The China Factory (4 page)

After the dinner her father and brother go back out to the sheep and she walks around the back of the house. There are a few puffy clouds at the far end of the sky. The afternoon is very still, and the day seems long. She goes back inside, to the sitting room and sits at the piano. The room is full of sunlight. She practises her scales three times, and the arpeggios three times, and then the piece from her exam book three times, too. When she is finished she opens the sideboard and takes out the wedding album. Her father and mother are about to walk down the aisle. She knows their whole story—how they met, their wedding, their honeymoon. She has asked her mother many times. She has read, too, the little piece clipped from the local newspaper. Her mother's dress was embroidered French brocade, ballet length. She carried a bouquet of pink carnations and maidenhead fern. There were seventy guests at the wedding breakfast. The happy couple toured the south of Ireland on their honeymoon.

She turns the pages slowly, searching their faces. Their shyness almost makes her cry. And knowing that their wedding day is over, over and gone forever, and they will never be this happy again. There is a photograph taken on the honeymoon at the back of the album. They are standing at the bonnet of a black car, smiling. The lakes of Killarney are behind them. Her mother is wearing a white sleeveless blouse and her Dorene skirt, the pale grey wool skirt that hangs under plastic in her wardrobe. It is the most beautiful skirt,
with green and pink lines, the same bright pink as a stick of rock. Sometimes when they are going on a day out to the seaside she runs into her mother's room and tells her to put it on. She thinks if her mother wears the Dorene skirt she might forget all about the work and the arguments and the five kids, and she and her father might be in love again, and happy. She gazes at their faces in the honeymoon photograph. They do not know what is ahead of them. If they knew what was ahead of them they might never have left the lakes of Killarney.

She hears her father's voice and looks out the window. A lamb has escaped through the gate and her brother runs after it and scoops it up. She puts the wedding album away and goes to the record player and puts on a John Denver record. His photograph is on the cover. She sits back on the couch and he starts to sing. Rocky Mountain High. Sunshine on my Shoulders. She thinks of her father out in the fields all summer long. Sounds from the kitchen drift down the hall: the clatter of delft, the radio, her mother's voice. She gets up and sits at the piano and places her fingers on the keys. She hears the back door close, and footsteps coming around the gable end. She plays high C. Her mother is crossing the yard. She plays each note,
C, B, A, C, B, A
and hums. She feels the sun on her mother's face. She closes her eyes.
You fill up my senses
.

In the late afternoon her mother drives her and her sister to town for their weekly music lesson. Did ye practise yere piano pieces? her mother asks. Yes, Mammy, she says. Her sister has her knees up on the back of the seat and hardly answers.

She goes in first for her music lesson, and her mother and sister walk down the street to the supermarket. Mrs Walsh, her teacher, is strict but every week she praises her. Good girl, she says when she plays her scales. Mr Walsh enters and sets down a tray with a cup and saucer, a tiny jug of milk, a plate with French toast and a pot of tea, kept warm under a tea cosy. It smells delicious and the crunch
of the French toast makes her mouth water. The room is very warm. Mrs Walsh is sitting so close to her she can hear her swallowing. She follows the sound of the tea and toast travelling down into Mrs Walsh's stomach and the click of the knife and fork on the plate and the cup touching down on the saucer, and when she starts playing her exam piece she cannot bring her mind back, and her fingers trip each other and she makes mistakes on nearly every line.

Then it is her sister's turn. She and her mother sit under a tree in the church grounds, and wait. Her mother takes off her sandals. The air is heavy and silent, as if there is something between them, waiting to be said. Her mouth goes dry. Suddenly she knows what it is. She has been waiting for it for weeks. Her mother is sick. One morning a month ago, she woke up early and walked along the landing to the bathroom, very sleepy. Her mother was walking ahead of her and did not hear her coming behind. Her mother's feet were bare. Her nightdress came to her knees. And then she saw the blood, bright and fresh, at the back of her mother's nightdress. She froze. Her mother kept on going and turned into the bathroom.

