Ghost Moth

by Michele Forbes

  George continues, as though Katherine has said nothing. “I remember feeling so happy. Thought I would go mad with happiness. Just sitting beside you. And everything right with the world. And I started reading the menu on the wooden paneling in front of us. Someone had written up the menu with a spelling mistake. ‘Tea, coffee, milk shakes, hot soaps, sandwiches.’ And the more times I said it, the more you laughed.”

  “No, George, I don’t remember that. That must have been a different night.” Katherine’s voice carries a gravity with it now. She is aware that George’s memory of the evening is very different from hers. As though he is only selecting the bits of memory he wants and reassembling them to invent moments that never happened. There is a disconnected quality to his voice, which is making her feel uncomfortable.

  “And the waitress kept looking at us, and her cheeks were getting redder and redder, and you said—”

  Katherine interrupts him. “I think you should get some sleep, George.”

  “It’s just that—if it wasn’t that night—whatever night that happened—we were happy together, Katherine. Happy. That night did happen. I remember it as clearly as though it were yesterday.” George turns his body fully around to Katherine.

  “We’re still happy.” Katherine has turned her face into the pillow.

  “Are we? This was different.” George speaks slowly. “Then, we were only prepared to see the good in each other.”

  Katherine moves her arm out from under the blankets and lets it fall outstretched above her head. It is a lick of white skin in the darkness and George reaches out to stroke it with his fin-gerstips. Her skin is soft and warm and yielding under his touch.

  “But there you were. And you kept giving me such a beautiful smile, Katherine, that I was the happiest man in the world.” George reaches out his hand now to stroke Katherine’s hair. “I’m trying my best, Katherine, but . . . it never seems enough. Please let it go, Katherine.”

  Katherine feels as though she is shrinking in the darkness, pulling down into herself like a small creature sensing the approach of something ominous; her voice now comes from a faraway cave.

  “That wasn’t the night you asked me to marry you, George. I don’t know what night you’re talking about.”

  “Please let it go, Katherine. Please.” He is begging her now.

  “You’re tired, George. Sleep. You need to sleep.”

  “Do you love me, Katherine?” George says from the lightening dark.

  Is he crying?

  “Yes, George, I love you.”

  And then on their honeymoon, the most anger George had ever felt. She was able to provide that for him. The most anger ever. An anger that had pushed him out of his words. He had had no language with which to describe it. He had had no name for it.

  Katherine is holding something in her hand. It is a folded piece of paper. She opens it. It is a grocery list. Sliced pan, custard powder, two onions . . . She looks at the piece of paper in her hand. It is folded again. She opens it again, but somehow the paper remains folded. Each time she opens the piece of paper, she finds it folded. She opens the piece of paper many times. Twenty, thirty times—she is losing count. She never sees the paper folding back in upon itself, but it is always folded when she looks at it. Then suddenly, it is open in her hand, although she has not tried to open it. She sees the words “Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime!” handwritten in blue ink and the imprints of her lips skirting the edges of the paper.

  A swarm of orange-red insects.

  One of the mouths trembles slightly and softly parts. A sweet sound issues from its white center. A breathy almost imperceptible “Aah,” but a definite note, not a sigh. It melts on the air. The mouth opens again and this time the breath lengthens and releases itself in a curved line of sound. This happens three, maybe four times before another mouth opens on the page, then another, and another, until all the mouths—hundreds of them now—are opening and closing, the sound building and building in intensity until it becomes a seraphic rhapsody. Katherine opens her own mouth just a little, mimicking the undulations of the paper mouths to sing along with them. But suddenly, the mouths shut with an abrupt snap! The song is now left hanging in the air, pulsing, but disembodied from its source. Violently then, the song rushes at high speed in through her half-open mouth like a tornado being sucked into her. It fills her up. She feels her limbs begin to vibrate uncontrollably as they swell and grow longer and wider. The cuffs of her blouse split as her arms and hands become huge; the buttons fly off the front of her blouse; her throat and shoulders rip through her collar. Her feet force themselves out through the ends of her shoes and socks. She is a swollen, fatted pupa prematurely rupturing through her larval skin. Floating now in water. Floating like a swollen carcass, her flesh weeping and skinless from the scald of the sea. There is something beside her in the water. Something huge, but she cannot see it. Something dark and wide. It is getting closer to her. Closer and closer. It rises up out of the sea. It is a huge head with a huge mouth and it is coming to swallow her. The terrifying lips open to take her.

