Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  There hasn’t been another woman, at least none of any significance, since Mandy Wilson’s mother six years ago; this she is reasonably sure of. There has, perhaps, been an occasional, discreet straying, evidenced by a temporary distancing when he gets home from a business trip, a restraint in the way he touches her. But nothing like that time when she feared she had lost him. Then, even the nights he was home, asleep beside her, she would get up and walk the house in the small hours, touching things, trailing her fingers along walls, the backs of chairs, as if trying to hold down whatever it was that was slipping away.

  Other nights she had taken things out to the garden, things singled out for destruction during the day: ornaments, serving dishes, a shell brought back from holiday. She would go to the end of the property, where Philip wouldn’t hear, and she would smash them against the fence. One such night, glass littering the ground at her feet, she had looked back up the garden and had seen a light come on in the house next door, saw the blinds raised, the outline of Mrs. Harding’s face at the window.

  But she had endured somehow, and her endurance had been rewarded. He had come to his senses, as she knew he would, and when Becky’s birthday came round, Janice had walked up to Mandy Wilson’s mother at the school gates and handed her an invitation. Mandy’s mother turned up at their house that Friday afternoon, her daughter shy beside her in a blue party dress. She accepted a glass of elderflower cordial, complimented the cut of the crystal. And then she and Janice and the other mothers had engaged in shrill, giddy conversation, had even laughed, if a little hysterically, while small girls ran up and down the stairs, or sat in circles on the floor, plaiting each other’s hair.

  Go before dawn to the statue of the Tiny-Footed Maiden. There you must leave balls of rice mixed with wolfberry, and a pair of silk slippers, no bigger than a sparrow.

  THE SCHOOL COMPRISES THREE two-story blocks of 1970s buildings and a glass and steel extension that houses the computer labs. The school insignia, MATER MISERACORDIA, is in steel lettering above the entrance. Ms. Matthews is waiting for her in an empty classroom, correcting assignments at a long rectangular desk. Her hair covers her face as she bends over a copybook. A pack of coloring pencils, neatly pared, lies beside a pink stapler and a dish of multicolored paper clips. “You must be Becky’s mum,” she says, standing up to shake hands. “Janice, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Janice says. She notices that Ms. Matthews doesn’t say what she is to call her.

  “Please,” Ms. Matthews says, gesturing to a chair on the opposite side of the desk, and Janice sits down.

  Ms. Matthews sits back in her own chair, and her hands erupt in a flurry of busyness. She moves the stapler an inch to the left, squares the edges of a sheaf of paper. Janice watches her run a finger along the inside collar of her blouse, adjusting it, though it already stands so rigid it may have been starched. “So,” Ms. Matthews says, bringing her hands to rest on the desk in front of her. “You got my note.”

  “I wanted to see you anyway, as it happens.”

  “Oh?” Ms. Matthews’s hand goes again to her collar, just a quick touch this time.

  “Yes, it’s about the foot-binding. I don’t feel it’s”—she pauses to allow the word more resonance—“appropriate.”

  Ms. Matthews’s head tilts slightly to one side. “It’s something I do with my girls every year. They usually find it interesting.”

  Her girls? Janice thinks. What proprietary claim can this woman possibly make, she who is barely more than a girl herself? And every year? How many years could that be, exactly? Three? Four?

  “It’s a bit medieval, isn’t it?” Janice says. “Literally.”

  “Well, actually,” Ms. Matthews says, “and this is very interesting, it was practiced in certain remote parts of China up until the 1940s. But it’s not about the dates, is it? I prefer to take a broader sociological perspective.” She has picked up a ballpoint pen and is striking it against the desk, not unlike something Becky might do, and Janice has to fight an urge to tell her to stop.

  “They’re fourteen,” Janice says. “Their feet are still growing, it could damage their bones.”

  Ms. Matthews frowns. “Sorry?” she says. “I’m not following—”

  “I’ve seen how tightly Becky winds those bandages. It could cut off circulation.”

  Ms. Matthews edges her chair back, putting a fraction more distance between herself and Janice. “Obviously,” she says, “we don’t do any actual foot-binding. Basically, we discuss it, watch videos on YouTube, that sort of thing.”

