The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  ‘We should talk more,’ she says.

  ‘What d’you want to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know… Tell me what you think about. Tell me what you do here at night.’

  He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes.

  ‘I work,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I read.’ He glances at the bookshelf. ‘I walk around the house and check the kids. Some nights I look at you.’ She looks down at her hands. ‘Other nights I leave the house, drive around.’

  ‘You leave the house? At this hour?’

  He nods.

  An upstairs light goes on in the house opposite. He imagines an infant crying.

  ‘One night I drove into town,’ he says. ‘It was a warm night last summer. I was so alert… I felt so alive driving out of the estate… It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning…’ His voice is low. He is remembering the hum of the engine. ‘There were girls in short summer dresses climbing into taxis. I kept driving. The city is different at night, bright, edgy… The buildings are watching… I drove along the south city streets… I was stopped at a red light… I felt something… I turned and this girl in the next lane was staring at me, you know, as if she’d been there all the time. At the next set of lights she was there again, the same stare. So I followed her. We raced each other to the next lights, and the next. She turned onto a side street and pulled up. I got out and the first thing she said was “I knew you’d follow me.” She looked ordinary, in dark clothes. I stood looking down at her. I thought it was a very daring thing she had just done and I said so.’

  He stops talking and looks at Ann. ‘For me too… it was daring.’

  Ann stares at him. Who are you? he thinks. Who are you with that hard face? And then, I don’t care who you are.

  ‘She was a cop, a detective in the Drugs Squad. She asked me into her flat but I didn’t go. I didn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting at a kitchen table under a bright light. So we drove. She moved over and I sat in and drove her car out of the city, through the suburbs.’

  He remembers her sitting in the passenger seat, their bodies almost touching, as if she were a wife beside a husband.

  ‘I remember everything,’ he says ‘—the taxis, the litter on the streets, the closed shutters, and then further out—the road narrowing, the hedgerows, the foothills… before we knew it we were climbing. I said we could go back if she wanted. I didn’t want to frighten her. We skirted a forest… I thought of you and the children asleep here. I thought of the way you sleep, on your back, with your mouth open…

  ‘We pulled over and looked down on the city. I could see the lights on the coast road out to Howth. We got out and walked to the summit. The moon was out. There were old ruins with beer cans and litter strewn on the ground. She said that kids came up there from the city for drug parties. It was strange… so bright and silent and eerie… Beautiful, too.

  ‘I told her stuff, about you and the kids, and work. I don’t know why I told her… except that she was there…’

  He remembers the moment, their perfect stillness. He remembers what he told her. Fears, fantasies, mistakes. She listened, and nodded at times. Her eyes were dead. He talked like it was his last chance at speech, and that she knew this. These nights he thinks of her out there in the city, driving around in her dark clothes and emptied-out eyes.

  ‘She drove the car back down to the city,’ he says. ‘The sky was lightening by then, the streets quieter. She drove past her own street towards the canal and then parked. We walked through a warren of narrow streets to a flats complex. There were old cars and junk lying around. She put on a dark hat—like a beret—and slipped her arm through mine. We went through an archway into an inner yard. There was a clothesline with children’s clothes on it. Half the flats were boarded up, scrawled with graffiti. There was an atmosphere… like we were being watched. We climbed a stairs stinking of urine and there was a pale girl sitting on a step, smoking, strung out. A door opened then into some kind of service area on a landing and this huge unshaven guy with tattoos stood there looking out as we passed. On the third floor she took out a key and let us into a flat.

  ‘She was working. She picked up an envelope from the floor inside the door and went into a back room. She was talking on her phone. When she caught my eye she kicked the door lightly to close it. In the yard below there was a vehicle, like an old milk float from years ago, driving in, and the sun was coming up. I was so weary. I kept thinking, I have to get out of here. I opened the door and hurried down the filthy stairs and through the quiet streets until I came to my car… When I got back here you were still fast asleep.’

