Modern Gods

Having taken a few months to write and rewrite, and a few weeks to shoot, and one tortuous day to add voice-over to, when it was finally broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening the Times heralded the hour-long show, The Use of Myth, as “fairly informative,” the Guardian trumpeted it as “standard BBC Four fare,” and the Telegraph lauded Liz’s presenting as “adequate, if a little stiff.” Judith had half of Ballyglass watching and was in tears on the message she left on Liz’s answerphone, telling her how proud she was. She’d even coaxed Kenneth into leaving a bluff “Well done.”

She had been writing the follow-up—attempting to do the same with Margaret Mead—for the last seven years. The book seemed to expand in every direction as she got more and more and also less and less interested in her, reading volume after volume of published work, then diaries and letters, and taking notes and underlining and stockpiling the timeline with anecdote and incident. The work had grown monstrous. She’d stopped actually putting words on the virtual page when the word count had hit 321,123, though her reasons for halting there were random and inscrutable to herself and seemed to be based solely on the palindromic, magical nature of the figure. That had happened several months ago, as she sat marking essays in the Moonlight Diner on Tenth Avenue. Now just seeing the file on her desktop gave her a singular feeling of dull terror. She was currently managing to look at the manuscript for a few minutes every couple of days before getting bored, or panicking, or getting bored of panicking. She’d follow the thread of her inattention through a maze of hyperlinks, and two hours later would know slightly more about, say, Hawking or fracking or twerking.

Alison’s voice came up from below. She was describing something as just completely pointless to her parents. Liz went down and met her younger sister at the bottom of the stairs, where they hugged and then pulled back and thought to themselves how old the other one appeared.

“You look great!” Liz said.

“I do not,” Alison countered with a wince. “I’ve been dieting for the wedding, but sure I’ve only lost seven pounds—”

“That’s not bad.”

“That short haircut really suits you—” Alison said.

“Och, it’s an old woman’s cut.”

“And you’ve lost weight.”

“Not on purpose.”

“Don’t sicken me.”

“How was your dress fitting? All ready to go?”

“Sandra’d put the zip on upside down. Can you believe it? It’s sorted now. I’m not paying her to fix it.”

Liz followed her into the kitchen.

“Is this new?”

Liz ran her finger along the top of the dining table. Alison nodded and whispered to her, “It wouldn’t be to my taste, but I can see why it’s nice.”

Kenneth’s voice arose from the armchair. “No one’s asking you to sit at it.”

Alison made a face at her sister. “Nothing’s changed.” She raised her voice: “I’m just saying it’s very dark, for my taste. For a kitchen.”

“Is it mahogany?” Liz asked.

“Yes, and extendable,” Kenneth’s voice announced.

Home was where you could spend an hour discussing any fixture or fitting or real estate question. Judith tended to praise, Alison to criticize, Kenneth to lament—the mysteries of planning permission or building regulations, the fad for Artex, the difficulty of removing stone cladding. Bay windows, rockeries, conservatories, the exotica of PVC apexes and dado rails and pelmets and the correct way to edge a lawn or instruct a repossession. They talked about crawlspaces and conversions. A rumor of subsidence or dry rot came among them with the same frisson that another family might have felt upon encountering reports of embezzlement or incest. Any house or flat or shop that entered the Mid-Ulster market fell squarely in their purview and their remit. They knew who’d built it, who’d lived in it, why it was to be sold, what they were asking, what they were hoping, what they would accept.

They talked like this because they talked in code of what they loved—not this particular extendable dining room table in mahogany but Ballyglass, continuity, sitting in judgment on one’s neighbors, and being granted membership of a family by way of all hating the same thing.

“How are the kids?”

“Mickey’s in the car. Come out with me now and we’ll wake him. Stephen said you slept the whole way.”

“I didn’t mean to … I was just—I hadn’t slept all night.”

“But did you like him?”

“I really did. We had a good chat, I mean, when I wasn’t dozing.”

“He doesn’t drink, you know, not really.”

Liz smiled sadly at this preemptive defense. The next thing she said as kindly as possible, though it didn’t stop the collapse of her sister’s face.

“Have you heard from Bill?”

