Modern Gods. Nick Laird

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      “Oh yes?”

      “He does a very good one on Tuesday nights. About the Tudors. It must be his fifth or sixth TV show.”

      “Must be. Which reminds me.”

      Her father un-muted the telly.

      “I meant to tell you I’m off on Sunday to Papua New Guinea to make a TV show.”

      Before anyone could reply, Liz left the room, like a boxer landing a knockout punch and striding from the ring.

      The Donnelly home had broadband, technically, though in practice it was unbearably slow. Over the years Liz and Alison and Spencer had each spent several hours on the phone to British Telecom complaining, rebooting, inserting various adaptors and splitters, but it was still not feasible to download photographs. At least, not feasible in human time. In geological time, maybe, or if you experienced the world as an oak tree did. Still, Liz was making a determined effort. As she waited for the system to boot up, she propelled herself slowly in a circle in the office chair with her right foot, taking in the study.

      Alison in graduation gear from Stranmillis—her head tipped slightly forward in embarrassment, though there was pride in her glance. Her blond hair had been permed to an awkward frizz, and she wore a touch too much blue eye shadow. One of Liz in the same getup, staring defiantly at the camera—her short brown hair hardly coming out from under the mortarboard. In lieu of a graduation photo for Spencer, there was one of him on the eighteenth hole of Killyreagh golf course handing over, on behalf of the estate agency, an outsized check to Cancer Research.

      If you met the sisters you’d have no reason to think that Alison and Liz shared the same parents. One so fair and blue eyed and one so dark with eyes so brown that in certain lights they were almost black. But then Spencer arrived and made sense of the gene pool; he grew up with Liz’s dark complexion and Alison’s blue eyes, and both his sisters doted on him. Had it made him a little infantile? A little protected? Even in photographs you could see he had always been loved—his broad physique, his ready smile. He was at home in the world, convinced of his place in it.

      Kenneth had three desks in the study, none of them for studying. They were mostly covered with prizes for various charitable lotteries and raffles he was running for Rotary, the golf club, and the Save the Children Coffee Morning. The computer screen began filling up with e-mails. There was nothing from Joel. And a great deal of bumpf. She opened the e-mail from Margo—LIZ: URGENT DISASTER—and began the tortuous process of downloading the PDFs.

      On the wall beside the photographs of the three Donnelly siblings was a framed map of the world. Liz located the huge island of PNG, and next to it New Britain, an archipelagic scatter, a broken grin in the gridded blue, small and very far away from Old Britain, and from New York. She stood up and looked closer. Here was New Ireland, and here, below it, was the little curved splinter of New Ulster.

      She found herself thinking of that moment when one steps from the lip of an aircraft onto the top of the steps, and the tropical heat hits you, remaking you. She wanted that, to be remade.

      Half an hour later, Liz sank down onto the sofa and began ostentatiously leafing through her stack of printouts.

      “So. A TV show,” Kenneth said, not lowering his paper, and using the abstracted, bored, and slightly hostile tone he reserved for his nearest and dearest.