Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  “It was our bubble wrap.”

  “He could have found that anywhere.”

  Liz didn’t bother replying. She lodged her ballpoint in her notebook and set it on the lino, then lay back on the bed and looked up into a survivalist’s fantasy. Above her towered orderly shelves of packets, jars, boxes, and tins: pasta, flour, sugar, coffee, and all manner of vegetables and fruits in syrup. Kenneth would have surveyed the room and given an approving nod, and his eldest daughter had inherited his ability to feel soothed—or at least marginally less agitated—by the presence of an epic amount of nonperishable foodstuffs.

  She said, “If there’s an earthquake I’ll be taken out by tinned corn.”

  Margo lay back down, deciding to be placated.

  “I have kidney beans. Who likes kidney beans?”

  “I suppose it’s whatever they get sent.”

  “I’m sure they make a shopping list out and it gets delivered.”

  “You don’t think it’s donations?”

  “It’s not like there’s a food drive for missionaries. Or maybe there is.”

  There was an indecisive knock at the door and Sarah’s head appeared.

  “Everything OK?”

  Liz propped herself up on her elbows.

  “Thanks so much for this.”

  “Will you guys come over for dinner?”

  “You know, we should probably eat with poor Paolo and Stan. They’re stuck in the hut.”

  “They could come too.”

  —

  Paolo refused, having discovered that the bodyguard Posingen possessed a large bag of marijuana and was happy to share it. Besides, he and Stan had plans to go with Malour into the forest later to look for an albino cuscus that a porter had seen the previous night. So only Liz and Margo sat holding hands with the Family Werner while Josh, at the head of the table, lengthily articulated grace. It seemed overly intimate and unnatural to Liz to hold hands with these people, but there was also a kind of ancient power here. As soon as she’d touched Esther’s and Noah’s hot little hands she felt the voltage of it—to make a circle, a human ring, warding off whatever forces gathered outside it. She watched Noah, the little three-year-old, open his eyes, his head still meekly dipped, and wait for his father to finish talking.

  Margo had her eyes tightly closed, an open helpless look on her face that Liz hadn’t seen before; a great affection for her producer blossomed in her. Josh spoke the usual routine of gratitude and petition. He thanked, he asked, he hoped that Belef might come to know the error of her ways and return to the fold. Thanking and asking, thanking and asking. Waiting. Hoping. Prayer was much like sending in your shopping list, Liz thought, but getting back random donations, whatever God had knocking around in the back of his cupboard. You wanted corn, you got kidney beans. Amen. Liz shut her eyes.

  Amen in Amulmul.

  “So how did the British Broadcasting Corporation get on today?”

  There was an edge in Josh’s question but Margo was unfazed.

  “I’ve got to say I think it’s going to work very well. Belef has a lot of charisma. I mean I know you’ve had your differences, but she comes across very well on camera. She has a naturalness, and a real power, and the whole setup, the scenery, the little children . . . it’s going to be beautiful.”

  “It’s certainly a stunning part of the world you live in,” Liz added, neutrally she hoped.

  “And the stories she has about everything. She’d have been brilliant in brand management,” Margo said and laughed, alone. “Or in advertising,” she persisted.

  Everything in Josh’s face tightened, like someone had pulled the skin from behind.

  “Will you come to church in the morning, do you think?”

  Margo speared a piece of fried pork and held it in midair.

  “Would you like us to?”

  “I think it might be good in the interest of balance. For your program. To show what Christianity has actually achieved here. What we’re dealing with, what we’re trying by God’s grace to do.”

  “Of course we’ll come,” Liz said, and Sarah smiled her small closed-mouth smile.

  The talk turned to the politics of New Ulster, the corruption, the AIDS epidemic, the drug problems, the “rascal gangs” who ran the towns. The government was useless and crooked, lining their pockets with international funds meant to kick-start fair-trade coffee industries or organic coconut plantations or whatnot. There was still large-scale intertribal war. The poverty was astonishing. Women were treated as chattels. Children were beaten and abused. Men sat around all day chewing betel nut or getting high. The country needed stricter governance, leaders of stature, a vastly improved infrastructure . . . and the answer to all of these problems, it turned out, was God. It seemed to Liz that Josh was living out the longings of a mystic who’d pitched up in the desert two thousand years or so ago. He’d staked his life—and his wife’s, his children’s lives, the little time he’d got on this good green earth—on something he could neither see nor hear. He had a hunch, a feeling in his gut, and on that he’d bet the farm. As Liz watched him talk, his liquid eyes shining, she found herself almost admiring him. Again and again he rubbed his chin in wonderment and looked from Liz to Margo for some validation of his choices.

  As Liz scraped a little desperately around the bowl for the final vestiges of pink strawberry mousse, he said, “And I hear there was some hooping and hollering this afternoon.”

  “How’d you mean?” Margo asked, knowing perfectly well how he meant.

  “I hear Belef attacked a young child.”

  There was a silence.

  “Jojo got whipped,” said Jess, with a certain curt brutality that seemed to give a flash of something dark beneath the All-American mom exterior. Only now had she sat down, and started to eat her dinner of cold pork and rice and floppy boiled greens.

