Ireland Doesn't Get Earthquakes
1
Brian’s house shuddered in the middle of the night. A fork fell into the sink. A microscopic crack threaded itself outwards from the corner of a downstairs window. He noticed none of this until phone fell out of his sleeping hand onto the floor.
He picked it up and recoiled as the light from the screen blinded him, before automatically adjusting itself to the point where no text was visible at all. He manually increased the brightness and messaged Kate.
– Just had an earthquake I think. Dropped my phone.
The reply came in.
– Heavy phone.
He fell back asleep.
The next morning his house made a lurch to the side and Brian fell off a chair. He was joined by a mug of tea and the laundry that had been sitting on the kitchen table for two days. He looked around, feeling betrayed by both his house and the ground for having lulled him into a false sense of stability over the years. He reached his arm out in the direction of where his phone was most likely to be had it had fallen too, but it had somehow remained on the table. He stood tentatively up and grabbed it.
– Another earthquake! For real this time.
– Dropped your phone again?
– Actually no.
– Not an earthquake then, sorry.
– Bloody earthquake police.
He put the phone down on the table and started to become aware of at least two car alarms, and probably one house alarm immediately outside. He made a cursory effort at mopping up the tea and gathering the pieces of mug and went out the front door.
There were a handful of people doing similar things, heads were poking out of doors, people were looking up at the sky, pointing downwards at the ground. Someone had brought a broken drinking glass and was waving it around, as if to prove a point.
After frantic button-pushing from the owners, the car alarms cut off within a minute of each other. Someone standing on a chair outside their front door managed to put a stop to the house alarm and the road was left with its own thoughts.
“C’mere,” shouted a voice near the end of the road. “Look at this thing.”
Brian walked towards whoever was calling, followed by a few neighbours, some of whom were unsure whether it was worthwhile to go back and trade their slippers for shoes and committing to being outdoors. Eventually they all gathered in a small circle at the closed end of the road. “Was this here yesterday?” asked a man. Brian knew him to nod at, but had long passed the point of being able to ask his name without it being an incident. The man was pointing at the ground.
There was a crack, seven or eight inches long, barely wide enough to slip a piece of paper into. But it was there.
“Ah, that’s been there for years,” said a woman in slippers, keen to go back inside. Interesting things had stopped happening and her commitment to being outdoors was waning.
“That’s my house,” said someone else, pointing at a building directly behind the crack, “and I have never seen this before in my life.”
“That’s because you’re always coming home drunk,” said another person, without even looking up. Brian stared at the crack.
“Did everyone else have stuff fall over?” he asked. “There’s car alarms. House alarms. Was it an earthquake?” “Dublin doesn’t get earthquakes,” said the man whose name Brian did not know. He didn’t know anyone’s name here. He had lived on this street for five years and may still have been the newest arrival.
“Maybe a tree fell down?” said Brian.
“Fell down from space maybe, cracked the road, then flew back up to space.”
Brian looked up, instinctively, at the word ‘space’ but then felt foolish, hoped nobody noticed, and returned to examining the crack. The woman in slippers turned around and walked back towards her house. The person who had brought the broken glass was trying to slip it into someone else’s wheelie bin without getting caught.
“Maybe it was always here,” murmured the man who, seconds before, had claimed to have never seen it.
“Yeah, and, like, who cares,” said a woman, to a general murmur of realisation and agreement. Nobody had time to care about a crack in the ground when they probably had a shelf at home that had fallen over, milk on the floor, mortgage payments, unsupervised children. Everyone in the small circle drifted off, leaving Brian alone, gazing down at the crack until he, too, decided there was no more to be done here, and went back inside.
Returning to his collection of broken materials and spots of un-mopped tea, he made a token effort of picking bits up while his attention was really on his phone. No further communication from Kate, so he sent out a message.
– Crack in the road.
He put the phone down and turned to continue cleaning up until it almost immediately shuddered and made noise.
– Did you try any?
– Ha. Neighbours all out but they lost interest.
– How many names do you know now?
– Literally my own.
That was the end of that. Brian circulated his thumb around the screen and navigated through three news sites by pure muscle memory. None of them had any mention of an earthquake. Too soon maybe? Social media would know. There was an out of context clip of a politician saying something stupid doing the rounds, the shards were cleaned up and it was still first thing in the morning on a work day. More tea. Life continued.
2
Four days later everything shook and Brian fell out of bed. It was seven in the morning. His wardrobe opened and tipped out three complete sets of clothing, joining the five complete sets already on the floor; a shelf of books distributed its contents across the bed. Miscellaneous things downstairs smashed.
Brian dragged himself to standing and stood in the doorframe, having learned from TV that this was, for some reason, safe. Nothing happened for long enough for him to feel foolish so he took a step over the book jetsam and looked out the window. A streetlight had collapsed and smashed into the roof of a parked car. He thought immediately of the crack. He stepped over broken frames and fallen objects on his way down the stairs, took a glance into the living room and then mentally filed away that he had to deal with that later.
He fired off a quick text to Kate.
– Earthquake. Big! Car smashed, wailing, gnashing of teeth!
He felt the vibration in response as he emerged onto the street at the same time as all of his neighbours. One of them ran to the car under the streetlight and collapsed onto his knees next to it. He put out one hand and touched its dented surface tenderly.
“That’s not your car, Liam,” said the woman who had worn slippers during the previous incident.
“He gives me a lift to work sometimes,” replied Liam in a strained voice, “when I can’t be arsed getting the bus.”
The woman nodded, put her hand on his shoulder and they both looked silently at the wreck.
Brian walked over to where the crack had been last time and stopped in astonishment when he reached it. It was six inches wide now, and the length of a fully grown adult.
“You could fall into that thing,” marvelled one of the people out on the street. Brian thought this guy’s name might also have been Brian, but was extremely aware of how confusing the conversation would be if he were wrong.
