Coming out of the boglands, they were forced into the ditch by a small car that careered toward them in a blaze of headlights. It bounced off the road, temporarily airborne, then sped away, a boy in a dark hoodie sunk low in the driver’s seat. “One of the Shaker Sweeneys from the Malin Road,” Pauline said, and Sarah waited for her to say more, but she leaned back and closed her eyes. In the rearview mirror, the taillights of the receding car flickered red and were gone, extinguished, the road returned to darkness.
Pauline didn’t speak again until they passed the sign for Shroove. A pub rose out of the blackness, an oasis of light on the otherwise desolate stretch of coast. “I had my debs there,” she said. “Four years ago last summer.”
Sarah had thought of Pauline as older—not older in the way that her parents were older, but older certainly than herself and Jonathan. Now she realized they were practically the same age. “Did you take Aidan?” she said. She tried to imagine Aidan in a tuxedo, a grown man awkward in a room full of teenagers, his hands red and calloused below the white cuffs of a dress shirt.
“I didn’t know Aidan then,” Pauline said. “I took Johnny. Johnny and I were at school together in Carn,” and as the lights of the pub fell away behind them, she said, “Here! Turn in here,” and she pointed to a gap in a field.
The grass was littered with cans and the charred circles of spent fires. The field ran to a line of low cliffs, with the sea, dark and choppy, stretched out beyond. Sarah stopped the car. Pauline was bent over, moaning, and when she lifted her face from her hands there were tears running down her cheeks. “They’ll be down at the shore,” she said. “Tell him to hurry.”
Sarah found a flashlight in the boot and followed a trail through the grass to the edge of the cliff. Below her, she saw lights bobbing on the water and, when her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the outline of a boat. There was a secluded beach: a strip of white sand, stark against the black of the surrounding rocks. The sea was silvered by the moon and by the lights of Magilligan across the estuary, and as she watched the boat cut ripples through the water she was struck by how very beautiful it all was, beautiful and unspoiled, and how, if it were not for Pauline waiting in the car, she would have liked to stay.
She began to descend the steep path to the cove, clutching at reeds to steady herself. The slope propelled her forward so that she was unable to stop even if she wanted to, and in the end she half-ran, half-fell onto the small beach. The cove was quiet, apart from the slap and fizz of waves breaking on the sand. The men had cut the boat’s engine and Jonathan jumped overboard, began to wade toward her. He was wearing a dark-colored oilskin, the hood pulled tight around his face. “What are you doing here?” he said when he reached her, and she realized that it was not Jonathan, but Aidan. He had something long, like a stick, tucked under his arm.
“Where’s Pauline?” he said when she did not answer, but she was transfixed by a shape twisting out beyond him on the water, something thrashing and struggling, the sea churning white all around. She thought with sudden fright that it was a body, but then she saw that there were many of them, and they were moving slowly inland, plowing furrows through the dark sea. They looked like divers in wetsuits, but as they got closer, she saw that they were seals, black and lustrous. They were rolling in on the waves, disappearing below the water, then surfacing again, moonlight glinting on their sleek heads.
“Where is she?” Aidan said again. He caught Sarah by the shoulder and shook her, and she realized that the thing under his arm was not a stick, but a gun.
“She’s in the car,” she said. “The baby’s coming.” She jumped back as a wave rushed in, wetting her shoes and the ends of her jeans.
The boat was close to shore now, Jonathan standing at the helm. Another wave rolled in and a seal came crashing onto the beach. It landed with a thud on its back then flipped over onto its stomach. It lay bleeding on the sand by Sarah’s feet and when she dropped to her knees, she saw the hole in the side of its head where it had been shot. “Oh my God,” she said, letting the flashlight fall from her hand. “Oh my God, oh my God.”
“Give me the car keys.” Aidan was standing over her, his hand outstretched.
“They’re in the ignition,” she said, without looking at him, and he turned and broke into a run, back up the cliff path, the gun still under his arm.
The boat was within a few meters of shore and Jonathan stepped out, pulled it up onto a bank of pebbles. He, too, wore an oilskin, the hood tight around his face, and waders that reached to the top of his thighs. “They’ve got brazen,” he said, walking toward her across the sand. “They’ve been eating through the nets, destroying the catch.” He held out a hand to help her up, but she didn’t take it.
