Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  “I haven’t thrown anything out,” she said.

  “Why can’t the child sleep in the other room?” He went over to the sack, dipped a hand in, and took out a battery.

  “Emer’s room? Because Emer will be sleeping there.”

  “Can’t he sleep there, too?”

  She watched him drop the battery back into the sack and root around, a look of expectancy on his face, like a boy playing lucky dip. He brought out the cracked mug, polished it on his trousers, and then, to her exasperation, put it back on the windowsill.

  “He’s six,” she said. “He’s not a baby anymore. I want things to be special; we see so little of him.” It was true, she thought, it was not a lie. And then, because he was staring at her, she said, “And I don’t want Emer asking about…” She paused, spread her arms wide to encompass the room. “About this.” For a moment he looked as if he were going to challenge her. It would be like him, she thought, to decide to have this conversation today, today of all days, when he wouldn’t have it all year. But he picked up his pajamas and a pair of shoes she had missed beneath the bed and, saying nothing, headed off across the landing. Later, she found his pajamas folded neatly on the pillow on his side of the bed, where he always used to keep them.

  —

  COLMAN WAS ON THE phone in the hall when the car pulled up in front of the house. Kate hurried out to greet them and was surprised to see a man in the driver’s seat. Emer was in the passenger seat, her hair blacker and shorter than Kate remembered. “Hi, Mam,” she said, getting out and kissing her mother. She wore a red tunic, the bodice laced up with ribbon like a folk costume, and black trousers tucked into red boots. She opened the back door of the car and the child jumped out. He was small for six, pale and sandy haired, blinking, though the day was not particularly bright.

  “Say hi to your granny,” Emer said, and she pushed him forward.

  Kate felt tears coming, and she hugged the child close and shut her eyes, so as not to confuse him. “Goodness,” she said, stepping back to get a better look, “you’re getting more and more like your uncle John.” The boy stared at her blankly with huge gray-green eyes. She ruffled his hair. “You wouldn’t remember him,” she said. “He lives in Japan now. You were very small when you met him, just a baby.”

  The driver’s door opened and the man got out. He was slight and sallow skinned, in a navy sports jacket and round dark-rimmed glasses. One foot dragged slightly as he came round the side of the car, plowing a shallow furrow in the gravel. Kate had been harboring a hope that he was the driver, that at any moment Emer would take out her purse and pay him, but he put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder and she watched Emer turn her head to nuzzle his fingers. He was not quite twice her daughter’s age, but he was close—late forties, she guessed. The cat had accompanied Kate outside and now it rubbed against her legs, its back arched, its tail working to and fro. Kate waited for her daughter to make the introductions, but Emer had turned her attention to Oisín, who was struggling with the zip of his hoodie. “Pavel,” the man said, and, stepping forward, he shook her hand. Then he opened the boot and took out two suitcases.

  “I’ll give you a hand with those,” Colman said, appearing at the front door. He wrested both cases from Pavel and carried them into the house, striding halfway down the hall before coming to a halt. He put the suitcases down beside the telephone table and stood with his hands in his pockets. The others stopped, too, forming a tentative circle at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Oisín,” Emer said, “say hello to your granddad. He’s going to take you hunting in the forest.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Bears?” he said.

  “No bears,” Colman said. “But we might get a fox or two.”

  Pavel shuffled his feet on the carpet. “Oh, Daddy,” Emer said, as if she’d just remembered, “this is Pavel.” Pavel held out a hand and Colman delayed for a second before taking it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he lifted the cases again. “I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  Kate remained in the hall and watched them climb the stairs, Colman in front, his steps long and rangy, the others following behind. Pavel was new, she thought; the child was shy with him, sticking close to his mother, one hand clutching the skirt of her tunic. Colman set a suitcase down outside Emer’s bedroom. He pushed open the door, and from the foot of the stairs, Kate watched her daughter and grandson disappear into the garish, cluttered room, its walls hung with canvasses Emer had painted during her Goth phase. Colman carried the other suitcase to John’s room. “And this is your room,” she heard him say to Pavel, as she went into the kitchen to make tea.

