I wake in a fug, with excitement peeking through my tiredness. This is my first invitation anywhere in a good many years. I wish Penelope had put it in writing, so that I could prove I was asked to come. I go downstairs and feed Lemonfish and eat breakfast—a small breakfast because I want to keep stomach room for a feed of sweet things. When the clock says a quarter to eleven, I get up and put on my coat. I take my bag with a notebook and pencil, in case Penelope says anything noteworthy or I need to draw a map of her flat. I put some stride in my walk and put a smile on my face—this is how an invited person would look—and I set off. I walk past the pub on the corner with the man selling newspapers from the windowsill. There is a large stone on the papers to stop them escaping. A garda car passes, pulling a horsebox; the garda horse must be starting his shift soon. I wonder if it gets the same pay and conditions the guards get and if it can work overtime for extra hay. I turn onto Penelope’s street and ring her doorbell. I feel like I should fix my hair or straighten my tie like people do in films, but Penelope would not notice such things. A noise like galloping hooves comes from the flat, the door is whooshed open, and Penelope’s face appears. She’s wearing red lipstick but it has escaped her lips. There is less face and more mouth than I remember.
“Hello, Penelope, thank you for having me.”
“You’re very welcome, Vivian, come on in.”
I step into the hall and sniff the air. It smells earthy like the zoo, a smell I shouldn’t like but I do. Downstairs, there are two closed doors at right angles to each other and a flight of stairs. I follow Penelope up the wooden stairs. My feet clack, Penelope’s shuffle in thick woolen socks. She leads me into a large bright living room at the top of the stairs. It has white walls and a door leading out to a balcony, but the carpet, oh the carpet! It’s purple with huge red and green and pink flowers; it’s a rage of a carpet. My eyes are drawn to it, even though it hurts to look. There are four cats sitting on two sofas. The kitchen is part of the living room, with open shelves displaying Penelope’s food; I feel like I’m snooping around her digestive system.
“Sit down, Vivian, and make yourself comfortable. I’ll put the kettle on.”
I don’t sit because the cats are taking up all the sofa space, they are staring at me with deep nothing in their eyes. I look at the books on the shelves. There are books on cats and angels and druids and fairies and darker-coloured books on the occult. In the corner of one shelf is a stack of hardbound marbled notebooks. I pick up one, open it, and see “January 1st” written at the top. The handwriting is smudged and bouncy, like it was written in fountain pen with ink made from frogs. I close the diary.
“I see you’ve discovered my secrets,” Penelope says with a laugh.
I wish she wouldn’t laugh when things aren’t funny, laughs should be dealt out sparingly.
“I didn’t look,” I say, “I mean I looked but when I saw it was a diary I stopped—”
“Vivian, it’s fine. Do you keep a diary?”
“I used to,” I say, “but it took too long to write everything I thought or saw or did. I couldn’t go anywhere without my diary, and my sister got annoyed when I wrote down everything she said. But if I didn’t do that, it wasn’t a true diary.”
“It’s all or nothing with you, isn’t it, Vivian?”
I sense she’s going to laugh again, so I speak hastily.
“There are boxes of my old diaries in the attic, but they’re so tiring to read. It’s like reliving a whole part of my old life while living in my current life. And I’ve forgotten most of what’s written, so what’s the point of living these details in the first place if I’m not going to remember them?”
I take a big gasp of air because this is the most I have spoken out loud in a long while.
“I understand,” Penelope says, nodding.
I’m glad she doesn’t laugh this time. She clears the cats off one sofa with a sweep of her arm, and I sit down. Then she brings two white mugs of tea over to the table. The mugs are chipped with old tea stains, I can tell I’ll feel at home here. She brings over a tray of biscuits. The tray is wooden and round, the size of six of my heads. I have never seen so many biscuits in one place. I take my notebook from my bag.
“Can I write the names of all those biscuits?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says.
I write: “Jam Rings, Custard Creams, Lemon Puffs, Raspberry Creams, Nice Biscuits, Coconut Creams, Milk Chocolate Digestives, Dark Chocolate Digestives, Caramel Digestives, Plain Digestives, Rich Teas, Mariettas, Bourbon Creams, Pink Wafers, Chocolate Wafers, Fig Rolls, Fruit Shorties, Shortcakes, Orange Creams, Jersey Creams.”
The biscuits are scattered and heaped and bunched like so many mute-coloured dead things. I start with a plain digestive, the calm before the chocolate storm.
“Where do you keep the biscuits?” I ask.
“In a huge tin, but I should probably separate them to stop the flavours mixing.”
She’s right; the digestive tastes of raspberry, but if I choose the strongest-tasting biscuits, they will surely defy contamination.
“So, Vivian, what’s your story?”
