Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  The bedroom light comes on, shines out feebly through dirty panes. Robin hears mattresses sinking on springs, sneakers falling on wooden floors, the snap of an elastic waistband, a zipper, low voices. It is dark and starry and there are snakes in the country. The country. A gravelled road leading to a strange house, the smell of must and cattle, pools of rainwater trapped in the pot-holed yard.

  Her husband comes out and walks the board floor. When he speaks, his voice is resonant and tender. She is not sorry she married him.

  ‘Nobody’s saying we can’t go back, Robin. Nothing’s final. You know that.’

  ‘I know.’ She reaches out, squeezes his hand.

  ‘We have to come to terms with this thing. If it doesn’t work out we can always go back to town, no damage done. You understand?’

  She nods her head in the gloom.

  ‘Christ, it’s like travelling back in time. I keep expecting to hear the cutlery drawer slam. That was the kick-off: she’d whack the drawer of knives shut and you could smell trouble.’ He grips the railings until his knuckles turn white. ‘You see this swing? I got this put up here for the boy, so he’d be able to swing in his bare feet and cool off the scalds. Jesus.’ He shakes his head, as if everything is beyond him. ‘How could I have been such a fool for so long?’

  ‘Come to bed, honey,’ Robin says, taking his hand.

  Their belongings, boxes and carry-alls are dumped all over the floors, but she finds her way by the glow of the children’s night-light through to the back bedroom. They undress and lie down without bothering to wash. Robin pulls the blanket up around her chin. In the darkness, she can’t make him out. She can’t get over how dark it is out here. If somebody paid her a million dollars she wouldn’t walk down that gravelled road alone. She rolls into the warmth of her husband’s body, feels sleep tugging, pulling her under, and as she is giving in, letting go, she wonders if this is the side his ex-wife slept on.

  *

  In the morning, they prop the doors and windows open and a fresh wind travels through the house. Some of the window latches are stiff; there are cobwebs in every corner. The boys inspect dead moths and insects on the sills, turn them over with toothpicks, counting their legs, pulling their wings off.

  ‘Gross!’ the girl says, finding a baby cockroach under an old cornflakes box in the pantry.

  A thick, white dust hangs over everything. The girl writes her name on the horizontal surfaces. (She has just recently learned to read and write.) The stuffed stag head above the fireplace looks like he’s come in from the snow. Robin hates his plastic, watching eyes and there’s something dreary about the kitchen, with its orange walls, the blue, wooden geese flying in a V above the sink, the wobbly kitchen table.

  They breakfast on junk food, leftovers from the journey: crackers, Easi-spread, tortilla chips. Robin digs some instant coffee from a jar, boils water in a saucepan. Much of the cutlery in the drawers is rusted. When she opens the refrigerator, she sees pickles floating in a jar of green vinegar, bulbs of dried-out garlic, shrivelled hot dogs.

  ‘Who’s for a shot of penicillin?’ she says, holding up a mouldy tomato.

  They explore the house after breakfast. The living area is all on the second floor; the country kitchen, a big, high-ceilinged living room, three bedrooms with baths, and a dormitory with eight single beds. (The extended family used to come up for Thanksgivings.) Off the kitchen, a junk room with a washing machine and dryer, a cradle, a wall of shelves stacked tight with paint cans, toddlers’ toys, frisbees, charcoal. Everything faded from too much sun. They descend the steps from the living room down to the ground floor, which is empty. Nothing down there only a musty feeling, a concrete floor, old smells of leather, roots and mice. The middle boy stands at the top of the steps and watches them descend and return, but he does not venture down.

  The yard stretches down to a black barn with stalls, hay bales, a chicken shed with toadstools inside the door. At the far end, trees are sprouting small, hard peaches. The morning sun throws this side of the house into deep and palpable shadow. Bamboo canes for supporting peas and beans still stand askew in the vegetable patch. The boys dislodge them from the earth and throw them like javelins across the tall weeds. The girl is quiet, carrying her stuffed giraffe, holding him up to peep in through the cracks in the chicken shed, the stalls in the barn, reading the brand names on empty feed bags.

