Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  “I’ll get your coat for you,” she says, snatching the number tag from my hands.

  “Wait,” I say (for I am brave with words now), “what does the number forty-two mean to you?”

  Her face looks pained.

  “Nothing, it’s just a number.”

  “I think the 4 looks very unstable, only one leg holding up a chair of a number. The 2’s leg is flattened so that it’s more balanced, but 2 keeps looking backwards and I fear it’s living in the past.”

  The girl is holding the gown and mirror with a strength so fierce that her knuckles are white, and there are white crescents on the tips of her fingernails like tiny onion slices.

  “Is there such a thing as an onion manicure?” I ask.

  She looks quickly to the reception area, her eyes bulging and pleading like a cow I saw on television that was about to be slaughtered. The phone rings and she breaks into a run and shouts “I’ll get it!” I don’t know where to be now: I’ve gotten up from the chair so it’s not my chair anymore; I can’t go to reception because I would be eavesdropping on the phone call. I stand in the middle of the salon looking at the floor, trying to avoid the mirrors. When the hairdresser ends the call and hangs up, I walk over to her, but she quickly disappears into a room behind reception. She comes out and pushes my coat into my hands and then goes back to the till.

  “That’ll be €45, please.”

  “Forty-five is even more unstable than forty-two, don’t you think?”

  “No, I mean yes.”

  She holds out her hand for the money.

  “The 4 might be doing a one-legged flamingo act, but at least it’s got one straight leg. Look at the 5—it’s balancing on a curve, the kind of curve that won’t straighten and could (if it wanted) keep curling around and topple the whole thing.”

  She stretches her arm out further for the money, and I hand it over.

  “Just one more thing,” I say. “Have you ever thought about what numbers would look like if we put them flat on their backs? It seems cruel to make them stand up straight all the time. Maybe when night falls, we should allow them to lie down.”

  The girl rummages in the till.

  “So here’s your €5 change, bye now—”

  Before I can respond, she has run into the cloakroom and shut the door.

  Wait, I want to say to her, if the coats go in the cloakroom, do the cloaks go in the coatroom? I look around, but the other hairdressers seem to be too engrossed in their work for such a topic, so I say a small quiet goodbye to the room and open the door. The building lets out a deep hot breath that whooshes me onto the street.

  I walk north from O’Connell Bridge and head down Moore Street, where the smell of ripe fruit mixes with the smell of curry and spices from the Asian and African shops. I pass a woman selling fruit.

  “Bananas there, ten for a eurrrrro!”

  The woman drags the “R” into the “O” as if the “R” is an older cousin being forced to play with the younger “O.” Her call is so strong and pure it’s as if generations of effort went into a single word. I repeat the way she says “eurrrro” in a mutter to myself, but it sounds like a misbegotten croak from my mouth. I need to develop an accent, I need to feel at ease with my syllables, but I haven’t used enough words aloud and I don’t know what kind of accent I’d like, or if I get to choose. If I could find the perfect combination of words in the right accent, a portal would surely open up. I walk over to the banana-lady’s stall.

  “I would like some fruit, please.”

  I put a vowel between the “F” and the “R” in fruit and another vowel between the “P” and the “L” in please so it comes out: “I would like some feroot, pihlease.”

  “What would you like, love?”

  “What would you recommen-ed?”

  She stares at me like I’m an unpicked scab.

  “I’ve got some lovely peaches and grapes.”

  “I’d like some gerapes, pihlease.”

  “Any peaches?”

  “No, I don’t like peaches, they’re like juicy velvet. Velehvet.”

  The words are taking too long to say. This won’t do as an accent. I hand over the money.

  “Where are you from, love, with an accent like that?”

  “I’m not quite sure—that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  She narrows her eyes and stares hard at me; her face is a crisscross of dents and clefts like a bashed-in car door. I say goodbye and walk down the street. The stalls sell flowers, fruit and vegetables or fish. They have striped awnings and two metal doors at the back, like portable kiosks. The fruit and vegetables are displayed on metal steps, as if they are singers in a chorus. In a fruit choir, the apples would have chubby rounded voices and the lemons would reach the high notes. The pears would do their best but they’d always be a little off key. The raspberries would twitter in squeaky voices, and the grapes would be impossible to train—they’d huddle in bunches and mock the choir mistress.

