by Nick Laird
“Pleeeezzzeee,” the kids chorused.
The footsteps stopped halfway down the path. He glimpsed Eric’s head through the topmost open trellis of the slatboard fence. It wheeled round and went back up the gravel path.
They’d spoken several times across the fence, him and Eric, when he’d been cutting the lawn, and that time when he was planting up the garden, putting in the clematis and honeysuckle. As he knelt to unravel the red nylon ropes he heard Eric’s back door softly open and softly close. Well, fair enough. And also fuck him.
“Now you aren’t to swing on this, do you understand?”
“We won’t.”
“Let me get something to stand on.”
He carried out a kitchen chair. It was two simple G-clamps to hold the loops of nylon and he screwed them into place. Even the threads of the nuts were poorly cut. His thumb opened again and as he tried to get the wipe from his pocket he left a smear of blood on his tracksuit bottoms.
—
He started digging a second hole and found that the spade—its lug nestled against his trainer—struck stone almost immediately. The rubble started after only a couple of inches. It was ridiculous. The builder’d simply sprinkled topsoil over the hard fill—the cheap fucker. After a few minutes of strenuous digging, the hole had expanded on the horizontal plane but not the vertical one.
When he looked up he saw Isobel swinging and Mickey hanging onto one leg of the swing set; it was shaking as if it might tip. She reached the top of her swing, and both back legs of the A-frame lifted a few inches off the ground. He screamed at her, “Stop that, Isobel, it’s not ready, you were told—”
Her white, terrified face turned to him. He ran up the garden and yanked her off the swing. She was holding fast to the ropes and somehow in the struggle he managed to give her rope burns on the inside of both arms, and on her stomach—on her soft white skin.
He kept saying, “It’s for your own good. It’s for your own good,” as he wrestled her little body into submission.
Between sobs she spluttered, “You hurt me, you hurt me.”
He carried her towards the back door and saw Alison, standing at the sink looking out at him. In her white dressing gown, hair wrapped in a towel, she was staring with her mouth open in anger, and not, it turned out, at Isobel.
The child ran from his arms and buried herself in her mother’s dressing gown.
“Stephen, take it easy with her. She’s only four.”
“I was trying to stop her tipping the whole swing set.”
Mickey appeared in the back door, also bawling, but he had managed to pick up the screwdriver en route.
Isobel turned towards him, the wee face all red and twisted up, and screamed, “You’re not my daddy. I know what you are.”
Alison fell asleep in Isobel’s bed that evening, having tickled her back until her own eyes had closed. After an hour, when she hadn’t come back downstairs, Stephen crept in and woke her by shaking her shoulder. Wordlessly she got up and followed him back downstairs. He sat on the sofa and waited for her to join him, as she had always done, but instead she sat in the blue armchair and hugged a cushion to herself.
“We could move,” he said.
“Where? To Scotland?”
“Why not? Or England.”
“My family.”
“I’m your family.”
A look passed over Alison’s face that she did not successfully disguise. It was a tiny grimace of disgust and Stephen saw it.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
She never expected marriage to be easy; Bill had taught her that. A second marriage meant substituting old ceremonies and traditions with different ones, meant trading in the old gods for new, but Alison couldn’t help it; she didn’t believe in it any longer. She’d lost her faith and found the new gods to be false gods. What desire she had ever had for him now dissolved entirely; she knew what his hands—his small pale hands—were capable of.
And beneath the disgust was a deeper shame. She understood that she could claim when she had married him she didn’t know, she didn’t know. But it wasn’t true, not quite. Underneath the continual earsplitting alarm of disgust was a tiny ticking drip of shame, her own shame, the shame of not wanting to know, of choosing not to know. She had been happy to have her eyes half closed. And she knew that her whole life she’d always been like this, chosen the downhill path, the passenger seat, the prevailing wind—and the humiliation of that knowledge made her revolted with herself as much as with him. As she passed the mirror in the hall she looked down at the carpet.
CHAPTER 26
When they went outside, the sky was so wide and tall and filled with so many stars that Liz gave a little helpless sigh. The far mountains were in silhouette. Below them, the empty valley dropped away forever. Bats whirred through the dusk, darting and veering off like they were on strings yanked from above. The vast cacophony of night was tuning up.
“Is that the chicken run down there?”
“Yeah, we keep Buff Orpingtons, a few redshanks.”
“My Uncle Sidney breeds Buff Orpingtons.”
“Oh no way,” Sarah said, and then sighed. “You know my dad feels she betrayed us, Belef. I mean maybe she did but I think she just went mad when her daughter died. She’d worked for us for years. With us. My mum taught her English and really she and Kaykay—that’s her daughter—were like part of the family, you know.”
The coop and the run were enclosed with wire. A few trees stood by themselves on the slopes before the forest began and they looked lost, wounded, abandoned by the vast retreating army of the tree line. The moon had not yet risen and the Milky Way was visible, its dark spine fringed untidily with light. They walked silently downhill.
“What happened to her, the daughter?”
“It was awful. She was leaving church one Sunday after evening service and a branch fell on her and killed her.”
