The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  She wrote to him in the fifth month—a letter full of apology and dread and small proffered hopes—and again in the seventh. She thought he would come. In the ninth month she sat her final exams and imagined that he had never got the letters. Her mother came to the city to talk to her. Her friend Kathleen Doran from Monaghan got her through it, and, afterwards when she got a teaching job, Kathleen and Kathleen’s younger sister took turns minding the child.

  It could have gone on like this. She could have lived in the city and raised him, and it would all have come right in the end. But her father fell ill and a job in the local school had her name on it and someone, somewhere—her mother maybe, or an aunt in America—thought that it all fitted, that it all made sense. And she was young and torn with doubt and guilt and duty. And on a wet Belfast evening in November, when he was eighteen months old, she handed the child into the arms of her mother’s cousin, a childless woman in her forties, visiting from Boston. The husband, a tall handsome American, stood guiltily in the background. Legal papers followed a few weeks later. She went back to the flat that evening and cut off her long hair and walked the city streets that December under bright brutal skies, past gardens with bare trees whose beauty almost broke her, past people who gazed at her and could not have known what she knew, or felt what she felt. Her father died two months later and Hughie Sweeney began to walk out with Marie Gallagher and within three months she was back in the stone house set into the hill, the daughter, the teacher, the breadwinner. And that was that.

  *

  Her mother never spoke of it and Manus never knew. She saw the child everywhere—in the small boys who walked through the school door every September; in Manus’s long straight back and serious face, in the elaborate wallpaper with the peacock which she and her mother hung in the sitting room and which would hang there for decades, a constant reminder of the visit to Belfast Zoo one Saturday and the peacock that had duly obliged and unfurled its feathers for the mother and child.

  Once, ten years or so later, she confronted her mother. She remembers the moment: a winter’s evening, Manus sitting at the table reading his library book, her mother sewing a button on a coat, the television on. Manus got up and went outside, the way he did some nights after reading, as if to recover from the contents of his book. Alice had been watching Hawaii Five-O. And Steve McGarrett, as he did every week close to the end, turned to his partner and with a wry contented smile, delivered his catchphrase, ‘Book ‘em, Danno,’ and then turned and skipped down a flight of steps and disappeared off camera. And she saw the child in that instant, as she did every week, after every episode, saw him sitting with a father in a front room with a picture window bearing onto a lawn with sprinklers, and a mother making popcorn in a kitchen with wooden cabinets and a big fridge, and then the child getting up and turning to that father with a broad happy grin, and pointing a finger and calling out ‘Book em, Danno,’ and the two of them tipping and gripping and thumping each other as the credits rolled, all high fives and low slaps, all confidence, all American, and all she ever had to reimagine him, to re-envisage him, to cling to, every single day and night and week of this miserable life.

  ‘Did she ever write?’ she asked her mother that evening.

  ‘Who? Did who ever write?’

  ‘You know well who,’ she said coldly. ‘Was there ever a letter or a card or a photograph?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing? Ever?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  And then out of the blue, years later, a month before her mother died, a visiting American relative sitting in the kitchen one day said ‘Ellen’s son trained as a lawyer, you know. He qualified last year. He’s with a big firm in Boston, I believe.’

  She had been turning towards the sink to fill the kettle and all sounds dissolved behind her and then, to steady herself, she looked up and out and a long slender bird, like a heron, was flying past the window.

  She had packed his things that morning and handed them over as if they had never been hers. She had written a long list of things that he liked and needed—how buttons, tags and cuffs made him itch, how he liked to touch the edge of his serge cotton blanket every day, every night, every moment, and look out the window first thing in the morning to check that the earth was still there—a list written and discarded and rewritten many times because it made her frantic and insane.

  The couple had hired a car and were touring around Ireland. They did not want the pram. They sailed on a liner from Cobh. She thought there might be dolphins for him to watch. She thought of him on the deck of the ship scanning their faces for some trace of her, fingering the wool of his Fair Isle jumper, making concentric circles on his tummy with his index finger, as he looked out from a small, grave face. At the last minute before they left the flat he had pointed to a shiny green apple sitting on the dresser, and later she thought of this and saw significance in it, saw significance in everything. She had taken the apple and placed it in his hand and as they rode in the taxi he bit into it with his small new teeth and left little nibbled marks on the tough skin. Then, as they pulled up at their destination, he looked into her eyes for several seconds and silently, meekly, handed back the apple. This act remained with her forever. At the front door of the flat two nights later, feeling around inside her handbag for her keys, she touched the apple’s cold skin. She unlocked the door and stood under the bare bulb in the kitchen and stared at the apple, at the little bites and teeth marks, and the current ran out of her, and she thought then that she would rather have had her head cut off.

  From the window she can see the car snaking uphill and she breathes deeply and stands ready. The sea is shining in the evening light. She has a clear view of the parish hall and the church and, a little further on, closer to the water, the cemetery. Cars are parked along the road and people in bright summer clothes are moving towards the hall.

