Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  22

  I LOOK OUT my bedroom window and see a girl’s hair sweeping into a capital “L,” so I know that it’s windy. The longer I stare out the window, the more of my nose I see from the corners of my eyes. It’s going to be one of those days when I can’t ignore the view of my nose, a constant triangle in my vision. Today I’m going to write a letter to somebody in a foreign country and send it in an airmail envelope. I like airmail envelopes: the blue and red diamonds around the edges, the words “Par Avion”—which sound like a cure for a common skin complaint if you push them together or an upmarket brand of water if you don’t—and the thin paper that looks as if it wouldn’t last a local journey, never mind an international one. I don’t know how to find an international address when the phone directory only covers the Dublin area, and it’s hard to write to someone when I don’t know who they are or what they want to read about. I go to the post office to buy some envelopes. I choose some large brown ones for unfolded letters, thick magnolia ones for official-looking typed letters, ordinary white ones for ordinary letters, and airmail envelopes for letters abroad. I need to buy stamps too, but I will get more sentences out of more people if I go to a different post office for those.

  When I get home, I go into the hoardroom and take the most recent telephone directory from the pile. I open it and crumbs of paper fall to the ground; the edges of the pages are jagged and frayed and bitten away. I take an unlined writing pad from the stationery pile, which hasn’t been eaten. The mice must prefer the taste of printed words. I bring the mouse-bitten directory and the unmouse-bitten writing pad downstairs and put them on the desk. I sit down and rub my hands together, then I clear my throat and say aloud: “Right, then, better get started.”

  I take a black biro from the jar on the desk.

  “No rest for the wicked,” I say, and I point my pen at the blank page. The plastic biro seems feckless and not up to my task, so I take a gel pen from the jar and write “Dear” in the top left corner. This pen has giddy ink; it produces rounded vowels and words that bounce, but it doesn’t look serious enough, so I pick up my great-aunt’s gold-nibbed fountain pen and write over the “Dear.” The ink is so thick and silky, the words will surely flow from my fingers. Now I open the telephone directory on the page with the most tooth marks: MacGillycuddy. One of the names is Ignatius, and I write “Ignatius” after “Dear,” and then I think for a bit and write in large curly script: “If you eat ham sandwiches five days out of seven, you are more pig than human.”

  I read back over the sentence and it looks a bit accusatory so I add in “possibly”: “If you eat ham sandwiches five days out of seven, you are possibly more pig than human.”

  “Possibly more pig” sounds like a tongue twister, so I paint a white line of correction fluid over “possibly.” I lean down to blow on it and I breathe in the smell, which is like a painful sneeze. When it’s dry, I write “maybe” on the rough patch: “If you eat ham sandwiches five days out of seven, you are maybe more pig than human.”

  My sentence takes up most of the page, but it still seems unfinished, so I draw a pig’s head and write “Oink” at the bottom.

  I choose a white envelope and write Ignatius’s address on the front, tear the letter from the pad, fold it, and put it in the envelope. Then I close the phone directory and open it on Clarke. Maura Clarke sounds like somebody I’d like to meet; she would cook hearty soups and lamb stews and keep the chat going as she was preparing the food. On a fresh sheet of paper I write “Dear Maura,” and I suck the metal top of the pen. I add: “Be careful what you put down the sink—it might come back to sink you.”

  I imagine heaps of tea leaves, globs of unused butter, lumps of meat and the odd pea, forming a mush and oozing up the sink through the plughole in vengeful mood. This letter also looks unfinished, so I draw a picture of a tap that looks more like a star with one fat leg. I take a magnolia envelope from the pile, and write Maura’s address on it. I put a thick book from the shelf under the pile of letters so it looks as if I have even more letters written. Now I take a fresh piece of notepaper for my letter abroad. Instead of trying to find a foreign address to write to, I decide to put my letter in a bottle. That will save the price of a stamp and reach whoever should be reached. I go to my notebook and look for my List of Nice-Sounding Places That No Longer Exist: “Timbuktu, Peking, Ceylon, Persia, Byzantium, Abyssinia, Rhodesia, Bombay, Saigon, Bohemia, Mesopotamia, Siam, Numidia.”

  The names have been replaced by new names that sound duller and flatter; I would like to reintroduce the old names, but I don’t know who to ask or how to begin. I look at the seas and oceans on the map of the world on the wall. I will aim my bottle for the Great Australian Bight because I’ve never heard of a Bight, and it sounds like a word I should have been using but have neglected until now. I write: “Ursula, Great Australian Bight” on the front of an airmail envelope because I’d like a friend with the same symmetrical vowel to consonant ratios as Penelope. Then I write my address in the top right corner, followed by:

  Dear Ursula,

  How is life on the Bight? I would like an Australian pen pal. I watch Home and Away and Neighbours sometimes (with the sound down) so I know what Australia looks like but not how it sounds. Maybe you could come and visit sometime.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Vivian.