“Oh God.”
“It smashed her skull in. We were all there, outside the church. Just before Christmas.”
“But why does she blame your dad?”
“He’d just given a sermon about the Wind of God. It’s what they call the Holy Spirit. The Wind of God. There was no way to translate it. And then—outside—it wasn’t even that windy, but the branch was dead and it snapped off. Dad carried the body back into the church. It was a real mess.”
The coop was already closed up and silent. The chickens had been locked away for the night and Liz wondered why she and Sarah were here. The far edge of the forest appeared to breathe in the semi-darkness, moving in, out, as the eye struggled to define it. In there, in the all-day permanent gloaming, beasts crawled on their stomachs, crept on all fours, stalked and pounced, rutted and died and rotted. The tree line marked the edge of civilization as much as any city wall.
“And Belef thinks it’s God’s fault?”
“She says it was punishment for breaking with the old ways. Kaykay was singing ‘Jesus Bids Us Shine with a Pure Clear Light’—it’s the only hymn they seem able to learn—when the branch fell and killed her. Belef says it was Amulmul. Amulmul wanted to show her who was the real Wind of God.”
“Is that why the husband left? Because of the death?”
Sarah fiddled with a piece of wire on the coop door and they started back up to the house.
“Oh no, he’d been gone years before. He just disappeared. One day he’d gone out to get honey from a tree, but no one knew exactly where the tree was. I mean he knew, but he wouldn’t tell anyone in case they stole the honey, and he’d done it before. He’d come back before with a huge honeycomb wrapped in leaves, apparently, but this time he just never came back. Dad arrived in the village a few weeks later and Belef was hysterical. She was screaming at him. She thought he was her husband come back. The dead turn white, they think. Or they used to think. And so it was a we
ird start to the relationship, you know. They used to joke about it. But it was always pretty intense between them. She always loved my dad, I think. But then, well, you heard, things started going wrong.”
Outside the storeroom Liz stopped, intending to say goodnight.
“I was going to show you my collage.”
“Shall we do that tomorrow?”
“But you’re going to be filming. It’ll only take a minute.”
Liz followed her into the house and down to Sarah’s room. Sarah shut the door behind them. It felt curiously illicit. There was light from the porch where Jess and Josh were, but they had gone straight past them.
“Here, sit here.”
Liz sat at the little school desk and examined the “collage.”
“My cousin Erin in Indiana sends her old magazines to me at school.”
Sarah had cut and stuck hundreds of images onto an enormous sheet of cardboard salvaged from one of their food deliveries.
“Have you a theme?”
There were animals, celebrities, furniture. A deck chair. A kitten. Some pop stars, actors, mouthpieces.
“Not really. It’s just things that strike me. I don’t think I’m going to have enough to cover the board.”
“They did this in Victorian times.”
Except the women in those collages were not so . . . naked. Nor pouting like that. Nor were they so skinny. It was lovely, almost innocent, and also pointless and terrible. There was a sense of someone held at some remove from all life, in the prison of her days. All the men were in suits or T-shirts and jeans, but the women—it was hard to find one in a proper outfit. Liz felt a tenderness towards Sarah. Motherly. She tapped her fingers on the pile of magazines—fashion, lifestyle, “interiors”—and thought how awful it was to be young now, even here, at the end of the earth. It pressed in, the wider world and its stupidity and pornification, lust and greed and envy and hatred. Sometimes she forgot how hard it was to be female, and then she was reminded. There was no way to protect a girl from the world—it was like trying to hold off a tidal wave of shit with Sellotape and string. But she was clever, Sarah. She would be all right. Would she? She was so skinny, so on edge, so eager and nervous and unhappy.
“You know a lot of the stuff in these magazines is nonsense, right?”
“Of course. I was just . . . I was just making something from it. For something to do. The other side’s more interesting.”
Sarah turned the board over and Liz started to laugh. This side was like Hieronymus Bosch.
“You haven’t showed this to your parents, have you?”
“Of course not.” Sarah grinned.
“Have Esther and Moses seen these?”
“They’re not even allowed in here.”
On the board, Kim Kardashian’s head was split in two and a Formula One car was driving into her mouth. Several arms came out of a dollar bill, holding the mounted head of a deer, a Molotov cocktail, a can of Budweiser, a tricorne hat. A long row of heads—John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, several models—appeared to be on a skewer turning over a fire made from yellow and red furnishings cut into the shape of flames. A pair of legs—Beyoncé’s?—missing a torso but attached to the top half of a spaceship stood in a forest, the trees made from skyscrapers topped with lettuce leaves.
“This is great.”
“Cool, isn’t it?”
“This is super cool.”
“And I did Donald Trump.” She pointed. “Just there.”
Trump’s head was on the body of a flamingo, and somehow the juxtaposition made sense of the glassy fear in his eyes, as if he were scared he might topple off his single spindly pink leg.
“And look.”
Sarah handed over a photograph she pulled from the inside of a book—a diary perhaps—by her bed. It showed Sarah, Esther, and Moses with Belef and a little black girl, grinning cheekily, overflowing with mischief, sitting on the front steps leading up to their verandah.
