When she returned to the bedroom, Colman was reading a newspaper. She peeled back the duvet on her side and got into bed. He glanced in her direction but continued to read. It was quiet in the room, only the rattle of the newspaper, a dog barking somewhere on the mountain. She read a few pages of a novel but couldn’t concentrate.
“I thought I might take the boy fishing tomorrow,” he said.
She put down her book. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “He’s had a busy day today. I was thinking of driving to town, taking him to the cinema.”
“He can go to the cinema in London.”
“We’ll see tomorrow,” she said, and took up her book again.
Colman put away the newspaper and switched off the lamp on his side. He settled his head on the pillow, but immediately sat up again, plumping the pillow, turning it over, until he had it to his liking. She switched off the other lamp, lay there in the dark, careful where she placed her legs, her arms, readjusting to the space available to her. A door opened and closed, she heard footsteps on the landing, then another door, opening, closing. After a while she heard small, muffled noises, then a repetitive thudding, a headboard against a wall. The sound would be heard, too, in Emer’s old bedroom, where the boy was now alone. She thought of him waking in the night among those peculiar paintings, dozens of ravens with elongated necks, strange hybrid creatures, half bird, half human. She imagined specks of paint coming loose, falling in a black ash upon the boy as he slept. Colman was curled away from her, facing the wall. She looked at him as the thudding grew louder. He was utterly quiet, so quiet she could barely discern the sound of his breathing, and she knew immediately he was awake, for throughout their marriage he had always been a noisy sleeper.
—
AS SOON AS SHE reached the bottom of the stairs the next morning, she knew she was not the first up. It was as if someone else had cut through this air before her, had broken the invisible membrane that formed during the night. From the utility room, she heard the high, excited babble of the boy. He was in his pajamas, crouched beside the bucket of bleach, and beside him, in jeans and a shirt, his hair still wet from the shower, was Pavel. Oisín pointed excitedly to something in the bucket. In the pool of an eye socket, something was floating, something small and white and chubby.
Kate bent to take a look. Her arm brushed against Pavel’s shoulder, but he did not move away, or shift position, and they remained like that, barely touching, staring into the bucket. The white thing was a maggot, its ridged belly white and bloated. Oisín looked from Pavel to Kate. “Can I pick it up?” he said.
“No!” they both said in unison, and Kate laughed. She felt her face redden and she straightened up, took a step back from the bucket. Pavel stood up, too, ran a hand through his wet hair. The boy continued to watch the maggot, mesmerized. He was so close that his breath created ripples, his fringe flopping forward over his face almost trailing in the bleach. “Okay,” Kate said, “that’s enough,” and, taking him by the elbow, she lifted him gently to his feet.
“Can I take the skull out?” he said.
Pavel shrugged and glanced at Kate. He seemed downcast this morning, she thought, quieter in himself. She looked down at the skull, and at the debris that had floated free of it, and something about it, the emptiness, the lifelessness, appalled her, and suddenly she couldn’t bear the idea of the boy’s small hands touching it. “No,” she said. “It’s not ready yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
Emer didn’t appear for breakfast, and when finally she arrived downstairs, it was clear that there had been a row. She made a mug of coffee, and, draping one of her father’s coats around her shoulders, went outside to drink it. She sat on the metal bench at the edge of the garden, smoking and talking on her phone. Every so often, she’d jump to her feet and pace up and down past the kitchen window, the phone to her ear, talking loudly. When she came back in, she didn’t go into the kitchen, but called from the hall: “Get your coat, Oisín. We’re going in the car.”
Oisín and Pavel were at the table, playing with the contents of the Tayto box. The two-wheeled truck had been commandeered for a war effort involving the soldiers and a tower built from jigsaw pieces stacked one on top of the other. “I thought Oisín was staying with us,” Kate said.
Emer shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “He’s coming with me. He likes galleries.”
“I’ll drive you,” Pavel said quietly, getting up from the table.
“No, thank you. I can manage.”
