Modern Gods

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Viking in 2017

Copyright © Nick Laird 2017

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Nick Laird asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008257354

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008257347

Version: 2018-05-22

Dedication

I.M. Carol Laird

(1950–2017)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1: Six Nothings

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part 2: In the Way That Fire Wanders

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Nick Laird

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

“I am a man of constant sorrow.”

The microphone right up at his lips and the black Stetson tilted back, Padraig was going at it full tilt. He liked to start a capella with that long and twisted first note, just the way Ralph Stanley did.

“I’ve seen trouble all my days.”

Around the bar the drinkers were two or three deep. Each of the snugs was occupied and the wee round tables by the dance floor were pretty much full. No one was dancing, not yet, but you could see it was about to start. When Alfie kicked in on the banjo the shoulders of a couple of women began swaying. In a matter of moments the floor would start filling up.

The lounge bar on the other side of the counter—you reached it through the side entrance—looked to be busy too. The front door banged against the high side of the first booth—some sort of scuffle broke out—and then there were two eejits in plastic Halloween masks.

“I bid farewell to old Kentucky.”

One, a vampire, the other a Frankenstein’s monster. The gipes. But it was Halloween soon enough and sure why not.

“The state where I was born and raised.”

Padraig hooked his thumbs in his belt and did a quick two-step to the side as Alfie and Derek harmonized.

“The state where he was born and raised.”

He pointed to Derek, who nodded and grinned and hit the hi-hat, then to Alfie, who closed his eyes and flicked the neck of the banjo vertical and back again.

“For six long years I been in trouble.”

A car backfired outside was it? And again, and then a young fella in a hooded top standing near the fruit machine seemed to fall into the wall. The vampire had his arms straight up and at the end of them was a pistol. Frankenstein strode out fast into the middle of the dance floor and in his arms he carried a semi-automatic. A surge of bodies away from the door now, pushing across the lounge bar and much screaming. Dozens of customers were pressed up against the front of the stage. Padraig sang, No pleasure yet … and trailed off. Alfie strummed on for a couple of chords, but then he stopped too.

Frankenstein spun round and round on his heel, firing. There was a loud dull pop-pop-pop-pop, and a little puff of redness erupted from the side of the head of an old man seated at the bar. Down he went off his stool like the string was cut inside him. A woman sitting at a table clutched at her breast and fell into her husband. He was shaking her by the shoulders, holding her head up. A wee fella trying to get down the corridor towards the toilets stopped when a large darkness flowered on the back of his shirt.

The screaming. Jesus, the screaming.

Alfie came to life and jumped over the drums and the whole kit went toppling backwards off the stage, taking Derek with him. The gunman became a centrifugal force—all the people threw themselves outwards, away from him, against the walls of the bar, scrambling, scrabbling—against the tables, the booths—trying to get farther and farther away as he turned round and around. Fut-fut-fut-fut went the gun.

A young woman wearing red spectacles ducked down under her table. Two women were already under there, but four had been sitting in the alcove. Wine glasses empty and half empty all slid down now, smashing onto the floor.

The shooting stopped and a man’s voice, hoarse with delight, shouted, “Trick or treat!”

Then the shooting started again. A pause and a different kind of gunshot: clipped, duller, efficient. The other man was firing now with a handgun. The vampire. Frankenstein was in the middle of the dance floor, loading the magazine on the semi-automatic. Bodies moved slowly on the ground.

Here was one moaning where the carpet met the dance floor. The vampire with the pistol fired another shot into it. The head just exploded everywhere.

Here was a man in a sports jacket curled into a ball. Here was a lady gripping the legs of a bar stool and wailing hysterically. Here was a scatter of archipelagic blood on a “Guinness Is Good for You” mirror.

Here was a man lying over his wife; more blood flowed out from under their huddled crying form in competing dark runnels across the parquet dance floor. Vampire fired at them again and fut, the huddle lay flat. A woman banged against the door of the ladies’ toilets, but the three women inside held the door closed. “Trick or treat,” the voice shouted hoarsely. “Trick or treat.” The woman screamed, “Please, please, please, please,” but then a very fast piece of metal entered the side of her head and she stopped.

CHAPTER 1

“Hello.”

“Do we need milk? Did you get the paper?”

“I got the paper.”

Kenneth opened the fridge.

“We have … half a carton of semi-skimmed.”

“There any buttermilk?”

“You making wheaten bread?”

“I was going to.”

“I don’t see any.”

“I’ll get some apple pancakes for Liz. Did the marquee people call?”

“Not yet. There’s an ad I see there in the Telegraph magazine for trousers with elasticated waists—”

“I have elasticated-waisted trousers.”