  When the boys ride into town with their father for supplies, Robin takes the girl down the field to pick wild flowers. The boundaries are blood-red with some shrub she cannot name. The girl points out the poison ivy, tells Robin to ‘watch out’, and reaches up to pluck the reddest, heaviest blooms. When she scratches the circular scar on her wrist, Robin asks if she can hold her flowers.

  Quickly, the girl pulls her sleeve down and shakes her head, no.

  They walk back through swishing, buttercupped grasses to the house. The girl finds old cans from plum tomatoes in the junk room, peels their faded labels off, revealing shiny silver tin underneath, and arranges the red flowers while Robin sweeps the floors.

  The boys come back with brown-paper bags of groceries and McDonald’s Happy Meals. Their father has brought drinking water for the fountain. When the girl climbs on to a stool, the table wobbles and her drink spills. A look of terror passes over her face. She begins to cry out of all proportion.

  ‘Hey!’ says her father. ‘Hey, my baby girl, what’s wrong? Here, it doesn’t matter. Here, have mine.’

  He sits her on his lap and gives her a sip out of his drink, dips a French fry into ketchup and tells her she is a good girl, his girl, to eat up, that soon she will be as tall as those weeds in the yard, but the girl slides down between his knees and crouches under the shelter of the table.

  *

  That night in bed, after the children have gone to sleep and doors are locked, they talk.

  ‘Maybe I’m just opening a can of worms, coming up here,’ he says. ‘Taking the kids up here. Opening a big can of worms.’

  ‘I don’t think so, honey.’

  ‘It’s like the bitch is still here. I feel it. The children feel it,’ he says. ‘Did you see her today, just spilling her drink, how upset she was? Maybe this just isn’t necessary.’ He reaches out to turn the fan up a notch. ‘We were in a restaurant one time and she spilled her grape juice; well, you know grape juice, the way it stains. It was a fancy place too, a white tablecloth and all. Well, she just lost her rag, reached out and whacked that little girl across the face before I could move.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  He sips water from a plastic cup. Some of the hairs on his belly have turned white.

  ‘Maybe we should do the place up different, make it over, change things round,’ Robin says. ‘We could ask some of the kids’ friends up. It’s not like there isn’t room.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He wipes his forehead. ‘Maybe we should shake holy water around, get the preacher in. Maybe we should set a match to this place and high-tail it out of here. Go back home, get our heads examined.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, scratching his hair. ‘Everything’ll be okay, you’ll see.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he says, punching up the pillows. ‘I certainly hope so.’

  *

  The first thing they tackle is the kitchen. They move out all the furniture, the dresser, the wobbly table, take the wooden ducks and the fire extinguisher off the walls and empty out the cabinets. They draw a design for a new kitchen on the back of an old Whitney Bank calendar. An island is what they decide on. Something they can all sit around and cook at. They let each child choose a name from Carpenters in the Yellow Pages and call for estimates.

  When the week’s over, their island is built in the centre of the kitchen. Nothing fancy, just a tall rectangular counter with cabinets underneath. The gas man has piped in a supply for a hob. Robin takes the girl down to the co-op, and they choose pretty, brick-red tiles for the counter tops, two dozen decorative tiles with beige leaves for the border. Together th
ey mix grout in a basin and lay it all down. She lets the girl stay up late to help her while everybody else is sleeping. She buys five tall directors’ chairs, the kind where you can take the canvas seats off and throw them in the washing machine, gets an electrician to install dimmer switches above the hob. The boys screw crooks into the beam overhead and hang all the cooking utensils from the ceiling.

  The night it’s finished their father drives down to the Winn Dixie market for root beer. Robin has a tray of lasagne in the oven and she’s baking a chocolate cake for dessert. The kids kneel on the directors’ chairs around the island and help out. Robin puts the eldest boy in charge of sifting the flour and cocoa while she beats the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. The girl measures out the teaspoons of baking powder and corn starch and greases the tin with butter while her brother whisks the eggs. Robin gives everyone a turn at the mixing bowl, smiles at the girl, who is left-handed and mixes counter-clockwise. Robin checks the oven, pours the batter in the tin. The children lick the bowl clean.

