Modern Gods

CHAPTER 4

She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.

She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart. Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.

Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?

Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.

She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.

She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?

The reply came after a minute.

Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.

Liz considered for a second, and replied:

Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.

She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered whether this conversation would make her feel better or worse. Liz always felt like the black sheep; her mother and father and brother and sister were their own club, and Liz was invariably outside the circle. But there was nothing more rewarding, in some lights, than a conversation with her sister. If Liz were a plaintiff in the court of some anecdote, Alison would quickly side with her and adopt on her behalf the prosecutor’s wrath. She was loyal as a pit bull, but then you don’t want a pit bull in the house, ideally. In phone conversations Alison would frequently crown a line offered by her elder sister with a stinging, cryptic, catchall phrase: Well, that’s typical of you. Or: You’re never going to grow up, are you? And once, astonishingly: That’s what you get for crying wolf your whole life.

She pressed the TALK key.

At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.

She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”

The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.

Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”

An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families … Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one … Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.

“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear all that. Bad enough he was ten years younger. And gay, as it turns out. Okay, whatever. Bi,” said Alison over her sister’s barks of protest. “Nine years younger. You want to split hairs? Sometimes I think you want to be unhappy.”

There it came. The great expected wash of tiredness ran across her. She leaned forward and rested her head against the cool leather of the seat in front. Her body relaxed into sadness and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to start crying again. She leaned down and tickled Atty’s head as Alison continued, warming to the theme of Liz’s general fecklessness:

“You haven’t seen Izzy in what? Nine months? Ach, you won’t believe the change in her. She’s up to my chest now. She was just moved up in her reading group. And sure Michael was tiny. Oh, we’re so excited. Izzy hasn’t talked of anything else all week. And there’s Stephen! You’ll get to meet Stephen!”

Two hours later and they were up, away, climbing. The lights in the cabin dimmed and she put the bag on her knees and covered both it and herself with the staticky polyester blanket. Atty popped her head up and panted and panted and finally calmed down, as Liz let her rest her muzzle in her hand. The Ambien that Yahoo Answers had advised her to give the dog kicked in, and Atty fell deeply asleep for the entire flight while Liz periodically worried that she’d killed her. She marked her student essays on mate choice and marriage finance with mostly random tics all the way through their two double-spaced pages, and wrote “Excellent!” at the end.

Goodbye Shirlita Goddard, she thought, and your repellent staccato laugh.

Goodbye Hector Martinez and your outsized silly quiff.

Goodbye Steve. Steve Something. Yellow polo shirt, psoriasis.

Repeatedly she slid her hand into the bag and placed her fingertips on the dog’s chest and felt the little reassuring tom-tom of its effort.

CHAPTER 5

When you found yourself hissing at your baby to shut up, to please for God’s sake just shut up for a bit, it was important to set said baby down delicately in his cot and leave the room. That was Rule Number One in Alison’s Big Book of Parenting. It was true that nothing gave her more joy than to look in Michael’s huge cornflower-blue eyes, which even now at 3 a.m.—especially now—radiated curiosity and attention, and to stroke his smooth fat cheeks, and feel his whole life force settle itself as she held him to her and pressed his small hard skull against her chest. But who wants to feel joy at this time of night? She wanted to feel sleep, to feel nothing, to be unconscious for eight or nine blissful hours. She had left him to cry for twenty-three minutes and then given in and got up again. Exactly the opposite of what you’re meant to do. Maybe if she’d waited twenty-four minutes he might have stopped. This was the infinite puzzle of parenting: You never could know for sure what might have been avoided, what inevitable. The crying wasn’t even the worst of it; he interspersed that with a kind of porcine grunting that intensified and lessened and intensified again, as if he were working out with tiny baby dumbbells.

Rule Number Two: Carry concealer. Apply it each morning in natural light to the deep shadow rings under your eyes.

Number Three. What would number three be? Not to run out of Baileys Irish Cream.