I don’t have a once-upon-a-time fairytale of a life, so I tell Penelope about my search for a portal and my blue party and Lemonfish. She says her cats would make short work of Lemonfish and I tell her that Lemonfish could take on a hundred cats, but only if he was in a large body of water and the cats stayed around the edge.
“What kind of edges?”
“Door frames mostly. That’s where I’d stand if the world ended. Cliffs and piers and shelf edges, where the dust gathers. And the lip of Lemonfish’s bowl, where the water meets the air, the gap between the carpet and skirting board. I like the place where one thing meets another—that’s where magic gets in.”
I snatch a gulp of air. I must learn to breathe as I talk.
“The middle is the scary part,” I say.
Penelope nods.
“I’m more of a middle person myself,” she says, and she is. She is sprawled in the middle of one sofa with two cats on one side, one cat on the other, and one asleep behind her. I’m perched on the left side of the other sofa, with a world’s worth of space to my right. It is a waste of a sofa; I should take up more space.
“I’m going to become more middle,” I say.
I would like to proclaim it, but I don’t quite know how. I lean back and throw out my right arm to use up the seat beside me. This feels awkward. There is a vast chunk of space between my body and the back of the sofa and I can’t reach my mug or the biscuits. I want to move but the effort has been made. I slide further back into the sofa and I spread my body wider without tossing out my limbs.
“What’s your story?” I ask Penelope so I can get stuck into the biscuits and keep my mouth full and my head nodding. She talks about her art and her cats and I stop listening when she mentions her angel guides and her spiritual paths. When I’ve had enough biscuits, and while the angels are still flying around the conversation, I ask to see some of her work. She leads me through a door into a small bright room off the living room. There are white walls and wooden easels with canvases on them. Every canvas has a cat on it: close-ups of cats’ faces; cats’ bodies and faces; ocean scenes with cats swimming and sunning themselves; cats dressed as clowns, farmers, Sherlock Holmes, ghosts, witches, even a cat dressed as a communist leader with ecstatic peasants saluting it.
“Told you I liked drawing cats,” she says with a grin.
I don’t know where to look. Communist Cat is staring at me, examining my face for signs of dissent.
“They’re very original,” I say, “what a unique perspective.”
My mind whirrs for more adjectives, and I fear my silence is degrees from rude so I let out a Raaaaar! Penelope’s shoulders scoot up to her ears and she jumps and squeals. The movements are so connected, they’re somewhere between comical and graceful. The subject has been changed.
“What’s wrong, Vivian?”
“I thought I saw a ghost, but it’s just the ghost-cat in the painting.”
“Right, let’s go back inside.”
We sit down again, I widen myself and take up a fair amount of space.
“So, Vivian, where did you grow up?”
“Dublin.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Not far from here.”
Sweat begins to trickle down my lower back, and I press my vest against the skin to mop it up.
“Do your family live nearby?”
“My sister lives on the other side of the city, my parents are dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, I was sorry when they were alive.”
I’ve said a good ways too much. Penelope looks quickly at me and then at the cat on her lap and starts talking about her childhood. It was unhappy, by the sounds, so I put a glass wall over my ears and let Penelope’s words thunk against the glass and slide down to my shoulders. I can’t bear tales of abuse and neglect and unwashed corduroy trousers so I replace her words with candyfloss and sherbet fountains and cake with buttercream so smooth it glides down the throat like a greasy angel.
“You’re a very good listener, Vivian, most people keep interrupting when I talk about this.”
“Mmm,” I say.
I’ve learned to crinkle my forehead like an accordion and draw in my lips like I’m sucking on a straw when people tell me sad things. Then my mind can climb up the Magic Faraway Tree or fly away on the Magic Wishing Chair. Penelope’s eyes are plump and wet, I should do something. I’ve read about patting unhappy people’s knees reassuringly but I’m not quite sure how. I cup her kneecap with my right hand a few times. She is weeping loudly now.
“There there,” I say, but I’m thinking, Where where? And does cupping a kneecap ever bring them there, wherever there is? When my hand gets stiff from cupping, I flatten it to a gentle slapping gesture. Penelope’s body heaves with great big sniffs that seem to go all the way up to her brain.
“Thank you,” she says, “it’s good to talk about these things you know.”
I don’t know because I don’t know what she was talking about and I don’t know why she would want to talk about things that make her do such ugly sobs. I want to take my hand off her knee and reach for another biscuit, but it might be too soon, so I reach my left hand under my right arm and strain for the table. Penelope snorts a laugh and I scoot away before I am covered in snot or tears or needless sorrow. I move onto the fruit course of biscuits and stuff anything with pink or orange or yellow cream into my mouth. Penelope’s voice fattens and rises, she mentions angels setting her on the right path, the sixth sense of her cats and art as a form of therapy. These words should be spoken to a person with wider, more welcoming ears than me but I’m the only one here, apart from the pointy-eared cats. When I have sucked the last drop of tea from the mug and eaten all the biscuits my stomach will allow, I decide to leave.
