‘They have big talent,’ Sasha said, ‘everybody has big talent for something.’
‘I don’t know what mine is,’ Cheryl said. One of the older men said something to Sasha in Russian.
‘He wants me to put on another film,’ Sasha said, ‘we are learning about America.’
When she got back to the caravan Dieter was sitting on her sofa, drinking cider and watching bootleg porn videos on her television.
‘Greetings, earthling. How does it go with red menace?’ Dieter said.
She started to go over to the coachworks in the evening. Sasha repaired vintage racing cars, Porsches and RS2000s, for the autoclubs who used the aerodrome at the weekends. Business was good. Sasha took her to the discount outlet on Saturday mornings and followed her into the cubicle. He brought basques to her, high-cut underwear. He touched her lightly on her stomach and bare thighs to show how things fit, the elements you had to pay attention to. He liked things that were glove-tight with American names like Gore-Tex. She liked being dressed in newly invented materials, clothes that were svelte and snugly contoured. It made her feel part of a higher purpose.
A week later he rang her, and she went over to the hangar. They climbed a metal staircase to a loft above the workshop.
‘No one has touched it since the war,’ Sasha said. ‘Pilots were billeted here. Americans. Yankees.’
There was a dartboard drawn in pencil on one wall. Beside it, on the rafters, the pilots had written their names and home places. Brooklyn, Des Moines. Places that sounded like lost townships.
Sasha bent down and pulled an old cigarette pack from the space between the joists.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘Camel cigarettes.’ He put his hand on her arm. He smelt of aerosol paint and solvent.
Cheryl painted a sign for the side of the coachworks. Sasha gave her the words. Custom Spoilers, Car Body Kits, Handmade Wings. She took a long time over it, using tins of metallic paint that she took from the aircraft factory. Underneath it she painted a pair of wings, each one about six feet long and painted in black and bronze. They looked as if they belonged to a dire angel.
‘I didn’t mean that kind of wing,’ he said, pointing to the damaged front wing of a vintage Porsche. Then he told her to turn her back to him. He lifted her sweater and undid the strap of her bra. He touched her twice, just below her shoulderblades.
‘But I make you wings,’ he said, ‘I put them there.’
All that summer blue exhaust fumes hung in the air above the concrete. The young Russians gathered at the perimeter to watch the races, drinking vodka and high-alcohol beers, watchful, remote figures. Sasha bought a video camera. After they had slept together for the first time he filmed her lying on his bed. She regarded this as an aspect of his melancholy inner life.
One evening in September Sasha called Cheryl outside. He had found a reel of 16mm film in the loft upstairs. He had transferred it to videotape. There was footage of bomber crews being addressed by a man in a general’s uniform in the winter before D-Day. They are wearing flying jackets and looking in the General’s direction. Behind him you can see a squall, coming up the lough. The runway lights are reflected off the dark clouds, and the airmen are watching this uneasily. There were many shadows on the film and no sound. There was snow on the ground.
‘That’s Patton, General George Patton,’ Sasha said, ‘standing right here in this place. Before D-Day.’
Cheryl went home. She woke during the night and saw that the projector was on. She thought of Sasha left with his lonely heroes. She put on a dressing gown and walked across the aerodrome, the mast lights of container ships moored outside the bar showing her the way. As she approached the coachworks she saw a giant elongated figure projected onto the wall of the hangar building. She saw that Sasha had been joined by the other older Russians. She stood outside the circle of light. She barely recognised herself on the screen. She wasn’t sure if it was betrayal or something even worse. She looked like someone from one of the ghostly cities that Dieter had talked about, one of their pale citizenry. She walked into the circle of light.
‘You have a talent all right,’ she said, ‘you Russian bastard.’
She walked back across the aerodrome. She took off her dressing gown and got into bed and tried to sleep but could not. She lay awake, dressed in garments whose purposes she no longer understood.
She got up and went to work the next day, but everything seemed very far away and the words coming out of her mouth did not seem to belong to her. She felt like a character from one of Dieter’s counterfeit porn movies. Flickering, badly dubbed.
