The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  THE CHINA FACTORY

  Mary Costello grew up in County Galway. Her collection of short stories, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Her debut novel, Academy Street (2014), was the winner of Irish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. She lives in Dublin.

  Also by Mary Costello

  Academy Street

  THE CHINA

  FACTORY

  MARY

  COSTELLO

  CANONGATE

  Edinburgh · London

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Canongate Books Ltd., 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Mary Costello, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in 2012 by Stinging Fly Press

  The Stinging Fly Press

  PO Box 6016

  Dublin 1

  Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in The Sunday Tribune, The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction and in The Stinging Fly

  The author and Canongate Books gratefully acknowledge the financial support of The Arts Council Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 601 1

  eISBN 978 1 78211 602 8

  Set in Palatino

  Contents

  The China Factory

  You Fill Up My Senses

  Things I See

  The Patio Man

  This Falling Sickness

  Sleeping With A Stranger

  And Who Will Pay Charon?

  The Astral Plane

  Little Disturbances

  Room In Her Head

  Insomniac

  The Sewing Room

  And night by night, down into solitude, the heavy earth falls far from every star.

  We are all falling. This hand’s falling too—all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  THE CHINA FACTORY

  The summer I turned seventeen I worked as a sponger in a china factory. I walked to the end of our road every morning to catch my lift to the city with Gus Meehan, and every evening I came home with a film of fine dust lodged in the pores of my skin. From the back seat I had a view of Gus’s broad shoulders and the china clay caked in the creases of his neck and in his grey hair. The air inside the car smelled of cigarette ash and stale masculine sweat. Gus’s other passenger, Martha Glynn, was a woman in her thirties from his end of the parish, and was engaged to be married to a local man for over twelve years. Martha worked in the office of an electronics factory in the industrial estate. Gus was shy and deferential to everyone but more so to Martha, sitting beside him in her good skirt and white blouse. He had a slight stammer and drew his meaty hands close to him on the steering wheel, as if they might cause offence.

  The spongers’ station was at the lower end of the factory between the moulding area and the kilns, close to the yard entrance. All day long I stood in my white coat at a wooden table, first paring, then dampening and sponging off the symmetry lines that the moulds left on the clay cups. The cups were cool and damp to the touch, and brittle enough to collapse at the slightest pressure. My hands, dipping in water for hours, were pale and crinkled and spotless by evening. All day long the radio churned out the pop hits of that summer and the sun spilled in through skylights and fell in yellow pools on the factory floor. I would sigh and think of home and the farm work and when the thoughts grew lonesome and a small ache began to surface, I would carry my basin over to the big steel sink near the entrance and spill out the cloudy white water. I smiled when I passed the other girls those first days, and longed to speak, but feared that words would betray the yearning for friendship that I felt inside.

  Gus was the only soul I knew in the china factory at the start. We parted in the car park on my first morning and I caught sight of him later on in heavy boots and dirty white overalls, rolled down and knotted at his waist. He lurched in from the yard, leaning forward as he hauled a wagon laden with bags of clay. His face glistened with sweat. When he passed the sinks and the sponging tables, dragging his wagon like a beast of burden, he did not raise his head or look for me. He did not seem to be the same Gus I’d known that morning.

  That summer was hot. The kilns fired all day long, burning the air dry, irritating our skin and leaving us hot and cross and exhausted. Further up the factory the cups and plates and vases were transformed into white glazed china and further along again they were decorated with flowers and Celtic designs and gold-leaf rims. The girls in the art and admin departments floated in and out through a white door at the far end that led to the elegant showrooms, with their high ceilings and antique furniture and chandeliers.

  At lunch time every day we clocked out and walked down the curved driveway and up to the shops at Mervue for Snack bars, Coke, cigarettes. The first few days—before I knew better—I sat alone in the dank basement canteen and bought a 7-Up and ate the sandwich I’d brought from home. The quietness amplified my isolation and after two days the smell of dirty oilcloths drove me outside. I sat under a tree and read a book. The lawn was wide, perfectly mown, with old oak trees along the high wall, and shrubs and flowers in the borders. The driveway curved up from the gate and then split, with one fork leading round the back to the factory and the other to the main house and Visitors’ Centre at the front. The house was Georgian with rows of high paned windows and pillars and granite steps up to the front door. Inside, the hall was carpeted in deep navy blue. Day trippers and coach loads of Americans arrived each day and traipsed through the showrooms in search of dinner services and cake stands and wall plates.

  When the other girls returned from Mervue they dropped onto the grass beside me and lit up their cigarettes. They were older than me, harder, funnier and more robust in their dealings with each other than I was accustomed to.

  ‘I’d never go all the way with Francis,’ Marion said.

  Marion was the senior sponger and the self-appointed leader, the one who complained to the supervisor about the heat or the infrequency of our toilet and cigarette breaks. She was four or five years older than me, shorter, plumper, stronger. She spoke in pronouncements and I saw her future—Francis handing over his pay packet on Friday evenings, the two of them rearing decent reliable sons who’d work in the factories, marry young and start the same cycle all over again.