“Nothing. I send photos to his mother but sure she hardly replies. I have to pinch myself to remember: These are his children! Imagine doing that.”

Atlantic padded dolefully into the kitchen doorway and stood there like she brought bad news from the front. Liz felt grateful; it saved them both from the painful act of conceiving Bill’s interior life.

She’d met her first husband, Bill, when the office was broken into and her parents were in Connemara for the weekend. Sergeant Bill Williams. It was a Protestant joke, that name: William, son of William, inheritor of sash and stick and puritanical despair. He was not handsome, but he had a nice clean freckled face and innocent blue eyes. Nor was he funny exactly, but he tried hard to be funny, and she liked that. She was twenty-six years old and absolutely ready to fall hopelessly in love. When he took her to Paris for the weekend, they stayed in a little hotel called Select near the Sorbonne, the bellboy departed, untipped, and they’d fallen on each other with an animal hunger surprising to her. But it seemed to have used up all the desire in one go. That night they’d gone out and Bill drank two bottles of the restaurant’s house white, almost by himself, and fell asleep immediately, not touching her. And that was her first clue. Didn’t stop her marrying him, but also meant she wasn’t entirely surprised by what followed. He was never physically abusive, but when he drank he said the most awful things, and it took it out of you, being told you were a whore, a fat slut, a moron, a useless fucking bitch. She started to apologize all the time, for nothing, and to everyone. If she dared mention his drinking he had a list of responses ready, usually referring to his “stress.” And did he tell her to stop stuffing chocolate down her throat? She met her future in his mother, Edna, who ran the grocery shop in Comber while Norman, Bill’s father, drank the takings. Edna had learned to refuse the world’s overtures, its silly promises, had the hardened air of the continually disappointed.

Soon enough it was a nightly thing. Collapsed by ten p.m. in the armchair. Even so, initially she managed to hide his drinking from her family pretty well. Then the first Christmas came, and with it the family lunch at Judith and Ken’s. They’d all sat down when Alison remembered the gravy. As she hoisted herself up to get it—she was six months pregnant with Isabel—and edged past Bill, he stuck a Christmas cracker out at her.

“I’ll do that when I’m back.”

“Just pull it,” Bill sighed.

She could see the danger of the moment, and part of her wanted it all to go wrong. She wanted him exposed to her family. She wanted them to know the truth of it. He continued to push the cracker at the curve of her stomach and she ignored it.

“Ah, just pull it now, pull the cracker, you fat cunt,” Bill muttered, and grabbed her arm.

Across the linen tablecloth and pale candles and silver reindeer napkin rings, Judith lowered her head into her hands. Spencer jumped up. All of him shivering with tension under his shirt. Part of Alison detached from the scene; that part was very interested in how all this would play out.

Bill worked out a laugh as Kenneth slowly got to his feet and said, “Perhaps you should go upstairs, to Ali’s old room, and take a nap.”

The note in her father’s voice meant business. Spencer’s eyes shone with a defeated fury. Bill stared drunkenly ahead of him into the bowl of homemade cranberry sauce and then lazily turned to Kenneth, grinned wolfishly, and asked, “Why don’t you go and have a lie down, oul fella, before I put ye on yer fucking back?”

Spencer was on him. Two chairs were knocked over. Although Bill had a few inches’ advantage, Spencer got him in a full nelson headlock and dragged him out onto the porch. It ended with Spencer banging Bill’s head against the doorframe.

Bill joined the AA group that met in the community center off the Dungarvan Road. She did what she could. She poured bottles down the sink. She told him she loved him and wanted to help him. He avoided the old crowd from the station and didn’t go to the pub after work. They began attending her parents’ Presbyterian church out at Killyclogher. She could feel him trying, really trying, the constant effort coming off him like a buzzing. He was stretched and tense as a balloon, always on the cusp of losing it. It was necessary to devise stratagems. Each night she made dessert, she ran him a bath, she checked the listings to try to ensure there was some sport or a documentary or an action flick for him to watch. She bought a thousand-piece jigsaw of The Last Supper in Toymaster and started it on the dining room table, called it their project. They spent a single evening with their heads engrossed in it, so close they were almost touching, and she thought, as she sometimes thought, that this could work. The next night he wouldn’t look at it. Called it boring and stupid, and asked what the fuck was the point of a jigsaw. You put it together and then you pulled it apart. Like a marriage, she thought. She spent two weeks sitting at the table for an hour or two here and there, and hadn’t even half of it filled in. There was the entire sky still to do. She looked in the blank, unhelpful face of Jesus (out of the whole picture, he was the only one looking at the viewer) and swept the whole lot into a bin bag.

