The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  Maybe they should have gone to America. Maybe they would have been different people in America. He would not have lingered in fields on summer evenings or stood alone in the shed on winter nights, putting off going inside. He had put it to her once, before the wedding.

  ‘My uncle Johnny is in San Francisco,’ he said. ‘He sent word that one of us lads should go out to him and he’ll sponsor us. He works in the fire department. There’d be a good wage.’

  She thought about it and then frowned. ‘They get earthquakes in California. I’d be afraid. My aunt Molly told me.’

  He had never heard that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’re dangerous.’

  She looked out of the car window where they were sitting after a dance. ‘It would be like eloping. It wouldn’t look good.’

  In the mid-morning Marie calls the surgery and then drives to town to keep the appointment. He walks to the front of the house and down the steps under the arched trellis with the pink roses. There are flowerpots on the windowsills, overflowing with pink and white flowers. He stands and looks at them. Lately, a strangeness has come on him. He sees and hears things that were once beyond him—the buzz of insects, the humming of electric cables, the blood drumming through his head. He gets flashes too—like the foxes under the hill—and one night he had a vision of all the animals he ever reared and sent off for slaughter, all standing before him on an open plain, looking into his eyes. He never tells Marie these things. He would like to, but he is afraid that it is too late. He wishes he had done something for her, some gesture, one big thing. Built her a house, maybe. Or planted an orchard. Or said something, one glorious thing—that her eyes remind him of a wolf’s and he loves wolves because they’re wild and lonesome, or that he is afraid for her all the time now, and himself too, and he cannot bear it when she leaves his side.

  At the front gate he sees Christy Kelly, bucket in hand, crossing the road towards his yard.

  ‘You’re late milking her,’ he calls out, moving towards Christy.

  ‘Ah, I am, I am. Sure it’s only a hobby at this stage. No one inside there’ll touch a drop of it, when it’s not pasteurised.’

  ‘No. We didn’t have it pasteurised years ago and we did all right.’ The white cat comes down the steps and brushes against his legs. He bends down and strokes her. ‘I suppose you can always give it to the cats.’ The cat rolls on her back, exposing herself. He thinks of the little organs inside her belly.

  ‘Christ, no. I can’t abide cats.’

  ‘And what do you do with the milk so—when you have no calves to feed?’

  ‘I fuck it down the drain.’

  He looks up at the sky. In the distance he hears a sheep bleat and all at once he is seized by its sound and last night’s dream returns to him. He is sick in a hospital bed, late at night. The door opens slowly and a little procession of lambs enters and his heart leaps and he is amazed and overjoyed at this miracle, and as he raises himself on his elbow the drip comes loose. The little procession marches to the edge of his bed and the first lamb is about to speak. He looks into the lamb’s eyes and starts to cry. Then Miriam is standing in the doorway, smiling because she has brought all the lambs to visit him, as if they are her children. She is holding a sickly newborn in her arms. She leaves it on the bed beside him, and goes to fix the tubes and when he looks up he sees that it is a nurse, and not Miriam, who has come to fix things. ‘I’ll just pop this back in again…’ she says and with a little flick of her wrist, she inserts the needle into the newborn lamb’s leg.

  ‘Marie feeds a few cats in there every morning,’ he says to Christy when he recovers himself. He gives a little nod in the direction of the white cat at his feet. ‘I think they’re company for her.’

  ‘Christ, she’ll only be drawing them around the place doing that,’ Christy says. ‘They’ll breed like anything.’ He waves his arm to hunt the cat away. ‘The bloody things are a nuisance. I came out from milking the cow a couple of mornings ago and left the bucket on the wall for a minute to wash my hands and when I turned around hadn’t one of them his big head within in it, drinking it? Well, if I had the gun handy I’d have shot the bastard… And that was the second or third time that happened. They’re filthy, you know, they carry every disease known to man.’

  ‘They keep the rats away at least.’

  ‘Ah, they do and they don’t.’