“You’d have to cut down on the pints a little if you want to fall in there now, Brian,” said the woman who had brought the broken glass outside the previous time. Possible Other Brian didn’t react to this in any way, so Brian froze, wondering if she was making fun of him. Did she know him? Why would she have said that if she didn’t? Why would she have said that if she did?
“You crawling into the hole there, Paul?” asked another man who had ambled up to take a look into the crack in the ground. Brian and Possible Other Brian were the only two people he could have been talking to. Oh God, who should reply to this? Brian looked over at the speaker, gave him a closed-mouth smile, and nodded once. Possible Other Brian didn’t move. Had he ever moved? Have he and this crack been here forever? The man seemed placated, turned around and walked off. Maybe I’m actually Paul, thought Brian.
Liam dragged himself to his feet in front of the smashed car and turned around, shaking his head. He put his hand on Brian’s shoulder as he walked by. “Sorry about your car,” he said.
Broken Glass Woman walked up to Brian when he was alone again.
“He’s an idiot,” she said, “doesn’t even know who you are.”
“Thank God,” said Brian, relieved, “I was getting lost here with everyone. I don’t know who knows who, or even who is who. People have been using different names for the same people, I’m incredibly confused. Do you know what’s up?”
“Nobody pays attention to their neighbours,” said the woman. “That’s Brian’s car.”
Might as well take advantage of this conversation to avoid awkwardness at the next earthquake, Brian thought.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked.
“Where?” replied the woman.
“You know, on the road.”
“Oh I don’t live here,” said the woman.
Any further questions here felt like they would cross the line into interrogation, but she was smiling politely, looking at him, offering absolutely nothing. A blank canvas, an empty search box. Could ask her name. Not much use if she doesn’t live here.
“What do you think about this earthquake business?” asked Brian.
“All overhyped if you ask me,” she said. “Probably not even real.”
Brian turned his head, looking left and right, taking in the crack in the ground, the fallen streetlight, the smashed car.
“But, like,” he said, gesturing, “what about all this?”
“Couldn’t say,” she said.
Time passed. Weeks. Centuries.
“I’m going to head back inside then,” said Brian.
“Grand so,” said the woman.
Back inside he went, nothing was clearer. He took his phone out, a message was waiting.
– Yep, here too.
– What, an earthquake?
– Guess it was a very big one.
– You felt that in Roscommon?
– It was big, things collapsed, alarms going off. Crack in the ground. Wardrobe fell on me, I think my legs are broken.
– Are you serious?
– Yeah, hurts quite badly actually. Who would have thought?
– Do you need an ambulance?
– Not a bad idea.
Brian hovered over his phone. What did not a bad idea mean? Was he supposed to call an ambulance? She had a phone. It didn’t occur to him to actually make a voice call, so he texted again.
– Have you called an ambulance?
– I have, nobody picked up. Must be busy.
– What are you going to do?
Time passed. No reply. Shit. This is clearly a joke isn’t it? Does 999 cover the whole country? How awkward is that conversation going to be with the dispatcher, no I’m not there but she texted me. I don’t know why she didn’t call you herself, maybe she’s dead. Yes, a wardrobe. Kills children all the time. Should I drive to Roscommon? That wasn’t actually my car under the streetlight was it? Focus. He texted again.
– Are you alive?
He freaked out a little at the flippancy of this, and so sent another.
– Haha
No, that made things worse. Oh god, I have to make an actual speaking phone call. He scrolled through his contacts and pushed the button. The phone rang. Nothing happened. He paced around, walked up the stairs, stepped over books and clothes, walked back down the stairs. He put the kettle on and tried to call again. Nothing. He noted that, for all his worry, there was a light dusting of relief that he didn’t have to talk on the phone.
What’s the limit of my responsibility here, he thought. I can’t actually go to Roscommon just because I didn’t get a reply to a text within half a minute. But for Kate, that is an unusually long delay. But you can’t die from a broken leg, or two of them, and she’s literally holding a phone. That guy from the movie was stuck under a rock for some number of hours and he was fine. She’s holding a phone.
He tried to ring through again, and nobody picked up. Sent another text.
– How’s the wardrobe?
This is very hard to nail down, tonally, he thought. A minute passed. Brian texted again.
– Haha
Oh god.
There’s a moral responsibility here, he thought. Kate is trapped under a wardrobe with two broken legs. Maybe. We’ve had multiple earthquakes, the ambulance isn’t coming. Possibly. It’s high alert, a time for heroes. Or, alternatively, she has put her phone down for the first time in six years. Is it even plausible for an earthquake to span the breadth of a country? Even a small country?
“Worst case,” said Brian aloud to himself, “I look silly. Small price to pay.”
He found his car keys on the ground and set out for Roscommon.
3
Heading west, he kept an eye out for evidence that the earthquake had spanned the entire country. There was a car upside down at the side of the road, but he figured nobody really needs an earthquake to do that. There was a single ambulance sitting at the edge of it, and a single paramedic leaning against the side, scrolling through her phone. The side of one petrol station seemed to have sloughed off into a mess of bricks and glass on the ground. People walked past it, not even glancing up. Maybe it had been like that for months, years. There were cracks in the roads, but that’s because nobody fixes the roads.
Brian had never managed to figure out if his car had a radio, so once he was off the motorway, he pulled over for a minute to check the news on his phone. A famous person had died. Two countries close to each other were not getting along very well despite being similar in almost every way. Someone had invented a new kind of milk. Nothing about any earthquakes. There genuinely had been a few - or at least one - in Dublin. He was sure of that much.
A small pub down the road a little bit from where he had stopped had two fire engines sitting outside it despite there being nothing visibly wrong. A man in full firefighting gear sat next to someone in a full chef’s outfit on a bench outside, both texting furiously.
Arriving into Athlone, things looked normal. People were going in and out of shops. McDonald’s was open, but it looked like the drive-through window had smashed so cars were parked haphazardly outside. Brian decided not to stop. If Kate had been grievously injured, arriving with a bag of takeaway fries would be poor form. He paused again and checked the news. The manager of a sports team was blaming a refereeing decision for a loss.