  Ann’s face is white. Her chest is rising and falling. ‘Did you kiss her or…?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Did you see her again?’ Her voice is hoarse.

  ‘I saw her on Grafton Street—I think it was her—a few months ago.’

  He stands up. ‘It’s cold… Are you cold?’ he asks. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Patty. Patricia, I suppose.’ He puts a hand out to her.

  She slaps it away. ‘Shit, Andrew, why are you telling me this? What are you doing to us?’

  He feels the breakage in her.

  In a few hours the sky will lighten, the streetlights will fade. He pictures them at the kitchen table.

  ‘When did you grow this cruel?’ She is talking into the dark.

  He wonders what time it is. He thinks of time like a small worm crawling across the earth. He opens his mouth and whispers ‘Go back to bed.’

  THE SEWING ROOM

  Alice sits back and checks the clock. Half past five. She has been sewing all afternoon and she gets up now, goes to the kitchen and makes a pot of tea. She does not eat as there will be a meal later. In her mind she goes over the things she has made ready for the night—dress pressed, shoes polished, handbag and gloves resting on the dressing table. A slight worry persists that the gloves will seem a touch contrived. There will be a parish function later to mark her retirement as a primary schoolteacher. There has never been an occasion in her life in which she has been the centre of attention.

  She finishes her tea and returns to the sewing room. Her dress hangs by the window and she stands to admire it. She is a small neat woman and dresses become her. It is straight and collarless, with three-quarter length tapered sleeves, in a light navy brocade, and it has taken three weeks to complete. It is her own design, simple and understated, and she is grateful for the kindness of navy.

  In the seven years since her brother Manus’s death she has taken to planning, sketching and sometimes creating her own designs. She buys her sketchbooks—with Japanese girls in silk kimonos on the covers—and HB pencils and black ink pens at the stationer’s in Derry that she has frequented for thirty-five years, taking the Lough Swilly bus to the city one Saturday in every month. With her purchases wrapped and a mildly glowing heart she walks down the street and sits in an alcove of a hotel where she orders lunch. She eats slowly, pencil in hand, and dreams up her designs, and can scarcely contain herself until she is back in her sewing room again.

  The room runs the width of the house. She sits at the back window to draw, and sews at the front where the sewing machine is set on a wooden table perpendicular to the window and the inward flow of light. A dark mahogany wardrobe with a long mirror set into its door stands against the wall, bearing down on the room. She gives her designs names; ‘Clara’ is a straight, tailored suit with a short jacket and skirt which she imagines made up in black bouclé wool and jade buttons; ‘New Moon’ is a classic evening gown in midnight blue satin, overlaid with chiffon to create a hint of a shimmer. She imagines them on smart women on New York streets, or on ladies stepping out to the opera on a summer’s evening in Boston.

  She moves into the sewing room late in the evenings in a slightly heightened state of mind. She lays tracing paper on the fabric and marks the measurements. She carefully cuts around it, then takes the fabric onto her lap and tacks the pieces together with la
rge white stitching. She crosses the room to the Singer sewing machine and sews in silence, with lamps on, eschewing the radio programmes of concerts and operas and music-hall melodies that Manus had loved. In this room, the silence has its own notes, plucked from the twilight outside and the stone walls and the murmurs of the sea. In the half light of evening she slips into reverie. Hours pass and she cannot account for them. She works into the night, feeling nothing of her body—not even her tired eyes, or the hands that cut and fold and sew. Then she looks up and out of the window at the moon and remembers herself, and the prospect of stepping out of this room or out of this house, ever, is almost too much to imagine. She thinks that it is only her memory and these nightly recalls that have any substance, and that everything else she has ever done—teaching the school children, caring for her mother, tending to this place or sewing these dresses—counts for almost nothing at all.

  The school’s board of management will send a car to collect her just before eight o’clock. She stands at the front window and surveys the area below. Every night a fishing boat or two traverses the bay and their lights bob and dip on the water, winking up at her on the hill.

