Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  Liz knelt. The side of the hole sloped and crumbled. It was uneven and about a foot and a half down, the dark wood of the coffin lid was visible. There was a lot of soil to be extracted before the coffin could be lifted out. She leaned forward and hauled up a handful and then another. The damp earth came away easily. She noticed that Usai, who had not stopped at all, was silently crying.

  When they had cleared around the coffin—it was so small, a roughly hewn wooden box no more than five feet long—Alan inserted the handle of Napasio’s broom under one end and tried to lever it up. After much exertion, one end of the coffin rose a few inches above the lip of the pit and then—a loud appalling crack. The side of the coffin had split. Alan lowered the broom and the coffin tilted; there was a sickening adjustment of its contents. Alan tried to let the coffin back down but now it stuck fast, half in and half out of the hole.

  The smell. Napasio lifted her skirt and covered her face. Liz put her hand to her nose—her eyes were burning. An evil stench. A clotted smell of putrefaction. It occurred to her that though she had come from a land of death, filled with frequent human sacrifice—both intended and collateral—she had never seen a body of any kind. She looked down and saw several white maggots squirming out of the split wood and falling into the soil below. People began to move backwards.

  Werner removed his baseball cap and held it with his Bible; it left a universal indent round his mousy hair, as if he wore an invisible crown.

  Raula shouted at the policeman with the spade to “get involved,” but this time when he put one leg over the low fence round the garden, Usai stood up and held out his hand for the spade. The policeman handed it over. Usai dug round the bottom of the coffin for a few minutes, then laid the spade aside and continued with his hands. They bent over—Leftie and Alan and Napasio and Liz and Usai—and lifted it, freed it from the earth. It wasn’t heavy but the stench was overpowering. They straightened up but then the vessel began to crumble. The wood, rotten after five months in the damp ground, could not hold together; the bottom fell out. What was left of Kaykay slid back into the hole. Alan still held one side of the coffin, but the rest stood empty handed. Leftie stepped backwards, doubled over, and vomited.

  Liz looked into the hole. Maggots writhing whitely. Some flesh, some mud, some bones, some hair.

  —

  From twenty or so feet away, Josh Werner sang out in his confident baritone, “Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light.” Other members of his congregation were gathered with him now—Watna and his wife, a few others Liz didn’t know the names of—and they joined in.

  “Like a little candle burning in the night.”

  Belef had not looked at the coffin. She had not reacted when it came apart but had continued staring into the middle distance. Upon hearing the hymn, though, she jumped up and began running towards Josh Werner. Everything happened very quickly. Suddenly the two policemen were on her, wrestling her to the ground. One of the policemen knelt on her back and was screaming at her to stay still. Usai ran over and pulled the policeman off his mother, shouting, “Stop!” And Josh Werner kept on singing—by himself now: “In this world of darkness”—and Usai wrestled with the policeman. He yanked the policeman’s knife from the sheath on his belt and got free of him. He wheeled around to face Josh, his reverend. The man who’d brought him to the light.

  “Stop it! You stop now!”

  Josh looked at him with shock. His brow bunched close, but he kept singing as loud as he could, as if he were singing before God himself. “So we must shine. You in your small corner and I in mine.”

  Usai ran at Josh, his knife raised. A shot rang out, unimpeded; it sounded like a small bomb.

  Usai bent double, staggered a few feet, and fell on his front on a patch of bare, baked earth. The wound on his back blossomed through the white Britney Spears T-shirt, seeping and spreading until it was a pool around him, shaped like an island, cut off from the world.

  CHAPTER 34

  For the whole journey back, Liz felt both light and heavy; she was floating mentally, and yet at the same time she could hardly lift her limbs. She drank the wine and watched the movies and couldn’t take anything in. When she let herself remember she saw Belef stretched across her real son’s dead body, she heard again the inhuman howling. She saw again the terrible expression in Belef’s eyes when she raised her head from the body and looked straight at her. There was such accusation in it, and such rage.

  After days of travel she reached the country of her birth, and a BBC driver stood at the carousel with the long version of her name scrawled on a board. She let him lift her bag and steer her to the car. In Ballyglass, the house was empty and she took the key from the hollow stone at the foot of the bird table. In her parents’ bathroom cabinet she found Judith’s zopiclone and swallowed two and crept up to her room and slept for fourteen hours.

  When she woke the room was dark and she had no idea where she was. For that second of unknowingness, she felt the liberty of being nothing and no one and nowhere, just potential unrealized, the self before it creeps down into the world to be born—and then she rushed back into her body, into her memories, into this bed and house and town. The bite on her neck itched again. Her heel hurt. She was there and here. Carrying the wounds of there and the weight of here. How small the body felt for what it had to hold; memory and experience and pain. How continually one must fold and trim the soul.

  The two policemen pulled Belef off the body, turned the body over. Already Usai was a corpse, an empty container. The black eyes stared up at the sky and saw nothing at all. There is an argument (she had argued it herself, as an optimistic student) that if people only saw and knew death like this, up close—the corpse, the container—they would not be so keen to make corpses of each other. There was a way to negotiate with the dead, to hear them. But then there is the ancient law—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—common to all people at all times. Belef had looked at her like that. Like the only conclusion to this was more death.