  He walks around the back, the day stretching ahead. He wants something to happen but is afraid of what it might be. At the end of the yard he rests his arms on the top rung of the gate. He fills his pipe with tobacco and lights it and gazes at the cattle and the hills in the distance. They have not seen Miriam in five years. She’s afraid to fly now. He pictures her in Vancouver, with her friends. He draws deeply on his pipe and then bites on the stem and becomes agitated. When she was eighteen they had a falling out. He did not like the lad she was going around with during her first summer home from college. The lad’s father was a drunk and he knew enough about men and human nature to know that the lad, no matter how decent he was in his youth, would turn out like the father. When she skipped down the steps on a summer’s evening and got into the lad’s car and drove off, he couldn’t bear it. He lay awake at night waiting for her key in the door, demented. Marie said to let it go, that it might fizzle out in time. But then, on a night out in a town not far away, he came face to face with the father’s drunken leer. Who’s the big shot now? And then he laughed. Isn’t she the lovely girleen! We might be related yet, Mick.

  The next weekend with her gone off in the lad’s car again, the words boiled up in his brain, the leer, the glass in his hand as he swayed, the coat with the dirty sleeves. In the early hours the front door opened and he jumped out of bed and pounded along the landing and down the stairs. He raised his hand but could not bring it down on her, so he brought his fist down on the kitchen table instead. He was not to darken the door again, he roared. She turned white but he could not stop his pacing, his raging.

  The lad was never mentioned again. She returned, still, at weekends and in the summer—a quieter girl, he thought, because everything has a price. After university she got a job in a city library, and then a few years later she went to Canada.

  The quiet of the day is blown apart by a terrible bang, and he is startled. A flock of starlings rises out of the trees. He walks down the road towards Kelly’s yard, tracking the sound that’s still rolling in waves through the air. He meets Christy walking out of his yard. He is carrying a gun and raises it in salute.

  ‘Christy, are you all right?’

  ‘Never better.’

  ‘I thought I heard a shot.’

  ‘The fuckin’ cat knocked over the bucket of milk this time.’ He nods in satisfaction and walks on. ‘He won’t do it again, the bastard.’

  He crosses Kelly’s yard, past the dairy and the open barn door. In the furthest corner the bucket is lying on its side in a pool of milk. Blobs of dirt float on its surface. He feels a chill on the back of his neck. He looks over the wall into the field. The cat’s corpse is lying on the grass five or six yards away. The head is flattened, the belly open with little twisted ropes of intestines and fur and blood. Flies are starting to swarm. He feels his legs grow weak, and the force of the bullet in his own middle. He moves his gaze to the paws, all four, tender, white. He closes his eyes for a second, lifts his face to the sun, as the bile begins to rise.

  He is sitting on the low wall at the edge of the front lawn, waiting. A white butterfly lands on a flower. He had never noticed butterflies or flowers much before. His shoulders are tired. Out on the main road a heavy truck goes by. He tracks the sound of its engine as it passes the shop, the church, the graveyard. The sky darkens. A cloud gathers directly above him, and seems to hang there for a minute. It starts to mushroom out then. He has the feeling that it will lower itself down over him. His heart thumps faster. He feels some danger close by, as if the cloud has come to pester him or question him, and when he ha
s no answers, it will press down on him and enclose him and smother him. He closes his eyes tight and then, for no reason, he turns his head and there among Marie’s red dahlias is the white butterfly. He watches its wings moving. He feels a little release, as if the cloud is lifting. For a second he is free. He feels some goodness, and that it is coming from the butterfly. He watches it flitting among the flowers. Then his breath catches and he thinks how something of Marie always revives him. He feels himself break. He should have talked to her more. He should have gone inside at night. He should have tried to coax her to California. He thinks of all the blindness he ever had.

  Out on the main road, he hears the familiar sound of the Toyota slowing down. He sits up and waits for the engine to draw nearer, until he sees her head inside the car. She slows at the front gate. A look passes between them. A little piece of him, a lump of flesh or an organ, seems to break off inside and drift away. She drives into the car shed and switches off the ignition.

