Modern Gods

For his part Stephen noticed the sandals, the black nail varnish on the toes. It was none of his business. And he had nothing against her, no, nothing against her. Bit trendy, no doubt. And a bit smart in herself, definitely. And from all those stories Alison had told him, a bit of a loose cannon. But she was his fiancée’s sister, and would be treated well by him. He hadn’t expected the dog. And that rucksack had seen better days—as had she.

The light of Ulster traveled not by particle or wave but by indirection, hint, and rumor. A kind of light of no-light, emanating from a sun so swathed in clouds it was impossible to tell where it lurked in the sky.

As they drove, Liz stared dully out the window. This hour was the strangest. The car functioned like a decompression chamber, adjusting the body to the new density surrounding it, to the element of Ireland. The rain that came in off three thousand miles of ocean left the land so verdant, so lush, that the light reflecting back into the sky took on aspects of the greenness, a deep virescent tinge. It was not raining, but it had been, and the land they drove through was waterlogged. One low field outside Antrim had a pair of swans riding across it as if on rails, cutting metallic wakes. This filter of light made the scenery seem a kind of memory, already heavy with nostalgia. She thought of the peeled, bare light of New York, its blues and yellows, its arctic sharpness and human geometries. Here the day was softened, dampened, deepened. The light was timeless—in the sense that midmorning might be midafternoon. Ten a.m. in May could be five p.m. in late November.

“Great you were able to come back for the wedding.”

“Aren’t I the good sister?”

“Ah now you’re both good.”

Liz hadn’t meant it as a comparison but now that he’d taken it that way, she didn’t much like his response. It gave him too much of a role in their lives. Who did he think he was? Who did he think she was?

“Everyone’s good in their own way,” she replied. Which seemed petty, so she added solemnly, “Alison’s one of the best, really. She’s there with Mum and Dad at all times.”

“Your dad seems a bit better.”

“That’s good … How’re you getting on with all of them?”

“Good. No, good, I think.”

When Kenneth’s first stroke occurred four years ago, Liz had intended to fly back to Dublin to see him but had, in the end, skyped instead. There was not enough time before the heart surgery and she had no money, and was just starting her teaching load for the term, and no one could have expected her to drop everything. She sent him an e-card with a gif of a tree frog in a fez singing “I hope you’re feeling better, better, better” to a jazzy little break beat. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery, and she came home three months later for a long weekend. If he got his words wrong sometimes, if he moved with stiff languorous gestures, as if he were underwater, still he seemed all right, or mostly all right.

Her father’s health was common ground and a safe area, but neither Stephen nor Liz could be bothered to pursue it. Kenneth himself never mentioned it, and if Liz asked him on the phone how he was doing she received a brusque, offended “Fine,” as if she’d questioned his sanity or his professional credentials.

“You want a fag?”

Obviously the answer to this query from Stephen should be no, but Liz felt that she was feeling, realistically, about as shitty as possible. Why not double down?

Home was like climbing into a suit that was made of your own body, and it looked like you, and it smelled like you, and it moved its hand when you told it to, but it wasn’t you, not now.

She flicked the finished fag out the window and closed her eyes and sleep overtook her. She woke on the dual carriageway into Ballyglass when her head bumped against the glass. There was Charlie McCord’s old petrol station, abandoned, the pumps chained and padlocked.

“Sorry I was out that whole time.”

“No bother. Good for you.”

“Did I miss anything?”

“Your wee dog snores.”

“She does, yeah.”

As they turned down Westland Road a woman in a plum-colored ski jacket and an orange bobble hat was hanging washing out on a rotary line.

“She won’t be cold.”

“She will not.”

There was a pause and Stephen felt himself about to tell Liz something but stopped. He hadn’t thought of the house for a long time—it was that rotary line that did it. A neat enough wee bungalow on a few acres, pebbledashed, brown trim, with two concrete cockerels on the gate posts he could still see raising their necks about to crow—and a rotary line in the garden. When he was a lad of ten they’d left Londonderry to move there, just outside Limavady. He’d loved that house. Surrounded by animals: doltish sheep, cows, rabbits, sticklebacks in the wee stream and birds, always birds, in the trees trilling out their notes, flittering about. The rotary was in the garden by the side of the house, where it could be seen from the road, and his mother, with that indefatigable air she had, would hoist the plastic basket of washing outside and peg up the damp things for him and his siblings, the wee socks for their wee feet. But not his father’s shirts. His father’s shirts were dried in the bathroom, over the bath, though the question of why did not even occur to him until his mother picked him up one Monday evening from Scouts in Dungiven and asked him, with a queer edge in her voice, what had happened at school today.

“Nothing, nothing really.”

They were stopped by traffic lights at the courthouse, the huge stockade of barbed wire and guard posts and searchlights.

She said, “Do you tell people what Daddy does?”

“What do you mean?”

“What he does for a living?”

“He’s a policeman.”

“He’s a policeman, yes. But when people ask you, you should say he works for the council.”

“Is Daddy OK?”

“Some bad men attacked the police station today, honey. But your daddy’s OK.”

He wanted to ask if someone was not OK, if someone would never be OK again, but he found that he couldn’t, that he was too scared to hear any more, and he sat in silence, his forehead pressed on the cold glass. Overhead there were a million stars; the dark branches of the trees sifted and released them. If there was a god, why was his purpose not to stop this?

After a few minutes, as the road unfurled under the headlights, as they sped through the fields and hedges, his mother said, “You’re a good boy, Stephen.”

Maybe everything led back to this exchange. Some small initial tilt in direction will cause, over time, a great distance to arise between the intended destination and the actual one. Certainly for days afterwards, it seemed to Stephen like someone had taken a kind of universal remote to his life and turned up the brightness and contrast, making everything sharp-edged and garish and strange. But his father was OK, until a few years later he wasn’t. Thirteen when his father was killed, shot twenty-six times by two men hiding in a ditch. There are clean deaths and messy deaths and this was the latter. Closed coffin.

The milk lorry was attempting to reverse. The sun had come out and the truck’s huge silver container tank caught the light. Stephen flicked down the visor and his license fell out, hitting the gear stick and landing in Liz’s footwell.

“Oh sorry. Here, I’ll stick it back up here.”

Liz lifted the license. The black-and-white photo showed Stephen with a side parting and a blank, slightly idiotic expression.

“You’ve a bit more hair there.”

“Aye a lot more. Here.”

He reached over sharply and lifted it out of her hands, but not before she saw his name was printed on the pink plastic card as McLean, Andrew. He slipped it back into the sun visor and flipped it up.

“Andrew?” she said involuntarily.

“Oh that. It was my father’s name, but they always called me Stephen.”

“Oh.”

Here was the sign announcing YOU ARE LEAVING COUNTY LONDONDERRY—though since a republican had blacked out the LONDON, and a loyalist had come along and erased with blue paint the DERRY, and finally some misanthrope or reasonable man at the end of his tether had whitewashed the O and Y, and all of LEAVING except for the A—the sign now cheerfully explained that:

YOU ARE A C UNT

The unofficial but more typical greeting was the next sign, which had been there as long as Liz could remember, painted in foot-high letters in a mock Gothic font on the side of the gospel hall: