The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  She looked around the bedroom now. If she were ever pregnant he would distance himself from her in public. He would not be proud to declare his paternity, like other men, men who walk beside their slow, swollen wives and lay a hand on the small of their backs, to take the strain.

  Late in the afternoon she strolled down the lane, running her fingers along the frilled edges of ferns. A yellow ESB van passed the gate and stopped a little further on. Four or five young men climbed out and began to unload large spools of cable and equipment from the van and then rolled the cable into a nearby field. She heard a rustling in the bushes, a bird hidden in its depths, and she turned and walked back to her chair and her book. When she looked up a while later an ESB man in a yellow helmet had begun the vertical ascent of a pole. Voices drifted across to her. Her book fell to the ground. Then Michael was beside her. He said, ‘Hi.’ His look held an appeal.

  An engine started up and they turned their heads. The ESB van began to advance slowly on the lane beyond the hedge. A shout went up from the top of the pole. A cable attached to the climber’s safety belt lifted into the air and grew taut. The van moved along, oblivious, dragging the cable until the pole began to lean sideways. Then a shout went up from below and she saw the climber drop, feet first, to the ground. Michael swore and began to run. She followed him down the lane out on to the road. She stepped up on the grass verge. The young men were bent over their fallen friend. They called his name, urgently. Seamus. Their accents were local, the clear clipped sounds of the north. Michael went into the field, looking like a man who could help.

  ‘Don’t move him. Keep talking to him.’ She saw that the men were little more than boys. Their faces were pale and grave. She heard the clang of iron gates and running feet.

  And then, miraculously, the fallen man stirred. The circle of comrades tightened, opened out briefly, then tightened again. She caught a glimpse of his head lifting slowly off the ground, as he emerged out of his strange remote world. His face came into view and raised itself to the sun.

  Bob and Susan brought back trout and cooked it for dinner. They put on music and placed lighted candles on the table and the windowsill. Michael declined the wine, joking that he needed to keep his senses while those around him lost theirs. Outside the light was fading. They talked of travel and holidays and houses. Bob and Susan were hunting for an old brownstone in Chicago. They described exactly the kind they wanted. Romy excused herself and went out to the scullery. She ran the cold tap and stood looking out the window. She remembered the young ESB men’s faces as their friend came to. She thought of them around his hospital bed at that moment, smiling, joking, changed. Saying his name over and over, as if they might glean something in its syllables, some hint of the marvellous.

  Beyond the window a patch of rough ground led down to the sea. She watched lights flickering on the far peninsula. She did not know what she felt. She did not know what was coming. She thought that this couple, Susan and Bob, had somehow, inexplicably, brought misfortune down on top of them. She wanted to return to the way things were before. She crossed the kitchen and when she passed the table they were all laughing. In the bedroom Michael’s shirt hung on the back of a chair. His briefcase stood packed and ready for the return to the city. She stared at the chrome clasps and then crossed the floor and flipped them open. She put a hand inside and urgently searched the slim fabric compartments.

  A month before she had found something. He had been in the shower that day, preparing to leave for a big meeting with a client; he had been tense and harried all morning, liable to err. The briefcase was on the dining room table, packed and ready, then as now. His mobile phone began to ring inside, and, thinking the call vital, she leaned over and popped open the clasps. The phone rang off and she could not explain what had driven her to grope in the dark compartments as if seeking an answer to a question not yet formed. She found a brown envelope, and inside a passport-sized photo. A small boy with dark hair and a solemn face looked out at her. She turned the photo over and on the back, a name and a date, in blue ink: Ross, b. 19 April 2004. From inside the envelope, she drew out an acknowledgement slip with the letterhead of their city lawyer, and three words, handwritten in black: All sorted, Tony.

  When she returned to the table Bob refilled her glass. He got up and announced that he was putting on Schubert. She knew before the approach of the first note that it would arc its way into her and with each successive note there would be an unravelling.

  ‘A man almost died here today,’ she blurted out, and they all turned to her.

  ‘Oh, I knew there was something we had to tell you,’ Michael said, seeking and then holding her look.

  She watched his mouth move as he told the story. He paused every now and then to let her contribute but there was nothing she could add. Afterwards, Susan switched on the lamps. They were talking about European cities then. Bob and Susan argued gently over Venice, he insisting it was a crowded, overrated city for tourists, she pleading its history, its architecture, its light.

  ‘What it had in the past has been lost,’ Bob said. ‘All that literary and artistic weight has pulled it down. Now it’s just a bunch of beautiful empty buildings, gazing at their own reflection in the water.’

  ‘It’s a lovers’ city,’ Susan said, ‘a bit like Paris in that respect. It’s a city one must see with a lover.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Michael said. ‘Romy and I fought all the time in Venice. I couldn’t stand the heat and the crowds and the narrow alleys.’ He met her eyes for an instant.

  ‘We spent a lot of time complaining too, Susan, if I remember correctly,’ Bob said.

  ‘I think maybe the lover should be new,’ Susan continued. ‘You know that early stage when you know very little about each other… and it’s all to play for and you’re in a kind of glow.’