It amazed her now how long it took her. It was a Friday night and she was washing up after dinner, watching the sun sinking between the town’s twin spires—Catholic and Protestant—and she thought, This isn’t going to get any better. She’d taken a pregnancy test at school that afternoon—according to her diary her period was three weeks late—and the little cross of St. Andrew surfaced in the stick’s window, a blue crucifixion. Felt nothing. Not happy, not sad. Nothing. She taught the rest of the day in a daze of nothingness, smiling at the children, but absent inside. Now she looked at her own daughter—soft-limbed, big-eyed, spellbound in her high chair in front of the telly, but no longer a baby, surely only a few months away from the consciousness of what it meant when your daddy passed out in an armchair. She peeled off the rubber gloves, lifted the child to halfhearted protestations, went upstairs, started packing.

Four months after she moved back home, Kenneth had another, minor, stroke, and Alison took early maternity leave and entered—little by little, toe by toe—the family business. Showing a home here, making a phone call there. Spencer had been working in Donnelly’s Estate Agents for years, but if he objected to her coming in, he never said anything directly, and Alison discovered she was good at it, at selling homes. She’d grown up with the lexicon of estate agency as her first language. Convenience. Location. Good bones. Character piece. Low maintenance. High yield. In recent years the property TV shows had added to her stock of ready-made phrases—wow factor, curb appeal, forever home, ticking the boxes—but it always felt a little ridiculous using them. She did, though. Her direct, judgmental manner worked on people; they wanted to agree with her, and if Alison made sure prospective buyers noted certain things, they were less likely to focus on certain other things, like the smell of the downstairs bathroom or the rising damp in the garage. She swept into a room and took control, opened blinds and cupboards, pointed out the overwhelming economic benefits of an electric shower or a multi-fuel stove or the lagging on a boiler. One wet cold morning in September—as she told the recently widowed Lily Burns to think of herself sitting out here on the patio, in the suntrap made by the fence and the back wall of the kitchen, reading a book and having a glass of wine or a cup of tea—it occurred to her that if she had a gift for presenting things not as they are, but as they really should be, well, that was only to be expected of someone who’d lived with an alcoholic for as long as she had.

CHAPTER 8

Liz was sleeping off her jet lag. Kenneth had gone to Ray Mullens’s funeral and Judith and Alison stood alone in the kitchen. Alison turned the carousel display of coffee capsules for the new machine, while Judith winced at her daughter’s neck: “He must be a very heavy sleeper.”

“Oh, he woke up almost immediately. Do you want cold water in this?”

“Just a splash. Is it just the neck?”

“He kneed my thigh and there’s a bruise but it’s nothing. Did you see the doctor yet about your bloods?”

“Next Wednesday.”

“How’s the tummy been? There’s more milk powder in a tub in the bag, but he shouldn’t need it.”

“Not bad at all. I’ll give him a biscuit later.”

Judith took the bottle out of Alison’s hand, and bent down to put her face in Michael’s. He sat still strapped in his car seat on the living room floor, asleep.

“Oh, I know what my little boy needs, don’t I?”

As Alison stood up, Judith touched her arm.

“It’s not like Bill again, is it? He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

“Stephen wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

Alison waited for her mother to say, “It’s not flies I’m worried about,” accompanied by a steady imploring gaze that Alison would avoid meeting. But nothing happened, her mother moved away, and to cement her victory, Alison cheerfully lifted a millionaire’s shortcake and took a bite from it. She knew Judith thought her younger daughter had a history of making bad choices. But Judith herself hadn’t made many better ones. She’d married the first man who came along, and if they were still together that was part indolence and part convention. Whereas Alison had faced up and taken hard decisions and was in many ways a braver woman than her mother. No one could deny that. She’d risked things for love! She’d suffered! All of this she intimated by the brusque way she buttoned up the second and third buttons of her lemon-colored wool coat. Her mother walked past her, opened the fridge door, and rearranged various Tupperware containers.

