Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  “Since somewhere between Grand Stretch in the Evening and We Won’t Feel it Now Till Christmas,” I say.

  “I’m sorry?”

  David is a lot of sorry it seems.

  “September.”

  “Okay.”

  He writes something on a page. David seems like the kind of man who likes neat black words to fit into neat white boxes. I look at his black biro and try to imagine all the other unworkers it has written about. I wonder if he ever writes things like, “Her house smells of boiled mutton” or “His ears stick out strangely.” The roar from the kettle becomes a gurgle and then a click. I pull the lid off the teapot and—oh no!—there is mouldy fur inside. I scoop it out and secretly sniff it—it smells like soil multiplied. When the tea has brewed, I bring the mugs to the table.

  “What kind of jobs have you been applying for, Vivian?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  I go into the living room to get my list. The toy gun is sitting on the red chair like a gift for a king—now is a good time for my trick. I run back into the kitchen pointing the gun at David and holding down the trigger: ratatatatatatatatat! David jumps at the noise; he turns to face me and squeals when he sees the gun pointed at him. Then he scrapes back his chair and dives under the table, his papers scattering around him. I stop to admire the arrangement of white paper on black tiles, it looks like the kitchen has been paper-bombed. David’s face peeks out from under the table—his eyes bulge, he looks like fear has taken him over.

  “It’s nice under there, isn’t it?” I say. “That’s where I had my blue feast.”

  “Jesus Christ, woman, what the fuck are you playing at?”

  I didn’t think officials were allowed to curse.

  “I’m playing at Job-hunters, that’s why I’m dressed in khaki. I thought you’d join in the game.”

  He gets up from the floor with a creak, his black trouser-knees covered in grey dust and cornflake silt. He sits in the chair, but he doesn’t sit up quite so straight. Then he leans his elbows on the table and puts his head in his hands. When he takes a sup of tea, the mug shakes and spills. I put the gun on the floor and gather up his papers. The top page reads, in squat handwriting:

  “Client appears to have inappropriate—”

  I put the pages on the table and look away. David is breathing in short gasps that don’t seem to take in much air. I sit opposite him and stare, in silence, until he gives his head a small toss, like a pony or a snooty child, and straightens his papers.

  “Right, where were we?” he asks.

  “Well, you were on the chair, until I started shooting, so you moved to the floor—”

  He waves his hand in the air like a conductor, so I shriek “Lalalalalalala” as loud as I can. He cowers under his papers and hisses,

  “Christ, what are you at now?”

  “You were conducting, it’d be rude not to make some kind of music in return.”

  I like singing—the breath and effort of it—even though I can’t tell from my own ears if I’m in tune. I was told to whisper in my school choir, but maybe I’ve grown in tune since then. I start singing “Doe a Deer,” but I sing quietly so that I don’t scare David. He looks at me like I have bled the last drop of milk from the carton and left none for him, so I drop my tune.

  “What kinds of jobs have you been applying for?”

  I push my list across the table. He reads aloud:

  “Dog walker, bubble-blower, changeling, assistant.”

  He turns the page over but that’s all there is. He looks at the list again and seems to wilt.

  “Assistant what?”

  He has barely enough up-breath to form a question mark.

  “Assistant anything, I won’t know until I see the job description.”

  “I see.”

  His tongue doesn’t quite reach the roof of his mouth, so it sounds more like “I hee.” He picks up the list with his fingertips as if it’s a paper disease, takes a sip of tea and coughs.

  “Excuse me.”

  “That’s okay, I put half a cough and a quarter of a hiccup in the teapot.”

  David closes his eyes and, I think if he had glue, he would have stuck his lids shut. When he opens them again, his eyes seem to have sunk further back into their sockets, as if he’s showcasing his corpse look.

  “Have you ever pretended to be dead?” I ask.

  His face doesn’t move and his voice, when it comes, is sealed good and tight.

  “Have you considered other areas—administration jobs, for instance?”

  I prefer an example to an instance, but David won’t understand this.

  “I don’t like telephones, and there are lots of them in offices.”

  His face twists into a tormented expression, the kind of expression I’ve seen on the faces of war victims on news reports.