  When his children, first one, then two, then four daughters, were born she had thought that when the time came she would not be able to teach them. She remembers a June day, years before, when she brought flowers to her father’s grave and stood there trying to call up some memory of him, distracted by the sun gleaming on stone and sand and by the birds singing—one bird praising the day with the same two notes ch-wut, ch-wut, ch-wut over and over—and then others with their own chorus, chwee, chwee, chwee, and she trying to recall her father but nothing coming except the child, and the birdsong gradually growing louder and shriller as if all the notes were tumbling into disharmony and all the birds into disagreement until she could bear it no longer and ran from the grave.

  But she had scarcely reached the path when there they were—a vision before her, like the holy family—coming over the stile. Hughie, lifting the smaller girl, then the bigger one, and finally, reaching out a hand to Marie, as she twisted her body, swollen with child, through the stile. She was wearing a green summer dress and flat white canvas shoes. Her arms were bare and freckled. The small children and small platitudes saved Alice. And Marie, open and friendly and oblivious, so familiar, so at one with him by her side, that Alice had an image of their married life—of Marie washing and folding his shirts, his socks, his underthings, of nighttime and warm sheets and the smell of their bodies, of whispers, and shared physical things. And then Marie telling her that Imelda would be starting school in September, and then Imelda, with something wriggling in her arms, leaning forward and dropping it. A small black pup came tumbling towards Alice and sniffed her shoes and wagged its tail joyously. Marie smiled and Alice smiled too and looked down, and then he bent down suddenly, fiercely, and scooped up the pup, chastising it, and he cast his eyes briefly, shamefully, on hers. As he withdrew, his arm brushed against the swollen belly, and Marie placed a hand lightly on her stomach and looked up at him, a knowing look, and Alice saw it for what it was, saw what Marie was showing her, what all women in this state proudly, shamelessly, declare to the world: the potency of their men, their private married acts, their fecundity, their triump
h. This is what he has done to me, this big belly. This is his seed he has planted in me. This is his child I am bearing.

  She sits next to the driver as they bump down the lane and onto the main road. As they approach the hall she becomes agitated and asks him to drive on a little. They pass the hall and he turns off left towards the cemetery and the shore. He pulls over at the bridge, and says in a gentle voice that it can be hard, sometimes, to face people. She looks at him for a second, this local man with soft blue eyes, and she is moved with gratitude to him.

  The priest and the principal receive her at the door and she is ushered into the hall where everyone is waiting. They stand and clap and she follows the two men to the top table. The microphone is switched on and the evening is announced. During the meal she nods and smiles and talks to those next to her. She knows all the words and all the answers that are required. She picks up her fork and brings food to her mouth. She feels the blood pulse through her temple. She closes her eyes for a second. Oh, to be far from here.

  The parish committee presents her with a suite of crystal goblets and a wallet of notes and she is lauded for her work and dedication. She is handed the microphone and tremulous words issue from her mouth about the fine people and the beautiful children of the parish. The tables are tidied away and everyone wants to talk to her. She will miss the job, she tells them. It is the truth. She will miss seeing the new batch of infants every September, eager and expectant and glowing. She will miss listening to their first faltering attempts at reading, and watching their tense bunched-up fingers grip a pencil and start to write.

  Grown men and women, whom she cannot place, take her hand and hold it and recount classroom tales that she cannot recall. She is sitting at the top of the hall, as if at an altar, receiving them, and they bow a little, genuflect almost, and then retreat. All evening she has held herself steady, and now, out of the blue, odd thoughts and images begin to encroach. She thinks of the pink hairband lying in the garden, and imagines it being carried there by some nocturnal animal while she slept. She thinks of boats edging out into the great Atlantic swell, nudging over waves in the dark and then anchoring, and the fishermen unspooling nets, with the hum of the ocean and the heavens in their ears. She thinks of a city street far away and houses with wooden porches and dark, damp crawl spaces underneath that would frighten a child. They lean down, these strangers, these overgrown children, and kiss her cheek now as if they know her, as if she is theirs, and as they straighten she looks at their faces, aghast, and for a moment she is far from this place, out in the ocean, cast alongside a big ship among dolphins and screeching gulls and desperate calls and cries and goodbyes. She would like to flee the hall now, or rise up to the rafters, to the dark shadows, to some quiet hiding place in her heart. Give Mammy a birdie, I said that day, and you cackled and lowered your head to mine and we nuzzled noses and I kissed you on the lips and the face and the eyes, my sweet delicious child.

  She makes her way down the hall to the ladies’ toilet at the far end, grateful for the chance to walk, stopping a few times when she is waylaid. Then, as she is about to enter, she feels a light touch on her elbow.

  ‘Alice, how are you?’ She turns and looks up at Hughie Sweeney. He puts out a hand and she stares, shocked, at the hand that takes hers and she cannot wait to snatch it back again. ‘I just wanted to say, good luck, you know, and… well… to wish you all the best.’

  She gathers herself. ‘Oh, thanks, Hughie, thanks, but sure I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I know that, I know that. Still… all the same…’ For a moment she thinks he is going to say something terrible.

  ‘How’re all the family? Imelda and Helen?’ she asks quickly. ‘Their kids must be getting big now. And the twins!’