She went to the gym on her way home. She looked up and saw Sasha watching her through the glass. Caught in the cathode-ray reflection of the television set, the death glow. She felt like something in danger, injured, hunted through the forest. He knew that she was wounded. He was drawn to her damaged lope.
At eleven o’clock that night there was a knock on her door. When she opened it, one of Dieter’s friends was standing there. He pointed across the aerodrome at the hangar buildings.
‘Dieter heard about the film. He’s gone to get Sasha,’ he said, ‘Sasha was Spetsnaz, Russian special forces. He fight in Chechnya.’ Chechnya. Spetsnaz. There would be ruined villages. There would be barren and wintry scenes of loss, children and dogs wandering in the ruins. As she drove across the aerodrome towards the hangar buildings she thought about Dieter. He wouldn’t know about Spetsnaz. He would adopt some doomed martial-arts stance in the face of seasoned veterans. He would rely on complex honour codes. He would defend her extraterrestrial beauty.
When she got there, the men were sitting quietly watching scenes from the collapse of the World Trade Center. Dieter was leaning against the hangar wall. There was blood on his mouth. The film showed figures jumping from the windows and the roof.
The people on the screen fell silently as though overcome by transcendence in flight. Dieter was looking at it open-mouthed, as though Heaven had collapsed and angels, the actual agents of divinity, were falling from the sky. The Russian men were watching it steadily. They were soldiers. They had an appetite for atrocity. Dieter was different. She wanted to tell him to close his eyes. That you looked away from God’s work, good or bad. You did not gaze openly on it.
Sasha looked at her, and she felt the two spots above her shoulderblades where he had touched her prickling and knew what he was thinking.
She got Dieter into the back seat of the car and drove back to the mobile home. For people like him, it was about getting through things, getting off the ground in a small way from time to time. It was different for Sasha. War and cruelty had left him with epic needs. He could never be sated.
When Dieter was asleep she looked out at the aerodrome. There was a glow of light from the hangar buildings. She thought about the Russians sitting there, watching their death films, and how much they reminded her of the pilots listening to General George Patton. She felt a desire to see the footage of Patton at the aerodrome one more time. The navigation lights of their bombers flashing on the snow-dusted apron and the lights of the aerodrome complex giving an orange glow to the underside of the clouds above, the storm clouds, the thunderheads borne in across the tumultuous waters of the lough, knowing that they would soon be aloft, storm-borne.
She Came to Me
Rebecca Miller
DRIVING UP THE HELIX-SHAPED CAR PARK, Ciaran Fox crept through floor after darkened floor, searching for a vacancy. Looking for a parking space in Dublin during working hours was just like trying to come up with a new idea for a novel, he thought as he turned the taut, leather steering wheel of his Mercedes gently, rounding the concrete curve and accelerating up yet another ramp: every time you thought you might have found one, it turned out to be taken by someone else. Sweet Jesus, why was it so fucking hard to find a space to wedge his goddamn, shitting car into? Seven floors of gleaming steel, SUVs parked hip to hip like cows eating out of their troughs. It was the women, he thought, clotting up the
place with their absurdly unnecessary off-road vehicles. Did any of them actually need to drive today? Carbon footprints as big as bathtubs, and for what? To shop, in all probability.
Ciaran emerged at the vivid sky. The final floor. And there it was. His space. A nasty, inconvenient little gap between two gleaming monsters. Ciaran detested parking. His wife was, he had to admit, far cooler when it came to backing into tight spaces. Maeve. He imagined her watching him as he reversed and moved forward, reversed and moved forward, tugging at the steering wheel furiously, left, then right, then left, then right, like a desperate sea captain trying to right a ship in a battering storm. At last, he turned off the engine, his heart hammering. His face felt coated in sweat. The car was parked so close to the SUV on his side that he could only open his door an inch. He had to clamber over the seats and squeeze out on the passenger’s side.
