Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Viking in 2017

Copyright © Nick Laird 2017

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Nick Laird asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008257354

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008257347

Version: 2018-05-22

Dedication

I.M. Carol Laird

(1950–2017)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1: Six Nothings

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part 2: In the Way That Fire Wanders

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Nick Laird

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

“I am a man of constant sorrow.”

The microphone right up at his lips and the black Stetson tilted back, Padraig was going at it full tilt. He liked to start a capella with that long and twisted first note, just the way Ralph Stanley did.

“I’ve seen trouble all my days.”

Around the bar the drinkers were two or three deep. Each of the snugs was occupied and the wee round tables by the dance floor were pretty much full. No one was dancing, not yet, but you could see it was about to start. When Alfie kicked in on the banjo the shoulders of a couple of women began swaying. In a matter of moments the floor would start filling up.

The lounge bar on the other side of the counter—you reached it through the side entrance—looked to be busy too. The front door banged against the high side of the first booth—some sort of scuffle broke out—and then there were two eejits in plastic Halloween masks.

“I bid farewell to old Kentucky.”

One, a vampire, the other a Frankenstein’s monster. The gipes. But it was Halloween soon enough and sure why not.

“The state where I was born and raised.”

Padraig hooked his thumbs in his belt and did a quick two-step to the side as Alfie and Derek harmonized.

“The state where he was born and raised.”

He pointed to Derek, who nodded and grinned and hit the hi-hat, then to Alfie, who closed his eyes and flicked the neck of the banjo vertical and back again.

“For six long years I been in trouble.”

A car backfired outside was it? And again, and then a young fella in a hooded top standing near the fruit machine seemed to fall into the wall. The vampire had his arms straight up and at the end of them was a pistol. Frankenstein strode out fast into the middle of the dance floor and in his arms he carried a semi-automatic. A surge of bodies away from the door now, pushing across the lounge bar and much screaming. Dozens of customers were pressed up against the front of the stage. Padraig sang, No pleasure yet … and trailed off. Alfie strummed on for a couple of chords, but then he stopped too.

Frankenstein spun round and round on his heel, firing. There was a loud dull pop-pop-pop-pop, and a little puff of redness erupted from the side of the head of an old man seated at the bar. Down he went off his stool like the string was cut inside him. A woman sitting at a table clutched at her breast and fell into her husband. He was shaking her by the shoulders, holding her head up. A wee fella trying to get down the corridor towards the toilets stopped when a large darkness flowered on the back of his shirt.

The screaming. Jesus, the screaming.

Alfie came to life and jumped over the drums and the whole kit went toppling backwards off the stage, taking Derek with him. The gunman became a centrifugal force—all the people threw themselves outwards, away from him, against the walls of the bar, scrambling, scrabbling—against the tables, the booths—trying to get farther and farther away as he turned round and around. Fut-fut-fut-fut went the gun.

A young woman wearing red spectacles ducked down under her table. Two women were already under there, but four had been sitting in the alcove. Wine glasses empty and half empty all slid down now, smashing onto the floor.

The shooting stopped and a man’s voice, hoarse with delight, shouted, “Trick or treat!”

Then the shooting started again. A pause and a different kind of gunshot: clipped, duller, efficient. The other man was firing now with a handgun. The vampire. Frankenstein was in the middle of the dance floor, loading the magazine on the semi-automatic. Bodies moved slowly on the ground.

Here was one moaning where the carpet met the dance floor. The vampire with the pistol fired another shot into it. The head just exploded everywhere.

Here was a man in a sports jacket curled into a ball. Here was a lady gripping the legs of a bar stool and wailing hysterically. Here was a scatter of archipelagic blood on a “Guinness Is Good for You” mirror.

Here was a man lying over his wife; more blood flowed out from under their huddled crying form in competing dark runnels across the parquet dance floor. Vampire fired at them again and fut, the huddle lay flat. A woman banged against the door of the ladies’ toilets, but the three women inside held the door closed. “Trick or treat,” the voice shouted hoarsely. “Trick or treat.” The woman screamed, “Please, please, please, please,” but then a very fast piece of metal entered the side of her head and she stopped.

PART 1:

CHAPTER 1

“Hello.”

“Do we need milk? Did you get the paper?”

“I got the paper.”

Kenneth opened the fridge.

“We have … half a carton of semi-skimmed.”

“There any buttermilk?”

“You making wheaten bread?”

“I was going to.”

“I don’t see any.”

“I’ll get some apple pancakes for Liz. Did the marquee people call?”

“Not yet. There’s an ad I see there in the Telegraph magazine for trousers with elasticated waists—”

“I have elasticated-waisted trousers.”

“They’re very reasonable.”

Judith sighed: “If I want to buy elasticated trousers, I’ll just go into Cunninghams and buy elast—”

“I’m just saying these are very reasonable. They’re twenty-nine ninety-nine. And they’re in every color. Salmon. Mauve. What are they in Cunninghams? Twice that? Three times?”

“Why don’t you order a pair for yourself?”

It was Kenneth’s turn to sigh. That Kenneth was overweight was not in doubt, but if anyone needed elasticated trousers, it was Judith: the deadly, hidden growth they knew from the X-rays was now a physical presence, rising up beneath her belts, no longer hidden by cardigans, and her husband was breaking an unwritten rule by referring to it—however obliquely—first. She didn’t need reminding. If she wanted to talk about it, she would talk about it.

“Did Liz call?” Judith asked, shoving the conversation on, and down the line Kenneth could hear the engine of a tractor, turning over somewhere near his wife’s car, and her busy hand tapping out her impatience on the steering wheel.

“No.”

“Does she expect collecting from the airport?”

“Well, she’s a grown woman, I’m sure she’ll let us know.”

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” said Judith.

Kenneth paused and then offered, “I’ll leave the magazine out anyway for you to see.”

Judith performed the last and therefore definitive sigh of the conversation.

Kenneth plugged the phone back into the charger. The beep beep beep went again and he remembered why he was standing in the kitchen. He tugged the dishwasher open, feeling the ligament twinge in his elbow. No, not the dishwasher: lifeless, smelling ruinously of yesterday’s fish pie. He pushed at the fridge door to check the seal was intact and saw out past the rockery a beige smear on the back lawn. He raised his readers from his nose up to his forehead, and with the other hand slid the distance glasses into place. A rabbit sat in the middle of the lawn, brazen, chewing stupidly.

Kenneth tapped on the window with his gold signet ring. Two coal tits fluttered off the bird feeder, lapped the tarmac, and re-alighted. But the rabbit did not move. Chew chew. Sniff.

He tapped the glass again. Sniff. Glance. Nothing. For a moment the “guiding best presence” he’d been working with their counselor Theresa, since September, to establish—“the mindfulness” to help steer the boat of himself through the treacherous currents of “this new life”—was utterly lost to Kenneth. He was pounding the window explosively hard with the side of his fist.

The rabbit jerked its gaze towards the house but felt that, no—on consideration it must decline. Chew chew. The base of Kenneth’s palm hurt, and yet how briefly elevating it had felt to bang one thing very hard against another. “Anger,” Theresa believed, “comes from feeling powerless.” Well, yes. Beep beep beep. A sudden hunch and Kenneth rounded the table quickly to depress the fat button of the microwave; the little door popped and swung out to reveal a vaguely semenistic stain of hardened oatmeal on the frosted circular plate. But no, not the microwave. He sat on the edge of the sofa and waited. The room was silent. He stood up and waited, and the room was silent. He walked back and stood at the kitchen window and looked out and waited. Beep beep beep.

That sky hanging over the back hills was heavy with rain about to get falling. Sidney, his older brother, would be heading up to the cattle in an hour or so. He’d get soaked.

Beep beep beep.

In every room in the house something was dying or calling out or crying to be tended to and soothed and nursed again on energy. Behind that rabbit, on the hillside in McMullens’s field, the pylon, the carrier of all that energy, stood with its arms upraised like St. Kevin’s, in perpetual ache, bringing the news of heat and light to all these decent bill-paying people. At the beech hedge the telegraph pole met a substantial black cable and led it down into the soil to swim through articulated tubing beneath the neat lawn and raucous flowerbeds, a few potato drills by the bitumen fence, the three bent-backed apple trees, and the tarmac and newly varnished decking, before it surfaced at the back door to surge through the rubberized wires in the wall, slalom the fuse box circuits, and arrive in his house to power this fucking beeping he still could not locate.

There was a rumble of the cattle grid and a second later Judith’s Volvo swung round the back of the house. The bunny upped and scarpered across the grass into the beech hedge, and the finality of the movement—the way the coppery leaves gulped down the little marshmallow tail—pleased Kenneth. He liked it best when problems disappeared themselves. He thought of Liz, his eldest, sloping towards him across twenty-five years, down in the hollow of Faulkner’s back field, retrieving a rabbit Kenneth had just shot. The wee lass’s lanky arm straight out, the coney hanging by the ears, urine still trickling from it. He remembered how his daughter had turned away from the thing, her mouth closed tight and her face concentrated upon not showing any emotion at all. He’d shot it through the hindquarters, the bullet entering from the back, and as Liz walked along little bits of white fluff came off the tail like a dandelion clock unseeding.

He put the kettle on and pressed his fingertips against it until they started to hurt with the heat. It was what? Eleven o’clock? A quarter past. He felt sleepy and heavy, like he might tip forward onto the counter. He tried it slightly, letting his stomach press against its beveled edge. The New Truth Mission calendar hung on a nail by the window, a little black child grinning out at him from Africa, delighted to receive some wispy shaving of Kenneth’s eight pound monthly direct debit. The child had a perfectly round head, and perfectly round eyes with perfectly round pupils, black circles in white circles in a black circle …

Judith was back now, she was just outside, she would come through the door and events would happen, life would move forward. A starling hung upside down on the feeder, mutilating with a wild flurry of pecks the fat ball he’d put out after breakfast. They went so quick. He’d bought twenty of them in Poundland only a couple of weeks ago. The door of the Volvo banged shut. The sky above the Sperrins was like a sheet of lead, cutting him off from all sources of energy—the sun’s heat, the sun’s light. He was trying to put off the thought that in two days there would be 112 drunk people in his garden, no doubt trampling over his newly planted flowerbeds.

The next beep entered his left ear a millisecond earlier than the right, and with a small grunt of triumph he realized it must be the tumble dryer. It sat atop the washing machine in the little porch by the back door. He pressed the button with the symbol of the key and the porthole clicked open; Kenneth pulled out the clothes in tangled clumps and let them fall in the plastic basket by his feet. They gave off warmth and a lilac smell and Kenneth felt his mood shift slightly upwards. The optimism of a load of freshly tumbled clothes. He could see his morning spreading benignly out before him. A bit of telly, one of the auction shows. A cappuccino. A piece of shortbread. But then as he lifted the basket, beep beep beep. It came from behind him, from the tumbler again.

Seeing the pixelated Judith looming through the back door, fiddling with keys, he said loudly, “But this is only ridiculous!”

He had the basket in his arms and was stepping through to the kitchen when she got the back door open. He could see immediately that something was not right by the look on her face, that his own morning trials were about to be subsumed by something much larger, but he kept going and set the basket on the table, and was already back in his armchair by the time she’d hung up her coat and come in. Maybe if he didn’t look at her, maybe if he kept his focus to the orange-skinned fool on the TV pricing antiques, whatever was coming would not arrive.

Judith unpacked the bags and put the shopping away, letting the cupboards slap shut, Kenneth noted, with scant regard for the hinges.

He kept on staring at the TV, but on the far left of his vision he could still see her, trying to arrange scarlet tulips in a Belleek vase so that a bent-necked one stayed straight in the middle of the bunch. It flopped forward, and again. The rain that had been threatening for the last hour started. Big drops exploding on the roof of the car. The patio spotted, mottled, in a moment darkened uniformly.

“I don’t know why I ever buy these. They never last. Honest to God the petals are already coming off this …”

Something in her voice—some new alarm, some warning—made him turn to her. He softened as he always did at the sight of sadness and stood up in his new, tentative way, and went to her. She was sobbing now and fell into him, and held him while he repeated—although he knew the answer—“What’s wrong, what’s wrong? Whatever’s wrong now?”

