I open the laptop. If I’m in a serious mood, I type “Assistant” into the search box of the job website. I have no particular skills or experience, so I can’t be in charge of anything or anybody, but maybe I can assist with something. Today, however, I am looking for dream jobs. I type “Bubble-blower” into the search box. The computer doesn’t even pretend to search, which is a bit rude. A blank screen appears almost instantly saying:
“The search for ‘Bubble-blower’ in Dublin did not match any jobs.”
The bold type is mocking me, and the language is harsh. It advises me to “Sign up for email updates on the latest Bubble-blower jobs in Dublin.” I try “Walker” next because I’m good at walking, and two jobs appear: a vacancy for a “Dog Walker” in Lucan (I have enough bother controlling my own limbs when I walk, never mind an additional four) and a “Commercial Analyst and Management Accountant” for Walkers Crisps. I’d best not apply for jobs whose titles I can’t understand. Next, I type “Changeling” into the search box. A vacancy for “Graphic Design Print Manager” comes up. It’s suitable for someone who wants “Changeling Roles,” so I scour the print for a description of me. The applicant must have a: “Personality for Sales and Upselling to Clients. Great Personality with Energy. Excellent Communication and Interpersonal Skills.”
None of those things sounds like me. It must be a different kind of changeling they are looking for. I close the lid of the laptop; I never switch it off because that seems so final, like writing a will.
It’s between mealtimes, so I will cook a fry. Somebody has decided that breakfast + lunch = brunch, but I think lunkfast suits this meat-heavy meal better. I melt butter in the pan and cook sausages, rashers and black pudding. The sausages hiss and I’m glad. I like food that sounds like itself. I don’t know when the black pudding is starting to burn because black can’t get any blacker. When the skin of the pudding has hardened, I heap the fry between two slices of white bread. The bread turns soggy with grease—a damp towel of a sandwich—but sog is good in food. I think of other black foods: burnt anything, liquorice, black pepper, half a bullseye boiled sweet. Then I go through other coloured foods in my head until I’m struck with a plan: I will eat only blue foods for the rest of the day. I search the kitchen cupboards but they are bare of blue, so I put on my coat. It’s a heavy coat, packed with wool, and it feels like I’m putting on summer. I put my keys and some money in my bag, but it still seems empty, and I’m not quite sure what else to put in. I’ve seen women carry such big bags—what big lives they must have!—so I take two books from the shelf and put them in my bag. Now I’m someone who could pile six planets on her shoulders and carry them off.
I bang the front door loudly when I leave the house, to rouse the neighbours. I want to tell them about my plan, but no heads pop up from flower beds or peer out from behind doors. I walk to the supermarket, take a basket and move slowly up and down each aisle. I feel like I’ve won a competition where the prize is blue food. I find: blueberries, which are more of a nunnish navy; blue cheese, which smells of socks and tastes of wet dust; blue freeze-pops in mouth-ripping plastic tubes; and a blue sports drink the colour of an ambulance siren. I also pick up several multipacks of Smarties and M&Ms, so that I can sift out only the blues. At the till, a heap of giddy rises up my throat. The shop assistant starts scanning my food.
“Do you notice anything about my items?” I ask.
She looks like she doesn’t want to play my game, so I make it easy for her.
“They’re all blue!”
“Oh yeah, why?”
“I’m having a blue party!”
The snarl on her face melts a little.
“Is it his favourite colour?” she asks.
“Whose favourite colour?”
She looks confused.
“Your little boy, are these not for his birthday party?”
I think for a moment.
“Yes, they are. And I’m making a Smurf cake!”
The woman behind me in the queue pokes her head into the conversation.
“Ah, that’s lovely, what age is he?”
“They’re six, I have boy twins.”
The words glide out of my mouth like a silk thread.
“You must have your hands full with them,” the woman behind me says, but the shop assistant only stares.
“How come you never have them in here with you?”
“Oh…”
I think for a minute.
“They’re in wheelchairs.”
“Ah, God, that’s terrible, terrible!”
“Who minds them?” asks the shop assistant. Her face is squeezed into strange shapes.
“What?”
“When you come in here to do your shopping, who minds them?”
“Oh, they’re fine on their own.”
“You leave them alone?”
Her voice sounds like a cup shattered on a tile.
I look from one angry face to the other.
“They can’t get out of the wheelchairs, they’re fine.”
They look at each other the way that girls in school used to look at each other: an eye-lock that doesn’t include me. Then they look at me with a purity of hate that stiffens me. I pack my blue items into my bag—I wish I’d remembered to bring a blue plastic bag—and pay. The woman behind me is muttering to the woman behind her, and I catch the words “…social services…shouldn’t be let have kids…something wrong with her…” I take my change and hurry off with great big gulps of marbles in my throat. When I reach the house I rush in, close the door and bolt it. If social services come, they might be angrier that I’m not neglecting children I don’t have than if I was neglecting children I did have. I feel sadder than I’ve ever felt before, sad like the end of the world has come and gone without me.