  “How long is he on the scene?” Colman said when he came back downstairs.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

  He sat at the table, drumming his fingers on the oilcloth. “What class of a name is Pavel, anyway?” he said. “Is it eastern European or what? Is it Lithuanian? What is it?”

  She debated taking out the china but, deciding it was old-fashioned, went for the pottery mugs instead. “I expect we’ll hear later,” she said, arranging biscuits on a plate.

  “She shouldn’t have landed him in on top of us like this, with no warning.”

  “No,” she said, “she shouldn’t have.”

  She found the plastic beaker she’d bought for their last visit. It was two Christmases ago, and the mug was decorated with puffy-chested robins and snowflakes. She polished it with a tea towel and put it on the table. “Every time I see Oisín,” she said, “he reminds me of John. Even when he was a small baby in his pram he looked like John. I must get down the photo album and show Emer.”

  Colman wasn’t listening. “Are we supposed to ask about the other fellow at all now?” he said. “Or are we supposed to say nothing?”

  Her eyelid was fluttering so fiercely she had to press her palm flat against her eye in an effort to still it. “If you mean Oisín’s father,” she said, “don’t mention him, unless Emer mentions him first.” She took her hand away from her face and saw her grandson standing in the doorway. “Oisín!” she said, and she went over, laid a hand on his soft, fine hair. “Come and have a biscuit.” She offered the plate and watched him survey the contents, his fingers hovering above the biscuits but not quite touching. He finally selected a chocolate one shaped like a star. He took a small, careful bite and chewed slowly, eyeing her the way he had eyed the biscuits, making an assessment. She smiled. “Why don’t you sit here and tell us all about the airplane?” She pulled out two chairs, one for the child, one for herself, but the boy went around the other side of the table and sat next to Colman.

  He had finished the biscuit, and Colman pushed the plate closer to him. “Have another,” he said. The boy chose again, more quickly this time. “Tell me,” Colman said, “where’s Pavel from?”

  “Chelsea.”

  “What does he do?”

  The boy shrugged, took another bite of biscuit.

  “Colman,” Kate said sharply, “would you see if there’s some lemonade in the fridge?”

  He looked at her the way the cat sometimes looked at her when she caught it sleeping on the sofa, a look at once both guilty and defiant, but he got up without saying anything and fetched the lemonade.

  They heard footsteps on the stairs, and laughter, and Emer came into the kitchen with Pavel in tow. Opening the fridge, she took out a liter of milk and drank straight from the carton. She wiped her mouth with her hand and put the milk back. Pavel nodded to Kate and Colman—an easy, relaxed nod—but he didn’t join them at the table. Instead, he went over to a window that looked out on the garden and the scrubland and forest beyond. “They’re like gods, aren’t they?” he said, pointing to the three wind turbines rotating slowly on the mountain. “I feel I should take them a few dead chickens—kill a goat or something.”

  His voice reminded Kate of a man who used to present a history program on the BBC, but with the barest hint of som
ething else, something melodic, a slight lengthening of vowels. “Don’t mention the war,” she said. “Those things have caused no end of trouble.”

  “Perhaps not enough goats?” he said.

  She smiled and was about to offer him tea, but Emer linked his arm. “We’re going to the pub,” she said. “Just for the one, we won’t be long.” She blew Oisín a kiss. “Be good for your granny and granddad,” she said as they went out the door.

  The boy sat quietly at the table, working his way through the biscuits. Kate remembered the board game she had found that morning and had left on the chair in the spare room. She thought about fetching it, but Pavel might notice it gone—would know she had been in the room in his absence. Oisín reached for another biscuit. “We could see if there are cartoons on television,” she said. “Would you like that?”

  Colman glared at her as if she had suggested sending the child down a mine. “Television will rot his brain,” he said. He leaned in to the boy. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you and I go hunt those foxes?”

  Immediately, the boy was climbing down off his chair, the biscuits and lemonade forgotten. “What will we do with the foxes when we catch them?” he said.