“You’re not used to that car,” he said. “I don’t have to meet your friends, I can drop you off and collect you later.”
“I’d rather walk,” Emer said.
“Listen to her,” Colman said, to no one in particular, “the great walker.” He had a screwdriver and was taking apart a broken toaster, setting the pieces out on the floor beside his armchair. He put down the screwdriver, sighed, and stood up. “We’ll go in my car,” he said. He nodded to Oisín—“Come on, sonny”—and without saying more he left the kitchen. The boy immediately abandoned his game and trotted down the hall after his grandfather. Already he had adopted his walk, a comically exaggerated stride, his hands stuck deep in his pockets. Emer gave her mother a perfunctory kiss and followed them.
After they left, Pavel excused himself, saying he had work to do. “I’m afraid I’m poor company,” he said. He went upstairs, and Kate busied herself with everyday jobs, feeding the cat, folding laundry, though she didn’t vacuum in case it might disturb him. She wondered what he did for a living and imagined him first as an architect, then as an engineer of some sort. She put on her gardening gloves and took the waste outside for composting. The garden was a mess. Winter had left behind broken branches, pinecones, and other storm wreckage, the forest’s creeping advance. She remembered how years ago a man had come selling aerial photographs door-to-door. He had shown her a photo of their house and, next to it, the forest. And she had been astonished to see that, from the air, the forest was a perfect rectangle, as if it had been drawn with a set square, all sharp angles and clean lines.
Noon passed, and the day moved into early afternoon. She listened for the sound of Pavel moving about the room overhead, but everything was quiet. Eventually, she went upstairs to see if he would like some lunch. She knocked and heard the creak of bedsprings, then footsteps crossing the floor. When he opened the door, she saw papers spread across the bed, black-and-white streetscapes with sections hatched in blue ink, and thought, Yes, an architect after all. “You could have used the dining room table,” she said. “I didn’t think.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I can work anywhere. I’m finished now anyway.”
She had intended to ask if she could bring him up a sandwich, but instead heard herself say, “I’m going for a walk, if you’d like to join me.”
“I’d love to,” he said.
She put on her own boots and found a pair for him in the shed. They didn’t take the shortcut through the field, but crossed the road at the end of the driveway and followed an old forestry path that skirted the scrub. Passing the pyre of timber that was once the hut, he said: “I saw your husband chopping firewood this morning. He’s a remarkably fit man for his age.”
“Yes,” she said, “he was always strong.”
“You must have been very young when you married.”
“I was twenty-three,” she said. “Hardly a child bride, but young by today’s reckoning, I suppose.”
They arrived at an opening into the forest. A sign forbidding guns and fires was nailed to a tree, half of the letters missing. He hesitated, and she walked on ahead, down a grassy path littered with pine needles. She slowed to allow him to catch up and they walked side by side, their boots sinking into the ground, soft from recent rain. Ducking now and again to avoid branches, they kept to the center path, looking left and right down long tunnels of trees. They stopped at a sack of household waste—nappies, eggshells, foil cartons—spilling over the forest floor.
“A local, most likely,” she said. “They come here at night when they know they won’t be seen.” Pavel tried to gather the rubbish back into the bag, a hopelessly ineffective gesture, like a surgeon attempting to heap intestines back into a ruptured abdomen. When he stood up, his hands were covered in dirt and pine needles. She took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and handed it to him.
“Does it happen a lot?” he said.
“Only close to the entrance,” she said. “People are lazy.” He had finished with the handkerchief and seemed unsure what to do with it. “I don’t want it back,” she said, and, grinning, he put it in his own pocket.
It was quieter the farther in they went, fewer birds, the occasional rustle of an unseen animal in the undergrowth. He talked about London and about his work, and she talked about moving from the city, the years when the children were young, John in Japan. She noticed his limp becoming more pronounced and slowed her pace.
“Thanks for going to such trouble with the room,” he said.
“It was no trouble.”
“I was touched by it,” he said. “Especially the bear duvet and the rabbit.”