“They’re very reasonable.”

Judith sighed: “If I want to buy elasticated trousers, I’ll just go into Cunninghams and buy elast—”

“I’m just saying these are very reasonable. They’re twenty-nine ninety-nine. And they’re in every color. Salmon. Mauve. What are they in Cunninghams? Twice that? Three times?”

“Why don’t you order a pair for yourself?”

It was Kenneth’s turn to sigh. That Kenneth was overweight was not in doubt, but if anyone needed elasticated trousers, it was Judith: the deadly, hidden growth they knew from the X-rays was now a physical presence, rising up beneath her belts, no longer hidden by cardigans, and her husband was breaking an unwritten rule by referring to it—however obliquely—first. She didn’t need reminding. If she wanted to talk about it, she would talk about it.

“Did Liz call?” Judith asked, shoving the conversation on, and down the line Kenneth could hear the engine of a tractor, turning over somewhere near his wife’s car, and her busy hand tapping out her impatience on the steering wheel.

“No.”

“Does she expect collecting from the airport?”

“Well, she’s a grown woman, I’m sure she’ll let us know.”

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” said Judith.

Kenneth paused and then offered, “I’ll leave the magazine out anyway for you to see.”

Judith performed the last and therefore definitive sigh of the conversation.

Kenneth plugged the phone back into the charger. The beep beep beep went again and he remembered why he was standing in the kitchen. He tugged the dishwasher open, feeling the ligament twinge in his elbow. No, not the dishwasher: lifeless, smelling ruinously of yesterday’s fish pie. He pushed at the fridge door to check the seal was intact and saw out past the rockery a beige smear on the back lawn. He raised his readers from his nose up to his forehead, and with the other hand slid the distance glasses into place. A rabbit sat in the middle of the lawn, brazen, chewing stupidly.

Kenneth tapped on the window with his gold signet ring. Two coal tits fluttered off the bird feeder, lapped the tarmac, and re-alighted. But the rabbit did not move. Chew chew. Sniff.

He tapped the glass again. Sniff. Glance. Nothing. For a moment the “guiding best presence” he’d been working with their counselor Theresa, since September, to establish—“the mindfulness” to help steer the boat of himself through the treacherous currents of “this new life”—was utterly lost to Kenneth. He was pounding the window explosively hard with the side of his fist.

The rabbit jerked its gaze towards the house but felt that, no—on consideration it must decline. Chew chew. The base of Kenneth’s palm hurt, and yet how briefly elevating it had felt to bang one thing very hard against another. “Anger,” Theresa believed, “comes from feeling powerless.” Well, yes. Beep beep beep. A sudden hunch and Kenneth rounded the table quickly to depress the fat button of the microwave; the little door popped and swung out to reveal a vaguely semenistic stain of hardened oatmeal on the frosted circular plate. But no, not the microwave. He sat on the edge of the sofa and waited. The room was silent. He stood up and waited, and the room was silent. He walked back and stood at the kitchen window and looked out and waited. Beep beep beep.

That sky hanging over the back hills was heavy with rain about to get falling. Sidney, his older brother, would be heading up to the cattle in an hour or so. He’d get soaked.

Beep beep beep.

In every room in the house something was dying or calling out or crying to be tended to and soothed and nursed again on energy. Behind that rabbit, on the hillside in McMullens’s field, the pylon, the carrier of all that energy, stood with its arms upraised like St. Kevin’s, in perpetual ache, bringing the news of heat and light to all these decent bill-paying people. At the beech hedge the telegraph pole met a substantial black cable and led it down into the soil to swim through articulated tubing beneath the neat lawn and raucous flowerbeds, a few potato drills by the bitumen fence, the three bent-backed apple trees, and the tarmac and newly varnished decking, before it surfaced at the back door to surge through the rubberized wires in the wall, slalom the fuse box circuits, and arrive in his house to power this fucking beeping he still could not locate.

There was a rumble of the cattle grid and a second later Judith’s Volvo swung round the back of the house. The bunny upped and scarpered across the grass into the beech hedge, and the finality of the movement—the way the coppery leaves gulped down the little marshmallow tail—pleased Kenneth. He liked it best when problems disappeared themselves. He thought of Liz, his eldest, sloping towards him across twenty-five years, down in the hollow of Faulkner’s back field, retrieving a rabbit Kenneth had just shot. The wee lass’s lanky arm straight out, the coney hanging by the ears, urine still trickling from it. He remembered how his daughter had turned away from the thing, her mouth closed tight and her face concentrated upon not showing any emotion at all. He’d shot it through the hindquarters, the bullet entering from the back, and as Liz walked along little bits of white fluff came off the tail like a dandelion clock unseeding.

