Modern Gods Read online

  ALSO BY NICK LAIRD

  Fiction

  Glover’s Mistake

  Utterly Monkey

  Poetry

  Go Giants

  On Purpose

  To a Fault

  Anthology

  The Zoo of the New:

  Poems to Read Now (editor, with Don Paterson)

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Nick Laird

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Laird, Nick, 1975– author.

  Title: Modern gods : a novel / Nick Laird.

  Description: New York : Viking, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025376 (print) | LCCN 2017025650 (e-book) | ISBN 9780735223738 (e-book) | ISBN 9780670025145 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PR6112.A35 (e-book) | LCC PR6112.A35 M63 2017 (print) | DDC 821/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025376

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_2

  I.M. Carol Laird

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY NICK LAIRD

  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

  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 o
f metal entered the side of her head and she stopped.

  PART 1:

  SIX NOTHINGS

  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, “B
ut 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.