Ghost Moth

by Michele Forbes

  She made her way to the small dressing room upstairs, towel-dried and pinned up her hair, and changed into her costume. Twenty minutes later, she was ready to join the rest of the cast backstage, all of whom were warming up for the performance that evening. Charlie Copeland was rocking back and forth as usual on his wooden stool, Rosemary Wylie was complaining to the Cigarette Factory Girls as they practiced their dance routine about the ugly, tight shoes she had been given, and Hugh Drummond could be overheard telling James McCauley a joke. “So he says to her, ‘Drinkin’ makes you look very bonnie,’ and she says, ‘But I haven’t been drinkin’,’ and he says, ‘No, but I have . . . !’”

  Just before “curtain up,” Cissie McGee swung around to Katherine from her prompt table.

  “I can see your mother and sister in the fourth row, Katherine. Is that George with them?” Katherine looked out through a gap in the curtain.

  “No, that’s my brother, Frank. I wonder where George is?”

  “Who’s George?”

  Katherine pulled back from the curtain and turned around. It was Tom. Hearing him say George’s name like that shocked her to the core.

  Tom kissed Katherine. But this time, she pulled away. Cissie McGee gave an embarrassed cough.

  And then it happened. Katherine heard herself saying flatly to Tom, “George is my fiancé.”

  Tom started laughing. “George is what—who?”

  “My fiancé,” she continued. “I’m engaged to be married.”

  Tom’s face froze. “I don’t understand, he said slowly. “I don’t understand, Katherine.”

  Katherine could not bear to return Tom’s gaze. She continued with her head bowed. “I didn’t know that we would—I had no idea that we—I didn’t mean this to happen.” She stopped, then lifting her head she said solemnly, “Oh my God, Tom. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, Katherine,” Tom was shaking his head, trying to reason this through. “No, no, no—if we need to talk about this, Katherine, we can.”

  Katherine raised her eyes. Her voice became charged as she suddenly ripped through Tom’s words. “No we can’t! We can’t talk about anything! There’s nothing to talk about! I’m engaged to be married to someone else! And I have been since the first time I met you! It’s not right! Do you hear me? It’s just not right!”

  The Cigarette Factory Girls stopped dancing and Charlie Copeland stopped rocking back and forth on his little wooden stool. They all turned to look at Katherine and Tom. In the awkward silence, the rumble of rain on the roof grew more intense.

  Tom shook his head again. “No, Katherine, no, please don’t do this to me. I love you.” He stood staring at Katherine. She could see the boy in him again, innocent, pure, just like on the night she had first met him, the night when she had woken him from his sleep in the tailors’ rooms.

  Cissie McGee broke the silence by calling out a verbal “Stand by” to the performers waiting stage right, waved furiously to indicate the same to those stage left, and then cast a nervous look toward Katherine and Tom.

  Katherine and Tom stood motionless in the dark.

  At that moment, Katherine realized how she had not calculated anything. How these dreams of hers had blinded her. How she had rashly and foolishly ignored the obvious until now. She had blatantly refused to consider who would be betrayed and how long afterward guilt might remain. And, instead of facing the consequence of the situation, she had buckled like a frightened child and had clung instead to what she knew, or at least clung to what she thought she knew.

  “I think you should leave now. Go,” Katherine said abruptly, her eyes filling with tears.

  Tom’s eyes held on hers. “No Katherine, no, please, I beg you, don’t do this, please don’t do this.” The sincerity in his voice chilled her to her core. He looked at her, his eyes deep as chasms, frightened, desperate. “Why did you keep that from me? Why did you not tell me?”

  Katherine looked at Tom. She was speechless. Then she dropped her head and covered her face with her hands, as though to make herself disappear in the darkness. As though to hide in her shame.

  Time seemed to stand still.

  Then, through her fingers she said softly, “We have nothing more to say to each other. It’s over, don’t you understand? Go. I never want to see you again.”

  “I can’t live without you, Katherine.”

