Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  “Double up how?”

  “A coffee drink and coffee-flavoured bun might seem excessive, but today’s a special day.”

  “Yeah, okay, love,” she says. “I’ll bring them down to you, have a seat.”

  I have wasted this topic on someone who doesn’t like it, but no matter, I can reuse it on Penelope. I sit in the corner table facing the window. The lady brings my coffee and cake, and I squash the coffee slice flat so that the cream oozes out the sides. Then I scoop it up and add it to my coffee. A couple of pastry flakes poke out of the cream, like planks of wood in a miniature snow scene. I look out the window. Potted plants and huge tubs of paint and garden ornaments are laid out on the footpath in front of the hardware next door. A woman comes up to the café window, a thin woman who should be fat, with the kind of face that looks like an empty sack when it’s not smiling. Her clothes are red and yellow and screaming. This must be Penelope: only people with three “E”s in their names could dress so loud. I wave. She smiles, the kind of smile that could reheat cold coffee, with yellow gappy teeth in need of a power hose. She bustles into the café, sweeping in leaves with her long skirt. A net bag swings from the crook of her elbow, and she is carrying a melon. In two giant steps, her feet eat up the floor and reach me.

  “You must be Vivian, I’m Penelope.”

  She grabs my hand and thrusts the melon into my chest, as if playing some kind of new fruit sport.

  “Hold this, I’m going to get some tea. You’re alright for everything?”

  I open my mouth to speak but she is gone, and I’m left holding the melon. It’s yellow, the kind of yellow that seas should be made of, or swimming pools at least. I sit down and put the melon on Penelope’s chair. She scuttles back in a breeze, squeezing between tables and knocking a salt cellar off a table: smash! Penelope doesn’t look surprised; smashes must soundtrack her every move. I take a breath to warn her about the melon, but she sits straight down on the yellow hump and doesn’t seem to notice.

  “So, Vivian, what possessed you to go on a Penelope hunt?”

  She guffaws and her breath hits me, a stench so powerful it could fell trees. It’s too soon for this question. I hadn’t prepared for it, so I stick to my original conversation plan.

  “Bit of a nip in the air, isn’t there?”

  Penelope’s forehead bunches and warps, and she squints at me. “I wanted to know why Penelope doesn’t rhyme with antelope.”

  “Right.”

  She stares somewhere above my right eyebrows and nods. Then she shifts in her chair, raises one haunch and pulls out the melon as if she has just birthed it. She takes the little packets of sugar out of the bowl on the table and balances the melon on top of it, like a golden fairytale egg in an ordinary egg cup. She looks like she does this kind of thing every day.

  “What’s your favourite colour?” I ask.

  “Red.”

  The lady brings Penelope’s tea. She looks at the melon, but says nothing.

  “Favourite animal?”

  “Cat.”

  I feel a twinge of unease, as if a cat has slunk between my ankles and curled its tail around my leg.

  “I don’t like cats,” I say.

  “Oh, you’re one of those.” She narrows her eyes and spits out “those.”

  “Those what?”

  “Cat bigots. Catists. Member of the anti-cat brigade.”

  I start to sweat. We haven’t spoken many sentences to each other and an argument is already forming. I jerk my arm and knock over the remains of my coffee. A grease-bubbled liquid flows across the table; Penelope grabs a napkin and wipes the stream. The cat conversation has vanished.

  “Do you work?” I ask.

  “Not a suit-and-desk job,” she says. “I paint.”

  “What do you paint?”

  “Cats, mainly.”

  She grins at me, and my eyes are drawn to her tooth gaps. A piece of corn is wedged between two particularly wonky teeth.

  “Did you have corn on the cob for breakfast?”

  “I had it for dinner yesterday.”

  “It’s in your teeth.”

  “Oh.”

  She digs it out and puts it on her saucer.

  “Sometimes I forget to wash my teeth. I believe hygiene is overrated.”

  The way she drawls her “L”s rips through my ears, but I allow her this fright of a vowel, because we have found common ground.

  “I agree,” I say.

  I look at the piece of corn—it’s yellow and inscrutable.

  “Do you think it’s lonesome without the rest of the cob?” I ask.

  “Probably. It’s like separating thousand-tuplets.”

