Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  On Thursday they found the beach loungers the attendant had allotted them were beside the Northern Irish couple. He was sitting up under their parasol wearing a Hawaiian shirt and playing something on his iPhone. She was lying in a sensible black one-piece in the sun, reading Glamour. Alison noted with approval the stretch marks like tidemarks all over her thighs.

  As the attendant laid out their towels, the man looked up from his phone at Stephen and said, “You’re a good man.”

  “You what now?”

  “I was just saying you’re a good man”—he pointed at the Liverpool football shirt Stephen had on—“to be wearing that, especially after how they played last night.”

  “Ah, you know, through thick and thin.”

  “Mostly thin.”

  “We’re biding our time.”

  —

  All day they lay a few feet from the other couple. There had been no further friendliness from either side, and after a while it became too late. If anyone had spoken it would have given the lie to the agreed pretense that they were not listening to each other’s brief conversations about sun cream or the attendant’s unwillingness to take a beer order or the Greek word for towel.

  At lunchtime they found themselves in the queue for the buffet behind them. Alison’d gleaned that he was called Paul, but he hadn’t mentioned her name yet, had referred to her as darling. Alison and the darling smiled at each other.

  “You guys here for two weeks then?”

  “We are.”

  “We’ve just got the week.”

  “You on the Sunday flight back to Belfast?”

  “We are.”

  “We’re all on the same flight then.”

  “Ach lovely.”

  “You in Belfast?”

  “Antrim, actually. Paul works in the hospital there and I teach.”

  “I teach. Well, I did teach. I work in the family business now. Estate agency.”

  They talked and talked but somehow the automatized sorting processes—the reflexive threshing, sieving, straining—were not working. Paul and Stephen drank six beers between them, and Alison and Claire—her name was Claire—shared a bottle of locally grown Chardonnay. For approximately fifty minutes the women discussed their children, the rewards and trials of parenthood, the importance of sun cream and other products that provide defense against the foreign climes. Meanwhile the men talked about Louis van Gaal, his mistakes, his aims, his rubbery muppet face. And still Alison had no idea whether they were Catholic or Protestant, Cathestant or Protholic. She felt the refusal of context as frustration and then as a kind of mild delight. It was like meeting someone from England, but they didn’t have that brittle cold veneer the English had, where you were always worried about being overfamiliar or too blunt.

  “And where’s the school exactly?”

  They had eaten together in the middle of a table meant for eight.

  “Do you know Antrim?”

  “Not well.”

  “It’s down in the Markets—it’s a nice wee school. Integrated, you know, so—”

  “And does that work all right?”

  “Ach really very well—we’re about half and half. I mean there’s teasing issues. And not all shades of the community would be behind it, you know.”

  “Shall we head back down to the beach for a drink?”

  “Let me put this on my bill.”

  “Sure, we’ll stick it on ours.”

  “It’s all paid for anyway.”

  Paul said to the waiter, “Can you put it on room 405?”

  “Certainly sir,” said the diminutive teenager in the snowy Nehru jacket. “What’s the name?”

  “Devlin,” said Paul.

  —

  Back in their room an hour later Alison said, “They were very nice.”

  There was a pause and Stephen said, “Surprised?”

  “I didn’t know, to be honest.”

  “Mixed, do you think?”

  “Which way?”

  “Well, he’s Devlin.”

  “She teaches in the integrated.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they were nice.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “No, I know.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Liz stood on the little hillock Jess had recommended with her arm in the air, clutching her iPhone.

  “Getting anything?” Margo called.

  Tendrils of wood smoke rose from the huts on the hillside and flavored the cold morning air. They had traveled back a million years. Or forward. Time had gone strange. There was no sign of movement from the Werners’ little compound. The mist below them in the valley was already clearing. A few of the porters sat round a campfire smoking and chewing betel nut and drinking tea. Paolo walked towards her, his camera hoisted on his shoulder. He might have stepped off a black run in St. Moritz—silver wraparound shades and a neon yellow anorak. Liz smoothed her hair down, while trying not to look like she was doing it. For her on-camera outfit, she’d bought five plain black, but not unstylish, blouses in Ballyglass, along with three pairs of identical beige cargo pants—the edit could rearrange the scenes in any order and it would still work—but now she thought she should have worn something less . . . austere.

  “Can you walk down there, towards the trees, and then turn around and come back? Don’t look at the camera.”

  “OK.”

  Walking, strangely, was one of the hardest things about presenting. At soon as you knew someone was watching you walk, it became almost impossible to do it. Where does this arm go? Why is my back so hunched? Am I walking too slow, too fast? Her limbs swung like they were very loosely attached.

  She settled on a brisk, determined stride and then remembered to slow up and look around her, marveling at everything. The problem with TV was you had to perform experience rather than actually have it.

  What she felt now was fraudulent, more than a little ludicrous.

  She touched her neck and found the spider’s bite, the marble under her skin, had almost disappeared.

  “Guys?” Margo was shouting across to them. “Can you get ready to go? We’re picking Belef up on the way.”