  Katherine dropped her hands from her face and looked straight into Tom’s eyes. “Go,” she said.

  Is it just the way she remembers it or did she really see the light leave his eyes, dark though it was behind the scenery flats? Did she really see something extinguish within him? Is that how it happened? Is that what she did to him? A slipping away, at once awful and unremarkable.

  She stood in the dark, her cold blood coursing through her veins. She tried to make out Tom’s shape in the dark as he moved away. Then he was gone. She wanted to change her mind. She wanted to call him back.

  “This letter was just delivered to the stage door.” Cissie McGee was in a state of panic.

  “Sorry?” Katherine lifted her head.

  “This letter just arrived for you. Just handed in. But we’re almost ready to start! You’ll have to read it later.” With that, Cissie McGee barreled at high speed back to the prompt corner.

  In a daze, Katherine slowly opened the letter and by the faint light on the prop table beside her began to read it. Her hands were shaking. “Katherine. Can’t make it to the performance tonight. Called out unexpectedly on duty. I’m sorry I’m going to miss your performance. Will telephone tomorrow. Good luck. George.”

  She stood at the side of the stage, behind the scenery flats, waiting for the performance to begin. She folded George’s letter in two and pushed it against her mouth to take the excess of lipstick. Then she slipped it into the pocket of her costume, smoothing the fabric with her hand, taking a deep breath to calm herself in the midst of all the commotion happening around her backstage. She stood like a strange, gormless creature, as though on the brink of extinction.

  7

  August 1969

  KATHERINE RISES LATER THAT MORNING, after a short, disrupted sleep, feeling as though she has not slept at all. Even getting dressed feels such an effort for her. She is comforted somewhat by the promise of a hot day when she opens the back door. Wafts of honeysuckle scent float on the balmy air and mingle with the slightly sour odor from the half-open dustbin beside the coal shed. But as Katherine turns her head to look over the city, her brow furrows in disbelief. Hanging in the sky is a huge pall of gray smoke like a wide, flat cigar, incongruous against the morning blue directly above it. The smoke’s curling, dissolute plumes move listlessly outward before folding back in upon themselves, twisting around a dense gray center.

  This stretch of gray cloud is confirmation of the trouble George had talked about in the early hours of the morning, at which Katherine had shaken her head in disbelief. Now, it is there for her to see, ominous, foreboding, and undeniable. What in God’s name is happening? She wonders. Riots in the streets, petrol bombs, cars and buses burning?

  Katherine calls George, who is inside the house, cleaning the dried dirt off his black boots from the night before. He arrives in his socks, a boot in one hand, a damp cloth in the other.

  “Look, George, look at the smoke.”

  George follows Katherine’s gaze. “I know. I expected it. I got a call from the station this morning when you were still in bed.”

  “Yes, I heard the telephone.” Katherine’s voice is barely audible.

  George speaks with a heavy and sober tone. “A nine-year-old boy was shot dead last night, Katherine. Shot dead as he was sleeping. Half the side of his head gone. Indiscriminate fire, they say.”

  “Dear God.” Katherine is stunned.

  “There were clashes between crowds and the RUC all night.” George shakes his head. “I’ve no idea how long I’ll be needed, Katherine. It all depends on how difficult our access will be.” He kisses her on the cheek. “I’ll p
ass a message to the station to get one of the boys to telephone you if I’m going to be very late. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”

  “And you’ve cleared this with the council? They’ve given you more time off work?”

  “Yeah—they understand the seriousness of the situation.”

  Katherine reaches out her hand to his face. “How will I know that you’ll be safe, George?”

  “Don’t worry, love, I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” Katherine stares into George’s eyes. There is something urgent, something pressing in his expression. George lifts his arms—still holding his boot in one hand and the cloth in the other—and folds them around Katherine. He presses his head against hers. He holds her tenderly. He holds her for what seems like an age. “I love you,” he says to her. Then, pulling gently back from his embrace, he kisses her on the lips.

  George.