“If you see your brother remind him he said he was coming for his dinner.”

“I wasn’t going to call into the office. I was just going to pick Isobel up.”

“Well, no rush. We’re going to be very happy here. Aren’t we?”

“Well, maybe I’ll call in at the church and check on the flowers. Just text me if you need anything, or if Mickey’s playing up.”

How Alison could christen her grandson with a lovely strong name like Michael—the name of an archangel no less—and then call him Mickey as if he were a gangster or a cartoon mouse was just beyond her. At times it seemed to Judith that her daughter held her in permanent contempt, and little decisions like these were designed purely to rile her. She knew it was irrational and unfair, but she felt it.

Kenneth came in from the funeral, plucked the tweed trilby from his head, and unwound the scarf delicately. It hurt today to lift his arms too high. Shrugging off his coat was taking some time, and Judith slipped behind him and began guiding one arm out of its sleeve. He pulled away.

“I can do it myself.”

“Just trying to—”

“But it’s not helpful. You’re getting in the way. I need to be able—”

“Calm down.”

Judith stepped back and lifted the wheaten loaf out of the bread bin. For over forty years of marriage, telling her husband to calm down was the closest Judith came to a daily mantra. Depending on the way the phrase was accented, the two words could mean almost anything—endearment, warning, threat. This “calm down” meant nothing in itself, but was designed to cut Kenneth off in his monologue; if it was allowed to continue, the trickle would turn to a torrent and carry him away into the kind of black despair it could take hours to dissipate. He had a remarkable gift for misery. The next step was to change the subject quickly, which Judith duly did.

“Big funeral? Do you want tea? A slice of wheaten?”

“I’ll have tea, yes. No bread. Not that many. A hundred maybe.”

She was surprised by how long it had taken to get used to watching this big bear of a man adapt himself to simple situations. To see him do such simple things with such tremulous care and physical trepidation. His eyes expressing fear, his fingers fiddling with a zipper. It was like the element he lived in had changed, had once been air and now was water, and the entire choreography of daily life had to be relearned. It was necessary to familiarize yourself with the actions of brushing your teeth, to study the order of the movements of getting into a car. It had been four years since the first stroke and heart surgery, but everything was still heavier, denser. For Kenneth, everything was a potential source of hurt.

Now he looked at her abdomen, at the hurt hiding in there, and asked, “You tell the kids?”

“I’ll tell them after the wedding. Sure, I’m not going to spoil everyone’s day.”

“Did you speak to Dr. Boyers?”

“I left a message.”

“You OK?”

“I’m all right.”

Kenneth watched her set the kettle on its base, the spout facing inward. When she went to the cupboard for cups, he adjusted it so it faced outwards, to let the steam vent away from the underside of the cupboards. She noticed and he watched her jaw perceptibly tighten with anger. It was not about cupboards and steam; it was about authority and submission, or men and women, or simply the ways of Kenneth and the ways of Judith. And so marriage goes, thought Judith. Everything becomes a sign and symbol of something else.

By four o’clock, Liz was awake and Alison had returned, though there was still no sign of Spencer.

In the living room Kenneth’s eyes were trained on yet another antiquing show on the TV, but in deference to the gathering of his daughters on the sofa, he voluntarily muted it.

“Mickey is a wee dote. God, those eyes.”

On cue, Michael appeared from the hallway, carrying a plastic dustpan in one hand and Kenneth’s tartan slipper in the other. Judith trailed behind, staring amorously at his blond curls.

“Cute, isn’t he? When he’s not screaming the house down.”

“Shooooooooos!” Michael tunefully declaimed, and handed his mother the slipper.

“The thing with Stephen is,” Alison said, “he’s very family orientated.”

“Is he from a big family?”

“It’s terrible actually. There was a brother in England but he’s dead now. Cancer. And his parents died years ago. He’s on his own. But he loves family, he’s so good with the kids.”

