Nick Laird - Modern Gods

“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.

“Where’d you say you got this beast then?”

He was rubbing Atty’s head.

“On a subway platform. She’d been abandoned.”

“Manky-looking thing.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“You get it injections?”

“All of them.”

“What about fleas?”

“She doesn’t have them.”

Despite himself, her father was grinning at the dog.

Liz knew Kenneth’s objections were only in principle. He had a sentimentalist’s adoration for all large-eyed mammals, excepting humans. Animals didn’t try to negotiate a lower percentage on commission, or let a leak in a boiler cause a ceiling to collapse, or fall behind on their rent. You knew where you stood with a dog, and where you stood was on a pedestal. Kenneth let Atlantic jump up onto his lap.

“How’s the teaching?”

“Fine, fine, I had a promising class this year really. One or two who’ll—”

“I see your man Dan Andrews is doing very well.”

Dan Andrews was a TV historian. He’d been in the year above Liz at Edinburgh, where his most famous action had been to fellate a future cabinet minister in the corridor of one of the residency halls.

“Oh yes?”

“He does a very good one on Tuesday nights. About the Tudors. It must be his fifth or sixth TV show.”

“Must be. Which reminds me.”

Her father un-muted the telly.

“I meant to tell you I’m off on Sunday to Papua New Guinea to make a TV show.”

Before anyone could reply, Liz left the room, like a boxer landing a knockout punch and striding from the ring.

The Donnelly home had broadband, technically, though in practice it was unbearably slow. Over the years Liz and Alison and Spencer had each spent several hours on the phone to British Telecom complaining, rebooting, inserting various adaptors and splitters, but it was still not feasible to download photographs. At least, not feasible in human time. In geological time, maybe, or if you experienced the world as an oak tree did. Still, Liz was making a determined effort. As she waited for the system to boot up, she propelled herself slowly in a circle in the office chair with her right foot, taking in the study.

Alison in graduation gear from Stranmillis—her head tipped slightly forward in embarrassment, though there was pride in her glance. Her blond hair had been permed to an awkward frizz, and she wore a touch too much blue eye shadow. One of Liz in the same getup, staring defiantly at the camera—her short brown hair hardly coming out from under the mortarboard. In lieu of a graduation photo for Spencer, there was one of him on the eighteenth hole of Killyreagh golf course handing over, on behalf of the estate agency, an outsized check to Cancer Research.

If you met the sisters you’d have no reason to think that Alison and Liz shared the same parents. One so fair and blue eyed and one so dark with eyes so brown that in certain lights they were almost black. But then Spencer arrived and made sense of the gene pool; he grew up with Liz’s dark complexion and Alison’s blue eyes, and both his sisters doted on him. Had it made him a little infantile? A little protected? Even in photographs you could see he had always been loved—his broad physique, his ready smile. He was at home in the world, convinced of his place in it.

Kenneth had three desks in the study, none of them for studying. They were mostly covered with prizes for various charitable lotteries and raffles he was running for Rotary, the golf club, and the Save the Children Coffee Morning. The computer screen began filling up with e-mails. There was nothing from Joel. And a great deal of bumpf. She opened the e-mail from Margo—LIZ: URGENT DISASTER—and began the tortuous process of downloading the PDFs.

On the wall beside the photographs of the three Donnelly siblings was a framed map of the world. Liz located the huge island of PNG, and next to it New Britain, an archipelagic scatter, a broken grin in the gridded blue, small and very far away from Old Britain, and from New York. She stood up and looked closer. Here was New Ireland, and here, below it, was the little curved splinter of New Ulster.

She found herself thinking of that moment when one steps from the lip of an aircraft onto the top of the steps, and the tropical heat hits you, remaking you. She wanted that, to be remade.

Half an hour later, Liz sank down onto the sofa and began ostentatiously leafing through her stack of printouts.

“So. A TV show,” Kenneth said, not lowering his paper, and using the abstracted, bored, and slightly hostile tone he reserved for his nearest and dearest.

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