Eggshells

by Caitriona Lally

  We go inside. I bring the glass with the mirror to the sink and pour out the water. Then I pour in some wine, and we remake our rainbow. Nothing happens. Nothing happens when we close the curtains, nothing happens when we open the curtains, nothing happens when there’s water in the glass, nothing happens when there’s wine in the glass: nothing happens.

  “Cheer up,” Penelope says, putting her arm around me. Even though she looks thin, she feels soft and pudgy, as if she moved from babyhood to adulthood in one step. Her armpit is resting on my left shoulder and I shrug, trying to shake it off. I don’t want her smell mixed with mine, I don’t want to be diluted or contaminated with the odour of someone else. She doesn’t heed my shrugging so I duck and run outside, saying,

  “Let’s go back to the sunshine.”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I walk home on two fizzy legs. Never has the North Circular looked lovelier. The trees are grand and high, the bumps on the footpath are fairy mounds, and I imagine a horse-drawn carriage pulling me along the curve of the road. A group of bare-chested teenage boys pass, their calls to each other like cheers after the end of a long drought. I let myself in the front door with my key and think what an odd thing it is to do, to let yourself in, as if you needed permission to enter your own house. I go into the living room, take the urn from the bookshelf and knock on the lid.

  “Hello, Maud,” I shout.

  I was never allowed to call her Maud when she was alive. “Maud, Maud, Maud!”

  I give the urn a shake, and shove it back between the books.

  Then I pick up the phone and dial my sister’s number. She answers with a hushed urgency.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Vivian, it’s me, Vivian!”

  She gives a monstrous tut that’s almost a THUTH, and a sigh that could scatter a plastic army.

  My sister’s relationship with me is one prolonged sigh.

  “It’s after two, Vivian, why are you calling?”

  “I want to let you know that Penelope can come too!”

  “Who’s Penelope—come where?”

  “Penelope’s my friend I told you about. She can come to France too!”

  There’s a low muttering in the background and a growl from my sister’s husband, followed by a rustle and a soft thunk. She returns with a hiss.

  “Vivian, have you been drinking?”

  “Yes, we were practising drinking wine for France.”

  “It’s gone straight to your head.”

  I picture a bottle of wine dressed as a rocket spearing into my brain.

  “Yes, I am speaking wine-words,” I say. My speaking is more of a “thpeaking.”

  Her voice drops to cold menace. “Listen to me and listen carefully: you are not coming to France, Penelope is not coming to France, I don’t want to ever hear about France from you again, understand?”

  I repeat the sentences in my head and my mood drops a thud down a concrete staircase with each one.

  “I understand. No France.”

  “Good night.”

  The line goes dead. I hold the phone to my ear awhile and listen to the beeeeeeeeeep. It’s a soothing even tone, unlike my sister’s north-facing voice. I raise my shoulders slowly. I feel as if I don’t fit into my body, as if there’s a gap between me and my skin. I don’t know what to tell Penelope—she has almost grown fins in anticipation of the sea—where would I find the words for such a conversation? I wish there was a shop where I could buy buckets of words; I would cut them out from a numbered sheet, arrange them in order and recite. I climb upstairs and get into bed: clothes, shoes and all—this is no time to be undressing. I pull the blankets over my head and huddle under, making sure that all my fingers are inside the blankets and nothing is peeping out, not even the tips. My head feels swimmy, and I repeat “No France No France No France” over and over in my blanket tent until they stop making sense as separate words and become “nofrance,” the name of a magic spell. I don’t know when I drift off to sleep but I must have, because I wake up the next morning and I’m still not going to France.

  I DON’T KNOW how to tell bad news. A doctor told me about my great-aunt dying and I try to remember how he put it: the words he used and the way he used them. I’ll telephone Penelope because I don’t want see her disappointed wail of a face; bad enough to hear it. I dial her number, and she answers on the first ring with a “hello” that’s beyond frightened. This is good; if she expects bad news, my task is easier.

  “Penelope, it’s me.”

  “Oh, hi, Vivian, how are you?”