  ‘Jesus, what are you? A nun or something?’ scoffed Angela. Angela was blunt and a little frightening; she would call the men over when they passed at the end of lunch hour and tease them. But Marion was immune to Angela, to all of us. One day she said, ‘If I as much as eat one Rich Tea finger I can feel it going straight to my hips.’ I was lying on the grass watching a jet cross the sky. I thought of the journey of the little biscuit down the short lumpen body to her hips. She lived with her widowed mother and her older sick brother in a terraced house in Bohermore. She was the sole breadwinner. I had known girls like her in school—old beyond their years, tough, proud, cunning, who would hold things together for others, no matter what. She was the kind of girl who wore flesh-coloured tights and pencil skirts but never jeans, and would grow into the kind of woman I never wanted to be.

  Gus lived about three miles from us at home but I had never once spoken to him. I used to see him in his car after Mass on Sundays, waiting for his mother, as my mother steered us kids to our car and my father stood in a huddle of men at the side door of the church. I saw him
in the village, too, at the petrol pump or coming out of the shop with his messages. One evening in May my mother drove me up a dry rutted lane to his house to ask for the lift to the city.

  ‘Tell him it’ll only be for the summer, it’s only a summer job,’ she said as I got out.

  ‘No, I better not,’ I said. ‘Come in with me.’

  We walked up the path under trees, between two strips of overgrown garden. There was a line of smoke coming out the chimney. The two-storey house had once been handsome but the paintwork and masonry were flaking and crumbling and the wood at the base of the front door was rotten. At the side of the house there was a row of slate-roofed barns. An old bicycle lay under a tree and a wooden barrel stood at the gable end of the house to catch water from a downpipe. My mother rapped lightly on the door and then stepped well back. Inside on the windowsill I could see a pile of ancient looking paperbacks, their spines faded from the sun. I tilted my head to read the titles—The Big Sky, The Virginian, Hopalong Cassidy, Riders of the Purple Sage.

  There was a shuffle and the door scraped open. He wore no shoes and his grey woollen jumper was stained. A black and white sheepdog sheltered timidly behind his legs. In the dark interior I saw the white banisters of the stairs. At the sight of us Gus’s eyes grew panicked. He and my mother knew each other and after they had exchanged greetings, she told him what we wanted. I think that he’d have consented to almost anything just to close the door and be left in peace again.

  We walked down the path and the sunlight fell through the trees onto my head. I thought of the lines of a poem I had learnt in school… Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. But I remembered it now as Dapple-dawn-drawn light, because the light flowing through the branches touched me and enveloped me in a new and strange way, as if I were encountering trees and leaves and light for the very first time. I thought of that poem and all the poems in my book, and felt the pull of all the books that would cross my path if I went to college that autumn. I felt a sudden calm, a sense of promise, and I’d like to have remained there for a little while under those trees.

  ‘That’s an awful way to live,’ my mother said when we got into the car. ‘The people who went before him would be ashamed.’ She reversed the car and faced it onto the lane. ‘D’you know we’re distant relations?’

  I turned to her. ‘How distant?’

  ‘Oh, second or third cousins—my mother and his mother were second cousins, I think.’

  ‘Well, B-Baby Face, were they all nice to you in there today?’ Gus asked me one Friday evening as we set off to pick up Martha. His arm was almost touching mine. I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. There were other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.

  He had dubbed me Baby Face from the start. Little by little we had grown accustomed to each other, and when we were alone he spoke in a slightly conspiratorial voice.

  ‘They were,’ I replied. ‘They were grand.’

  ‘I hope Marion is nice to you.’

  ‘She is. She’s very nice.’

  And then my heart sank and I reddened. One day under the trees the factory girls had quizzed me about where I was from and what school I’d gone to and if I had a boyfriend. They were all from the city. Then Marion said. ‘You get a lift with that Gus fella, don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Jesus. You’re some girl! And you don’t mind sitting there beside him in the car?’

  I shook my head and felt all their eyes on me.

  ‘How d’you stick it—the BO? I’d say that fella never took a bath in his whole born life. Every single girl that ever came into the place here was afraid to go near him, d’you know that? He’s like… something out of a zoo!’

  She kept looking at me. ‘They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?’

  My heart took fright. ‘I don’t know. Are they?’

  She tilted her head. ‘Oh, you get pockets of it everywhere, indeed,’ she said, and for a second she had a soft look and I thought I was safe. But then she said ‘We had a guy here a few years ago. He was a porter up at the Visitors’ Centre for a while. Came from your part of the country too—he knew Gus. They used to go up to Coen’s at lunchtime every day and knock back a few. He got shown the door eventually because you couldn’t have that kind of thing—the smell of drink—you couldn’t have that kind of thing and the tourists walkin’ in the door past him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Seanie Ryan… that was the porter. D’you know him?’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t know any Seanie Ryan.’

