into the forest. She was not beholden to formal entrances and exits, staying for as long as something was interesting to her, leaving when she had something else to do, and apparently never feeling the need to alert others in either case. For a moment Liz felt an intense envy. She turned and spoke to camera.

  “It’s becoming clear to me that the Story is a syncretic structure . . .”

  “Lizzie, can we hold off with words like that? BBC Two, not BBC Four. Simply as you can.”

  “It’s becoming clear that the Story is a mix of Christianity and the traditional myths Christianity displaced. Manup and Dodo are part of a creation narrative common on the island, but Belef has also brought modern elements into the mix, such as the imagery of technology, which seems to the indigenous mind miraculous—these machines like aeroplanes and tractors.”

  As Liz spoke she became aware of a low rumbling, a chanting that varied in intensity and pitch. Margo held her hand up to stop her speaking. Paolo swiveled the camera on its tripod to point it across the river, towards the source of the sound. Among the trees figures began to appear. They wore native clothes, grass skirts, loincloths. There were maybe fifty men and women, all naked from the waist up. Some held hands, some carried babies or trailed children behind them. They moved slowly, and sang in pidgin or Mouk, then repeated a line in a rough, strangely accented English. There was a happy emptiness in their eyes.

  Wait and see the sky crowded with airplanes,

  Wait and see the sea crowded with ships,

  We will sit down like whites at the tables,