  The shops on this street are packed tight together like a large family. A large yellow sign above my head says “Lucky Four Bingo,” but surely there’d be no bingo if four always won. I pass the yellow-and-blue supermarket with uniformed staff outside smoking. When I reach Parnell Street I cross at the lights and walk up Dominick Street. Dominick Lane has been blue-ed out to read “DOM,” which I write in my notebook, humming the “Big Bad Dom” tune from the bleach ad on television when I was small. Two mannequins lean against the upstairs window of a disused warehouse near the top of the street, as if they’re taking a break from a naked aerobics class. Opposite the concrete Virgin Mary at Broadstone Station, I pass a petrol-puddle rainbow on the side of the road, a display of fairy firepower that shouldn’t be ignored. I bend down and sniff: it smells chemical and dreadful and gorgeous, like garden sheds and garages and uncooked cement. The rainbow has formed full circle, and the uncoloured inside is small so I step gently inside, perch on my tiptoes, close my eyes, and wish hard. It would help if I knew what I was wishing for. I open my eyes because I’m losing balance and now, oh no, I drop flat-footed into the rainbow and the colours re-swirl. I squeeze my eyes shut and wish hard, because a reforming rainbow must be one of the most magical things that can happen to tarmac. When I open my eyes, nothing has happened. I walk the rest of the way home and turn on the radio. The news is being read by a woman with a steady accent who spends a good measure of time on each syllable. I sit and repeat words after her: “tribunal,” “hearing,” “recession,” “high court ruling,” “shortage of hospital beds,” “suspended sentence,” “death by misadventure,” which makes me think of Huckleberry Finn’s raft overturning on the Mississippi. The words she uses are not words I use, so I change the dial. I pause between stations where there’s a bristle of static, the wordless gush of it settling something inside me. I trace my route onto greaseproof paper. Today I walked a Turkmenistan with a tail.

  19

  KIOSKS. KIOSKS. KIOSKS. Kiosks.” When I say the word over and over again it stops making sense as a word so I write it down on a piece of paper and put it in my pocket to make it real. When I was small, I used to watch a television programme about a man who wore forty coats with fifty pockets. He owned a flying sweet shop that was shaped like a kiosk, and I wanted, more than anything, to live in that sweet shop. If there is one thing I could do now, it would be to stand behind a counter and measure out sweets. I don’t like calculating sums of money, so it would be a charity sweet shop with sugary donations for the poor.

  I walk down the North Circular—I would like to call it the Norrier, but I don’t feel I have the right—to the Phoenix Park, and follow the path to the Tea Rooms in the kiosk. It’s white and octagonal with a red roof almost half the size of the building. If the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” had a holiday home in Dublin, this would be it. Inside, there seems to be a kiosk within a kiosk containing food items, with a hatch in front of the inner kiosk to order from. I ask for coffee and a slice of chocolate bi
scuit cake. A pair of swinging half-doors lead to the kitchen; I have an urge to hurl myself through them with my hands shaped into a gun, shouting, “Put your hands UP!,” but that might jeopardise my cake order. I bring my food to a table in the corner and bite into the cake but, oh no, they used ginger biscuits—how unwise to put such a divisive biscuit in a cake without warning. I pick at the chocolate parts surrounding the biscuit and think about kiosks, hatches, cubby holes, booths, pavilions, gazebos: cosy, odd-shaped structures halfway between a piece of furniture and a room. When I’ve finished my coffee, I walk out of the park to the bus stop. A snail trail loops and swirls across the path as if somebody took a silver-inked pen for a walk. I imagine a giant snail that could tuck the kiosk onto its back and carry it off, teapots, cups and all. At the bus stop, a middle-aged woman comes over. She’s holding a newspaper and mumbling to herself. She stares at me.

  “When’s the next bus?”

  I look at the electronic screen.