  “We’ll worry about that when it happens,” Colman said. He turned to Kate. “You didn’t want to come, did you?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s okay. I’d better make a start on dinner.” She walked with them to the back porch, watched them go down the garden and scale the fence at the end. The boy’s hair snagged as he squeezed beneath the barbed wire, and she knew if she went to the fence now she would find silky white strands left behind, like the locks of wool left by lambs. Dropping into the field on the other side, they made their way across the scrub, through grass and briars and wild saplings, Colman in front, the boy behind, almost running to keep up. The grass was in the first rush of spring growth. Come summer, it would be higher, higher than the boy’s head and blonder, as it turned, unharvested, to hay. They reached the pile of timber that used to be the hut, and Colman stopped, bent to take something from the ground. He held it in the air with one hand, gesticulating with the other, then gave it to the boy. Goodness knows what he was showing the child, she thought, what rubbish they were picking up. Whatever the thing was, she saw the boy discard it in the grass, and then they went onward, getting smaller and smaller, until they disappeared into the forest. She moved about the kitchen, preparing dinner, watering the geraniums in their pots on the window. She rinsed the plastic tumbler at the sink and watched the sky change above the Dennehys’ sheds, the familiar shifts of light that marked the passing of the day.

  —

  AN HOUR LATER HER husband and grandson returned, clattering into the kitchen. Oisín’s shoes and the ends of his trousers were covered in mud. He was carrying something, cradling it to his chest, and when she went to help him off with his shoes, she saw it was an animal skull. Colman went out to the utility room and rummaged around in the cupboards, knocking over pans and brushes, banging doors. “What are you looking for?” she said, but he disappeared outside to the yard. The boy remained in the kitchen, stroking the skull as if it were a kitten. It was yellowy white and long nosed with a broad forehead.

  Colman returned with a plastic bucket and a five-gallon drum of bleach. He took the skull from the boy and placed it in the bucket, poured the bleach on top until it reached the rim. The boy looked on in awe. “Now,” Colman said, “that’ll clean up nicely. Leave it a couple of days and you’ll see how white it is.”

  “Look,” the boy said, grabbing Kate’s hand and dragging her over. “We found a dinosaur skull.”

  “A sheep, more likely,” his grandfather said. “A sheep that got caught in wire. The dinosaurs were killed by a meteorite millions of years ago.”

  Kate peered into the bucket. Little black things, flies perhaps, had already detached themselves from the skull and were floating loose. There was green around the eye sockets, and veins of mud grained deep in the bone.

  “What’s a meteorite?” the boy said.

  The front door opened and they heard Emer and Pavel coming down the hall. “The child doesn’t know what a meteorite is,” Colman said, when they entered the kitchen.

  Emer rolled her eyes at her mother. She sniffed, and wrinkled her nose. “It smells like a hospital in here,” she said.

  Pavel dropped to his haunches beside the bucket. “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s a dinosaur skull,” Oisín said.

  “So it is,” Pavel said.

  Kate waited for her husband to contradict him, but Colman had settled into an armchair in the corner, holding a newspaper, chest height, in front of him. She looked down at the top of Pavel’s head, noticed how his hair had the faintest suggestion of a curl, how a tuft went its own way at the back. The scent of his shampoo was sharp and sweet and spiced, like an orange pomander. She looked away, out to the garden, and saw that the evening was fading. “I’m going to get some herbs,” she said, “before it’s too dark,” and, taking scissors and a basket, she went outside. She cut parsley first, then thyme, brushing away small insects that crept over her hands, scolding the cat when it thrust its head in the basket. Inside the house, someone switched on the lights. From the dusk of the garden, she watched figures move about the kitchen, a series of family tableaux framed by floral-curtained windows: now Colman and Oisín, now Oisín and Emer, sometimes Emer and Pavel. Every so often, she heard a sudden burst of laughter.