  “There was an incident, yes. It was certainly unpleasant,” Margo said, shifting gear into a formal seriousness. She was always impressive in this mode.

  “Jojo?” Liz said, “I thought he was called Namor.”

  “He was called Jojo before she baptized him into her cult. She changes their names. It’s—well, it’s a way of throwing her weight around, I suppose,” Jess said, now meek again, eyes wide at the very idea of a woman throwing her weight around.

  “Can I leave the table?” asked Esther, the ten-year-old, possessor of one magic dimple and an irritatingly scratchy voice.

  “That kind of viciousness, that kind of wickedness . . . The problem is she has a little knowledge, but not a lot, not enough.” Josh wagged his spoon. “Proverbs 29:18 says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ A newer translation might say something like, ‘Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint.’ The Spanish version of the Bible—I did a year in Venezuela—says, ‘Donde no hay visión, el pueblo se desenfrena—Where there is no instruction about God, the people don’t have any brakes.’ Belef has no brakes. I see it. I know it.”

  Josh motioned a car speeding along the tabletop gathering speed.

  “She saw a book of ours, one of Sarah’s. It was a guide to the national museum in Sydney. We’d gone there as a family for a faith refresher course, and the kids had spent a day at the museum with one of the junior pastors.”

  “Can we play badminton?” Esther asked.

  Jess nodded.

  “It was a lovely way to renew our beliefs. We saw the opera house, and we had the most wonderful boat trip out into the bay—”

  “Tell them, Sarah. Tell them what she did.” But his daughter was not quick enough. “She was sitting in Sarah’s room looking at this book one afternoon when she was meant to be doing the washing—and she got enraged by it.”

  “It was the pictures of the exhibits,” Sarah said. She looked down at the table. The thwock of a shuttlecock from outside.r />
  “They’d put their idols in glass cases,” Jess added. “You know, in the museum. The graven images. All the funny little wooden figures.”

  “Totems, they’re called,” Liz said.

  “Well, whatever they’re called, she saw the photographs of that and she got mad, like really mad,” Sarah said. She was very slowly peeling a red apple with a dinner knife: the apple was a compromise, in lieu of the strawberry mousse she’d refused.

  Josh elaborated, “I came back from a vestry meeting and she was standing in front of the house shouting. She was cursing, saying all of them had been told by us that these gods of theirs, these statues and carvings and idols they kept in the haus tambaran were worthless—but now here they were being kept in a special house in Sydney. In a glass house. In a glass cage. Because they were so powerful. Did we ever find that book, by the way? Things just disappear here. Anything you leave outside overnight just goes. Anyway, she was giving quite a speech. There was a crowd gathered round. It was undermining. Undermining to the mission. And the anger. Like a switch had been flicked. There was no question. I knew immediately of course we’d have to let her go.”

  “It’s time for your bed, little man,” Jess said then, scooping Noah out of his high seat, ingeniously fashioned from an ordinary chair, a fruit crate, a cushion, and a luggage strap.

  “Her view was: ‘We’ve been tricked!’” Sarah offered. She set the half-naked apple on the table; it was plain she wouldn’t eat it. “That the white people had stolen their gods and kept them for themselves. That they’d lied and if those gods were not worth anything, why did they lock them up? Why did people come to see them?”

  Josh laughed his tinny laugh: Har har har. He said, “I mean, how do you begin to explain something like that?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Flight BA187 descended from the blue through the immaculate clouds. The plane entered an underworld of muted grays and greens. Rain throbbed across the round-cornered window.

  “We’ll be glad of our jumpers.”

  “Yeah.”

  Alison’s anxiety came out in little well-worn patterns of speech. All morning, as soon as her mind saw a phrase bobbing in the distance it had leapt on it like a life ring. For his part Stephen said less and less. She noticed his bottle of diazepam had been left out that morning and had asked if she could take one. It hadn’t done anything except make her fall asleep on the minibus to the airport. When she woke the anxiety was just the same as before, as if she were connected to a higher current than normal. Reality was coming up to meet them at three hundred miles an hour. As the plane bumped onto the runway, Alison took Stephen’s hand in hers and squeezed it tight.

  She thought of the kids. She knew what children said and did to each other up close; she’d seen it again and again, and little Isobel already found the slightest unkindness intolerable. A girl in her class called Jenny had once given a marble to all the other girls but her and told them they were now the Marble Club, and Isobel was not a member. She cried for an hour on her lap. She would have to toughen up. At least she’d have the summer and maybe by the autumn it would have died down a bit. But what about when they grew up and read about it? How could she explain?

  In Ballyglass they’d called at the house but there was no one there, and finally her mum answered her mobile. They were in a café, they’d head back. Alison sat oddly frozen on the edge of a sofa arm with her phone in her hand for a long ten minutes, and then stood to attention when she heard the key in the lock. She observed Judith greeting Stephen in the hall with a quick kiss, not meeting his eye, and thought: Can we do twenty years of this? But Mickey’s wailing at being both woken up and parted from his grandmother was enough distraction for them all to pretend that normality—at least for the moment—had been resumed.

