Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  Aileen’s mother looked on with the detached air of a spectator at a bullring who was waiting for the main event to start. “She’s got very fat,” she said. “She didn’t used to be that fat.”

  It was then that Aileen noticed the window above their table was open. “She’d want to watch out,” her mother said, “or Richard will look elsewhere. I always wondered about her marrying a younger man. I worried about it.”

  Aileen stood up and, too late, pulled the window shut. “He’s only three years younger,” she said.

  Her mother seemed to take this as encouragement. “Well, yes, but three years is three years,” she said, “And he’s a man. Men are different.” Their food had arrived and she took her boiled egg, began to strike it with a spoon all around the shell in sharp, brisk movements. Outside, the children had unlocked the door and now Janet was half in and half out of the car, walloping the children in turn, all of them except for the baby; walloping them with a force that made Aileen’s hand go instinctively to her still-flat stomach.

  Her mother took a mouthful of egg, then put the spoon down. “She used to be so pretty,” she said. “She’s let herself go.” It was true, Aileen thought, looking at her sister. Janet used to be beautiful. “It’s not easy to keep a man,” her mother continued. “She’d want to be careful. Tidy herself up a bit.” Aileen’s father had died when she was three, so it wasn’t as if their mother had had to worry too long about keeping him, but Aileen didn’t say this. Janet slammed the car door and began to walk back toward the café entrance.

  “It’s the children, of course,” Aileen’s mother said. “Children do that to you.”

  Janet delayed for a while on the café porch. She appeared to be studying the posters on the notice board, advertisements for local fundraisers and sports fixtures and missing pets. When eventually she returned to the table, her eyes were red rimmed.

  “You need to get Richard to have a word with that lad,” her mother said, inclining her head toward the car where Crucifixion Keith was now crying in the passenger seat. “Otherwise he’s only going to get worse. Best nip it in the bud.”

  Aileen imagined Janet putting their mother in a hatch and running away, their mother rolled up like a rug, her head tucked into her tummy, the soft, almost noiseless thud as she landed. And then, as if they’d been discussing something different entirely, as if Janet was not sniffling furtively beside her, their mother looked across the table at Aileen and said: “Remember those dolls you had when you were young?”

  “Yes,” Aileen said. It was hard to know where her mother might be going with this.

  “I was only thinking about them the other day,” her mother said. “You were still playing with them when you were twelve or thirteen. I used to worry about that. I thought maybe you were a bit slow.”

  “I collected dolls, Mam. Lots of girls did back then.”

  “Yes,” her mother said. “Possibly you’re right.” And she nodded, but slowly, as if even now, thirty years on, she was still not fully convinced. “They very possibly did.”

  They said goodbye to Janet and the children and left the café, driving farther south until they reached Courtmacsherry and the sweep of the bay, the white fleck of waves, the boats rising and falling along the pier. There was a small public beach—a narrow strip of pebbly sand—and a hotel set back from the sea behind a line of rocks and a bank of low sand dunes. Access to the beach from the public parking lot was along a sloping path, and Aileen helped her mother out of the car and linked her arm as they made their way down together. Her mother moved slowly and with care, her eyes following the progress of her own feet over the sand. A dozen or more elderly women were gathered at the shore—hotel residents, Aileen presumed, because they all wore matching red swim caps. They were watching an instructor, a man young enough to be their grandson, demonstrate swim strokes. And then, as though a nudge from providence, a way into the conversation Aileen had determined she would have with her mother today, she saw in the water a pregnant woman. There was something loud, almost indecent, about her large belly, as if a hologram of her impregnation were stored beneath the skin. As she made her way in to shore, a strip of seaweed drifted across her path and she flung it away without breaking her stroke. How easy she made it look, Aileen thought, how effortless. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the baby had swum out of her right then, without struggle, without pain, a small, shut-eyed thing carried in on the tide like a jellyfish. “She’d want to be careful,” Aileen’s mother said. “She’s quite far along. I’d be worried about that.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Aileen said. “She seems to be a strong swimmer.”