  She opens the door and stands in the garden. The smell of July is everywhere—heather, honeysuckle, the scent of yellow furze and the faint promise of night-scented stock. There is a spot down the lane where, year after year, she awaits the appearance of primroses, their pale yellow a salve to the eyes after the bleak winter—always the bleakest of winters here. They spring out of this unlovely ditch and though she knows it is absurd to imagine that a small wild flower might yield up some message, their appearance after such a long time bestows certainty, confirms the existence of real and material things, their constancy, their permanence.

  Her eye is caught by something bright on the grass. It is a child’s pink hairband, made of elasticated cotton, with a sequined butterfly at the centre. Its presence here is a mystery and she is suddenly thrown by it. She glances around. We are always being watched, the nuns said, by God or the angels or the dead. She raises her head. The small uninhabited island far out in the bay reclines like a giant on his back. Down below on the main road the school is part hidden by the hedgerow. Her eyes glide to a snug two-storey house a little further on. Once it was the first place her eyes sought when she opened the front door each morning. The first chimney she fixed upon as she walked down the hill to the school, waiting for the trail of grey smoke to rise into the sky, and know he was up. They were up. I would have knocked down that outhouse at the back, she thinks, if I’d been him, I’d have knocked it down and got a clear view out to sea.

  She switches on the immersion water heater and rearranges the box of face powder, lipstick and perfume bottle on the dressing table. She removes her glasses and her shoes and eases herself down onto the pink eiderdown. Thoughts of the evening ahead unsettle her. Pupils, past and present, the local curate, the principal Con Gallagher, half the parish will be there. There will be a meal—a cold meat salad and desserts—prepared by the ladies of the parish, and then speeches and toasts and finally the presentation. She cannot stand to be looked at. She opens her eyes. This is my place, she thinks—this house, these rooms, contain me. She switches on the lamp by her side. It casts an orange glow on the walls. This had been her parents’ room. She remembers evenings here, looking out the front window. She dates the start of her own conscious life to the moment when she was two, and, bathed in light, she saw for the first time the top of her head in the mirror of the wardrobe door. She tries to reimagine herself at two. She brings her hand to her face and presses on her eyelids, to stem the flow of tears.

  There had been a child. His hair had grown from fair to dark in one year. His ears were small and, she thought then, a little too close to his head. He had learnt to walk at ten months. She’d come home from school through the city streets on winter evenings and the upstairs flat would be warm, with condensation running down the window panes, and Kathleen would hand him to her and his weight would sate the ache in her arms and there was nothing sweeter, ever, in her life after that. When he was born she thought of him as having come out of another realm, uncontaminated, pristine, whole. His eyes turned to the window, like a plant straining towards the light, and she wanted to say no, no, stay pure. She whispered—she dared not say it aloud—my son. She whispered his own name and his father’s name into his ear. She almost forgot to eat. At night he slept beside her in the narrow bed set against the wall. She wanted nothing to divide them. At times she wanted to put him back inside her.

  On Saturdays she walked around the city, pushing him in his pram, fearful of being sighted by the nuns from her school. She went out early to the library and to bookshops and to the Botanic Gardens, and one Saturday morning in spring she took a bus out of Belfast to Strangford Lough. The bus driver helped her with the pram and she held him on her lap for the journey, like any other mother. They passed a fishing-tackle shop on Lower Donegall Street, a strange shop with a dark interior that she walked past every day on her way to school. The surname was written in sturdy red lettering above the door. Sweeney. The sight of this name, with the child sitting there on her lap, gave her a bearing. She bent her head close to the child’s and whispered the two syllables in his ear.