“That’s Kaykay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s the same age as you.”
“Two months apart.”
“Were you friends?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Belef looked so young in the photograph. She wore a yellow head wrap, and the bright smiling face that looked out from the picture was almost unrecognizable. Since then pain had come and done what pain does to a face. Liz passed the photo back and Sarah slipped it into her book, then sat back on her narrow bed.
“So . . . do you like Stan?”
“Stan? He’s too old for you.”
“I don’t mean that! I just wondered if you liked him.”
“I like him fine.”
“What about Paolo? Do you think he’s cute?”
“I think he thinks he’s cute. What about boys? Do you have a boyfriend in PM?”
“Not as such.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s a boys’ school across the road, but . . . Doesn’t Stan seem so good with kids?”
“I think he’s at home with them. That’s not quite the same thing. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about boys.”
Sarah gave her a meaningful look, and said, “Me neither.”
She got up off the bed and took the two steps to the desk and stood in front of Liz, then awkwardly bent and tried to put her arms around her. She brought her head down and tried to kiss her. Liz rerouted the movement into a hug and said, “Oh honey.”
“Forget it.” Sarah pulled away strongly and was back on her bed. She turned her face away towards the wall.
“No, it’s . . . Oh Sarah, I’m like twice your age.”
“Forget it. Let’s forget it. Could you go?”
Liz sat down on the bed beside her.
“Don’t be bonkers. Nothing happened. We’re cool, OK? We’re cool.”
Sarah turned towards her. Her neck and face were blotchy, puce with embarrassment.
“I’m not even like that.”
“Of course not. Whatever. I remember being fifteen. Look, we’re cool.”
“OK.”
“Honestly. Everything is fine.”
But everything was not fine. Liz stayed for another five minutes, trying to kick-start fake conversation. She waffled and waffled and all through it she found herself thinking, What would it be like to kiss this fifteen-year-old girl? She was pretty. A delicate neck. And then she would think, Liz, what are you doing in here? Get out. Get out.
—
She told Sarah that she could make her own way back to the storeroom. She had her Margo-issued torch. In the corridor, she saw a light on under a door she’d not been behind and heard a chair scrape, Josh’s voice, a crackle of static and Josh’s voice again.
“That’s what I said. Physically attacked. I understand he was whipped, the poor child.”
More buzzing static. There was a click as Josh plugged something in and the static stopped.
“I haven’t seen him. I told you they’re filming here. It’s getting out of hand . . . Daniel, I ask you to get the police down here, and you send Raula. She’s running rings round him. You need to get the body reburied in our graveyard. . . . Ten years work, ten years of my life! She cannot stay in Slinga. I can’t allow it.”
There was a long pause. Liz began to tiptoe down the corridor. Josh spoke again and his voice was softer, sadder.
“No, I know. But it’s not a situation I can bear. The church needs support. I’m asking you for help here.”
The chair scraped again as Liz reached the back door. Sarah came out of her room and saw her, but only raised a hand in silent farewell. Liz waved back and undid the latch and slipped out into the night.
—
“We were all longlong, we were all in darkness, all of us knew nothing, and then God gave his ten l
aws on to his people. And the second of these laws was—You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Wantok bilong mi em I husat? Who is my neighbor?”
You couldn’t call Josh a natural preacher, but he had watched enough sermons to pick up the basic tricks. He grinned and cajoled and glowered. He raised and lowered his voice, although his stresses did not always fall on the appropriate word.
“You shall love the person near you as you love yourself. This is the second law, and we must obey all of these ten laws to gain eternal life, so that we might live forever.”
Josh walked across the little raised dais of the church and back again. There were two men with guitars, who had, a minute before, been playing “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace.” They stood on either side of him watching, impassively. Josh pointed at one of the guitarists and said, “Watna knows that.”
Watna dutifully grinned back.
It was a small building of wooden planking and a corrugated roof. In lieu of the expected rows of wooden pews, there were red plastic stacking chairs. The congregation consisted of twenty or so people, about a third of the church’s capacity. The women wore meri skirts and blouses, the men short-sleeved shirts and shorts. The earthen floor was covered in raffia matting. For ten minutes before the service started, Moses ceremoniously bashed “the bell,” a rusted wheel arch hung on a chain from a nearby mango tree, in a one-two-three rhythm. Inside, the air of expectation and tension was resolved into genuine joy when the singing began.
Josh started the service with a list of reminders: They were not to chew betel nut in church, since the red spit got on the prayer books. If the children cried they were to be taken outside. They were to remember to give their hymn books back by the door at the end. Paolo dutifully filmed from various angles. He’d wired Josh up before the service started—running the wire under his shirt and into the transmitter at the back of his trousers—which had involved much off-key joking from the missionary: “Now careful, Paolo, we’re not even engaged. Buy a guy a drink first.” Paolo smiled and nodded and laughed, and finished clipping on the mic, before glancing over at Liz with a look that conveyed the single word “prick.”