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  “Oh?”

  “We did everything we could, but she was very old.”

  “Sorry?”

  “In the end, her heart just gave out.”

  “Whose heart?”

  “Sometimes even the most advanced medical equipment is no use when your time has come.”

  “Vivian—”

  “If there’s anything we can do, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Vivian, what are you talking about?”

  “The trip to France, we’re not allowed to go.”

  “Oh. Not even you?”

  “Especially not me.”

  “Oh.”

  “She had a good life, and that’s what we must focus on: a long and healthy life.”

  “Who had?”

  “My sister says—”

  “Your sister’s dead?”

  “No, well, I don’t know, I haven’t talked to her this morning. Last night she said there aren’t enough bedrooms in the house, and she didn’t want us to be squashed.”

  The lie sounds so true, it sings.

  “I understand.”

  I don’t know how she can understand something that’s not true; if you understand a lie, does that make you a double liar? A whole bag of silence follows. I don’t want to dilute my lie with more details, and I’m scared of catching myself out with stories that twist and ramble, so I try to cheer Penelope up.

  “If my sister is dead, then maybe I’ll inherit the house in France.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “Not that I know of, but there are car crashes sometimes. And aeroplane accidents,” I add, hopefully. “They’re better because there’s more chance of the whole family being wiped out.”

  Penelope sighs.

  “But there are life jackets and whistles for every passenger.”

  I think for a moment.

  “If the air steward had an off day, she may have forgotten to pack all the whistles. That’s what we need to cling onto.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Penelope?”

  “Yes?”

  “We could go on our own holiday.”

  She draws a sharp breath.

  “We could—we could go anywhere in the world!”

  “Hold on, I need to get my list.”

  I put the phone on the floor and run to fetch my notebook. I open it on my List of Nice-Sounding Places That Exist, and run back to the phone.

  “We could go to: Golgotha, Meat Camp, Ouagadougou, Humpy Creek, Bell Buckle, Mudsock, Dirty Butter Creek, Bean Station, Tightsqueeze, Spuzzum, Unicorn, Burkina Faso, Sulphur, Pencil Bluff, Vladivostok, Bumba, Chugwater, Monkey’s Eyebrow, Slicklizzard, Ulan Bator, Robbers Roost, Tulsk, Zook, Buttermilk, Limpopo, Pondicherry, Udupi, Gough, Esmeraldas, Poskov, Jammerbugten, Gdansk, Pyongyang, Hindu Kush, Ningbo, Muscat, Necker, Mermaid Reef, Spratly Islands, Guam, Mogadishu, Djibouti, Tonga, Wollongong, Inglewood, South Sandwich Islands (I don’t think there’s a North Sandwich Islands, but we could find a group of rocks in a lake in Northern Ireland and eat sandwiches on them to officially name them), Walla Walla, Tbilisi, Lesotho, Oberpfaffenhofen, Timbuktu or that town in Wales with the longest name: Llan-fairpwll­gwyngyllgo­gerychwyrnd­robwllllan­tysiliogo­gogoch. I’m not sure if I’ve pronounced the last one properly.”

  I draw breath.

  “That’s a lot of place names,” Penelope says.

&n
bsp; “I’ve been making my list for a while.”

  “Sounds like all of them are abroad apart from Tulsk?”

  I look back over my list.

  “Yes.”

  “Why Tulsk?”

  “It’s the big heap of consonants,” I say, “they make my throat catch and my skin crawl. I need to get over my fear of consonants, and Tulsk would be good practice for going to Gdansk.”

  Penelope laughs.

  “Viv, you’re a ticket.”

  I don’t like being called a ticket or a card or any other flat object; I would prefer to be called a three-dimensional thing.

  “There’s another reason,” I say. “Oweynagat Cave is near Tulsk, it’s supposed to be a portal to the Otherworld.”

  “Reckon it works?”

  “Reckon it might.”

  I’ve dropped my first pronoun; this is the start of things to come.

  “Tulsk it is, then,” she says.

