Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Gerard felt someone touch his arm. The girl was behind him, holding his jacket. She didn’t say a word, but Gerard held out his arms and allowed her to slip the jacket on, let her zip it up and smooth it down over his shoulders.

Afterward, as they turned the lorry in the yard, Gerard noticed Liddy standing alone on the porch. Gerard raised a hand and waved, but Liddy didn’t wave back. The girl was by the forklift, hands in her pockets. Gerard watched her in the rearview mirror as the lorry drove out of the yard, saw her turn and walk toward the house, saw the light go out on the porch.

Kavanagh didn’t speak until they reached the end of the muddy track and were back on the road. “I’m calling on Clancy tomorrow,” he said. “He owes me a few bob. I’ll sort you out then.”

“It’s all right,” Gerard said.

They drove in silence for a while, the only sound the relentless squeak of the wipers as the rain grew heavier. “Tell me,” Kavanagh said. “Did you ever see a silver fox?” Gerard shook his head. Kavanagh let out a low whistle. “Beautiful animals,” he said. “Beautiful. But why do you think their fur is that color? Aren’t they foxes, at the end of the day?”

Gerard shrugged and looked out the window. Kavanagh kept talking, his voice becoming more animated, his hands restless on the steering wheel. “They weren’t silver, exactly,” he said. “You’d be expecting silver but it was more…” He paused, and his eyes scanned the cab — his wife’s photograph, the pictures of the Asian women, the collection of knickknacks on the dash. When his surroundings failed him, he clicked his tongue in exasperation. “They were a sort of bluey black,” he said. “White bits on their tails and faces. Little balls of fur.” He went suddenly quiet, as if he had embarrassed himself.

Back on the main road, the lorry picked up speed as they headed south. A few miles on, Kavanagh spoke again. “What kind of life is it at all?” he said. “Weaned at six weeks and shipped off in a crate?”

It was cold in the cab, and Gerard pulled his jacket tighter around him. He put a hand to the inside pocket, felt for his wallet, and realized that it was gone. Shadowy trees and ditches blurred past. The wind blew dark, shapeless things across the path of the lorry, things that might have been alive or might have been dead: tiny night creatures and flurries of fallen leaves. They drove on through small, half-lit towns, through dark countryside whose only light was the flicker of wide-screen televisions in bungalow windows. Kavanagh began to hum. It was the chorus of a country and western song, full of love and violence, and he kept it up until they reached Bantry and took the dark coast road for Castletownbere.

The train stopped at a station east of Rome, a small, bucolic station with tomatoes stacked high in wooden crates. The doors opened and an odd rancid smell rushed the carriage, hot and sweaty and carnal, like meat on the point of turning. The young Austrian woman sitting across from Lily noticed it, too. She looked up from her notebook and frowned, the same quizzical, slightly nervous frown she’d presented to the ticket checker earlier, even though she had a ticket, had it ready for inspection since the train pulled out of Termini.

“Oleanders,” Lily said. She’d seen them growing along the edge of the railway line as the train wheezed into the station, a profusion of white-flowering bushes depositing petals onto the tracks. The Austrian woman smiled and looked relieved, as if the smell had sent her mind down a siding filled with other things, things darker and unflowery.

Her name was Etta, and she was traveling to Gariano, where she would spend two weeks. She’d laughed, but not in an unkind way, at something Lily said about Sacher torte, and when Lily had mentioned that she’d nothing to read, Etta had given her a book — a French novel in translation — and told her to keep it. She was in her midtwenties, a doctoral student in geothermal energy, something she’d spoken about fervently before they’d moved to the more manageable topic of Italian rail timetables. She closed her notebook now and put it in one of the myriad zipped pockets of her holdall. At every stop along the route, at every tiny backwater, she’d taken out the notebook and copied down the name of the station in tiny, neat handwriting, as if they were pebbles she might need to find her way back.

They’d fallen into conversation shortly after Peroli, the second to last stop before Rocosalto, where they were both getting out. Etta had blond hair in a ponytail and blond brows and the lightest fuzz of blond hair on her upper lip. Lily watched her take a tiny mirror from the holdall and dab at the sweat beading her hairline. Her blouse had slid off one shoulder, exposing a delicate clavicle no thicker than a chicken bone and perilously close to the surface. In the waiting room at Rocosalto, she settled herself one bench down from Lily and took out the notebook. It was unclear whether or not she desired company. Their conversation on the train, though fleeting, had been pleasant, very pleasant, but now Lily wondered if perhaps its pleasantness might have been rooted in the very fact that it was fleeting, if perhaps she should leave well enough alone.

It was just the two of them in the waiting room, apart from a woman with a child of about three or four. The child slid from his mother’s lap and, going over to the vending machine, delivered a kick to the glass front. The man behind the cashier’s desk stood up — to scold the child, Lily presumed, but instead he switched the sign on the hatch from APERTO to CHIUSO and pulled shut the grille. A moment later, he came out a door in the corner of the room and, giving the barest of nods, left. The child lay on the floor and inspected the cord that ran from the machine to the wall, tugging at it, poking his fingers into the weave of exposed wires. Children were like that, Lily thought; children added to the dangers of an already dangerous world, and how was it that so few people besides her seemed to realize this? The child’s mother jumped up and slapped him hard across his legs before dragging him back to their seat, where he climbed again onto her lap and began to cry softly.

Etta got up and came over. “Do you think he’s coming back?” she said, inclining her head toward the cashier’s window.

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Do you need to buy a ticket?”

“I don’t think so, but they should have somebody here, shouldn’t they? And I’d like to get a map.” She was frowning again, biting on her lower lip. Lily wondered if she should invite her to sit. The sweet, uncomplicated pleasure of their encounter on the train was now a hair’s breadth from descending into awkwardness. If someone didn’t arrive for one or other of them soon, it would be spoiled entirely. Things were very easily spoiled.

“Here,” Lily said, taking out a map she’d picked up at the airport. “Have this.”

Etta shook her head. “Thank you,” she said, “but I have that one already. I wanted to get a different one. Perhaps he will be back.” She hesitated then, and her gaze seemed to shift from Lily’s face, moving higher and a little to one side. Another frown. “Keep still,” she said, and she reached out, rummaged with her fingers in Lily’s hair. When she withdrew her hand, she was holding a petal between thumb and forefinger, one of the gauzy oleander petals that were blowing like confetti up and down the platform and in through the door of the waiting room.

“Thank you,” Lily said.

“You have very beautiful hair,” Etta said. “I thought to tell you that on the train, but I didn’t. Such a beautiful color, like nutmeg.” And then she scuttled back to her own bench.