Ghost Moth

by Michele Forbes

  Elsa hands Mrs. McGovern her penny and then, bejeweled with her saucer ships, she leaves the shop. The smell outside the shop sharpens almost immediately to a stink, as the chimneys of the plastics factory, along the adjacent dual carriageway, have begun to belch their fumes. The taste of plastic hits the back of Elsa’s tongue. Elsa hears the flat click of the sign against the glass of the door as Mr. McGovern turns it to CLOSED and she catches Mr. McGovern blessing himself behind the glass. How stupid, she thinks, to do that, to give yourself away like that, to give yourself away as a Catholic in a Protestant neighborhood where everyone can see you—that’s something she knows never to do.

  As Elsa makes her way home, the wail of the siren from the local fire station suddenly rises and begins to fill the sky. For a moment, Elsa imagines she walks the streets of a war-torn city just like the ones she has read about in her books from the library. She is an orphaned waif now in search of an air raid shelter or a nurse running to give aid to the injured. She is a spy who knows exactly where to find the prisoners and free them from the camp or the girl who risks her life on the dangerous streets to bring her family supplies. She slips a flying saucer into her mouth, always amazed that such lightness contains such sweetness. The fizziness inside the flying saucer delights her tongue as it melts, and with that, her fantasies slip away.

  She knows the reality to be a far duller thing. She knows what the siren means. It means that her father will be late coming home. It means that her father won’t be there tonight to read to her when it’s time to go to bed.

  Just as Elsa arrives back from McGovern’s shop, Katherine, Maureen, and Elizabeth are bringing the last bits and pieces from the garden into the house. Stephen is pretending to be a rabbit and is hopping around in the grass.

  Isabel arrives in a blue gingham dress. “Are yous coming out?” she asks Elsa.

  “Okay,” Elsa replies. “Where to?”

  “Up to the blackberry bushes. Julie Driver and Karen Kirby’s goin’.”

  Katherine catches sight of Isabel from the kitchen window and, remembering what the child had said to Elsa about Catholics being dirty and stupid and poor, comes bristling back out to the garden. Katherine is surprised at how angry she feels at the child.

  “Isabel Stewart, what are you doing here?” Katherine says sharply.

  “Just calling for Elsa, Mrs. Bedford.” Isabel smiles sweetly.

  “Can I go up to the blackberry bushes with Isabel, Mummy? Please.” Elsa is smiling, too.

  Katherine checks herself. Elsa appears to be harboring no dislike for Isabel. On the contrary, she seems delighted that Isabel has called for her. Katherine takes a deep breath, gently reminding herself that, of course, children are children and talk about things they don’t even understand. She shouldn’t judge Isabel too harshly. There’s obviously no harm done. Katherine nods to Elsa that she can go with Isabel. The blackberry bushes are close enough to home, hemming the corner of a neighboring street and signaling a sort of suburban cusp, so Elsa will be safe enough. After that, there are only fields.

  “And go no farther than the blackberry bushes, do you hear?” Despite Katherine’s reasoning to herself, there is still effort in her voice.

  “I won’t,” promises Elsa, slipping the last flying saucer into her mouth. She walks with Isabel up the road.

  At the blackberry bushes, Elsa is told by Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby to stay put, to “stay put,” for they had something to talk about together that wasn’t for her ears. Stay put and don’t move and they will be back in a minute, they say.

  So Elsa sits and waits among the blackberry bushes. She looks through the small gap in the growth that is intertwined with woody hawthorn. She watches the little river that runs through the blackberry bushes and on to—somewhere. On the other side of the river, the ground opens out into a grassy meadow where flowers grow—some nicotiana, some night-scented stock. In the river’s bed, soft-mossed boulders sit, their surfaces scarred where fallen twigs and small stones have swirled over them. Other boulders, out of the river’s reach, have been etched into by pilgrim lovers who, while swiftly carving a heart or the curve of an initial, have been discovered and have then fled, leaving behind them their lovers’ stone chapter. An empty glass bottle hugs the farther bank, its insides stained with a skin of algae. A plastic bag, knotted and bloated, is caught in the river on a fallen branch.

