In the window I see a reflection of an old woman sitting in her great-aunt’s chair and I tell her, “Go to bed.” I haul myself to my feet, ignoring the twinge in my hip, but pausing for a moment at the little driftwood box shrine we keep on the dresser. I made it five years ago during the worst grief-numbed weeks after the Gigastorm, and Lorelei decorated it with shells. Aoife and Örvar’s photo is inside, but tonight I just stroke my thumb across the top edge, trying to remember how Aoife’s hair felt.
“Sleep tight, sweetheart, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
October 27
UP BEFORE DAWN to pluck the feathers from four dead hens. Only twelve hens left, now. When I first moved to Dooneen Cottage — a quarter of a century ago — I couldn’t have plucked a hen if my life depended on it. Now I can stun, decapitate, and gut one as casually as Mam used to make a beef and Guinness stew. Necessity’s even taught me how to skin and dress rabbits without puking. One old fertilizer bag of feathers later I put the dead hens into the wheelbarrow and walk down the end of the garden via the hen coop, where I add the fox’s body to my one-wheeled hearse. He’s male, I see. Don’t touch fox’s tails, Declan says. A fox’s brush is a bacteriological weapon, barbed with disease. Probably got fleas, too, and we’ve had enough trouble with fleas, ticks, and lice as it is. The fox looks like he’s having an afternoon nap, if you ignore the ripped-out throat. One of his fangs protrudes slightly, pressing in his lower lip. Ed’s tooth did that. I wonder if the fox has cubs and a mate. I wonder if the cubs’ll understand that he’s never coming back, if the heart’ll be ripped out of their lives, or if they’ll just carry on foraging without a second thought. If they do, I envy them.
The sea’s ruffled this morning. I think I see a couple of dolphins a few hundred yards out, but when I look again, they’ve gone, so I’m not sure. The wind’s still from the west and not the east. It’s an awful thing to think, but if Hinkley is spewing radioactive material, which way the wind happens to be blowing could be a matter of life or death.
I tip the wheelbarrow’s grisly cargo off the stone pier. I never name our hens, ’cause it’s harder to wring the neck of something you’ve named, but I’m sad they had such frightened deaths. Now they’re drifting away with their killer into the open bay.
I want to hate the fox, but I can’t.
It was only trying to survive.
BACK AT THE house, Lorelei’s in the kitchen spreading a bit of butter on yesterday’s rolls for her and Rafiq’s lunch. “Morning, Gran.”
“Morning. There’s dried seaweed, too. And pickled turnip.”
“Thanks. Raf told me about the fox. You should’ve woken me.”
“No point, love. You can’t raise chickens from the dead, and Zim dealt with the fox.” I wonder if she’s remembered the date. “There’s a few strips of corrugated iron from the old shed — I’ll try sinking some underground walls around the coop.”
“Good idea. It should ‘outfox’ the next visitor.”
“That’s one gene you inherited from Granddad Ed.”
She likes it when I say that sort of thing. “It’s, uh,” she makes an effort to sound breezy, “Mum and Dad’s Day, today. The twenty-seventh of October.”
“It is, love. Want to light the incense?”
“Yes, please.” Lorelei goes to the little box shrine and opens up its front. The photo shows Aoife and Örvar and a ten-year-old Lorelei, against the background of a dig at L’Anse aux Meadows. It was taken in spring of 2038, the year they died, but its greens and yellows are already fading and the blues and magentas blotting. I’d pay a lot for a reprint but there’s no power or ink cartridges to print one, and no original to make a reprint from; my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the ’39 Crash was like a collective stroke.
“Gran?” She’s looking at me like my mind’s gone walkabout.
“Sorry, love, I was, um …” Often, there are just blanks.
“Where’s the tin with the incense sticks?”
“Oh. I tidied it up. Put it somewhere safe. Um …” Is this happening more these days? “The tin, above the stove.”
Lorelei lights the new incense stick at the stove, then blows out the tiny flame. She crosses the kitchen, placing the stick in the holder in the little shrine. On the ledge are a Roman coin, which Aoife gave to Lorelei, and an old windup watch Örvar inherited from his grandfather. We watch the sandalwood smoke unthread itself from the glowing tip. Sandalwood, yet another old-world scent. The first year we did this, I’d prepared a prayer and a poem, but I started weeping so uncontrollably that I appalled Lorelei; since then we’ve tacitly agreed that we just stand here for a little while and sort of be alone together with our memories. I remember waving them off at Cork airport five years ago — the last year that ordinary people could buy diesel, drive cars, and fly, though ticket prices were spiraling through the roof, and they couldn’t have gone if the Australian government hadn’t paid Örvar’s way. Aoife went to see her aunt Sharon and uncle Peter, who’d moved out there in the late twenties and who I hope are still alive and well in Byron Bay, but there’ve been no news-threads to — and precious little information from — Australia for eighteen months. How easily, how instantly we used to message anyone, anywhere on earth. Lorelei holds my hand. She would’ve gone with her parents if she hadn’t been getting over chicken pox, so Aoife and Örvar drove her here from Dublin, where they were living that year. A fortnight with Grandma Holly was the consolation prize.
Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office — all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing — while denying — that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.