  “Are frogspawn called million-tuplets?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  This is the kind of conversation that I’ve been dreaming of, or half-dreaming of, in that part of my brain that conjures up the nicest most suitable things, things that never enter my mouth or my waking brain, things that I feel for a few seconds somewhere on the edge of my eyeballs, on the edge of my waking.

  “What do you do, Vivian?”

  I haven’t prepared this question and I start to feel sticky.

  “I had a job once but the company put me out of my desk.”

  “I’m sorry. The job hunt can be a bit grim.”

  “I used to hunt,” I say, “but I’ve had hundreds of silences from employers, so now I regard my job seeking as more of a hobby, rather than an action that could produce results.”

  Penelope laughs, the sort of laugh that makes me think of wolf cubs being reunited with their mothers: it’s the tail end of despairing. I think about how to end our meeting and my heart thunks faster. I hate arriving, but I hate leaving even more. Penelope gulps down the rest of her tea and claps her hands.

  “Must rush, Vivian, I’ve to bring one of the cats to the vet. Come over to my place next week?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She says her address and I say mine and she says, “It’s in the computer,” which must mean her brain because she taps her temple with her finger. We say goodbye and her body seems to be shaping up for a hug, so I move backwards and wave. I walk home and close the front door behind me.

  “It’s in the computer,” I say, in what I think is a light-hearted tone, and then I tap my left temple, but the two need to be done together so I try again.

  “It’s in the computer.”

  I’m so happy about how my Penelope meeting went that I consider burning down the house with me in it, so good things can’t unravel. My legs are too excited to sit down and the day hasn’t yet been emptied of light, so I decide to visit my thin places—places in which non-humans might live, potential gateways to the world I came from. My parents used force to try and shunt me back to this Otherworld; I will use willing.

  After the Phibsborough crossroads, I walk down the steps into Broadstone Park. A sign tells users not to drink alcohol or cycle and to keep dogs on leashes; in this part of the park alone, people are disobeying all of these rules. At the end of the park, I close my eyes and pass through a black door in a wall into Blessington Basin. Doors in outdoor walls remind me of the magic door of a red-haired puppet in a children’s television programme that I used to watch as a child. No magic world opens for me now. I emerge facing the basin and walk to a bench to sit for a while and watch the birds. I like pigeons; I like their greed and their laziness and their determination to avoid flying if at all possible. A sign says: DON’T FEED THE PIGEONS, which seems unfair. I don’t understand how people are supposed to feed the swans and ducks without feeding the pigeons. I watch a thin pigeon eating a chunk of bread. A fat pigeon comes along and pecks him until he drops the bread. I wave my arms to shoo away the fat pigeon, but both fly off and I’m left with a half-pecked chunk of bread. When a woman in a fluorescent yellow vest passes, I stop her.

  “What’s your policy on bird bullying?”

  She looks at me like I’m Christmas in July.

  “Sorr
y, what’s that?”

  “I’m just wondering how you deal with the issue of big pigeons bullying smaller ones.”

  The woman checks her walkie-talkie.

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that, excuse me.”

  And before I can ask about the possibility of kitting out Thin Pigeon with a helmet and wing pads, she quickly walks away. The gate leading onto Blessington Street isn’t as good as a door in a wall, but I make a wish as I pass through, just in case. I walk straight down North Frederick Street and stop by the Gate Theatre, in front of a small grey metal box that could be a small hut (or hutlet) for elves. It’s rectangular, with a slanted metal roof and two metal doors, the perfect size for a shin-high elf couple. I picture rocking chairs on either side of a stove, and a spiral staircase leading to a four-poster bed covered with a patchwork quilt. I stop and crouch down on my hunkers, pretending to fix my shoe and peek in, but I don’t look too closely in case I see wires and circuit boards and no elves. My elves wear tracksuits and play Scrabble when they’re tired, or Twister when they’re full of energy. I whisper goodbye, straighten up and head south to D’Olier Street. I cross at the lights, follow the curve of the college around to College Green and stop outside an ivy-covered house at the edge of the college, facing the hotel that used to be a bank. I imagine a kind of everyday Santa Claus and his wife living in this house, plotting ways to rid the world of its problems. The ground floor is a control room, with lots of maps and gadgets and wires and devices all connected to enormous screens. Everyday Santa and Everyday Mrs. Claus wear headsets and hold remote controls and joysticks to give the superheroes the coordinates of their missions: “Delta Spiderman, bike thief on the quays, Roger that” or “Oscar Superman, girl weeping in front of Central Bank, bring tissues, stat.”