  “She’s young, at least,” her mother said. “She has that going for her. Too young, maybe. I doubt there’s a husband.”

  They had reached a cluster of flat black rocks. Her mother’s pace was slowing, her breath coming in ever-shorter gasps. Aileen looked at her and thought that she seemed to have shrunk since they left that morning. She wondered if the trip had been a mistake. But she’d asked the matron before setting out and the matron had said it should be fine, adding—rather curtly, Aileen thought—that she’d already told Janet the same thing. She helped her mother lower herself onto the flattest of the rocks to rest, and for a while they sat looking out at the sea and at the elderly women who were now moving farther out, yellow flotation devices tucked under their arms.

  “I’m worried,” her mother said.

  Aileen waited. Over the years, her mother had so devalued the currency of worry that it was impossible to guess what might come next.

  “About…you know,” her mother said, “about what will happen.”

  “What will happen when?”

  “You know…” her mother said. “What will happen at the end.”

  This was the first time her mother had addressed, directly, at least, the fact that she would soon die. “I’m afraid that there will be nobody there,” she said.

  Aileen thought they were about to embark on a spiritual discussion, but her mother said: “Not you, not Janet, not anybody.” Her grip tightened on Aileen’s hand. “There was a man from the ground floor died last week,” she said. “Eily told me they couldn’t find a vein in the end, and he was screeching for an hour before the ambulance arrived.”

  Aileen thought of the pregnancy chat rooms with their grotesque tales of forceps and episiotomies and thirty-hour labors. “Mam,” she said, “don’t be talking like that. You know I’ll be there.”

  “You won’t. You’ll be in London.”

  “They’ll contact me when…” Aileen wasn’t sure when they would contact her. Because how, at this point, could they know, really know, from one minute to the next, when the end might be? “They’ll contact me when the time comes,” she said. “And anyway, Janet will be there.”

  “There’s something wrong with Janet,” her mother said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong. I’m worried.”

  Aileen reached across and took her mother’s hand. Farther up the coast, a kite surfer plowed a white furrow through the water. Aileen followed the plume of red and orange twisting in the sky above him as if the answer, the words she needed to next say to her mother, might be found up there. They sat in silence for a while. At the end of the day, Aileen thought, this was all she and her mother could offer one another, the comfort of being frightened together.

  “I noticed you had a camera back in the car,” her mother said. “I’d like you to take my photograph.”

  In the house in Ballyphehane, there had only ever been two photos of her mother: one taken on her wedding day, the other some years earlier in a cousin’s drawing room when her mother was still only a girl in a gingham dress and ankle socks, hair so fiercely parted it might have been done with a knife. “Yes, of course,” Aileen said. “A photo would be lovely. I’ll go get the camera.” She looked at her mother. “Will you be okay here by yourself?”

  “Certainly,” her mother said. “Why wouldn’t I
be?”

  The afternoon had turned cold and, as she walked, Aileen pulled her jacket tighter about her. She was passing through the dunes when a sudden dizziness struck, accompanied by the nausea that her doctor kept insisting was a good sign. She sat down for a moment, and, lying back on the grass, she closed her eyes. Here, by the seafront, the neat lawns of the hotel gave way to scrub colonized by clusters of yellow-eyed daisies and celandines. Back in London, the father of her child—how strange those words still sounded, “her child”—would be taking the younger of his two sons to a violin lesson. He’d accused her of being heartless, selfish, in her plan to have the baby. “The boys are six and ten,” he’d said. “Have you considered at all what this will mean for them?” The nausea worsened and she tried to still her thoughts, to breathe slowly and deeply, but was foiled by the clamor of the gulls, circling and wheeling above the dunes. Their cries were sharp and high-pitched, almost human. As she lay there in the grass, they seemed to grow louder and shriller, and she sat up with a start, realizing that what she was hearing was not gulls, but women.