CHAPTER 2

The moment the students filed out of the classroom, Liz felt humiliated. She could never entirely shake the suspicion that they had been laughing at her moments before she entered, and then at best they seemed indifferent and at worst contemptuous through the long three hours that followed. The ideal of teaching was surely to produce something like a gravitational effect when one walked into the room. She’d certainly had dons like that: dry, thickly draped women with hair in retentive buns; or Professor Paulson himself, who would walk up the lecture hall to a silence that gathered and gathered until only the sound of his footsteps ascending to the podium were heard. But lately Liz found herself forced to the conclusion that she was of a different stripe, the kind of teacher who talks fast because she’s not entirely sure of her facts, directs questions to the logorrheics to waste time, and forgets her grading, or forgets to do it, and whose lesson plan is three lines long and most weeks consists of reading out chapters of her own far-from-finished book. She couldn’t get her act together. Although the classroom engendered panic, it was never quite enough to spur her into useful action. Now she closed the door behind the last shuffling backpack, fell into one of their empty seats, and at once opened her Gmail, looking for relief, distraction, and read: LIZ: URGENT DISASTER which seemed an accurate if brutal definition.

Liz, darling, it’s Margo—

It’s been so long! Too long!

I still think back to the Myth project with such affection and such pride and I’ve been hoping to work with you again for the longest time. I heard you were teaching in America so I hope this e-mail finds you happy and well and ensconced in life stateside. But not *too* happy and not *too* well! Because I need your help!

A somebody called Charlotte Taylor-Anderson had been lined up to present The Latest of the Gods—a documentary about a religious movement in New Ulster, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, for The State of Grace, a special season on religion the BBC were doing—but this Taylor-Anderson had just broken her back on an artificial ski slope in Perthshire. Margo had an experienced cameraman lined up who’d done an Attenborough series, the permits were in place, but she lacked a presenter. They were meant to shoot next week. Would Liz consider stepping in?

Several PDFs were attached, including a newspaper clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald, “A New God in New Ulster,” written by Stan Merriman. Liz skimmed the article. A cargo cult prophet named Belef had started a movement called the Story, which merged some of the local religions with Christianity, and threw in a bit of political independence. The missionaries were all stirred up. The most surprising thing seemed to be that Belef was a woman.

Could she do this? She’d have to go back to the apartment and get hiking gear and waterproofs, more contact lenses, a couple of books—maybe William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and there was that Peter Lawrence one on cargo cults. She opened Google Earth and called up New Ulster. Curved like a scimitar. Entirely green. A chaos of peaks and valleys. When she tried to zoom in, none of it, not an inch, appeared to be mapped.

The excitement propelled her effortlessly along, all the way home, until she reached the front door of her own studio. She knocked, got no answer, and began to look for her keys. She jiggled away the loyalty key rings for various pharmacies, opened the door, and look, there was a man she didn’t know standing in her kitchenette. He wore a green T-shirt that had the words “Some Crappy Band” printed on it, purple underpants, and one red sock—the other foot was bare and long toed and dirty looking. Clearly not a burglar. It occurred to Liz that she had for once occasioned something like a sudden atmospheric change—her presence used up all available oxygen. Atlantic, her useless dog, butted at her shins and whined. Joel was also standing—also wearing a T-shirt and pants—on the far side of the bed, breathless, saying, “Liz, hi, I didn’t—this is Jeff.”

“Okay.”

Liz said it very slowly, testing the weight of the word on the room. Nobody replied. Joel was for some reason on the verge of smirking. She turned towards Some Crappy Band.

“Hello.”

“How’s it going?”

The man in the kitchenette spoke with no embarrassment or shame. Really quite cheerful, considering the situation he now found himself in. There was some disjunct going on here. Tall and freckled and milky-skinned with light brown eyes, somehow even more Joel’s opposite than she was, gender aside. A farm boy with that fleshy softness. Innocent as butter. And a dark wet coin on the front of his purple briefs.

Joel said, “Weren’t you going straight to Newark?”

There was no need to answer this, but she found herself doing so: “I got an e-mail. I’ve been asked to present a TV show … in Papua New Guinea.”

Joel was nodding foolishly.

“Amazing,” he whispered across the bed.

Atlantic butted and pawed at Liz’s knees.

The man said, “A TV show? Cool. Very cool. And very cool of you to let Joel crash here.”

“Oh. Well. I am nothing if not cool.”

What was she saying? She felt her fury being ousted by some kind of ironic pose. And there was an inconvenient pressing in her bladder that was now a matter of some urgency. In her tiny bathroom, only a rattan door separated her from the rest of the studio, she turned on the tap to camouflage the sound of her ablutions. But now she couldn’t hear them. Were they whispering? She stopped the tap, and waited. Nothing. She turned it on again.

Crap Band. She’d seen him before, at the SoulCycle class a few weeks ago. He’d worn a green, deep-cut sleeveless vest and sat on the other side of Joel. When Joel dropped his water bottle Crap Band picked it up. It was Liz’s first time and she had not returned. But Joel now went every other day to hear Madison shout, “The body does what the mind tells it”—which had never been Liz’s experience. She sat on the toilet and gripped the edge of the basin in front, pissed while staring dumbly at her hands, the way Atlantic pissed, as if it were happening to somebody else. Like the end of this relationship. Apparently unfolding right now, though it somehow felt like it was happening to somebody else.

She’d first met Joel in the lobby of the Standard hotel. A young Asian man sat eating by himself nearby, facing a wall. He wore a black tie and a white shirt, and she’d realized he worked here and was on his break. Widely spaced eyes and a tiny bud-mouth, grinning intensely at her. Then he was not there—then materialized again from behind a very tall black woman in a silver lamé body suit. He was coming towards her, weaving between tables. Shorter than she might reasonably have hoped for but proportionate. Ran a hand through his fringe and squared his shoulders, which endeared. She’d studied the melt of ice in her glass and swirled the blunted cubes around with the straw. Here, here he was. The most marvelous cheekbones and thin mocking eyes.

“You’ve really got to stop staring at me,” he had said.

All delightful. But beginnings always are. They tell you nothing. It’s the end of the affair that brings the real information.

Washing her hands, delaying reentry, she looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. She made herself bare her teeth like a monkey, then dried her hands on the towel and walked back into the crime scene.

Jeff put his hand out and Liz shook it meekly, not meeting his eye. He’d pulled on a pair of unclean denim dungarees that were a few inches too short, and now he punched his way into a frayed plaid shirt and began buttoning it up.

“Good to meet you finally. Joel talks a lot about—”

“Jeff,” Liz repeated dumbly, setting her bag down on the chair.

“That’s right. Jeff.”

“This is my flat,” she said, as if that were news.

“Hey, you know,” said Jeff, spreading his arms. “I’m sorry if any of this is awkward for you.”

Three mason jars were standing on the kitchen counter—one green, one purple, one yellow—and each held some kind of fetal-looking object.

“They’re mine,” Jeff said, following her gaze. “So, I pickle? Pretty much every vegetable you can think of, really. It’s a hobby … I brought a few jars over for Joel.”

Liz turned her full attention to Jeff, and looked into his brown eyes. Too late he understood that he shouldn’t keep mentioning Joel’s name. It poked up out of his speech like a swear word. They both looked at the name’s owner; at some point he had climbed back into bed and there was a definite sense of bemusement coming off him. He was wearing her Montclair T-shirt, and it was on inside out.

Joel said, “I’m sorry about this, Jeff—”

“You’re apologizing to him? Really?”

“Can we do this later?”

“Oh, I think we need to do this now.”

“These things happen,” Joel said. “We agreed monogamy was … not for us. You said that you—Liz!”

She had decided to kick over the chair on which she’d hung her tote, but her foot got entangled in the strap and she stumbled slightly, had to hop. Enormous lovely Jeff steadied her with a hand to the shoulder, which Liz shrugged off. She had an urge to rip something up, but the only thing she could see was some junk mail on the oven. She lifted it but saw now it was a bill from Con Ed and they were a massive pain to contact and she set it down again. Jeff the pickler left a minute later, having silently wrapped his three jars in hessian sacks and placed them in an old blue Pan Am bowling ball bag. Joel finally found the decency to look unhappy, and Liz righted the chair and sat in it and stared at him.

Eleven minutes later Joel set his holdall and three plastic bags by the door, and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her. He placed his fingertips together and, as if admitting something, sighed and said, “I hate to think you’re unhappy. That I’ve made you unhappy.”

Liz felt her own silence working on him as punishment, and she kept it up and stared at him. Was it the fact it was a man? Did that make it better or worse? The morning after they’d first fucked, which was the morning after they’d first met, she and Joel had gone for coffee at the Moonlight Diner a block down from her apartment. Peaceably hungover, him back in his waiter’s uniform, they’d studied their respective magazines and Joel had ordered eggs—no yolks—and mentioned, offhand, that his last relationship had been with a man.

She’d just sipped her green tea and smiled and said, “In this economy you got to diversify.”

How brave, the new world. She slid the menu between the salt and pepper shakers and went back to Shouts & Murmurs, feeling the fond glow of her progressive nature.

After two months of very casual dating, Joel’s sublease in Astoria expired and he asked her could he stay at hers for a week. Some cocaine had been taken and she’d readily agreed. That was three weeks ago.

But they were having fun. She liked him being around.

But now it was not fun, and now she did not like him.

Why was one thing always followed by the other? Why did no emotion hang around for very long?

“Did you fuck him or was he fucking you?”

Joel looked disappointed in her.

This was almost enjoyable. Bring on the heteronorms. Bring on the suits and ties. These kids were too free. They were having way too much fun. Bring back standards, family values and monogamy and chaperones, modesty, lowered hemlines, the death penalty. These kids with their Tinder, their Grindr, their 3nder, their constant fucking. It was too much. Joel was nine years younger and it occurred to Liz that the difference in their races, in their nationalities, in their sexes, was irrelevant. It was really a question of where you sat in relation to time. Did she have more in common with a thirty-four-year-old anywhere in the world than with this twenty-five-year-old in front of her? Was it self-sabotage? Did she want to get married? Did she want to have children? Did she want what she was supposed to? Sometimes. Sometimes she really thought she did. But mostly she did not.

Atlantic was scratching against the cupboard under the sink, where her food was kept. Pointless fucking dog. What were you doing while this was going on? Sleeping? Watching?

Joel was sorry she’d reacted like this.

Liz was sorry he was such a total cock.

Joel was sorry she was so consistently uptight and hadn’t she discussed this with her therapist?

Liz was sorry he thought it was fine to behave like such an entitled asshole.

Joel was sorry she was so limited and bourgeois and prejudicial and narrow-minded.

Liz was sorry he was such an unbelievable fucking cock.

The door shut behind him and she sat and stared at it and felt herself collapse in stages, like a marquee.

She was picking bits of wax out of Atty’s ears and rubbing them into her sock when her phone beeped. Alison. Amazing. One of her sister’s gifts—perhaps her sister’s only gift—was to contact people at their weakest, lowest, most humiliated point. Across oceans, across time zones—no doubt across light years and galaxies and the expanding unfathomable distances of deep space—Alison could smell it. The inimicable scent of sibling disaster. She was getting married—for the second time, admittedly—but still, Liz was getting nothing, was getting shafted, left alone again … She stuffed the phone in a crevice of the duvet nest she had constructed. It was silent for a few seconds then buzzed again. She willed herself to draw it out.

Flight on time? All OK? looking 4ward to catching up x

The sun had sunk out of sight, but the glass sides of the skyscrapers downtown gave back its old lion face. A diffuse ruddy light fell on the upper stories of the brick edifice of London Terrace. Liz tightened the left strap of her rucksack and considered her circumstances. No boyfriend meant no dog sitter.

There were no cabs. She needed to take Atlantic to her cousin Marcus’s flat, if he’d take her, and then head straight to Newark. Even if the fuss Marcus caused about Atlantic was tedious—setting a tea towel on his lap before the dog sat on him, ostentatiously picking the yellow hairs off his black sofa and dropping them into the toilet bowl—there was no one else.