  Liz lay there now in the dark and thought she had spent her lifetime studying the differences, how one tribe does this, another that—and all the time there was no difference, not really, just tiny variations on a theme of great suffering, great loss.

  Naspasio had held Belef and Leftie had held Belef and she had held Naspasio and Paolo had held her and—

  She lifted her arm out from under the duvet and stroked it with the fingers of her other hand. She remembered the feeling of being held, of holding, of being part of a chain. What divides us is as nothing to what joins us. She would not stop at the eyes. She would journey out beyond the reef of her body and into open sea. The period of watching was over; she knew that as a fact within her. A change had come. But what? And what came next? She would be kind. She would learn to love the world. She would try. As if for the first time, she felt the grief inherent in all things, in all relations, in all love. She thought about her mother and wanted to see her, and sat up and turned the light on.

  She found Alison standing at the sink, rinsing glasses.

  “You were out for the count.”

  Liz walked up to her sister and embraced her for a long time. After resisting for a second, Alison allowed herself to be held.

  —

  For hours they talked past each other, both so caught up in their own stories, but it still felt comforting to get the details out, to expel the poison.

  “And the man McFadden said to him, ‘You killed five people that day, you made five people into nothing, but I wish to God you’d killed me too.’ He said, ‘I wish you’d come down to my house afterwards and just shot me there on the doorstep. It would have been easier.’”

  “I left money for her, for Belef. I left about eighty dollars and thirty pounds under a stone inside her hut. I didn’t know what else to do. Margo said it had happened and it was a tragedy but it had happened now. And it wasn’t our fault. It was
n’t anyone’s fault. But maybe the fault was all of us, was everyone.”

  “I was daydreaming this afternoon about what if Stephen hadn’t done it. What if he just hadn’t gone with them, if he had turned back, or been sick, or just ran away.”

  “She’d already lost one child, her daughter, and now she’d lost two. You could see the life go out of her. She just slumped down to the grass over her son’s body. She just lay there.”

  “And Stephen said to McFadden, very quietly, ‘You know I killed myself that day too.’ He said, ‘I made myself into nothing.’ He said he’d killed himself that day but he didn’t. He didn’t do that.”

  —

  In her father’s many-desked study there was an e-mail from Paolo. Because she found the errors in his written English charming and not exasperating, she knew that she was probably in love or something like it. He wanted her to come to London, but she already felt the death of Usai as something that had spoiled everything that happened, that had infected her feelings for Paolo, and she didn’t know if they could—or should—get round it. It was easier to forget the awful thing and move on, not looking back. But then she felt that she was always doing that, was always skipping out, and finally she replied and wrote that she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it either, and that she missed him too, and if she could she’d come to London.

  —

  By eight o’clock everybody had stopped pottering about; all three Donnelly children were reunited in the dark lounge. Alison and Liz lay top to toe on the sofa, and Spencer was on his back on the rug, holding his straight legs an inch off the ground, then raising them another inch, dropping them an inch. An empty bottle of wine stood on the coffee table.

  It had been years since they’d sat around like this and talked. They listened as Alison told them how she couldn’t love and she couldn’t hate; she’d lost all feeling. But these, being borrowed words, were not quite true, and when Liz reached out a hand for her she started crying.

  “Oh honey,” Liz started.

  “No, no, it’s all right.”

  She blew her nose. They sat in silence awhile, watching the skipping flames of the gas fire.

  Spencer said, “It’s not very complicated, is it? You don’t kill people.”

  “That’s such a simplistic thing to—” began Liz.

  But Alison forced a lot of noisy air into her lungs and said, “No, he’s right. He’s right.”

  Spencer sprang up and lifted the empty bottle.

  “I’ll get another.”

  When he had left the room, Alison said, quietly, to Liz, “I didn’t want him to touch me anymore. It was more than that, really. When he touched me I wanted to scream. If he brushed against me in the hotel room or when he’d reach his hand across the table, I just wanted to be far away from him. I was talking to him but I felt like I was shouting from a great distance away, you know? I thought it would get better. But it didn’t. It hasn’t.”

  The curtains were open and outside the large sky was full of stars—exit wounds or promises of some greater light behind the black. An orange glow sat over Ballyglass in the distance. There came the low rumble of the cattle grid and boxes of light scrolled across the far wall, across the mantelpiece of Moorcroft vases and Royal Doulton plates and Lalique dancers. Their parents were back.

  —

  “It’s like a morgue in here,” said Kenneth, as he entered. “You not turn on the lights?”

  Alison sat up and said, “The kids are upstairs asleep.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t turn the lights on.”

  “No, I’m just warning you they’re here.”

  “Fine. How was Guinea?”

  “Papua New Guinea.”