  ‘Okay,’ says Robin, ‘your dad’ll be home soon. Let’s clear up.’

  Robin lights a candle and places it on the middle of the island, dims the lights. Seeing the girl’s red flowers on the sill, she reaches, and it’s then she notices something at her feet. At first she thinks it’s a mouse. She is not afraid of mice. The girl is the first to scream. The children instinctively climb up on the island for safety and knock the lighted candle over.

  And that is how their father finds them, his three children and his new wife screaming, a naked flame, a fire starting in the kitchen, and the floor moving. He douses the candle, quickly before it catches, and looks down at the floor. He has never seen anything like it. For some reason he cannot move. Instead, he remembers an old black-and-white movie with locusts descending on a field somewhere in Africa, wiping out an entire crop, a livelihood, in minutes.

  Cockroaches are everywhere. Hard-bodied, shiny roaches. They are crawling around the island, scuttling up the cabinet doors, behind the taps, underneath the water fountain. They swirl in behind the red flowers that smell like cat piss on the sill. The sound they make is not unlike the sound of drizzling rain. The children are standing on the island. The eldest boy reaches for the cooking utensils on the beam, the serving spoon, the fish-slice, the ladle, and hands them to his siblings. They start killing. They stamp on them with their sneakers. The girl, reluctant at first, rolls her sleeves up to get a good whack at them. Robin runs into the junk room. Her shoes make an awful sound with every step. She brings out tennis racquets and a plastic baseball bat and she too starts killing. Her husband is mesmerised. His new wife is killing with both hands.

  ‘Don’t just stand there!’ she screams. ‘Help us!’

  She hands him the baseball bat, opens a cabinet door under the island and a fresh invasion spills out on the floor. A darting stream is crawling up from what seems to be the heart of the house, from downstairs into the centre of the kitchen. A surge of children’s voices, piercing and irreverent, thunders through the house. Everyone clambers, is covetous to kill them.

  ‘Come on!’ The father is shouting. ‘Come on, you bitches!’

  They cannot say how long it is before the shiny stream of roaches dwindles to a trickle and stops. The father’s eyebrows are wet with sweat, the elastic in the girl’s ponytail has fallen within an inch of her hair’s end, the boys are breathing as they would after a football game. They do not smell their dinner burning. They are watching. They are listening. Every one, listening. They can hear their own heartbeats. When a drop of water falls, plop, into the sink, they move violently, as one.

  Quare Name for a Boy

  I have come home to tell you. I have walked back into my past, my clothes too small for me, a story from a women’s magazine. Oh, I’ve come back before, bought ferry crossings for engagement parties, my nephew’s christening and Christmases. That’s when I met you, at one of those dos. You chatted me up over the hors d’oeuvres, fed me paté on melba toast as we stood between a besequinned hostess and a man in black. I was your Christmas fling, a thing to break the boredom of the holidays, and you were mine. But now these suitcases have the weight of anchors on this floor I learned to walk on. It may be I’m back for good.

  My female relatives huddle round me in the bedroom, have brought up tea, china cups and saucers excavated from the sideboard, the clink of crockery on trays. They’re tweedy, big-boned women who like to think they taught me right from wrong, manners and the merits of hard work. Flat-bellied, temperamental women who’ve given up and call it happiness. We come from women who comfort men, men who never say no. Now they fill their best teacups, asking about my future, asking, ‘What is it you do now?’ and ‘What are you going to do now?’, which isn’t quite the same thing.

  ‘I’m going to write,’ I say. A smutty novel, I want to add, something lecherous and bawdy, make Fanny Hill look like your Sunday missals.

  This always brings a sneer. It’s a smart answer but a queer occupation, especially at my age. They calculate my age mentally, trying to remember what happened around the time I was born, who died. They’re not too sure, but I’m no spring chicken any more. I should be doing something else by now, latching myself on to some unmarried man with a steady wage and a decent car.