She flicked through her phone. Who was Jason? Who was Lesley? Who was Nicky P? Man or woman? Friend or foe? Atlantic’s charms were far from legendary. She scrolled back to MARCUS and hovered her thumb above the name. Atlantic was giving something an exploratory chew. Liz crouched and pulled an Almond Joy wrapper from her slippery and unresisting teeth. She texted Marcus—BIG DOG FUCKUP: ANY CHANCE YOU COULD TAKE FOR A FEW DAYS? RIGHT NOW?—and walked north for a block before Marcus replied. He was in Hong Kong and it was 6:00 a.m. in the morning. He hoped that nothing was wrong and that she was doing OK—the kind of text that is like a plea to end the matter there. Liz took off the rucksack and sat on it on the corner of Twenty-fifth and Tenth. It happened like this. You were fine you were fine you were fine, and then you fell apart.

CHAPTER 3

The problem with zopiclone was it launched you into the ocean of sleep handily enough, but subsequently it tossed you up on the beach of 3:11 a.m., wide awake, spectacularly marooned. You came to with a jolt, alert, your mind already mid-churn.

So here we are again, the Voice said to Judith. Just you and me. Us two. Us twosome. Us all alonesome. Us gruesome duo. How do you do, so?

The vast hulk of Kenneth beside her whistled serenely, steadily steaming across his own deep.

The Voice said, You know, you never should have bought a memory foam mattress. It makes you so hot. Like lying in a slice of white bread. And you can never admit this now, of course, since it was your idea to buy it. Not just your idea. Your insistence. Nothing else would do. Oh no.

The blinds were still black but would start edging closer soon to gray, then a kind of gray-green, then forest green, deciduous green, the green of well-fed grass, of grass that grows on graves.

It was impossible not to imagine the worst at 3:11 a.m.

What did Theresa say?

Allow the feeling in, experience it, and let it go again. Let it move on. Let it float past.

The Voice said, Do you think little Michael will remember you? Sure, how could he? What age will he be when you go? You’ll be a kind of misty presence in his memory, at best, and maybe video or pictures will remind him, maybe. But you won’t be reading books to him, you won’t be watching him at football matches, you won’t be seeing him put on gang shows with the scouts …

The Voice would not shut up. It would not be outwitted or shouted down. You could not threaten it or bargain with it. The Voice just talked and talked, recounting the things that must be done, the things that never would be, mixing the probable and the possible, the hopeless and the endless and the pointless … The mind leapt from rock to rock. The only way to escape it was to get up and go into the kitchen and make the mind do what the body told it. Read a book or make some wheaten bread or pay the bills. Clean the grouting in the upstairs bathroom. Which is what she had intended to start on this afternoon and might as well tackle now. Why not.

She put her feet on the cold floor and the Voice said, Slippers, Judith, you’ll catch your death. Ha.

The Voice had a sense of humor, of course, and yet it was not funny. You could not call it funny. Kenneth was doing his best. She was doing her best. Everyone was trying hard to do their best but so what? To what end? You went through the day doing your utmost and smiling and telling everyone you were fine really you were coping and then the night came and you lay down and in the darkness were gripped by the million hands of terror. So, said the Voice, I said how are we doing?

Not great, Judith replied. I’ve been better.

You have, said the Voice. Oh, you surely have.

She crept up the stairs. This had been the “kids’ toilet” until her son Spencer moved out it must be almost eight years now. Overnight Judith began calling it “the guest bathroom,” which Kenneth found “a bit affected.” But as usual he misunderstood. It had taken a conscious effort to rechristen it, and it was a deliberate overwriting, part of her efforts to keep abreast of time, not fall behind it. Time snuck up on you and she’d seen some of her friends—Carol Thomson, Betty Moore—keep their children’s rooms like little shrines when they went off to their universities or jobs. She was not going to be one to wallow. As the clock moved on, so did she. It felt important—morally important—not to be caught in past attitudes. Not to be hung up on it, on what happened, on the museum of the family. There was an obligation to live your life forward. She told anyone who’d listen that she wasn’t going to be one of those grandmothers obsessed with their grandkids, looking after them every week and talking of nothing else. But then of course Isobel was born and this was exactly what happened.

Now that Isobel, Alison’s daughter, stayed with them all the time, in the little box room called “Izzy’s room,” the bathroom too had reverted to its old name, its first name.

Judith tugged on the light and the extractor fan ticked awake, too loud. It wouldn’t rouse Kenneth unless she plucked it from the wall and dropped it on his head, but its whirring was too loud for the night. There was no place for the mechanized in this darkness pulled up like a coverlet over the fields and the woods and Ballinderry River, over the garden and the hillside beyond it, its gorse and bare rocks and tussocks, and over the house, the middle one of three on the lane, that she stood in now, breathing very lightly. She tugged the bulb off and stepped into the guest room, turned on the bedside lamp and carried it to the bathroom, setting it on the lowered lid of the toilet. The plastic Tesco’s bag full of bath toys in the sink she moved to the low shelf of the wicker unit. She ran the hot tap and used her fingernails to clean Izzy’s hardened red toothpaste off the smooth enamel.

Things, being things, always wore out. They wore down. They got dirty and needed cleaning. They wanted bleaching. Over the years, the grouting in the shower had turned from white to this mouse gray. She needed to spray it first, really, with a peroxide-based cleaner, and then leave it for half an hour. It would need to be scrubbed fairly gently not to take the grouting off. Wire wool would be too harsh. A nailbrush. Even a toothbrush.

She opened the cupboard under the sink. Cleaning products were always named to make it sound like cleaning took no time at all. In a jiff. In a flash. Everyone was so concerned with time. So worried about spending it the right way. And how much more pressing was it now. Life-limited. The phrase Dr. Boyers used. The limited life. But wasn’t everyone’s?

She spritzed the grouting until all the tiles ran with little foamy rivulets, and the chemical smell nauseated her. When she opened the window the night air came in like a cold hand on her neck. There was a smell of cut grass, manure. She’d leave the liquid to soak for a while, and go and have a look at the attic. It would need to be cleared at some point.

She found herself sitting on the bed in the guest room, staring into the deep-pile carpet, a striped affair of red and cream, and then at the curtains, a heavy red damask.

Liz had said, after her first night in here after it was decorated, that she’d felt like she was sleeping inside someone’s womb. Now what slept in Judith’s womb was monstrous. Awful.

Hello, the Voice said. Are you referring to me?

Of course it could be beaten. It was unlikely, very unlikely, but who knows what could happen? Who knows what miracles science might yet come up with?

People would say to her sometimes there are good things about getting a diagnosis, and she would smile and say, “Oh yes,” and think, How dare you. But it was true that the fact of the thing had freed her, for a bit. She’d moved into the center of their lives, hers and Ken’s, and found herself appreciated—like an ornament gathering dust in the back of a cabinet unexpectedly appraised at some fantastic value, and brought out to the light of the mantelpiece. But here too the dust alighted.

Four years, two months, and seventeen days ago she’d noticed that she couldn’t close the button of her good navy slacks. She had carried three children and now this lump. It could be benign, a benign cyst. Why not? What was the point in mentioning it to Kenneth? He had enough going on. He was making a good recovery from his surgery, and his speech was pretty good, considering the way it had been six months before. It was a Saturday night and she didn’t sleep well at all, even after several G&Ts. The next day she’d made a roast chicken for lunch and Ken’s brother Sidney came round, and told them in his halting way a long story about Lynn’s horse being stolen from a field outside Markethill and her friend Sean buying said horse back from a man in a pub in Dundalk, but she was too distracted to follow all the details, and when she tried to lift the bowls of trifle before Kenneth and Sidney had finished eating, her husband looked at her like she had two heads and said, “What’s got into you?”

I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t know what’s got into me or how it got there or how to get it out. But instead she smiled and said, “Och, I didn’t sleep last night. I’m dead tired.”

The following Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. she stood at the back door of the clinic at the Westland Road waiting for someone to arrive and open up. Once inside, Judith did what she was told. It was a relief to follow instructions, to enter a system and just sit and look at a poster telling people—especially old people and children, who were apparently particularly at risk—to get flu shots, and just to sit and wait and wait and sit and know that the process, whatever it turned out to be, had started. A relief it was to pass the problem of herself to other people. They would sort it. They would know. They would do what they could.

The attic was accessed by a half-sized door—an Alice-in-wunnerland door, Izzy called it—in the wall of the small bedroom. Judith stooped and entered and tugged the light pull. Even with her slippers and terry-cloth dressing gown, the coldness felt cautionary. She was still too warm-blooded to be standing here among lifeless junk, the abandoned clothes and pictures and games and books. Heaped in the corners, hanging from makeshift rafters, filling cardboard boxes and shelves and plastic-lidded stacked bins, the grave goods. A foot away from her head, a spider, her host, shinned down its twisting filament and twirled and reconsidered and hauled itself back up.

Look at all this crap, she thought. Look at all this crap.

All the many hundred accumulated products of marriage and children. They could open a Museum of Late-Twentieth-Century Life. The History of Board Games, of Soft Toys, of Side Lamps, of Winter Coats. Maybe Isobel and Michael would want some of it. But she never showed any interest in making things, Isobel. Judith couldn’t get her to touch the Lego or jigsaws. She was all about dolls. Girls liked things with faces; no matter what the feminists thought, it was true.

She pulled out a broad hanger from which a maroon suit bag hung. A transparent window in the bag revealed thick brown fur. It was so heavy. When they’d gotten engaged over a bag of chips in Morans’ Café on Lower Merrion, Kenneth had said they would have four children, a house with a river that ran through the grounds, where he could fish—and she would have a fur coat. They’d managed three children. That took ten years. The coat took twelve … Life was both slower and faster than you expected. You saved up and worked towards … Must have been 1982. They were living in the wee Iveagh estate up in Prehen on the Waterside in Londonderry and she was working in the City Shirt Factory, in Personnel. Kenneth traveled for a while from Dublin and then got a job with Kennedy Collins estate agency, which had just opened a branch in Derry, up at the diamond.

She unzipped the bag and a great rush of soft fur escaped from the plastic. She ran her hand down it, and static made the fur twitch as if it were alive.

She found herself reluctant to try it on. It was a different Judith who’d worn it. She smoothed a hand down the collar of the coat, with the nap and then against it. It looked dark brown this way, then black the other. It all depended. She thought of pushing her face into it for a second but didn’t. Mink? It was mink, wasn’t it? What was mink? Like an otter? More ferocious. Like a ferret. How many minks? You got a coat like this from ten, twelve animals, she thought, checking the pockets automatically. Nothing.

The things they’d done in this coat! She slipped it on and sunk her hands into the pockets lined with satin. She gave a little curtsy for no reason, and noticed in the corner another rail of clothes balanced between a rafter and the housing for the water tank. She hadn’t looked at those in years. Among the trench coats and sheepskin jackets and leather skirts, she came to a plastic bag on a wooden hanger, filled with exercise books. She worked the bag off the metal hook of the hanger and pulled out the tired orange and blue exercise books.

Liz Donnelly. P.4 English. P.4 Geography. P.4 Maths. P.4 History.

Judith opened the English book to a story written by the eight-year-old Liz from the point of view of the town of Ballyglass. Such imagination!

Each step round the chimney took her further into the past. Boxes of their own wedding presents from forty-two years ago were stacked here, and boxes of books and crockery from Kenneth’s parents’ house in Ballyshannon. There was too much of it. It overwhelmed. She moved back into the lit part of the attic, pushed with her slippered foot a plastic crate of old candles and Christmas decorations under the eaves, making a passable trail from the door to the chimney stack. The bookshelf leaning against it held all the books in the house. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland. Dick Francis. That was Kenneth’s, and unread. Jeffrey Archer. He turned out to be a shyster, didn’t he? His poor wife. What were those boxes? Oh, the Hummel plates—they’d bought one a year for the first twenty years of their marriage. History of Hummel Plates, circa 1972 to 1994.

It hadn’t been easy. God knows. They’d fought and fought. She’d moved out once, moved into the flat above the agency for a night, and taken one of the girls with her. He was a terrible thorny old bastard sometimes, no doubt about that. Things you think you’ll always love you don’t. You really don’t. She’d wanted a nice home with nice things. On the farm there was never enough of anything. Except for work. There was enough of that.

She didn’t want the children to have to go through the boxes—she’d done it with her own mother’s things, few though they were. All her mother’s clothes had fitted in two bin bags. She found she was hugging herself now, hugging her fur-coated body. She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end.