  The classroom feels suddenly hot and airless. Janice wants to open a window, but Ms. Matthews is speaking. “Perhaps,” she is saying, “this brings us, in a roundabout way, to why I wanted to see you. Have you noticed Becky seems unsettled lately, more withdrawn than usual?”

  Than usual? And is Becky withdrawn? Quiet, certainly, but “withdrawn” is different, isn’t it? “Withdrawn” is something else. “She’s a teenager,” Janice says. “ ‘Withdrawn’ is the factory setting,” and she hates herself as soon as she’s said it.

  “As you know,” Ms. Matthews says, “Becky finds school socially challenging. That’s always been a problem, but, basically, it’s becoming more pronounced. The teasing about her weight hasn’t helped, but I’ve tried to put a stop to that.”

  “How come we’re only hearing about this now?” Janice says.

  Ms. Matthews looks wistfully toward the window, out to the manicured green of the hockey pitch, where girls in yellow gym gear gambol like lambs, despite a biting November wind. “I did mention it to Becky’s dad,” she says, “at the parent-teacher meeting.” She rests her hand on the pack of coloring pencils as if it were a talisman. “I understand,” she says, “that there are problems at home?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Becky mentioned there are tensions….”

  There will most certainly be tensions, Janice thinks, when she gets home and speaks to Becky. She has an urge to find Becky’s classroom and drag her outside by the scruff of the neck, to ask what she thinks she is doing, discussing their business, their private business, with this stranger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

  Ms. Matthews opens her mouth. This is where a little age might have saved her, where a year or two might have made all the difference, but she really is the girl Janice has taken her for, and so she says, “I meant between you and Becky’s father.” Her position shifts slightly toward the door, her body ahead of her mind, readying for flight.

  Janice wants to grab her by the hair and slap her. She knows what Ms. Matthews is trying to say, knows also that she must not be allowed to say it. Ms. Matthews is speaking again, the thing that she must not say twisting on her tongue, emerging in hesitant darts of words and phrases.

  On the other side of the room, beneath a poster of the Gobi Desert, is a wastepaper basket. Janice makes it to the basket in time to vomit. She vomits all over an empty juice carton and pencil shavings curled like a ribbon of orange peel. Then she vomits again. She straightens up, wipes her mouth with her hand. Her eyes are wet and she dries them with her sleeve, but more wetness rises up and she realizes she is crying. Walking to the door of the classroom, she glances at Ms. Matthews and sees that she looks stricken, shocked; more shocked, Janice thinks, than if she had gone ahead and slapped her.

  A foot, once bound, will be bound forever: Few can withstand the pain when bones awaken. Tend to it carefully, but always in darkness. The beauty snared beneath the bandages may dissipate in light.

  SHE SITS IN A café for a few hours until the staff put the chairs on the tables and begin to mop around her feet. When eventually she goes home, she finds the hall and the downstairs rooms in darkness, save for the flicker of the TV in the living room. Becky is sprawled on the couch, her feet bound in white bandages and propped on a beanbag. Janice switches on the light. “Becky,” she says. “We need to talk.”

  Becky blinks, rubs her eyes. She m
utters something under her breath, then picks up the remote and begins surfing channels.

  Janice positions herself between her daughter and the screen. “I went to see Ms. Matthews today.”

  Becky puts down the remote, letting the TV come to rest on a cartoon station.

  “Your father and I are very happy, Becky. Do you understand that?”

  Becky stares at her mutely.

  “And if you ever have worries about that, or any worries at all, you come to me first, okay? I’m not blaming you for anything, Becky, please don’t think I’m blaming you, but we’re a family, we’re a team, and we need to trust each other.”

  Becky is examining her fingernails, poking at her cuticles.

  Janice sighs. “All right,” she says. “I’m going to make a start on dinner. Then we’re going to sit down together and you’re going to tell me what you said to Ms. Matthews.”

  “I can’t really remember,” Becky says. “We talked about lots of stuff.”

  Janice feels the nausea returning. “You must try to remember,” she says. “It’s important.” She nods at Becky’s feet. “And I know that’s not homework, so take off those bandages.”

  Becky gives no indication of having heard.

  “I said take them off, Becky.”