I crawl under the kitchen table with my bag, and crouch among the chair legs. This is the perfect picnic spot with no chance of rain, and it isn’t too uncomfortable if I lean forward. I lay out my blue feast on the black tiles, empty out the M&Ms and Smarties, pick out the blue ones and put the rest away. I start off with the sweet food then I eat some blue cheese—a horror of a food, so I stuff spongy blueberry muffin into my mouth to cancel out the stinking taste. This feels like cheating, because the muffin is mostly beige with only an inky blue stain. It seems right that on the day of my blue feast I’m feeling blue myself. My belly feels bruised inside, as if all the blue foods were having a fist fight among themselves. The underside of the table reminds me of the inside of a coffin lid, so I decide to practise being buried alive. I crawl out from under the table, take the thickest cushions from the sofa and lay them out under the table. I pile them on top of one another until they nearly reach the top, then I squeeze between the cushions and the table and lie down, with my nose tip touching the wood. I lie staring at the table-ceiling, in the muffled peace of the cushions. I don’t know why people talk of the terror of being buried alive—surely the terror is in being alive.
When my mind has settled, I get out and look up world news on the Internet. The news is: “Possibility of war,” “Terror Threats,” “Elections,” “Bomb Blasts,” “Nuclear Threats,” “Global Downturn,” “Anti-Government Protests,” “School Shooting,” “Potential Chemical Weapons Attacks,” “Alleged Murder,” “Suspected Abuse.” My neighbours like to speak of these potentials and possiblys as definitelys and certainlys. Next I look up national news. A politician is calling on another politician to do something. I would like to call on someone to do something, but I don’t know if anyone would listen. A dossier has been compiled about an organisation. I wonder if there’s a dossier about me somewhere. I close the laptop. The news stories are bouncing off each other in my head and words are producing more words and I picture reams of paper hurtling out of printers, filled with unspaced, unparagraphed, unchaptered words. I switch on the radio and turn the dial to the static between stations, but this isn’t enough to fetch me out of a jangle: I must walk. I put on my coat and pick up
my bag. I need some gold in my life because blue has not served me well; I will buy a goldfish. I put on my great-aunt’s double-glazed spectacles as a disguise, in case I bump into anyone from the supermarket, and leave the house. I don’t bump into anyone from the supermarket, but I do bump into the garden gate and the kerb, my eyes watery and blind behind the thick glass. I walk through Phibsborough with my arms outstretched in front of me, feeling for obstacles, then I take off the glasses when I turn onto Western Way. This street makes me think of the lifestyle choices of country singers. I head down Dominick Street and swing left onto Parnell Street. A burly man stands at the door of the taxi company smoking.
“Taxi, love?”
“No, goldfish.”
I go into the pet shop and head for the fish tanks. The man behind the counter comes over with a net.
“Looking for a goldfish?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Right so.”
He lifts the lid off the tank and dips in the net.
“Wait!” I say.
“For what?”
“I haven’t decided which one I want yet. I need to see their personalities.”
The man’s top lip curls up.
“You want one with a good sense of humour?”
I laugh to show that I have a good sense of humour, even though I don’t think his joke is very funny. I lean over the tank. The fish are all swimming in the same direction, except for a slightly slower fish drifting at the bottom. He’s more yellow than orange, and some of his scales are missing. I turn to the man.
“I’ll take the yellow one, please.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The man scoops out my Lemonfish and puts him in a plastic bag of water, then ties the top of the bag in a knot. I buy some goldfish food, pay the man and put the plastic bag in my handbag. Lemonfish will be happier in the dark of my bag than in a moving house with a see-through floor and a knotted roof. I walk back home, putting my great-aunt’s glasses loosely on my nose so that I can see out from over them. Then I let myself into the house, add water to the bowl containing the lemons I bought yesterday and pour in Lemonfish. At first he keeps crashing into lemons, but soon he swims around cautiously and noses the fruit. Maybe he thinks they’re obese, bitter-smelling new friends. I sit at the table and trace the route I just walked onto greaseproof paper: it’s shaped like a fishing rod that has caught another fishing rod.
I DECIDE TO sleep on chairs in the living room tonight. They will be kinder to me than the bed, which creaks and hisses when I can’t sleep. Tea is a comfort but it keeps me awake, so I boil the kettle and make tea in my hot water bottle. The smell of tea and rubber is a good solid combination, like grandmothers and classrooms. I go upstairs and swallow a blue pill from the bathroom cabinet, one for coughs and colds that makes me drowsy. This will be the last of the day’s blue party. I go downstairs and arrange two soft chairs in front of the red chair in the living room. This way, I get to use three chairs and hurt fewer chairs’ feelings. I take up the spongy cushion from the red chair, and put the hot tea bottle on the chair top. Then I lie face down on the chair, pull the cushion over my head and press it down over my ears. The inside of the chair is musty and my nose is tickled by dust-clumps and crumbs, but it smells of something close to home. I count “One-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six” until I fall asleep, a sleep so delicious that it has the quality of toasted peaches.