Liz would be home in nine hours—eight. She must remember to cut some hydrangea from the garden and set a vase of it in her room. She lifted Liz’s exercise book and tugged off the attic light. Back in the guest room she sat on the bed and read:

As towns go, I’m not the best looking. My spine is one big wide street running along for over a mile, dead straight. I have shops all down me and you can tell how well the shop owner did a hundred years ago by the highnesses of the building. I sit at the foot of a mountain, Slieve Gallion, which wears its white cap in winter and in summer time is brown. I was born in 1645 as a marketplace, a meeting place for all the peeple to come and buy and sell vegtables and animals, cows and pigs and horses. I was burnt down and built bak up, and burnt down and built back up. My name is also An Corr Crea, from the Irish for Boundry Hill.

There has been a lot of fighting. Everybody wants me. My MPs have been UNions and Shin Fein—the people who walk all over me are both Protesants and Roman Catholics. There are the same amounts of people of both kinds. I have nearly ten thousand people living on me like little nits in my hair.

My synbol is made up from the synbol of the county and three fish. The synbol of the county is the red hand and it comes from the story of when Ulster had no proper ruler. The men agreed that a boat race would happen and who’s hand was first to touch the shore of Ireland, would be the owner of the place. Many boats were in the race and a man called O’Neill saw that he was losing so he got a sword and chop off his hand and lifted it and threw it and it reached the shore first. O’Neill was made the king and he lives at Tullyhog fort outside the town near Christine’s house.

The family Donnelly live in the south part of me, on the Lissan road. They are a happy family and there are five of them. Mummy and Daddy and Liz and Alison and little baby Spencer. The mummy makes rice krispy buns and cherry scones. The Daddy sells houses to people who need places to live. Alison and Spencer are OK.

My businnesses are to make cement out at the Cement works and to make sausages at the Bacon Factory. Sometimes out in the playgground of the primary school you hear the pigs squealing in the factory as they’re being brought in or put down. They cut their throats, but quick so it doesn’t hurt. And sometimes there is a bad smell from the factory sweet and rotten both.

CHAPTER 4

She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.

She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart. Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.

Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?

Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.

She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.

She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?

The reply came after a minute.

Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.

Liz considered for a second, and replied:

Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.

She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered whether this conversation would make her feel better or worse. Liz always felt like the black sheep; her mother and father and brother and sister were their own club, and Liz was invariably outside the circle. But there was nothing more rewarding, in some lights, than a conversation with her sister. If Liz were a plaintiff in the court of some anecdote, Alison would quickly side with her and adopt on her behalf the prosecutor’s wrath. She was loyal as a pit bull, but then you don’t want a pit bull in the house, ideally. In phone conversations Alison would frequently crown a line offered by her elder sister with a stinging, cryptic, catchall phrase: Well, that’s typical of you. Or: You’re never going to grow up, are you? And once, astonishingly: That’s what you get for crying wolf your whole life.

She pressed the TALK key.

At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.

She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”

The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.

Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”

An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families … Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one … Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.

“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear all that. Bad enough he was ten years younger. And gay, as it turns out. Okay, whatever. Bi,” said Alison over her sister’s barks of protest. “Nine years younger. You want to split hairs? Sometimes I think you want to be unhappy.”

There it came. The great expected wash of tiredness ran across her. She leaned forward and rested her head against the cool leather of the seat in front. Her body relaxed into sadness and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to start crying again. She leaned down and tickled Atty’s head as Alison continued, warming to the theme of Liz’s general fecklessness:

“You haven’t seen Izzy in what? Nine months? Ach, you won’t believe the change in her. She’s up to my chest now. She was just moved up in her reading group. And sure Michael was tiny. Oh, we’re so excited. Izzy hasn’t talked of anything else all week. And there’s Stephen! You’ll get to meet Stephen!”

Two hours later and they were up, away, climbing. The lights in the cabin dimmed and she put the bag on her knees and covered both it and herself with the staticky polyester blanket. Atty popped her head up and panted and panted and finally calmed down, as Liz let her rest her muzzle in her hand. The Ambien that Yahoo Answers had advised her to give the dog kicked in, and Atty fell deeply asleep for the entire flight while Liz periodically worried that she’d killed her. She marked her student essays on mate choice and marriage finance with mostly random tics all the way through their two double-spaced pages, and wrote “Excellent!” at the end.

Goodbye Shirlita Goddard, she thought, and your repellent staccato laugh.

Goodbye Hector Martinez and your outsized silly quiff.

Goodbye Steve. Steve Something. Yellow polo shirt, psoriasis.

Repeatedly she slid her hand into the bag and placed her fingertips on the dog’s chest and felt the little reassuring tom-tom of its effort.

CHAPTER 5

When you found yourself hissing at your baby to shut up, to please for God’s sake just shut up for a bit, it was important to set said baby down delicately in his cot and leave the room. That was Rule Number One in Alison’s Big Book of Parenting. It was true that nothing gave her more joy than to look in Michael’s huge cornflower-blue eyes, which even now at 3 a.m.—especially now—radiated curiosity and attention, and to stroke his smooth fat cheeks, and feel his whole life force settle itself as she held him to her and pressed his small hard skull against her chest. But who wants to feel joy at this time of night? She wanted to feel sleep, to feel nothing, to be unconscious for eight or nine blissful hours. She had left him to cry for twenty-three minutes and then given in and got up again. Exactly the opposite of what you’re meant to do. Maybe if she’d waited twenty-four minutes he might have stopped. This was the infinite puzzle of parenting: You never could know for sure what might have been avoided, what inevitable. The crying wasn’t even the worst of it; he interspersed that with a kind of porcine grunting that intensified and lessened and intensified again, as if he were working out with tiny baby dumbbells.

Rule Number Two: Carry concealer. Apply it each morning in natural light to the deep shadow rings under your eyes.

Number Three. What would number three be? Not to run out of Baileys Irish Cream.

Number Four was not to feel guilty about feeding your baby formula or rusks, or your toddler fish fingers or an Easter egg, or letting them watch telly or do any of the necessary activities that other parents—other mothers—tried to make you feel guilty about. The one-upmanship of the whole thing had to be ignored.

Rule Five was to make yourself laugh madly when one of your wee bairns boked on your black party dress just before you left the house for your bimonthly night out, or when one of them wet the bed, or when Izzy tugged the eight-inch purple vibrator the girls had given you on your hen night out from under the bed and started smacking it against her cheek.

Maybe you made rules in your head because there was no other way to feel in control. You had to keep churning the events of your life and try to skim some sense from them. It all slipped through your fingers otherwise. And what was “it”? Time. Children ate time. Before, days moved at a walking pace, routine and predictable. You could liken time to some natural state or process, a backdrop to events, not an event in itself. But once Isobel came, and now Michael, time itself changed. The minutes hardened into objects that could be counted and traded like money, and she always came up short.

At Izzy’s birthday party last week in the café at the leisure center, as she was planting the four pink candles in the cake shaped like a football, which was the only children’s cake left in Tesco’s and would just have to do, it struck Alison that she was going to be sticking candles in cakes every year for at least the next eighteen, which would take her up to the age of fifty, and the conclusion made her sit back for a second on the edge of a radiator. Judith was slicing open a packet of paper plates with a pearlescent fingernail and Alison had managed to turn to her and say, “Can you believe that Izzy’s four?”

“It just gets quicker and quicker,” her mum had replied, smiling her wisest, most insufferable smile.

Michael’s breathing regulated and Alison inched forward to the edge of the tub chair. Slowly, slowly she stood up. He raised his head and she began swaying in their nightly slow dance. He gave a curt, liquidy burp, hot on her ear, and then settled his cheek into her shoulder.

Even as she was telling Liz how excited they all were to see her, she felt a protective wariness. She didn’t mind Liz with the kids—when she actually saw them, she was great with them—but she didn’t particularly want her sister to meet her soon-to-be second husband. And Liz’s presence introduced a stress to the household that was paralyzing. Kenneth and Liz had not actually come to blows since school—but the needling and riling that Liz considered normal made everyone around her tense. Liz was the star of the family, and her mother’s clear favorite. She was so sure she had the answer to everything. But she just had different questions. Normal people, real people, who had to get up and go to work and come home and make dinner, found answers enough in the repetition, in the dull, rough ceremony of cooking, and bathing the kids, and reading three stories, and downing a large glass of chenin blanc, and turning off the television, and double-locking the door, and heading up to bed, amen.

Educated to the nth degree—but so what? To what purpose? Liz knew a lot about some things, sure, but nothing about how to live. She was one of life’s tenants—she rented: flats, people, cars. Trying them out, using them up, breaking them down, moving along. Liz was older, twenty-one months older, but as soon as Alison could speak she’d adopted the responsible role. Had Liz got money? Had she got tissues? Had she remembered her packed lunch? Alison could never have told her, of course, but it was clear as day that Liz would never become an adult till she had children of her own—climbing over her, lying on her, needing her at three in the morning. And not until she became a solid fact in someone else’s life would she start to understand her own parents. She still had the worldview of a child. She faced upwards. She hadn’t yet forgiven Kenneth and Judith—not that there was so much to forgive. Alison knew that Liz pitied her, still stuck in Ballyglass, still stuck with their parents, the business, but in turn Alison pitied her right back, pitied her harder, longer, louder.

The laptop was still showing Downton Abbey on the wicker stool, and she closed it and exited the room, shutting Michael’s door softly. Typical Liz to be snobby about a TV show she didn’t even watch. How could it be offensive? It wasn’t as if it didn’t show the servants to be just as wise and just as confused as the masters. Just that everybody knew their place back then. They weren’t lost in wanting more. Now everyone thought they deserved to have everything at every moment. She was a great fan of the individual, her sister, while hating any actual person she ever had to meet. Liz liked the concept of people but not the reality. That’s why she couldn’t hold onto a boyfriend. Alison stood for a moment on the landing. A soft, repetitive clicking that took her a second to identify as the tap dripping into the bath. It had started again. How amplified a sound became at night. She’d mention it to Stephen.

This was the umpteenth time he’d stayed overnight, but only the third or fourth time he’d done it with the kids here and not at Judith and Kenneth’s. You couldn’t say the evening hadn’t gone well. She’d made a proper roast chicken dinner and Stephen lit the fire. The kids were pretty good, and after dinner, when she bathed them among the ducks and frogs and foam letters that Isobel still refused to spell her name with, he’d slid Bill’s old red toolbox out from between the turf basket and the coal scuttle under the stairs and fixed the loose shelf beneath the sink. Back when Bill was around, she’d have nagged him for weeks, and he’d have botched it anyway, if he ever did it. But Stephen would be a different kind of husband: He could do stuff. He’d be a great dad, and Isobel and Mickey would soon think of him as the only father they’d ever had. She hadn’t heard from Bill in almost two years. Stephen was far from perfect, God knows, what with his sullenness, his gift for switching off, leaving the room but not through the door or the window. Stephen, Stephen, Earth calling Stephen, and he’d turn back towards her and smile a little shyly.

The kids went down easy and they shared a second bottle of Tesco’s finest Italian red, and watched TV and cuddled on the sofa. Upstairs, in bed, they did it twice, once quickly and then, twenty minutes later, again but slowly. She didn’t come but she wasn’t far off the second time. She wore a new nightie from M&S, a classy white satin thing, and he liked it, or said he liked it.

She looked in now to check on Isobel. Her daughter’s darling head was pressed against the wall, the hair covering her face entirely so that for a second she couldn’t tell which direction she was facing. One bare foot came out from under her Tinkerbell duvet. She gave a little moan and shifted her legs, taking a step. What went on in her head? When she came home from school now she was silent about it, just said it was “good.” Alison knew already the inner life of her daughter, at four years old, had closed up to her, was newly zoned and fortified and she couldn’t visit. She might tell Isobel her life was one long carousel ride of being fed and entertained and washed and soothed, but she’d seen her daughter nervous, embarrassed, tense. You can’t protect them from everything.

Everyone sleeping, Alison felt like a ghost wandering the house, benevolent, visiting the much loved, the much missed. She put an ear to Michael’s door, but it was silent. In her own bedroom Stephen lay splayed across the duvet, his white T-shirt riding up his narrow back, revealing the scatter of a few moles. At the nape of his neck the hair whorled in such a way that it came down into a perfect point. She slipped in under the duvet and felt his warmth and the lovely new security of a breathing human body in her bed. And then he spoke, surprising her.