  Back inside, she found Colman, Oisín, and Pavel gathered around a box on the table, an old cardboard Tayto box from beneath the stairs. She put the herbs in a colander by the sink and went over to the table. Overhead, water rattled through the house’s antiquated pipes: the sound of Emer running a bath. From the box, Colman took dusty school reports, a metal truck with its front wheels missing, a tin of toy soldiers. “Aha!” he said. “I knew we kept it.” He lifted out a long cylinder of paper and tapped it playfully against the top of Oisín’s head. “I’m going to show you what a meteorite looks like,” he said.

  She watched as Colman unfurled the paper and laid it flat on the table. It curled back into itself, and he reached for a couple of books from a nearby shelf, positioning them at the top and bottom to hold it in place. It was a poster, four feet long and two feet wide. “This here,” Colman said, “is the asteroid belt.” He traced a circular pattern in the middle of the poster, and when he took away his hand, his fingertips were gray with dust.

  Pavel moved aside to allow Kate a better view. She peered over her husband’s shoulder into the vastness of space, a dazzling galaxy of stars and moons and dust. It was dizzying, the sheer scale of it: the unimaginable expanses of space and time, the vast, spinning universe. We are there, she thought. If only we could see ourselves, we are there, and so are the Dennehys, so is John in Japan. The poster had once hung in her son’s bedroom. It was wrinkled, torn at the edges, but intact. She looked at the planets, pictured them spinning and turning all those years beneath the stairs, their moons in quiet orbit. She was reminded of a music box from childhood that she had happened upon years later in her mother’s attic. She had undone the catch, lifted the lid, and, miraculously, the little ballerina had begun to turn, the netting of her skirt torn and yellowed, but her arms moving in time to the music nonetheless.

  “This is our man,” Colman said, pointing to the top left-hand corner. “This is the fellow that did for the dinosaurs.” The boy was on tiptoe, gazing in wonder at the poster. He touched a finger to the thing Colman had indicated, a flaming ball of rock trailing dust and comets. “Did it only hit planet Earth?”

  “Yes,” his grandfather said. “Wasn’t that enough?”

  “So there could still be dinosaurs on other planets?”

  “No,” Colman said, at exactly the same time Pavel said, “Very likely.”

  The boy turned to Pavel. “Really?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Pavel said. “There are millions of other galaxies and billions
of other planets. I bet there are lots of other dinosaurs. Maybe lots of other people, too.”

  “Like aliens?” the boy said.

  “Yes, aliens, if you want to call them that,” Pavel said, “although they might be very like us.”

  Colman lifted the books from the ends of the poster, and it rolled back into itself with a slap of dust. He handed it to Oisín, then returned the rest of the things to the box, closing down the cardboard flaps. “Okay, sonny,” he said. “Let’s put this back under the stairs,” and the boy followed him out of the kitchen, the poster tucked under his arm like a musket.

  After dinner that evening, Kate refused all offers of help. She sent everyone to the sitting room to play cards while she cleared the table and took the dishes to the sink. Three red lights shone down from the mountain, the nighttime lights of the wind turbines, a warning to aircraft. She filled the sink with soapy water and watched the bubbles form psychedelic honeycombs, millions and millions of tiny domes, glittering on the dirty plates.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, THEIR FIRST to share a bed in almost a year, Colman undressed in front of her as if she wasn’t there. He matter-of-factly removed his shirt and trousers, folded them on a chair, and put on his pajamas. She found herself appraising his body as she might a stranger’s. Here, without the backdrop of forest and mountain, without the ax in his hand, she saw that he was old, saw the way the muscles of his legs had wasted, and the gray of his chest hair, but she was not repulsed by any of these things; she simply noted them. She got her nightdress from under her pillow and began to unbutton her blouse. On the third button, she found she could go no further and went out to the bathroom to undress there. Her figure had not entirely deserted her. Her breasts when she cupped them were shrunken, but she was slim, and her legs, which she’d always been proud of, were still shapely. Thus far, age had not delivered its estrangement of skin from bone; her thighs and stomach were firm, with none of the sagginess, the falling away, that sometimes happened. She had not suffered the collapse that befell other women, rendering them unrecognizable as the girls they had been in their youth; though perhaps that was yet to come, for she was still only fifty-two.