A wave thundered in and, farther up the cove, another seal was tossed onto the beach. She left the first seal and ran to the second. This one was smaller—a pup, she thought—its skin a lighter color. Blood dribbled from its mouth and from a wound in its neck, and all along the edges of the rocks the tide foam was stained a deep pink.
Jonathan had followed, slowly, across the sand, and now he stood looking down at her, his hands in his pockets. “Is Pauline okay?” he said. “Is it the baby?”
Sarah was crouched beside the seal. It was still alive, a steady trickle of blood coming from its mouth, its chest rising and falling.
“We’ll take the boat back to Moville,” Jonathan said. “The van’s parked at the pier. You’ll need to change before we go to the hospital.”
She rubbed at her wet jeans, tried to brush away the pebbles and bits of broken shell that clung to them, and saw that they were stained with the seal’s blood. And still the waves charged in, an incessant advance and retreat, and, a few feet away, the body of another seal somersaulted onto the rocks. “We can’t leave them like this,” she said. She reached out a hand and touched the seal pup’s head. It flinched but did not pull away, its eyes, black as onyx, beginning to lose focus.
“They’re almost dead,” he said, and she could hear the impatience in his voice. “The tide will carry them back out.” He was already walking away from her, toward the boat. “Come on,” he said, as he dragged it to the water. “Climb in.”
She got to her feet and looked around the beach. The wind had eased, the night sky was clear, and the clean, white bones of a dead seabird were scattered across the sand like pieces of carved ivory. At the base of the cliffs, a length of timber, slime green and rotting, was jammed between two rocks. She dislodged it and dragged it back across the sand to where the seal lay dying.
Jonathan shouted to her from the water. “What are you doing?” he said. To the south, beyond the village, lights appeared on the cliff top, the headlights of a car pulled in on the coast road. “Come on,” he said. “We need to get out of here,” and he jumped into the boat.
She stood over the seal and raised the piece of timber. She heard the splutter of an engine and saw Jonathan standing in the boat, waiting for her. He did not speak or call and he appeared only in silhouette, his face featureless under the dark oilskin. She looked down at the seal and saw its half-closed eyelid flicker. All around her, the shore glittered like a sequined cloth, tiny shells and pebbles luminous in the moonlight, even as blood darkened the sand. She stood there, the timber held high above her head, the seal bleeding out at her feet. And all the time the waves rushed in, remorseless, and, beautiful across the water, steadfast and unblinking, shone the lights of Magilligan.
The house on Drumcondra Road was a double-fronted red-brick with bay windows and a wooden door set back into an arched porch. I put down my suitcase and rang the bell. A huddle of sickly plants, brittle stemmed and arid, stood in pots on the front step. There was an elaborate twisting of keys in locks, a sliding across of bolts, and all the time Lou Anne shouting at me to “hold on,” as if, after making the journey from Tuamgraney, I might turn around and go back again. “How was the bus?” she said when finally I stepped inside, and then, without waiting for my reply, “How w
as the taxi?”
Lou Anne was my mother’s cousin, and her house was on the bus route to the university. She was the same age as my mother, somewhere in her early forties, but her clothes were unlike anything my mother might wear: a knee-length turquoise dress, gold braiding at the collar and sleeves, an amber brooch squatting like a beetle on her shoulder. Her hair was henna red, tied in a ponytail with the faintest tidemark of gray around the temples. She had her back to me and was busy with the door, bolts squealing like pigs as she coaxed them into place. On the hall stand was a telephone, something we hadn’t yet got at home. There was a rug that didn’t quite stretch the full width of the hall, so that along the edges I caught a glimpse of black-and-white checkered tiles. Several leaves lay scattered about, carried in perhaps by the wind because above the door a small square of glass was missing from the fanlight.
Finished at last with the bolts, Lou Anne turned to me. “Look at you,” she said. “All grown up,” and she shook her head, as if my reaching adulthood were something she hadn’t countenanced. She reached for my hand but didn’t shake it. Instead she straightened out my fingers, and worked her way from one to the next, pinching the middle joints. “You have good hands,” she said. Her own hands were bumpy and stubby fingered, not at all how I imagined the hands of a pianist, but then it was only ever my mother who called her that; my father called her “the hippie” or “the head case,” sometimes “the communist,” depending on his mood, and on how he was getting along with my mother. Because in the way that Lou Anne was my mother’s cousin and not my father’s, so, too, was she my mother’s friend.