  ‘Go on then,’ Michael said. ‘We’re all ears.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing, really,’ Susan said.

  But he pleaded, mockingly, until she relented.

  ‘It was before I met Bob, of course! Or Duncan! I had just arrived in Paris and I was waiting in line for a phone to try to book a room. There was a guy behind me, an American too, also looking for a hotel room. We got talking. He was twenty-eight, a doctor—handsome—on his first trip to Europe. Well, actually, he was getting over a divorce. Anyway we had no luck with the phone so we went to a small café where we found another phone and we each took turns calling around while the other one stayed with the luggage. Eventually I got a room—one room with three beds—so I took it, and I gave him the option of sharing. So we checked in and then went off to see the city and later we had dinner. And the next day we did the same and we… fell in love, I guess… People fall in love remarkably easily. He was a sweet guy. We were in a beautiful city… he made me feel safe. We were lovers for a week.’

  In the lamplight she had grown seductive, and the story, slipping from her, added a new dimension, made her vulnerable. Her long slender neck reminded Romy of Picasso’s gored horse that they’d seen in Barcelona—the beautiful white horse brought to its knees, the tip of a sword emerging from the ground, poised to pierce the pearl-white neck, spurt blood from the jugular.

  ‘And then?’ Michael asked, ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Oh, we had to say goodbye. He was going on to Rome and I had to return to the States.’

  Nobody spoke for a while.

  ‘I read some research recently,’ Susan said then, ‘that proved men are actually more prone to falling in love at first sight than women.’

  In the candlelight Romy looked across at Michael. His eyes met hers and she felt herself surrender.

  Later on they piled into the car and Michael drove them up the mountains. The road rose and they rounded bends and the headlights shone high in the trees, like searchlights. The radio was on low and a woman sang the blues. After a few minutes, without warning, Michael switched it off.

  ‘Bob, are you drunk yet? Start us off on a song there.’r />
  They laughed and argued and finally hit on a song. Romy looked out the window at the forest. All day long she had coasted on the brink of tears. She looked down to where the trees parted and a river flowed, and for an instant she saw a campfire in the clearing. Men and women and children were laughing and dancing, as if there was music there. The flames licked the trees and shadows leapt on the children’s faces. She pressed her face to the glass. Her heart beat faster. Then the car climbed and rounded a bend and the fire and the dancers disappeared.

  They emerged out of the forest onto a high moonlit road. She felt her mind remote. She thought that by now she would have had the key to him. She would like to be able to say things to him. To be able to say, You are mine. She would like to be a different woman, a strong strident wife, one who would reach into a briefcase and turn her face hard towards her man and say, What’s this, then? She would like, for once, to shock him, shame him, shake that indifferent heart of his.

  He reached across and took her hand. His face was lit by the dashboard. For a second his eyes were desolate. Had he loved that woman, that mother? Had he been wounded? Had he loved enough to wish her, Romy, dead?

  The song ended and they started to descend. Bob asked a question and Michael answered. She listened to his voice. His words trailed out of him with strength and clarity and certainty and instantly it came to her. This is what he had carried for her—this is what he had afforded her. He had gone ahead of her and tested the world. He had verified it for her. Outside, the forest was bearing down on the car. Suddenly she felt doomed and everything run to ruin. Perhaps there is no key, she thought, perhaps there is no key to anyone, not even to ourselves, least of all to ourselves, to our own terrified hearts. The singing started up again and the words swirled around her. She longed to climb down into the forest, and walk in the river and succumb to the sound of water tumbling over ancient stones.

  INSOMNIAC

  It is Saturday evening and below his window Andrew’s two daughters are playing Hospital with their friends. Occasionally he hears the whine of a siren and their pretend voices calling out orders. They rush around the garden tending to patients on trolleys. They race out of the house every day and rush headlong into these other roles.

  His room is small and cramped. He has a large drawing board with compasses and squares and pencils lying in the well at the bottom. It takes up most of the space so that he is forced to the edge. Some nights he comes up here to work and he draws the curtains and switches on a lamp, throwing sharp light on the paper. Outside the street is always quiet, with the neighbours all enclosed behind walls. He sharpens his pencils—he is eager, optimistic, then. He rolls up his sleeves, his head teeming with ideas. Then at the very point of commencement he loses momentum and his plans slip from him and he stands looking down at the paper without a thought.

  He opens the window and leans out to look at the girls. They have the garden hose out and when they see him, Rachel, the eldest, aims the jet of water up at him and they both squeal. He tells her to water the plants in the border. A neighbour up the street is mowing grass, over and back, starting and stopping. He thinks of the tiny spindles of grass flying out from the blades. Rachel is struggling with the hose. She is serious about her chores. He tells her to straighten the twist and when she does so the water shoots out at her sister. He likes to watch them. Sometimes he wishes they would fall over lightly so that he could comfort them. There is always some hesitation in him. Ann is easier with them, she knows what to do. When he drives into the street some evenings she is on the footpath dragging toys and bicycles and children back towards the house.

