Modern Gods
Page 31
“Do you remember how Mum and Dad used to fight the bit out?” asked Alison. “She moved out that time even.”
A little frisson erupted in the air around Liz’s head.
“She went to the flat above the office,” said Alison, still feeling around, Liz thought, to check if she had privileged information, if she knew a story Liz was never told.
“I remember.”
Liz stared into the fire. How regular the buds of flame were. The secret to being perfectly dull. Repetition, unchanging, the same shade and shape.
“Do you think there was someone else involved?”
“I don’t know.”
“But she came back for you,” Alison said, and there was a broken sob in her voice. One of the ways Liz knew that Alison was the favorite, that Alison was the child preferred by both her parents, was because of this incident. They had never talked about it for this reason.
“Well, she came back for Spencer,” Liz corrected. “Remember how he wouldn’t go. How crazy he was, holding onto Dad’s leg and screaming. He could only have been four.”
“So she took you. I was third choice obviously.”
Liz looked at her sister. How could something so apparent never have occurred to her? She had never considered how the episode looked to Alison.
“Ally, she took me because she thought you’d look after Spencer. She didn’t think I was capable of doing it, of being motherly.”
“That’s not what you think.”
“It’s what I know.”
“No, no, she didn’t want me.”
“That’s not true. It was because she didn’t trust me not to fight with Kenneth, and she didn’t think I could look after Spence. Even though I was two years older than you.”
Alison sat and clenched and unclenched her jaw, just like Kenneth did when he was brooding on something.
“I was sure it was because . . . I thought she didn’t want me.”
“Oh Al. You’ve been reading between the wrong lines.”
—
A little tilting and resettling of the world and its contents. Did Alison settle for men who didn’t deserve her because she felt at some basic level that her mother had rejected her? Did Liz refuse to grow up because she felt her mother had told her once that she was unsuited to motherhood and responsibility? And what if neither of those things were the case? Or what if both were? They stared into the fire.
There was a movement behind the glass door. A white nightgown sloped into the kitchen.
“You two still up? I’ve terrible reflux. I’ve been trying to sleep sitting up. But I’m going to take these zopiclone.”
Their mother, she of the variously interpreted motives, filled a glass of water.
“Do you remember, Mum,” ventured Liz, “when you moved out of the house in Coolreaghs?”
Alison sat up straight and both daughters now realized they were eyeing their mother very intently, like two people in a dock before a judge.
“When we moved here?”
“No, when you moved out,” said Alison impatiently. “When you and Dad were fighting loads.”
Their mother turned off the tap and came into the living room.
“Now, what made you think of that?”
“We were just talking,” said Alison casually, but her jaw was still set like Kenneth’s.
Judith sat on the edge of the sofa. It was clearer in her nightgown how thin the cancer had left her legs, how distended it had left her stomach. Looking at her, Liz was suddenly regretful of their present interrogation but Alison was set on the single track, not able to stop or turn.
“Why did you take Liz with you?” she asked.
“Well, Spencer wouldn’t go.”
“You took me because you thought I’d fight with Dad, didn’t you? And because you didn’t think I’d look after Spencer.”
Judith looked at her eldest daughter.
“No. I can’t remember exactly, but—”
“You took her because you didn’t want me,” Alison said.
“No! I wanted to take all three of you. I can’t remember the specifics now! I think you’d locked yourself in the bathroom after Spencer had his fit, and Ken was holding onto him, and he was sobbing. And Liz wanted to go. She’d got into the car and lain down in the back seat. Your dad was hurt, I think, that you wanted to go—”
Judith adjusted her nightgown around her stomach, and swallowed the tablet from her fist.
“It was a difficult time, every family has difficult . . . God, have you two been sitting here thinking up reasons to hate me!”
“No!”
“Not that at all.”
Her mother had tears in her eyes, and Liz felt some hardness that she hadn’t even been aware of in her crumble. She looked at Alison; she was staring at her mum with a kind of boundless childish hunger.
Upstairs, Liz sat on the bed and looked out at the scattering of stars, the dark fields, the light from the corner of Sidney’s farmyard. It felt stuffy and she opened the window and felt a new coolness sweep over her face. The flowery brocaded curtain shifted very slightly, almost imperceptibly, swayed by the little breeze she’d brought into the closed room.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their patience, insight, and careful suggestions, many thanks to Natasha Fairweather and Paul Slovak. For his trust and enthusiasm, many thanks to Nick Pearson.
Thanks also to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship that aided the completion of this novel, even if the fellowship was to write a nonfiction book about poetry. (I’m on it.)
While some of the occurrences in the narrative are based on real events, all the characters are imaginary. I read and took prompts from many books on Northern Ireland and on cargo cults, including Susan McKay’s Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People; Peter Taylor’s Loyalists; Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, and David McVea; Peter Lawrence’s Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea and his Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia; David Attenborough’s Quest in Paradise; Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia. I borrowed a few details—such as the names of Belef’s spirit children—from Andrew Lattas’s anthropological study Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults.
Thanks also to Jon Moorhouse and Dave Saraga, wherever they are, with whom I first traveled to Melanesia almost twenty years ago.
As always, thanks to Zadie for everything.
Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He has published two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover’s Mistake, and three collections of poetry, To a Fault, On Purpose, and Go Giants. He is the recipient of many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
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