  Judith turned on the lights. Kenneth carried bags from the Murnaghan Outlet. Liz felt as if she hadn’t been anywhere at all. Spencer sat up. He said, “Someone was shot dead.”

  “In Guinea?”

  “Papua New Guinea. Actually I wasn’t in PNG but an island off it. New Ulster. I told you.”

  “And someone was shot there?” Judith asked, pulling the curtains.

  “A home from home,” Kenneth said.

  “What’d you buy?” Alison asked, setting her wineglass on a coaster and standing up.

  —

  Liz and her mother stood in the kitchen. Liz washed and her mother dried.

  “Where?”

  “One tumor of six centimeters, right by the bowel. They’re worried it might perforate it.”

  “But they can treat it.”

  “Well, they can give me more chemo, but you know, the last time the tumors didn’t get any smaller.”

  “I know but—but they stopped growing.”

  “For a while.”

  Kenneth and Spencer sat in the living room a few feet away. Kenneth scanned the sports pages of the Daily Telegraph and Spencer typed another e-mail to Trisha, telling her everything would be all right, that it would be better now, that now it was out in the open they could at least decide what to do. . . . Kenneth lifted the remote control and turned the television on.

  Spencer’s phone buzzed. A text from Ian. Do you love her?

  Spencer replied with a simple Yes and turned his phone off.

  —

  A little later the women moved to the conservatory. The men stayed watching rugby in the lounge. The rhythms of Ulster life as Liz had always known them. Alison turned to her mother and sister and tried to find a story that would fit.

  “All his stuff is still in Mickey’s room, in boxes, not that he has much. I told him not to be unpacking it.”

  “But the wedding, all the presents!” Judith said.

  And Liz could not suppress an infuriated sigh. What fetish gods the Donnellys were! They’d stay in a marriage so as not to waste the cargo of a fondue set.

  “I just mean: people gave things in good faith,” said Judith in a wounded tone that left Liz a little ashamed.

  “I wrote him a letter and left it on the kitchen table. I said that I didn’t want the children—I didn’t want to have to tell the children, you know, about any of it. The way it is now sure they can find anything online. They’ll be reading all them comments and stories about him. I couldn’t bear them to know him as one thing, as their father, and then learn he was this other thing. This monster.”

  Atlantic padded in and Liz scooped her up. Alison wrinkled up her nose and leaned away.

  “You know I’ve never liked dogs.”

  —

  Spencer appeared in the doorway, filling it.

  “I’ve news too.”

  Judith stood up.

  “Well, let’s all go into the lounge,” she said. “I’m sure your father will want to be involved in this.”

  Spencer sat on the sofa. He placed his fingertips together.

  “This is difficult to say—”

  “Son, if it helps,” Judith began, “I think we know what you’re about to—”

  “You do?”

  “You’ve been keeping a secret—”

  “What—”

  “It’s OK,” Judith began. “Lots of people nowadays are that way. Alison told us—”

  Kenneth interrupted, confident, like a local newscaster reeling off some tolerant facts that had been going round the town these last few years: “Sheila Byrne’s son Alistair is gay, and Carol Allen’s son is gay, and Margaret Costelloe’s daughter’s a real lesbian—but I could have told you that when she was six. And do you know what Sheila says ‘gay’ stands for?”

  “What are you talking—” Spencer began, but Kenneth would not be waylaid.

  “Good as you,” he said, nodding brightly. “Good as you.”

  “I never said that he was gay,” Alison shouted. She was getting up, getting ready to leave the room, but Spencer held onto her arm.

 
“What the fuck are you—”

  “Yes, you did,” Kenneth said. “And mind your language, son, in this house.”

  Spencer laughed. “Er, I’m not gay. I’ve been having a relationship with Trisha.”

  “Our Patricia?”

  “From the office. For a long time.”

  Only Liz wasn’t surprised. She stood up.

  “Shall I make tea?”

  —

  She sat on the sofa beside Alison, flicking through pictures of New Ulster on her laptop: everything so small and clean and bright and two-dimensional. Alison wanted to know which one was the dead one. Spencer came in, still looking at the screen of his phone and Liz clicked Belef’s face closed. When Spencer turned to them, his face wore a look of definite joy.

  “They’re getting divorced.”

  “Really?”

  “So he says.”

  “Is he angry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Their parents went to bed, Spencer left—to find Trisha, they supposed—and Alison and Liz sat on in the living room.

  “Shall I get another bottle of wine?”

  “Take a bottle of the Shiraz from the garage. He has a box of it behind the running machine.”

  When Liz came back, Alison had made a nest for herself with cushions on the rug in front of the gas fire.

  “Here, set mine here.”

  Liz placed the glass of wine on the slate hearth, and sat down beside her little sister. They sipped and sat and stared at the gas fire for a second—the uniform buttery flames budding, unlocking, disappearing.

  “Are you going back to him?”

  Alison shrugged.

  “I don’t know how people forgive.”

  “Me neither.”

  “All marriages have difficult patches.”

  Alison looked at her.

  “I’m just repeating what people say. What do I know?”