  Stephen reached out for Isobel and Judith noticed that her granddaughter responded by hugging her mother’s legs and positioning herself behind Alison, where she stood now, peeping out. Alison’s arms were bare and brown and goosebumped.

  “You’ve got good color. How was it?”

  “We’d a nice time. Hotel was good. Food was good.”

  “I’m just going up to make some calls, Judith,” said Stephen.

  “You go ahead.”

  “Your hair’s nice,” Alison said and Judith touched the side of the arrangement of highlights, and gave the slightest narrowing of her eyes.

  “I haven’t had it redone.”

  Alison beckoned her into the kitchen and said in barely a whisper, “I feel on edge the whole time. He’s hardly spoken about it.”

  “Do you want him to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Alison turned on the television on the counter for the children and took two packets of crisps from the tall cupboard.

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing. I’m worried about him. About his job. And the kids. And you and Dad. What have people been saying?”

  “It’s been OK. A lot of people said to Kenneth they felt for him.”

  “Who?”

  “In the golf club. Protestants and Catholics.”

  Alison was aware that a formal distance had arisen between her and her mother. They stood on opposite sides of a border, in different countries. Her parents were the unhappy victims of history, ambushed by circumstance—but to choose Stephen, as Alison had, meant complicity.

  She could hear the intermittent rumble of Stephen talking through the ceiling.

  “He’s ringing Jason Newell, his boss at Glencore, to see if he still has a job.”

  “They can’t fire him over something he did in his past.”

  “Depends on whether he told them. And depends on whether it stops him doing his job. Like if the other guys don’t want to be on site—”

  They heard Stephen coming down the stairs and Alison stopped.

  In the afternoon Stephen disappeared to do a “message.” Half an hour later the kids spotted him in the driveway with a huge box visible in the boot. They stood on the sofa to follow his progress through the front window, lugging the huge thing towards them, surely towards them. He got a rapturous greeting in the hallway.

  Isobel tried to pry the cardboard walls of the box apart with her hands.

  “And look, Mickey look, there’s a slide. And ooh there’s a swing. Can I help? Can we help you? Are there monkey bars on it? Can you make it? Can you make it now?”

  “I’m going to do that. Can you give me a minute to get the toolbox?”

  “I’m going to swing,” Isobel said, holding imaginary ropes on either side of her shoulders and tilting her head up and down.

  Her brother looked up at her, wide-eyed, and said dramatically, “Her going to swinnnngggg.”

  —

  “Just stand back there, Isobel, stand back, and pull Mickey back too.”

  Stephen already cut his thumb on the inside of one of the tubes and he hadn’t even unpacked all the pieces. The metal tubes looked too thin, and the ropes for the swing were cheap nylon.

  “When will it be done?” Isobel said.

  “Oh honey, it’ll be a while yet. I haven’t even found the instructions. Can I take a baby wipe?

  “Wipey wipey,” Mickey said, and offered the packet.

  “I just need to go and put a Band-Aid on this.”

  The cut was deeper than he’d thought, and every time he applied any pressure to his thumb it bled. By the time he’d got the bare skeleton, the four-legged mainframe, constructed, every piece of bright blue tubing bore several bloody thumbprints.

  “Is it ready yet?” Isobel whined. She sat on the back doorstep, pulling petals from a daisy.

  “Can you please stop asking me that, honey? Why don’t you go inside and watch the end of The Jungle Book.”

  “I want to swing.”

  “Swinggggg,” Mickey echoed, looking up from a piece
of cardboard he was stabbing with a screwdriver.

  “You shouldn’t have that,” Stephen said, and lifted the screwdriver from him, precipitating a wailing that was not stopped by the presentation of an adjustable spanner, a spirit level, or the bubble wrap the screws came in. Finally Stephen handed him back the screwdriver.

  “All right, all right, knock yourself out.”

  At the first spot, as soon as he’d gone down about four inches, he hit stone. The builder of these houses, who’d bulldozed the UDR center to make way for them, must have just dumped a load of the rubble in their back gardens.

  “Stand back. You two! Stand back.”

  Stephen swung the spade over his head and brought it down with a crack. His hands shook painfully with the reverberation. Isobel gave a nasty little chortle and Mickey clapped with glee. He’d have to dig around it, lever it out, whatever it was. He was hot now, and he stopped and took his flannel shirt off. His T-shirt was already wet with sweat.

  “Stephen, can you put this up?” Isobel whined.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you put the swing on?”

  “You can’t use it until the legs have been buried.”

  “I won’t.”

  The frame stood at the other end of the garden, by the back door. Isobel was holding out the swing to him. Couldn’t she call him Daddy? He’d asked Alison about it on the honeymoon; he wanted it to happen, and she said she’d tell the kids when they got back that he was their new daddy. It sounded so cheeky when she called him Stephen, like she was making fun of him.

  He heard the back door next door being unlocked and then the neighbor Eric’s footsteps going down his gravel path.

  “Can you put the swing on, with the ropes?”

  “What’s the magic word?”