“Right,” I say.
“Right?”
“I must go,” I say. “Please visit me at the same time next week.”
I get up and dust biscuit crumbs off my lap. I don’t know any suitable departing sentences so I think about how characters in Coronation Street leave.
“Ta-ra chuck,” I say, but it comes out flat and wrong, it lacks accent and punctuation and a Manchester upbringing.
“Bye, Vivian.”
We walk down the stairs and I jump out the door and wave before Penelope decides a hug after a weep would be a good idea.
8
I WAKE IN a hurry, as if I’ve been blown out of sleep by a giant puff of wind. I get dressed, making sure that every piece of clothing is the right way around; today is not a day for being inside out or back to front. I go downstairs to the kitchen, put on the kettle, and toast some bread. When the toast pops, it’s burnt black. I take the slices to the bin with a knife and scrape a map of Dublin onto the first slice, and the letter “V” onto the second. The kettle boils and clicks off. Most of my meals involve waiting for pops and clicks and beeps. Someday I would like to get a stove with real fire and toast bread on a fork through the slats, and put a pyramid-shaped kettle on the hob and wait for it to whistle. I spread butter on my toast from the butter dish, trying not to transfer the burnt specks from the toast onto the dish, and make tea with one heaped spoon of tea leaves, stirring until it’s a deep red-brown. I don’t really like tea that strong, but I like the phrase “heaped teaspoon” and I can’t use it if I don’t heap the spoon. The colour is spoiled when I add milk; milky tea is so sad and lonely and grey. I take David’s chair from the kitchen table and return it to the living room, then I sit down on the only chair and eat. My ears have been saturated with other people’s words recently; today I will hear only my own.
When I’ve finished eating, I take the blue folder from the drawer of the desk in the living room. There is no chair decision to make when I sit here, because only one chair fits into the desk. It has a round wooden seat and round wooden arms, which enclose me like a wrist in a cuff. I sit down and open the folder containing my Last Words Project, which I would like to abbreviate to LWP, but that sounds like a political organisation whose members all believe the same thing. My project involves trawling through all my great-aunt’s books, and writing out the last word from each one. When I’m finished, I will examine them to find some kind of pattern. I expect this word-pattern to be a code or a message or a map, leading me to my rightful world. Last week I finished “G,” today I will work through H. I go to the bookshelves and take down as many “H” books as will fit in my arms, carry them to the desk and arrange them into two jagged piles. Then I sit down again and peel back the cover of King Solomon’s Mines. The last words is “else” and I write it in the notebook under “Last Words: H.” Next comes “existence,” from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, “cambo” from L. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone and “Spain,” “now,” “things,” “pain,” “on,” “accordingly,” “known” and “boterel,” from the Thomas Hardy books. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter comes “Gules.” My favourites so far are “Cambo,” “Boterel” and “Gules.” I don’t know what these words signify—they sound like a company of solicitors—but I feel certain that they hold meaning for me. From Ernest Hemingway’s books come “forest,” “stream,” “lions” and “go”; from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays I get “fulness” and from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame comes “dust.” I look at my list of “H” words and let them swirl around my eyes, but seeking meaning in small clumps of words could weaken the final pattern. I close the notebook and put it in the folder, then I put the books back on the shelves. I swipe the palm of one hand against the palm of the other, then I repeat the gesture in the opposite direction. This means I have completed something; it feels clean and good.
Now I look through the shelves for books that I have no intention of reading, and pick out three. Inside the cover of the first book I write:
Zolanda,
The sardines have eluded us yet again.
Someday, Zolanda; some day.
The second book is called The Girl You Left Behind. Inside its cover I write:
To The One Who Was Replaced By Me,
Show me the way back, and I will give you the keys to Great-Aunt Maud’s house.
Expectantly Yours,
Vivian.
The third book is about horoscopes. Inside it I write:
Gobnait,
The heart of a maiden runs deeper than her monthly forecast.
Godspeed, young Gobnait, Godspeed.
Your Godsib Ethel.
I don’t know who Zolanda, Gobnait or Ethel are, but I imagine that Ethel is a wise older lady who will guide Gobnait through this world and beyond. Maybe I should advertise for an Ethel-friend next. I take a plastic bag from the wad in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and put the three books in the bag. Then I put on my coat and walk to the charity shop near the post office.
I give the bag to the woman behind the counter and leave before she talks to me. If I see “Wanted” posters tacked to local trees looking for Zolanda or Gobnait or Ethel, I will answer them and be that friend. I walk down Phibsborough Road into town feeling giddy with success, but it’s a success that I don’t know how to measure; I may never know the consequences of that book drop.