Not long thereafter, Brian arrived in Roscommon. His phone GPS directions, talking through the car, stopped mentioning specific street names, but rather started announcing suddenly that he should turn left, like a passenger who was only half paying attention. Eventually, the upbeat robot lady told him that in two hundred metres, his destination would be on the right. He looked ahead and saw a fairly impressively-sized house on its own plot of land, with a field in the back. The front had two windows on the ground floor, three upstairs, and looked like it had a handsome amount of depth. Everything looked intact, until he got closer and saw a network of cracks in the walls, and a dark recess on the outside of the roof.
He pulled into the driveway and got out. He took out his phone and tried ringing, but once again, there was no response. He reasoned it would be silly to drive all this way and then just talk on the phone from his car outside the house. He got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell.
4
There was no answer. This was the physical world equivalent of Kate not picking up the phone, but he didn’t have the option to just quit, hide and look at the football results again. How long ago had he got this address? Must be four or five years. What if she had moved since then? He had been sending physical Christmas cards all this time, like he had been genetically programmed to by his parents, and had never really thought too much about it. He had never come to visit. It had been years. He hadn’t seen her in Dublin either, though. Unless she had come and not tell him. The map of possible awkward consequences to this endeavour began to grow; Brian began to slightly, in the back of his mind, hope he had the wrong house.
He rang the bell again. Nothing. Glanced at his phone. No notifications. He thought about trying the door. An entire new continent spawned in the map of awkward consequences, a mountain range of things that could happen if Kate was home and he blundered in, a rainforest if someone else lived here.
But he had come all this way.
The door, of course, was unlocked. He knocked loudly as he opened it a crack. He took in what he could see while keeping it plausible that, while arguably breaking, he was not yet technically entering. It looked deserted. There was a couch, some books. Bare walls. Hard to gauge the amount of dust at this distance so he opened the door further and put a foot inside. No taking it back now.
“I’m not a burglar,” he called out. Good start, he thought, get the facts out there. Like how police have to identify themselves before they immediately kill whoever they find. “Kate? Are you home?”
Silence.
“You said you were dying, I think, when you texted,” he called, “and then never answered the phone again. Have you noticed the earthquakes? I think your house is broken.”
He took a few tentative steps into the living room and got a closer look at his surroundings. It was genuinely hard to tell if the house was abandoned or not. There was a small TV with - he looked closer - a VCR connected to it. It had a red standby light, indicating that the place at least had electricity. Sitting facing this was a grey couch with clothes strewn across it and a mug wedged into each back corner. He walked softly over and picked one up, thinking if it was still warm he could congratulate himself on being a detective, but it was dry and empty. There was a clock on the wall telling the wrong time, and it was overhung by an uncomfortable amount of mould.
Brian made a move towards what he assumed was the kitchen when he heard a creaking noise upstairs and remembered the reason he was ostensibly here. If Kate was crushed by a wardrobe, that wardrobe was unlikely to be in the kitchen.
He called up the stairs: “I’m not here to kill you. It’s Brian. Kate?” That didn’t come out as reassuring as he had hoped. Another creak in the ceiling, and a pause. He put one foot on the bottom step and tried to twist his head around to see the landing up above.
Footsteps. Coming his direction. This is getting resolved right now, one way or the other, he thought.
He put his second foot on the bottom step, looked up, and saw Kate at the top of the stairs, hoodie and pyjama bottoms, hair tied up, completely unhurt.
“Brian,” she said. “You’re in my house.”
“I am,” he replied.
Total silence.
“Why?” she continued.
“Have you,” he said, almost volcanic with embarrassment, “checked your phone recently?”
She tilted her head slightly to the side and waited another second or two.
“Recently? Weren’t we texting like two hours ago? Were you here during that? Like, outside my door?”
“We were, yes,” said Brian. “And no, I was not. You said you were…” He paused, exquisitely aware of what he was about to say, with no viable path to not saying it. “You said you were trapped under a wardrobe. And that the ambulance wasn’t coming. Your legs were broken. And then you stopped, I didn’t get a reply, you didn’t pick up.”
“So you jumped in the car and burned it to Roscommon to check on me?”
“I tried to call you a few times first.”
“Remember one time I told you that the ghost army from The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was in my living room?”
“I, yes, I do remember that.”
“You didn’t burn it to Roscommon for that one. Didn’t even call me. Don’t think you’ve ever called me.”
“That one, you know, seemed like a joke.”
She let that hang in the air for a few seconds.
“That one,” she paused, “seemed like a joke. Those ghosts took down a Nazgûl, Brian, that’s no joke.”
“There was an earthquake!” said Brian. “Three of them now!”
“That’s how I came up with the joke. Did you actually have an earthquake?”
“Three of them. Did you not? Your window is cracked, there’s some kind of hole in the roof.”
“I think we had one maybe, yeah,” she said, absentmindedly picking clothes off the back of the couch and very badly folding them. She looked around for another surface to put them on and, finding none, put them back where she found them in the first place.
“What was your plan then?” asked Kate.
“I was thinking mostly about lifting up a wardrobe.”
“Ferrying me personally to the hospital. Carrying me across the threshold shouting about how you need a doctor. Maybe saying ‘stat’.”
“Something along those lines, yes,” said Brian. He was starting to think that this was perhaps an unnecessary level of mockery for what was, really, a selfless act. The worst case, he had said to himself, was that he’d look silly, and here it was. It seemed unfair.
“What’s your new plan?” asked Kate.
“Well the new plan might be to just sack it off and go home, if you’re just fine and have a nice evening of folding clothes ahead of you.”
“Ah now, you’re here,” she said. “Should we go down to the pub? We can talk about earthquakes.”
5
The pub was walking distance. Kate led the way, Brian noticed she didn’t lock her door, but let it swing almost shut and left it at that. The wall at the edge of her property was made of rocks and had crumbled to the ground. She walked directly over it without glancing downwards. Brian stumbled as rocks slid from beneath his feet, and he quickly shuffled to catch up.