  Katherine gives a sharp gasp and sits bolt upright in the bed. The room is dark except for the spoon of light that bends in under the bedroom door from the landing. Stephen is crying. Katherine turns to George in the bed beside her. He is an imageless shape, a smooth, silent mound of sleep. Katherine tries to gather herself for a moment. She feels that her body is tingling all over, as though she has pins and needles that have caught fire. Glowing sparks of brittle, fizzing light through her. But though her limbs feel weightless, her head feels heavy. She gives a dry cough and then climbs out of bed to attend to Stephen. Stephen is already calling her name, his arms outstretched to her approaching shape.

  “Mama.”

  “Sssssh, darling, everything’s all right.”

  His fretting makes his voice judder in his throat like a frightened bird, as though he is attempting to decipher where the large animals that have been chasing him have gone.

  “It’s okay, my pet,” Katherine says, soothing him. “It’s only a dream.”

  Katherine lifts him out of his cot. Once he is in her arms, his body sinks immediately into her chest, his head tucking into the curve of her shoulder. His weight speaks slumber once again. Katherine rocks him to and fro, kissing his head, caressing his soft, downy curls with her lips, breathing in his skin smell of daisies and milk.

  “My beautiful boy,” she whispers, “my beautiful boy,” and she becomes a lullaby. After some minutes holding and swaying him, Katherine carefully tilts her body and, keeping her motion as smooth as possible, places Stephen back in his cot and covers him with his blanket. She reaches across to lift up her cotton underslip from the back of the chair, where she left it the night before as she undressed, and, rolling it into a loose, soft bundle, she squeezes it in under the blanket beside Stephen. The smell of mother for him to feed off.

  As Katherine stands beside Stephen’s cot, she feels exhausted, the tingling in her body having given way to a thick grogginess in her limbs and in her back. Her head still pulses heavily. She leaves the bedroom quietly so as not to disturb George or Stephen and makes her way down the stairs to the kitchen. She walks to the counter beside the sink, the linoleum feeling chill against the soles of her feet, and fills the kettle with water. In the back room beside the kitchen, where the fibers of love and life are woven together, Katherine now stands and waits for the kettle to boil.

  More than she can handle. That’s what it feels like. But it’s just that they’re both exhausted. Tiredness like a shock in her bones. And her dream has shaken her. At least the station did not call him back and he sleeps still. Katherine knows how deeply George will now wrestle with a sense of failure at not having rescued the child alive, at not having arrived at the fire more quickly, or taken the appropriate orders from his superiors. She knows how difficult it will be for him to accept the fact that there was nothing he could have done to save her. She knows how desperate he would have fe
lt as he made his way back through the house, carrying the girl in his arms, and she knows deep down that, in a sense, he will always carry her.

  The kettle begins to screech, and Katherine lifts it off the burner. She pours the hot water onto the tea leaves in the teapot, giving the hot water a quick stir with a spoon before putting on the lid. She still feels exhausted.

  She hears a noise behind her. She turns around, to see Elsa standing at the kitchen door, a pale ghost of a child in her white nightdress, her hair disheveled.

  “What are you doing up, Elsa?”

  “I heard Stephen crying. What time is it, Mummy?”

  “It’s early, or it’s late, Elsa, I don’t know. What does it matter, love? Go back to bed.”

  “I can’t sleep. Can I have a drink please, Mummy?”

  Katherine, although knowing she should show her disapproval at Elsa being up out of bed at this unearthly hour, cannot help but feel relieved that her daughter has now joined her.

  Katherine pours Elsa a glass of milk and then a cup of tea for herself. They both stand in the kitchen without switching on the overhead electric light, so reflective are the steely shards of morning as they fall in around them through the window.