“Was Michael all right?”

“Yeah. Just wanted a cuddle.”

There was a long pause, and just when she thought he’d gone back to sleep, he spoke again.

“Wouldn’t mind one of those myself.”

He turned towards her and draped one of his skinny arms across her waist. A few minutes later, Michael started again. Stephen and her lay perfectly still. Michael grew louder, the pitch rising and rising until he was wailing in utter despair. He started making a hacking, sobbing sound. She set a hand gently on Stephen’s chest and whispered, “I’m going to leave him. He needs to learn to settle—”

Stephen’s whole body jerked awake and backwards in a panic, as if she’d flicked a switch. It was intent on repelling her, hell-bent on defending himself—the side of one hand caught her on the cheek, the other grabbed her by the throat hard.

Something awful possessed him. His eyes stayed closed and she screamed and tried to pry his fingers from her neck. He raised his leg and kneed her in the thigh. Then he was looking at her but his eyes were strange and hard and far away and he was shouting, “Fuckoff, fuckoff” in a voice high pitched and different, sharp with fear. Then it was over—but what had it been? She was crying and hitting at him and he hugged her as she tried to pull away. “It’s me, it’s me,” he kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry. I was dreaming. I was dreaming. I’m sorry.”

Ten minutes later she sat in the empty bath, her knees pulled up. Stephen passed her a bag of frozen sweetcorn from the freezer and wrapped it in a tea towel. She held it now to her eye.

“Go on back to bed, you. There’s no point in us both being up.”

Stephen perched on the toilet lid and sighed repeatedly, as if he were the one thumped in the face. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It wasn’t that she thought he’d done it on purpose. He’d have been out on his ear with the door banging his heels if she’d thought that. It was not deliberate, and that was the point, wasn’t it? But another point, another really very pressing point, was that it hurt.

“Go on, really. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

“I am so sorr—”

“Honestly, it’s fine.”

She didn’t want to hear it but he kept on.

“Well, it’s not fine.”

“No.”

“I was just—it was an accident. We’ll have to get separate beds if we get married.”

She looked up and he was trying to smile. She nodded.

“If we get married? You haven’t left yourself much time to pull out.”

“Sure, it would only take a minute.” He was grinning, knowing that the worst of it was over now; she was coming round.

“You planning on standing me up at the altar?”

“Course not,” he said, but then widened his eyes and nodded.

“Stephen!”

He shook his head.

“Not funny. What were you dreaming?”

“For the life of me I can’t even remember. I think I thought I was being attacked. You know sometimes how you can’t even tell where you are or what’s happening …”

She didn’t.

Stephen stood up and sighed again and said I’m sorry again and finally left.

The frozen sweetcorn were still too cold on her hand, even wrapped in a tea towel. There was a hook by the bathroom door behind her and she reached up and pulled a purple towel off it and down onto her.

The towel knocked off his wash bag and she lifted it back onto the side of the bath. It rattled and she opened it. Just to see. A bottle of diazepam—they were tranquilizers, weren’t they?—and one of zopiclone. And one of paroxetine. What did they do? And why did they all have parts of the labels, where his name should have been, ripped off? She’d ask him about the tablets in the morning. Or maybe google the names to see. In the eight months she’d known him, she’d never once seen him sick.

She got back into bed. Stephen, dead to the world, gave a low intermittent wheeze. A few minutes later she opened her eyes and there stood a miniature person staring at her a few feet from the bed, naked but for Cinderella underpants. She lifted her side of the covers and Isobel climbed in, pressing her warm back against Alison’s body.

“Can I ask you something? Are witches real?”

“No, honey. Go to sleep.”

“Are goblins real?”

“Shush.”

“Are they?”

“No.”

“Are dragons real?”

“No. Go to sleep.”

“Are robbers real?”

“No. Sort of. But no one’s going to rob us.”

“Are bad men real?”

“Honey, please.”

“Are bad men real?”

“Sleep!”

A rustle and sigh. Another rustle. The tempo of her breath loosening and loosening.

(i) Patrick Creighton, 19

The smell was on his clothes, on his hands, in his hair. He’d washed before he left the plant, but it hung around, that metallic taint. Maybe it was the iron in all the animal blood. He liked to go and spend a good long while at the silver trough scrubbing his hands and under his nails before punching out; it was not, in fact, allowed, but who cared. Of course Morrison had noticed, in the locker room announcing in his wee high voice that standard practice was everyone clocked off before washing up, all the while staring directly at him, but he’d just looked right back and through him. Later, in their red boilersuits and white wellies and hairnets, he’d stood beside him at the urinals. Morrison kept on sighing and sighing as if he might start up with the weeping. The man was a fucken freak show. It was creepy.

He wound down the car window. Someone was spreading slurry out the Ardrum Road. Pearl Jam came on Downtown and he turned it up. You’re still alive, she said. Oh, and do I deserve to be?… There would be some crack had tonight. The Cotton Mountain Boys were booked so there’d be a big crowd in. There was a point in having two jobs, as he’d explained to Gerry at lunchtime. You didn’t get a motorbike given to you. You couldn’t win one or steal one or build one from fucken twigs. You had to just buy it, and by Christmas he’d have eighteen hundred quid in the Ulster Bank, which would be enough to get a Suzuki RGV250, probably from late ’88 or early ’89.

He parked outside the house and went down to the yard, fed the dogs, then went in and had his own tea of a gammon and a half, a couple of eggs, some boiled potatoes. His sister Majella was in fine form; she’d sold three engagement rings in two hours and Francie Lennon had told her she was in line for a proper bonus. She kept winding him up about Veronica, who she said he should really think about asking out. What was wrong with him? She was a pretty girl, and it wasn’t like he had them queuing up outside his fucken bedroom door. A little later, in the shower, he made his list. The bad: this weird raised redness round the mole on his thigh, and the length of the fence he had to bitumen tomorrow down by McAleer’s. The good: Portrush with the boys next Saturday night, and Damon’s uncle having that caravan they were going to crash in on the site behind Kelly’s nightclub. The crack would be mighty altogether. Altogether mighty. It would be something else again. And it also meant skipping Mass on Sunday. Oh, he could handle that!

He got to the bar before Hugh turned up. It was unreal why Hugh insisted on him arriving at 6:30 p.m., when he himself never bothered showing up till a quarter to seven. If he wanted him to open up he would, he would be happy to, but he was fed up to the back teeth with sitting out in the car, watching an empty Tayto’s crisp bag scraping across the tarmac, waiting on Hugh to show his fucken face.

Two of the barrels needed changing, which meant Seamus D hadn’t bothered closing up properly. Plus, the drip trays in the lounge bar hadn’t been washed out. It was best just to get on with it. Stickiness. Stickiness here by the Tennant’s mats. Stickiness here on the top of the mixers fridge. Lazy fuckers. He rolled a barrel of Tennant’s in from the store, then a barrel of Murphy’s. The band was to arrive at 7:30 p.m., and Hugh was mucking around with the lights for the stage. He flicked on the tap for the Tennant’s and heard the air whistling out, and then a low gurgle, and caught the splutter of foam with a pint glass.

The Cotton Mountain Boys—Derek and Padraig and Alfie—had a combined age of two hundred and something, and they offset their different plaid lumberjack shirts with the same black leather waistcoats and bootlace ties. It was slow starting off, but around 8:00 p.m. or so a whole pile of customers arrived at once, and by 8:15 p.m. the place was packed. The Boys were doing “The Gambler” and the chorus had been gradually taken up by the customers, so when they got to “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” for the third time, the whole place joined in and you could feel it go through your body, the sound of it. Then they started on the one about the man who’s constantly sorry or something and Derek’s voice cut through the pub like a hot knife. The man could still hold a note, no doubt. Paddy was reaching up for a few empties on top of the quiz machine when it started, the shouting, and that sound like firecrackers. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and looked down to see the sleeve of his blue shirt gone dark with wet.

CHAPTER 6

It must be him. Short and severe with his hand held out. Unimpressive, Liz thought. Blotchy stonewashed jeans and a black fleece. She shook the hand and immediately afterwards swung the bag round on her shoulder and unzipped it, but a small dog did not poke its head out. She put her fingers in and stroked the skull until Atlantic gave a thin disgruntled moan and her squirrelly head arose, eyes half shut. Stephen, startled, laughed and cupped Atty’s head in his hands. Tattoos on his wrists. A gold signet ring.

“Hello, och, who have we here?”

Liz set the bag down and the dog hopped neatly out. Stretched her front legs, her back. When Stephen tried to pet her from above, she pushed her soft nose up into his fingers, pulled back, and looked at him a little formally, then gave the fingers a confirming swipe with her pink clean tongue.

“They let you take him on the plane?”

“Sort of.”

As the dog began olfactory investigations of the column they stood beside, Stephen gave a little grimace of pain.

“He’s not about to piss on that, is he?”

“It’s a she. We should head outside.”

Liz looked at his profile as they tramped down the corridor to the exit. The small sharp nose that reached from his small round face seemed permanently primed for smelling something foul in the atmosphere. There was a slight anxious squint to his whole aspect and an awful softness in the large brown eyes. Some neediness or base want. Alison always had a weakness for weakness. But Liz had nothing against him. That was the phrase she held up in her mind for Stephen. I have nothing against you. You seem fine. Your fingernails are short and clean. You wear an analog watch with a white face and a black leather strap. You seem like hundreds of men I might walk past: shrunken, tired, aligned to some faction that has suffered defeat.

For his part Stephen noticed the sandals, the black nail varnish on the toes. It was none of his business. And he had nothing against her, no, nothing against her. Bit trendy, no doubt. And a bit smart in herself, definitely. And from all those stories Alison had told him, a bit of a loose cannon. But she was his fiancée’s sister, and would be treated well by him. He hadn’t expected the dog. And that rucksack had seen better days—as had she.

The light of Ulster traveled not by particle or wave but by indirection, hint, and rumor. A kind of light of no-light, emanating from a sun so swathed in clouds it was impossible to tell where it lurked in the sky.

As they drove, Liz stared dully out the window. This hour was the strangest. The car functioned like a decompression chamber, adjusting the body to the new density surrounding it, to the element of Ireland. The rain that came in off three thousand miles of ocean left the land so verdant, so lush, that the light reflecting back into the sky took on aspects of the greenness, a deep virescent tinge. It was not raining, but it had been, and the land they drove through was waterlogged. One low field outside Antrim had a pair of swans riding across it as if on rails, cutting metallic wakes. This filter of light made the scenery seem a kind of memory, already heavy with nostalgia. She thought of the peeled, bare light of New York, its blues and yellows, its arctic sharpness and human geometries. Here the day was softened, dampened, deepened. The light was timeless—in the sense that midmorning might be midafternoon. Ten a.m. in May could be five p.m. in late November.

“Great you were able to come back for the wedding.”

“Aren’t I the good sister?”

“Ah now you’re both good.”

Liz hadn’t meant it as a comparison but now that he’d taken it that way, she didn’t much like his response. It gave him too much of a role in their lives. Who did he think he was? Who did he think she was?

“Everyone’s good in their own way,” she replied. Which seemed petty, so she added solemnly, “Alison’s one of the best, really. She’s there with Mum and Dad at all times.”

“Your dad seems a bit better.”

“That’s good … How’re you getting on with all of them?”

“Good. No, good, I think.”

When Kenneth’s first stroke occurred four years ago, Liz had intended to fly back to Dublin to see him but had, in the end, skyped instead. There was not enough time before the heart surgery and she had no money, and was just starting her teaching load for the term, and no one could have expected her to drop everything. She sent him an e-card with a gif of a tree frog in a fez singing “I hope you’re feeling better, better, better” to a jazzy little break beat. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery, and she came home three months later for a long weekend. If he got his words wrong sometimes, if he moved with stiff languorous gestures, as if he were underwater, still he seemed all right, or mostly all right.

Her father’s health was common ground and a safe area, but neither Stephen nor Liz could be bothered to pursue it. Kenneth himself never mentioned it, and if Liz asked him on the phone how he was doing she received a brusque, offended “Fine,” as if she’d questioned his sanity or his professional credentials.

“You want a fag?”

Obviously the answer to this query from Stephen should be no, but Liz felt that she was feeling, realistically, about as shitty as possible. Why not double down?