Shops were open, people were coming in and out with snacks and newspapers. There was one pothole about the width of a car, but vehicles were routing around it. A pipe sticking out from the side of the post office was gushing water straight into a storm drain. If there had been an earthquake here, people had adjusted to it without breaking stride.
They reached the pub and Kate opened the door with her shoulder. There was one person behind the bar, scrolling through a phone. Two tables were occupied, on opposite sides of the room, leaving seven empty between them and nobody sitting at the bar. One table had an elderly couple; he had one full pint and two empty glasses, she had the remnants of a full meal and a mostly full glass of water. The other table had just a child, around the age of eight, with a pile of chips in front of her.
Directly in front of the emergency exit was a broom leaning against a pile of broken dishes, glasses and wood.
They walked to the bar; the bartender did not look up.
“Still a cider, or have you moved up in the world?” asked Brian.
“Diet Coke is fine,” said Kate.
“Times have indeed changed”
“Yeah, I don’t actually drink.”
Brian moved his head to precisely the angle that put him on the same psychic wavelength as the bartender, who, sight unseen, put her phone away and walked over.
“Diet Coke and a pint of whatever lager you have,” he said.
When they were seated, there was a yawning silence for several seconds.
“So I haven’t seen you for six years,” said Kate.
“We’ve texted a lot, though,” said Brian. He sipped his pint.
“Very modern indeed,” she replied, drink remaining untouched.
“You replied, I replied, things continued. I was doing a life, I presume you were too.”
“I was doing a life, yes. Doing it by myself mostly.”
“Hey, I was in Dublin, everyone we know is in Dublin, why didn’t you come back at all in that time?”
“I was there once or twice,” she replied.
“Maybe it’s not my fault then,” said Brian, annoyed now. He sipped his pint again, but more angrily, insomuch as you can sip angrily. “I did drive the width of the country immediately because I thought you were hurt.”
“Have you decided I’m not hurt?” she said.
“I’m getting close to not actually understanding what you’re talking about,” he replied. “Are you doing that thing where people pretend they’re in a movie and obliquely refer to something that only they know about? For the audience? Is that the audience?”
He gestured towards the child, funnelling chips into her mouth.
Their own table moved slightly and the head of Brian’s pint slopped out.
“I thought you might come out. It’s not a big country,” she said.
“I thought you might come back,” he replied, “It’s the same size country from the other side. And hey, you say you did. Mission accomplished. Didn’t look me up?”
“I only came back on business.”
“I guess it takes a full twenty four hours of the day to…” Brian paused. Kate looked at him, he was stuck ending that sentence, whether he wanted to or not.
“Yeah. I guess you win this round. I don’t know what you do,” he said.
“I don’t do anything, really,” she said.
“You’re not giving much away so I am going to choose to take that literally. How do you afford to, you know, stay alive, and eat?” Brian folded his arms and less than two seconds later felt uncomfortable without a drink in his hand, so he opened them again and picked it up.
“I own the place. It’s Roscommon, it’s cheap. It’s not like I fled to Howth.”
“You’d really be fleeing up in the world.”
“I have some money, I eat sometimes.”
“Sounds fulfilling.”
“Yeah,” she replied.
“How did you get the house?”
“It’s a long and complex tale,” she said, looking out the pub window, “and it involves time travel.”
Brian said nothing.
“My grandad owned it, then he died. Due to time.”
“Travelling forwards in time is a lot more straightforward,” said Brian.
“I don’t know what you do either,” she said.
“I don’t know what I do. I’m in meetings, and people talk at each other and then nobody does anything. Several days later I have to make a decision about it and everyone defers to me. There is no follow up as to whether I was right or wrong. Ever.”
“Are you generally right or wrong?”
“I don’t think anything that has happened in those meetings has ever mattered. The company is a machine that moves itself and we’re just talking around the edges.”
“Does it make something?”
“It makes money,” he said, and flapped his hand a little at her immediately rolled eyes, “No, that’s what it does. It takes money from one place and moves it to a different place, and then there’s more money. I’m responsible for this so they give me some of it. I make reports, they have built-in telemetry to see how many people read them, do you want to guess?”
“None. Nobody,” she said immediately.
“Not a single fucking one,” he said, picking up his pint.
“Not one, any of them?”
“Ok, I exaggerate,” he said, “one of my reports hit double figures in views once. Eleven. Then I figured out how to exclude myself from the stats and it went down to six. The sum total of my career.”
“But you own a car and you can afford a round.”
“Cheaper when it’s just Coke,” he said. “When did you stop drinking?”
“Few years ago,” she replied, and Brian realised he had picked up his pint immediately after asking that question. He let it hang in the air for too long to ask a follow up so came up with basically nothing.
“Yeah,” he said. She hadn’t touched her drink. “What do you actually do though? What have you been doing for six years?”
“Honestly don’t worry about it,” she said, “I’ve been doing boring things. I worked in a coffee shop for a while. Then a slightly different coffee shop. This pub. I volunteered at the library.”
“They don’t pay people at the library?”
“They pay some of them. They didn’t pay me.”
“I will stop asking if you want me to stop asking.”
“About the library?”
He said nothing to this.
“Yeah, ok,” she said, “Maybe later. I’m just going to have some thoughts first.”
“I will, I think then, have another,” said Brian, standing up just as every glass and dish in the place rattled at the same time, three chairs and the child all fell over.
“What’s up with the ground?” asked Kate.
“Yeah,” said Brian, transparently relieved at the change of subject. “I was going to mention that.”
“That’s the first one I’ve felt.”
“I thought you had a few? Wardrobe joke? Your house is full of cracks and holes.”
“No this is the first. I was lying about those. Joking, I mean. Lying for laughs. Honestly I thought you were joking too until you turned up at my door. Should we help that child?”
“We had genuine earthquakes in Dublin,” he said, ignoring that last part. “It’s kind of phenomenal if they span the width of the country. That’s serious, isn’t it?”
“If it gets any worse I could end up trapped under a wardrobe with my legs broken.”
