The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  He digs a hole in the border. He taps out a young fuchsia from its pot. When he lays eyes on the tender nude roots he feels a small twinge between his shoulder blades. He read once in a science magazine that when a tomato is plucked those in the immediate vicinity secrete certain hormones, like the pheromones of fear released by humans in moments of terror. He tries to hold back these thoughts. Sometimes there is too much to take. He left horticultural college because of this, the thought of it all—nature’s throb, the secret life of plants, of insects, the hum and frequency of life under the surface. He knew that another reality was within his reach. He was afraid it would break through and he might hear it.

  He wheels barrowloads of sand from the front of the house and lays them on the patio, allowing a slight slope towards the garden. He lifts the heavy slabs into place and sets the spirit level on each. The afternoon turns hot and he strips off his sweatshirt.

  Inside the house the phone rings. He wonders what she does all day. She never leaves the house. The garden had been bare and forlorn at the start. She left the design and the plant selection entirely up to him. He had the impression that everything, every thought, cost her great effort. On his second day he stood at the back door, poised to knock with a query about the positioning of the wisteria. The door was ajar and he heard her talking on the phone. ‘I think so, mmm,’ she said, and then in a clear voice, ‘I have the patio man here at last. He came yesterday… Yes, he’s done that… I was watching him just now from upstairs…’

  A while later she brought him out a glass of orange juice.

  ‘Here, take this,’ she said and stepped back. He towered over her. She asked about the plants, their names, out of politeness, he thought. He sensed that she longed for him to leave so she could be alone again.

  After a moment’s silence he nodded towards the garden. ‘It’s a lovely quiet garden you have. When the plants fill out it’ll be very nice.’

  ‘Yes. It will.’

  ‘You could put a bench down in that far corner to catch the sun.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘You could pave the corner first—there’ll be some paving slabs left over.’

  ‘Okay… though I’m not a great one for the outdoors. I don’t much like the sun.’

  She was very still. He looked into her eyes.

  ‘I prefer winter…’ she said. ‘So much is expected of people in summer.’

  He looked down at the top of her head, at her short dark brown hair. The ends curled out at the nape of her neck.

  ‘I’m not much of a green fingers, I’m afraid,’ she said and smiled.

  ‘I can leave you the plan, and gardening books can be very useful.’ He mentioned a title. She went inside for a pen and paper and then stood close to him as he spelled out the author’s name. Her skin was pale. She was his age or a little older, maybe thirty, and uncertain, as if she wasn’t fully sure of her place in that house or garden. As if they weren’t really hers. Her arms were bare; she wore a white sleeveless blouse and jeans. She had a mannerism: when she spoke she raised the back of her hand to shield her eyes, and squinted up at him. But the sun wasn’t in her eyes. Then, aware of the futility of this gesture, she’d quickly avert her hand to push her hair back. Her hands were a burden to her. Now she gripped the pen tightly with her fingers. They both stood there, looking at the page.

  ‘It’s good… very readable,’ he said.

  She nodded and underlined the title. He noticed a tiny mole above her wrist bone.

  ‘It has a good index.’ He felt the silence of the garden close around them.

  She drew lines above and below and around the title, boxing it in. They looked down at her boxed words. Their heads were very close. She raised her eyes to his, and let them linger there. Then she walked away.

  He remembered how in January he had found a lone flower, a tiny purple Vinca, that had survived the winter under old growth. How, when he pushed aside the weeds, it had astonished him.

  The sun is blasting down. He rests for a few minutes. A neighbour’s cat walks along the back wall. He hears the far-off murmur of traffic. Sometimes he thinks of going away. He has friends in New York and Boston, working in banks and IT, painting, decorating, gardening too, and fishing on boats off Cape Cod. He looks up and sees the cat watching him. He could always go west—the land is there, it is his. Lately he’s been dreaming of warm places. In the bookshops he finds pictures of red-roofed houses on wooded hillsides in Tuscany. There are vineyards and wildflowers and bougainvillea that reminds him of the rhododendrons of Mayo. He thinks of working in such a warm lush place, of how almost anything is possible. But then something—the teemingness of it all—returns to him. Too much abundance, he thinks.

  The back door opens and she is standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello… You’re almost finished, I see.’

  ‘Yeah, another hour should do it, then a bit of tidying up.’

  ‘I have to go out.’ He can barely hear her. He takes a step closer.

  ‘Right, okay,’ he says.

  ‘I need to pay you but I may not be back when you’re leaving. Can you…’ She drops something from her hand. She bends slowly and picks up her car keys and as she rises she sways a little.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She takes a step back inside and puts a hand on the counter. He leans into the kitchen. ‘Are you not feeling well?’

  ‘No, I need to…’ He pulls a chair towards her and she sits down.

  ‘Can I call someone, a doctor?’

  ‘I have to get to the hospital.’ She flinches.

  He takes out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll ring an ambulance.’

  ‘No. It would take too long.’

  He helps her into her car, then sits in beside her and reverses out of the driveway. She names the hospital, a large, city-centre maternity hospital. He thinks of stories of babies born en route to hospital. This is different. He turns out of the estate. There are speed ramps and he has to slow. When they join the main road she straightens up and leans her head back. He thinks she has come through the worst.