  She ran back through the dunes to discover her mother in the sea, up to her waist in water. The hotel swimmers were making their way toward her, calling to her, their red bathing caps bobbing like stray buoys as they approached. Aileen ran down the beach, sliding and stumbling over the stones. She saw her mother tumble face forward and disappear for a couple of seconds beneath the surface. The instructor and one of the women had reached her now and were attempting to lift her, the water churning white in a mess of flailing arms and limbs. As Aileen waded out to meet them, they faced for shore and began to make their way back in, carrying her mother between them. They laid her down on the jetty wall and Aileen looked on as her mother coughed up water, spluttered, choked, coughed up some more, her hair plastered in wet strands to her skull.

  They carried her mother to the hotel, up a long, straight avenue, with mature trees bordering the lawns on either side. Two peafowl, a hen and a cock, were foraging along the grass verge; they gently nudged and butted each other and raised their heads in lazy ambivalence as the party went by. Her mother was brought to a bedroom, and the hotel manager organized a robe and a pot of tea. One of the women offered a change of clothes—underwear and an oversized cardigan and skirt—which Aileen promised to return by post. Feeling nauseous again, she excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she vomited a little and splashed water on her face. She came out of the bathroom to hear her mother reciting her local pedigree to the other women as if she were a stud animal, delivering it in a singsong voice, like a poem learned at school. Aileen thought she could probably recite the list herself at this stage, she’d heard it often enough, though over the years her mother had become a little devious. Every so often, by way of erratum perhaps, or downright lie, she would slip in something hitherto unheard-of, some small, brazen embellishment.

  When they were left alone, her mother ran a bath, refusing Aileen’s offers of help. Every so often, Aileen knocked on the door to ask if she was all right, if she needed help washing her hair, but her mother said she didn’t. “Call me when you want to get out,” Aileen said through the door. She sat in a chair by the window and watched gulls stalk the lawn outside, and a group of children play tag on the beach, moving amphibiously between pools, cliff path, and rocks. After a while, she heard the gurgle of water down the plughole and pictured her mother attempting to clamber unaided from the bath, slipping on the wet floor. She went over to the bathroom, but when she put her hand to the door, she discovered it was locked.

  Later that evening, back at the nursing home, Aileen got her mother into a nightdress and helped her into bed. At her mother’s insistence, she went downstairs to the matron’s office and fetched some brown paper to package up the borrowed clothes. “You’ll send them tomorrow, won’t you?” her mother said. “They’ll only go missing here.” Eily, mercifully, hadn’t yet made an appearance this evening. Aileen topped up her mother’s water glass. Beside the bed was a softly rounded groove in the floorboards. They were the original boards—eighteenth-century oak, according to the nursing home’s brochure—and were peppered with small knotholes that spiraled away into blackness. Toward the end of the bed was another, identical, groove. A different bed must once have occupied this space, its ordinances closely but not exactly mirroring the one in which her mother now lay. Some other woman, perhaps a whole series of women, had lain here, night upon night, year upon year, mouths parted slightly in sleep, all the time pressing this memento of their existence into the timber.

  Her mother took a sip of water, then lay back on the pillows, closing her lips tightly against the offer of more. “You forgot to take that book last night,” she said. “Don’t forget it this time. There’s nothing safe here.” And as Aileen picked up the book and put it in her bag, it occurred to her that these might very well be her mother’s last words.

  On the way back to her hotel, she took the slip road for Ballyphehane. Her mother’s house was a modest two-bedroom townhouse in a not-so-fashionable area, and she wondered now how Janet had managed to find a tenant for it. She parked directly outside. She would be polite, she told herself; calm and polite. The tenant—the girl—would understand; Aileen would understand if it were her. She would say that she knew it was the girl’s home now, that she, Aileen, only wanted a look around, that she had come all this way. As she sat in the car, she rehearsed two speeches: one for if the girl turned out to be pleasant, the other for if she was rude. All the time she was rehearsing, she saw the girl as clearly as if she were standing in front of her, still fine boned and blond, still dressed like a cat burglar.