5
I WAKE TO the sound of me grinding my teeth. I should probably sleep with cotton wool or marshmallow in my mouth to soften the attack. David from the Social Welfare office is visiting today but I don’t want to think about that just yet, so I lie in bed snatching at my dream-thoughts before they vanish through my eyelids: I am in a tunnel that’s split in two, each side rising up to the roof in turn, crushing anything on it. I have to keep jumping from the rising part to the falling part until that too starts to rise. No wonder I feel tired, I saved my own life in my sleep. My throat feels scratched where the scream clogged, I only wake from a nightmare if the scream scrapes through. I wish it were a song and not a scream. Or a laugh. My sister laughs in her sleep. When I used to share her room I would wake in the night to hear her laughing, eyes shut tight, at something that didn’t seem funny in the morning.
I get up and root through the wardrobe for a pair of khaki combats that will show David I am a serious job hunter. Then I take a dark-green jumper from the shelf. I bring my clothes into the bathroom, put the plug in the bath and run the taps. I duck my head under my pyjama top and breathe in my smell for the last time—even when I leave it another while to wash, the smell will not be this exact combination of sweat and food emissions. I pick up a bottle of pink bubble bath that my great-aunt left behind. The bottle is heart-shaped and ugly, like two inward-facing question marks with no interest in the world. I tip the bottle into the bath. It pours like a thick gluey syrup, turning the bathwater pink and adding white bubbles on top: beer for little girls. Then I hold the bottle over my head and thrust it onto the floor with all my might. The bottle has been transformed into dozens of shards and pieces. I examine them for a while, then step into the bath, squat on my hunkers and lower myself into the water. I stretch out my legs and raise them out of the water, but they haven’t turned into a tail and my skin hasn’t turned into scales and I haven’t turned into a mermaid. I lie back, the bubbles scrinch scrinching, and try to form an expression of extreme calm on my face like the women in television ads, but I’m so hot my heart is rattling in my chest and my toes feel like they belong to somebody else and I can’t relax when I smell like strawberry bubblegum and feel like dirty dishes. I’m not sure how long I have to stay in the bath to be clean, so I swirl the water around and sluice it over my face. Then I lie back with my head facing the ceiling to wash my hair. The water fills my ears and muffles my world; this must be what Lemonfish’s world sounds like. I pull the plug and sit in the bath while it drains. It feels like I should be dying, like my internal organs are being slowly sucked out of my body and down the plughole. I get out, crouch under a towel and tug my clothes on. Then I blast my head with the hairdryer, breathing in the smell of hot burning dust. I eat breakfast and bring Lemonfish’s bowl to the sink. I slowly pour some water out, trying not to lose fish or lemons. Then I turn on the tap and add some fresh water. I’ve just changed Lemonfish’s liquid nappy. I brush my teeth at the kitchen sink and imagine a toothbrush so small that it could brush each tooth individually. If only there was an elf section in the supermarket.
David has the name of a king, so I will clean the house and make it fit for a king-guest. I bring the hoover upstairs and open the door to the hoard-room. A huge toy gun, the kind that stretches across the body and makes a ratatatatatatat noise when you pull the trigger, catches my eye from the childhood-toys pile. It could be useful for a job-hunter so I bring it downstairs. I hoover the landing, then I hoover the stairs, which is like trying to slide down a fireman’s pole in stops and starts, then I hoover the hall and, finally, I bash the hoover in between the chair legs in the living room. I wish I’d made a list of chores so I could put a thick pencil mark through “Hoover House.” Or, to get more pencil strikes, I might divide the chores into:
1. Hoover Landing
2. Hoover Stairs
3. Hoover Hall
4. Hoover Living Room
When the doorbell rings, I’m standing in the hall sniffing my strawberry hands, which smell unfamiliar and hateful. I open the door.
“Hello, David,” I say.
His face doesn’t match his name, David is a gentle name, with soft indecisive “D”s and an open “V,” but this David is pursed and definite.
“Good morning, Vivian,” he says, and shakes my hand—a crisp formality of a handshake.
“Come on through,” I say, because that’s what people in soap operas on television say to visitors, but the words come out in a Manchester accent. He sits at the kitchen table, and Lemonfish swims
bowl-side to look out.
“You’re his first visitor, so you must excuse him if he’s shy,” I say.
David half-laughs, a cautious kind of sound without much bark in it.
“Would you like some tea?”
“Please, a drop of milk, two sugars.”
He speaks with an admirable abruptness, but his sentences don’t provide enough information.
“A big drop or a small drop—like a thundershower or a drizzle?”
His face puckers and narrows, as if something under the skin is pulling it back.
“A big drop.”
“Right. Heaped or level?”
“Sorry?”
“Your sugars. Heaped or level teaspoons?”
“Either.”
David waves his hand as if swatting away my question, pulls out a grey folder from his briefcase, lays it on the table and opens it. I fill the kettle and whisper, “Take your time, boil slowly.” I should have added ice to the kettle to slow it down. David clears his throat.
“So you’ve been out of work since when?”
I don’t like being asked questions that are already answered in grey folders.
Eggshells Page 4