Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  I HEAR A small beep from my bag and think it’s a bomb, but no, it’s my phone. Penelope has sent a message: “Going to visit my mother tomorrow. You are invited. Pack for the weekend.”

  I read the message again and again, and even after six reads, it’s still an invitation and Penelope still wants me to come. I go upstairs to my great-aunt’s bedroom and take down an old brown suitcase from the top of the wardrobe. There’s a sheet of dust on top, thick and greyish white, like dandruff from an unwashed scalp. It seems a shame to disturb something that has been so many years a-growing, so I snap the locks gently to one side. Inside, it’s lined with faded stripy wallpaper and smells like old feet and talcum powder. I bring the suitcase to my bedroom and start packing my things.

  15

  I WAKE UP excited like it’s Christmas and nervous like it’s exams. Penelope is picking me up at eleven to drive us to her mother’s house on the left thumbnail of County Meath. I get out of bed and put on a white top and blue bottoms because I want to look like a crested wave. I eat breakfast and shake some fish food into Lemonfish’s bowl.

  “Morning, Lemonfish, here’s today’s food.”

  He bobs up and gulps down the powder. I shake some more into the other side of the bowl.

  “And this pile is for Saturday and Sunday.”

  His eyes bulge, and he swims over to his weekend rations. “No, Lemonfish, this way.”

  I tap the other side of the bowl to encourage him back to today’s breakfast. The doorbell rings and Penelope’s voice squawks through the letterbox, “We’re all going on our summer hol-i-days!”

  I drop the fish food, grab my suitcase, and run to open the door. Penelope looks surprised by the suddenness of my face.

  “Morning.”

  I close the door quickly behind me and hurry her along. “Morning, Vivian, are you excited?”

  “Yes.”

  I follow Penelope to her car. It’s an old car, the kind of car that I used to draw in school, a boxy square on top of a boxy rectangle. It looks more definite than the other curved cars on the road. Penelope unlocks the boot and I put my suitcase next to hers and get into the passenger seat. The inside smells of old skin and warm petrol. The other door opens and closes (clunk) and Penelope gets into the driver seat. She breathes out as if the effort is over when it has only just begun.

  “Are we ready to roll?” she asks.

  A baker is flattening us into a Swiss roll in my head.

  “Yes.”

  She turns the key in the ignition, the car sputters and gasps like a hospice breath.

  “What will your last words be?” I ask.

  “Vivian, now is not the time to indulge such morbid thoughts, we’re going on our holidays!”

  I’m not indulging anything; these thoughts come unbidden and stay until they’re answered. I try telling her the sound of the engine is like death, but she shushes me with a song that sounds more like death than my talk of death. The sound of beeping begins to drown out her singing.

  “Why are they beeping?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Other drivers can be so rude.”

  Penelope sighs and swerves to avoid a cyclist, who roars something I can’t hear. She drives like a Don’t Drink and Drive ad, she drives with a rattle and a wallop and a clang and a bang. When she doesn’t like the feel of a lane or the colour of a puddle or the shape of a pothole, she glides into the other lane. I’ve never seen cars driving straight at me before, the drivers’ mouths forming into cartoon “O”s before beeping and swerving. The road is straight, but we veer from side to side like a boat on a rough sea. Penelope keeps up a word-clatter about her mother from Dublin to Meath. I half-listen and half-count the dead birds on the side of the road. Soon we pass through a small seaside town with a train running through it. A huge plastic ice-cream cone outside a shop gives me a hunger even though I don’t like soggy wafer or runny ice cream. We round the bend and turn right opposite a pub onto a bumpy lane.

  “Home sweet home!” Penelope says, with one of her fake shrill laughs. I hate when she says meaningless things she has heard other people say.