“I don’t know what we should actually do if it gets worse, though. Have you read the news? There must be something by now.”
Kate took out her phone and Brian watched her thumb slide up and down a few times before stopping.
“Here it is,” she said, “There’s an article about how a League of Ireland game had to be postponed because…,” she scrolled down further, “… the entire stadium has been destroyed. Jesus.”
“Postponed?” said Brian. “Really.”
“It says they’re going to try make it up midweek.”
“I’m worried about this earthquake situation,” said Brian. “Why isn’t anyone else?”
“Because it’ll be grand,” said Kate, shrugging.
“But a stadium collapsed?. Your house is in bits. A car was crushed outside my front door. My front door is attached to my house, and my house is on the entire other side of the country.”
“It’s a small country, to be fair. We established that earlier.”
“Can I take out your brain and look at it,” he said, “Is it missing the seriousness gland.”
“I’m not sure brains have glands,” replied Kate, and then catching his eye she quickly continued, “but yes, this is weird and probably serious. It is unusual that this country has earthquakes. And it’s worrying if they span the entire middle bit.”
“Do you know anyone up in the North?” asked Brian.
“No,” she said.
“What about south.”
“Also no.”
“Aren’t your parents in Waterford?”
“I think so.”
He paused a second at this. “I feel like I’ve missed something.”
“It’s been a long time,” she said. “There’s plenty to miss even if you’re not trying.”
“Should we get out of here?”
“Weren’t you going to get another drink?”
“I don’t think they have any more glasses.”
“My house is, as you say, in bits.”
“Come to Dublin. I have a spare room.”
“Are we sure your house isn’t in bits?”
“No, but we’re sure yours is.”
“A fair point, I suppose,” she said, “Let’s go back there so I can grab all of my belongings that are not currently in bits.”
6
They walked past the same shops, with what looked like the same people buying the same things, and the same pile of rocks that was previously a wall. The door to Kate’s house flapped open, but she floated in, unconcerned. Brian hadn’t paid much attention to the house before, but now began to notice how bare it was. There were no photos, but he figured people didn’t actually print photos any more. There was no art, no movie posters, no… he tried to think what he had on his walls at home. Receipts? Pasta sauce? Maybe this was growing into a revelation about his own life. The walls remained cracked and he saw scattered broken glass lying on the floor. Brian began to wonder if this was actually related to the earthquake at all.
Kate stepped over the various fragments of devastation and went on upstairs. Brian walked tentatively into the kitchen, eyes still on the cracks lining the walls. He opened the fridge. Inside was a single bottle of Heineken and an egg carton. Brian felt the urge to open the carton and was oddly disappointed to discover eggs, but intrigued to see that the five remaining were unevenly distributed.
“Serial killer behaviour,” he said to himself.
Kate came into the room with a small backpack slung over her shoulder.
“Find anything interesting?” she asked.
“I’m just looking in the, you know,” said Brian.
“We call it a fridge here.”
“Thought you said you didn’t drink.”
“Doesn’t look like I drank it.”
“That all you have?” he asked, gesturing towards her bag.
“Computer, change of clothes. Do they have toothbrushes in Dublin still? I can get a fresh one.”
“They don’t, actually,” said Brian.
“Ah well,” she replied, “have to cut down on sugar then.”
“Do you, you know, generally, live like this?” Brian asked.
“With long-lost acquaintances poking around my fridge? No, not generally.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe you should have texted me about it.”
Brian quelled the urge to get annoyed again, it was surface-level resistance that he kind of felt he deserved. Time to start making up for it.
“You don’t have any food.”
“There’s food,” she said, gesturing at the fridge. “Eggs and such.”
She reached over and opened a cupboard. Inside was a Kit-Kat multipack and three litres of vegetable oil.
“I know it’s been a while, but over text you were normal and light-hearted, and talked about movies and cats. I’m realising now that you never said anything about your actual day to day life.”
She leaned towards him, nodding, getting him to finish the thought.
“And yes,” he continued, “I didn’t ask. You didn’t ask. Who was my last girlfriend? What was my last professional accomplishment? How many children do I have?”
She blinked at that last one.
“Yes, the answer is none, but you didn’t know that.”
“Yep, we’re bad at this,” she said. “Kind of a waste of six years if you think about it.”
“Why did you leave Dublin?”
This froze her momentarily and in trying to avoid making it obvious she opened another cupboard. Paper cups and a box of one hundred tea bags. Brian couldn’t see a kettle.
“Can you pretend that I just answered you in a hand-wavy way or made an easy joke?”
“Sure, alright.”
“Easier than me having to actually come up with something, you see.”
“Should we go, then?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m ready to go.”
He gestured towards the fridge. “Do you want an egg for the road?”
“I think I’ll be ok.” She shouldered her backpack and they went out the front door. Kate paused before opening the passenger side of the car.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Brian looked upwards and around. There were the ambient sounds of a commotion drifting in the air. Kate dropped her backpack and climbed onto a wall.
“There’s something going on,” she said down to him. “Blue and red lights. Crowd.”
“What?”
“I can’t read the subtitles from here,” she said, with a glance down.
Brian shook his head and started to climb up as well, but she flapped her arms around and ushered him back to the ground.
“It’s not far,” she said.
She started walking in the direction opposite to the pub they had been to earlier. Brian scooped up her discarded backpack and did a light jog to catch up with her. Anticipating being at best ignored, or more likely wryly rebuffed, Brian asked no questions and they walked in silence for a couple of minutes. The scene began to reveal itself as they got closer: three police cars lined up one after the other, lights flashing; two ambulances, seemingly just for good measure as there didn’t seem to be any violence or injuries. One of the police officers was standing on a pile of rubble, trying to make something known, but every single person was deeply engrossed in a phone, and paying no attention to him whatsoever.
Brian slid out his own phone without breaking stride. He figured the police officer must be telling everyone something that is worth immediately looking up while ignoring the live human being trying to give you that same information.
He flipped to the news homepage and stopped dead in his tracks.