  I fold the letter and put it in the airmail envelope and seal it, though this really should be a watermail envelope if it’s travelling by sea. Then I go to the kitchen and open the drinks cupboard. I take out a bottle of cola and pour what’s left of it into three mugs. I rinse out the bottle and shake it, bring it to the bedroom, and dry it with the hairdryer. I bring the bottle back downstairs, roll the airmail envelope up like a sausage roll, tie it at either end with twine, and squeeze it through the bottle opening. It doesn’t look like much; it could be ignored or discarded as rubbish, so I stick a blank white label over the red label and write “MESSAGE” in permanent marker. I put the bottle in my bag with the other letters, and take from a teacup on the bookshelf all the copper coins that my great-aunt had been collecting since the euro was introduced. Then I put on my coat, leave the house and walk into town. With all this communication potential in my bag I feel like I’m carrying a bucket of radar. I pass charity collectors, and a group of religious people with a microphone outside the GPO. Inside, it reminds me of an echoey Soviet building from a spy novel, with its railings and queues and grey-brown efficiency. In the middle of the floor stands a kiosk-shaped wooden counter, with silver shields on some of the panels that make it look like a solid wooden crown. Black and white triangles on the floor radiate from the counter, I wonder if the people addressing envelopes and licking stamps know that they’re standing in the middle of a zebra sun. I walk to the counter.

  “Two stamps, please,” I say.

  “Irish or international?”

  “Irish. I’m sending my international letter by bottle.”

  “By what?”

  “By bottle, look.”

  I take the cola bottle from my bag and show it to the man.

  He leans closer and laughs.

  “Ah, here, Cathal, would you look at this.”

  Cathal leans over from the next counter.

  “She’s sending this by bottle instead of airmail.”

  Cathal grins and looks at me.

  “Where’s it going to?”

  “The Great Australian Bight,” I say.

  I don’t want them to think I don’t trust their postal system, so I add, “It’s cheaper than buying a stamp.”

  They both roar laughing, like I’ve said the funniest thing.

  Maybe I am full of comedy and just don’t know it.

  “Recession postage,” Cathal says, and goes back to his counter. I pay for the Irish stamps in small copper coins and say bye to the man.

  “Good luck with the bottle,” he says.

  I leave the post office, cross O’Connell Street and walk down Sackville Lane. Taxi
s line one side of the street, and there’s a smell of piss from the other. A group of men and women sit on the steps of a shop drinking cans. One of them is singing. I like daytime drunk people because they sing; maybe they only shout at night-time. One of the women steps in front of me.

  “Have you got forty cents for a hostel, love?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “What about forty cents for alcohol?”

  “No.”

  Her friend shouts: “An alcoholic without alcohol is like a bird without feathers!” and they all laugh.

  The first woman’s face looks bald, and I feel sad for this featherless bird, but I can’t spend my bus fare on hostels or alcohol. I cross Marlborough Street, turn left onto Abbey Street and join the queue for the bus that will take me to the nearest seashore on the northside of the city. When the bus comes, I get on.

  “The seaside, please,” I say.

  “Whereabouts?”

  Oh no, I have worn out my words for the day but this man wants more.

  “The wooden bridge.”

  He says the price and I count out the fare in small coins. The driver tuts and sighs.

  “Robbing the piggy bank, were you?”

  “No piggy bank,” I say, “just a teacup.”

  I cram the money into the machine as fast as I can and take my ticket. I sit upstairs and watch the sea begin. It’s a grey squally day: the waves are bouncing over the wall, the seafront is empty but for a few people walking dogs. When the wooden bridge appears I ring the bell, twist myself down the stairs and get off the bus. I cross at the lights and walk down the bridge to the beach. I remember my father teaching me to swim here when I was small. I remember a hand on my back and a pushing and a shoving. I remember lungs of burning saltwater and stinging eyes and pain-cold skin. I remember staying home when they went to the seaside after that.

  The tide is in, the waves full of gush and thud. I walk down the jut of land to the statue of the Holy Mary on stilts. Beyond her, a line of rocks stretches further out to sea. I climb down to the rocks and, when I reach the last dry rock, I fling the bottle with all I’ve got. It feels like my arm was ripped from the shoulder and flung to sea as well. The bottle bobs about on the wave-foam, uncertain which way to go. The surface of the sea is covered in shreds of dirty-beige foam. Mermaids who die in The Little Mermaid turn into foam; this must be a mermaid massacre. I climb down the rocks onto the strand and do little giddy jumps thinking of where my bottle will end up and how it will be received. A car is driving in squealing circles on the narrow patch of dry sand: two perfect circles connected in the middle like the number eight. This might be two fairy forts with the magic concentrated at the point where the circles meet. I walk to the dunes to wait for the car to leave. The dunes fling sand into my eyes, the long grass cuts my hands, the wind whistles through an empty glass bottle like a banshee with no heed for my ears; this is a stinging place. There are pieces of brown and green glass that I can’t call shards because they’re rubbed soft by the sea, and “shards” sounds sharp and mean. These pieces are scratched and cloudy and hold secrets of long sea voyages.