  “Tulsk it is,” I say. “It’s in the middle of Roscommon—if County Roscommon was Africa, Tulsk would be the Central African Republic—and I need to become middle.”

  I’m glad I’ve given up on the accent that squeezes vowels between every consonant; whole seasons would change before I’d get the word “Tulsk” out.

  “Next week suit you?” Penelope asks.

  I let a small silence fall, to pretend that I’m sifting through pages of plans in my head.

  “Next week is very busy for me,” I say, shaking my head so only select syllables drop into the receiver.

  “The following week, then?”

  “That’d be perfect,” I say. “Midsummer’s that week, the year’s on the turn. The gates to the Underworld are supposed to open up at Oweynagat every Samhain to abduct humans, but Midsummer’s a bit bright for abductions, I could probably just go in willingly myself.”

  “Okay. Where will we stay?”

  Penelope’s head is wadded with needless practicalities.

  “We’ll camp,” I say. “We’ll pitch a tent near the mouth of the cave, and we can ask other campers for some propane and butane for the bonfire. If we get to a second conversation, we can call them prope ’n’ bute.”

  “Right,” she says, “I can drive.”

  “Good,” I say, “I don’t like the smell of egg sandwiches on the train.”

  “Grand so, Viv, I mean VIV. I’ll get back to you about arrangements later in the week.”

  “Bye.”

  Penelope hangs up and I continue to hold the phone against my ear, listening to the beep. It’s like a song with only one word. Then I place the receiver back in the cradle and go upstairs to pack my suitcase. It’s important I bring the right things.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. Vivian makes a lot of lists and plays with word associations and sounds. She also searches through her notebook of lists in contemplating her own feelings and significance. What insight do we gain into Vivian from the ways she plays with language? What do we learn about her character specifically and only through this device?

  2. The drawings in the book show not only how visually perceptive Vivian is, but also how abstract she can be. How literally can we interpret these images to be her mental maps and shapes?

  3. Many moments in the book feel as though they honor Irish traditions and lore, such as the plaque that Vivian reads: “Near here is the reputed site of the well where St. Patrick baptized many local inhabitants in the 5th century AD.” Do you feel these scenes connect to a broader

  4. The way Vivian mentions certain landmarks recalls James Joyce’s Dubliners. Scholars of Joyce have noted that his observations of Dublin differ in his stories depending on whether the travel is either passive (e.g. by bus) or active (e.g. on foot). Is the same true for Eggshells? Are Vivian’s experiences and observations different or more important whether she is passive or active?

  5. In Greek myth, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, and she is known for her faithfulness to him while he fights in the Trojan War and completes his long Odyssey home. Do you think the issue of faithfulness is what prompts Vivian to advertise for a friend named Penelope specifically? Do you think she feels she needs a Penelope of her own, because she is on an Odyssey of her own? If not, what are other reasons why she might have preferred this particular name?

  6. Is it possible, in the world of this book, that Vivian really is a fairy? Or that there is a portal to another world? Do you think she really believes this? If so, what does that belief say about her?

  A CONVERSATION WITH CAITRIONA LALLY…

  How did you come to write Eggshells, and how did you come up with the character of Vivian? Did you have the character in mind first, or the story, or…what?

  I didn’t set out to Write A Novel, it grew from notes and overheard snippets. I’d been made redundant from my job during the recession, and I found myself walking the streets of Dublin a lot. I noticed that many of the city’s street signs had letters missing, and I wrote these new spellings in a notebook, imagining what new meanings they signified. From that, I came up with the character of Vivian, who takes notes of these street signs and tries to find a pattern or code in the missing letter. So, the character of Vivian evolved from me in a way; that sense of aimlessness when you lose your job and the daily structure a job brings, comes through in Vivian. I started with the voice, the voice of a character who sees the world a little differently. I was interested in the idea of a misfit character who felt she didn’t belong in society, who sees things a little differently. But while I was out of work, I only took notes; I didn’t have the confidence to actually start writing until I found a job one year later.