  “Indeed” is all he says, but he says it like it’s the last word before the end of the world. He rustles through his papers as if he’s looking for an official response, then he straightens up and makes a small speech about benefits and credits and signing on and job seeking and computer courses and upskilling and qualifications in pharmaceuticals or marketing or industries where they are hiring. I nod my head and say “hmm yes” and “oh I hadn’t thought of that,” but I know this is all a cod. Employers won’t hire me to work in their offices when they can hire a shiny woman who speaks in exclamation marks.

  “It’s important to keep an open mind,” he says.

  “I am open-minded,” I say. “Sometimes I wear my slippers on the opposite feet to change my worldview, even though it makes me hobble.”

  David takes a deep breath. He looks like a faded mural in a children’s ward.

  “Right, I think we’re all done here,” he says on a new gust of breath, and he bundles his papers and stuffs them into his briefcase. He says half a goodbye and leaves in a great hurry, such a great hurry that it makes me think there’s a fire, so I follow him outside and look up at the house. There are no flames, but the house seems more menacing now that David’s been in it. The smell will be all wrong: the smell of fake strawberry and David and fresh paper. I regret my bath—David didn’t even ask to smell me. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. I still smell strawberry-sweet, but there is also the start of a sweaty tang. I go back inside and walk through the house, closing every blind and every curtain and every door. I crouch in the bathroom, pick up a piece of the smashed bottle and stare into it. I will check every shard, surely in one of them there’ll be a glimpse of where I’m supposed to be.

  6

  I WAKE ON a damp pillow; my dreams must have leaked. I put my head under the blankets and sniff: it smells aged. I creep out of bed, pull on some clothes from the floor and go downstairs to look at Lemonfish’s bowl. The water is a little cloudy and smells of lemons. I take the lemons out, before he gets too attached to them and knows enough to miss them. He looks at my fingers and the fruit and doesn’t seem to care, but I’m not sure how I’d know if a goldfish cared. I put a pinch of goldfish food in the bowl. I eat a pinch myself—it looks like Brunch ice cream, but it tastes bland and pointless. I eat my mashed cornflakes breakfast and wipe the lemons dry. I’ll bring them to their home in Lemon Street.

  I leave the house at a run, calling “Bye” to Lemonfish. The lemons take up most of my bag space. I look busy with life plans. I walk to the bus stop and wait. Two old ladies with tartan shopping trolleys are chatting. A woman is making big exaggerated faces at her child. I wish the bus would come, because the wind is skinning. It’s the kind of vicious easterly wind that makes my eyes water and my nose drip, the kind of cold that makes me hate. I bounce at the bus stop to stay not warm but as not-cold as possible. A man jogs by in shorts and a T-shirt; just watching him makes my eyes cold. When the bus comes we rush the door, and the old ladies use their trolleys as moving barricades to get on first. I sit near the back, beside a man who is on the phone.

  “NO!” he shouts. “I had the score and I was
outside the off-license an’ it blew out of me hand an’ I went down to pick it up, but some prick got there ahead of me, an’ when I said that’s my money he said he had a knife and if I didn’t fuck off he’d bleedin’ knife me, I’m tellin’ yeh that’s what happened.”

  He talks like he’s being chased by words, swallowed up by sentences. Other people in the bus are giving little secret glances over their shoulders at him.

  “For fuck’s sake, yeh can go and shite,” he shouts, and hangs up. I root around in my bag to look busy in case he wants to tell me his problems but his phone rings again, a blast of shouty music that makes me jump.

  “Hello!” he shouts as if there is a bad connection.

  There’s shouting on the other end, and he shouts back: what a feast of shouting.

  “I told ya, I was walkin’ to the off-license and some prick held a knife to me throat and said he’d fuckin’ kill me if I didn’t give him a score, that’s what happened, I swear on me daughter’s life.”

  The rest of the passengers are silently listening, and I feel proud to have picked the best seat on the bus; some of this man’s fame has trickled onto me.

  “Listen, I have to go, me battery’s dyin’, I’ll give yeh a buzz later, alright?”

  From the shouting on the other end of the line it isn’t alright, but he hangs up.

  “Fuckin’ prick?” he says, and I wonder if I’m supposed to answer. He turns to me.

  “Here, you wouldn’t have the lend of a twenty, would yeh? I got mugged, right, by this fucker with a gun, and I owe me friend a score, an’ if he doesn’t get it there’ll be killings.”