Number Four was not to feel guilty about feeding your baby formula or rusks, or your toddler fish fingers or an Easter egg, or letting them watch telly or do any of the necessary activities that other parents—other mothers—tried to make you feel guilty about. The one-upmanship of the whole thing had to be ignored.

Rule Five was to make yourself laugh madly when one of your wee bairns boked on your black party dress just before you left the house for your bimonthly night out, or when one of them wet the bed, or when Izzy tugged the eight-inch purple vibrator the girls had given you on your hen night out from under the bed and started smacking it against her cheek.

Maybe you made rules in your head because there was no other way to feel in control. You had to keep churning the events of your life and try to skim some sense from them. It all slipped through your fingers otherwise. And what was “it”? Time. Children ate time. Before, days moved at a walking pace, routine and predictable. You could liken time to some natural state or process, a backdrop to events, not an event in itself. But once Isobel came, and now Michael, time itself changed. The minutes hardened into objects that could be counted and traded like money, and she always came up short.

At Izzy’s birthday party last week in the café at the leisure center, as she was planting the four pink candles in the cake shaped like a football, which was the only children’s cake left in Tesco’s and would just have to do, it struck Alison that she was going to be sticking candles in cakes every year for at least the next eighteen, which would take her up to the age of fifty, and the conclusion made her sit back for a second on the edge of a radiator. Judith was slicing open a packet of paper plates with a pearlescent fingernail and Alison had managed to turn to her and say, “Can you believe that Izzy’s four?”

“It just gets quicker and quicker,” her mum had replied, smiling her wisest, most insufferable smile.

Michael’s breathing regulated and Alison inched forward to the edge of the tub chair. Slowly, slowly she stood up. He raised his head and she began swaying in their nightly slow dance. He gave a curt, liquidy burp, hot on her ear, and then settled his cheek into her shoulder.

Even as she was telling Liz how excited they all were to see her, she felt a protective wariness. She didn’t mind Liz with the kids—when she actually saw them, she was great with them—but she didn’t particularly want her sister to meet her soon-to-be second husband. And Liz’s presence introduced a stress to the household that was paralyzing. Kenneth and Liz had not actually come to blows since school—but the needling and riling that Liz considered normal made everyone around her tense. Liz was the star of the family, and her mother’s clear favorite. She was so sure she had the answer to everything. But she just had different questions. Normal people, real people, who had to get up and go to work and come home and make dinner, found answers enough in the repetition, in the dull, rough ceremony of cooking, and bathing the kids, and reading three stories, and downing a large glass of chenin blanc, and turning off the television, and double-locking the door, and heading up to bed, amen.

Educated to the nth degree—but so what? To what purpose? Liz knew a lot about some things, sure, but nothing about how to live. She was one of life’s tenants—she rented: flats, people, cars. Trying them out, using them up, breaking them down, moving along. Liz was older, twenty-one months older, but as soon as Alison could speak she’d adopted the responsible role. Had Liz got money? Had she got tissues? Had she remembered her packed lunch? Alison could never have told her, of course, but it was clear as day that Liz would never become an adult till she had children of her own—climbing over her, lying on her, needing her at three in the morning. And not until she became a solid fact in someone else’s life would she start to understand her own parents. She still had the worldview of a child. She faced upwards. She hadn’t yet forgiven Kenneth and Judith—not that there was so much to forgive. Alison knew that Liz pitied her, still stuck in Ballyglass, still stuck with their parents, the business, but in turn Alison pitied her right back, pitied her harder, longer, louder.

The laptop was still showing Downton Abbey on the wicker stool, and she closed it and exited the room, shutting Michael’s door softly. Typical Liz to be snobby about a TV show she didn’t even watch. How could it be offensive? It wasn’t as if it didn’t show the servants to be just as wise and just as confused as the masters. Just that everybody knew their place back then. They weren’t lost in wanting more. Now everyone thought they deserved to have everything at every moment. She was a great fan of the individual, her sister, while hating any actual person she ever had to meet. Liz liked the concept of people but not the reality. That’s why she couldn’t hold onto a boyfriend. Alison stood for a moment on the landing. A soft, repetitive clicking that took her a second to identify as the tap dripping into the bath. It had started again. How amplified a sound became at night. She’d mention it to Stephen.