  She was about to step out of the car when she noticed that the front garden was straggling and uncared for, her mother’s precious lupines listing sideways and choked by weeds. She experienced a sudden burst of anger toward the girl, who she decided now would most likely be rude. To one side of the front door an overflowing trash bin was disgorging its contents onto the path. The curtains were missing from the living room window—she could imagine what her mother would say about that—and she could see beer cans on the coffee table and the silhouette of someone on the couch watching television. But the silhouette was not of a girl, fine boned or otherwise. It was that of a man and when, perhaps having noticed the car, he stood up and came to the window, she saw that it was Janet’s husband, Richard. The garden was small, no more than half a dozen yards from porch to gate, and she knew he must have recognized her. She waited, wondering if he might go to the door and invite her in, but he remained at the window, and after a moment she turned the key in the ignition and drove away.

  At the end of the street she went east, skirting the edges of the city as she made her way back to her hotel. Tomorrow she would say goodbye to her mother at the nursing home and would catch her flight back to London. The nausea that usually renewed its onslaught at this hour was missing this evening; her doctor had told her it would go in time, that she shouldn’t worry when it did. She found that in its absence, without its bittersweet niggling, she felt nothing, no sense of anything beyond herself, and so she tried to summon an image. All that offered itself was a grainy composite of other women’s scans, a shadowy thing floating in a sea of amniotic fluid. For a moment, as she waited at traffic lights, it took on features, morphed into a girl, fair-haired and fine boned. Its eyes were tightly shut, the way her mother’s eyes had been when she came out of the water that day, steeled against the sting of salt. Her mother, who, it had seemed to Aileen, had been striking out with the last of her strength, her arms raised in resistance against her rescuers, her face set to open sea.

  At Kinnego the light was silver, the sea and sky gray, and the wind that snatched at her breath had a sharp, almost metallic, edge. Anytime he had spoken of this place he had always spoken of the light and now, early morning, the beach deserted, she understood what he meant. They had traveled from Dublin the day before but had left late, then stopped too long in Derry, so that it was dusk
before they drove north along the Foyle. The sea was already slipping into darkness then, the cabin lights of a boat carried like a lamp up the estuary, and as they passed through Quigley’s Point, Moville, Greencastle, small dark shapes cut the air above the water: birds, perhaps, or bats from the trees that grew along the shore road.

  —

  WAKING THAT MORNING IN his brother’s bungalow, she had pulled back the bedroom curtains to get a proper look at the sea and had found herself staring at a concrete wall, roughly plastered, set no more than three or four feet back from the house. Beneath the window, filling the space between it and the wall, was a tangle of orange netting, half a dozen crudely cut lengths of galvanized sheeting, and a stack of plastic boxes stamped with the logo of a fisherman’s co-op.

  “It’s a boat shed,” Jonathan said from the bed, and she had turned to see him raised on one elbow, watching her in amusement.

  “But why here?” she said, gesturing in disbelief to the wall. “Why block out the sea, the light?” It was cold in the bedroom, her breath misting the glass as she leaned closer to the window. The net held remnants of the sea: strips of black, leathery seaweed, thin as bootlaces, and a handful of barnacles. “Imagine,” she said, conscious of his eyes on her as she shivered in her nightdress, “what a view like that would be worth in Howth.”

  He had laughed, patting the pillow next to him. “You’re not in Kansas now, Dorothy,” he said, and as she climbed back under the blankets he put his hand on the jut of her hip and pulled her close.

  They drove to Kinnego first thing after breakfast, before anyone else was up. They parked at the top of a rocky headland, and as she stepped out of the car the wind almost pulled the door from her grasp. Below them the bay lay wide and empty, the cliffside a tangle of green, bushy vegetation sloping to the water. She held his hand as they descended the steep path to the beach. “A ship from the Spanish Armada was wrecked here,” he said, putting an arm around her waist to steady her. “An old Venetian trading ship, converted for battle.”