‘She wants my money,’ Ned informs the vicinity. ‘But!’ (If a bite were a weapon.) ‘I spent it! I’ve nothing left. So you’re welcome … to my nothing.’ When Sive won’t meet his gaze, he glances from stranger to stranger. Who’ll listen? They’re connivers on all of this. He looks at the scenery. The liver spots on the hands. Don’t know that that’s good. Skin like wrapping paper, scrunched and discarded. Bones protruding like … like, what’s it? Tents. Poles. Sticks. These people have no clipboards. What do they want–
‘What’d’ya blow your money on, Ned?’ Art tries to dissolve the panic that rises reliably as tides in him when he’s been away too long from the administers of meds – those clerics, so good at taming their congregants. Ned groans. Ignoring him can make it worse. ‘Was it ladies?’ Art says. ‘You spent your money on?’ Art’s wiping grass from the soles of his feet to reveal the ‘Made in Bolton’ tat, like wiping snow from a headstone to reveal a history.
‘What?’ Ned buys himself time to squint at the palimpsest of his memory, to see if he can’t make out the shapes of what was there when there was something … ‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you what I spent my money on, shall I?’
Ned looks guardedly relieved.
‘On a zoo,’ Art says. ‘I bought Dublin zoo.’
‘You did not!’
‘Oh aye.’
‘How much?’
‘Cost an arm and a leg. To a cheetah. But prosthetics are dead good nowadays, don’t you think?’ Art’s camo-print cargo shorts allow him to make a show of himself. He models his calf muscles. Ned looks vaguely appalled but amenable to this one, to whatever’s going on. A smile threatens to set the windscreen wipers going.
‘It were a rainy day in Ireland,’ Art begins, ‘round the time of the great recession and no one could pay for t’ animals’ feed. Me, I’m good with animals. Bit of a rhino whisperer. An’ I’d sacks of cash from making smart investments in York. So when I come and seen all the poor giraffes, shrinking to straws, I thought: I can’t av that. No, I can’t av that. Thing was, I’d said it out loud, and someone had heard me and she’d said: Actually, you can have it. It’s for sale. The whole hog. We’ve run out of dosh. So we shook hands and that’s how I come to be the owner of a zoo. Not bad, having a stake in a zoo. Get a load of these two monkeys, for a start.’ Art takes Soraca by the arms and swings her from side to side, then up into the air before landing her on the ground, where she squeals and stamps her feet and nurses her wrists and giggles. ‘Not the most attractive specimens. But it could’ve been worse. You should’ve seen their dad.’
Soraca claps for everyone’s attention. ‘Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da? Da!’
Ronan laughs because he knows a good line when he hears one.
Soraca’s temper turns because her arms feel weird now from the swinging.
Guthrie packs away the kids’ things and the picnic, which means it’s time for meerkats.
Gael doesn’t help because one of the downsides of having Art around is that Sive has relaxed into her role of hearer. She’s never been a natural talker. So it had really been something to get her to tell a story, before she was rudely cut off by her father. What is it with this family and its fathers? Maybe Guthrie will break the pattern. She’s forced to stand, as the rug is literally being pulled from under her, but she asks what happened with the customer. Brushing the crumbs from her lap, Sive dismisses the comedic value of the rest of the tale. ‘Come on, Mum. Don’t be such a woman.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Gael. He brought in a safe and asked us to make an offer on it without showing what was inside. It was clear the wife had changed the code on him. That’s the height of it.’
Gael’s jaw drops. ‘Did you buy it?’
Sive ignores this – her obligation isn’t to entertain – and takes the picnic rug a few feet away to shake it clean, but the wind blows the scraps back at them and, before long, a riffraff of magpies rallies nearby.
Ned is mincing his jaw: his telltale sign of muddled delirium that spirals into aggression like a raver on rock. Mildly narked, Gael helps settle the twins into the bike box, among the cushions. She awaits the inevitable: ‘You lot go ahead to the zoo while Art and I take Dad back.’
Gael studies the magpies bouncing around the grass. Their tails make up half their length, so they seem much bigger than they are. They’re not migratory. It’s rare for one to fly ten kilometres from where it was hatched. She concentrates on this so that all the sounds of logistics and see-yous are muted and missed and Guthrie has to repeat himself.
‘Gael? You don’t have to come. I’ve got something else for your birthday, but the ticket was meant to be the main thing.’
‘What? No, I’m coming.’
‘Oh,’ Guthrie says, with some relief. ‘Good.’ Perhaps there’s something lonely in fathering twins. To come so close to that togetherness. ‘You might’ve had work to do.’
