Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  “Hello!”

  I lift my head. Mary’s head is peeking over the garden wall.

  “Vivian, what in the name of God are you at?”

  “I dug my grave and now I’ve planted a fairy fort,” I say.

  “Ah, Jaysus, Vivian, you need to get a hold of yourself.”

  This sounds like something I could try, and I wrap my arms tightly around myself.

  “What are you at now?” she asks.

  “I’m trying to get a hold of myself but I can’t reach all the way around.”

  “Ah, Vivian.”

  She shakes her head slowly. I feel New Year’s Eve kind of lonely, the kind of lonely that throbs and grinds, until I remember Penelope.

  “My friend dug it with me,” I say, “it was fun.”

  “That’s good. I haven’t seen your sister about recently…” Her voice trails into an ellipsis and, although there’s no question mark, she seems to expect a response. Well, two can play the punctuation game.

  “She’s very busy,” I say, “she has lots of children…”

  “Two, isn’t it?”

  “Two what?”

  “Two children; I thought your sister had two children?”

  “Yes, but they seem like a lot when they’re together.”

  “Ah.”

  She smiles. Lines around her eyes form like wings when she smiles, etched so deep they almost bleed. She gives a half-wave.

  “I’ll let you get back to it, then.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  Her head disappears. I climb out of the hole and go into the house. I look at Lemonfish; he might benefit from a change of scenery. I bring his bowl outside and empty the contents into the hole. The water level drops so I refill the bowl a few times and empty it in. Lemonfish bobs about near the surface—I haven’t seen him move so much in weeks. I say goodnight to him and go inside to eat cheese: tonight I hope to dream of the little people who will come out of my fairy fort. I picture them pulling themselves out of the earth wearing the mushrooms for hats and coming into my bedroom to lead me away. The more cheese I eat, the more little people I conjure up, so I chew as fast as I can before my brain catches up with my stomach and tells me to stop eating. When I’ve eaten my fill and beyond, I pour a gulp of whiskey into a saucer. I would like the fairies to get sufficiently tipsy that they’re happy to come fetch me, but not so stewed that they get angry and shouty, even if a fairy shout is quieter than a human whisper.

  18

  I LIE IN bed awhile trying to figure out why I’m excited, and then I remember: my appointment with the hairdresser is scheduled for mid-morning. I have never been to a hairdresser before; my great-aunt used to cut my hair when it got ragged. I need to look my best, so I put on my great-aunt’s tweed suit and frilly white blouse, and go downstairs and out the back garden to check how Lemonfish got through the night in his new home. When I reach the hole, I look in. The water has vanished, oh no, and Lemonfish is lying motionless on the dry soil with one eye staring up at me.

  “Lemonfish, no!”

  I lower myself into the hole and squat down and blow at him, but this doesn’t seem to be the best way to perform mouth-to-gill resuscitation. I climb out and run to the kitchen for a jug of water, which I pour into the hole. The bottom fills with water and he rises—Lemonfish Lazarus I’ll call him if he survives—but when the water settles, he floats still and glassy-eyed on the surface, not moving a fin. Suddenly my breakfast of cornflakes no longer seems appetising. Lemonfish ruled a kingdom no bigger than a fruit bowl, but he deserves to be treated like an ancient Egyptian king and buried with his treasures. I go inside and take his carton of food from the kitchen counter, along with some chocolate coins and a lemon from the fridge, to remind him of his first friends in this house. Then I go into the hoardroom and pick out a notebook with an ocean scene on the cover (I make sure there are no sharks because I think that would scare him), and some marbles. I bring the afterworld treasures out to the garden and arrange them in the hole around the deceased. Then I run back inside for his bowl and place it upside down around him so he’s on show in a glass case, like a famous saint or a dictator. I get the shovel from the shed and scoop some of the soil from Penelope’s mound and scatter it over the bowl. I shape it into a pyramid fit for an Egyptian king. I try to think of what is said at burials on television, and I say in my most solemn voice:

  “Scales to ashes, fins to dust.”