  “It should be home salty home because it’s beside the sea,” I say, but Penelope has gotten out of the car, and I follow her down a cracked path to the front door. The cottage is small and white and sits on rocks jutting out to sea. The sea is the front garden, back garden and side garden, with the cracked path connecting the cottage to land like a three-quarter island. The door opens and Penelope’s mother comes out. She has short white hair and is wearing a navy housecoat with flowers on it. I would like to wear a housecoat, it would cover my whole body and put an end to the morning foostering in the wardrobe. Penelope and her mother eye each other warily, muttering stilted sentences. I turn to the sea. The strand is long, the tide is out, the rocks seem over-prepared for something that might never happen. The sea churns white foam like it’s beating egg whites.

  “Vivian!”

  Penelope waves me over. She introduces me to her mother and we shake hands. Mrs. Drysdale’s hand is soggy dough and her mouth curls downwards like a tortoise but she says, “Welcome,” and leads us inside. The hall is dark and cluttered with holy water and pictures of the Pope and Padre Pio. It smells of salt and damp. I follow them into the kitchen and sit on an old brown sofa covered in red crocheted cushions. Mrs. Drysdale bustles about making tea and putting scones on the table. I should learn to bustle so I don’t look like an imposter in my kitchen. Penelope and her mother keep up a strange twittering sort of chatter that doesn’t include me and seems to be loudening into an argument, so I turn my ears to deafness and examine the walls, which are white and mottled with warty bulges of damp. A grotto of the Virgin Mary sits on a small altar in the corner lit by a blue bulb, and a framed picture of the Sacred Heart hangs on the wall lit by a red bulb. It’s like being in a room with a fire engine and a traffic light. I turn my attention to the scones. I can’t decide between butter and jam or cream and jam, so I choose butter and cream and jam, and I manage to get two eaten as the sentence pitch climbs higher and higher in the background. Soon I hear the thud of words descending and the squeak of a chair on the linoleum floor. Penelope gets up.

  “I’m going to unpack the car,” she says, “you two can get to know each other.”

  I don’t know how to get to know somebody; I haven’t brought my notebook of friendship questions. Mrs. Drysdale sits across from me with a face that says, “Well?” I feel bare and hunted.

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

  She sniffs. I attack the silence alone.

  “I like ants—I like how busy they are and how they can carry away breadcrumbs twice their size…”

  She cocks her head to one side.

  “…and how they follow each other to their secret den. I want to shrink and visit their den to see if they have a map of Antworld and magazines with advice about investing breadcrumbs in ant banks.”

  Mrs. Drysdale hasn’t moved her face since I started talking. Sweat runs down my back and is diverted by the waistband of my jeans. Somebody somewhere has just pierced a voodoo doll of me. We sit in a thick, wadded silence until Penelope comes back with the suitcases.

  “Come on, Vivian, I’ll show you to your room.”

  I pick up my suitcase and follow her to the room that faces out to sea. It’s white and bare with a single bed, covered in a dark green eiderdown. A crucifix hangs above the bed and there’s a dark wooden wardrobe in the corner. As soon as Penelope leaves, I check for Narnia, but the back is solid. I look out the window. The sky and sea and sand are all the same shade of grey; only the wave foam tells them apart. I put my things in the wardrobe quickly and hurry down the hall to the kitchen.

  “I’m going for a walk on the beach,” I say.

  Penelope gets up and peers out the window.

  “I don’t know, Vivian, it’s a bit damp.”

  “I don’t mind, I’ll go on my own.”

  The two women murmur a bit but I put
on my coat.

  “I won’t be long,” I say, and I walk quickly out the door before the tide rushes in and takes over my walk. I clamber down the rocks, skidding on black seaweed that looks like strips of bloated beetles. I pop them (squelch squelch) and start walking the strand, looking at all the treasures the tide has brought in. There are shells and starfish and crabs and stones, and I take out my notebook to write a list:

  1. A piece of orange rope, barely long enough to hang an elf

  2. A black tyre, half buried in the sand (I step inside in case it’s a fairy fort, but nothing happens.)

  3. A rusty fridge that could be a retirement home for magnets

  4. A child’s car seat face down in the sand, that looks like it tipped the child out and shunted it to a world beneath

  5. A dead sheep that could be a mer-sheep from the sea depths

  6. Blue rubber gloves.

  Every few feet there are blue rubber gloves on the strand—a container must have been lost at sea. Some are buried palm down, only the wrists showing; some are reaching up, a finger or two visible from the sand; others are gathered together in a menacing huddle. When darkness falls, they move so slowly, so calmly, pulling their blue bodies out of the sand, taking over the village with their rubbery ways.