This was the umpteenth time he’d stayed overnight, but only the third or fourth time he’d done it with the kids here and not at Judith and Kenneth’s. You couldn’t say the evening hadn’t gone well. She’d made a proper roast chicken dinner and Stephen lit the fire. The kids were pretty good, and after dinner, when she bathed them among the ducks and frogs and foam letters that Isobel still refused to spell her name with, he’d slid Bill’s old red toolbox out from between the turf basket and the coal scuttle under the stairs and fixed the loose shelf beneath the sink. Back when Bill was around, she’d have nagged him for weeks, and he’d have botched it anyway, if he ever did it. But Stephen would be a different kind of husband: He could do stuff. He’d be a great dad, and Isobel and Mickey would soon think of him as the only father they’d ever had. She hadn’t heard from Bill in almost two years. Stephen was far from perfect, God knows, what with his sullenness, his gift for switching off, leaving the room but not through the door or the window. Stephen, Stephen, Earth calling Stephen, and he’d turn back towards her and smile a little shyly.

The kids went down easy and they shared a second bottle of Tesco’s finest Italian red, and watched TV and cuddled on the sofa. Upstairs, in bed, they did it twice, once quickly and then, twenty minutes later, again but slowly. She didn’t come but she wasn’t far off the second time. She wore a new nightie from M&S, a classy white satin thing, and he liked it, or said he liked it.

She looked in now to check on Isobel. Her daughter’s darling head was pressed against the wall, the hair covering her face entirely so that for a second she couldn’t tell which direction she was facing. One bare foot came out from under her Tinkerbell duvet. She gave a little moan and shifted her legs, taking a step. What went on in her head? When she came home from school now she was silent about it, just said it was “good.” Alison knew already the inner life of her daughter, at four years old, had closed up to her, was newly zoned and fortified and she couldn’t visit. She might tell Isobel her life was one long carousel ride of being fed and entertained and washed and soothed, but she’d seen her daughter nervous, embarrassed, tense. You can’t protect them from everything.

Everyone sleeping, Alison felt like a ghost wandering the house, benevolent, visiting the much loved, the much missed. She put an ear to Michael’s door, but it was silent. In her own bedroom Stephen lay splayed across the duvet, his white T-shirt riding up his narrow back, revealing the scatter of a few moles. At the nape of his neck the hair whorled in such a way that it came down into a perfect point. She slipped in under the duvet and felt his warmth and the lovely new security of a breathing human body in her bed. And then he spoke, surprising her.

“Was Michael all right?”

“Yeah. Just wanted a cuddle.”

There was a long pause, and just when she thought he’d gone back to sleep, he spoke again.

“Wouldn’t mind one of those myself.”

He turned towards her and draped one of his skinny arms across her waist. A few minutes later, Michael started again. Stephen and her lay perfectly still. Michael grew louder, the pitch rising and rising until he was wailing in utter despair. He started making a hacking, sobbing sound. She set a hand gently on Stephen’s chest and whispered, “I’m going to leave him. He needs to learn to settle—”

Stephen’s whole body jerked awake and backwards in a panic, as if she’d flicked a switch. It was intent on repelling her, hell-bent on defending himself—the side of one hand caught her on the cheek, the other grabbed her by the throat hard.

Something awful possessed him. His eyes stayed closed and she screamed and tried to pry his fingers from her neck. He raised his leg and kneed her in the thigh. Then he was looking at her but his eyes were strange and hard and far away and he was shouting, “Fuckoff, fuckoff” in a voice high pitched and different, sharp with fear. Then it was over—but what had it been? She was crying and hitting at him and he hugged her as she tried to pull away. “It’s me, it’s me,” he kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry. I was dreaming. I was dreaming. I’m sorry.”