  “Three minutes.”

  “Why do they make newspapers like this?” she asks. “They’re impossible to fold.”

  “Maybe they’re allergic to staples,” I say, “but if you ironed it, it might fold better.”

  She looks at me suspiciously.

  “I’m not allowed to iron.”

  “Oh, I don’t iron my clothes either, you’re not missing much.”

  She shakes her head fiercely from side to side as if she’s trying to get rid of some especially tenacious lice.

  “How many minutes now?”

  “Two.”

  She puts her face closer to mine.

  “I’m having lunch with the president. Where can I buy new shoes?”

  “Henry Street has lots of shops,” I say.

  “Am I?”

  “Are you what?”

  “Am I having lunch with the president?”

  “You said you were.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I’m not sure how to fill the silence that follows until the electronic screen changes.

  “One minute now,” I say.

  “One minute of what?”

  “One minute of time until the bus comes.”

  “Am I getting the bus?”

  “I don’t know. I am.”

  “Oh.”

  The bus roars up the slope. When it stops, I put my arm around the woman and bundle her on. She stands beside the driver.

  “Where are you off to, love?” he asks.

  “I’m going to dinner with the president,” she says.

  “I thought you said it was lunch,” I say.

  “It’s dinner,” she says, glaring at me.

  The driver snorts.

  “I don’t care if you’re going to breakfast with the pope, where are you going to?”

  “I told you, I’m going to meet the president.”

  “The president lives in the park,” I say. “You have to go back that way.” I gently shove her out of the way and pay my fare.

  “Oh, right,” she says, and she shuffles off the bus with another shake of her head.

  The driver smiles at me.

  “Mad as a bag of cats, wha’?”

  “Completely loo-lah,” I say, and I twirl my finger around my temple.

  Then I say “Leeson Street, please,” in my most superior voice because for once I’m not the mad one, I’m the person who puts mad people on buses and pushes them off again. I look down the bus. I’m the first person on and it feels like my bus; I have the pick of the seats. I sit in the front seat, but I might have to make way for old people, so I get up and sit in the double seats at the back, but someone opposite me could ask me for the time and I don’t have a watch, so I move to the second seat from the back. I am the Goldilocks of Dublin Bus with my just-right seat. When we reach Leeson Street, I push the bell and walk the length of the bus without clutching the yellow poles because they’re usually sticky. A gang of guerrilla passengers with glue on their hands must get on every bus in Dublin and spread the glue from pole to pole.

  I look at the driver in the mirror.

  “She was really for the birds, wasn’t she?”

  The driver looks at me in the mirror.

  “What?”

  I repeat my sentence. I wonder if the driver notices that I used a phrase involving birds after he used one involving cats. He turns his gaze back to the road and says, “Yeah,” but he has cut the word as short as it will go, his throat wrapped tight around it. The bus stops and the doors open.

  “Thanks, bye now,” I say, “see you again.”

  I give him more words than I usually give drivers, because I was the first one on and it really was my bus.

  I cross Leeson Street to the red-brick kiosk on an island in the middle of the road. It’s a rectangular shape, with the occasional bulge and jut and a large circular window almost the size of the front wall, like a see-through door to a hobbit hole. A red-and-white striped awning hangs over the window, but awning is such an ugly gape of a word, I’ll call it a “pluice.” If I tried to enter “pluice” in the dictionary, I’d have a fight on my hands to keep it from being spelled “ploose,” but I am up to the task. I walk around the building. It used to be a public toilet, so I give a few great sniffs, but no smell remains. Inside is wooden, with snacks and fruit for sale. I get coffee, and bring it to a silver table outside. When I look around, the streets come at me at odd angles: everything seems at a slant, there is no symmetry, no order, no system. A blue clock at the top of a large, ivy-covered house tells the wrong time. I need to be in symmetry, so I get up and cross over to the canal. The canal flows in a straight line, and a duck leads two ducklings in a neat triangle; all’s straight in the world. I walk towards the statue of the poet on a bench—he looks so calm and serious compared to the poet at the other canal. The long grasses on the canal bank rustle in the wind; if they’re not grasses but wheat or oats, then I’m witnessing the prequel to bread or porridge. I turn onto Northumberland Road and look at the brass plaques outside gates, which wouldn’t be so grand if they were brass placks. And “plack” would suit the ugly tooth-coating better. I pass by embassies in quiet buildings that look as if they’re locked into a deep sleep. They should keep in mind that the hero from an action movie could blast in at any moment.