  ‘You and your books,’ they say, shaking their heads, squeezing the good out of the teabags.

  They don’t know the half of it. Don’t know the disguises I’ve made for them, how I took twenty years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blonde rinses out of their hair. How I put them in another country and changed their names. Turned them inside out like dirty old socks. The lies I’ve told.

  I unpack my suitcases and the ritual begins. They lean in from the bed, the armchair, the windowseat, and make conversation, wondering what new clothes I have, if my shoes are patent, my dresses silk. They finger the fabric, see how deep the hems are, read the labels, ruminate:

  ‘Nice bit a stuff in that; where’d ya come at it?’

  ‘Be the flip, look at the mini!’

  ‘But sure the minis are all in again, don’t you know.’

  ‘She has the legs.’

  ‘Lovely bit of linen in that but the devil wouldn’t iron it.’

  ‘Can’t beat the drip-dry, really, can ya?’

  ‘What size is that? Would that fit me? You’ve put on a bit of weight if ya don’t mind me saying so. But you have the height, you can carry it.’

  I drape practical cotton blouses, flared elasticated skirts, across wire hangers, a black wool trouser suit, a cashmere dress. Practical shoes that belie my occupation. A pair of red high heels to confuse them. They rummage through my things, trying to find out who I am.

  Eventually they retreat into the kitchen to prepare dinner. It’s getting on for six: the men’ll soon be home. I hear the clunk of potatoes in the sink, the clatter of saucepan lids, and soon the smell of boiled turnip drifts upstairs. I had forgotten how these back rooms bruised yellow in the evenings. I sit under the window and read with my face in the shade and my book in the sunlight and wonder if it’s bad for my eyes, crossing that distance. I read Jamaica Inn, the first book that lured me into this deception, and think Daphne would be a good name if it’s a girl.

  *

  I have arranged to meet you in Dublin. You look handsome and tall in your cowboy boots. You kiss my neck in greeting, but your lips are cold. And something I do not remember, a gold stud, peeps out of your left earlobe. You tell me the English air must suit me, that I’m blooming.

  ‘You’re looking well, whatever you’re doing with yerself over there,’ you say with something that sounds like disapproval.

  Irish girls should dislike England; they should stay home and raise their sons up right, stuff the chicken, snip the parsley, tolerate the blare of the Sunday game.

  ‘I’m a hooker, did you not know?’

  ‘Well, your tongue’s not changed.’ You laugh and loop your arm through mine and take me out to t
he coast, to Sandycove, the granite dome of Joyce’s tower mushrooming into the cold afternoon sun.

  ‘He wrote all them famous books. Imagine,’ you say, ‘and this is the snot-green sea.’

  A ruffle of dirty sea splashes against the rocks overlooking Gentleman’s Beach. I lie down and pull my coat up round me. The salt wind is sharp, would cut the arse off a girl. We stay there for a long time without saying a word, our thoughts forking out separately.

  I remember the story of a young woman someplace down west. They found her in a hut her father’d built, a one-roomed place without a chimney. In a wood he’d kept her and let her die sooner than let a neighbour know. I can still see the photos: a stretcher with a body bag, another of her smiling in a school group, her head and shoulders circled.

  A fishing boat passes, not so far out that we cannot hear the men’s voices singing ‘My! My! My! Deeelilah!’ We watch them go out into deeper waters towards Howth.

  You think it’s funny.

  ‘Idiots,’ you say, smiling.

  You have always liked other men’s pleasure, taking a small share of it for yourself. I would have thought it was funny too, if I hadn’t known what I know now. I used to think I could never know too much. In college, I couldn’t get enough. I stacked the books up high on the bedside locker, read late into the night and traded them in for more as if learning was something you could reduce over time. But now I know too much; like an eavesdropper I feel I have overheard an irrefutable story about myself, and so I must go slowly, must keep this to myself until I’m ready. Like holding a too-full glass, not being able to move, afeared of spills.