She glanced at him, and saw that he was teasing. She laughed.
“She didn’t tell you I was coming, did she?” he said.
“No, but it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry it caused awkwardness,” he said. “I know your husband is annoyed.”
“He’s annoyed with Emer,” she said, “not with you. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
She sensed he was tiring, and when they came to a fallen tree, she sat on the trunk and he sat beside her. She tilted her head back and looked up. Here there was no sky, but there was light, and as it traveled down through the trees, it seemed to absorb hues of yellow and green. She saw the undersides of leaves, illuminated from above, and their tapestries of green and white veins. A colony of toadstools, brown puffballs, sprouted from the grass by her feet. Pavel nudged them with his boot. They released a cloud of pungent spores and, fascinated, he bent and prodded them with his finger until they released more. He got out his phone and took a photograph.
“I’ve seen Oisín three times in the last four years,” she said. “Emer will take him back to London tomorrow, and I can’t bear it.”
He put the phone away and, reaching out, he took her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand why Emer would live anywhere else when she could live here. But then I guess I don’t understand Emer.”
“I’m a stranger to him,” she said. “I’m his grandmother, and I’m a stranger. He’ll grow up not knowing who I am.”
“He already knows who you are. He’ll remember.”
“He’ll remember that bloody skull in the bucket,” she said bitterly.
Very softly, he began to stroke her palm with his thumb. She pulled her hand away and got up, stood with her back to him. Still facing away, she pointed to a dark corridor of trees that ran perpendicular to the main path. “That’s a shortcut,” she said. “It leads back down to the road. I remember it from years ago when the children were small.”
This route was less used by walkers, tangled and overgrown, obstructed here and there by trees that leaned in a slant across the path, not quite fallen, resting against other trees. Ferns grew tall and curling, and the moss was inches thick on the tree trunks. In the quiet, she imagined she could hear the spines of leaves snapping as her boots pressed them into the mud. They walked with their hands by their sides, so close that if they hadn’t been careful, they might have touched. The path brought them to an exit by the main road, and they walked back to the house in silence, arriving just as Colman’s car pulled into the driveway.
They were all back: Colman, Emer, Oisín. Emer’s mood had changed. Now she was full of the frenetic energy that often seized her, opening the drawers of the cabinet in the sitting room and spreading the contents all over the carpet, searching for a catalog from an old college exhibition. Oisín had a new toy truck his grandfather had bought him. It was almost identical to the truck from beneath the stairs, except this one had all its wheels. He sat on the kitchen floor and drove it back and forth over the tiles, making revving noises. Colman was subdued. He made a pot of tea, not his usual kind, but the lemon and ginger that Kate liked, and they sat together at the table.
“How did you get on with Captain Kirk?” he said.
“Fine,” she said.
Emer came in from the sitting room, having found what she was looking for. She poured tea from the pot and stood looking out the window as she drank it. Pavel was at the end of the garden, taking photographs of the wind turbines. “Know what they remind me of?” Emer said. “Those bumblebees John used to catch in jars. He’d put one end of a stick through their bellies and the other end in the ground, and we’d watch their wings going like crazy.”
“Emer!” Kate said. “They were always dead when he did that.”
Emer turned from the window, gave a sharp little laugh. “I forgot,” she said. “Saint John, the Chosen One.” She emptied what was left of her tea down the sink. “Trust me,” she said. “The bees were alive. Or at least they were when he started.”
Oisín got up from the floor and went over to his mother, the new truck in his hand. “If I don’t take my laser gun, can I take this instead?” he said.
“Yes, yes,” Emer said. “Now go see if you can find my lighter in the sitting room, will you?” She made shooing gestures with her hand.
The child stopped where he was, considering the truck. “Or maybe I’ll take the gun, and I won’t take my Legos,” he said. “They probably have loads of Legos in Australia.”
“Australia?” Kate said. She looked across the table at Colman, but he was staring into his cup, swirling dregs of tea around the bottom.