  Why did you decide to make Dublin, and not some other city or town, the setting for this story?

  For the simple (and slightly lazy) reason that I live in Dublin and it made the research a lot easier. I’m a little bit obsessed with maps, and I looked through maps and atlases of the city for names of streets that sounded magical or otherworldly and then visited these streets, just as I had Vivian do. I’ve lived in Dublin most of my life, but it was only when I had the time to wander the streets, really examining the buildings and the street signs, that I began looking at the city through Vivian’s eyes and imagining: What if this other layer existed underneath the real city?

  There’s a wonderful uncertainty about the supernatural in the story. Does Vivian really believe she’s a changeling?

  Her parents brought her up to believe she’s a changeling and I don’t think she questions their beliefs too deeply. She sees it as a logical reason for her inability to belong, to fit into society. So, it makes sense in her mind to walk the streets of Dublin looking for this portal to another world in which she eventually will belong.

  Changelings and fairies are such a rich part of Irish folklore. What did you mean to get across in weaving such elements into your story?

  I’ve always been fascinated by changelings – the idea that fairies come in the night to steal the human child and replace it with a fairy child has sometimes been used by Irish parents in the past to explain why a child was acting strangely or differently. I think a changeling is the ultimate in not belonging, and it suited the story for that purpose. I liked Vivian’s relentless hope that she would find a world in which to belong. I’ve used some other elements of folklore in the book—the legend of the Children of Lir, holy wells— but Vivian’s attempts to find these otherworldly elements in the city are always thwarted by gritty reality; instead of a holy well, she has to make do with a public toilet. I liked the idea of folklore from a traditional, rural Irish setting being transplanted onto a contemporary city and being misunderstood. As well as Celtic folklore, the worlds of European fairy tales and Greek myths are as real to Vivian as the actual “real” world is.

  The story of Eggshells seems to be, ultimately, about battling loneliness. Do you agree with that, or what, more precisely, would you say it is about?

  I do agree. I think the book is about the loneliness that comes from not belo
nging. I’ve always been drawn to misfits or people who think differently, and sometimes these people are excluded from society. I wanted to write a character that people avoid sitting beside on a bus, and not just because of her poor personal hygiene. I’m not sure that Vivian sees herself as lonely, however. I mean, she puts a notice on a tree to advertise for a friend called Penelope, but the reason for that is to ask why she doesn’t rhyme with Antelope. Vivian has a resilience and a lack of self-questioning that I liked—as someone who second-guesses herself constantly, it was refreshing to write a character who persists with her whims or plans and, even when they go awry, picks herself up and gets going again. I think the reader sees Vivian’s loneliness more than Vivian does.

  Why did you select the name Penelope for Vivian’s friend? Did you intentionally model her on the character from Greek mythology?

  In a word, no. I kind of wish there was more depth to my answer here—I’ve been asked before if I named her for the chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and again the answer is no. I’m afraid this is just from my own head. When I was a child I read lots of books but somehow mispronounced many of the names of the characters. I came across Penelope in a book (long forgotten) and thought it was pronounced Peeny-loap, and so I had Vivian advertise for a friend called Penelope in order to find out why she doesn’t rhyme with antelope.

  The open ending of the book is one of its most wonderful aspects—it’s like the end of Casablanca, where Humphrey Bogart turns to Claude Raines and says, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and they go off together into the fog. Do you think at this point in the story Vivian feels she has obtained, finally, a good friend? Has she some sense of achievement?

  Again, I’m not sure if Vivian reflects deeply about these things in an abstract sense. Her idea of a successful friendship is having someone who will come to her funeral—and if she continues to try and feed Penelope carrots instead of cake to prolong her life, maybe Penelope will outlive her and fulfil this wish. Their friendship is unorthodox—it seems to be based on Vivian’s ability to tune out Penelope’s chattering—but I think there is genuine affection between them. Penelope is possibly more eccentric than Vivian, and Vivian has some not-altogether-charitable moments in which she feels superior to Penelope, so she’s probably not going to win Friend of the Year anytime soon.