Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  A clock sticks out of a red-bricked pub in the laneway across the road. It tells the wrong time. A band of mischievous clock-makers must sneak around the city at night with a ladder and screwdriver, tweaking clocks until they run slow. They share tips on ladder safety and clandestine urban high jinks with the Smurfs painting the street signs. I cross the street and stand under the neon “Why Go Bald?” sign, looking at the soot-streaked backs of the buildings at the junction of George’s Street and Dame Street. They’re all edges and angles and juts, the kind of discordant imperfection that makes me feel I can breathe—unsymmetry at a symmetrical T-junction. I walk the length of the lane to Andrew’s Street. If I had a friend for all the first-named streets of Dublin, I would be so popular. There’d be a Leo in my address book, and a Geraldine and an Andrew. There’d be a John, Anne, Thomas, Henry and a Mary. There’d be two Georges. I walk up the slope to Suffolk Street, past the green pub with the hanging baskets and the smell of cooked dinner. There isn’t a bus for ten minutes, so I follow the curl of the road back around the tourist office that used to be a church. I walk to the far end of the car park to look at the decrepit statue of St. Andrew. There’s a look of pure torment on his face, but I suppose I’d be tormented too if my face was almost worn away. I walk back to get my bus and stop in the supermarket on the way home to buy an eggplant. I’m tempted to buy three to triple my luck, but then I’d need to triple the hawks and Mount Fujis to balance the ratios. When I get home, I trace the walking part of my route onto greaseproof paper. Today I walked a squinting side profile of a cat with an upturned collar and a stalk on its head.

  I take a book about birds from the shelf and open it on the hawk page. Then I find a picture of Mount Fuji on the Internet and print it out. Now I have all the components of a lucky dream except the timing: it’s not the first sleep of the new year, but it’s surely the first sleep of a new baby somewhere. When I go to bed, I stare hard at the hawk and Mount Fuji and the eggplant, making sure I spend equal amounts of time on each. Then I put the book and the picture under my pillow, hold the eggplant in my hands and will myself to dream correctly.

  17

  I WAKE UP in a frown. Things don’t seem right already and I’ve barely opened my eyes. I’m lying on a squelchy mush; the eggplant has burst and is mashed into the sheets. I sift through my dreams—I seem to have had more dreams than sleep—but none of them featured vegetables or mountains or birds. I duck under the blankets and sniff, but a vegetal smell has taken over my own smell. I scrape the worst of the eggplant off the sheets and throw it down the toilet, then I put on some clothes over my pyjamas, eat breakfast and pack my bag. I take the street map down from the bookshelf. Today I will visit Middle Third. There are three branches of Middle Third on the map: a straight line and two curved lines attacking it at an angle like a Chinese symbol. The three branches don’t connect at a point of concentrated magic so I will need to walk the whole area. I put on my great-aunt’s green coat because hobbits like green, and leave the house.

  “Ah, Vivian, how are you?”

  Bernie’s sitting on her doorstep smoking a cigarette, her right elbow cupped in her left hand.

  “Fine, thanks,” I say and keep walking.

  “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  “To Middle Third to find a hobbit.”

  “Where?”

  “Middle Third in Killester,” I say. “If hobbits live in Middle Earth, then every third person in Middle Third should be a hobbit.”

  She coughs up a puff of smoke and shakes her head.

  “You’d do better to find a husband, never mind your hobbits.”

  I walk quickly on. A roar hits me square in the back of the head: “About time you got the ring on the finger, a woman your age.”

  I WALK THROUGH Phibsborough and Glasnevin to Collins Avenue. It takes me an age to walk the length of it—there are so many houses, it’s hard to believe all these people exist without my knowing them. Just before the road ends, I turn left and follow the road to Middle Third, which opens out onto a large triangular green with clumps of trees. I wander among the trees looking for the entrance to a hobbit hole and find a beer can and some empty crisp packets. Hobbits love their food and ale; they may have left a trail of crisps and beer drops. I walk the different prongs of Middle Third looking for signs of a trail, but all I find is a cigarette butt, and hobbits prefer pipe-weed. The houses are mostly bungalows, but it’s underground dwellings that I’m looking for. A short man walks towards me, about the height of a tall hobbit. He’s wearing shoes, so I can’t see if he has large hairy feet; he’s wearing a cap so I can’t see if he has pointy ears; he’s wearing a black coat which is the wrong colour—unless he’s coming from a hobbit funeral. I stare at his face as he passes. It’s mild and friendly and he nods at me—he has given me the nod to follow him to his hobbit hole, so I turn around and follow. He walks quite slowly, and I have to be careful not to catch him up if we are to keep up this pretence for the human world. He enters the driveway of a house. I look behind me for potential spies before following him. He is putting his key in the front door when he turns around to face me. He looks surprised.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  “How come your door is rectangular?” I ask.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, this must be the decoy door—where’s the round door to the underground part?”

  “I’m sorry, what’s this about?”

  “The quest to find my way back,” I whisper. “I’m looking for a hobbit to guide me.”

