Nick Laird - Modern Gods

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.