Liz played along, though she did not see why her sister was so set on selling her life to her, as if without the approval of others she could hardly bear to live it. Then it occurred to her that it was perhaps a mark of how unsure Alison was about the marriage if she was seeking even Liz’s affirmation.

In Liz’s eyes, her younger sister had always been much closer to Judith and Kenneth than she was, and if their parents didn’t always applaud Alison’s choices, there was no doubt she was the daughter they understood. After all, she stayed behind while Liz had upped and left. She shared their setting—the restaurants, doctors, local news, TV shows, all the cast and daily apparatus of their life—and Alison had the Donnelly gift of reducing something complex to a clichéd phrase, and saying it over and over, singing it almost. She had the same strange numerous compartments of expectation and orthodoxy, growing predictably outraged—like Kenneth—because a Christmas card was not returned, or a neighbor’s lawn was left to get too long, or the tip was automatically added to a bill.

If, occasionally, Judith liked to complain on the phone to Liz about Alison, it was with the understanding that Liz would not offer her own criticisms of her sister but simply listen and agree. Whatever competition there had been for their parents’ affection, Liz was certain that she’d withdrawn, honorably, from it, having accepted defeat. During the years when their parents had argued continually—when Spencer was a toddler—Judith had moved out for a night, to the flat above the estate agency, and so little did she trust Liz not to fight with Kenneth, and to look after Spencer, who was hysterical and wouldn’t leave his father, that she took Liz with her, entrusting Alison with her little brother’s care. Alison was the steady one, the responsible daughter.

Her father lifted a cork-lined, laminated coaster from the stack on the little table by his chair and lobbed it at Liz for the coffee she had in her hand. It landed on the sofa and she ignored it.

“Oh, dear,” Judith said, straightening up from looking in the cupboard under the sink, holding a can of Brasso and a cloth. “It’s so sad when a family just disappears.”

Everyone murmured in agreement. It was indeed awful when a family disappeared, though it did make your own look much more solid.

After Liz had helped her mother tidy the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels, and organize the glasses in the utility room, and clear various surfaces for the caterer to set her wares on, they found they had everything done, suddenly, at least until the caterers and marquee people started turning up the next day, and Judith announced she was “going to have a wee nap.”

“Does she often go and lie down during the day?”

Liz had never, as far as she could remember, known her mother to go to bed during the day. She’d rarely seen her sit down. Sometimes, in the late evening—after the dinner was served and the dishwasher loaded and the pots and pans washed and dried, and every surface cleared and wiped down, and the laundry done, and the piles of ironing completed—she might perch for a half hour before bed on the arm of a chair, watching TV distractedly, offering everyone tea or traybakes, always threatening to jump up again. Occasionally she’d sit properly, draw her legs up under herself, and read a paper from the rack by Kenneth’s chair—the Belfast Telegraph or the Mid-Ulster Mail—scanning it for people she knew. Sometimes she’d be working on a fat novel that one of the girls—her group of sixty-something female friends—had recommended, and would read steadily while Kenneth flicked the channels between football and golf and the news. But mostly she was vertical, industrious, quick.

“I think she’s tired,” Kenneth replied, not looking up from the quiz show.

“Has she been getting tired a lot?” Liz pushed on.

“None of us are getting younger. You want up here? You want up?”

Kenneth had been feeding Atlantic scraps from his ham sandwich, and Atlantic had found—what all dogs want—a brand-new god to worship. She stood now on her back legs, resting her front paws on the side of Kenneth’s armchair, her long foxy head propped on the little fanned paws. Animals sometimes seemed the only remaining recipients of Kenneth’s affection. Five or six years ago, home for Christmas, she’d been sitting reading in the conservatory and looked up to see him through the glass door, alone, wiping away a tear. Kenneth was sobbing, actually sobbing, as an Australian vet in Animal Hospital put down a black Labrador, whose big dumb beautiful eyes looked up at the vet and then were stilled. Her father, she realized suddenly—and wondered why she hadn’t put it in these terms before—was seriously depressed. In the intervening years, the evidence accumulated for this point of view. Several times she had tried to broach the topic with him, but he would not have it. She watched Atlantic lick his paw as her father looked at the dog with more pure affection than she could ever remember him showing his children.