  Katherine looks out to check the sky.

  “I’d say it’s maybe four o’clock.”

  “Isabel didn’t think the fair was very good, Mummy.”

  “Really? Well, she’s wrong, don’t you think?”

  Elsa shrugs her shoulders. Katherine turns her head to look out the window again.

  “Look. Madam Maureen’s tent is still standing.” Katherine puts down her cup of tea and pulls back the curtain that hangs by the kitchen door, taking the key from a little hook on the wall behind it. When she opens the back door, both she and Elsa stand together on the back steps.

  The fortune-teller’s tent looms in the cool, transparent haze of the garden in front of them like the last surviving pavilion of a lost crusade, tilting on its axis, a rickety vestige of defeat, its lank flaps subdued further with light droplets of morning rain.

  “Get the cover from the sofa, Elsa. We’ll sit out awhile.”

  Elsa brings out the gray woolen throw with its mint green edges and gives it to her mother. Katherine wraps it around them both, and they sit on the back step, huddled together. Elsa drinks her milk in tiny sups. Katherine strokes Elsa’s hair for a moment and then turns to look around her.

  “Wasn’t this Elizabeth’s nightdress?” Elsa asks.

  “What, my love?” Katherine drinks her tea.

  “This nightdress I’m wearing, did it belong to Elizabeth or to someone else?”

  “I think it was Maureen’s.” Katherine lifts the cuff of the garment back a little to examine it.

  “Yes, it was Maureen’s. Look, she embroidered a tiny blue m, just here.” Katherine shows it to Elsa.

  “Does that mean that it’s still hers?”

  “No, love, it was Maureen’s, then it was Elizabeth’s, and now it’s yours.”

  Elsa laughs. “Then it’ll be Stephen’s, and he’ll look like a girl!”

  Despite her tiredness, Katherine smiles at how her daughter finds humor in Stephen’s getting his sisters’ hand-me-downs. As she watches Elsa now, she marvels at the inconsequentiality of time. In an instant, Katherine can look at her daughter, as she is, the contours of her young face elongating and changing with each slight shift in her understanding of the world, and also see her, at one and the same time, as a baby, all rounded flesh and soft bones and wisps of fluffy hair. Two images of the same child completely at one, completely preserved and still living, still breathing, still available to her at any moment.

  “Mummy?”

  “Yes, Elsa?”

  “Isabel said she felt sorry for me because I was a Catholic.”

  “Really?” Katherine looks at Elsa. “And why did she say that?”

  “She said because Catholics are dirty and stupid and poor.”

  “Isabel said that, did she?” Katherine cannot hide the concern in her voice.

  “And she said that lots of people hate Catholics and so they’ll hate me, too.”

  “Isabel should watch her tongue. And what else did the little blurt say?”

  “Just that she’ll still be my friend because she needs someone to get sweets for her in Mr. McGovern’s shop because she doesn’t like going into the shop because Mr. McGovern’s a Catholic, too.”

  “That child needs a good talking-to.” Katherine shakes her head.

  “Mummy?”

  “Yes, Elsa?”

  “Why does it matter if you’re a Catholic or a Protestant?”

  “It doesn’t—unless you’re Isabel, of course!”

  “But it does, Mummy, ’cos sometimes I get frightened coming home from school in case I get stopped, ’cos that happened to Mary Feely and she got beaten up and she had to move to a different school.”

  “Well—that’s not going to happen to you, Elsa. Don’t worry, love.” Katherine can feel her throat tighten. She feels anxious now, forlorn even.

  Elsa pulls the gray woolen throw around her shoulders and drinks her milk. “Anyway, I feel sorry for Isabel.”

  “Do you now, love, and why’s that?” asks Katherine quietly.

  “Because she has a webbed toe and that needs an operation to put it right.”

  “I think it’s more than her webbed toe needs operating on,” Katherine mutters to herself; then she turns to Elsa and pulls her close. “We are what we are, pet, and that’s all right, don’t you think?”

  Elsa nods in agreement.

  Night falls back as the morning sky slowly opens like a huge door. Shafts of apricot light appear behind the silhouettes of the gardens shrubs, which splay their long leaves as though they are giant black insects stretching their long legs.