  Elsa wonders where Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby have gone. For a few moments, she indulges in her favorite daydream, where she can go into McGovern’s shop and take as many sweets as she wants to, all for free.

  Above her head, blackberries, like clusters of swollen bruises, hang from the angular, fibrous stems of the brambles. The stems are streaked with an inflamed red and pulse deep pink at the point where their sharp thorns sprout. Dust has settled on the fruit, stirred up by a steady, if modest, flow of traffic from the adjacent main road, and has covered the druplets in an unappetizing grainy film.

  The bush shudders and a loose blackberry falls on Elsa’s head like a tiny baptism. So the girls have come back—Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby. They have come back with thin smiles on their faces. They’re going to play a dare game, they say, and Elsa says okay. Karen can go first, Isabel says. “Karen, we dare you to call your mummy a bitch.” They huddle under the blackberry bushes together and Karen Kirby calls her mummy a bitch, and Isabel and Julie Driver laugh. Elsa laughs, too, even though she doesn’t really want to, because that isn’t a very nice thing to say. And then it’s Julie Driver’s turn and Isabel says that Julie Driver is to throw a stone at a passing car. And Elsa asks, “Isn’t that dangerous?” and Isabel says, “Well . . .” And Julie Driver scoots out from under the blackberry bushes and quick as anything goes to the edge of the road and lifts a stone. Isabel, Karen Kirby, and Elsa watch from the bushes. Then a car comes along and Julie Driver throws her stone and it hits the wheel of the car, but nobody in the car seems to notice. Isabel says that it’s her turn, and Karen Kirby and Julie Driver start to laugh and Julie Driver says, “Isabel, you have to show your knickers to a passing car,” and Isabel has a strange look on her face, as though she is surprised and, then again, not surprised. So when the next car comes along Isabel, lifts her blue gingham dress and shows her knickers, but the woman on the passenger side of the car just looks at Isabel and looks away again, and the expression on her face doesn’t change at all, as if she doesn’t really care one way or the other if Isabel lifts up her blue gingham dress and shows her knickers. And then the car is gone and all three of the girls, Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby, turn to Elsa and say that it is her turn. And they all have those thin smiles on their faces again. And Isabel says, “I dare you to go over to the house across the road and show your knickers to the blind man.” And Elsa can feel her throat get tight almost immediately and she says, “No, I won’t.” And Julie Driver says, “You have to; we all did our dare.” And Elsa says again, “No, I won’t,” and Isabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby all look at one another and smile. Elsa says that their dares were easy and to give her one of their dares, and Karen says that Elsa has to do the one she is given and she has to hurry up, or else they will have to punish her. And Elsa can feel her face getting hot and a heat rising up in her stomach, as if there is a red knot there, and yet she is shaking as though she is cold. And she doesn’t know if she is hot or cold and she feels as though she is going to cry and can feel the huge wet beads well up in her eyes and she needs to swallow, and she says, “Please,” but very quietly this time, because the thought of the blind man frightens Elsa, frightens her so much. Elsa is sure that if she walks through the always-open front door of his house and walks as quietly as she possibly can to stand in front of him and show him her knickers, the blind man will see her and choose her and grab her and push her head into the fire. The blind man waiting for her and somehow seeing her and somehow seeing her knickers and grabbing her head and pushing it into the fire.