Kate kept walking, but soon realised this was a game of chicken she was not going to win, and so turned around, hands on hips. Brian didn’t look up. They stood in this standoff for ten or fifteen seconds, though Brian didn’t realise it. Kate gave up and walked back to him, and when he noticed her in his peripheral vision, he looked up, stunned.
“They’re evacuating the country,” he said.
7
“They are what-ing the what?” asked Kate.
“They are,” said Brian, looking at his phone and pointing at it to emphasise his point, “evacuating the country.”
“The country,” said Kate. “Ireland. All of it.”
“Well, it’s only a paragraph long and it says ‘more to follow’.”
“More to follow,” said Kate. “Like, for example, what the actual fuck?”
“Let’s go down and see if the police guy knows any more.”
Brian walked past Kate as she stood, hands on hips, staring up to where they had walked from, taking in the dented cars and crumbling walls, before turning around and doing an awkward shuffling run to catch up with Brian. They continued until they arrived at the crowd, which was eerily silent. Nobody was talking to each other, half were reading intently and the other half were furiously typing things on their phones. Brian approached the police officer.
“So,” he started, then paused a second. “What’s going on?”
“Evacuating the country,” said the officer.
“Ireland?” asked Kate.
“That would be the country, yes.”
“All of it?”
“You would have to imagine so.”
“I mean,” said Brian. “How? And also, why?”
“More to follow,” said the officer.
“More to follow,” said Brian.
“Do you have any information that’s not in this single-paragraph news report?” asked Kate, pointing at her phone.
“I do not, no,” he replied.
“What are you here for?” asked Brian.
“Keeping the peace,” he replied.
“Job well done,” said Kate, turning her head around at all the silent, hunched people around her.
“Can you radio someone?” asked Brian.
“Who do you think it is I’d radio?” the officer said.
“HQ or something?” said Brian.
“The police station is there,” said the officer, indicating a building across the road with a single police car parked outside of it. There was one officer sitting on the bonnet of the car drinking from a small carton of milk. He was also typing at speed on a phone.
“Where did the news get this thing?” asked Kate.
“The government, I suppose.”
“And they just made it up did they? Is this because of the earthquakes? Is Ireland delicately balanced on a wall under the sea?”
“More to follow.”
“What should we do?” asked Brian.
“I have no more information,” replied the officer.
“Well, points for not saying ‘more to follow’. That’s probably enough,” said Kate, turning to walk away. Brian took out his phone and glanced up a few times as he followed her. He texted his parents, some colleagues, a group chat full of people who lived in six different countries and hadn’t all been in the same room for eight years. Kate strode on ahead.
“Are we,” asked Brian, in motion, “still going to Dublin?”
Kate stopped, considering. She turned around to him.
“Do you think they’re really evacuating the country?” she asked.
“I’m not sure I can really accept that, no,” said Brian.
“So let’s carry on then. Either nothing is happening, and we go to Dublin, or they’re evacuating three million people and they’re hardly going to be doing it from Belmullet.”
“I need to know what’s actually happening,” said Brian. “I can’t just accept this. Evacuating the country isn’t a thing. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s not possible.”
He opened his phone again, once again read ‘more to follow’, checked up his group chats and texts, saw the same phrase being copied and screencapped and shared around. Nobody knew anything. It wasn’t clear where this evacuation order had come from. The foreign media had picked it up and had started treating it as a joke, because obviously it wasn’t a serious thing that could happen.
Kate had disappeared into the distance. The crowd from the vicinity of the police officer had begun to disperse, every single one head down, scrolling, typing, turning the screen upside down to establish if ‘more to follow’ revealed any more information from another angle. Brian, feeling instinctive discomfort with being one of these people, despite very much being one of those people, put his phone into his back pocket and walked in the direction of Kate’s house.
The earth moved again, very slightly. A single brick fell from a wall that was already significantly damaged. This captured the attention of nobody. A week ago this would have been headline news, possibly even with more to follow. Brian walked on, feeling the weight of his phone in his pocket, wondering if anything had changed, almost physically feeling the messages moving through the air, through his skin and being transformed into a push notification that had new information. More to follow.
He took it out and had no messages.
He arrived at Kate’s door, which was still ajar, and opened it with his elbow as he realised his phone was once more in his hand. He quickly put it away so he could enter the house empty handed. He could hear Kate rummaging around upstairs. He started up the stairs, noticing the threadbare carpeting and damp walls. Not caused by an earthquake, presumably.
He followed the sound of movement and reached the door of Kate’s room the second, coincidentally, she emerged from it and closed it behind her. In the tiny sliver of visibility before it shut, he saw a mattress on the floor with a half-dozen books scattered around it, with a lamp overlooking the scene.
“Right,” said Kate, “we heading off?”
“Have you lived in this house for the whole six years?” asked Brian.
“Most of it,” said Kate, already halfway down striding out the door.
“You don’t have a lot of stuff.”
“Das minimalism,” she said, “or whatever that Danish word is where you don’t have a lot of stuff.”
“But like,” said Brian, “a bed.”
“Has more followed?”
“No, nothing has followed.”
“Does your car have a radio?”
“I actually don’t know.”
8
Brian backed the car out out Kate’s driveway in an awkward pattern, avoiding a tree that may or may not have been lying on its side when he arrived in the first place. He was still in the mindset of just driving back to Dublin, because evacuating the country was such a ludicrous concept that it hadn’t even come close to lodging properly.
“Do you think they’ll say ‘more to follow’ out loud on the radio?” asked Kate.
“I have a radio then?”
He looked around to make sure the street was clear and saw a woman holding hands with two small children, taking them for a walk, clearly not evacuating anything at all. The supermarket was still open. There were a half dozen people sitting at a table outside the pub. Brian tried to peek inside through the window to see if there was still a child working on a plate of chips.
“Have we fallen for some kind of prank?” asked Brian.
“There was a police guy,” replied Kate.
“Yeah but, was there really? He didn’t know anything, and nobody is doing anything. Maybe someone just… posted something and one credulous reporter picked it up and everyone went mad with it. Have you looked at the international news? This is in the wacky stories section.”