  It had not been difficult to teach his girls at all. Imelda came in that first morning, the sweetest thing, with his eyes and his earnestness and his anxieties, and then Helen and later the twins, bright and polite and diligent. And one day, when Imelda was twenty and training to be a teacher herself, she stood at Alice’s classroom door to request some book, this beautiful, dark-haired intelligent girl, and Alice thought, You would have found me, you would have come looking, you would have trawled the ends of the earth and found me.

  ‘Oh, aye, Imelda’s eldest is at university now and Helen’s one is—God, I suppose, he’ll be starting soon too. Helen herself gave up work for a few years to mind the smaller ones.’

  ‘Ah, sure it’s hard to do both.’

  ‘Aye, it is.’

  There was a time when she had hardened her heart towards him. When she had walked past him at the school gate or at the church door, with anger and resolve and pride in every stride. And let her back fix him firmly with blame.

  They stand a little awkwardly now.

  ‘Aye, that’s the way,’ he says then. She smiles and makes to move away. ‘Things have changed a lot,’ he continues, a little urgently. ‘You’d have noticed that in the school too.’

  She nods. ‘I did… big changes, indeed, over the years.’

  ‘Aye, for the better too, if you ask me,’ he says and then nods, and two women squeeze past them and when she looks up again, he is still nodding. She is completely arrested by this and recognises in the lined face and the lock of grey hair that has fallen over his forehead the same uncertainty, the hesitancy, the faltering of the eighteen year old on the mountain that day. She stares at him now. In his bleak eyes, in his high furrowed brow she sees, for the first time, something of what he too must have endured at the bottom of the hill all these years—the permanent disquiet, the forfeiture. He had known the child’s name; when it was all over she had written him the name and the destination, and how that name must have threaded its way through him, attaching itself and gnawing into him, so that in moments of anger or anguish—when he raised his voice to Imelda or Helen or to Marie, when he laid a stick on the back of a beast or kicked a stable door—was it to himself the wrath was aimed, to himself and his lonely secret, his awful privation?

  ‘Aye, Alice, things have changed. If things were different… Aye… It’s not the same at all today. The young are right now—they do what they like. They don’t care what anyone else thinks, and they’re right too… They’ll have no regrets then.’

  She is standing in the dark of the kitchen, her handbag dangling from her arm. A light is blinking out on the bay and down below her is a land full of dark shapes. Her heart is racing. She would like to stand at the shore and look into the ocean’s depths and let the waves break over her bare feet and watch them turn and flow back out, to break on other shores. She thinks of her life, her whole existence, as a catastrophe. She drops her arm and the bag slides off and she thinks how everything has sprung from one moment, one deed—the insane beauty and shock of the flesh, the fire of the soul—with consequences that flowed out and touched and ruptured every minute and hour and day of her life ever since. That brought her to her own crime, her own awful act, on a Belfast street, the relinquishment. Greater than all that had gone before or would ever come after. Making her heart grow small, making extinct everything that was essential for a life. Was it all fated, she wonders? Was the desire fated? And the shame? And the crime—was the crime fated, too?

  In the bedroom she switches on the lamp and sits on the edge of the bed. She searches for a word but there is none capable of containing what she feels. She narrows her eyes and a procession of words crosses her mind, like ticker tape, and then she feels its approach, the only word that is ample; it rises out of her in a voice she has never heard in these rooms, an exhalation, an utterance, a cry. John.

  Tears fall on her hands. She hears the faint hiss of the lamp. She looks around at the walls. Eventually her heartbeat slows. There is no repose, there will be no repose, just the long wait in these rooms, and the sea sighing in the distance.

  The author is grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland for its generous support.

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  AS
HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2014 SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2014

  Tess Lohan appears to be a quiet child. But within lies a heart of fire. A fire that will propel her from her native Ireland into the hurly-burly of 1960s New York. In this city she will face the twists of a life graced with great beauty, but forever floating close to hazard. Joyous and heart-breaking, Academy Street journeys through six decades and one incredible story.

  ‘Exceptional’ The Times

  ‘Packed with emotional intensity’ Sunday Times

  ‘With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion’ J.M. Coetzee

  ‘I read this book from cover to cover in one night, unable to stop’ Maggie O’Farrell

  ‘A powerful and emotional novel from one of literature’s finest new voices’ John Boyne

  ‘Brings to mind John Williams’s resurrected masterpiece, Stoner’ Guardian

  £8.99 ISBN 978 1 78211 420 8

  £8.49 EBOOK ISBN 978 1 7821 1419 2

  www.canongate.tv

  1

  IT IS EVENING and the window is open a little. There are voices in the hall, footsteps running up and down the stairs, then along the back corridor towards the kitchen. Now and then Tess hears the crunch of gravel outside, the sound of a bell as a bicycle is laid against the wall. Earlier a car drove up the avenue, into the yard, and horses and traps too, the horses whinnying as they were pulled up. She is sitting on the dining-room floor in her good dress and shoes. The sun is streaming in through the tall windows, the light falling on the floor, the sofa, the marble hearth. She holds her face up to feel its warmth.