He put the kettle on and pressed his fingertips against it until they started to hurt with the heat. It was what? Eleven o’clock? A quarter past. He felt sleepy and heavy, like he might tip forward onto the counter. He tried it slightly, letting his stomach press against its beveled edge. The New Truth Mission calendar hung on a nail by the window, a little black child grinning out at him from Africa, delighted to receive some wispy shaving of Kenneth’s eight pound monthly direct debit. The child had a perfectly round head, and perfectly round eyes with perfectly round pupils, black circles in white circles in a black circle …

Judith was back now, she was just outside, she would come through the door and events would happen, life would move forward. A starling hung upside down on the feeder, mutilating with a wild flurry of pecks the fat ball he’d put out after breakfast. They went so quick. He’d bought twenty of them in Poundland only a couple of weeks ago. The door of the Volvo banged shut. The sky above the Sperrins was like a sheet of lead, cutting him off from all sources of energy—the sun’s heat, the sun’s light. He was trying to put off the thought that in two days there would be 112 drunk people in his garden, no doubt trampling over his newly planted flowerbeds.

The next beep entered his left ear a millisecond earlier than the right, and with a small grunt of triumph he realized it must be the tumble dryer. It sat atop the washing machine in the little porch by the back door. He pressed the button with the symbol of the key and the porthole clicked open; Kenneth pulled out the clothes in tangled clumps and let them fall in the plastic basket by his feet. They gave off warmth and a lilac smell and Kenneth felt his mood shift slightly upwards. The optimism of a load of freshly tumbled clothes. He could see his morning spreading benignly out before him. A bit of telly, one of the auction shows. A cappuccino. A piece of shortbread. But then as he lifted the basket, beep beep beep. It came from behind him, from the tumbler again.

Seeing the pixelated Judith looming through the back door, fiddling with keys, he said loudly, “But this is only ridiculous!”

He had the basket in his arms and was stepping through to the kitchen when she got the back door open. He could see immediately that something was not right by the look on her face, that his own morning trials were about to be subsumed by something much larger, but he kept going and set the basket on the table, and was already back in his armchair by the time she’d hung up her coat and come in. Maybe if he didn’t look at her, maybe if he kept his focus to the orange-skinned fool on the TV pricing antiques, whatever was coming would not arrive.

Judith unpacked the bags and put the shopping away, letting the cupboards slap shut, Kenneth noted, with scant regard for the hinges.

He kept on staring at the TV, but on the far left of his vision he could still see her, trying to arrange scarlet tulips in a Belleek vase so that a bent-necked one stayed straight in the middle of the bunch. It flopped forward, and again. The rain that had been threatening for the last hour started. Big drops exploding on the roof of the car. The patio spotted, mottled, in a moment darkened uniformly.

“I don’t know why I ever buy these. They never last. Honest to God the petals are already coming off this …”

Something in her voice—some new alarm, some warning—made him turn to her. He softened as he always did at the sight of sadness and stood up in his new, tentative way, and went to her. She was sobbing now and fell into him, and held him while he repeated—although he knew the answer—“What’s wrong, what’s wrong? Whatever’s wrong now?”

CHAPTER 2

The moment the students filed out of the classroom, Liz felt humiliated. She could never entirely shake the suspicion that they had been laughing at her moments before she entered, and then at best they seemed indifferent and at worst contemptuous through the long three hours that followed. The ideal of teaching was surely to produce something like a gravitational effect when one walked into the room. She’d certainly had dons like that: dry, thickly draped women with hair in retentive buns; or Professor Paulson himself, who would walk up the lecture hall to a silence that gathered and gathered until only the sound of his footsteps ascending to the podium were heard. But lately Liz found herself forced to the conclusion that she was of a different stripe, the kind of teacher who talks fast because she’s not entirely sure of her facts, directs questions to the logorrheics to waste time, and forgets her grading, or forgets to do it, and whose lesson plan is three lines long and most weeks consists of reading out chapters of her own far-from-finished book. She couldn’t get her act together. Although the classroom engendered panic, it was never quite enough to spur her into useful action. Now she closed the door behind the last shuffling backpack, fell into one of their empty seats, and at once opened her Gmail, looking for relief, distraction, and read: LIZ: URGENT DISASTER which seemed an accurate if brutal definition.

Liz, darling, it’s Margo—

It’s been so long! Too long!

I still think back to the Myth project with such affection and such pride and I’ve been hoping to work with you again for the longest time. I heard you were teaching in America so I hope this e-mail finds you happy and well and ensconced in life stateside. But not *too* happy and not *too* well! Because I need your help!