Emer sighed. “Sorry, Mam,” she said. “I was going to tell you. It’s not for ages anyway, not until summer.”
—
IN BED THAT NIGHT, she began to cry. Colman switched on the lamp and rolled onto his side to face her. “You know what that girl’s like,” he said. “She’s never lasted at anything yet. Australia will be no different.”
“But how do you know?” she said, when she could manage to get the words out. “Maybe they’ll stay there forever.”
She buried her face in his shoulder. The smell of him, the feel of him, the way her body slotted around his, was as she remembered. She climbed onto him so that they lay length to length and, opening the buttons of his pajamas, she rested her head on the wiry hair of his chest. He patted her back awkwardly through her nightdress as she continued to cry. She kissed him, on his mouth, on his neck, and, undoing the remainder of the buttons, she stroked his stomach. He didn’t respond, but neither did he object, and she slid her hand lower, under the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He stopped patting her back. Taking her gently by the wrist, he removed her hand and placed it by her side. Then he eased himself out from under her, and turned away toward the wall.
Her nightdress had slid up around her tummy and she tugged it down over her knees. She edged back across the mattress and lay very still, staring at the ceiling. The house was quiet, with none of the sounds of the previous night. She could hear Colman fumbling at his clothing, and when she glanced sideways, saw he was doing up his buttons. He switched off the lamp, and, after a while, perhaps half an hour, she heard snoring. She knew she should try to sleep, too, but couldn’t. Tomorrow, they would return to London: Oisín, Emer, and Pavel. Oisín would probably want to take the skull with him. She pictured him waking early again, sneaking down to the bucket at first light. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she went downstairs in her bare feet.
A lamp on the telephone table, one of Colman’s wooden lamps with a red shade, threw a rose-colored light over the hall. The cat rushed her ankles, mewling and rubbing against her. “What are you doing up?” she said, stooping to run her hand along its back. “Why aren’t you
in bed?” The door of the sitting room, where they kept the cat’s basket, was partly open. She listened and thought she heard something stirring. The cat had been winding itself in and out around her legs, and now it made a quick foray into the room, came running out again, voicing small noises of complaint. She went to the door and, in the light filtering in from the hall, saw a shape on the sofa. It was Pavel with a rug over him, using one of the cushions as a pillow.
He sat up and reached for his glasses from the coffee table. He appeared confused, as if he had just woken, but she noticed how his expression changed when he realized it was her. “Kate,” he said, and she was conscious, even in the semidarkness, of his eyes moving over the thin cotton of her nightdress. The house was completely still, and the cat had quieted, settling itself on the carpet by her feet. Pavel stared at her but said nothing more. They stayed like that, neither of them moving, and she understood that he was waiting, allowing her to decide. After a moment, she turned and walked down the hall to the kitchen, the cat padding after her.
In the utility room, she put on a pair of rubber gloves and, dipping her hand into the bucket, lifted out the skull. It dripped bleach onto the floor, and she got a towel and dried it off, wiping the rims of its eye sockets, the crevices of the jaws. She sat it on top of the washing machine and looked at it, and it returned her gaze with empty, cavernous eyes. Not bothering with a coat, she slipped her feet into Colman’s Wellingtons and carried the bucket of bleach outside.
It was cold, hinting at late frost, and she shivered in her nightdress. In the field behind the house, the pile of newly chopped wood appeared almost white in the moonlight, and moonlight glinted on the galvanized roof of the Dennehys’ shed and silvered the tops of the trees in the forest. She tipped the bucket over, spilling the bleach onto the ground. For a second it lay upon the surface, before gradually seeping away until only a flotsam of dead insects speckled the stones. Putting down the bucket, she gazed up at the night sky. There were stars, millions of them, the familiar constellations she had known since childhood. From this distance, they appeared cold and still and beautiful, but she had read somewhere that they were always moving, held together only by their own gravity. They were white-hot clouds of dust and gas, and the light, if you got close, would blind you.
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 18