  The man stares at every piece of my face as if he’s trying to suck it all in. He speaks in a low voice full of corners.

  “If you don’t get off my property right now, I’m calling the guards. Now get lost!”

  I turn around and leave the driveway, leave Middle Third, leave the chance of a hobbit guide. He was a hobbit for sure, but a reluctant one who didn’t want to leave home, just like Bilbo Baggins. Maybe if I wait, he will change his mind and seek me out, especially if he suspects how much cake there is in my cupboards. I walk to the Howth Road and get a bus into town, then I get another bus home from town because I don’t trust my feet to lead me to the right place. On the way home, I send Penelope a message: “Please come over. Bring shovel.”

  Penelope replies: “Okay.”

  I stop at the supermarket, and take a great big sniff of a breath as I walk in. It settles something inside me to see so much stuff in one place: the tins of food all piled up, the stacks of frozen food in the freezer, the pallets of produce waiting to be shelved, the crates of fruit and vegetables, the heaps of toilet rolls, shelves of cakes, buns, biscuits, cereal, soup. The things that contain the food interest me the most: the tubs and packets and bags and boxes and cartons and bottles. Whoever thought to put different foodstuffs in different kinds of packaging? I stroll around stroking the packaging and looking at the contents. I buy three cartons of mushrooms and seven mesh bags of chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, caught like chocolate fish in their nets. When I get home, I map the walking part of my route. Today I walked the hood of the Grim Reaper with a giant ladybird clinging to its underside.

  I get up and empty one of the dead plants from its earthen pot into the bin. The smell of dry clay is delicious and I bend down and sniff the bin. Then I rinse out the pot, dry it and empty the gold coins into it. When I cut the nets open, they leave tiny yellow pieces of netting on the counter—I could glue them to Lemonfish as new scales. I scoop up the pieces and bring them over to his bowl. Things are not looking good. His white beard has grown longer, like a water-goat, and his stomach is an angry bloat. He’s listing to one side as if the water under him is the floor that he’s dragging his body across. Poor Lemonfish. I knock on the bowl and wave, but he ignores me. I throw one of the gold coins into the bowl so that he knows what he should look like. It sinks slowly and he doesn’t seem to care.

  I GO UPSTAIRS and scoop out the unflushed eggplant from the toilet with my hands.
When I sniff the toilet bowl, my eyes burn; it must be time to clean it. I spurt some toilet cleaner into the bowl and swoosh it around with the brush until it smells of swimming pool and lime. The doorbell rings and I come down the stairs at a leap and a run. Penelope seems to be inside before I have opened the door and my mouth to say hello. She’s carrying a shovel with a plastic bag wrapped around its tongue.

  “Hi, Vivian, what are we digging?”

  “Just a hole.”

  She has already pushed past me into the kitchen.

  “Do you want to go to the toilet?” I ask.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “It’s clean.”

  “I don’t need to go.”

  “Oh.”

  Penelope leans her shovel against the counter and sits down at the table, but I pull her up and bring her outside. I put her shovel in her hand and take up my shovel and scrape out a circle on the grass.

  “Here’s where we dig.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  We slice into the earth, which is soft and spongy on top. The going is easy until we hit gristle and mean little stones; the sound of metal on stone is terrible to my ears. Penelope stops digging and leans on her shovel.

  “Where will we put the soil we’ve dug?”

  “Around the edges is fine.”

  The smallness of our progress is surprising. I had expected boggy softness and squelch but this is dry hard work; the soil doesn’t want to come up. Penelope grunts with every movement of her shovel. It’s like listening to a tennis match with the grating of metal on stone instead of the puick puick of a tennis ball. Every time she puts her foot on the shovel, her skirt catches under the heel of her shoe, and I hear “Feck” and “Balls” and “Why me?”

  “Because you won’t hoist up your skirt,” I say.

  “What?”

  “You asked ‘why me’—if you pull your skirt up higher, it’ll be out of the shovel’s way.”

  Penelope stares at me, her forehead creased into a question mark. She has the look of someone who has something big to say, but she purses her lips and tucks in her skirt and slashes the earth with her shovel. We’ve hit a pocket of worms, which burrow furiously under the soil when they’re exposed. I never knew so many worms could exist—this wriggling brown world under my feet is terrifying—but I understand why they stay so secret and safe and hidden. When two mounds’ worth of clay have built up on the sides, the hole still doesn’t seem so deep. Penelope sighs.

  “Hard to believe all that came from this small hole.”

  She sneezes, but I’m so caught up in my soil-world that I forget to say “bless you” for a few minutes. I want to ask Penelope whether the “bless you” still counts if it’s late, or whether it counts towards the next sneeze, but she seems tired and bothered and closed to my questions. Her face is red and puffy, a burst sandbag of a face. I worry she’ll sicken and die into the hole, and that’s not what this hole is for.

  “Do you want to rest for a bit?” I ask.

  “Jesus, I thought you’d never ask.”