  Katherine gathers herself. “I’ve made sandwiches,” she says, visibly warmed by his display of affection. “They’re on the table.” She smiles at George. “I love you, too,” she says, and then moves swiftly into the house.

  With George gone now, Katherine sets about preparing breakfast for the children. She can hear the thump-thump of Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa upstairs as they jump heavily onto the floor from their beds, and above that she can hear Stephen squealing from the cot. She walks to the bottom of the stairs and calls up to the girls.

  “Take it easy. Someone’s going to get hurt. Maureen! Maureen!” The rumpus stops immediately, followed by an unearthly silence.

  Then: “Yes, Mummy?” Maureen’s voice sounds hoarse.

  “Lift Stephen out of his cot and come down for something to eat.” There is barely an acknowledgment from Maureen before the noise begins again.

  After a lazy breakfast, Katherine rallies the girls to help tidy up the kitchen. She is now feeling exceptionally tired, although it is only late morning. She tries to shake off her worry over George, but it clings like an unsettling dream.

  “We need to bring in the sheets and blankets and things from the garden,” she informs the girls with a forced briskness.

  “I can’t believe the summer holidays are nearly over,” Maureen moans as she scrapes off the remaining flakes of cereal from a bowl into the kitchen bin.

  “There’s ages left,” Elizabeth says.

  “Well, there’s not ages left,” Elsa says, correcting Elizabeth as she checks her upside-down face in her spoon; “there’s two weeks left.”

  “You know what I mean,” mutters Elizabeth.

  “Smarty-pants,” says Maureen, taunting Elsa.

  “Big smelly pants!” replies Elsa.

  Katherine gives Elsa a quick slap on her behind as she passes her by. “Manners, Elsa!”

  Stephen has been looking intently at Elsa from his high chair and is now peering into his own spoon. Then he throws the spoon on the floor, laughing loudly to himself. Maureen picks it up and gives it back to Stephen. Stephen throws the spoon back onto the floor again.

  “All right, girls,” Katherine says, putting away the last of the dishes, “let’s sort out the garden.”

  They dismantle Madam Maureen’s fortune-telling tent as though they are a circus leaving town, imbued with the inevitable contemplation that transience brings and with the growing sense that somehow their world is changing. Katherine removes the clothes pegs, then pulls the sheets and blankets slowly from the clotheshorse and bunches them in her arms for washing. Maureen collapses the clotheshorse. Elizabeth gathers the cushions and lifts the little wooden table that had been used to hold Madam Maureen’s crystal ball to put it away. Elsa becomes prospector of her own garden, sweeping her leg like a metal detector through the blades of grass to search for forgotten things. With her toes, she discovers the Butlin’s Holiday Camp eggcup in the grass by the garden wall, the HOME BAKING sign crumpled and sodden with dew under the hedge, and the bag of toffees in the long clump of weeds by the apple tree. The toffees have melted into a sticky clump. They all work silently, lifting their heads a little now and then to check on Stephen, who plays beside them in the grass, and to sense how the morning swings on a light, warm breeze, on the piping voices from a neighboring garden, on the solitary coarse bark of a dog chasing its tail.

  Katherine, holding the roll of sheets and blankets, looks up at the sky.

  Here and there is the blue promise of a hot day, but where is the sun? Gray smoke still hangs over the city. “Dear God, keep George safe,” she whispers.

  She gives each of the girls a penny for all their work setting up the fair and for raising money for charity and for helping with the tidying up. They will give the proceeds of the fair to Father Daly after Mass on Sunday. Maureen and Elizabeth both put their pennies away for saving. But Elsa wants to buy sweets from McGovern’s shop. She runs down the crazy-paved driveway of her house, holding the penny in her hand. As she makes her way down the road, she can see the city spread out below her and she can blot it out with just one hand if she wants to.