  Slowly, Becky raises one foot onto the couch and begins to unwind the bandages, letting them fall in spirals to the floor. Underneath, her foot looks white and pale and startled. Red marks run across her toes where, Janice sees now, she has used elastic bands to hold the tights in place. Becky examines her toes, the arch of her foot. Her small toe is a bluish-white color, beginning to pinken as the blood comes rushing back. She forgets for a moment that she is fighting with her mother. “Look,” she says, holding up her foot, “it’s got smaller.”

  Janice bends and squints at her daughter’s foot. “It’s exactly the same size it always was.”

  “It’s not,” Becky says. “It’s smaller.” She gets up and hops across the floor to where she has left a pair of canvas pumps. She slides her bare foot into one and wriggles it around. “See?” she says, “it’s loose. It wasn’t loose before.” She hops back across the room and flops onto the couch. She reaches for a strip of cloth from the floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to sleep in them, see what my feet are like in the morning.”

  “You most certainly are not.”

  “You hate me,” Becky says. “You want me to have big, ugly clown feet like Ms. Roberts.”

  Janice pulls the strip of fabric from her daughter’s hand, rips it in half, then in half again, and flings the pieces onto the carpet.

  “Stop it! You’re ruining them!” Becky jumps up, swaying a little, hopping on her one bare foot. She tries to gather the strips, but Janice kicks them, sends them scattering across the floor. “I hate you!” Becky screams. “I wish you weren’t my mother. I wish I had any other mother in the world except you.” She hobbles to the stairs, one foot still bandaged. Holding on to the banisters, she hops up the first set of steps, stopping to rest on the half landing.

  “Get down here now,” Janice says. She begins to climb the stairs after her daughter.

  Becky shakes her head. Outside on the street, the lamps come on, a soft glow falling on the stairs, on the table with its crystal animals, glittering as if they’d been torched, sparking with light and fire. Becky, in that instant, is alight, too, as fierce and beautiful as a starlet from an old black-and-white movie, her hair falling loose of its bun, her face flushed. And in the next moment, she is a child again, dismayed, confused, scorched by the life sap bubbling up through her.

  Janice is beside her now. “Come on, Becky, you’re being silly.”

  Becky wipes away a tear. “Yeah?” she says. “Well, maybe I’m silly, but at least I’m not fucking pathetic. No wonder Dad hates you.”

  Her hand catches Becky high on the cheek, just below her left eye. She watches, as if in slow motion, her daughter toppling backward, the table crashing to the floor. The little figurines collide as they fall, cracking, splintering, slivers of crystal lodging like miniature stalagmites in the carpet. And in the immediate aftermath, just for a second, there is utter and complete silence; that brief, fleeting silence she has heard described on television by survivors of terrorist attacks and explosions. Becky gets shakily to her feet, putting one hand to the wall to steady herself. Her face is pale, apart from a red gash beneath her eye that has already started to bleed.

  “Oh no,” Janice whispers. “Oh no.” She sinks down beside the upturned table, the floor all around glinting with shards of birds and animals. She looks at her hand, tingling still from the force of the slap. The ring on her middle finger was a gift from Philip years back that she has kept meaning to get resized. It has slid around, as it is wont to do, the stones now to the underside, a hard ridge of diamonds.

  Becky puts a hand to her cut cheek. She barely seems to register the blood on her fingers when she takes them away. As if in a daze, she rights the table, returns it to its position beneath the window. Then she drops to her hands and knees and begins to gather up the crystals: the ones that have survived and the broken ones, dozens of severed limbs and shattered torsos.

  “Don’t,” Janice says, sobbing. “Don’t bother. There’s no point.” Reaching out, she traces a finger along the trail of blood on her daughter’s face. “He will leave me now,” she whispers. “He will never stay with me after this.”

  How beautiful the tiny slippers, the swaying walk, that will forever keep her from the fields. Let her begin now her dowry: slippers embroidered with fish and lotus flowers, crafted by her own hands.

  THERE IS A CRAB apple tree, planted by a previous owner, at the end of the garden, the ground all around a pulp of bruised windfalls, though she had sworn that this year she would harvest them. She leans against the trunk, listening to the river flowing by on the other side of the fence. Looking back at the house, she sees that the light is on in Becky’s bedroom, the curtains closed. Later, lights come on downstairs and she sees Philip moving about the kitchen, and she makes her way back up the garden to the house.

