Modern Gods. Nick Laird

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       CHAPTER 5

      When you found yourself hissing at your baby to shut up, to please for God’s sake just shut up for a bit, it was important to set said baby down delicately in his cot and leave the room. That was Rule Number One in Alison’s Big Book of Parenting. It was true that nothing gave her more joy than to look in Michael’s huge cornflower-blue eyes, which even now at 3 a.m.—especially now—radiated curiosity and attention, and to stroke his smooth fat cheeks, and feel his whole life force settle itself as she held him to her and pressed his small hard skull against her chest. But who wants to feel joy at this time of night? She wanted to feel sleep, to feel nothing, to be unconscious for eight or nine blissful hours. She had left him to cry for twenty-three minutes and then given in and got up again. Exactly the opposite of what you’re meant to do. Maybe if she’d waited twenty-four minutes he might have stopped. This was the infinite puzzle of parenting: You never could know for sure what might have been avoided, what inevitable. The crying wasn’t even the worst of it; he interspersed that with a kind of porcine grunting that intensified and lessened and intensified again, as if he were working out with tiny baby dumbbells.

      Rule Number Two: Carry concealer. Apply it each morning in natural light to the deep shadow rings under your eyes.

      Number Three. What would number three be? Not to run out of Baileys Irish Cream.

      Number Four was not to feel guilty about feeding your baby formula or rusks, or your toddler fish fingers or an Easter egg, or letting them watch telly or do any of the necessary activities that other parents—other mothers—tried to make you feel guilty about. The one-upmanship of the whole thing had to be ignored.

      Rule Five was to make yourself laugh madly when one of your wee bairns boked on your black party dress just before you left the house for your bimonthly night out, or when one of them wet the bed, or when Izzy tugged the eight-inch purple vibrator the girls had given you on your hen night out from under the bed and started smacking it against her cheek.

      Maybe you made rules in your head because there was no other way to feel in control. You had to keep churning the events of your life and try to skim some sense from them. It all slipped through your fingers otherwise. And what was “it”? Time. Children ate time. Before, days moved at a walking pace, routine and predictable. You could liken time to some natural state or process, a backdrop to events, not an event in itself. But once Isobel came, and now Michael, time itself changed. The minutes hardened into objects that could be counted and traded like money, and she always came up short.

      At Izzy’s birthday party last week in the café at the leisure center, as she was planting the four pink candles in the cake shaped like a football, which was the only children’s cake left in Tesco’s and would just have to do, it struck Alison that she was going to be sticking candles in cakes every year for at least the next eighteen, which would take her up to the age of fifty, and the conclusion made her sit back for a second on the edge of a radiator. Judith was slicing open a packet of paper plates with a pearlescent fingernail and Alison had managed to turn to her and say, “Can you believe that Izzy’s four?”

      “It just gets quicker and quicker,” her mum had replied, smiling her wisest, most insufferable smile.

      Michael’s breathing regulated and Alison inched forward to the edge of the tub chair. Slowly, slowly she stood up. He raised his head and she began swaying in their nightly slow dance. He gave a curt, liquidy burp, hot on her ear, and then settled his cheek into her shoulder.

      Even as she was telling Liz how excited they all were to see her, she felt a protective wariness. She didn’t mind Liz with the kids—when she actually saw them, she was great with them—but she didn’t particularly want her sister to meet her soon-to-be second husband. And Liz’s presence introduced a stress to the household that was paralyzing. Kenneth and Liz had not actually come to blows since school—but the needling and riling that Liz considered normal made everyone around her tense. Liz was the star of the family, and her mother’s clear favorite. She was so sure she had the answer to everything. But she just had different questions. Normal people, real people, who had to get up and go to work and come home and make dinner, found answers enough in the repetition, in the dull, rough ceremony of cooking, and bathing the kids, and reading three stories, and downing a large glass of chenin blanc, and turning off the television, and double-locking the door, and heading up to bed, amen.

      Educated to the nth degree—but so what? To what purpose? Liz knew a lot about some things, sure, but nothing about how to live. She was one of life’s tenants—she rented: flats, people, cars. Trying them out, using them up, breaking them down, moving along. Liz was older, twenty-one months older, but as soon as Alison could speak she’d adopted the responsible role. Had Liz got money? Had she got tissues? Had she remembered her packed lunch? Alison could never have told her, of course, but it was clear as day that Liz would never become an adult till she had children of her own—climbing over her, lying on her, needing her at three in the morning. And not until she became a solid fact in someone else’s life would she start to understand her own parents. She still had the worldview of a child. She faced upwards. She hadn’t yet forgiven Kenneth and Judith—not that there was so much to forgive. Alison knew that Liz pitied her, still stuck in Ballyglass, still stuck with their parents, the business, but in turn Alison pitied her right back, pitied her harder, longer, louder.

      The laptop was still showing Downton Abbey on the wicker stool, and she closed it and exited the room, shutting Michael’s door softly. Typical Liz to be snobby about a TV show she didn’t even watch. How could it be offensive? It wasn’t as if it didn’t show the servants to be just as wise and just as confused as the masters. Just that everybody knew their place back then. They weren’t lost in wanting more. Now everyone thought they deserved to have everything at every moment. She was a great fan of the individual, her sister, while hating any actual person she ever had to meet. Liz liked the concept of people but not the reality. That’s why she couldn’t hold onto a boyfriend. Alison stood for a moment on the landing. A soft, repetitive clicking that took her a second to identify as the tap dripping into the bath. It had started again. How amplified a sound became at night. She’d mention it to Stephen.

      This was the umpteenth time he’d stayed СКАЧАТЬ