  ‘Traffic isn’t too bad this time of day,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  A small white dog trots along the footpath.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I’m sorry about this.’

  ‘That’s okay. No worries.’ At a red light a group of teenagers crosses in front of them. The girls have long shiny hair. Halfway across one girl says something, and they all laugh.

  ‘They’re lucky, aren’t they?’ she says. He puts the car in gear and looks at her. Her eyes are green and her hair is tucked behind her ears. Her face is very pale. He glances at her hands.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ he says but he isn’t sure what she means.

  He drives on, stopping and starting in a line of cars. He wonders what lies ahead.

  ‘You’re not from the city,’ she says then.

  ‘No, I’m from Mayo.’

  ‘On the coast?’

  ‘Yeah.’ They are going over the canal bridge now. ‘Do you want me to call someone for you when we get there?’

  ‘Yes… No, it’s okay, actually. Peter, my husband, is in Germany, on business. I called him already. I have a sister in Meath and she’ll come in.’

  They are moving very slowly in the traffic.

  ‘Will you go back to Mayo?’ she asks. Her face is tilted towards him, calm, serene. He feels himself within her orbit.

  ‘Yes, I think so. I might build a house there.’

  ‘Beside the sea?’

  He nods. ‘On a hill. Looking out to sea.’

  ‘Oh,’ she whispers. She is silent then. Some minutes pass. She has forgotten him. He fears she will fade out and he will lose her.

  ‘Tell me about the place you come from,’ she says then.

  He shrugs, reluctant.

  She lifts her eyes to his face. ‘Please.’

  ‘Well, it g
ets a lot of rain, like everywhere in the west. The roads are bad. The land is poor. But… you get used to all that because it’s home, I suppose. I don’t know… I only think about my own place, the villages and the towns—Lecanvey and Murrisk and Louisburgh. The Atlantic is always there, pounding away, and the mountains too, Croagh Patrick and Mweelrea, half-hidden in cloud or mist most of the time, but you’re always aware of them. And the way people turn to them every day—they don’t even know they’re doing it. They look out to sea first and then up to the mountain… Sometimes I walk halfway up Croagh Patrick and stand and look out. Then these big clouds come rolling in from the sea and everything changes. You don’t know where you are. And the wind—Jesus, it would lift you… On a clear day you can see way out, all the islands in Clew Bay, and Clare Island too. My mother came from Clare Island, she’s an island woman…’

  He pauses. Her eyes are still on him.

  ‘There’s a story she tells,’ he says, ‘a true story, something that happened in the late eighteen hundreds, I think. It happened on Achill Island… The local people were out working—whole families—in the fields. There was a baby wrapped up asleep in the heather while the mother worked. This huge sea eagle with a seven-foot wingspan flew in, plucked up the sleeping baby in its talons and carried it off out over the sea. All the local men of the island dropped what they were doing and rowed furiously towards Clare Island. The Clare Islanders were alerted too and everyone searched and searched and stretched up into the cliffs and the baby was found, safe and well, asleep in the robber’s nest…’

  They are weaving their way through the narrow streets near the hospital. Something deep, below words, lies between them.

  ‘Do you know my worst fear?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Being alone. Christmases alone by a fire. With maybe a dog or a cat.’ She gives a little laugh. Then she leans forward and looks out and up, as if searching the sky for something.

  He stops at the hospital entrance and switches off the engine.

  ‘They’ll think you’re the father,’ she says.

  Inside she is wheeled away. His final glimpse is of the porter bending down to hear something she’s saying. He stands for a few moments in the corridor, his hands hanging by his side.

  He walks out of the hospital and gets into the car. He sits there, motionless, with fixed eyes. After a while he pulls away and drives south through the city. His heart is pounding. He glances at the bloodstain on the seat beside him. He remembers her hand raised to shield the sun. He sees her now, lying down, turning to face a wall.

  Something had been forming, cell by cell, limb by limb, in the dark of her. Vertebrae, tendon, knucklebone. The iris in an eye. Now, it had fallen away, a subtraction of her being. Fingerprints cut short in the making. He thinks of things he has not thought of before, about women’s lives. It is not the same for men at all. His hands turn the steering wheel. His strength, his maleness, is of no avail.

  He leaves the main road and turns into her estate. He has the feeling that a long time has passed, years even, and that he will find her garden overgrown and a For Sale sign swinging in the wind. He comes to her house and eases the car into the driveway. He switches off the ignition and listens to the engine ticking. She will be stricken, no longer intact. She might need to touch walls when she gets out. She might not trust the ground anymore. She might slide her foot along the pavement, like a blind person. Trying out the world again.

  THIS FALLING SICKNESS

  Ruth had not thought of Matt, her first husband, for some time. Then Matt’s brother, Paul, called to say he was dead. She was lifting Emily into her cot when the phone rang. A drop of water fell on her head and when she looked up a grey stain had formed on the ceiling. It reminded her of the amoeba in her science book years ago.

  ‘Matt’s been killed,’ Paul said.