  Just then, I
sabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby move toward Elsa and say that they are going to catch her and hold her and drag her over to the blind man, because they all did their dares and Elsa has to, and they seem to be still laughing, even though they are serious. And Elsa can feel her heart beating hard and her head tight and the hotness in her getting hotter and she wants to cry really loudly and she just can’t stop herself from saying it. She says, “Let me call my mummy a bitch instead, because she is,” and so she says it, says, “My mummy’s a bitch,” and then she turns and runs. She runs straight into the blackberry bushes and the wild hawthorn and she pushes her way through them, even though the curved thorns scratch and hurt her. She raises her arms to cover her face and keeps going, keeps pushing through the bushes, and she feels the thorns scraping off her skin, but she can’t stop. And she can hear Isabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby calling after her “dirty Fenian Catholic” and laughing their hard laughs. Because she must look silly. It must look all so stupid. The hot panic making Elsa run and her getting caught in the brambles and the whole bush of brambles shaking like something alive and terrified, and Elsa pushing her way, all the way through the blackberry and hawthorn, and not taking one of the little paths that are right there, right beside her, because the thought of the blind man has frightened her so much. And then she gets through the bushes onto the road on the other side, somehow. And she doesn’t even look to see if a car is coming on the road, she just runs onto the road, and a car is coming, and the man in the car blows the horn so loudly, it makes Elsa feel sick, it is so sharp and sudden, and she is shaking and running. She runs all the way to the top of her street. She wants her daddy to come home. She wants her daddy to be home when she gets there. She runs home feeling frightened and sick and feeling stupid for feeling frightened and feeling ashamed of herself.

  8

  October 1949

  THE RAIN HAD FALLEN IN RELENTLESS SHEETS on the Friday night of Carmen, but by morning the air had cleared and the sun had appeared like a large egg in an empty sky. As though rinsed clean, the new day had lived to belie the storm. Only the rushing sounds of the swollen rivers persisted to fill the air.

  The events of the previous evening had left Katherine distraught, but what else could she have done? As much as she felt crushed by her rejection of Tom, she realized on reflection that it had been the right thing to do. Everything else could be forgotten now, everything else, as her father used to say, was water under the bridge. She would apologize to Tom wholeheartedly when she next saw him; she would talk it through with him. It had been wrong of her in her panic to hurt him so badly. She would do whatever it took to make amends, to heal the hurt she had caused him. And she vowed to herself, as she walked, to make every effort to redeem, on her own part, her relationship with George. She would take on any extra work she possibly could in order to pay back the money on the statuette and retrieve her engagement ring. She would rectify her rash decisions. She would bring her life back around to the way it had been. And there was something at least to be grateful for, the fact that George, throughout the whole affair, had been blessedly blind to it. At least there was that. He had remained unaware of how her passions had run amuck, of how she had been foolishly caught up in her own flights of fancy, of how she had been careless. She swallowed hard at this last thought, for her period was still late. No, nothing would come of that; everything would be fine, she reassured herself.

  There was no one in the church hall when she arrived. The onstage curtains were closed. The wooden chairs that had been set out for the audience had yet to be straightened back into their rows and the floor had yet to be swept for the performance that evening. She was suddenly calmed by the quiet atmosphere of the hall and by its familiar dusty smell. She stood for a moment to allow her thoughts to settle, lifting her eyes to take in the details around her. A single sheet of music had been left on one of the stands in the tiny orchestra pit, some of the fabric flowers from the street sellers’ baskets had fallen onto the floor of the hall, and a handkerchief had been left behind on a chair. Feeling a little more at ease with herself, she walked to the door at the side of the stage and slowly climbed the small staircase that led to two narrow dressing rooms on the upper floor.

  The muted strains of conversation, which she became aware of as she approached the ladies’ dressing room, came to a sudden halt as she opened the door. Inside the room, a small group sat huddled together in near darkness. Cissie McGee, three of the Cigarette Factory Girls, Miss Harper, and Rosemary Wylie all lifted their heads and simultaneously turned to Katherine as she stood in the doorway. There was a ring of tension in the air. Rosemary Wylie swung around on her chair and began busily applying blusher to her cheeks, despite only being able to catch a shadowy image of herself in the mirror. Cissie McGee smiled broadly at Katherine but said nothing. The Cigarette Factory Girls stared blankly at one another biting their lips, and Miss Harper stood up briskly, as though she had just thought of something elsewhere in the building that needed her urgent attention.

  “How can you ladies see in here, it’s so dark?” Katherine said, switching on the overhead light. The sudden illumination of the room startled the women. Katherine threw her coat over the back of her chair and placed her handbag beside the little box of makeup on her designated area of the table.