I walk down Constitution Hill and veer left, onto Coleraine Street. Men in fluorescent vests are laying fresh tarmac on the street. It smells like chemical heaven. I walk slowly and inhale deeply, then I bend down and pretend to tie my shoelace so that I can sniff closer to the source. I cross North King Street and head for Cuckoo Lane. The “CUCK” has been blacked out so that it reads “_ _ _ _ OO LANE,” which sounds like the chorus to a new song. I come out onto Mary’s Lane facing the redbrick fruit markets, which have the look of a court or a temple. The whole street sign has been blue-ed out: I have walked off-map onto a street that doesn’t exist, not in this world, at least. Vans and trucks and forklifts scud about through arched doorways, emitting a constant low-grade beeeeeeeeep. Fruit-sellers and drivers call to one another inside the market buildings, their voices echoing in these great caverns with their wrought-iron doors. Boxes of fruit and vegetables are piled high on wooden pallets outside the shops facing the market—their smell is of the world being born. I wonder whether vegetables get jealous that they smell so silently, with fruit getting all the glory. I walk by the shops staring at the produce, my feet skidding on squashed fruit. There is something so appealing about seeing so much of every grown thing heaped together in one place. There are cabbages, turnips, mushrooms, lettuces, tomatoes, swedes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, cherries, strawberries, apples, oranges, nectarines, peaches, clementines, melons, watermelons, raspberries, blueberries, bananas and grapes, all so fat and full and squelching with life.
I picture the inside of the market as a gigantic barrel filled with a huge fruit salad. I don’t want to be rid of this image, so I circle the outside of the building, taking care not to peer too closely inside. There are stone clumps of fruit and vegetables and fish carved into the wall, and white stone faces above the doors. The faces look stoical and wise, but silently judging. Statues of two ancient Greek goddesses stand on the roof next to the city crest—they might be fruit muses who inspire the invention of new fruit and, from that height, they could point out the thinnest boundary between worlds if they felt so inclined. When I look up to wave to them, I bump into a man in a fluorescent vest (“Mind your step, love”) and am forced to jump out of the path of a forklift truck (Beeeeeeeeeep). I leave the markets to avoid a fruit incident, and head for the quays. On a building on the north quays, the words “I like scaldy mots” are scrawled in black. “I like scaldy mots,” I say aloud, and it sounds like I know what I’m talking about. Near this is written: “The army are coming.” But it doesn’t state which country’s army is coming, what they plan on doing when they get here and whether the army is in any way connected to the scaldy mots. Further along the quays, on the front wall of the abandoned whitewashed hotel, the words “Not Me” are written. I would like to meet the writer of those words: I’m not me either, and there’s a possibility we could be each other, or we could be friends at least. I’d also like to ask if I could borrow those words for my epitaph (“Here Lies Vivian Lawlor: Not Me”). I cross the Ha’penny Bridge. The words “Troll Below?” are stencilled on the tarmac, which reminds me of the troll underneath the bridge in the “Three Billy Goats Gruff” fairytale, and makes me want to point to the fattest person and say, “There’s more eating in him, don’t bother with me.” The question mark suggests uncertainty, and I’m glad of it: there’s another person who doesn’t have the world and its underneath figured out. I stop and read the messages on the love locks tied to the railings of the bridge. Someone loves someone and someone else loves their mama and someone else says “Fuck love.” The man begging on the bridge says to a passer-by, “Any spare change, bud? I like your haircut.” The man thanks him and walks on, the compliment unpaid for. I pass underneath Merchant’s Arch and close my eyes, hoping for a transformation—an arch is surely as good a portal as any—but the smell of stale piss doesn’t fade to flowers, and the noise of the traffic doesn’t change to fairy bells. I open my eyes and walk back through the arch. The sign for Fownes Street Lower has been blue-ed out to read “_ _ _I_S_STRE[_OWER.” The middle prong of the second “E” in “street” has been blue-ed out, leaving a symbol that looks like a square bracket, which could be a letter in an alphabet from another world. I write “Isstre[ower” in my notebook. I will keep it safe, until I find someone who can tell me what [means. I head for College Green. The fountain by the statue of the four skinny angels is spewing out multiplications of bubbles—someone must have put washing-up liquid in the water. I walk to the statue and pick up handfuls of suds. It always surprises me that bubbles are wet; from their whiteness, I expect dry fluff. I put some in my mouth, but they taste sharp and clean when I expected soft and sweet. I take the bus home from Dame Street, and buy a carton of milk in the local newsagent. I try to creep past Bernie’s house, but she’s standing by her open window, smoking.
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