I unzipped my shoulder bag and brought out the box of perfumed soaps my mother had gift-wrapped, purple ovals inlaid with flower petals. “There was no need for anything like that,” Lou Anne said, but already she was tearing open the wrapping paper. I looked at her—her legs bare under the gold-braided dress—and thought my mother had got it wrong, Lou Anne was not a gift soap sort of woman, but she pried an oval from its plastic hollow and pinched it the way she had pinched my fingers. She seemed genuinely pleased. “Lavender,” she said, bringing it to her nose and sniffing. “Your mother and I went through a phase when we would wash ourselves with nothing else.” She pressed the oval back into its plastic nest and dislodged a little half-moon of soap from under her nail. She smiled at me then, and I saw that she was quite beautiful and younger looking, when she smiled, than my mother.
Somewhere upstairs a door opened, and a young woman appeared on the landing. She was tall and plump, her roundness apparent even from this distance beneath blue pajamas. The last time I’d met Cassie, we’d both been children, and I was startled to see her now, in body at least, a grown woman. “You remember my daughter,” Lou Anne said, and I had a sudden, vivid recollection of a day at our farm when I was ten and Cassie twelve, when she’d squatted to pee outside the milking parlor, sending a yellow stream winding through the dust of our yard. The exact nature of Cassie’s disability was never discussed in our house. She rarely spoke and was sickly, as well as being what my father called “backward,” though my mother would tut-tut whenever he used that word. Cassie still wore her hair in two dark brown plaits, at odds now with her new adult shape. Lou Anne called up the stairs. “Go back to your room,” she said. “I’ll be up in a while,” and Cassie turned, retreated across the landing. “Come on,” Lou Anne said then, putting the box of soaps down on the hall table, “I’ll show you your bedroom.”
The hall had been clean enough, well-kept apart from the unmended fanlight and a lingering smell of cooking, something spiced and unidentifiable. Climbing the stairs behind Lou Anne, I saw a layer of dust along the dado rail and on the picture frames. Four doors led off the landing. One was partly open, and I could see the enamel corner of a bath, and blue and white tiles on the wall. “I’ve put you in Daddy’s old bedroom,” Lou Anne said, pushing open a door. “It’s Daddy’s old bed, the springs are a bit rickety, but the mattress is new.” The air felt older here than in the hall, thicker, as if it had been fermenting. Lou Anne went over to the window and opened the curtains to let some light in. “We haven’t used this room in a while,” she said. “I did try to sleep here once after Daddy died, but it was just too strange.” There was a bed beneath the window, and at the foot of the bed a wardrobe. Shoehorned into one corner was a desk in cheap plywood, the self-assembly kind, newer than the rest of the room, with a lamp and a vase of yellow flowers that looked suspiciously like dandelions. “Marcus made the desk,” Lou Anne said. “We had to take off the skirting board to get it to fit.” Marcus. My mother had mentioned another lodger; he was “from the country, too,” which seemed to give her some comfort, though I knew she’d be better comforted were he a girl. “I’ll leave you to it,” Lou Anne said. “Come downstairs when you’ve unpacked and we’ll have a bit of supper.”
As I hung up my clothes, I could hear Cassie moving about in the next room, the occasional creak of bedsprings, the soft thud of things dropped. I wondered if Marcus was home, and listened out for other sounds, but there were none. In the wardrobe I found a plastic bag full of men’s ties, paisley patterned with the knots hardened into them. They still held the smell of Lou Anne’s father, a smell of sweat and tobacco, and I pushed the bag to the very back and stood my empty suitcase on top of it. When everything was put away, I sat on the edge of the bed and watched, through the net curtains, traffic going by on the road outside. I sat there for as long as I thought I could get away with and, when I could put it off no longer, I went downstairs.
I found Lou Anne in a room toward the front of the house setting a circular table with cutlery. “Can I help with anything?” I said, because my mother had warned me a hundred times that I must offer to help.