  I walk up a concrete slope into the village. An ice-cream van at the entrance to the beach looks forlorn and misplaced in the grey mist. I find a supermarket that has a family name on the sign instead of a brand name I can sing from radio ads. In the baking section, I pick up red and blue food colouring. The bottles are such perfect miniatures, they look like quarts of coloured whiskey for a pixie. The woman at the till scans the bottles and smiles.

  “Baking for a children’s party?”

  I look at her. Why does everyone in supermarkets think I’m having a children’s party?

  “No, I’m going to colour in the beach.”

  “Well, I hope they’re magic bottles, you won’t get far with those!”

  She laughs. I would like to say a sentence and end on a height and laugh at my own joke.

  “I’m just doing the patch in front of my window to improve the view.”

  “Oh, right.”

  She has lost interest and starts a conversation with the girl at the next till about her husband’s coeliac attack. I walk back to the beach, picturing a giant loaf of bread punching a man in the belly, and head in the direction of the cottage. Now I can’t see the sand for blue gloves. I pick one up and put it in my pocket to dilute their power, and I’m so engrossed in keeping my mind off a potential blue takeover that I almost walk into the moat of a sandcastle. A boy and a girl are kneeling beside it, adding stones to the curved path.

  “I like your castle,” I say, and I kneel down beside them to examine it more closely. There are four high turrets, four shell windows, a stone door and a stone path, with a moat guarding the outside. A frond of tea-brown seaweed hangs from a stick in a turret as a flag. The children barely glance at me and keep adding stones to the path.

  “Where does the path lead to?” I ask.

  The girl looks at me and points to the gate behind her. “That’s our house.”

  I take the food colouring from my bag.

  “Do you want to colour in the turrets?”

  They eye the bottles warily as if they were black magic potions.

  “What’s turrets?” the boy asks.

  “These.”

  I point to the sand cubes on the top.

  “This is where the princess would stand and wave.”

  The girl looks at the food colouring.

  “Pink!” she says.

  “It’s actually red,” I say, “but maybe it’ll come out pink.”

  I open the red bottle and pour a few drops on the turrets, but a shout goes up and I take fright and spill the bottle. A woman walks quickly from the children’s house shouting their names. The girl suddenly starts to wail: “She put blood in the moat!”

  I look at the moat. A streak of red is running down the front of the castle, and there’s a splash of red in the moat.

  “Why are you crying?” I ask. “We killed the troll who lives in the moat.”

  The boy looks thrilled but the girl’s face scrunches up and she shouts: “She killed the troll!”

  The mother has reached the gate and I don’t want to take part in a botched explanation, I don’t want to waste words that will be flung back at me, so I get up quickly and half-run half-walk, until I’m sure they aren’t following me. Then I slow down to look at the shells. I used to bring home damp and gleaming shells, I used to think if I found the perfect shell I would find the shape of the world, but I was always disappointed. When I washed them later, their sea–gleam would trickle down the sink, leaving a dull sheen the colour of dry lament.

  I pick up the skeleton of a periwinkle shell, examine the whorls and put it in my pocket. This one won’t betray me, it holds no promise of gleam. Then I pocket a dog whelk shell that’s dull alabaster, an honest colour that won’t disappoint. I find two shards of pottery and a grey oval stone wrapped by a narrow white band, like an unfinished American football, and add them to my collection, hoping they don’t have an inter-substance squabble in the darkness of my pocket. A man with a metal detector and earphones walks slowly along the strand, moving the detector from side to side before him like a grass strimmer. I follow him in case he hits treasure, but there’s no beep. I’m surely more of a beachcomber than he is, even though he’s looking for precious metals and I’m looking for broken treasures and shells that will keep their colour in the dry. A blotch of pink near the shoreline becomes a partially deflated balloon when I get closer. It says “Happy 60th” on it. I wonder whether I’ll live till sixty and, if I do, whether anybody will throw me a party. I would like a birthday cake big enough for everyone at the party to have a slice but not so big that there’s lots left over the next day and I doubt whether anyone came to my party.