He walked down Dame Street, hands in his pockets, head down. Like a man pawing the grass for a lost contact lens, he was searching his mind desperately for an idea, a memory, a notion, a headline. What if he never wrote another book? He hadn’t written well in eight months, and it was two years since his last novel was finished. Every morning he thudded down in front of the computer and wrote words down, but they were dry and tasteless as old raisins. No juice, he had no juice in him anymore. He had mined his childhood, his first marriage, every love affair before Maeve. He had tried to write historical fiction, yet he couldn’t make it real for himself. He wasn’t that kind of writer. What if he had used himself up? He was beginning to panic.
Finding himself staring into the great glass wall of Hodges Figgis bookshop, he glimpsed his own reflection in the glass: grey, thinning hair fanning up from his head in the breeze, bags under his eyes, his gangly, lumbering body hunched against the cold, hands in the pockets of his shapeless down jacket. Dispirited, he stalked into the bookstore and automatically made his way to the fiction area, scanning the shelves for his own work. They had a single copy of three of his novels. He reached down and pulled one of the books out – his first real success. A novella, it seemed shamefully flimsy to him now, the scant pages flopping over in his thick fingers like a limp wrist. He took the book in both his hands, stiffening it, and peered at the author photo. A slender, thirty-year-old man in a tweed jacket looked out at him with a bemused expression: shoulder-length hair, hands in his pockets, nostrils slightly flared – there was something questioning and arrogant in his gaze. Ciaran felt no sense of connection with that young writer; what’s more, he reckoned if he met him, he wouldn’t like him too much.
Ciaran knew that he was digging himself into a good old fug. Not just a bad mood, but a trench he would be inhabiting for a long time. He felt a sour, familiar comfort as he moled his way into this darkness. There was something almost reassuring about the descent – down, down, down – to a place where no one could reach him, where he loved no one, and no one loved him. There was pleasure – yes, he confessed it, knew it: there was onanistic pleasure in his sadness and he didn’t even feel guilty about it. At least it was honest. He had had enough of impersonating happiness, of his wife’s faintly accusatory, percussive kisses on his head at breakfast, his daughters’ wily attempts to make him laugh, his own brittle resolve to make it to the next book without getting depressed again. He didn’t know how many more of these bouts Maeve could take. One day he feared he’d wake up and she’d be gone. A woman like that, a humorous, sensual, hard-headed woman, was a queen who stayed until she left. Eighteen years so far, but she was capable – the most loyal woman on earth, salt of it – was capable, he knew, of leaving. Like a feral cat, tamed for a time, she’d slip away with her kittens. He mustn’t take her for granted. And yet he felt himself drifting away from her and everything incandescent in his life, like a man succumbing to a dream at the wheel, eyes fluttering shut, his car careening across the dual carriageway.
He replaced his book on the shelf and walked out onto the street again. So many bodies – why weren’t they at work? Who were these people? Tourists, students, suits on lunch breaks, mothers killing time till the next school run. Stories in each of them, infuriatingly locked away from him. He peered into their faces for clues. This was what he needed, he thought: he needed to get out more, to be among strangers. He craved new encounters. He had been holed up with his little family for so long, he had run out of things to say. He couldn’t write about his marriage, it would be a violation. His conjugal happiness had tied his writer’s hands. He would come into town more; he would write in cafés. Volunteer in a homeless shelter. He needed a pee. The old pub on the corner was glossy black as liquid tar, with gilt lettering. He hadn’t been there in years. Maybe he would stop for a pint. It was time to break some patterns.
