Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

The juicer sputtered to a stop. “I’m out of oranges,” Fiona said.

“I’ll get some,” he said, sensing an opportunity, because there was a liquor store in the village.

“Aoife will get them. She can go on her bike. It won’t take her a minute.” Fiona banged on the kitchen window. Aoife was sitting on a swing in the back garden, talking on her phone. She looked up and pulled a face at her mother, but didn’t budge. Her mother banged on the glass again. Aoife slid slowly, insolently, off the swing and began to walk toward the house.

“How old is she now?” he said. “Sixteen?”

“Eighteen next month. Which means we’ll have to do this whole bloody thing all over again.”

“Well, I won’t come,” he said. “So you needn’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” she said. “You’re not invited.”

Aoife arrived in from the garden, slamming the back door behind her. She snatched the ten-euro note her mother handed her. “Oranges,” Fiona said. “Two nets, and make sure they’re properly ripe.” Aoife rolled her eyes and left.

There came the sound of feet plodding down the hall, and a wet, wheezy sigh. Bob Miller was unlikely to take anyone by stealth. “Beer, Kev?” he said, opening the fridge, and then, before Kevin could answer, “I mean, Coke?”

“No, thanks.”

Bob cracked open a can for himself. “Long time no see,” he said. “I was only saying to Fiona this morning: When was the last time we saw Kevin, and we couldn’t remember, could we, Fiona?”

Fiona was slapping a wet cloth — randomly, it seemed to Kevin — over kitchen surfaces. Now she went to squeeze the cloth out in the sink, at the same time running fresh water noisily into a basin.

“So,” Bob said, “what’ve you been getting up to?”

“Nothing much.”

“Anything turn up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Have you tried JobBridge?”

A small, weeping child with a grazed knee came into the kitchen. She was followed by four other children who formed a circle as Fiona applied ointment — none too gently, Kevin noticed — and a Band-Aid. No sooner had the children been dispatched outside than Aoife returned, her cheeks flushed from the bicycle, wisps of dandelion seed caught in her hair. She flung a plastic bag onto the kitchen island. “These are mandarins,” Fiona said, peering into the bag, but Aoife had already flounced out to the garden to resume her position on the swing. Bob winked. “The joys, eh, Kev?” he said, and he flopped into a chair in the corner. Fiona took the oranges, or mandarins, to the sink and began to scrub them with a wire brush as if they’d been rolling around the floor of a nuclear waste facility. She piled them into a bowl before proceeding to drop them one by one into the juicer, and the slow dribble started up again.

“Excuse me,” Kevin said, pretending to check his phone. “I need to take a call.” Once in the hall, he went to the door of the living room and looked in. The woman at the drinks table still hadn’t moved from her station. She was busy now; the caterers had set out trays of salads and cold meats, and everybody had come in from the garden. He considered where Aoife might have put his jacket. He’d been in this house many times, mostly times when he shouldn’t have been.

On the half landing, he paused to inspect the photographs. He didn’t recall noticing them before, but then before, his mind would have been on the curve of Fiona’s hips as she climbed the stairs ahead of him. They weren’t the usual snaps of seasides or birthdays, but black-and-white photographs of war. Biplanes rose from scorched airstrips, into skies black and hellish with smoke. Hollow-eyed soldiers in steel Brodie helmets lay on their stomachs in the mud. How he envied Bob Miller. He didn’t envy him the photographs — ghoulish things that already had triggered the early stirrings of nausea. Nor did he envy him his wife, his house, or his job, though there’d been a time when he’d envied all of these things. No, what he envied most was Bob Miller’s want of imagination, a want that saved even as it failed, that allowed Bob to make a hobby of war, to gaze with complacency upon the horror of others, happy it hadn’t come for him, certain it never would. Lucky, lucky Bob who knew so little pain that he must order it neatly packaged on eBay, to hang in lacquered frames on his wall.

In the spare room, the coats lay on the bed in a tangle of empty sleeves. Several had slid from the heap onto the carpet. He went through the ones on the bed first, lifting them, setting them aside until, halfway through, he found his jacket. When he picked it up, its lightness registered with him on some subterranean, animal level before the thought had even formed in his brain. The flask was missing. He searched beneath the remainder of the coats on the bed, then started on the pile on the floor.

“All right, Kev?”

He was holding a woman’s green blazer in his hands when he turned to see Bob in the doorway. “Grand, Bob,” he said. “I was just looking for my car keys.”

“You’re not thinking of driving, Kev?”

“I need to get something from the car.” He floundered about, mentally, for something plausible. “An inhaler. For my daughter.”

“Well, then,” Bob said, “we’d better find those keys,” and he bent to lift a man’s navy overcoat from the floor.

Kevin had a sudden vision of Bob finding the flask. “Thanks, Bob,” he said, “but I’ve already found them, actually.” He patted the pocket of his jeans. “They were under the valance.”

Bob straightened up. He looked confused. “Right,” he said.

Kevin realized he was still holding the blazer, and tossed it quickly onto the bed. They stood in awkward silence for a moment, staring at each other, while through the open window came the shrill laughter of small girls playing tag on the Millers’ driveway.

“I guess we can go back downstairs,” Bob said.

“Okay, then.”

“Okay.”

Bob gestured for Kevin to exit the room ahead of him, and when they were both outside, he pulled the door shut and took something from his pocket. There followed the excruciating sound of the key turning in the lock. The men descended the stairs together, careful not to make eye contact, neither of them speaking. When they reached the bottom, Kevin didn’t stop but kept on walking, down the hall and out the front door, across the cobble-lock drive to the pavement where his wife had parked their car by the curb. He leaned against the garden wall and stared at the car. He didn’t have the keys; his wife had them. These days, she was careful to keep them on her person at all times. He had a sense of somebody watching him, and knew that if he turned it would be Bob, but he didn’t turn. Let him watch, he thought, because here on the street it was peaceful, the air clean and sweet smelling, the only noise the yapping of a small dog farther along the avenue. In the distance, beyond the village, beyond the city, he saw fields and hills, green unpeopled expanses not yet spoiled.

When he went back inside, a cake was being cut in the sunroom, a giant three-tiered confection topped with a troupe of miniature white-iced girls in white-iced dresses. The real girls were seated around a trestle table, protective plastic covers over their clothes. His wife was at one end of the table, passing around slices of cake and plastic cutlery, but he didn’t go in. Instead, he went to the living room where, with a heady feeling approaching joy, he found the drinks table deserted. It was a wasteland of empty bottles, wine, Pimm’s, prosecco, but in the middle of the debris was a bottle of vodka, practically untouched.

In the kitchen, he poured orange juice into a glass. Through the window he saw Aoife on the swing, her long legs dangling, the toes of her white Converses scuffing the dust. She was nothing like her father; Bob’s genes had lost that particular skirmish. Instead, she was slim and dark and pretty, how he imagined Fiona must have been at that age. He watched her for a moment, then poured a second glass of juice and went out to the garden, taking the vodka and the glasses with him. The expression on her face bordered on a sneer, but she brightened when she saw the bottle. The day had remained fine, but there was something ominous in the stillness of the clouds, as if now that they had stopped moving, they might suddenly drop to earth. Aoife hopped off the swing. “This way,” she said, indicating a gap in the hedge. “They don’t like it when I drink.”