  —

  Paolo filmed Liz walking up to the hut. She felt she was bobbing her head to some inaudible rhythm. Stan was already there, sitting on the log beside Belef, and Margo motioned to him to move out of the shot, but he didn’t see her or anyway didn’t comply. He held a hand-drawn map out in front of him and was asking Belef to point out various places on it. Reconciling her 3-D world to the 2-D map somehow amused her; she smiled and smiled at the piece of paper. As the crew approached, her face took on a rigidity and she said, “Do you make work with the New Truth?”

  “We’re from the BBC.”

  “What is the Beeby Say?”

  Margo’s face managed to express both rage and pity.

  “The BBC. The British Broadcasting Corporation. From Great Britain.”

  “David Beckham?”

  “He’s also from Great Britain.”

  “You work for the New Truth?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “You know Mister Josh?”

  “We just met him. But we’re here to learn about you. We’ve come all the way from London—”

  “And Ireland—”

  “To learn about you and your movement.”

  “The Story?”

  “Yes, the Story. Sorry.”

  There was a pause and she looked at the map again, pointed to something on it. Just then a low insectile whine started above them, and they looked up to see a white twin prop plane coming from the north, heading for the village. It banked steeply against the blue, readying itself to land.

  “You should get this,” Margo said, but Paolo was already filming it.

 
“What is the plane for?” Stan said.

  “For the mission,” Belef answered, and dismissed with a wave of her hand. “All their stuff, all their good stuff.”

  “I’d never get up to the landing strip in time to film it coming in.”

  “No, well, let’s leave it.”

  “Here.” Belef struck the map with a finger. “We must go here and make a telephone call. I need to speak to my children.”

  “To Kasingen,” Liz began.

  Belef nodded impatiently. “I have one daughter and three sons. Come, we will talk to them.”

  Belef stood and took the two steps across the grass to meet Liz and grabbed hold of her wrists firmly. Her hands were rough, chapped, and her mouth looked shocking, vampiric, blood red from betel nut. She stared into Liz’s eyes.

  “You and me, Lizbet, we died. Long time ago. But we did not know it—”

  “We died?”

  “We go on with walk and talk, but our spirits are gone from us. At Kirlassa I have visits of the tambaran who comes to me at night from the five stones. And last week my three boys came to me when I sleep. I was like this.”

  Belef let go of Liz’s wrists, closed her eyes sleepily and pushed her head onto Liz’s shoulder. Liz stumbled backwards slightly. She could see the camera from the corner of her eye and tried to stay completely calm. Part of her wanted to laugh and part of her wanted to turn on her heel and go home. She raised her hand and patted Belef on the arm. Belef pulled her head back and slowly opened her eyes; there was a dazed half smile in them. Your mind is very far from mine, Liz thought.

  “Kasingen, she comes every night and brings a flashlight so I can see them all well, all my boys and girl, and she told me Lizbet is your friend but she is dead, and you also are dead.”

  Belef looked into Liz’s eyes again, insisting. Liz found herself nodding.

  “Michael Ross told me: ‘The spirit of Lizbet entered your body and Lizbet’s body now has your spirit.’ So you must tell her this, and tell her the message also.”

  The hands again, gripping. Liz let herself be held. She stayed very still, though inside her heart thrashed and she found she was swallowing hard. Belef’s face was very near hers. The woman spoke matter-of-factly and Liz managed to match her tone. “And what is the message?”

  “Johnson told me this. Soon the whiteskins and all Chinese will leave New Ulster. They will go and not come back.” Belef widened her eyes; moats of white surrounded the deep brown irises. “The goods that the white spirits have stopped will be given among you. They say tell Lizbet this for she is our friend.”

  Liz nodded and tried to gently pull her wrists free, but Belef held fast. A tall thin woman appeared in the doorway of Belef’s hut, carrying a broom—twigs tied to a branch—to which she bore some resemblance. Her face was impassive, though her eyes imbibed the scene, pausing briefly at the fabulous eye of the camera. She wore a yellow cotton shift with small red flowers and butterflies embroidered along the hem, around the neck, and along the frayed sleeves that stopped halfway down her stringy upper arms. Among all the strangeness the dress looked familiar; Liz realized it was exactly the same one her sister had worn for her confirmation. It was in the photograph on Ken and Judith’s mantelpiece: them all standing outside Ballyglass Presbyterian’s stone arch doorway, the adolescent Alison in the middle, a kind of Elvis quiff that Judith would tong back for her in the mornings, her arms folded, a smile being coaxed out under sufferance . . . From Monsoon or Whistles or somewhere.

  Liz freed herself from Belef’s grip to gesture at the woman and say, “My sister has the same dress. That yellow dress.”

  Belef glanced behind and said: “That is your sister. And I am also.”

  The woman disappeared again into the shadows, and they heard the swish-swish of the brush start up.

  “Let us make moves. We have much to get done.”

