Modern Gods. Nick Laird

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      Four years, two months, and seventeen days ago she’d noticed that she couldn’t close the button of her good navy slacks. She had carried three children and now this lump. It could be benign, a benign cyst. Why not? What was the point in mentioning it to Kenneth? He had enough going on. He was making a good recovery from his surgery, and his speech was pretty good, considering the way it had been six months before. It was a Saturday night and she didn’t sleep well at all, even after several G&Ts. The next day she’d made a roast chicken for lunch and Ken’s brother Sidney came round, and told them in his halting way a long story about Lynn’s horse being stolen from a field outside Markethill and her friend Sean buying said horse back from a man in a pub in Dundalk, but she was too distracted to follow all the details, and when she tried to lift the bowls of trifle before Kenneth and Sidney had finished eating, her husband looked at her like she had two heads and said, “What’s got into you?”

      I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t know what’s got into me or how it got there or how to get it out. But instead she smiled and said, “Och, I didn’t sleep last night. I’m dead tired.”

      The following Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. she stood at the back door of the clinic at the Westland Road waiting for someone to arrive and open up. Once inside, Judith did what she was told. It was a relief to follow instructions, to enter a system and just sit and look at a poster telling people—especially old people and children, who were apparently particularly at risk—to get flu shots, and just to sit and wait and wait and sit and know that the process, whatever it turned out to be, had started. A relief it was to pass the problem of herself to other people. They would sort it. They would know. They would do what they could.

      The attic was accessed by a half-sized door—an Alice-in-wunnerland door, Izzy called it—in the wall of the small bedroom. Judith stooped and entered and tugged the light pull. Even with her slippers and terry-cloth dressing gown, the coldness felt cautionary. She was still too warm-blooded to be standing here among lifeless junk, the abandoned clothes and pictures and games and books. Heaped in the corners, hanging from makeshift rafters, filling cardboard boxes and shelves and plastic-lidded stacked bins, the grave goods. A foot away from her head, a spider, her host, shinned down its twisting filament and twirled and reconsidered and hauled itself back up.

      Look at all this crap, she thought. Look at all this crap.

      All the many hundred accumulated products of marriage and children. They could open a Museum of Late-Twentieth-Century Life. The History of Board Games, of Soft Toys, of Side Lamps, of Winter Coats. Maybe Isobel and Michael would want some of it. But she never showed any interest in making things, Isobel. Judith couldn’t get her to touch the Lego or jigsaws. She was all about dolls. Girls liked things with faces; no matter what the feminists thought, it was true.

      She pulled out a broad hanger from which a maroon suit bag hung. A transparent window in the bag revealed thick brown fur. It was so heavy. When they’d gotten engaged over a bag of chips in Morans’ Café on Lower Merrion, Kenneth had said they would have four children, a house with a river that ran through the grounds, where he could fish—and she would have a fur coat. They’d managed three children. That took ten years. The coat took twelve … Life was both slower and faster than you expected. You saved up and worked towards … Must have been 1982. They were living in the wee Iveagh estate up in Prehen on the Waterside in Londonderry and she was working in the City Shirt Factory, in Personnel. Kenneth traveled for a while from Dublin and then got a job with Kennedy Collins estate agency, which had just opened a branch in Derry, up at the diamond.

      She unzipped the bag and a great rush of soft fur escaped from the plastic. She ran her hand down it, and static made the fur twitch as if it were alive.

      She found herself reluctant to try it on. It was a different Judith who’d worn it. She smoothed a hand down the collar of the coat, with the nap and then against it. It looked dark brown this way, then black the other. It all depended. She thought of pushing her face into it for a second but didn’t. Mink? It was mink, wasn’t it? What was mink? Like an otter? More ferocious. Like a ferret. How many minks? You got a coat like this from ten, twelve animals, she thought, checking the pockets automatically. Nothing.

      The things they’d done in this coat! She slipped it on and sunk her hands into the pockets lined with satin. She gave a little curtsy for no reason, and noticed in the corner another rail of clothes balanced between a rafter and the housing for the water tank. She hadn’t looked at those in years. Among the trench coats and sheepskin jackets and leather skirts, she came to a plastic bag on a wooden hanger, filled with exercise books. She worked the bag off the metal hook of the hanger and pulled out the tired orange and blue exercise books.

      Liz Donnelly. P.4 English. P.4 Geography. P.4 Maths. P.4 History.

      Judith opened the English book to a story written by the eight-year-old Liz from the point of view of the town of Ballyglass. Such imagination!

      Each step round the chimney took her further into the past. Boxes of their own wedding presents from forty-two years ago were stacked here, and boxes of books and crockery from Kenneth’s parents’ house in Ballyshannon. There was too much of it. It overwhelmed. She moved back into the lit part of the attic, pushed with her slippered foot a plastic crate of old candles and Christmas decorations under the eaves, making a passable trail from the door to the chimney stack. The bookshelf leaning against it held all the books in the house. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland. Dick Francis. That was Kenneth’s, and unread. Jeffrey Archer. He turned out to be a shyster, didn’t he? His poor wife. What were those boxes? Oh, the Hummel plates—they’d bought one a year for the first twenty years of their marriage. History of Hummel Plates, circa 1972 to 1994.

      It hadn’t been easy. God knows. They’d fought and fought. She’d moved out once, moved into the flat above the agency for a night, and taken one of the girls with her. He was a terrible thorny old bastard sometimes, no doubt about that. Things you think you’ll always love you don’t. You really don’t. She’d wanted a nice home with nice things. On the farm there was never enough of anything. Except for work. There was enough of that.

      She didn’t want the children to have to go through the boxes—she’d done it with her own mother’s things, few though they were. All her mother’s clothes had fitted in two bin bags. She found she was hugging herself now, hugging her fur-coated body. She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end.

      Liz would be home in nine hours—eight. She must remember to cut some hydrangea from the garden and set a vase of it in her room. She lifted Liz’s exercise book and tugged off the attic light. Back in the guest room she sat on the bed and read:

       As towns go, I’m not the best looking. My spine is one big wide street running along for over a mile, dead straight. I have shops all down me and you can tell how well the shop owner did a hundred years ago by the highnesses of the building. I sit at the foot of a mountain, Slieve Gallion, which wears its white cap in winter and in summer time is brown. I was born in 1645 as a marketplace, a meeting place for all the peeple to come and buy and sell vegtables and animals, cows and pigs and horses. I was burnt down and built bak up, and burnt down and built back up. My name is also An Corr Crea, from the Irish for Boundry Hill.

       There has been a lot of fighting. Everybody wants me. My MPs have been UNions and Shin Fein—the people who walk all over me are both Protesants and Roman Catholics. There are the same amounts of people of both kinds. I have nearly ten thousand people living on me like little nits in my hair.

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