  Now I feel ripe for a poem so I finish with, “Your death is untimely, it’s so unjust.”

  I balance one foot on the lip of the shovel and clasp the handle with both hands and bow my head. This feels sombre and fitting, like a scene I once saw in a painting.

  I brush the soil from my hands, leave the house and walk through Blessington Basin. The pigeons are out in force, a kind of feathery force that could inflict real damage if they acted as one. They gather around the sign saying “Please Don’t Feed the Pigeons” and produce a communal guttural “coo” that sounds like an impassioned protest about workers’ rights. I loop to the left around the basin. Two men are sitting on a bench and two are standing facing them, hunched into each other. Their voices seem strained, pained, pushed from the depths of their bellies, as if the effort of making sounds was just too much; the pigeons have more vocal force. The man supping from a gold and blue can steps into my path.

  “Excuse me, love, have you got any spare change?”

  The “U” in “Excuuuuse me” takes up a sentence of its own.

  “No, sorry.”

  I use the same two words when I’m asked if I have a light, a smoke, or money for a cup of tea. I walk down O’Connell Street and pass Prosperity Chambers, which makes me think about money, so I go into a newsagent to buy a scratch card, and walk back to scratch it under the word “prosperity.” I fail to prosper. I walk on past Hammam Buildings, which has two large wooden doors that should be swept back by two butlers with elegant bows. I walk up to the doors but no butlers appear. If only they would add another “mah” at the end to make it “Hammammah,” and spell it in capitals, “HAMMAMMAH.” It could be a palindrome of a curse, a symmetrical curse against a mother.

  I cross O’Connell Street at the Spire and walk up Henry Street. It’s early, so the delivery vans have control of the street. Men jump in and out of vans and wheel boxes of goods through doors that I don’t notice when the street is thick with shoppers. The street thrums with the engines of delivery vans and trucks, the roll and thunk and click of van doors, the beeps of reversing trucks, the squeaks of trolley wheels. I walk up Mary Street to the traffic lights, but crossing at the lights seems too fierce a jolt after the shock I had this morning, so I go into the shopping centre that used to be a hospital. It’s supposed to be haunted, but I don’t believe it because the clock above the entrance tells the right time; if I was a ghost, tampering with the clock would be the first item on my mischief list. I cut through the shopping centre to the supermarket that leads to Liffey Street, holding my nose so that I’m not tempted by the sweet buttery smell from its bakery. A lady in a hairnet and white coat is giving out free egg cups of fruit juice. I take one and she turns her smooth-tipped words on me about the health benefits of the juice. I nod—“yes, that sounds healthy alright”—and take a carton of juice. I walk to the next aisle and stuff it behind some crisps, then I leave the shop and wander around the small paved park behind the shopping centre. Old headstones line one wall, from the pub that used to be a church. I love buildings that used to be something else and that look more like the thing they used to be than the thing they are now. In the middle of the park, a bronze cow looks contented even though there is no grass to chew. I walk back through Liffey Street. The street sign for The Lotts has been completely blue-ed out. I step onto The Lotts and close my eyes but nothing happens, even though I’m off-map, on a street that doesn’t exist, as close to another world as I can be. I walk on. The sign for Hotel Yard, another lane off Liffey Street, hasn’t been greened-out, because the leprec
hauns prioritise sleeping over making their mark. I walk down Hotel Yard. I can’t find a hotel or a yard, only a pair of women’s underwear. Proby’s Lane, further along Liffey Street, has been blue-ed out to read “PLAN.” I write “PLAN” on the inside cover of my notebook next to “Dreadnaught”; it seems like a word to live by.