  Ann comes out of the house now with Ian, fat and placid, in his pushchair. She is going to Saturday evening Mass. She looks up at him and squints. ‘Do you want to come?’

  He makes a doubtful face. ‘What about the girls?’

  ‘They’ll come if you do. We’ll only be half an hour.’

  He shrugs and she says, ‘Okay, Okay.’ He watches her go out the drive and along the footpath. She is tall and slim and wears a green dress with small flowers, and white sandals, and, for a moment, there is nothing in her back that he recognises. She belongs to the street more than to him, to the milling and spilling of children and neighbours and gardens. She slows, checks her watch, then quickens her pace down the street.

  He goes downstairs and takes a can of beer from the fridge and stands drinking it at the kitchen window. She has asked him to mow the grass. He will have to cross the garden and lift out the mower from the shed. He imagines revving it up and turning it onto the lawn, like an assault weapon. Unseen things, worms and snails, will be mown. He remembers the neighbour’s grass and the thought of its dispersal grieves him. He goes into the living room and switches on the television and zaps it to mute. He glances at the clock on the mantelpiece every twenty or thirty seconds. In an hour or two the light will fade. He knows already—it is a feeling he gets—that tonight will be sleepless. It is worse in summer. The stillness of summer nights unnerves him. He fears he will stumble on something. He thinks he could sleep through a storm, that his sleeping self would sense the elements fully at play, fully occupied, leaving him free to fall into deep forgetful sleep. On quiet nights everything is singled out under the moonlight, and he sits ambushed and conspicuous in the middle of it all, and it is this visibility, this awareness, that causes his sleeplessness.

  He lies on the couch and drifts off. He awakes to the sound of Ann’s key in the front door and the girls’ chatter in the hall. She will feed the children and put them to bed and then they will sit side by side on the couch and watch TV and eat supper in silence.

  For over an hour he has lain awake listening to Ann’s breathing. His thoughts are profuse tonight. There is expectation in his body. He gets up and goes into the study. He is reminded of Monday morning, the office, the endless cycle of work and home and long nights. It will go on and on. He goes downstairs to the living room and flicks through the TV channels. He finds a foreign film with subtitles. A man is walking along a beach at dusk. A boy on a horse passes him. The man walks to the end of the beach, then over rocks until he runs out of land.

  He sits back with his arms folded across his chest. He remembers the dead horsefly on the windowsill of his study. He came upon it earlier, its legs in the air, its thin wafery wings lying flat. The heat of the sun will dry its body outright. He thought he could smell its deadness, and the smell of warm dust that never leaves that room. Some nights he thinks it’s his own dust that he smells, that specks of him rest on the shelves and the windowsill and on the spines of books. He thinks that he is atomising particle by particle, and he is getting a preview of his own dissolution each night.

  He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Before it is finished he flicks it into the fireplace and returns to the study. In the rooms around him Ann and the children sleep. He can hardly remember a time before this life, this house, this marriage. They have all toppled in on him. He remembers a moment from school years before. Something funny had made him laugh in science class and he could not stop and the teacher, a young woman named Pearl, grew angrier and angrier. The angrier she grew the more he laughed. And then, without warning, she raised the textbook she was holding and brought it down on his head. Thwack, thwack, thwack. And he laughed on. He looks around the office some days, at his colleagues, searching for telltale signs in them, of some slippage in their lives. There are days when he feels they are all watching him, waiting for the breach. He puts his head in his hands. Lately it has hit him. All new worlds of possibility have closed off, utterly. He fears a loss of faculties. He thinks he has already lost some foresight or insight. He knows it is happening and that he is beginning to shed, and that the dust particles are visible only to him.

  ‘Andrew?’ Ann is standing at the door.

  She sits in the armchair opposite him.

  ‘Why are you up?’ he asks.

  She shrugs and curls her feet up under her. Suddenly he likes having h
er there. A soft hope spreads over him. He has an image of the two of them at the kitchen table, talking, drinking tea, until the sun’s rays break over the back wall.

  ‘You need to see someone,’ she says.

  He shakes his head. ‘More pills, more Prozac—no thanks!’

  ‘You’re worrying too much. Why are you worrying?’ Her voice is full of mercy.

  He looks at her and considers something. ‘You remember Brian Sinnott? From the tennis club?’

  She shakes her head and yawns.

  ‘Pete knew him from way back. We used to play him and his friend sometimes, go for a drink afterwards. He was a bank manager in town. He was a nice guy—is a nice guy, he’s married with a couple of kids. ‘

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He lost his job.’

  ‘God. What happened?’

  ‘Fingers in the till.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘The bank is going to take a case.’

  ‘Jesus… Why do people do that? How old was he? What kind of guy?’

  ‘Dead normal. Mid-forties. Just… flipped.’

  ‘God… his poor wife.’

  The landing light is shining into the room. Her skin is pale. She was always beautiful. He wonders what she thinks about, if she harbours secret thoughts, unspeakable yearnings.