A somebody called Charlotte Taylor-Anderson had been lined up to present The Latest of the Gods—a documentary about a religious movement in New Ulster, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, for The State of Grace, a special season on religion the BBC were doing—but this Taylor-Anderson had just broken her back on an artificial ski slope in Perthshire. Margo had an experienced cameraman lined up who’d done an Attenborough series, the permits were in place, but she lacked a presenter. They were meant to shoot next week. Would Liz consider stepping in?

Several PDFs were attached, including a newspaper clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald, “A New God in New Ulster,” written by Stan Merriman. Liz skimmed the article. A cargo cult prophet named Belef had started a movement called the Story, which merged some of the local religions with Christianity, and threw in a bit of political independence. The missionaries were all stirred up. The most surprising thing seemed to be that Belef was a woman.

Could she do this? She’d have to go back to the apartment and get hiking gear and waterproofs, more contact lenses, a couple of books—maybe William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and there was that Peter Lawrence one on cargo cults. She opened Google Earth and called up New Ulster. Curved like a scimitar. Entirely green. A chaos of peaks and valleys. When she tried to zoom in, none of it, not an inch, appeared to be mapped.

The excitement propelled her effortlessly along, all the way home, until she reached the front door of her own studio. She knocked, got no answer, and began to look for her keys. She jiggled away the loyalty key rings for various pharmacies, opened the door, and look, there was a man she didn’t know standing in her kitchenette. He wore a green T-shirt that had the words “Some Crappy Band” printed on it, purple underpants, and one red sock—the other foot was bare and long toed and dirty looking. Clearly not a burglar. It occurred to Liz that she had for once occasioned something like a sudden atmospheric change—her presence used up all available oxygen. Atlantic, her useless dog, butted at her shins and whined. Joel was also standing—also wearing a T-shirt and pants—on the far side of the bed, breathless, saying, “Liz, hi, I didn’t—this is Jeff.”

“Okay.”

Liz said it very slowly, testing the weight of the word on the room. Nobody replied. Joel was for some reason on the verge of smirking. She turned towards Some Crappy Band.

“Hello.”

“How’s it going?”

The man in the kitchenette spoke with no embarrassment or shame. Really quite cheerful, considering the situation he now found himself in. There was some disjunct going on here. Tall and freckled and milky-skinned with light brown eyes, somehow even more Joel’s opposite than she was, gender aside. A farm boy with that fleshy softness. Innocent as butter. And a dark wet coin on the front of his purple briefs.

Joel said, “Weren’t you going straight to Newark?”

There was no need to answer this, but she found herself doing so: “I got an e-mail. I’ve been asked to present a TV show … in Papua New Guinea.”

Joel was nodding foolishly.

“Amazing,” he whispered across the bed.

Atlantic butted and pawed at Liz’s knees.

The man said, “A TV show? Cool. Very cool. And very cool of you to let Joel crash here.”

“Oh. Well. I am nothing if not cool.”

What was she saying? She felt her fury being ousted by some kind of ironic pose. And there was an inconvenient pressing in her bladder that was now a matter of some urgency. In her tiny bathroom, only a rattan door separated her from the rest of the studio, she turned on the tap to camouflage the sound of her ablutions. But now she couldn’t hear them. Were they whispering? She stopped the tap, and waited. Nothing. She turned it on again.

Crap Band. She’d seen him before, at the SoulCycle class a few weeks ago. He’d worn a green, deep-cut sleeveless vest and sat on the other side of Joel. When Joel dropped his water bottle Crap Band picked it up. It was Liz’s first time and she had not returned. But Joel now went every other day to hear Madison shout, “The body does what the mind tells it”—which had never been Liz’s experience. She sat on the toilet and gripped the edge of the basin in front, pissed while staring dumbly at her hands, the way Atlantic pissed, as if it were happening to somebody else. Like the end of this relationship. Apparently unfolding right now, though it somehow felt like it was happening to somebody else.

She’d first met Joel in the lobby of the Standard hotel. A young Asian man sat eating by himself nearby, facing a wall. He wore a black tie and a white shirt, and she’d realized he worked here and was on his break. Widely spaced eyes and a tiny bud-mouth, grinning intensely at her. Then he was not there—then materialized again from behind a very tall black woman in a silver lamé body suit. He was coming towards her, weaving between tables. Shorter than she might reasonably have hoped for but proportionate. Ran a hand through his fringe and squared his shoulders, which endeared. She’d studied the melt of ice in her glass and swirled the blunted cubes around with the straw. Here, here he was. The most marvelous cheekbones and thin mocking eyes.