  When the car drives off, I climb down from the dunes and make for the circles. They look perfect from afar, but up close, clumps of loose sand have sputtered out of the lines. I jump inside one circle, landing with both feet together. Nothing happens. I jump to the next one. Nothing. Then I jump for the meeting point that connects the two circles and stand still with my eyes closed. Nothing has changed in my ears, and I open my eyes slowly. I check my arms for wings and my horizon for height differences, but there’s no change, apart from a small pair of feet near the circles, followed by a larger pair of feet. It’s a little girl holding a plastic bucket and spade, with her mother. The girl stares at the circles.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “I’m playing hopscotch,” I say.

  “Hopscotch is squares, they’re circles.”

  She points at the circles with her spade.

  “I don’t like sharp edges, and corners can be so mean.”

  “Oh.”

  The girl understands my answers better than any adult. Her mother isn’t quite so interested. The girl drops her bucket and starts to draw another circle in the sand with the corner of her spade.

  “Stop!” I shout.

  The mother jumps.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s spoiling the magic.”

  “She just wants to play.”

  I don’t want to play this game with a child who has ruined any chance of a portal opening up, I don’t want to fake fun with a small person who has more chance of fitting through a portal than I have.

  “Let’s play hide-and-seek,” I say.

  “Yay!”

  The girl drops the spade and claps her hands.

  “You two count to twenty-five, now close your eyes.”

  They cover their eyes with their hands and start to count aloud. I run as fast as I can in the direction of the wooden bridge and I don’t stop until I’m certain I’ve shaken them off. Then I walk back towards land. The houses facing the seafront look like Noddy’s Toytown from this angle, all differently coloured and shaped and higgledy-piggledy. If I could connect all the lines where the tops of the houses meet, I might find a pattern and solve the world with it. As I walk over the bridge, I stop to watch the waves flinging themselves at the wooden posts beneath. What if the sea just stopped—what if the sea-motor under the sand stopped turning and the waves got tired of thrashing around? My bottle would have no chance of reaching Australia then. I erase that thought from my head by rubbing my forehead from left to right and from right to left, from up to down and from down to up. A girl passes me, swinging her arms and moving quickly. She’s wearing an expression of pure fury on her face and a pastel-coloured tracksuit. There’s something wrong with buying special clothes to walk in, instead of walking in old clothes that you already have: something wrong that I can’t explain, like buying seashells instead of finding them on the shore.

  When I reach the main road, I walk along the seafront to the disused baths. On one side of the baths the tide has washed in a faded pink armchair, a rusty cooker, an orange traffic cone stripped of its reflective band and three yellow-green tennis balls. While one of the mermaids cooks a meal, a second sits on the armchair juggling tennis balls and a third plays mer-guard, and puts the cone in the middle of the road to stop traffic for a caper. I follow the path around to the front of the baths. A rusted gate that used to be blue is padlocked, and the railings are overgrown with shrubs that smell damp and cloying and are preparing to take over the concrete. I feel as if I’m beginning to rust so I walk back to the road where cars are moving forwards not backwards and catch a bus into town. Then I take another bus home and come in the front door feeling like I’ve been declared a champion of something, some obscure sport that nobody has heard of. I map my walk but it’s unsatisfactory—pieced together from chunks of walks between bus rides. I walked a length of twine with a small hook on either end, the side profile of an old-fashioned cash register, and one half of a cursive capital “T.”

  I MAKE A white-bread-and-butter sandwich, and pour some milk into a white mug. I put it all on a black tray and add a bar of chocolate to break up the monochrome. Then I bring my lunch into the living room and sit on a brown soft chair that smells of seeping body. When I pull a green rug over my knees, I might be in a particularly soft tree. During the chocolate course, I realise chocolate and milk are a good combination and wonder why quenching chocolate thirst with water feels thin and metallic and terrible. When I’ve finished eating, I look through the bookshelves and take down a couple of books. One has a red-and-white special-offer sticker on the cover. I fear the discounted books might be taunted by their full-price peers, so I take out the metal stepladder from under the stairs, open it against the bookshelves, and climb up. I lift out each book and peel off any labels I find, adding them to a small sticky ball. There are books about birds, flowers
, the Arctic, the Antarctic, Africa, the Americas (my great-aunt stopped learning about continents after “A”), trains, medicine, war and make-believe things. My favourites are the make-believe books; I like to get lost in worlds inside other characters’ heads, which is impossible if the writer slaps out hard cold facts that I can’t retain.

  A shelf at the top contains hardback books by famous people about how they overcame hardships to conquer their parts of the world: half-lies from gleaming smiles. I want to read the stories they left out: the childhoods with enough to eat, the friends in school not the bullying, the connections to power not the start-from-scratch. I decide to get rid of these books so I drop them on the floor in a heap of white teeth and red lips. I pull my sleeve down over my hand like I’m cold or about to punch someone and sweep the dust off the empty shelf with my sleeve. The full shelves frown at the empty one, the pursed-lip disapproval of my great-aunt seeps through the urn on the next shelf, the famous faces on the covers turn into my great-aunt’s face and the smiles twist into menacing grimaces. I pick up the books in clumps and stuff them back on the shelf; it was a bad idea to change anything, to get rid of anything owned by my great-aunt. I crawl in between the red chair and the cushion, and sniff the dust and feel the scratch of crumbs on my face. Although there is very little air, I feel like I can breathe for the first time today.