  *

  Soon she will lead him inside and in the kitchen she will tell him what he already knows. All day long they will move about the house with their separate thoughts. When the light fades they will sit in their chairs by the range. She will prompt him to retell a story from the past, and when he frowns and pauses halfway through she will reach down into his memory and pluck out the name or the date he has forgotten, and they will laugh and almost forget themselves. He will no longer be afraid to say things. When night comes they will lie down and he will tell her that she has never changed and that her blue-grey eyes remind him of a wolf’s. He will tell her that there was always some want in him and he is afraid of almost everything now. He will ask her to send for Miriam. He will remind her that the front of the graveyard gets waterlogged in winter, and to go well back towards the end. Pick a dry grave for me, he will say. Don’t bury me in water.

  ROOM IN HER HEAD

  Romy watched the Americans go down the lane. Bob carried the fishing rods and Susan walked beside him. She wore a yellow T-shirt and sunglasses in her hair. At the end of the lane they turned right onto the road in the direction of the lake, nearly a mile away. Romy looked at the mountains across the way. Just then a cloud covered the sun and shadows darkened the slopes. She saw the tiny figures of sheep grazing on slanted fields and imagined the sound of their faint plucking on the short grass. In winter the cold silver river sliced through the valley and the bare trees were silhouetted against the sky. She liked the stark beauty of winter. She thought about Bob and Susan for a while. Their absence left her feeling momentarily free.

  She stood at the door and squinted into the dark interior. Michael was working on his laptop at the desk with his briefcase on the floor beside him. She wanted to speak, but something in the purposeful arrangement of his body deterred her. She brought a kitchen chair outside and sat against the white cottage wall and began to read.

  Little things disturbed her; the strong sunlight on the page, children’s laughter on the next farm, the ticking of a baler nearby. A blackbird on a branch of the ash tree opened its beak in song. At times all the sounds gathered and melded into one. The sun burned the top of her head and when she touched her hair she thought the hot brittle strands might ignite, and her whole head catch fire. Her novel was set in a frozen northern landscape and the main character an intense silent man who loved his neighbour’s wife. Gradually she forgot herself and was drawn down into the book, into the man’s suffering, into the cold white place, until suddenly it struck again—the gathering, the concordant notes of the baler and the cries of children and birds—and she closed her eyes and she was neither in the frozen north nor in the man’s heart nor there burning up in the sun. She dropped her hand and touched the edge of the chair, relieved that it still contained her.

  The cottage belonged to their American friends. Susan was an artist and professor in a university in the Midwest and Bob was a photojournalist. Romy had met Susan in a Dublin library a few years earlier, when Susan was experiencing a ‘creative crisis’. The American woman had hoped that an intense shift to literature, to the deliberateness of words and language, might help unleash the internal visual images that had backed up in her psyche. She believed the rhythm of words, of poetry especially, would release her, free her of her affliction. This was how Susan spoke. She was ten years older than Romy. Bob was her third husband. She told Romy that she had proposed to him three weeks after they met.

  ‘I popped the question and he looked at me for a moment and then he said, “Oh, I don’t think so, babe… I’d make a bad husband.” “That’s ok,” I told him, “I quite like bad husbands… I’ve had two. They amuse me.”’

  Romy had stared at Susan, taking a moment too long to register the words.

  ‘Rosemary, honey, I’m kidding! That’s a line!’

  Bob was more boy than man, at times sluggish, other times volatile. He had fine Germanic features and blue eyes and straight blond hair. On their first trip to Ireland they found the cottage in the northwest and returned each summer. They converted the outhouses into a studio with white walls and a wooden floor and skylights in the roof. Every morning Susan donned an old shirt, and stood at her easel with her brushes and paint and her music swirling around her, composing and painting the large canvasses that shocked Romy with their derelict beauty. Limestone walls, ancient stone circles, blue-grey mountains and white suns, haunting portals and archways and always some mysterious figure at the edge—human or animal or bird—a lurking presence that made something flip over inside Romy and render her silent.