  I go into the huge mostly-clothes shop halfway down Henry Street. It’s so big it never feels crowded, it’s so bright it almost feels gloomy. If I stand at the Henry Street entrance, I can see a whole building’s length through to the Ilac Centre behind. I come here when I need to know there are piles of umbrellas and shoes and candles and pillows and bread and meat to be had. I like to imagine being locked in here overnight. I’d start by running laps of the place—it looks like a football pitch worth of space—then I’d raid the supermarket downstairs. I’d cram cake and sweets and crisps into my mouth, then I’d take the halted escalator upstairs. I would take heaps of women’s clothes, men’s clothes, large children’s clothes to the changing rooms and try them all on together. I’d run in and out of each changing room and then up to the homewares department, where I would set up a bed with piles of pillows and cushions and blankets. By now, I’d have worked up a second appetite, and I would raid the café on the top floor. I’d bring a bale of towels to the toilets and wash my face and dry each part of my face with a different towel: a pink towel for my nose, yellow for my eyes, green for my cheeks and, of course, a purple towel for my forehead. I would go to the ladies’ and piss a dribble in each toilet and flush them all mightily. Then I’d turn on all the taps and the hand driers and blow my nose hugely with toilet paper from every stall. I’d light lots of candles and settle into bed, leaving the candles burning all night around the bed like Sleeping Beauty’s byre (I would find out what a byre is first) and fall into a deep deep sleep. I don’t know what would happen the next morning; this is where my imaginings end.

  I leave through the shopping centre and walk to the hair salon. I was picturing a cowboy saloon with swinging wooden doors and sawdust floors and spitting and fighting, but this salon has a tiled floor and girls dressed in black with lots of big shiny hair.

  “I’m Vivian, I ordered a haircut.”

  “Hi, Vivian, I’ll just take your jacket.”

  One of the girls gives me a laminated card with the number forty-two on it. We seem to be having a raffle.

  “Is the prize a bottle of shampoo?” I ask.

  The girl looks at the other girls and gives a half-snort.

  “No, that’s for your coat.”

  “Oh.”

  I look at the card. Two twenty-ones are forty-two, but three fourteens is even better, and seven sixes is best of all.

  “You can follow me, Vivian.”

  I walk behind the girl into a long room with mirrors on either side. It smells hot and clean, the hairdryers are hoover-loud, and there are small piles of hair on the floor. I press my eyes onto the back of the hairdresser until she comes to a stop and points me to a chair. I sit down, and she pushes a lever with her foot “squeak squeak,” I feel like I’m being milked or inflated but it’s only the chair rising upwards. The mirror in front of me takes up my whole front vision—this seems to be the way I talk to the hairdresser. I stare at my knees until a voice says,

  “Just lean forward there and we’ll get this on you.”

  I look up to a black cloak enclosing me. I could be a witch or a melancholic wizard or a puffed-up professor in this cloak, I could deliver pronouncements or cast spells or make impassioned speeches. A different hairdresser puts a batch of magazines on the ledge in front of me.

  “Would you like tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee, please, with lots of milk foam.”

  I’m being tended to by a team of black-clad angels, and I don’t know where to look because hands are coming at me from all angles and different voices are saying my name. A girl brings coffee, and, finally, the girl who took my coat sits in the chair beside me. It’s a relief to be at eye level with someone.

  “So what can we do for you today?”

  “You’ve already given me coffee and magazines and a cloak,” I say, “it almost seems rude to ask for a haircut.”

  She gives another half-snort, closer to a whinny this time. “Are you looking for a trim or something totally different?”

  “What would be totally different?”

  “Well, you could go for a choppy bob or a slanted fringe or a…”

  She seems excited by the thought of breaking my hair into pieces, but my neck already feels cold at the thought.

  “I just want a trim,” I say.

  “Okay, how many inches will we take off?”

  “One, please.”

  “Okay. And will we colour your hair today too, cover those greys?”

  “There are greys?”

  “Yeah, the grey hair coming through, did you not notice?”

  I’m so surprised I almost look at myself in the mirror but I avert my eyes just in time.

  “Like badger stripes or zebra stripes?”

  “Have you not seen it in the mirror?”

  Her voice is a long dose of surprise.