  When she slides open the patio doors, she sees that she has startled him. He still has his coat on and is taking a beer from the fridge. He turns and she studies his face from across the kitchen, trying to gauge what he knows. “You scared me,” he says. “I didn’t realize you were home. Where’s Becky?”

  When she doesn’t say anything, he comes over and puts an arm around her shoulder. “You’re not still mad at me, are you?” he says. “I thought we were okay,” and he kisses her on the forehead.

  “Philip…” she begins, but overhead a door opens, and she hears footsteps coming down the stairs. She moves away from her husband, goes to stand at the far side of the room. Becky’s hair hangs down her back in a single plait, and she no longer looks fourteen but like a child of eleven or twelve. She has washed her face and put a Band-Aid on her cheek, a square fabric dressing that covers not just the cut but the skin all around, too. She has removed all the bandages and her feet are in a pair of pink slippers.

  “Hey, princess,” Philip says. “What happened to your face?” He puts down his beer and goes over to her. “Did something happen at school? If something’s happening at school you need to tell us. Janice, have you seen this?”

  Becky winces as he touches her cheek. “I fell against the fence playing hockey,” she says. “It’s only a scratch.”

  “Let me see,” he says, but she takes a step back.

  “It’s fine, honestly,” she says, “Mum had a look already. She put some antiseptic on it.”

  He throws his hands up in a gesture of defeat. “Okay,” he says. “I guess you girls have it under control.” Picking up his beer, he goes out to the living room.

  Later, while Philip is watching TV, Janice goes quietly upstairs. On the half landing, she sees the crystal animals have been reassembled, the casualties glued back together, crudely but effectively
, each figure back in its correct place. She stops outside Becky’s bedroom and listens. There is no noise, apart from a soft, papery sound, like pages turning. She tries the door handle but it is locked, and then even the paper sounds stop, and it is so quiet she can hear Mrs. Harding through the walls, moving around the house next door. She considers calling to Becky through the door, but doesn’t know what to say, and is afraid Philip might hear. After a few minutes, she goes back downstairs.

  It has started to rain, a drizzle first that quickly becomes a slanting downpour, hammering against the glass of the patio doors. She sits at the kitchen table, looking out at the darkness of the garden, watching rainwater leak through the center join of the doors to form a puddle on the kitchen floor. She watches the puddle grow larger, not bothering, as she would usually do, to fetch a mop and bucket. It is something that happens every time it rains, a fault dating to the doors’ original installation. She has meant to get them fixed, or replaced, but it will be impossible to find a tradesperson this close to Christmas. She will wait until January, when things are quieter. She will do it then.

  A man will seldom touch a bound foot. Knowing this, into the smallest of her slippers, let her sew a pouch: There she will keep her darkest secrets.

  Ranelagh on a summer Saturday, the pavements scattered with blossoms, the air pulsating with the rhythmic thrum of lawnmowers. Kevin stood at the window of the Millers’ living room, watching a dozen or so little girls pose for photos in the front garden. His own daughter was among them, her blond curls straightened and pinned in a plait, so that at first, in the midst of so many other plaited heads, he hardly recognized her. The Millers lived in a red-brick Victorian near the church, and Fiona Miller had insisted on the party. It was no trouble, she told anyone who attempted to cry off. It would be a treat for the children, and she and Bob were happy to host it, knowing as they did that not everyone was as fortunate as themselves. The girls shrieked and giggled, buzzing with sugar and summer, and then, remembering themselves, they smoothed the skirts of their white dresses and raised small, careful hands to adjust veils and tiaras. “Lovely, aren’t they?” Kevin said, turning to the woman behind the drinks table. The woman frowned. She wasn’t the caterer but one of Fiona Miller’s friends, perhaps even one of her sisters, and this placed her firmly in the ranks of people who hated him. “Great that the rain’s held off,” he said, because she could hardly find that objectionable, but she began to move bottles around the table as if they were chess pieces, taking them by the necks, setting them down in their new positions with unmistakable hostility.