  When I reach the cottage, I pour the food colouring onto the patch of sand in front of my bedroom window. The blue and red meet in the middle to form purple: three-sevenths of a rainbow. A shopping trolley has come to a bad end near the rocks, its nose in the sand and two back wheels jutting into the air in an awkward dive. I consider bringing it home for Mrs. Drysdale, but up close, it’s dirty and rusty so I leave it be. I climb back up the rocks to the cottage, and Penelope opens the door.

  “How was your walk?”

  “Good,” I say, “look at my fresh hoard.”

  I pull out the shells and pottery and stone and blue rubber glove from my pockets, along with clumps of wet sand. The kettle on the range is already whistling, and Mrs. Drysdale gets up to make more tea. I don’t want another hot drink, but it seems as if this is a ritual I must take part in. I wash the shells under the tap while Penelope hangs my coat on a hook by the range. Her mother puts the teapot on the low table in front of the sofa and sets out a plate of biscuits. I sit down. The biscuits, oh no, the biscuits are the soft beige not-quite-biscuit not-quite-cake atrocities with an almost burnt taste that I hate; they make me retch beige vomit. Penelope puts two cups on the table, sits beside me, and hands me the plate of biscuits. I take one.

  “Have another,” she says.

  “No, thanks,” I say, “I’m grand.”

  “Ah, you have to have another, we’re on holidays,” she says, and she pushes the plate towards me.

  I take another biscuit and bite into it. It’s as awful as I remember. Penelope starts talking about the games she played on the beach as a child, and I nod “mmm hmm” and “really gosh wow,” and while she’s gazing out the window I stuff one of the biscuits down the back of the sofa. If there are mice living there, they can feast on my leftovers. I pretend to nibble the other biscuit and then stuff that one in the same place. Penelope looks at my empty hands.

  “You’re a big fan of the biscuits, huh?”

  She shoves the plate at me again, and I take another biscuit and stuff it behind the cushions
. There would need to be whole teams of mice living in the sofa to get through so many biscuits. Penelope and her mother have started to argue again. I can’t make out their words, it’s all dry snarl and wet hum, so I get up and look at my hoard. I’ve left the shells to dry around the edge of the sink; they too hate the arguing and are about to creep down the steel sides and escape through the plughole. I pick up the dog whelk and put it to my ear. I can hear the fizz of the ocean even though the tide is still out. Now I stick the periwinkle skeleton in my ear, but the sea must have passed right through the bones; I can hear only the hiss of Penelope and her mother, a live version of the soap opera on my television at home.

  The walls start to press in on me so I climb onto the counter, open the window, and squeeze out. A seagull on the rocks shrieks like it’s being pinched, then laughs like it’s being tickled. The tide has gone out so far it’s hard to believe that it will ever come back. I’m glad the tide is out. I hope to die without ever having to set foot or hand in seawater again. I hunker down at the wall under the kitchen window. Life feels narrower in this cottage, hemmed in by questions and tea routines and constant word-spatter. I realise that I don’t miss being in a family, the clutch and the cling of it, the hold they have over you, but I probably should go back.

  I get up, walk around to the front door, and let myself in. Penelope is standing staring at the wall, and her mother is scrubbing a pot with steel wool. Her fingers have worked up a pale pink foam, they’re moving so fast they’re in a blur. The air is so stiff, it makes me want to back into a corner and climb under something.

  “Grey and pink go well together,” I say.

  “Sorry?” Penelope turns to me.

  “The grey pad and the pink foam,” I say. “It’s a sporty combination.”

  “Vivian, we have to leave now. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t mind,” I say.

  “You’re very kind.”