  She was eighteen that summer and home from St Mary’s Training College in Belfast. Neighbours worked together saving hay and turf, bending and sweating and labouring from dawn to dusk, the women returning to the houses at noon to bring out sandwiches and bottles of sweet tea. She worked side by side with Manus. With Hughie Sweeney and his younger brothers, too. Years later she came upon a print in a bookshop—it was a photograph of a young man and woman on a Paris street. The young man looked just like Hughie, shy and clumsy and lost. His tall, thin rangy body in baggy trousers and a pullover, his head lowered a little, and hands like Hughie’s—big rural hands that he never knew what to do with. Hughie’s voice was thick with the local accent and he had a habit of nodding a little too fervently as if he was still greeting the person long after meeting them. When she was alone with him the nod got worse. They started to fall in together at the work and in the comings and goings to the fields. He had a black and white sheepdog, Percy, who followed him everywhere and he told her of a neighbour who had never named his dog but whistled and called out Dog and the dog came, and they both laughed at his story.

  That day in late August when the work was all done, they had gone up the mountain so that Hughie could fish from a small lake high up. He carried a homemade fishing rod and a jar of bait, and she, in her sleeveless dress, tucked a book from her college course under her arm. They walked along a stony lane that wound its way around the back of the mountain. Halfway up Percy stopped and looked back, uncertain, and Hughie told him to go on home. Wild goats perched high up on tiny rocky outcrops and she, afraid of heights, had to look away, for fear she might cause them to topple off. The path narrowed and the overgrown briars caught on her dress and he had to disentangle her. She felt her face flare red when he leaned behind her. At the top the mountain opened out to surprise them—a secret plateau of luxurious grass and heather and bog cotton, high and concealed and embedded into the summit. He told her the name of the place, Áit na hAltaire, the altar place, named after the secret Masses celebrated there in Penal times.

  She would have preferred not to read, to talk instead. She grew hot and tense and could not follow her novel. She brushed off a fly and she saw he was looking at her and her heart rose. She turned back to her book, to its story set in nineteenth-century London society, and on this mountain on this bright day the characters and their lives felt dull and stifling and irritating. She left the book aside and got up and walked off to find a view of the sea, but there was none. The collar of her dress was stiff and hot against her neck. She lifted her hair to cool off. She listened out for birdsong. It is too far up, she thought, birds don’t fly this high. She would have liked to open her arms out wide and run in circles under the sun and call out the name tha
t was coursing through her head all summer. Instead she pulled wisps of bog cotton and rolled them between her fingers and thought of slaves toiling in American cotton fields in the searing sun all day long.

  She knelt down and touched small purple flowers that she had never seen before, and it seemed a shame to pull even one. When she looked up, Hughie’s eyes were on her again and he smiled and something stirred and swelled and dropped inside her. She smiled back and felt suddenly drenched in his smile and in the light and the blueness of sky. She sat back and placed her palms firmly on the heather, to steady herself. He left down his fishing rod and turned to get bait from the jar. She kept her eyes on him, her chest rising and falling, her heart egging her on. She crept over the heather and leaned in and pounced on the rod and made off with it. He jumped up and ran after her, round and round. She moved fast, the rod high over her head, laughing. She ran through the heather and the long grass and around the lake’s edge and then he caught her by the hem of her dress and brought her down. He was lying on top of her, breathless. The heather scratched her upper arms. The laughing stopped. His eyes were hazel, dappled with green. Speckled eyes, you have, like a speckled thrush, she thought. He searched her face, then stroked it with his finger. He lifted her hair and touched her neck and shoulders and she felt every part of her gather and rise to meet his touch. They pressed hard against each other, and his body frightened and delighted her. Her own wanton body ached and opened and every cell in her belly, in her womb, cried out for him and she could not have stopped it, she could not have stopped it.

  Then it was over and he was lying in his white vest and open trousers on top of her. He pulled away but his face had darkened. After he had put on his shirt he looked down and saw that he had buttoned it wrong and a look of unbearable sadness came on him. They did not say anything and he went back to his fishing and she to her book, and she was filled with terror and shame at what had just happened. But then later, as they were leaving, he said, ‘I’m going to get you a pup, for next summer,’ and he took away some of her shame. She would have liked him to hold her hand or kiss her hair, or something, before they went back down the mountain.