  “I’ll see what I have,” I say, and I open my bag and pull out two damp lemons.

  “You can have these.”

  I hold out the lemons. He looks at my hand and then at my face, his mouth hanging open.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with lemons?”

  He says “lemons” like it has two “L”s.

  “They’re two for a euro, so if you give him two lemons, you only owe him €19.”

  “Are you fuckin’ mental or wha’?”

  He puts two syllables into “you”—maybe it’s an honour to get double-syllabled—but he isn’t looking at me in a pleasant way and other passengers have turned around to watch.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “All I know is that I have twelve lemons and no money to give you.”

  He shakes his head and mutters “fuck’s sake,” but it’s a despairing “fuck’s sake,” not an angry one. He sits silently beside me, shaking his head and giving off alcohol and anger fumes until he gets out at O’Connell Street. As I’m waiting to get off at Nassau Street, the driver looks at me in the mirror.

  “He wasn’t bothering you, love, was he?”

  “No, he just didn’t think much of my lemons.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  I get off the bus and cross the street. I walk up Dawson Street and turn into the little arch with shops that sell Celtic jewellery and paintings of horses and chocolates without wrappers. It’s windy in here; there’s a picnic bench in the middle of the plaza, but only a polar bear would enjoy a picnic there today. I walk through to Lemon Street, check that there’s no one behind me, and drop a piece of fruit every couple of steps. When my bag is empty, I look back. The street looks like it has been lemon-bombed. I come out onto Grafton Street, opposite the red-and-white awning of Bewley’s Café. I go inside and sit near the fireplace. It’s cosy here, with red velvet seats and an orange fire and blue stained glass windows. I order black coffee. I prefer milky coffee, but I’ve heard things on the radio about lactose intolerance and I sometimes think that if I stopped drinking milk my life would be a different thing. When I leave the café I take Grafton Street at a saunter, and head east along Stephen’s Green. I make for the Natural History Museum. Students walk by in groups, laughing and in no hurry. It must be a weekday—weekdays churn out people in suits and students with large bags. Weekends have wardrobes full of suits on hangers and school uniforms on floors and children moving about in large doses. I prefer weekdays to weekends; there are fewer people around and expectations are lower.

  I walk into the museum. It smells of something old and musty, furniture polish or mothballs. There are glass cases of birds and fish and animals, most of them some shade of beige or brown, with typewritten descriptions on faded, tea-coloured paper. I’m looking for new names of things, a list of new words in a particular order that could form a pattern and give me a clue as to how to find my way back. I take out my notebook and write out the names of interesting-sounding birds: “Chats, Warblers, Wrynecks, Choughs, Buntings, Pipits.”

  My list is short: too many names are ordinary and not worth writing down. In the fish section, an enormous goldfish from Mrs. McComas in County Dublin looks healthier than Lemonfish, even though it’s almost a hundred years dead. There are strange specimens in glass coffins and long cylindrical jars, like kitchen jars for foodstuffs. I write the interesting-sounding names: “Natterjack Toad, Butterfish, Butterfly Blenny, Tompot Blenny, Spotted Dragonet, Atlantic Football Fish, Barrelfish, Porcupine Bight, Crystal Goby, Bogue, Poor Cod, Purple Sunstar, Cuckoo Wrasse, Lumpsucker, Boarfish, Comber, Pouting, Beadlet Anemone, Snakelocks Anemone, Dead Men’s Fingers, Sea Pen, Boring Sponge, Smelt, Stone Loach, Shad, Porbeagle Shark, Gudgeon, Darkie Charlie, Leafscale Gulper Shark, Spurdog. Bluntsnout Smooth-Head.” “Bluntsnout Smooth-Head” is like giving an insult and then softening it with a compliment.

  Next I head for the cases of butterflies and moths, and pull back the red leather covers. I write nearly all these names in my notebook; they’re like patches of words from a beautiful poem: “Purple Hairstreak, Red Admiral, Heath Fritallary, Painted Lady, Pearl-bordered Fritallary, Small Tortoiseshell, Speckled Wood, Pale Clouded Yellow, Brimstone, Brown Hairstreak, Peacock, Silver-Washed Fritallary, Marsh Fritallary, Ringlet, Bath White, Cinnabar, Grayling, Small Copper, Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, The Wall.”