  When he said that word, killed, for a second Ruth saw him being gunned down in the street. ‘He died in Jordan this morning. In a climbing accident.’

  He had been with his friend Maurice. The family thought she should know.

  ‘Did Maurice die too?’ She was not accustomed to hearing Paul’s voice anymore. She stared at the floor and felt herself folding. She thought Matt was behind her, turning a handle, winding her down.

  She stood at the bedroom window listening to Emily’s wheezing breath and looking down on the garden. The afternoon was grey and very still. In the other house, Matt had laid a gravel path down to the garden shed. Some nights now when she was preparing for bed she would hear Matt’s movements below and be surprised by a sudden elation. Then she would catch herself. It was David—David emptying the dishwasher, opening the back door, putting out the bin. But it was Matt she heard, Matt’s step on the stairs, his nighttime movements. As if he had accompanied her into this new marriage. As if he had put his imprint on this new house, this new husband.

  The marriage to Matt had lasted ten years. He was older than her, and ready for children from the start. She had not wanted children or anything that might ration her love or alter her indescribable happiness. On all other things they were at one. When Charlie was born a few years later she found that she’d been wrong—that love does indeed beget love. But Matt had not felt the same—he had felt cast aside. He worked long hours and did as he pleased. Her mother told her this was the way with men and babies. It would change when the child got older.

  Emily’s asthma had become chronic over the winter. Every night her wheeze filled the house and Ruth or David ran up and down the stairs all evening. And yet she slept through the night, this pale compliant child. Charlie had been different—a riotous boy, scarcely sleeping, hyper alert to every sound in the house. She had removed the ticking clock from his room before he was a year old. One Sunday when he was eighteen months, they drove to a restaurant in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Charlie followed everything that moved. He spat his dinner down the front of his red jumper and stepped into the path of waiters and around tables, seeking out the children of other diners. Silently, repeatedly, Ruth or Matt went to retrieve him. When they finished Matt paid the bill and Ruth tried to coax Charlie into his buggy. Then her phone rang. It was her sister Angie in London.

  From the porch of the restaurant she watched them cross the car park. Matt was holding Charlie with one hand and wheeling the buggy with the other. Every now and then a car whizzed by on the road outside. Matt bent down to fix Charlie’s shoe and she saw the pale curls on the back of the child’s head rise in the wind. She stepped outside and began the walk to the car. Something was different, something was halted or hovering in the air. On the phone Angie told her she needed to live a little. Matt let Charlie’s hand go for a second while he collapsed the buggy and opened the boot. The wind gusted and a strand of hair hit her face and she turned back to catch something Angie was saying. When she turned around Matt was running through the entrance. There was a screech of brakes. She squinted at the red bundle that rose into the air. She watched the falling, so much swifter than the rising, and she was struck by the absurd grace of the movement. She thought that from where Matt was standing, he could have reached out and broken the fall.

  Paul called several times during the week with updates on the repatriation of Matt’s remains. ‘The embassy people are working on it. It’s just a matter of waiting now,’ he said.

  ‘What happened? Was it a steep fall?’

  ‘No. Just three rises. They had only started out. He lost his foothold—he wasn’t roped up.’

  She had pictured a great fall, from thousands of feet. From a dazzling white snow field. He had been in thrall to all that, to the colossal silence, to the mysteries of the mountains and their beckoning.

  ‘It was quick,’ Paul said. ‘He wouldn’t have suffered. Maurice had the post-mortem report translated from Arabic today…’ He paused. ‘Internal injuries… Do you want to hear this, Ruth?’

  His legs had not broken—the long muscular legs he’d thrown across her
belly, pinning her down in his sleep, had held firm.

  ‘Are you going out there?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Anna thought I should, but Maurice is going to accompany him home. I’ll be at the airport and drive west with the hearse.’

  At the mention of the hearse she pressed the phone hard against her ear. She had thought he would always exist, and be easily found again. She had not envisaged this. She had not imagined him tumbling from those ancient rocks. She had not foreseen him falling from the sky.

  ‘Ruth,’ Paul said, ‘I know you have your own life now but—’ ‘I’ll come to the funeral,’ she said. Then, ‘Is there anyone… A woman, I mean?’

  ‘No. Not that we know of.’

  She thought of something. ‘Could he have had a heart attack?’

  ‘No. The heart was perfect.’

  It was Paul who had driven them to the cemetery that April morning. She and Matt sat in the back with the white coffin on their laps. A small group of mourners was leaving the cemetery and at the sight of the white coffin a woman clasped the arm of another. Ruth kept looking back at them. Then the priest started up the prayers. She heard a tinkle on the wind and she turned her head and there, in row after row, were hundreds of identical graves, each adorned with wind chimes and toys and trinkets, and for a second her heart rose and she turned to tell Matt. But he was leaning into the grave, unsteady with the weight of the coffin in his hands, and her sister was reading a poem in a voice starting to crack. Ruth saw her mother’s shoes sinking into the clay and then her brother’s startled eyes. The traffic roared just beyond the high wall. Suddenly she was afraid the graves might part, cleave open like the Red Sea and spill out their contents onto the busy road. She closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them her father was leaning against a tree.