Both of their phones buzzed at the same moment, with a third noise coming from Kate’s backpack.
“Odd,” said Kate, “mine is on silent.”
She picked it up and checked the notification: EMERGENCY BROADCAST.
“Perhaps more has followed,” she said.
“What is it,” asked Brian, trying to look at the road and her phone and his own simultaneously.
“Emergency broadcast,” she said. “There will be more earthquakes.”
“So what are they telling us to do?”
“Doesn’t say. Raising awareness? There will be more earthquakes. That’s all it says. Five words.”
“Great, useful,” said Brian. “Let me just hover the car a little bit off the ground so we’ll be safe. How can they know that? Do I have a radio?”
“I genuinely can’t tell. Does the car connect to your phone?”
“It’s new enough that it can, but old enough that it doesn’t.”
“Well,” she said, leaning back, putting her phone in her pocket, “we’ll see what Dublin looks like. Maybe we can fall into a crevice along the way.”
“Genuinely the strangest day I’ve ever experienced.”
“And it’s barely lunchtime.”
They drove for a little while, alternating silence and idle chat. Earthquake conversation ran out surprisingly quickly, due to the lack of new information. There were only so many times one could point out that, typically, Ireland does not get earthquakes, and this sure is a strange situation. I wonder if any buildings fell down. Don’t know. Are a lot of people hurt? No idea. More to follow.
Brian decided to have a swing again.
“So how come you left Dublin?”
“Alright, sure,” she said. “I can’t just bail out of the car in the middle of the motorway I suppose.”
“If you’re ready and all.”
“Not particularly. Do you remember Christmas 2015? Final year.”
“Oh my god you left because of that?”
“Don’t get ideas. We were at some house party. Our relationship,” she paused at this word, “had entered some kind of ambiguous state. People had expectations. Ideas. I had ideas, if I’m honest.”
She paused, waiting for him to interject, but he said nothing.
“You were drunk, I was drunk. Everyone for about half a kilometre in every direction was drunk. We were in the kitchen and someone elbowed you into me. We kissed for about ten seconds.”
Brian squirmed a little. Eyes on the road.
“And then stopped,” she continued. “And that was it. You left the kitchen, I pulled myself together, half a dozen people saw it and nobody ever mentioned it again. Not to me. Nobody. Straight into the memory tube. Up into the walls and out to the pile of beavers.”
“Yeah,” said Brian.
“Exactly like that,” she said. “You’ve done it again in real time right in front of me. Do you know how confusing that was? Is?”
“Hey listen I was also extremely confused. Drunk, confused.”
“That’s great for you. None of that, anyway, has anything to do with why I left Dublin.”
“What? Then? What?” Brian glanced over at her and then back to the road.
“Do you remember Cathal?”
“Vaguely, I only met him a couple of times. You were going out with him by new year’s eve. Was that a - not a rebound, bit grandiose, that - but like, related?”
“I don’t think I was aware at the time, but yeah, probably.”
“You were gone to Roscommon by the summer. I was out of the country. Was he from there? Did we leave him in your house tied up in the attic? Is he in the back seat?” Brian glanced into the rear view mirror.
“No, he was just from around,” she said, quietly.
“Ah, had to get away from him, did you? Go to the last place anyone would willingly go? The edge of the civilised world, Roscommon! Pitch it to the tourist board: someone trying to beat the shite out of you in Dublin? Come to Roscommon, as soon as an old person dies we’ll give you a pile of rubble and call it a house.”
He glanced over to his left with a stupid grin and nearly swerved off the road when he caught her expression.
“Shit,” he said, “is any of that true?”
“You genuinely have no idea why I left,” she said.
“I thought it was for,” he paused, scanning internally for a plausible reason, “work?”
She didn’t even bother to look up at him for that one.
“You know I spent a year in the US after college, it just felt like you went somewhere else as well,” he said, getting a little desperate. “Separate ways. The natural passage of time.”
“Genuinely no idea.”
“I didn’t know you were actually in a, you know, abusive, kind of,” he trailed off.
“I almost told you,” she said. “I’m not in touch with anyone else. I came so close to texting something unhinged like, yes, I do remember the movie The Station Agent, it is underrated, also I currently have a skull fracture?”
“Fucking… I mean.”
“Yes,” she said, “fucking you mean.”
“What happened?”
“Well, you have the general idea.”
“Did he get caught?”
“What do you mean caught? I caught him.”
“I mean, like, did he get in trouble?”
“He did, yeah.”
“But you still didn’t want to come back. Ah, fuck, I never asked and I never came out to see you. What did we talk about for six years?”
“Bullshit, mostly. It was kind of nice. I haven’t spoken to my parents for a while. They were very serious, no fun at all. They don’t know where I live. I think they’ve moved and now I don’t know where they live.”
“How can they not know where you live? Even I have your address.”
“I wanted to see what you’d do with it,” she said.
Brian had, of course, done nothing with it. He thought back over everything they’d discussed for the last six years. This must have started happening just as he had been swanning around the cheapest part of New York he could find without technically straying into New Jersey, paying very little attention to anyone else. Cursory responses to texts, ok, sure, haha. He foresaw an evening spent scrutinising their entire correspondence for subtext.
An entire field to the left hand side of the road collapsed into a chasm and a hill grew immediately behind them, tipping them slightly forward.
“Jesus,” said Brian.
Kate took out her phone again, dragged her thumb down it a couple of times and then tapped the side to turn the screen off.
“No signal,” she said. “No internet.”
“What the fuck is going on?” asked Brian. “We’re not on a fault line. We’re just a stupid island floating around.”
“Can’t find out now,” said Kate. “Maybe all the phone masts were in that field.”
“I’m kind of worried we’re going to die,” said Brian.
“Doesn’t feel fantastic, does it?”
“How could I not know?”
“You didn’t want to. Honestly don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to.”