  She sits down on the mound she has dug up and sinks back into it, her legs dangling in the hole. Her feet in her sandals are grubby and the toenails have a black rim of dirt under the tips, like a soil pedicure. I go into the kitchen and bring out mugs of milk and the biscuit tin.

  “Men who work the fields drink milk when they take a break,” I say.

  Penelope takes two biscuits and eats with her mouth open; I wish she would keep the biscuit mush private.

  “So when do we stop digging?” she asks, biscuit particles firing from her mouth.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  We eat in silence because Penelope is out of puff and I have nothing to say. When I’ve finished my milk, I take Penelope’s mug from her hands and stand up.

  “Up and at ’em, rise and shine,” I say, and I clap my hands because this is how armies and boarding-school children are put into action.

  Penelope climbs to her feet in a low grumble. She has clay streaks on her face, under her fingernails, on the back of her skirt. I look into the hole.

  “If we keep digging until the hole is my height, I can be buried here standing up, with the grass lid pulled over my head like a stopper.”

  “I’m not sure that’s allowed, Vivian. I thought you’d already bought your plot in Glasnevin?”

  “Not yet, I’m considering my options.”

  We dig for a bit.

  “You could do it,” I say.

  “Do what?”

  “When I die, you could come over and drag me into the hole.”

  “How would I know when you were dead?”

  “I could ring you if I think I’m dying. You could walk me out to the hole and I’d die in there—but just in case I go suddenly, we should practise now.”

  I drop my shovel and lie down on the grass a good distance from the hole.

  “Okay, pretend I’m dead and you drag me to the hole.”

  Penelope lays down her shovel and runs over to me. Even though it’s a straight line, she runs zigzagged like someone in a film trying to avoid getting shot. I close my eyes and feel a sudden wrench to my armpits, I had expected a more dignified death-pull.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m dragging you by the oxters. Jesus Vivian, you’d want to lay off the cakes, you’re a ton weight.”

  I dig my bottom and elbows into the ground to add more tonnage. Penelope tugs and heaves and grunts. She doesn’t get very far, even when I raise myself as much as possible off the ground.

  “This isn’t working,” I say. “You’ll need to devise some kind of system using pulleys and ropes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll be dead.”

  Penelope’s face is blotched pink and white like a mutant Friesian cow, and she’s panting so hard I fear she’ll be the first to die. I get up off the ground.

  “Okay, back to the digging.”

  I dig until my legs and arms stiffen up and feel like they belong to someone else. Penelope’s grunts have arpeggioed into moans of rage and horror, as if she has reached an outer circle of Hell. I tell her to stop digging and I climb into the hole, which is only thigh-deep but fairly wide. I kneel down and duck my head.

  “Can you put the lid on?”

  She slides the grassy top over my head, and a darkness consumes me, a dense darkness that smells more alively damp than any daylight I have known. A muffled voice barges through the hole like the click-stop of a CD player at a funeral ripping me out of the music and spoiling the magic. The lid slides off and Penelope looks down. Her skirt is bunched up, showing a strip of dark hairs down her shin that the razor forgot. A fierce, meaty bang from her sends my nose in the opposite direction. I climb out.

  “When I die, you’ve to come over before my body sets and put me in the hole.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  Her dug-up earth is mashed down, mine is formed into a tall peak. It looks mystical and full of mountain promise. Penelope has recovered her puff and lets out a gush of words, enough to fill ten bedpans, but this is no time for listening to outside sounds.

  “You have to go home now,” I say.

  Her face empties and sinks; it looks like a diary with only January filled in. She shrugs and nods her head.

  “I’ll get my things.”

  “You have to go because I’m going to visit my sister,” I say. “Thanks for your help, though.”

  Penelope’s face perks up.

  “You’re welcome, Vivian, and I’d be honoured to drag your body to the hole when the time comes.”

  “Thanks.”

  Now forms a silence clogged solid as old concrete, the kind of silence in which physical contact is made or serious words are spoken. I clap my hands three times to break the spell, and I move towards the hall. Penelope’s words have restarted. I open the door as loudly as I can and wave goodbye. She chatters on the doorstep and I say “yes yes oh indeed yes” and move the door slo
wly to a close, until I’m peeping through a narrow chink, and the word “goodbye” has been uttered. When I close the door, I lower myself into a squat against it and listen to the sound of peace and nothing. The house looks different at this level: The walls are higher and the doors are giants’ doors and I am a shrunken Alice in a not-so Wonderland.

  I crawl through the house to the kitchen and take the packets of mushrooms out of the fridge. I pierce the film and empty them into a glass bowl, because surely natural materials hold more magic than man-made ones. Then I bring the bowl outside and start planting the mushrooms in a ring around the unmashed mound of earth. I leave small gaps between each mushroom but when I start to run out, I space them further apart. I consider uprooting the ones I’ve planted close together but that might cancel out the fairy magic, so I try to ignore the lack of symmetry. The smells of earth and fungus are so damp and inviting that after my fort is planted, I climb back into the hole.