  “All ready for tonight, then?” Cissie McGee said in a rush to her.

  “Well, I will be,” Katherine said.

  “Any alterations needed?” Miss Harper’s voice rose to a tiny squeak.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Katherine said, looking from one face to another.

  “Right, then,” continued Miss Harper, moving toward the door, “I’ll be off to check on the gentlemen.”

  Katherine sat down in front of her wall mirror to apply her makeup. The other women remained silent. She pulled her hair back from her face and tied it neatly with a ribbon. The women were staring at her.

  “Is there anything wrong?” she said finally, perplexed at their behavior.

  Rita, one of the Cigarette Factory Girls, was the first to speak. “You haven’t heard, then?” Rita asked warily.

  “Heard what?” she replied. There was a moment’s silence only, for Rosemary Wylie could not stop herself.

  “They say it was an accident, but that tailor fella, Mr. McKinley—his body was found in the Lagan this morning.” She delivered the news with a keen, rehearsed despair in her voice, but her eyes betrayed a simmering, voyeuristic expectation. Rosemary Wylie stared at Katherine and waited, as though waiting for a sign, any sign at all, to confirm the suspicions that Katherine and Mr. McKinley had been having a liaison. The frantic distraction with which Rosemary Wylie had applied her blusher had given her one big red cheek.

  “Isn’t it shockin’?” Cissie McGee shook her head.

  “I heard it from Miss Harper, who had heard it from Mr. Boyne, who had heard it from the police no less when they banged on his front door in the early hours of this morning! I’m sure the poor man nearly had a heart attack being woken up like that.” Rosemary Wylie was in full flight. “Someone said there was going to be a criminal inquiry—but that means that there must have been foul play of some sort. Why else have a criminal inquiry?”

  “Who told you there was going to be a criminal inquiry, I never heard that,” said Cissie McGee.

  “Why? What did you hear?” said Rosemary Wylie, turning sharply to Cissie McGee.

  “Well, I heard that it was an accident and that he’d slipped off the bank and the Rescue Services found him.”

  “Yes, the Rescue Services did find him, but—” Rosemary Wylie was cut off mid-sentence by Bella, the smallest and youngest of the Cigarette Factory Girls, who opened her mouth for the first time that evening.

  “Is it true that somebody said that they saw him jumping into the river?”

  “Really?” Rosemary Wylie swung around in her chair to face Bella.

  Rita joined in, her eyes widening. “That would mean suicide, then.”<
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  “I thought someone had heard a distress call from the river, so why would there have been a distress call if it was suicide?” Margaret, the third Cigarette Factory Girl, chipped in.

  “I never heard that,” said Rosemary Wylie, miffed that Margaret might have heard something she hadn’t.

  “I still don’t think it was foul play,” said Cissie McGee.

  “But no one saw it happen, so how can you be sure?” said Rita.

  “And why would anyone do something to someone like him?” said Margaret sadly.

  “Well, when the Rescue Services found him, he was already dead, so he couldn’t tell them anything,” added Bella.

  They all looked at Bella.

  Then a knock came at the dressing room door.

  “Yes?” Rosemary Wylie lifted her voice proprietorially.

  The door opened and Charlie Copeland poked his head in. “Any of yous ladies have an eye pencil I could borrow?”

  Rosemary Wylie tutted as though she were addressing a naughty child. “Charlie, you’ll have to get one of your own.” She handed him her eyebrow pencil. “And bring it back straight away!”

  Charlie hovered at the doorway. “I heard the news about Tom McKinley. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Yes, it’s awful,” drawled Rita.

  “But what I can’t understand is why was he walking by the river last night when the weather was so bad?” Cissie McGee checked her watch as she spoke.

  “There’s lots of things I can’t understand,” muttered Rosemary Wylie, throwing a glance over Katherine’s costume, which still hung on the rail.

  Both Rita and Bella caught Rosemary Wylie’s expression but said nothing.

  “Treacherous,” said Charlie Copeland, “I never saw rain like it, and that river must have been freezing—you wouldn’t have stood a chance—and that wind was howling like a song.”