  I leave before I catch any detail that would sully my imaginings, and walk up Grafton Street, turning right onto South King Street and into Zara. I take the escalator up to the first floor and walk to the left, to the opposite wall. I pick up a shirt from the rail and drop it like a hot mistake. Then I kneel down to pick it up and catch sight of the small door in the wall. I saw a shop assistant step out of that door some years ago, and I’ve kept it on my list of thin places ever since. Inside that door I picture a kind of candy-laden paradise, a combination of the Hansel and Gretel house made of sweets, the mountain the Pied Piper led the children into and the chocolate factory that Charlie visits. I put the shirt back on the rail and leave before I can be disenchanted by a glimpse of a non-chocolate reality.

  I head west along St. Stephen’s Green and down Kildare Street, passing Leinster House and a small band of protesters outside carrying posters of foetuses or foxes. A man wearing a cycle helmet walks up and down holding a small black-and-white sign on a stick, a paper lollipop that says “Close Sellafield.”

  I go into the library, leave my bag and coat in the locker, and climb the stairs to the reading room with my pencil and notebook. At the bottom of every recessed bookshelf lining the room is a small wooden door coated in mesh. I pretend to look at a Welsh dictionary and bend down and peek through the mesh. Behind these doors I picture a maze of tunnels that house living examples of creatures believed to be extinct. There’s a dodo, of course, and an auk and an Irish elk, along with others I have written in my notebook: “Pygmy Mammoth, Stilt-legged Llama, Shrub-Ox, Pocket Gophers, Dwarf Elephant, Cave Bear, Spectacled Cormorant, Heath Hen, Golden Toad, Cebu Warty Pig, Caspian Tiger, Gastric Brooding Frog, Sharp-Snouted Day Frog, Pig-Footed Bandicoot, Toolache Wallaby, Laughing Owl, Narrow-Bodied Skink, Big-Eared Hopping Mouse, Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse, Chadwick Beach Cotton Mouse, Christmas Island Pipistrelle, Scimitar-Toothed Cat, Giant Aye-Aye, Quagga.”

  They have duped the human race into believing they’re extinct, so that they can live un-pestered by zoos and breeding programmes, animal versions of death-faking tricksters.

  I sit down and open my notebook on a fresh page. I read somewhere that the words “month,” “silver” and “purple” cannot be rhymed with. I stare hard at my silver pencil and try to come up with rhymes, but I can only invent words:

  Pilver: To quietly steal from one’s wealthy hostess.

  Bilver: A dry retch at the end of a vomiting bout.

  I try “month.” The problem with “month” is that I pronounce it “munth,” so my definitions are:

  Bunth: A collective noun for a group of flags.

  Thunth: The noise a jaw makes on contact with the bottom step of the stairs.

  They don’t quite reach the essence of the thing, so I have a go at “purple”:

  Gurple: The sound of a baby post-feed when it’s full of wind and joy.

  Vurple: The chief of a fox clan with jaunty taste in clothes.

  I could keep inventing words, but that is not my place. I stare at the backs of the other library users. They seem to know what they’re doing and are getting on with doing it, instead of making up words that will never be used. I stare up at the domed ceiling. The coloured ceiling panels run from white through peppermint to old-library green, like a swatch of paint-colour charts.

  When my stomach rumbles, I gather my belongings and head downstairs to the café. I sit at the table nearest to the cash register, from where I can see the inner workings of the café. I see the waitresses spill milk when they pour it into the coffee machine, and I see their faces get red and tense when lines of lunchers form, demanding all manner of breads I have never heard of. Where do they hear about such breads, and why does it matter so much? Bread is beige or white fluff that will be swallowed in as much time as it takes them to complain. I like seeing the mismatched delph scattered about the perfectly matched Tupperware tubs of dry foodstuffs: a tinge of disorder in an ordered system. I don’t want to seem nosy so I act as if I’m staring thoughtfully into the middle distance, then I scribble some words in my notebook. But the words I write are just “mischief mischief mischief,” over and over again; “mischief” should always be spelt with a lower case “m”—it seems more mischievous than its sensible big sister, upper case “M.” And “mumps” should never be capitalised, but “Measles,” its spottier cousin, should. “Rubella” works either way. We should be allowed to choose when to use lower and upper case letters; having to use a capital letter at the start of a sentence is like saying the firstborn son gets all the money, no matter how vile he is. Some words should be spelt entirely in capital letters: TORRENTIAL, BELLOWS, RIPPED, FLED, GLEEFUL. And if letters have capitals, why don’t numbers? I could invent capital numbers, but schoolchildren would hate me for increasing their learning-load and they would throw eggs at my face. My brain has got carried away with crossover branches and twigs, all grabbing and twisting and outgrowing each other, and my hand can’t keep up with writing these knotted thoughts, so I finish my food and leave the café. I’d like to be the type of person that calls a cheery farewell to the café staff, but I settle instead for a skulk.