  The footpaths on either side of Elsa’s road are edged by rectangular patches of grass. During these summer months, the men from the Belfast Corporation came as usual with their giant whirring machines and leveled the growth, tossing the freshly cut grass into the air. The children who live on the road played with it, creating ancient city walls that snaked the surface of their new world while unleashing smells of grassy sap and dog shit. Once these games were over and conquests had been lost and won countless times, the grass cities became deserted like abandoned archaeological digs, left to the mercy of the wind and the feet of passersby. Now Elsa kicks clumps of walls here and there as she runs, scattering the grass about the street and over the curbs, which are painted red, white, and blue.

  Elsa reaches the bottom of the hill, where it broadens and becomes flat. There is a bigger, open area of grass where the remnants of this year’s twelfth of July bonfire lie. The recent spell of hot weather has made the large circle of burned grass, left after the fire, seem blacker. Bits of charred wood and the twisted springs from a sofa lie scattered within the scorched ring. As is usual for bonfire nights, potatoes had been thrown onto the edges of the fire to cook slowly as people danced and drank in the spiky heat. The tiny Mr. Wilson had played his shiny accordion like a heavily pregnant woman fingering an ivory stomach. Heads and limbs had twitched to the beat of the Protestant loyalist anthems while lemonade and crisps had been divided among the children. Elsa liked the crisps and lemonade on those nights, but never the potatoes—they always had hard bits in the middle.

  Elsa likes McGovern’s shop. But there is a sweet shop at the top of the road that she does not like. This sweet shop is inside a house where an elderly brother and sister live together. In the small kitchen at the back of the house, the elderly sister has a Formica countertop on which stand a few jars of sweets and a shoe box of loose change. Her blind brother sits by the roaring fire in the parlor and frightens the children with his stillness and his white eyes. To get to the counter of sweets at the back means having to cross the wide red ocher tiles of the parlor floor, where the blind man sits. Elsa does not like that sweet shop because the blind man frightens her. The blind man sitting, fat and piggish, in his parlor, burning his visions by the fire, his eyelids like twists of newspaper, the front door of his house always open. Once Big Adam, a boy from Glenhill Road, had said that the blind man was cooking himself, slowly, day after day, cooking himself by the fire. The blind man’s pink and stubbled skin sizzling and sweating and roasting and frightening her.

  Now Elsa is inside McGovern’s shop and the image of the blind man disappears as her eyes scan the dark cherrywood shelves that stretch from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves are divided like boxes displaying trophies—one packet of Bisto gravy, two tins of Fray Bentos meatballs, one packet of strawberry Angel Delight, two boxes of Brillo pads. Similar objects are displayed in the front window amid cardboard ads for Andrews liver salts and packets of “Sahara brown” tights and “nigger
brown” shoe polish. The front counter is lined with jars upon jars of sweets and chocolates. As Elsa stands in the shop, the sugar perfume envelopes her and bathes her in vanilla aromas of comfort and delight.

  Mr. McGovern is a polished man, eager to smile. Mrs. McGovern, on the other hand, is plump and non-plussed. They run their shop like they run their marriage, each purveyor of his and her own silently acknowledged territory in the bigger scheme of things. Mr. McGovern deals with the groceries, haphazard and indiscriminate as they are, while Mrs. McGovern parades as lollipop lady amid the traffic of sweets.

  “All on your own today, sweetheart?” says Mr. McGovern absentmindedly, rubbing the breast pocket of his white nylon shop coat.

  Elsa nods.

  Mrs. McGovern, whose mouth is constantly set in a pucker of dissatisfaction, is filling an empty sweet jar with Black Jacks.

  “What can I get you, love?” The pucker unpuckers itself for a moment.

  Elsa’s eyes scan the selection of sweets—bonbons, butterscotch, caramels, lollipops, Jujubes, Raspberry Ruffles, Sugarmines—the smell ambrosial and satisfying. Elsa points at the jar of flying saucers.

  “Four of these, please, Mrs. McGovern.”

  “Right-e-o.” Mrs. McGovern, laughing tightly to herself, as though she had been playing a game in her own head of predicting Elsa’s choice, plunges her hand deep into the jar of flying saucers and then pulls out two pale pink ones and two pale blue ones. She puts them into a little paper bag.