Ten minutes later she sat in the empty bath, her knees pulled up. Stephen passed her a bag of frozen sweetcorn from the freezer and wrapped it in a tea towel. She held it now to her eye.

“Go on back to bed, you. There’s no point in us both being up.”

Stephen perched on the toilet lid and sighed repeatedly, as if he were the one thumped in the face. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It wasn’t that she thought he’d done it on purpose. He’d have been out on his ear with the door banging his heels if she’d thought that. It was not deliberate, and that was the point, wasn’t it? But another point, another really very pressing point, was that it hurt.

“Go on, really. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

“I am so sorr—”

“Honestly, it’s fine.”

She didn’t want to hear it but he kept on.

“Well, it’s not fine.”

“No.”

“I was just—it was an accident. We’ll have to get separate beds if we get married.”

She looked up and he was trying to smile. She nodded.

“If we get married? You haven’t left yourself much time to pull out.”

“Sure, it would only take a minute.” He was grinning, knowing that the worst of it was over now; she was coming round.

“You planning on standing me up at the altar?”

“Course not,” he said, but then widened his eyes and nodded.

“Stephen!”

He shook his head.

“Not funny. What were you dreaming?”

“For the life of me I can’t even remember. I think I thought I was being attacked. You know sometimes how you can’t even tell where you are or what’s happening …”

She didn’t.

Stephen stood up and sighed again and said I’m sorry again and finally left.

The frozen sweetcorn were still too cold on her hand, even wrapped in a tea towel. There was a hook by the bathroom door behind her and she reached up and pulled a purple towel off it and down onto her.

The towel knocked off his wash bag and she lifted it back onto the side of the bath. It rattled and she opened it. Just to see. A bottle of diazepam—they were tranquilizers, weren’t they?—and one of zopiclone. And one of paroxetine. What did they do? And why did they all have parts of the labels, where his name should have been, ripped off? She’d ask him about the tablets in the morning. Or maybe google the names to see. In the eight months she’d known him, she’d never once seen him sick.

She got back into bed. Stephen, dead to the world, gave a low intermittent wheeze. A few minutes later she opened her eyes and there stood a miniature person staring at her a few feet from the bed, naked but for Cinderella underpants. She lifted her side of the covers and Isobel climbed in, pressing her warm back against Alison’s body.

“Can I ask you something? Are witches real?”

“No, honey. Go to sleep.”

“Are goblins real?”

“Shush.”

“Are they?”

“No.”

“Are dragons real?”

“No. Go to sleep.”

“Are robbers real?”

“No. Sort of. But no one’s going to rob us.”

“Are bad men real?”

“Honey, please.”

“Are bad men real?”

“Sleep!”

A rustle and sigh. Another rustle. The tempo of her breath loosening and loosening.

(i) Patrick Creighton, 19

The smell was on his clothes, on his hands, in his hair. He’d washed before he left the plant, but it hung around, that metallic taint. Maybe it was the iron in all the animal blood. He liked to go and spend a good long while at the silver trough scrubbing his hands and under his nails before punching out; it was not, in fact, allowed, but who cared. Of course Morrison had noticed, in the locker room announcing in his wee high voice that standard practice was everyone clocked off before washing up, all the while staring directly at him, but he’d just looked right back and through him. Later, in their red boilersuits and white wellies and hairnets, he’d stood beside him at the urinals. Morrison kept on sighing and sighing as if he might start up with the weeping. The man was a fucken freak show. It was creepy.

He wound down the car window. Someone was spreading slurry out the Ardrum Road. Pearl Jam came on Downtown and he turned it up. You’re still alive, she said. Oh, and do I deserve to be?… There would be some crack had tonight. The Cotton Mountain Boys were booked so there’d be a big crowd in. There was a point in having two jobs, as he’d explained to Gerry at lunchtime. You didn’t get a motorbike given to you. You couldn’t win one or steal one or build one from fucken twigs. You had to just buy it, and by Christmas he’d have eighteen hundred quid in the Ulster Bank, which would be enough to get a Suzuki RGV250, probably from late ’88 or early ’89.