Home was like climbing into a suit that was made of your own body, and it looked like you, and it smelled like you, and it moved its hand when you told it to, but it wasn’t you, not now.

She flicked the finished fag out the window and closed her eyes and sleep overtook her. She woke on the dual carriageway into Ballyglass when her head bumped against the glass. There was Charlie McCord’s old petrol station, abandoned, the pumps chained and padlocked.

“Sorry I was out that whole time.”

“No bother. Good for you.”

“Did I miss anything?”

“Your wee dog snores.”

“She does, yeah.”

As they turned down Westland Road a woman in a plum-colored ski jacket and an orange bobble hat was hanging washing out on a rotary line.

“She won’t be cold.”

“She will not.”

There was a pause and Stephen felt himself about to tell Liz something but stopped. He hadn’t thought of the house for a long time—it was that rotary line that did it. A neat enough wee bungalow on a few acres, pebbledashed, brown trim, with two concrete cockerels on the gate posts he could still see raising their necks about to crow—and a rotary line in the garden. When he was a lad of ten they’d left Londonderry to move there, just outside Limavady. He’d loved that house. Surrounded by animals: doltish sheep, cows, rabbits, sticklebacks in the wee stream and birds, always birds, in the trees trilling out their notes, flittering about. The rotary was in the garden by the side of the house, where it could be seen from the road, and his mother, with that indefatigable air she had, would hoist the plastic basket of washing outside and peg up the damp things for him and his siblings, the wee socks for their wee feet. But not his father’s shirts. His father’s shirts were dried in the bathroom, over the bath, though the question of why did not even occur to him until his mother picked him up one Monday evening from Scouts in Dungiven and asked him, with a queer edge in her voice, what had happened at school today.

“Nothing, nothing really.”

They were stopped by traffic lights at the courthouse, the huge stockade of barbed wire and guard posts and searchlights.

She said, “Do you tell people what Daddy does?”

“What do you mean?”

“What he does for a living?”

“He’s a policeman.”

“He’s a policeman, yes. But when people ask you, you should say he works for the council.”

“Is Daddy OK?”

“Some bad men attacked the police station today, honey. But your daddy’s OK.”

He wanted to ask if someone was not OK, if someone would never be OK again, but he found that he couldn’t, that he was too scared to hear any more, and he sat in silence, his forehead pressed on the cold glass. Overhead there were a million stars; the dark branches of the trees sifted and released them. If there was a god, why was his purpose not to stop this?

After a few minutes, as the road unfurled under the headlights, as they sped through the fields and hedges, his mother said, “You’re a good boy, Stephen.”

Maybe everything led back to this exchange. Some small initial tilt in direction will cause, over time, a great distance to arise between the intended destination and the actual one. Certainly for days afterwards, it seemed to Stephen like someone had taken a kind of universal remote to his life and turned up the brightness and contrast, making everything sharp-edged and garish and strange. But his father was OK, until a few years later he wasn’t. Thirteen when his father was killed, shot twenty-six times by two men hiding in a ditch. There are clean deaths and messy deaths and this was the latter. Closed coffin.

The milk lorry was attempting to reverse. The sun had come out and the truck’s huge silver container tank caught the light. Stephen flicked down the visor and his license fell out, hitting the gear stick and landing in Liz’s footwell.

“Oh sorry. Here, I’ll stick it back up here.”

Liz lifted the license. The black-and-white photo showed Stephen with a side parting and a blank, slightly idiotic expression.

“You’ve a bit more hair there.”

“Aye a lot more. Here.”

He reached over sharply and lifted it out of her hands, but not before she saw his name was printed on the pink plastic card as McLean, Andrew. He slipped it back into the sun visor and flipped it up.

“Andrew?” she said involuntarily.

“Oh that. It was my father’s name, but they always called me Stephen.”

“Oh.”

Here was the sign announcing YOU ARE LEAVING COUNTY LONDONDERRY—though since a republican had blacked out the LONDON, and a loyalist had come along and erased with blue paint the DERRY, and finally some misanthrope or reasonable man at the end of his tether had whitewashed the O and Y, and all of LEAVING except for the A—the sign now cheerfully explained that:

YOU ARE A C UNT

The unofficial but more typical greeting was the next sign, which had been there as long as Liz could remember, painted in foot-high letters in a mock Gothic font on the side of the gospel hall:

The wages of sin are death: but the gift of God is eternal life.

Romans 6:23

This was a place of voices, they jostled and contested with one another—a small hard town with one long road leading to a mountain—but even now the sight of sunlight shifting on those distant slopes of bog and rock and gorse made Liz’s heart give a little shiver in her chest. They drove past the agency—Liz could see her father’s receptionist, Trish, standing behind the desk in a white blouse looking into her phone—then through Monrush, smoke rising straight up from a few chimneys on the council houses. And here another voice spoke—a new sign, roughly lettered in red, white, and blue on a sheet of plywood nailed to a telephone pole:

In Texas murder gets you the electric chair. In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.

She gestured up through the windscreen at the sign.

“What’s that about?”

“Oh, that Shinner Declan Keogh. The one who escaped from the Maze. It’s out of date now anyways.”

“How come?”

“Well, he’s now replaced wee Kieran Smith as our ‘local representative’ for Stormont. You know Kieran’s the new MP?”

“That’s right.”

Liz did not know, and when Liz did not know something she had found that “That’s right” was a usefully ambiguous formulation to reply with, particularly in the classroom. But that was in New York.

In Northern Ireland, Stephen said, “What’s right?”

“About the new MP.”

“Yeah … I just said it was. Oh they look after their own. McGuinness handed it on to Smith, and the Unionist was a fella called Barrett. Now Barrett’s father was a caretaker at Springhill. Smith was the main suspect in his killing, they say.”

“I heard that.”

There was a long pause. Stephen shifted into third. They passed the new estates—dozens and dozens of white blocky constructions littering Morgan’s Hill; they’d been erected quickly in the years of madness and entitlement when everyone could buy everything and did. The houses had something childish and optimistic about them as they strained for a little grandeur; flanking each primary-colored front door were thick fluted Doric columns.

“I’ll say this. It’s all one sided in any case. There’s no consultancies coming our way.”

Our way? She wound the window down a few inches and let cool air into the car. There was the lancing smell of slurry. Our way. Our way or the highway. Press-ganged back into the caste, no questions asked. Impossible not to be picked for a side. If you tried to sit on the fence, you came to realize that you couldn’t move, not an inch, for you would topple off and land on one side or the other, covered in bullshit. The north was thesis and antithesis, but no synthesis. It would outlast us all. There was no way round it. What was the word? There was a French word. Uncontournable. There was no getting round it. For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.

At university she wrote her master’s dissertation on the special kinship groups of Ulster. Her home province was a nightmare of disorder in which she tried to find an order. She became an anthropologist, she told herself and others, because her childhood in that province, state, statelet, made her search for reason in the most unreasonable of places. The work she loved—Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, even Foucault—shared the desire to tease new meaning from habituated reality. For how could you live here and not be sad? It was absurd: You didn’t “believe” in something if you were born into it. You accepted it, you acquiesced, you submitted, you lost—and you gave up the chance to become yourself, to come to conclusions of your own. One must be very naive or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

“A mess. A complete mess. And that crowd at Stormont, sure they couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery.”

She pressed the tip of her index finger against the side of the pad of her thumb, shaping from her hand a triangle. She made the other match it, touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs to each other. Were there other triangles in a world of circles and squares? Was everyone a triangle pretending to squarehood or circledom? Who was Andrew McLean? The triangle, the circle, the square? Her hands looked like a mask. She wanted to ask him but didn’t. I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.

“True enough.”

They were through the roundabout.

She was almost home and then she was.

And here on the doorstep were her parents: her mother—elegant in black slacks and a caramel cashmere sweater—watering the dripping hanging baskets; and behind her Kenneth, directing, grayer and frailer and smaller than in the memory but now waving with both hands, and pleased to see his daughter. She could see that clearly now, the real pleasure that she brought to them both just by being in their world, at least at first.

As she hugged her mother, Stephen carried her rucksack into the hallway and her father commented on the rain holding off. Then he looked down and said, “Now what in God’s name is that?”

The dog was jumping up at her knees. She stooped and picked her up.

“Atlantic. You remember me telling you about the dog?”

“I do, yes. I didn’t know you were bringing it over.”

“Her.”

Atlantic gave Liz’s ear an explorative lick and Kenneth grimaced.

“I found her on a subway platform.”

Judith said to Stephen, “Will you sit and have a cup of tea? Or coffee? We have a new machine.”

“I really should fly on, actually. I have to be in Tandragree by twelve.” Stephen felt the little extra silence Judith greeted this with, and said, “Maybe a quick coffee.”

“It’s very good of you to go and pick this one up,” Judith continued, to Stephen, who did not disguise in his face the fact that he thought it was good of him too.

“Well, Alison’s off to a fitting there for the dress, isn’t she, and I know you guys have enough to be getting on with.”

“I think we’re almost there,” Judith said.

Kenneth frowned. “I don’t see why your brother couldn’t have—”

“I didn’t ask Spencer,” Liz cut him off. “I mean I texted him and left him a message, but sure he never got back to me.”

Stephen looked from Liz to her father. Already a gloom of mutual resentment was setting in on both their faces.

“The garden looks very well,” Stephen offered, but the thought of the garden only reminded Kenneth of the tent that was destined to destroy his lawn.

“The marquee people were supposed to come tomorrow morning to put it up, but now they say they can’t come till the afternoon.”

“It’ll be fine,” Judith said, throwing Liz a glance. “It’ll all be fine.”

CHAPTER 7

Liz lugged her rucksack up the stairs, and set it on the bed beside one of her old exercise books. She flicked through it and felt a great rush of sadness. There was such pathos in childish handwriting, especially one’s own. Time had this terrible habit of creeping up and pistol-whipping you on the back of the head. She unzipped her suitcase and decided she couldn’t be bothered to unpack yet. She emptied her pockets of her passport and coins and gum on the vanity unit, where her mother had set a little vase with a head of blue hydrangea from the garden. Behind the vase, propped against the mirror, was a neat row of eight copies of her own book—all signed by her—which Kenneth kept there in case he ever found anyone else to give it to. She lifted the books and set them in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe.

After she received her PhD from King’s College, London, Liz had entered “her slump,” as the family referred to it: two years of trying to get her thesis on Lévi-Strauss accepted by academic publishers, and being rejected for dozens of research fellowships and junior teaching positions, and working in a bar in Clapham, and smoking a great deal of weed. One lunchtime, having woken at noon, she stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and noticed the letter on the table, a smear of raspberry jam on its corner. Aberystwyth University Press was keen to meet and talk about the thesis, meaning they were interested in bringing it out, and the very next day, a Friday, she traveled at ludicrous expense on two trains and a rail-replacement bus service to see their publisher, Owen Hughes, who was, it turned out, a Lévi-Strauss expert himself. He disagreed about aspects of Liz’s characterization of Lévi-Strauss’s relationship to art, had met Claude, more than once, and had come away with many subtly self-flattering anecdotes from these encounters. Liz perched in a low leather club seat and felt herself sliding lower and lower and lower, until it seemed she looked up at the desk from several feet beneath it. The interview concluded with Liz being asked whether she’d be capable of writing a short guide to either quantum physics or dogs, which was the kind of thing that sold at the moment, and her replying no, not really, no.

For the next month Liz got up and sat in her pajamas and watched daytime television, smoked more weed, and read only magazines, and on a drizzling Wednesday morning woke up knowing instinctively what she had to do. She caught the 34 bus to the Victorian library on Brixton Hill, walked between the rows of computers where recent immigrants typed up their CVs, and found the self-help section. She photocopied the chapter pages and indices of every book that didn’t look obviously stupid or crazy. She found an empty carrel, set up her laptop, and started a spreadsheet in which she collated the main recurring topics, and typed in what Lévi-Strauss had to say about them. And that was the genesis of The Use of Myth: How Lévi-Strauss Can Help Us All Live a Little Better. Whenever she couldn’t find anything relevant in the actual work, she just extrapolated from the circumstances of his life, and soon she had a seventy-thousand-word manuscript that told the story of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work and pontificated cleverly, or cleverly enough, on the usual topics of love, marriage, infidelity, work, ambition, children, parents …

It found a small but respectable publisher, Hawksmoor, within a few weeks. The advance was a modest two thousand pounds, but after a series of interviews, the book began to sell quite well. When it was taken as a Radio 4 Book of the Week, sales accelerated and they went to a fifth reprint. A week after that, the publisher forwarded an e-mail from a producer called Henry Barfoot who was interested in possibly making it a program for BBC Four. Was Liz interested in presenting?

