Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Pavel moved aside to allow Kate a better view. She peered over her husband’s shoulder into the vastness of space, a dazzling galaxy of stars and moons and dust. It was dizzying, the sheer scale of it: the unimaginable expanses of space and time, the vast, spinning universe. We are there, she thought. If only we could see ourselves, we are there, and so are the Dennehys, so is John in Japan. The poster had once hung in her son’s bedroom. It was wrinkled, torn at the edges, but intact. She looked at the planets, pictured them spinning and turning all those years beneath the stairs, their moons in quiet orbit. She was reminded of a music box from childhood that she had happened upon years later in her mother’s attic. She had undone the catch, lifted the lid, and, miraculously, the little ballerina had begun to turn, the netting of her skirt torn and yellowed, but her arms moving in time to the music nonetheless.

“This is our man,” Colman said, pointing to the top left-hand corner. “This is the fellow that did for the dinosaurs.” The boy was on tiptoe, gazing in wonder at the poster. He touched a finger to the thing Colman had indicated, a flaming ball of rock trailing dust and comets. “Did it only hit planet Earth?”

“Yes,” his grandfather said. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“So there could still be dinosaurs on other planets?”

“No,” Colman said, at exactly the same time Pavel said, “Very likely.”

The boy turned to Pavel. “Really?”

“I don’t see why not,” Pavel said. “There are millions of other galaxies and billions of other planets. I bet there are lots of other dinosaurs. Maybe lots of other people, too.”

“Like aliens?” the boy said.

“Yes, aliens, if you want to call them that,” Pavel said, “although they might be very like us.”

Colman lifted the books from the ends of the poster, and it rolled back into itself with a slap of dust. He handed it to Oisín, then returned the rest of the things to the box, closing down the cardboard flaps. “Okay, sonny,” he said. “Let’s put this back under the stairs,” and the boy followed him out of the kitchen, the poster tucked under his arm like a musket.

After dinner that evening, Kate refused all offers of help. She sent everyone to the sitting room to play cards while she cleared the table and took the dishes to the sink. Three red lights shone down from the mountain, the nighttime lights of the wind turbines, a warning to aircraft. She filled the sink with soapy water and watched the bubbles form psychedelic honeycombs, millions and millions of tiny domes, glittering on the dirty plates.

—

THAT NIGHT, THEIR FIRST to share a bed in almost a year, Colman undressed in front of her as if she wasn’t there. He matter-of-factly removed his shirt and trousers, folded them on a chair, and put on his pajamas. She found herself appraising his body as she might a stranger’s. Here, without the backdrop of forest and mountain, without the ax in his hand, she saw that he was old, saw the way the muscles of his legs had wasted, and the gray of his chest hair, but she was not repulsed by any of these things; she simply noted them. She got her nightdress from under her pillow and began to unbutton her blouse. On the third button, she found she could go no further and went out to the bathroom to undress there. Her figure had not entirely deserted her. Her breasts when she cupped them were shrunken, but she was slim, and her legs, which she’d always been proud of, were still shapely. Thus far, age had not delivered its estrangement of skin from bone; her thighs and stomach were firm, with none of the sagginess, the falling away, that sometimes happened. She had not suffered the collapse that befell other women, rendering them unrecognizable as the girls they had been in their youth; though perhaps that was yet to come, for she was still only fifty-two.

When she returned to the bedroom, Colman was reading a newspaper. She peeled back the duvet on her side and got into bed. He glanced in her direction but continued to read. It was quiet in the room, only the rattle of the newspaper, a dog barking somewhere on the mountain. She read a few pages of a novel but couldn’t concentrate.

“I thought I might take the boy fishing tomorrow,” he said.

She put down her book. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “He’s had a busy day today. I was thinking of driving to town, taking him to the cinema.”

“He can go to the cinema in London.”

“We’ll see tomorrow,” she said, and took up her book again.

Colman put away the newspaper and switched off the lamp on his side. He settled his head on the pillow, but immediately sat up again, plumping the pillow, turning it over, until he had it to his liking. She switched off the other lamp, lay there in the dark, careful where she placed her legs, her arms, readjusting to the space available to her. A door opened and closed, she heard footsteps on the landing, then another door, opening, closing. After a while she heard small, muffled noises, then a repetitive thudding, a headboard against a wall. The sound would be heard, too, in Emer’s old bedroom, where the boy was now alone. She thought of him waking in the night among those peculiar paintings, dozens of ravens with elongated necks, strange hybrid creatures, half bird, half human. She imagined specks of paint coming loose, falling in a black ash upon the boy as he slept. Colman was curled away from her, facing the wall. She looked at him as the thudding grew louder. He was utterly quiet, so quiet she could barely discern the sound of his breathing, and she knew immediately he was awake, for throughout their marriage he had always been a noisy sleeper.

—

AS SOON AS SHE reached the bottom of the stairs the next morning, she knew she was not the first up. It was as if someone else had cut through this air before her, had broken the invisible membrane that formed during the night. From the utility room, she heard the high, excited babble of the boy. He was in his pajamas, crouched beside the bucket of bleach, and beside him, in jeans and a shirt, his hair still wet from the shower, was Pavel. Oisín pointed excitedly to something in the bucket. In the pool of an eye socket, something was floating, something small and white and chubby.

Kate bent to take a look. Her arm brushed against Pavel’s shoulder, but he did not move away, or shift position, and they remained like that, barely touching, staring into the bucket. The white thing was a maggot, its ridged belly white and bloated. Oisín looked from Pavel to Kate. “Can I pick it up?” he said.

“No!” they both said in unison, and Kate laughed. She felt her face redden and she straightened up, took a step back from the bucket. Pavel stood up, too, ran a hand through his wet hair. The boy continued to watch the maggot, mesmerized. He was so close that his breath created ripples, his fringe flopping forward over his face almost trailing in the bleach. “Okay,” Kate said, “that’s enough,” and, taking him by the elbow, she lifted him gently to his feet.

“Can I take the skull out?” he said.

Pavel shrugged and glanced at Kate. He seemed downcast this morning, she thought, quieter in himself. She looked down at the skull, and at the debris that had floated free of it, and something about it, the emptiness, the lifelessness, appalled her, and suddenly she couldn’t bear the idea of the boy’s small hands touching it. “No,” she said. “It’s not ready yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

Emer didn’t appear for breakfast, and when finally she arrived downstairs, it was clear that there had been a row. She made a mug of coffee, and, draping one of her father’s coats around her shoulders, went outside to drink it. She sat on the metal bench at the edge of the garden, smoking and talking on her phone. Every so often, she’d jump to her feet and pace up and down past the kitchen window, the phone to her ear, talking loudly. When she came back in, she didn’t go into the kitchen, but called from the hall: “Get your coat, Oisín. We’re going in the car.”