The place was empty, save one young woman sitting at the bar. Late twenties perhaps, a little pudgy, with black-rimmed eyes and a delicate, pointy nose, she reminded Ciaran of a raccoon. The many silver bracelets on her wrists made a tinkling sound as she raised the glass to her lips, sampling the Guinness and putting it down again after a swallow. She was probably a tourist, Ciaran mused as he walked towards the Gents’. Dublin girls came out at night. Maybe she was Eastern European. As he walked back into the bar, he observed her. She had pale skin that glowed against the dark walls of the pub. Her lank hair was brown, cut in a bob, with a hard-edged, short fringe. There was something sleek and mysterious about her, even though she was plain. On the street you wouldn’t look at her twice, most likely. But here in this dim pub at one o’clock in the afternoon, drinking by herself, she seemed damn interesting. He sat down at the bar, ordered a ham sandwich and a pint, snatched a handful of peanuts from a dish at the bar, then slid the dish over to the young woman.
‘I just read you can get hepatitis from that,’ she said in a flat voice. American. Ciaran winced. He found American English as alluring as a cold fried egg.
‘From what?’ Ciaran asked, already walking down the street in his mind.
‘Communal nuts,’ she said. He looked at her to check if she knew that was funny. She did.
‘Where in the States are you from?’ he asked.
‘I wish I could master a fake accent,’ the woman said, flattening her mouth in a little grimace. He glanced at her body; she was all in black – loose sweater, leggings and ballet shoes. She had big, shapely legs that tapered abruptly to delicate ankles and small feet. She looked at him from the side of her painted, raccoon eyes and asked, ‘Are you from Dublin?’
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘Lucky,’ she said.
‘You like it here?’
She thought it through for a moment. ‘Yeah.’
‘How long are you here for?’ he asked.
‘We leave tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m here with my parents and my brother.’
‘Did you drive around the countryside?’ he asked.
‘No, we just stayed in Dublin. It’s a sort of rest cure.’
‘For who?’
‘For me,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘I’m sort of getting better …’ she said. There was a long pause. Suddenly, Ciaran needed to find out who this person was.
‘Would you like to … take a walk?’ he asked. She hesitated.
‘Just a few blocks’, he added. In broad daylight. To see the city.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
He paid her bill and his own, and they walked out of the dim pub, into the glare.
They walked along a canal, the water shivering, silvery.
‘What do you do?’ she asked.
‘I’m a novelist,’ he said.
‘Wow,’ she said.
‘You?’
‘I work at a pet store in Cincinatti,’ she sneered. He looked over at her again, imagining her with a hamster curled on her chest. Suddenly, he had her placed, he knew her American type: nerdy, angry, compulsively wise-cracking, often Goth girls who are inevitably chubby and look perfect behind the counters in pet stores, record stores, clothing store
s – any service job suits them. They are intelligent but without self-confidence. All interest fled him as he pigeon-holed her.
‘My daughter has a turtle,’ he said. ‘I bought it in a pet store. I found the place a little depressing, to be honest.’
‘There are very few people who actually love animals,’ she said. ‘Most people turn animals into people, little people they can control, who won’t hurt them because they depend on them for food. It’s pathetic.’ Her darkly painted mouth, Ciaran noticed, was defined by two sharp points, a cupid’s bow.
‘So I won’t be buying you any pets,’ he said. She looked at him sharply, as if he had said something startling.
‘No,’ she whispered, a slow smile creeping across her face.
They walked along the docks and looked out at the big boats.
‘Where’s your family now?’ he asked.
‘They’re at the National Museum,’ she said. ‘They think I’m getting a facial.’
‘And why aren’t you getting a facial?’ Ciaran asked.
‘I don’t believe in them,’ she said.
He smiled and looked over at her. Her hair was whipping around her full, starkly made-up face. You couldn’t say she was pretty, but she had something.
As they walked back, she paused at a narrow, white, Georgian house. A sign outside read ‘Bed and Breakfast’.
‘I have a room in there,’ she said. They both stopped to look at the place. ‘Do you want to see it?’
‘I don’t feel up to meeting the whole family,’ he said.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘We’re all staying at Jury’s.’ He was about to ask what she meant when she hurried up the walk and paused on the bottom step, waiting. He saw her in her totality then: thick, muscular legs in black leggings, little feet, erect posture, big black tent of a sweater masking her body, those blackened eyes. His curiosity coagulated again.