Having taken a few months to write and rewrite, and a few weeks to shoot, and one tortuous day to add voice-over to, when it was finally broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening the Times heralded the hour-long show, The Use of Myth, as “fairly informative,” the Guardian trumpeted it as “standard BBC Four fare,” and the Telegraph lauded Liz’s presenting as “adequate, if a little stiff.” Judith had half of Ballyglass watching and was in tears on the message she left on Liz’s answerphone, telling her how proud she was. She’d even coaxed Kenneth into leaving a bluff “Well done.”

She had been writing the follow-up—attempting to do the same with Margaret Mead—for the last seven years. The book seemed to expand in every direction as she got more and more and also less and less interested in her, reading volume after volume of published work, then diaries and letters, and taking notes and underlining and stockpiling the timeline with anecdote and incident. The work had grown monstrous. She’d stopped actually putting words on the virtual page when the word count had hit 321,123, though her reasons for halting there were random and inscrutable to herself and seemed to be based solely on the palindromic, magical nature of the figure. That had happened several months ago, as she sat marking essays in the Moonlight Diner on Tenth Avenue. Now just seeing the file on her desktop gave her a singular feeling of dull terror. She was currently managing to look at the manuscript for a few minutes every couple of days before getting bored, or panicking, or getting bored of panicking. She’d follow the thread of her inattention through a maze of hyperlinks, and two hours later would know slightly more about, say, Hawking or fracking or twerking.

Alison’s voice came up from below. She was describing something as just completely pointless to her parents. Liz went down and met her younger sister at the bottom of the stairs, where they hugged and then pulled back and thought to themselves how old the other one appeared.

“You look great!” Liz said.

“I do not,” Alison countered with a wince. “I’ve been dieting for the wedding, but sure I’ve only lost seven pounds—”

“That’s not bad.”

“That short haircut really suits you—” Alison said.

“Och, it’s an old woman’s cut.”

“And you’ve lost weight.”

“Not on purpose.”

“Don’t sicken me.”

“How was your dress fitting? All ready to go?”

“Sandra’d put the zip on upside down. Can you believe it? It’s sorted now. I’m not paying her to fix it.”

Liz followed her into the kitchen.

“Is this new?”

Liz ran her finger along the top of the dining table. Alison nodded and whispered to her, “It wouldn’t be to my taste, but I can see why it’s nice.”

Kenneth’s voice arose from the armchair. “No one’s asking you to sit at it.”

Alison made a face at her sister. “Nothing’s changed.” She raised her voice: “I’m just saying it’s very dark, for my taste. For a kitchen.”

“Is it mahogany?” Liz asked.

“Yes, and extendable,” Kenneth’s voice announced.

Home was where you could spend an hour discussing any fixture or fitting or real estate question. Judith tended to praise, Alison to criticize, Kenneth to lament—the mysteries of planning permission or building regulations, the fad for Artex, the difficulty of removing stone cladding. Bay windows, rockeries, conservatories, the exotica of PVC apexes and dado rails and pelmets and the correct way to edge a lawn or instruct a repossession. They talked about crawlspaces and conversions. A rumor of subsidence or dry rot came among them with the same frisson that another family might have felt upon encountering reports of embezzlement or incest. Any house or flat or shop that entered the Mid-Ulster market fell squarely in their purview and their remit. They knew who’d built it, who’d lived in it, why it was to be sold, what they were asking, what they were hoping, what they would accept.

They talked like this because they talked in code of what they loved—not this particular extendable dining room table in mahogany but Ballyglass, continuity, sitting in judgment on one’s neighbors, and being granted membership of a family by way of all hating the same thing.

“How are the kids?”

“Mickey’s in the car. Come out with me now and we’ll wake him. Stephen said you slept the whole way.”

“I didn’t mean to … I was just—I hadn’t slept all night.”

“But did you like him?”

“I really did. We had a good chat, I mean, when I wasn’t dozing.”

“He doesn’t drink, you know, not really.”

Liz smiled sadly at this preemptive defense. The next thing she said as kindly as possible, though it didn’t stop the collapse of her sister’s face.

“Have you heard from Bill?”

“Nothing. I send photos to his mother but sure she hardly replies. I have to pinch myself to remember: These are his children! Imagine doing that.”

Atlantic padded dolefully into the kitchen doorway and stood there like she brought bad news from the front. Liz felt grateful; it saved them both from the painful act of conceiving Bill’s interior life.

She’d met her first husband, Bill, when the office was broken into and her parents were in Connemara for the weekend. Sergeant Bill Williams. It was a Protestant joke, that name: William, son of William, inheritor of sash and stick and puritanical despair. He was not handsome, but he had a nice clean freckled face and innocent blue eyes. Nor was he funny exactly, but he tried hard to be funny, and she liked that. She was twenty-six years old and absolutely ready to fall hopelessly in love. When he took her to Paris for the weekend, they stayed in a little hotel called Select near the Sorbonne, the bellboy departed, untipped, and they’d fallen on each other with an animal hunger surprising to her. But it seemed to have used up all the desire in one go. That night they’d gone out and Bill drank two bottles of the restaurant’s house white, almost by himself, and fell asleep immediately, not touching her. And that was her first clue. Didn’t stop her marrying him, but also meant she wasn’t entirely surprised by what followed. He was never physically abusive, but when he drank he said the most awful things, and it took it out of you, being told you were a whore, a fat slut, a moron, a useless fucking bitch. She started to apologize all the time, for nothing, and to everyone. If she dared mention his drinking he had a list of responses ready, usually referring to his “stress.” And did he tell her to stop stuffing chocolate down her throat? She met her future in his mother, Edna, who ran the grocery shop in Comber while Norman, Bill’s father, drank the takings. Edna had learned to refuse the world’s overtures, its silly promises, had the hardened air of the continually disappointed.

Soon enough it was a nightly thing. Collapsed by ten p.m. in the armchair. Even so, initially she managed to hide his drinking from her family pretty well. Then the first Christmas came, and with it the family lunch at Judith and Ken’s. They’d all sat down when Alison remembered the gravy. As she hoisted herself up to get it—she was six months pregnant with Isabel—and edged past Bill, he stuck a Christmas cracker out at her.

“I’ll do that when I’m back.”

“Just pull it,” Bill sighed.

She could see the danger of the moment, and part of her wanted it all to go wrong. She wanted him exposed to her family. She wanted them to know the truth of it. He continued to push the cracker at the curve of her stomach and she ignored it.

“Ah, just pull it now, pull the cracker, you fat cunt,” Bill muttered, and grabbed her arm.

Across the linen tablecloth and pale candles and silver reindeer napkin rings, Judith lowered her head into her hands. Spencer jumped up. All of him shivering with tension under his shirt. Part of Alison detached from the scene; that part was very interested in how all this would play out.

Bill worked out a laugh as Kenneth slowly got to his feet and said, “Perhaps you should go upstairs, to Ali’s old room, and take a nap.”

The note in her father’s voice meant business. Spencer’s eyes shone with a defeated fury. Bill stared drunkenly ahead of him into the bowl of homemade cranberry sauce and then lazily turned to Kenneth, grinned wolfishly, and asked, “Why don’t you go and have a lie down, oul fella, before I put ye on yer fucking back?”

Spencer was on him. Two chairs were knocked over. Although Bill had a few inches’ advantage, Spencer got him in a full nelson headlock and dragged him out onto the porch. It ended with Spencer banging Bill’s head against the doorframe.

Bill joined the AA group that met in the community center off the Dungarvan Road. She did what she could. She poured bottles down the sink. She told him she loved him and wanted to help him. He avoided the old crowd from the station and didn’t go to the pub after work. They began attending her parents’ Presbyterian church out at Killyclogher. She could feel him trying, really trying, the constant effort coming off him like a buzzing. He was stretched and tense as a balloon, always on the cusp of losing it. It was necessary to devise stratagems. Each night she made dessert, she ran him a bath, she checked the listings to try to ensure there was some sport or a documentary or an action flick for him to watch. She bought a thousand-piece jigsaw of The Last Supper in Toymaster and started it on the dining room table, called it their project. They spent a single evening with their heads engrossed in it, so close they were almost touching, and she thought, as she sometimes thought, that this could work. The next night he wouldn’t look at it. Called it boring and stupid, and asked what the fuck was the point of a jigsaw. You put it together and then you pulled it apart. Like a marriage, she thought. She spent two weeks sitting at the table for an hour or two here and there, and hadn’t even half of it filled in. There was the entire sky still to do. She looked in the blank, unhelpful face of Jesus (out of the whole picture, he was the only one looking at the viewer) and swept the whole lot into a bin bag.

It amazed her now how long it took her. It was a Friday night and she was washing up after dinner, watching the sun sinking between the town’s twin spires—Catholic and Protestant—and she thought, This isn’t going to get any better. She’d taken a pregnancy test at school that afternoon—according to her diary her period was three weeks late—and the little cross of St. Andrew surfaced in the stick’s window, a blue crucifixion. Felt nothing. Not happy, not sad. Nothing. She taught the rest of the day in a daze of nothingness, smiling at the children, but absent inside. Now she looked at her own daughter—soft-limbed, big-eyed, spellbound in her high chair in front of the telly, but no longer a baby, surely only a few months away from the consciousness of what it meant when your daddy passed out in an armchair. She peeled off the rubber gloves, lifted the child to halfhearted protestations, went upstairs, started packing.

Four months after she moved back home, Kenneth had another, minor, stroke, and Alison took early maternity leave and entered—little by little, toe by toe—the family business. Showing a home here, making a phone call there. Spencer had been working in Donnelly’s Estate Agents for years, but if he objected to her coming in, he never said anything directly, and Alison discovered she was good at it, at selling homes. She’d grown up with the lexicon of estate agency as her first language. Convenience. Location. Good bones. Character piece. Low maintenance. High yield. In recent years the property TV shows had added to her stock of ready-made phrases—wow factor, curb appeal, forever home, ticking the boxes—but it always felt a little ridiculous using them. She did, though. Her direct, judgmental manner worked on people; they wanted to agree with her, and if Alison made sure prospective buyers noted certain things, they were less likely to focus on certain other things, like the smell of the downstairs bathroom or the rising damp in the garage. She swept into a room and took control, opened blinds and cupboards, pointed out the overwhelming economic benefits of an electric shower or a multi-fuel stove or the lagging on a boiler. One wet cold morning in September—as she told the recently widowed Lily Burns to think of herself sitting out here on the patio, in the suntrap made by the fence and the back wall of the kitchen, reading a book and having a glass of wine or a cup of tea—it occurred to her that if she had a gift for presenting things not as they are, but as they really should be, well, that was only to be expected of someone who’d lived with an alcoholic for as long as she had.

CHAPTER 8

Liz was sleeping off her jet lag. Kenneth had gone to Ray Mullens’s funeral and Judith and Alison stood alone in the kitchen. Alison turned the carousel display of coffee capsules for the new machine, while Judith winced at her daughter’s neck: “He must be a very heavy sleeper.”

“Oh, he woke up almost immediately. Do you want cold water in this?”

“Just a splash. Is it just the neck?”

“He kneed my thigh and there’s a bruise but it’s nothing. Did you see the doctor yet about your bloods?”

“Next Wednesday.”

“How’s the tummy been? There’s more milk powder in a tub in the bag, but he shouldn’t need it.”

“Not bad at all. I’ll give him a biscuit later.”

Judith took the bottle out of Alison’s hand, and bent down to put her face in Michael’s. He sat still strapped in his car seat on the living room floor, asleep.

“Oh, I know what my little boy needs, don’t I?”

As Alison stood up, Judith touched her arm.