‘And miss seeing chimpanzees with alopecia?’ Gael says. ‘From a binocular-worthy distance? Are you mad?’
Art and Sive are already en route to the car park, with Ned in tow.
Guthrie hunkers down and tucks the twins in for an excuse to look at them. If his love were bath suds, they’d be up to their necks in it, clapping their hands through it to hear it fizzle, bursting its bubbles for merriment, knowing there’s enough of it that they can afford to let some go down the drain – enough, even, that some can be urinated in. In the half-song half-whisper voice that’s just for them, he tells them to tip their hats to the magpies, so that their lives will be lucky ones. Ronan points obediently. Guthrie asks his rhetorical questions. ‘Will we try it?’ The twins sit forward in the box and grip its wooden rim with their sticky mitts, unused to riding with the plastic coverlet open. What’s this? What have you got for us? Guthrie tips their hats for them. ‘Can you say, Good day, Mister Magpie? Huh?’ He kisses the back of Ronan’s hand, which is prickled red from playing in the grass. ‘Good afternoon, Missus Magpie.’ Guthrie’s eyes are reflective enough to appear green below and blue on top.
‘Pood!’ Soraca says. This is the word she uses for food and for defecation, so she may well be suggesting they take a magpie home to roast.
‘Wise move, Sorsh.’ Gael kicks the bike stand back out for the nappy change. ‘A load of shite indeed.’
‘Don’t listen to Auntie Gael,’ Guthrie says. ‘She doesn’t know her own luck.’ He lifts Ronan up for the smell test. Puts him back. At twelve kilos each, lifting the twins hundreds of times a day is having its effect on Guthrie’s arms. Thin as they are, they’re newly strappy.
‘Do listen to Auntie Gael because she knows that luck boils down to Right-Place-Right-Time, and fowl have fuck-all to do with it.’
‘Lel el el,’ Soraca attempts the name.
Guthrie grins, despite himself, lifting Soraca back out of the box and laying her down on the grass for his magic-trick blink-of-an-eye nappy change. ‘Trust my sister to spend three years in college and to come home with a four-word philosophy.’
‘PS,’ Gael leans in to whisper, her hands making a furtive delta around her mouth. ‘Vaginas count as a Place in the Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time scenario.’
Guthrie’s expression darkens.
She’s thinking of asking him if he remembers that deluxe magic set he got for his seventh birthday. She’s thinking of asking if he recalls not being able to make any of the tricks work. If he recalls, in a moment of rebellion, taking the small white plastic ball from the cups-and-ball trick and directing Gael to wait outside while he practiced. How, when she was let back in, tears veined Guthrie’s face so that he could barely get it together to wave the wand in the direction of his penis. How he dropped his pyjama pants and popped the ball from his foreskin like a strip-club ping-pong show, saying, ‘Ta-aa-aa …’ How he couldn’t stop hyperventilating to pronounce the ‘da!’
The new nappy is on; all the wipes are secured within the dirty one and the plastic bag is double-knotted.
Meanwhile, Ronan has climbed out of the box and, led by his finger, tottered towards a large bridled dog, mid-dump. Zoo! he must think. Gael has clocked this and wonders how Ronan can tell it’s an animal, seeing as its ears and tail are cut. What makes something an animal, at first glance? Incisors? Haunches? The stink. It’s a pitbull-somethingbigger-something-mangier-cross. The owner is a hard-as-flint hard-done-by with his hood up. The no-way-out sort you fear more than fear for, because nothing to live for is the same as nothing to lose. His tracksuit looks empty, but for the spurs of knee, elbow, shoulder. He is hooked forward in a C shape; back to Ronan, who comes to a standstill a metre from the dog’s fresh turd.
‘Don’t look now,’ Gael says, ‘but what’s the likelihood Ronan would eat–’
Don’t say ‘Don’t look’ to a parent whose toddler is out of eyeshot.
Guthrie practically pounces on his son, who is indeed reaching for a handful of shit, sure to startle the dog. Gael rushes over too because something feels familiarly wrong and, without looking at her, Guthrie passes Ronan to her for safekeeping. She has to take him back to the other one, the girl twin, so that she has them both because their dad is not quite … posture stiffened. Is he about to? At least grass makes for a soft–
‘Excuse me? … Sir?’
Man and dog are moving on. But the dog pulls back. He whines, sensing unrest.
‘Hey!’ Guthrie calls, louder, ignoring Gael’s frantic gesturing. No one can hear each other clearly, purely. It’s as if the whole park has tinnitus. The owner turns. High and twisted on the comedown as a shoddy kite. There’s an unlit fag in his mouth and he pulls back his lips so it’s held by his grey teeth.