  Belef gave a shrill whistle, and from behind the hut a skinny wide-shouldered man appeared wearing only a grass skirt—his torso reminded Liz of a kite, all struts and concave stretched membrane. And there was something steerable about him, his eyes eager for instruction as he stood shifting from foot to foot, waiting to catch a breeze and veer off.

  “This is Leftie.”

  “Leftie?”

  “He carries my tools.”

  She pointed to the string bag over his shoulder. In it were stones, twigs, some rough yellow papers covered with indistinguishable marks.

  “You like mango?”

  “Sure.”

  “Leftie, bring ’em mango. Good and soft.”

  A figure was making his way down the wide grass fairway. He wore sunglasses and beige slacks and a khaki short-sleeved shirt. Raula was lighter-skinned than most of the New Ulster inhabitants; he looked to have Indian blood. In his right hand he carried the briefcase, allowing it the tiniest of swings as he tramped down the slope. When he moved his arm the dark crescent of a sweat patch peeped out and was covered again. Behind him strolled two policemen in blue shirts and shorts.

  “That’s the deputy administrator,” Margo said.

  Belef looked up at the approaching delegation and gave a little half smile.

  “Leftie is my deputy.”

  They watched the delegation approach. When Raula was within a few meters of the hut, Belef got up and stood in the doorway with her back facing out. She spoke languidly to the woman inside, “Smel nogut i kamap,” at which the woman laughed loudly. Raula stopped at the edge of Belef’s garden and gave a little rigid bow.

  “Good morning.”

  Leftie appeared with a bark plate of mango and offered it round, ignoring the delegation. The two policemen stood a few meters away, one with his arms angrily folded, staring at Belef’s hut while the other fidgeted with his moustache and threw an occasional shy glance in their direction. Both had pistols on their belts. Finally, Belef turned round. She’d put on a pair of black glasses—glasses that had no lenses in them.

  “Mr. Raula, it is so nice to see you.”

  Liz wasn’t sure why she was so surprised that a person who professed a daily interaction with ghosts and who lived in a hut and who assumed that different spirits inhabited each rock and tree would be capable of high-grade sarcasm—but she was surprised. She liked Belef even more.

  “The Development Committee tells me you are causing much trouble.”

  A little pearl of spittle appeared on Raula’s lower lip as he talked. Out of the corner of her eye Liz could see that Paolo had started filming. She wiped mango juice from her chin.

  Belef chuckled meanly at Raula and said, “How could that be? I sit right in this place and watch the sun go up and it come back down.”

  “You are preventing the quotas being filled.”

  Belef sat down on the other log. She removed her glasses and closed them.

  “I don’t see that.”

  “The village gives two days for work on the coconut fields, one day for development, one day in the gardens, and two days in church work, Belef. I understand your followers have neglected their duties.”

  Raula looked at the camera.

  “Please do not.”

  Belef stood up and put her pretend glasses back on.

  “I see it all clearly. You want us to do the work for you.”

  “It is not the work for me. Please.” He turned to Paolo. “Please do not.” He wagged a finger at the camera.

  “Aren’t you the government?”

  “I work for the government, but, Belef, this is no good for the village. No good.”

  “I stop no one, I tell no one nothing. And who am I? I am no one. You have said it yourself to me.”

  This angered the administrator. He looked back at the two policemen, before turning to Belef again. “It is illegal to disrupt the development plans. I have asked you, please do turn the camera off.”
<
br />   Paolo set the camera on a log, but Liz could see the recording light stayed lit.

  “But I do nothing wrong.”

  “Nothing?” Raula stepped forward into the garden. “Is this a grave, Belef? Is this where Kasingen is buried? Isn’t it illegal to bury bodies anywhere but the graveyard?”

  Belef stood up. Raula was standing on top of the grave. He began to kick over the little crosses and shells. Belef’s eyes, for the first time, showed fear. Liz wondered if Raula was here because of them, to perform this power play for the cameras.

  “Are you keeping her close because you expect her to bring you money—to bring you law? You are malas, Belef. Malas. Bodies in the graveyard. There are rules for death. Rules!”

  “I keep all them rules.”

  “You are a nothing troublemaker. Your husband was bad as. And I hear the stories of your followers breaking Christian law. I could have you taken to Wapini and put into the jail. I could have your house burned down and all your followers put into the jail. Napasio! Napasio!”

  The tall woman appeared in the doorway of the house. She held her broom still and stared at Raula with open contempt.

  “Do you want to go to jail? I can send you into jail too. I can send all of youse. You need to put your house in order, Belef.” He lowered his voice. “Start going to church again. Stop all this nonsense.”

  Liz watched as Belef—her new sister—hawked and spat a red stain on the grass.

  —

  “One of the most important aspects of any religion,” Liz whispered, “is how it deals with its dead.” She peered behind her and the camera moved with her, seeing what she saw: A few meters distant, between two of the huge buttresses that supported the massive trunk of a date palm, Belef stood like a third buttress, pressing her forehead against the tree.

  “Belef is in the process of what she calls ‘talking on the telephone’—in this case through a hole in the side of the tree. And it’s through these telephones—these portals in the natural world—that she contacts those who have passed on.”