“It’s not like Bill again, is it? He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

“Stephen wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

Alison waited for her mother to say, “It’s not flies I’m worried about,” accompanied by a steady imploring gaze that Alison would avoid meeting. But nothing happened, her mother moved away, and to cement her victory, Alison cheerfully lifted a millionaire’s shortcake and took a bite from it. She knew Judith thought her younger daughter had a history of making bad choices. But Judith herself hadn’t made many better ones. She’d married the first man who came along, and if they were still together that was part indolence and part convention. Whereas Alison had faced up and taken hard decisions and was in many ways a braver woman than her mother. No one could deny that. She’d risked things for love! She’d suffered! All of this she intimated by the brusque way she buttoned up the second and third buttons of her lemon-colored wool coat. Her mother walked past her, opened the fridge door, and rearranged various Tupperware containers.

“If you see your brother remind him he said he was coming for his dinner.”

“I wasn’t going to call into the office. I was just going to pick Isobel up.”

“Well, no rush. We’re going to be very happy here. Aren’t we?”

“Well, maybe I’ll call in at the church and check on the flowers. Just text me if you need anything, or if Mickey’s playing up.”

How Alison could christen her grandson with a lovely strong name like Michael—the name of an archangel no less—and then call him Mickey as if he were a gangster or a cartoon mouse was just beyond her. At times it seemed to Judith that her daughter held her in permanent contempt, and little decisions like these were designed purely to rile her. She knew it was irrational and unfair, but she felt it.

Kenneth came in from the funeral, plucked the tweed trilby from his head, and unwound the scarf delicately. It hurt today to lift his arms too high. Shrugging off his coat was taking some time, and Judith slipped behind him and began guiding one arm out of its sleeve. He pulled away.

“I can do it myself.”

“Just trying to—”

“But it’s not helpful. You’re getting in the way. I need to be able—”

“Calm down.”

Judith stepped back and lifted the wheaten loaf out of the bread bin. For over forty years of marriage, telling her husband to calm down was the closest Judith came to a daily mantra. Depending on the way the phrase was accented, the two words could mean almost anything—endearment, warning, threat. This “calm down” meant nothing in itself, but was designed to cut Kenneth off in his monologue; if it was allowed to continue, the trickle would turn to a torrent and carry him away into the kind of black despair it could take hours to dissipate. He had a remarkable gift for misery. The next step was to change the subject quickly, which Judith duly did.

“Big funeral? Do you want tea? A slice of wheaten?”

“I’ll have tea, yes. No bread. Not that many. A hundred maybe.”

She was surprised by how long it had taken to get used to watching this big bear of a man adapt himself to simple situations. To see him do such simple things with such tremulous care and physical trepidation. His eyes expressing fear, his fingers fiddling with a zipper. It was like the element he lived in had changed, had once been air and now was water, and the entire choreography of daily life had to be relearned. It was necessary to familiarize yourself with the actions of brushing your teeth, to study the order of the movements of getting into a car. It had been four years since the first stroke and heart surgery, but everything was still heavier, denser. For Kenneth, everything was a potential source of hurt.

Now he looked at her abdomen, at the hurt hiding in there, and asked, “You tell the kids?”

“I’ll tell them after the wedding. Sure, I’m not going to spoil everyone’s day.”

“Did you speak to Dr. Boyers?”

“I left a message.”

“You OK?”

“I’m all right.”

Kenneth watched her set the kettle on its base, the spout facing inward. When she went to the cupboard for cups, he adjusted it so it faced outwards, to let the steam vent away from the underside of the cupboards. She noticed and he watched her jaw perceptibly tighten with anger. It was not about cupboards and steam; it was about authority and submission, or men and women, or simply the ways of Kenneth and the ways of Judith. And so marriage goes, thought Judith. Everything becomes a sign and symbol of something else.

By four o’clock, Liz was awake and Alison had returned, though there was still no sign of Spencer.

In the living room Kenneth’s eyes were trained on yet another antiquing show on the TV, but in deference to the gathering of his daughters on the sofa, he voluntarily muted it.

“Mickey is a wee dote. God, those eyes.”

On cue, Michael appeared from the hallway, carrying a plastic dustpan in one hand and Kenneth’s tartan slipper in the other. Judith trailed behind, staring amorously at his blond curls.

“Cute, isn’t he? When he’s not screaming the house down.”

“Shooooooooos!” Michael tunefully declaimed, and handed his mother the slipper.

“The thing with Stephen is,” Alison said, “he’s very family orientated.”

“Is he from a big family?”

“It’s terrible actually. There was a brother in England but he’s dead now. Cancer. And his parents died years ago. He’s on his own. But he loves family, he’s so good with the kids.”

Liz played along, though she did not see why her sister was so set on selling her life to her, as if without the approval of others she could hardly bear to live it. Then it occurred to her that it was perhaps a mark of how unsure Alison was about the marriage if she was seeking even Liz’s affirmation.

In Liz’s eyes, her younger sister had always been much closer to Judith and Kenneth than she was, and if their parents didn’t always applaud Alison’s choices, there was no doubt she was the daughter they understood. After all, she stayed behind while Liz had upped and left. She shared their setting—the restaurants, doctors, local news, TV shows, all the cast and daily apparatus of their life—and Alison had the Donnelly gift of reducing something complex to a clichéd phrase, and saying it over and over, singing it almost. She had the same strange numerous compartments of expectation and orthodoxy, growing predictably outraged—like Kenneth—because a Christmas card was not returned, or a neighbor’s lawn was left to get too long, or the tip was automatically added to a bill.

If, occasionally, Judith liked to complain on the phone to Liz about Alison, it was with the understanding that Liz would not offer her own criticisms of her sister but simply listen and agree. Whatever competition there had been for their parents’ affection, Liz was certain that she’d withdrawn, honorably, from it, having accepted defeat. During the years when their parents had argued continually—when Spencer was a toddler—Judith had moved out for a night, to the flat above the estate agency, and so little did she trust Liz not to fight with Kenneth, and to look after Spencer, who was hysterical and wouldn’t leave his father, that she took Liz with her, entrusting Alison with her little brother’s care. Alison was the steady one, the responsible daughter.

Her father lifted a cork-lined, laminated coaster from the stack on the little table by his chair and lobbed it at Liz for the coffee she had in her hand. It landed on the sofa and she ignored it.

“Oh, dear,” Judith said, straightening up from looking in the cupboard under the sink, holding a can of Brasso and a cloth. “It’s so sad when a family just disappears.”

Everyone murmured in agreement. It was indeed awful when a family disappeared, though it did make your own look much more solid.

After Liz had helped her mother tidy the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels, and organize the glasses in the utility room, and clear various surfaces for the caterer to set her wares on, they found they had everything done, suddenly, at least until the caterers and marquee people started turning up the next day, and Judith announced she was “going to have a wee nap.”

“Does she often go and lie down during the day?”

Liz had never, as far as she could remember, known her mother to go to bed during the day. She’d rarely seen her sit down. Sometimes, in the late evening—after the dinner was served and the dishwasher loaded and the pots and pans washed and dried, and every surface cleared and wiped down, and the laundry done, and the piles of ironing completed—she might perch for a half hour before bed on the arm of a chair, watching TV distractedly, offering everyone tea or traybakes, always threatening to jump up again. Occasionally she’d sit properly, draw her legs up under herself, and read a paper from the rack by Kenneth’s chair—the Belfast Telegraph or the Mid-Ulster Mail—scanning it for people she knew. Sometimes she’d be working on a fat novel that one of the girls—her group of sixty-something female friends—had recommended, and would read steadily while Kenneth flicked the channels between football and golf and the news. But mostly she was vertical, industrious, quick.

“I think she’s tired,” Kenneth replied, not looking up from the quiz show.

“Has she been getting tired a lot?” Liz pushed on.

“None of us are getting younger. You want up here? You want up?”

Kenneth had been feeding Atlantic scraps from his ham sandwich, and Atlantic had found—what all dogs want—a brand-new god to worship. She stood now on her back legs, resting her front paws on the side of Kenneth’s armchair, her long foxy head propped on the little fanned paws. Animals sometimes seemed the only remaining recipients of Kenneth’s affection. Five or six years ago, home for Christmas, she’d been sitting reading in the conservatory and looked up to see him through the glass door, alone, wiping away a tear. Kenneth was sobbing, actually sobbing, as an Australian vet in Animal Hospital put down a black Labrador, whose big dumb beautiful eyes looked up at the vet and then were stilled. Her father, she realized suddenly—and wondered why she hadn’t put it in these terms before—was seriously depressed. In the intervening years, the evidence accumulated for this point of view. Several times she had tried to broach the topic with him, but he would not have it. She watched Atlantic lick his paw as her father looked at the dog with more pure affection than she could ever remember him showing his children.

“Where’d you say you got this beast then?”

He was rubbing Atty’s head.

“On a subway platform. She’d been abandoned.”

“Manky-looking thing.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“You get it injections?”

“All of them.”

“What about fleas?”

“She doesn’t have them.”

Despite himself, her father was grinning at the dog.

Liz knew Kenneth’s objections were only in principle. He had a sentimentalist’s adoration for all large-eyed mammals, excepting humans. Animals didn’t try to negotiate a lower percentage on commission, or let a leak in a boiler cause a ceiling to collapse, or fall behind on their rent. You knew where you stood with a dog, and where you stood was on a pedestal. Kenneth let Atlantic jump up onto his lap.

“How’s the teaching?”

“Fine, fine, I had a promising class this year really. One or two who’ll—”

“I see your man Dan Andrews is doing very well.”

Dan Andrews was a TV historian. He’d been in the year above Liz at Edinburgh, where his most famous action had been to fellate a future cabinet minister in the corridor of one of the residency halls.

“Oh yes?”

“He does a very good one on Tuesday nights. About the Tudors. It must be his fifth or sixth TV show.”

“Must be. Which reminds me.”

Her father un-muted the telly.

“I meant to tell you I’m off on Sunday to Papua New Guinea to make a TV show.”

Before anyone could reply, Liz left the room, like a boxer landing a knockout punch and striding from the ring.

The Donnelly home had broadband, technically, though in practice it was unbearably slow. Over the years Liz and Alison and Spencer had each spent several hours on the phone to British Telecom complaining, rebooting, inserting various adaptors and splitters, but it was still not feasible to download photographs. At least, not feasible in human time. In geological time, maybe, or if you experienced the world as an oak tree did. Still, Liz was making a determined effort. As she waited for the system to boot up, she propelled herself slowly in a circle in the office chair with her right foot, taking in the study.

Alison in graduation gear from Stranmillis—her head tipped slightly forward in embarrassment, though there was pride in her glance. Her blond hair had been permed to an awkward frizz, and she wore a touch too much blue eye shadow. One of Liz in the same getup, staring defiantly at the camera—her short brown hair hardly coming out from under the mortarboard. In lieu of a graduation photo for Spencer, there was one of him on the eighteenth hole of Killyreagh golf course handing over, on behalf of the estate agency, an outsized check to Cancer Research.

If you met the sisters you’d have no reason to think that Alison and Liz shared the same parents. One so fair and blue eyed and one so dark with eyes so brown that in certain lights they were almost black. But then Spencer arrived and made sense of the gene pool; he grew up with Liz’s dark complexion and Alison’s blue eyes, and both his sisters doted on him. Had it made him a little infantile? A little protected? Even in photographs you could see he had always been loved—his broad physique, his ready smile. He was at home in the world, convinced of his place in it.

Kenneth had three desks in the study, none of them for studying. They were mostly covered with prizes for various charitable lotteries and raffles he was running for Rotary, the golf club, and the Save the Children Coffee Morning. The computer screen began filling up with e-mails. There was nothing from Joel. And a great deal of bumpf. She opened the e-mail from Margo—LIZ: URGENT DISASTER—and began the tortuous process of downloading the PDFs.

On the wall beside the photographs of the three Donnelly siblings was a framed map of the world. Liz located the huge island of PNG, and next to it New Britain, an archipelagic scatter, a broken grin in the gridded blue, small and very far away from Old Britain, and from New York. She stood up and looked closer. Here was New Ireland, and here, below it, was the little curved splinter of New Ulster.

She found herself thinking of that moment when one steps from the lip of an aircraft onto the top of the steps, and the tropical heat hits you, remaking you. She wanted that, to be remade.

Half an hour later, Liz sank down onto the sofa and began ostentatiously leafing through her stack of printouts.

“So. A TV show,” Kenneth said, not lowering his paper, and using the abstracted, bored, and slightly hostile tone he reserved for his nearest and dearest.

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