Brian didn’t respond to this, mentally replaying several dozen conversations, both in-person and by text. What had he missed? Her parents didn’t have her address? He saw them from time to time. They looked old. He had a sudden thought.
“Your parents don’t have your address.”
“Are you having a sudden thought?”
“Who does have your address?”
“Just you.”
“Fucking shit,” said Brian.
“Just you. The only person in the country who has known where I live for the last six years. Texting back and forth about what colour ham can be without poisoning you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Brian.
“I think I could look back through your texts and chart the price of a pint.”
“Hey listen, this isn’t just me. It takes two to text-o,” he said, regretting that phrase half a second before he spoke it. “I had no idea why you weren’t around. You seemed happy, you replied, you never came home, I thought you didn’t care.”
“Yes, but you genuinely didn’t care.”
“Have you spent the last six years polishing this big speech? I texted you about ham half a decade ago.”
“It was a good conversation,” she said, “we’re almost in Dublin.”
9
They approached the port unhindered, driving alone on a road divided by a grass verge. Both sides featured large expanses of concrete with the backs of trucks scattered around, detached and waiting. No engines were evident. There were empty parking spaces everywhere, and a few hundred metres in front loomed a giant ferry. Before all of this, however, sitting in the middle of the road, was a table. It looked to Brian like a desk taken out of a classroom, metal pole legs and a basic, cheap wooden top. It had a piece of A4 paper taped to the front that was flapping in the wind in a way that made it unreadable. A lone woman sat at it, holding a notebook.
Brian slowed down and stopped the car twenty metres before the table.
“What does the sign say?” he asked.
“Can’t read it from here, why have you stopped?” said Kate.
“Is this not weird?”
“You said an hour ago this was the strangest day you’ve ever experienced.”
“Yes, but now it’s ominous as well,” he replied.
“Sure let’s investigate, there’s two of us and she looks small.”
Brian got out of the car and Kate did the same on the other side. He raised his arm at the woman at the desk and she smiled politely, still sitting down. Brian and Kate looked at each other and began to walk forwards.
“Hi,” said Brian, then, that not seeming enough, “how’s it going?”
“Are you here for the evacuation?”
“So there is an evacuation?” said Brian, looking around and seeing a handful of truck drivers engrossed in their phones, and two or three taxi drivers smoking, but essentially in the same pose.
“There is indeed,” said the woman. She leaned over the table and flattened down the sign: EVACUATION REGISTRATION. Brian glanced at her clipboard and saw two signatures.
“There doesn’t seem to be lots of people doing this,” he said.
“Well, it’s not mandatory,” she said, smiling.
“So what’s going on?” asked Kate. “I have only been told to take the names of evacuees so we can correlate them on the other side.”
“The other side of what exactly?”
“The other side of the Irish Sea,” said the woman, gesturing in the direction of the boats behind them.
“Who told you to do this?” asked Brian. “Who do you work for?”
“The council.”
“What council?”
“You have a binder,” said Kate. “Can I see it?”
“Certainly,” said the woman, but made no attempt to move. Kate picked it up herself and flipped through the pages while Brian watched, waiting for some kind of revelation. She held the binder by its spine, hung it downwards, and shook it. She turned it upside down, then back again, and handed it back.
“Every single page is blank.”
“Well as you said,” said the woman, “not a lot of people have been participating.”
“Are you,” said Kate, “and I mean this in the nicest possible way. Are you a form of artificial intelligence? Like a chatbot in a human body?”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been given enough information to help you,” said the woman, still with an upbeat disposition.
Brian looked at Kate and tipped his head in the direction of ‘away from here’ and they both walked few dozen metres, out of range of the woman’s hearing.
“What do you think?” asked Brian.
“I think this is insane bullshit,” replied Kate.
“I mean, yeah,” he said, “but it’s also actually real, isn’t it? There’s a boat. There’s a lady with a clipboard.”
“Insane bullshit,” said Kate,.“This is some kind of prank. We’re on the internet.”
“But there have really been earthquakes. You remember that one on the road? A field disappeared. It’s gotten a lot worse since there was just a crack in my road.”
“I have nothing much more to offer here than ‘insane bullshit’,” said Kate. “Besides, I decided about half an hour ago to stay. I haven’t been to Dublin for six years. I should see if my parents still live here.”
“I think you should come on the boat, at least until we know what’s going on.”
“Nah,” she said, looking past him. “We had a good drive. I’m feeling a lot less haunted than I did even a week ago. I thought after I killed him I should just never come back but now that I’m here it’s feeling a little bit like home again. ”
“After you what?”
“I know, right? We almost got there. I thought you’d ask. Enquire a little bit more. I’ve been on the verge of just dropping it into an unrelated sentence for ages, because there haven’t been any related sentences. I was telling you stuff and then you saw a bird or something and just stopped. That’s enough information for now, cheers. More to follow.”
“I was distracted by the earth trying to swallow us whole. And I was asking you in the pub. Feels like weeks ago, but you shut that down, not me.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t ready. But then I was for a while. Read the room. Read the inside of your car. Maybe I won’t be ready again.”
“So I have to know the precise moment where it’s appropriate to ask?”
“Yes,” she said. “And the precise moment was one second ago. Instead of choosing ‘I didn’t do anything wrong’, you had the option of ‘Wait, you killed him? Why? Are you on the run? Do you need help? Are you ok? How did it get to that? What did he do?’”
“Are you, did you, I mean,” said Brian.
“Nah. Now I’m not ready any more,” said Kate.
“This is infuriating.”
“You know what, just don’t worry about it. Thanks for the lift, and for the very small and very subtle exorcism, I’m just going to grab one of these taxis.”
Brian raised his hands in an exaggerated shrug.
“Fine then.”
“See, you missed another precise moment, they come thick and fast, don’t they?” She took his hand for a few seconds, looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll text you.”
She stalked off, raising a hand at one of the taxi drivers who scrambled off the bonnet of the car and started to pull himself together. Brian was left alone, looking back and forth between the taxi making its way out of the port, his own car, and the woman at the desk who had been smiling at them this whole time.