Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Pauline, his brother’s girlfriend, had been in bed when they left the house that morning. Now she was at the stove, frying an egg in a blackened pan. She was heavily pregnant, one hand resting on the small of her back, the other shaking the pan, sliding the egg back and forth. “Come in quick,” she said, “and close that door. It’s wild cold today.” She tipped the egg onto a plate, where it quivered in a pool of grease, and then she filled the kettle at the sink.

She was good-looking in a raw, violent sort of way: black hair loose about her shoulders; thick, unplucked brows. She wore a checked shirt and tracksuit bottoms and, although it was late October, a pair of flip-flops. Her toenails were crudely cut, the skin of her heels hard and yellow. She reminded Sarah of the girls from the estates in Castlebar when she went to visit her cousins in the summer: girls in the backyards of pubs after closing time, resting half-finished pints on empty kegs; girls propped against alley walls, taking boys like bullets.

There was a table in the center of the kitchen covered with a square of blue-checked oilcloth that barely reached the edges. A potted plant, dense and woody, with dark-green variegated leaves sat on a lace doily. Pauline lowered herself into a chair and began to eat her egg. Her shirt was too small, and when she reached for the salt it rose to reveal a dark line, like a dorsal stripe, running from her belly button into the waistband of her tracksuit. “Your brother’s away to Killybegs with the van,” she said. “He’ll be back later.” She patted her stomach. “I hope the wee babby doesn’t take a notion to come early.” As she spoke, her stomach shifted of its own accord, broke into a furious bulging and rippling.

Sarah sat beside her and slipped off her wet boots. Jonathan was making tea, taking mugs from the draining board, a box of Sainsbury’s tea bags from a shelf in the corner. Whatever the bungalow’s architectural failings, he was at ease inside it, opening cabinet doors, rooting about to find sugar and biscuits. “The baby won’t come early,” he said. “And anyway, if it does, I’m here.”

When Pauline laughed, her front teeth were white but slightly crooked, one edging in front of the other, the way Sarah’s had done before she got braces. “Towels and hot water, is it, Johnny? No offense, but I’d have it in the field first.”

“I meant,” he said, joining them at the table, “that we’d drive you to the hospital.”

He went to pour Pauline’s tea, but she waved him away. “Wild bad heartburn from the tea,” she said.

A window looked out on the narrow lane to the side of the bungalow, while another overlooked the rough ground toward the back. Though it was barely noon, the sky had darkened and a bank of cloud was forming above the estuary. A clothesline ran from a hook on the boat shed wall to a pole in the field, and the wind tore at a pair of blue overalls, whipping them into a frenzy, arms and legs flailing. Sarah unbuttoned her coat and hung it on the back of her chair, and, as she did, the scarf around her neck slipped to the floor.

Pauline noticed it first. She picked it up but instead of returning it, held on to it, rubbing the fabric back and forth between her fingers, stroking it. “Burberry?” she said, inspecting the label, and she raised her dark eyebrows.

Sarah felt herself blush. “Jonathan gave it to me,” she said, “for my birthday.”

“Jonathan?” Pauline said, looking at him across the table, and she laughed. “Well, Jonathan, your taste has improved. They must have taught you something down in Dublin.” She slapped him playfully in the face with the scarf and laughed again, more softly this time. “Very nice, Jonathan,” she said, repeating the name as if it were a joke. “Nice, but wild, dear,” and she put the scarf down on the table.

Sarah drank her tea and listened to Jonathan and Pauline talk about people she didn’t know, people with strange, improbable names such as Jimmy High Boy, Larry the Wren, Frank the Post. She heard Jonathan’s accent shift little by little to match Pauline’s, until it became something different, something foreign. And, as she listened, it seemed to her that the border they had crossed and uncrossed the night before, the black line cutting through villages and sitting rooms, was little more than artifice, a nod to some semblance of containment. It was a belt slung loosely, land and sea spilling over it like paunch, because here, here, too, it was a different country.

A white HiAce van drove up the lane, trailing exhaust fumes, and turned in at the bungalow. It parked next to the blue Fiat, and a man, tall and thin, got out. They had not met the night before, but she knew it was Jonathan’s brother as soon as he walked by the window. He had the same high cheekbones, though his were veined and ruddy, and he walked with the same long stride. He paused on the doorstep to take off his boots. “All right, Johnny?” he said, and he winked. “State visit, is it?” He was in his early thirties, hair so tightly shaved it was barely a shadow on his skull, fair eyebrows disappearing into his face. He crossed the kitchen in his socks and slapped Jonathan on the back. He held out a hand to Sarah. “I’m Aidan,” he said.

Under his arm was a parcel wrapped in plastic and secured with blue twine. He placed it on the table and began to untie it, his hands red and scarred, one finger ending in a round, pink stub just above the knuckle. When he peeled back the plastic, a pile of fish spilled out. He picked one up, a black, monstrous thing over a foot and a half long, cartoonish in its ugliness: a wide mouth studded with teeth; white, wiry filaments protruding from its forehead. Pauline reached for it, sliding her fingers through the red flap of its gill. “There’s a beauty,” she said, and she nodded at Sarah. “I bet you haven’t seen one of these in Dublin.”

“She hasn’t seen one here, either,” Aidan said, and they all laughed, everyone except Sarah.

“Och, what harm a few fish?” Pauline said. “Pure sinful to throw them back and half the world starving.”

Aidan parceled up the fish again, tossing them one on top of another in a black, slippery mound, and put them in the fridge. He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one first to Sarah. When she refused, he lit one for Pauline and another for himself.

Pauline settled back in her chair, her hands resting on the dome of her belly, smoke from the cigarette curling toward the ceiling. “Your uncle Seamus rang this morning. He says he’ll leave the wee outboard tied up at the pier in Moville.”

“Aye,” Aidan said, taking a pull of his cigarette. “That’ll do rightly.” He didn’t join the others at the table, but remained standing, leaning against the kitchen wall.

Pauline blew smoke out the corner of her mouth. “You’re not taking a wee boat like that out tonight, surely?”

“I’m not going far, just off the shore in Shroove.”

“Is Seamus going with you?”

“I’m going on my own.”

Pauline tapped ash into her empty plate. “What sort of a job is it, anyway?”

Aidan put a hand to the back of his neck, kneaded the skin as if soothing a sore muscle. “Trouble with the nets,” he said.

Pauline stared at him. She said nothing for a moment, and then she looked away. She reached past Sarah and picked up a copy of the Derry Journal that lay at the end of the table. “That’s not a job for this kind of weather,” she said, opening the newspaper.

“It’s not a job for any kind of weather. It might as well be tonight.”

Pauline shook her head. “Only a fool would be out by himself in a wee boat tonight.” There was silence in the kitchen apart from the crackle of the newspaper as she turned the pages.