  I make for the Liffey. As I wait to cross O’Connell Bridge, I see a sign at the bottom of a tall red-brick building with a curly roof on O’Connell Street saying: “Witches’ Attic.” I look up and see a man wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt in the attic window, near the weather vane. I wish he was wearing a cape and a pointy hat, but maybe the modern warlock needs to go undercover. When I enter my house, the waft of myself hits me. I sniff around me, turning my nose to different pockets of air. The smell from upstairs is strongest, because I haven’t changed my sheets for a long time. I like them to smell properly of me, and I like to find papery shards of foot skin and debris from my body in the bed-nest. I heard on the radio that the rise in asthma is caused by an increase in the use of cleaning products, and I don’t want to get asthma. If I have to get a disease, I want one that contains multiple syllables and a range of vowels. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. A pleasant sort of lived-in smell comes from my body, of meat and sweat and damp newspaper. I sit at the kitchen table and map my route and trace it onto greaseproof paper. Today I walke
d a slice of batch loaf with an aerial poking out.

  4

  I LOOK OUT the kitchen window at the giant pear tree in the back garden. I don’t like pears, so when the fruit falls in autumn it rots, and the garden is full of wasps and squelches. Now that the tree is bare, it’s as if pears don’t exist and autumn never happens. I open the back door and go outside to look at the treetop. I once read a children’s book about the magical lands at the top of a tree in an enchanted wood. I swing one leg onto a low branch and hoist my other leg up. I climb up a few branches, but there are no signs of elves or fairies or the little man wearing saucepans who appeared in that book. In Bernie’s garden I can see gnomes and ceramic swans, and a small concrete boy who used to piss into a concrete basin. Mary’s back door suddenly opens. I try to hide, but the branches are wintry-bare.

  “Jaysus, Vivian, what are you doing up there? Are you stuck?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  These are the wrong weather words, no sooner are they out of my mouth than I feel the damp chill of the air.

  “Ah, Vivian, would you look at yourself, a grown woman up a tree on a day like today.”

  Even if it wasn’t a day like today—if it was a day like yesterday or tomorrow—I don’t think she would have liked to see me up a tree.

  “I’m looking for the lands at the top,” I say.

  “The what?” She says “what” like it hurts her teeth.

  “In the book The Magic Faraway Tree, the Land of Spells and the Land of Dreams and the Land of Topsy-Turvy appeared on the treetop. I’m trying to find those lands, you see.”

  Mary doesn’t see, and she doesn’t really hear either. From this angle she looks neckless, like an up-tilted face mashed onto a body. Her mouth hangs open, and while she’s stuck in the gap between questions I climb back down and escape into the house. I look around the living room to decide which chair I will sit in today. The one with the plastic cover is quite scratchy so I say “No” to that one. I don’t want to hurt its feelings so I stroke its plastic back six times. I have to comfort the chairs in strokes of three, but three itself is uneven and unsatisfactory so I double it and stroke in sixes. Some of the chairs give off a homely smell, of boiled cabbage and unwashed great-aunt. I choose the dark green armchair. It’s ripped and the stuffing peeks through and there’s a great-aunt-sized dent in it, but it’s comfortable. Today I will search for jobs, but first I need to conjure up some company in the room. I turn on the television with the sound down. If I squint and stare at the laptop, the people on the television look like small live people on the other side of the room, a silent gathering which I am sitting apart from. The soap operas are best because the characters spend lots of time in kitchens and on living room sofas, but they argue a lot and even though the sound is down, it causes tension in my living room.