  “I don’t like mirrors.”

  “We could do a semi-permanent colour at the roots to hide the greys, something that will blend in with your natural colour.”

  “I don’t want to be coloured in, I need to stay the same colour I started out.”

  “Okay, let’s get your hair washed first.”

  “You’re washing it?”

  My hair hasn’t been washed in a long while, it feels like a sticky paste at the top of my head with straggles coming out.

  “It’s a wash, cut, and blow-dry—it’s included in the price.”

  I look over to the basins where a woman is sitting with her head leaning back. Her head is being hosed, and her neck looks long and exposed and vulnerable—if a knife-killer came in this minute, he’d go straight for her neck.

  “I don’t want to get hosed, can you cut my hair when it’s dry? Please?”

  “Alright.”

  She stands up and starts scissoring my hair, a miniature sword fight around my head squang squang squang. I squeeze my eyes shut in case the scissor-swords pierce my eyeball.

  “Up to anything special tonight?” she asks.

  “No, I buried a loved one this morning.”

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry, were you close?”

  “Yes, he lived with me, but I could never tell what he was thinking.”

  “Yeah, they’re all like that,” she says, throwing her eyes to the ceiling. “Was it a nice funeral?”

  “It was. I recited a poem and buried him with his favourite things.”

  “Ah, that’s lovely, what did you bury him with?”

  “His food and his bowl.”

  “Oh. No football jersey or anything?”

  “No, I don’t think he liked football, he didn’t seem to care if it came on TV.”

  “Ah, it’s terrible all the same. No kids?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t have kids together?”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay, I’m more upset that he’s dead.”

  “Oh God, yeah, of course. What did he die of, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “He had a fungal growth. And he was falling apart, he kept losing bits of himself.”

  “Jaysus, that sounds serious,” she says, removing her hands from my head and wiping them on her skirt. “Are you not afraid it’s contagious?”

  “No, I never usually touched him, but sometimes he nibbled my fingers when I fed him.”

  “Oh.”

  Now there’s a silence, a happy silence for me because I’ve had a to-and-a-fro of a conversation like I haven’t had in a long time, but there’s a tense quality to her silence that I hope the scissors don’t catch. When she has finished snipping, a different hairdresser comes over to wipe the hairs of
f my cloak.

  “Are you off out anywhere tonight?”

  “I might go out the garden and check on my fairy fort.”

  “Oh.”

  Her “oh” sounds like she wants the conversation to end, but I’ve had such a successful conversation with the other girl that I want to continue.

  “Isn’t hair great all the same?” I say. “Where would we be without it.”

  “Bald,” she says.

  I hadn’t expected an answer, I thought I was uttering one of those half-joke half-question sentences that produce laughs not responses.

  “What would you do if a bald man came in and asked for a haircut?” I ask.

  “He’s not going to come in, is he, if he has no hair.”

  “But what if he hadn’t looked in the mirror and didn’t realise he was bald?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Now the silence has teeth in it. I pick the dirt out of my fingernails.

  “Are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  She sounds like she really wants me to go somewhere and I’ve disappointed her.

  “Oh, I forgot,” I say, “I’m going to the Isle of Man. I’ve been learning Manx and I’m going to bring home a cat.”

  “That sounds nice. What’s the weather like there?”

  “Temperatures hit close to fifty, I hear.”

  The highest temperature I’ve seen is thirty degrees, but when I lie, I like to lie big.

  “Oh.”

  Her voice is doubtful, but she ends the holiday conversation and holds a mirror behind my head.

  “Now, what do you think?”

  I raise my head and focus my eyes to the right of my reflection—seeing part of my behind-head is alright. It’s lank and striped with frizzy white hairs and looks like the head of a stranger.

  “It’s lovely,” I say, “just what I wanted.”

  “Good, good,” she says, and she’s already undoing the Velcro of the cloak at the back of my neck with a rip. Her head has moved beyond me and my holiday to the next cuttee.