  The afternoon was warm and still. She moved towards Michael and away from him, repeatedly. She feared the return of the Americans but did not know why. She made coffee and placed a mug at his elbow and then walked to the window.

  ‘I think I’ll go back to work,’ she said.

  He twisted his body towards her. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No, I’m serious.’

  They looked at each other. ‘I knew this would happen,’ he said.

  ‘I have too much time. I don’t need all this time.’

  ‘You did before. You wanted time. That’s what you wanted, you said.’

  ‘That was then.’

  She had thought she would recreate the long mornings of her youth spent in libraries. She thought she might recover something in the poems and novels from those years and take it back out with her, take it home to Michael, to both of them. But the words did not affect her in the way they once had, as if, in the intervening years, she had shed some of her imagination, or access was denied, or there was not enough room in her head for such words any more.

  He turned back to his laptop, lifted the briefcase from the floor and removed some files. She looked out the window. She could not tell him that she was afraid. Lately, she was preoccupied with a feeling of hopes sinking. She woke at night primed for sounds in the dark, for the flapping of a moth’s wings too close to her face or the screech of a late-night siren on the city streets. Her fear was odd and diffuse. She waited to hear her name on Michael’s sleeping breath, or for a word to come to her, or a dream—a sign that the world was all right and it was all in her head. Michael would rise early and shave and head out into the morning and for a moment it seemed that everything was in order, as it should be, as it always had been.

  ‘You could always have a child,’ he said then.

  She almost smiled at the release his words brought, as if they’d been banked up treacherously between them. Outside she heard the blackbird trill, like a plea, Hear me, hear me… over and over. He turned his face to her. ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know. And stop bringing it up slyly, like that.’

  She went back to her chair in the sun. She used to think that a child might return her to poetry. That what the poets had once granted her—those brief encounters with the sublime—a child might too. But she would read a poem and feel the approach of something terrible. Fear and sadness without cause. Still she would keep returning to the poem. And then, one
day, it came to her: a child would do the same. She could not trust herself to love a child without obsession. She might raise a child brimming with fears. She might grow to fear the child itself.

  She felt Michael move about inside. She closed her eyes. It was his name that had first drawn her. It had evoked tenderness in her. She knew of no Michael who was not a good man. In the early days they walked about the city, finding pubs and cafés in whose dark corners they would hunker down. In the evenings he cooked for her and she fell under his spell. She slipped off her sandals and raised her bare feet onto his lap and, still talking, he took them in his hands. His touch, his burn on her, consumed her. After they were married he’d come home from work and they’d open wine and he’d talk of his day, and they’d sit there in glorious union. She could never have too much of him. But then, when the wine wore off, a little fear would steal in and occupy her. She thought she would get all used up, and he would know this. She thought there would never be enough of her for him.

  In the afternoon she sat in the cool bedroom. The cottage had thick white walls and cold slate floors, softened with scatter rugs. His question lingered in her head, and, unexpectedly, a memory pressed in, from a winter’s evening in London a few years before. They had emerged out of the Underground onto the crowded street at Earl’s Court, tired and thoughtful and separate after a day wandering in the city. A mist began to fall, softly, magically, making the orange lights and the whole street opaque. She stopped and gazed up at this strange, vaporous light and when she went to move, a sea of dark faces encircled her. They pressed closer, soundless, menacing. She opened her mouth to say something. She felt a hand rough on her breast. She wheeled around but she was penned in. She saw Michael’s blue rain jacket up ahead. She called his name. The gang pressed tighter. They will kill me, she thought, they will drag me into that alley and rape me and kill me before he has turned around. But then he turned and took in the scene, and, wordlessly, beckoned to her. Come on, come on. She stepped to the right and the pack swarmed with her. Come on, hurry up, his eyes were saying. She stiffened her shoulders and pushed out through the ring of youths and up the street towards him. She thought he would open his arms. What the hell was that? he asked. She looked around for a lamppost, a ledge, a shop window to lean on.