  ‘Anyway, on our staff night out that Christmas he told me a story. He was well jarred but I believed him. He said when he was young he knew Gus’s father, and that he was an alko too and spent his whole life drinking and fighting. I said to Seanie you’d never guess from Gus, would you!’ The others laughed. I wanted to say that Gus doesn’t fight.

  ‘Anyway this guy Seanie tells me this story… he says that Gus’s father himself used to tell it in the pub… It was a summer years ago and your man—Gus’s father—was in the bog, cuttin’ turf, and it was an awful hot day and of course your man got thirsty, and he set off across the bog in the direction of the nearest pub, two or three miles away. And when he got there he told the barman how a terrible thirst had come on him in the bog. “So I tied the young fella to the cart,” he said, “and headed off walking…” And he did, too, Seanie said, he did, too! He tied the son to the cart and left him there all day in the sun. And that was Gus! Gus was the son!’

  I had grown used to seeing him cross the factory floor, and come to know the intervals of his crossings. In the first weeks I timed my own little trips to the sink so that our paths might cross and I might hear a familiar voice from my own country. He never spoke, just nodded and turned his eyes down and continued on his way. There was something vague and distant about him inside the factory. Other men would pass with their trolleys or machinery and they’d wink and flirt and say ‘How ya doin’, sweetheart?’ and make me blush. Gus would plough on, lugging his wagon past the sinks and the tables and the kilns, purple-faced and sweating, as if he’d drawn the clay up from the bowels of the earth.

  When she finished her story Marion turned to me. ‘He’s an oddity all right… And you’re a great girl to stick that car every day…’ Then she peered at me. ‘You’re not related to him or anything, are you?’

  ‘No! Jesus, no! No way! Are you mad!’

  Angela, lying lazily against a tree, drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. ‘He’s a fuckin’ freak, that Gus, a fuckin’ freak,’ she said.

  I watched his large hands and dirty nails on the steering wheel as we set off. His breathing was laboured and I thought any minute now his sweat will come seeping through the jacket and drown the two of us.

  ‘D’you like the rhododendrons?’ he asked.

  I looked out the window as we rolled down the drive. ‘Which ones are rhododendrons?’

  ‘The pink ones, with the shiny leaves.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re nice.’

  ‘They grow wild in some places, people think they’re a scourge.’ After a pause he took a deep breath, and exhaled. ‘It’s like an oven in there… So much for the earth, water, air and fire. There’s not much air in there these days, that’s for sure.’

  I gave him a puzzled look. I never minded revealing my ignorance to Gus. His eyelashes were caked with clay and I wondered if, when he blinked, he heard the tiniest sound, like a butterfly might hear from its own flapping wings.

  ‘Fine bone china,’ he said, ‘made with the four elements…’ He looked at me again, and nodded out the window. ‘That’s what the brochures in there say. Earth, water, air and fire—that’s what goes into the china. Who’d ever have thought it?’ And then he looked out the window ‘The same stuff we’re all m-made of, or so
they say… I read once that a man is really only a bag of water.’

  ‘Will we stop for a mineral?’ he asked after we passed Carnlough Cross. We were miles into the country now, Martha, Gus and I, our own little tribe, regrouped and reunited again.

  Every Friday evening we stopped at the Half Way House, ten miles from home. I had not yet started to drink so Gus bought me a 7-Up. Martha got the second round. I did not know what to do, or how to be, or if, in the eyes of Gus and Martha, I had crossed far enough over the threshold into adulthood to buy a round of drinks.

  ‘James and I are going to Dublin this weekend,’ Martha announced when we were all sitting around the little table in the empty bar.

  Gus smiled and nodded at me. ‘Oh, Baby Face, I hope you have a hat!’

  I looked from Gus to Martha, lost again. Martha stiffened. ‘We’re going up on business actually. James has to go for work. We’re making a weekend of it.’

  Gus looked chastened.

  ‘D’you go up there often?’ I asked Martha.

  ‘Now and again. We go to a hotel a few times a year.’ And then she forgot herself. ‘I love walking down Grafton Street on Saturday mornings with James. We got the ring in Appleby’s—well, it’s a good while ago now. They bring you into a private room at the back, and they have these lovely velvet tables and armchairs, and dishes with sweets and they serve champagne, and you can take your time choosing.’ Her eyes shone in a way I had not seen before.

  ‘It must be very nice,’ I said, and then nearly gave myself away by saying I’d probably be going to Dublin to college myself soon. I had not told anyone in the china factory of my intentions. I had been taken on as a bona fide permanent employee. ‘Do you go to Dublin much, Gus?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, only a few times ever, Baby Face—I used to go to Croke Park to an odd hurling match when I was young. The last time I was up there was for a funeral… well, a sort of funeral. There was no coffin and no grave. A first cousin of mine who died in London, and they brought him home in a small pot. Me mother was alive at the time. There was just the Mass, and the pot of ashes was left above on a small table beside the altar.’