  The people who name butterflies must be more imaginative than those who name birds—naming a bird Great Finch or Little Owl is like naming a street New Street or Main Street. If I could name things, I’d squeeze chains of consonants together mercilessly without a vowel for breathing room, I’d shove letters together that should never sit side by side in the English language. I’d add numbers and symbols and insist that they be pronounced. I move onto the moths and write: “Ruby Tiger, Puss, Elephant Hawk-Moth, Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, Oleander Hawk-Moth, Bedstraw Hawk-Moth, Eyed Hawk-Moth, Convolvulus Hawk-Moth, Coxcomb Prominent, Sallow Kitten, White Ermine, Pebble Prominent, Buff-Tip, Buff Ermine, Purple-Bordered Gold, Mottled Umber, Scalloped Oak, Early Thorn, Chimney Sweeper, Purple Bar, Magpie Moth, Speckled Yellow, Red Sword-Grass, The Shears, Grey Dagger, The Ear Moth, Burnished Brass, Heart and Dart, Silver Y, Middle-Barred Minor, Flounced Rustic, The Grey Pug, Latticed Heath, Satyr Pug, The Tissue, Plume Moth, The Drinker, Large Emerald, Lunar Hornet Moth, Goat Moth, Vapourer, Red-Necked Footman (which has disappeared and left just a beige stain, probably in a sulk over its name), Northern Eggar, Ghost Moth, Fox Moth, Emperor Moth, Lobster Moth, Figure of Eight Moth, Mouse Moth, Satellite, Garden Carpet Moth, Belled Beauty, Grass Emerald Moth, Straw Belle, Brindled Beauty and The November Moth,” which I imagine is prone to fits of melancholy.

  I look through my lists for a pattern or code, but all I find are the names of creatures that include the names of creatures of a different species: “Elephant Hawk-Moth, Mouse Moth, Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, Fox Moth, Lobster Moth, Sallow Kitten Moth, Spider Crab, Goat Moth, Cuckoo Wrasse, Butterfly Blenny, Cuckoo Ray, Nursehound Shark, Sea Horse.”

  The moth-namer seems to be overly dependent on his animal- and fish-namer colleagues; he needs to be jolted into originality. I leave the museum and walk down Merrion Street, past the bookshop on Lincoln Place that used to be a chemist and that sells lemon soap regardless of what else it sells. Either James Joyce or Leopold Bloom or Stephen Daedalus (or maybe all three) bought soap there, so i
t attracts citrus-seeking literary tourists. I walk down Westland Row to Pearse Street—the clock on the tower of the red-brick fire station tells the wrong time—and cross at the garda station. This would be the worst stretch of street for a botched self-immolation; after the firemen quenched the fire, the guards would arrest you for public disorder. I walk by The Steine which, I have read, is also called Ivar the Boneless’ Pillar, after a ninth-century Viking ruler. Two faces are carved into opposite sides of the base of the pillar: those of Ivar, a berserker, and Mary de Hogges. I like that I don’t have to name these faces—I don’t think I could top Mary de Hogges for originality—and I like that Ivar was a berserker; I think I could go berserk myself if certain things happened to me in a certain order without my consent. I catch the number 4 bus heading north. I wonder if the drivers with the fewest accidents and the cleanest buses are rewarded with the single-digit routes, or the routes with a mixture of numbers and letters, or the even-numbered routes, or if it matters at all.

  7

  I CAN’T SLEEP, in a night-before-Christmas or night-before-funeral kind of way; tomorrow I will visit Penelope’s house. I watch the red numbers on the clock radio turn 4:44. The 4s look like three unstable chairs. I get up and stalk the rooms, trying out different beds and chairs, like Goldilocks. The house feels fraught in the small hours, like it has a secret it won’t divulge. I turn on all the lights, I need to know that my hands and face are real and connected to me, that I’m not about to dissolve. I go back to bed and watch a patch of the wardrobe by the window turn green, amber, red from the traffic lights up the road. I have to watch closely for the amber-red changeover. I watch 4:58 turn into 4:59; it seems important that I do. I stare at the time for so long that I can’t figure out how the numbers on the clock radio relate to me. Their shapes look familiar and I know their sequence, but I don’t understand what they signify. Two 00s look smug, like they know everything there is to know about ovals. The 2 seems confident, assured. The 3 is living in the past. The 9 just looks surprised.