“It’s just a bit of cold meat and salad,” she said. “I have it ready in the fridge.”
This room had a wounded look, a sense of damage inflicted from myriad tiny skirmishes over many years. It was heavy with furniture: As well as the dining table and chairs there was a tallboy with dusty cacti; a nest of tables piled with out-of-date telephone directories; glass-fronted cupboards crammed with yellowing silverware. I imagined what my father would say if he saw it, how he would delight in its chaos, squirreling away details to use as ammunition against my mother. Against one wall was a piano strewn with magazines and other paraphernalia, so that it looked like some effort would be required to raise the lid.
Lou Anne returned with plates on a tray: slices of yellow-crumbed ham beside circles of almost translucent cucumber and quartered tomatoes, spoonfuls of different kinds of salad. This was what my mother served to visitors, though Lou Anne’s version was less practiced: Already the pickled beetroot was bleeding red juices into the coleslaw, turning it pink. “Sit, sit,” she said, and as I took a seat I noticed that there were four place settings. Lou Anne was busy now with a tea set, cups and saucers resonating off each other like tuning forks. “At last!” she said, when the doorbell rang. “Why does he have to be so late?” She went out to the hall and I heard the bolts sliding across and then a man speaking. “There was a march on O’Connell Street,” he said. “I was stuck on the bus for an hour.”
“You could have got out and walked.” That was Lou Anne against a backdrop of bolts.
“Well, I couldn’t, could I? I hadn’t rosary beads on me.”
“Shh,” Lou Anne said. “She’s here.”
He came to the door of the living room. “Why, hello,” he said. “I didn’t think you were arriving until later.” He was short and slight, with dark hair and a dark beard. He wore a black leather jacket, and a satchel was slung over his shoulder, though he looked old for a student, late twenties or thereabouts.
“Daddy had to take calves to Tuam,” I said, “so he dropped me to the bus early.” Immediately, I regretted it, because why did this man need to know about our calves?
“It must be demanding for your father—the farm, I mean—now that your brother’s gone to England.”
I d
idn’t like him knowing that about us. I wondered what else Lou Anne had told him.
“I’m Marcus,” he said then, and he came over to the table and shook my hand. I wondered if I should tell him my name, or if he knew that, too, but he turned to Lou Anne, who was standing behind him. “How’s she been today?”
“Oh, you know,” Lou Anne said. “The same; she’s been the same. I rang the surgery, but Dr. Raymond is still away and it’s that locum doctor. You know what he’s like.”
“Did you tell him about her headaches?”
“He kept going on about getting her reading glasses. How many times do I have to tell you, I said to him, she doesn’t read.” She threw her hands up in disgust. “Does he even look at her file?”
“Should I try talking to him?” Marcus said.
“We can’t fall out with him,” Lou Anne said. “We might need a prescription before Dr. Raymond gets back. We’ll have to muddle through until next week.” She took the satchel from his shoulder. It was beaded with drops of rain, and she wiped it dry with the sleeve of her dress before hanging it on the back of a chair. She pushed a slick of wet hair out of Marcus’s eyes and went to help him off with his jacket, which was wet, too, but he unzipped it himself and hung it beside the satchel. “I’ll go fetch her for supper,” he said, and he went upstairs.
Lou Anne stood for a moment, twisting her ponytail. Her gaze wandered absently around the room as if she’d been looking for something but had forgotten what. Her eyes came to rest on me, and she flinched, as if suddenly remembering I was there. “Get the napkins, would you?” she said, and she gestured to a mahogany dresser on the far side of the room. I located the napkins in the middle of a sea of crockery and knickknacks, and when Lou Anne didn’t show any sign of doing anything with them, I placed one at each setting.
Marcus returned leading Cassie by the hand. She had on a blue quilted robe over her pajamas, buttoned to the neck. In her free hand was a glass jar with little black beads rattling about the bottom. She didn’t come as far as the table but hung back a little, pulling at her plaits. “Cassie,” Marcus said, “say hello to Louise,” but she just stared. Marcus tried again. “Cassie,” he said, but Lou Anne interrupted. “Oh, just leave it,” she said. “She knows who it is. I’ve explained,” and, pulling out a chair, she sat down and began to butter a slice of bread.
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 12