  At the junction with Lansdowne Road, I see my next kiosk. It’s a neat hexagon, decked out in shades of brown and cream like a chocolate bar. I circle the building but the shutters are down, and a notice tells its “Dear Valued Customers” when it will reopen. If I bought coffee here every day, I might have value, but I would never be worth as much as the kiosk, which I heard is on the most expensive piece of land in Ireland. I don’t know how land value is decided—I’m imagining gold ingots or silver bullion buried beneath. I’d like to live in this kiosk because it looks the cosiest, but I’d rather carry it off somewhere first because these roads are too busy and the big grey building nearby looks unhappy. To find out if my bed would fit in the kiosk, I lie flat on my back and stretch my body along the length of one side. It’s difficult to see if my feet are within the line of the kiosk. A man in a suit walks by.

  “Excuse me,” I say, loudly, because he’s wearing earphones.

  He pulls out one earphone and looks at me a little anxiously. “Are you alright?”

  “Yes, thanks. Could you tell me if my feet are sticking out?”

  He stares at my feet.

  “Well, they’re sticking out at the ends of your legs.”

  “I mean, are they sticking out beyond the kiosk.”

  He looks at the kiosk and then at my feet.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Have you got any chalk?”

  “Sorry?”

  “If you had some chalk you could draw a line from the edge of my feet to the edge of the kiosk, and then I’d know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Know if I could fit inside lying down.”

  His face puckers and he brings the earphones up to his ears again.


  “Thanks for your help,” I say quickly, because it’s okay if I end the conversation first. He nods and walks off. I sit up, keeping my legs stretched out, and open my bag. I take some copper coins out of my purse and start throwing them gently, until one lands just where my heel ends. This is my marker: I crawl forward to the coins but, oh no, there are lots lying around, and I don’t know which was the deciding one. The copper pattern the coins have made looks like a trail from a snail with digestive problems.

  “Is everything alright there?”

  I look up at the sudden thud of a voice; a guard is standing over me.

  “I’m fine, I’m just looking for my money.”

  I gather up the coins, trying to remember their pattern to map them later.

  “Would you mind telling me what you’re up to?”

  He speaks in italics, all slant and emphasis. I climb up off my knees with a creck crick crack and look at him. He wants nice tidy reasons for concrete problems that are solvable in this world.

  “I was playing,” I say.

  “Right, well next time, play in your own home.”

  “But there’s no kiosk at home,” I say. “If only there was a flat-pack kiosk I could buy and set up in the garden.”

  The guard’s face is set hard, so I say, “Thank you, officer,” and scuttle off. I wish people would ask the right questions; everybody wants to know if I’m alright, nobody wants to know how to sleep in a kiosk.

  I walk back into town. Stephen’s Place has been blue-ed out to read “_ _ _ PHEN’S PLA_E.” I write it down in my notebook, relieved that the Smurfs left in the apostrophe. Apostrophe. I repeat it aloud: “apostrophe, apostrophe, apostrophe.”

  It could replace “achoo” as a sneeze-word, if the sneeze has more than two syllables—but who would I write to suggest such a thing? I walk to the gazebo by the duck pond in St. Stephen’s Green. It’s open on all sides, the kind of place a singing couple would haunt, not cosy and enclosed enough to count as a kiosk. I leave the green and walk down Dawson Street to my final kiosk of the day: a telephone kiosk with one green side and three cream-coloured sides. The roof is turret-shaped, with a knob on top like a lid that you could pull off. I step inside with my eyes closed, and when I open them, I’m facing a battered blue phone. The smell of piss burns my eyes. I close the door behind me and pick up the receiver.