‘Can you clean up after your dog please?’ Guthrie says. ‘There’s children in this park.’
The owner shifts from foot to foot like a wrestler; eyes flit from the kids to Gael to this one … He pockets the fag. ‘Do you think I done that?’
‘Your dog did.’
He leans in. ‘I seen who took a shite.’
‘You need to clean up after your dog.’
The dog stops and starts like a bus trying to merge with traffic. The owner pulls back his hood and his grease-flat hair looks like it’s permanent-markered onto his scalp. ‘–smack the head off yeh.’
‘My son was about to pick it up.’
‘Leave it,’ Gael says.
‘It could have killed him.’
The dog’s tail stump twitches and he whines. Ronan is screaming. Gael’s searching with one hand for his meds, or keys, her phone, but it all happens in the time it takes to unzip Pandora’s daypack.
It makes a prison percussion sound. The heavy-duty chain that serves as a leash. When he whips it up to lash Guthrie’s face, chin to cheekbone. The dog doesn’t bark so much as howl at being tugged and jerked away before the blood comes. Fled fast. And Gael has to dump both kids into the bike box – Soraca with her pants down – to get to Guthrie, painting the grass sloppily red as those Queen of Hearts cards he so pitied. His hand’s out in front of him for balance, as if he’s trying to get up. But he never fell down. He’s pushing his other sleeve to his lip so Gael chases back for a towel. Curses are the only words that come and Guthrie groans at her to stop in front of the babies. Some time must pass before either manages to say more.
‘No. Don’t phone. No. No ambulance. No police. No hospital. Don’t frighten them. You’re S C A R I N G them.’ He can talk, with a spoof lisp, without using his bottom lip. It’s split deeply but he says lips can’t be stitched anyway.
‘Don’t you have health insurance?’ Gael asks.
‘I do. Yeah, I do.’
‘Then let’s get it glued. Disinfected. Come on. I’ll call a cab.’
‘I’ve got first aid at home. We’ll just go home and put the kids in the pen in front of YouTube and wait to see if it stops bleeding.’
‘That’s insane, Guthrie! You’ve got insurance. Let’s go.’
‘No, Gael. No. It’s a cut. It’s a bruise. There’s an excess.’
‘What?’ Gael scans his injuries for some literal meaning. ‘How much?’
‘If I’d broken a bone …’
There’s another reason he’s not articulating. But Gael can’t think, not with the mauve tinge broaching on his cheek alongside his nose, like when you press a tea towel onto a red wine spill and it just begins to soak through. But way down in the fibres still. The twins are bawling and Gael goes to them to pull on Soraca’s trousers. The temperature seems to have dropped.
Then, because it’s very hard to do things like button buttons and lace laces when you’re thinking of all the things you should have done, shouted – he has fucking epilepsy, you scabbydickedtwat – she has to slow down and concentrate to fasten Soraca’s booties. ‘Shushushush, it’s okay.’ One task at a time. One boot. One boot. These booties. She holds them. A yellow embroidered logo on fawn leather. Blue-and-white striped cushioned interior. Ralph Lauren. Knockoffs, she thinks for a moment, but it’s obvious. Ronan has on a matching pair. A few hundred quid’s worth of footwear. Jarleth. His way of ‘providing’ because, of course, Guthrie wouldn’t take money.
‘Gael,’ Guthrie says.
Did he see her cop on to that just now?
‘Will you come and stay the night?’
Gael finally quiets the twins and zips the plastic cover shut. ‘We need to get ice on that.’ She takes the bike off its stand. ‘Tell me you have an ice tray.’ She waits. ‘Tell me you have a freezer.’
Guthrie hands her his keys. ‘Could you take them home?’
‘What’ll you do?’
He looks around vainly. ‘Walk.’
‘Don’t be an idiot.’
‘A bus. I can’t cycle them home like this. With one hand.’
‘I’m phoning Mum.’
‘Don’t. Please don’t.’
‘What if you– ’
‘I won’t.’
‘But what if–?’
But she didn’t need to ask it and he didn’t need to answer.
‘Don’t worry, Gael. I’m fine. I’m better.’
Gael goes over it on each of the seven kilometres home. Why had she been so slow? She should’ve photographed the fucker. Taken a video. Damages might’ve been worth it, to have that dickwad declared officially bankrupt. There was even a bike. She could’ve chased him down. Áras an Uachtaráin, the President of Ireland’s residence, was right there in the middle of the park. Within egging distance. Did his people not look out the window for fear of what they’d have to report? She should’ve known the zoo would come to them. The road would rise up to meet them on the chin. Slow-motion punches never land.