  Katherine and Elsa sit like two pilgrims on the steps of a new day.

  “I could catch ghost moths in this nightdress,” Elsa whispers.

  “You could.”

  “Where did you hear the story about them being the souls of dead people again?”

  “My father told me.”

  “Granda Jack?”

  “Yes, Granda Jack.”

  “And where did he hear the story?”

  “I suppose he always knew the story without knowing where he had heard it or where it came from. Like lots of stories.”

  “I like those kind of stories that you don’t know where they came from. They’re not so scary.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they mightn’t of even happened yet; they might have just been dreamed. And that means that there’s a chance that they’ll never happen, if you don’t want them to.”

  “And what if you want them to happen?”

  “You have to keep dreaming them.”

  With morning’s inevitable growth, Katherine and Elsa become less like specters and more like themselves.

  “And if they were the souls of dead people,” Elsa continued,

  “and you caught them, would you have to hold on to them forever, or could you just let them go when you wanted to?”

  “I don’t know, Elsa.”

  “Because you might get to like them too much; you might get too used to them, like pets. Moths could be pets, couldn’t they, Mummy? And then you wouldn’t be able to let them go.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Could we get a pet, Mummy, a hamster or something? I’d love a hamster.”

  Katherine is becoming more and more soothed by Elsa’s company, carried by her daughter’s unconscious grace to feel the eloquence of ordinary things. There is no other sound on earth like it, the voice of a child who sees the world as God’s safe harbor.

  Katherine gives Elsa an affirmative pat on her knee.

  “Let’s get two hamsters!”

  “Really?” Elsa is amazed.

  “Yes, why not. I’ll talk to your father about it, shall I?”

  “Yes, please.” Elsa beams at her mother, the
n looks out into the garden, the huge smile remaining on her face.

  “I wish I had met Granda Jack. Do you miss him, Mummy?”

  “Yes, I miss him. Every day I miss him.”

  “He looks funny in the photograph on the mantelpiece.”

  “I know, but he was carrying on to make me laugh.”

  “Why’s he holding you up with one hand?”

  “It was a trick for the camera. My mother took the photograph in Tollymore Forest. I was actually sitting up on a wooden post, but it looks like he’s holding me straight up in the air with one hand.”

  Sunlight tongues of pinky apricot now lick the edges of the garden shrubs, giving them back the dimension that the nighttime shadows had stolen. The day looks nearly ready.

  “Elsa, I think it’s time to go in now; I’m feeling a bit tired.” Katherine pats Elsa on the head. “We’ll leave Madam Maureen’s tent until later, shall we?”

  Elsa smiles at her mother and nods her head, fixing the gray woolen throw around her.

  “Let’s go,” says Katherine.

  As they rise from the back steps, Katherine lifts her head. She notices a line of dirty orange light across the city, like the glow of a distant furnace, and feels the heavy fall of her heart.

  6

  September 1949

  HOW HEAVILY IT RAINED. It was as though the weather could not stop itself. Rain fell from a liquid sky like pellets of broken silver, battering against the buildings and the pavements, falling so suddenly and heavily that the earth did not have time to drink it in. Water spilled off the streets and the gardens, running in long and furious ropes into the rivers and the sea. As Katherine closed the door of the church hall behind her, the rain hammered on it as though it wanted to get in.

  It was Friday. Tonight, George and her family would come to the church hall to see her perform Carmen. All day at work, Katherine had not been able to concentrate on her accounting duties. A large portion of her day was spent checking and rechecking the entries in her ledger. A colleague had kindly pointed out three mistakes that she had made within the first hour of starting work. But even as she brought her mind to follow the figures in her ledger with as much rigor as she could muster, she still found herself pressing the wrong keys on her accounting machine. By half past five, she was exhausted. She had left the Ulster Bank offices and had run the short distance to St. Anne’s church hall in the pouring rain. The cheese and pickle sandwich that she had made for herself that morning to have before the show, she had thrown in the bin as she entered the hall; the thought of eating it had made her feel queasy.