How had Guthrie’s voice sounded, though? How had he made it sound so … calm, authoritative? At the corner of the estate, a woman in a Hubba-Bubba-pink velour tracksuit is pushing her mother home in a SuperValu shopping trolley. The nearest SuperValu is an hour’s walk. Sisyphus, eat your heart out.
The twins sleep the whole way home. Gael missed the turnoff some blocks back going over it all again, thinking. Thinking: there’s no way this is it.
It was evening by the time things were back under control. Or at least under its semblance. Gael had bathed the twins and dried their unbearably soft, warm bodies until they glowed as if firelit. Getting them into new nappies and jammies while keeping both of them alive was something she considered an accomplishment, but had no interest in repeating on a daily basis for years on end, however lovely it was to be the recipient of their pure spontaneous smiles or to feel their awe at adult coordination.
With a sock full of frozen peas duct-taped to his cheek and a temporary dressing on his chin, Guthrie had taken up his usual sleeping post between the twins on a double mattress on the floor (so that they wouldn’t fall far if they rolled off) and he closed his eyes to set an example, to listen to Gael’s rendition of Where the Wild Things Are. ‘If I read it to them, like this, they’ll have nightmares,’ Guthrie had said. Gael gave in. She was curious to remember the
feeling of reading to her six-year-old brother when no one else would. It had been a sort of homework for both of them. Gael would point at the long words for Guthrie to pronounce, developing her ad-libbing skills when faced with his courage of questions: Are pancakes alive? Is Pooh a real name? Is oldness contagious? Do we have a stepmother? But where will they sleep if they run away? Why can’t he have more if he’s still hungry? When he developed a taste for didactic Victorian literature, Gael had quit. ‘Read yourself to sleep. If you’re stuck on a word, ask the internet. Or Mum, if she’s around. Don’t ask Dad, because his answers aren’t reliable.’
The twins’ breathing slowed and deepened and their eyelids fluttered like filament bulbs burning out. Guthrie stayed with them until the slow lapping of their breath assured him they were asleep.
On the sofa, Gael’s watching The Daily Show buffer on Guthrie’s shonky laptop, soaking up the sitcom that is US politics. To be fair, only a couple of weeks back, Ireland elected a seventy-year-old poet for a president. So if poetry can be called entertainment … ‘It can’t,’ Gael says, in the form of a grumble, to cancel out the image of Harper reciting her way across Gael’s delineations. In any case, the Irish had learned the meaning of ‘no laughing matter’ and ‘not amusing’ these past few years and were taking all five-foot-three-and-a-half of the poet-president to heart. He would reacquaint politics with philosophy.
‘Huh?’ Guthrie shifts his head on her lap.
‘Kicked in yet?’ she asks.
‘Huh?’
‘The Nurofen?’
‘Oh.’
Guthrie makes an effort to sit up.
‘Whoa-whoa-whoa easy there. Watch the scissors.’
Gael had redone his dressing even though the twins would only pull it off in the morning. She said she’d gaffer-tape mittens to their hands if he didn’t rest his head on her lap pronto so she could see what could be salvaged of his face. He’d submitted, a little more reluctantly than she was used to. Had he pulled his head to the ends of her knees? Had he tilted his split mouth, his nose, away a fraction? Had he flushed when she loosed his bun? All the more reason to draw him towards her: if you forgo that sort of intimacy too long, it can’t be recovered. She disinfected the cuts and used Steri-Strips to close the slit in his lower lip, which would take the longest to heal for how often the twins would break him open. ‘Keep a tub of Vaseline handy,’ she said. Again, the flinch. Did something else hurt? Beneath the dressing, his chin had looked like a beadlet sea anemone: the bloodred rock-suckers that retract when the tide goes out and become slimy blobs. If you press them, they squirt maroon liquid in defence, like a teenage girl calling ‘period’ when she doesn’t like her dare and wants out. When they went to Dún Laoghaire on summer days as kids, Gael would scour rock pools for those creatures and poke them dry. Guthrie would try anything to stop her from doing it. It pained him. ‘I found a ring!’ he’d shout, knowing full well it was a bottle cap. ‘Let’s collect periwinkles for pets!’ Then he’d try, ‘You could sell them?’ until finally being forced to play his last card: the thing that would make her drop anything, up to and including a future. Freeze, throe, flash.
Orchid & the Wasp Page 17