An old lady walks by and smiles at them and enters the church. Her mother is leaning against the tree. She watches her closely, afraid that any minute now she will clear her throat and start to speak the dreadful news. But her mother just tilts her head back and closes her eyes. She wonders if cancer makes you tired. That day of the bleeding her mother was pale and quiet. She watched her all the time; she followed her around the kitchen and outside for turf. That night she could not sleep. She lay listening to the sounds of the house and praying for her mother and waiting for morning to come. In the dark she remembered all the things her mother had ever told her. She imagined the small girl her mother was, and the dining-room table set for the funeral meal and the bird flying out the window with the ivy in its beak. She doesn't know how anyone could eat a meal after burying a mother.

Her sister crosses the street after her music lesson. Her mother has dropped off to sleep against the tree. If her mother has cancer and if she dies, then they will be the same—they will both have had a dead mother. She and her sister rouse her mother now. She hops up quickly, her eyes bright, and she looks strong again. Her legs are strong. Her voice is strong. On the way back to the car they buy three Super Split ice creams and on the drive home they are quiet and content, concentrating on the ice creams. She tries to make hers last, but she keeps looking over at her mother and she licks too hard and too fast. Her mother is talking about what has to be done when they get home. She thinks the danger has passed and that her mother might be okay after all. If her mother is okay she will thank God for the rest of her life.

Late in the evening she finds her brother sitting on the wall of the pen. Captain is lying at the edge of the yard, his head resting on his paws, his eyes following her. She can hear the engine of a tractor out on the main road. The day's work is done, and her sisters and small brother are inside, playing, and her father is drifting around the farm—closing gates, tidying the shed, folding old fertiliser bags.

—What happened? she asks her brother. The pen is filthy and wet from the sheep dirt, but it is not that. Where did all the blood come from? she asks. What were ye doing?

—Squeezing the lambs, he says.

—What's that? she asks, pointing to the corner. There is a heap of blood and guts in the dirt, and little circles of grey wool. They are like woollen hats for tiny dolls.

—That's where he cut them underneath with the penknife. He cut them and squeezed out the little yokes. He had to pull out the guts with the pinchers.

She cannot look at him. One day he hurt himself on the bar of his bicycle on the way home from school. Did you hurt yourself underneath? her grandmother asked him when they got home. He
couldn't talk with the pain. She remembers when her mother used to bath herself and her brother together on Saturday nights. She knows that the underneath in boys is soft and easily hurt.

She is scraping the sole of her sandal on the edge of a brick. She is afraid to look, but still she turns her head a little towards the corner. The flies are swarming around. The guts are like short fat worms, creamy-pink and shiny, with little veins all over them. There are dozens of small pale balls, like raw meat, among them. And the little wool caps. She presses her hand on her belly button and for a second she cannot breathe.

—They have to be castrated, her brother says, so they won't grow into rams.

She is running down the road to the Well Field, Captain running beside her. She stands outside, looking through the rungs of the gate. They are all lying down over by the ditch, the lambs pressed against their mothers' bodies. She is thinking of their underneaths, open and sore, against the ground. As she watches a lamb rises slowly. The mother rises too and the lamb lowers his head under her, for milk. He pauses and stands there. Then his front legs fold at the knees and he is down again. The mother kneels too and the lamb lets out a thin feeble bleat. She has never heard such a sound.

She finds her mother at the clothesline at the back of the house. The pine trees are leaning over them, making everything darker. As soon as she starts telling her mother, the tears come.

—They have to do it, her mother says. It's the way things are done. She is taking clothes off the line, shirts, pants, towels, and folding them into the laundry basket.

—They weren't dosing them at all this morning, she sobs. You said they were dosing.

Her mother says nothing. She takes the clothes pegs off her father's socks.

—Don't be thinking about it, she says then. Put it out of your mind.

—They shouldn't have cut them like that.

Her mother moves along the line, drags a sheet off roughly, folds it from the corners.

—They're not able to stand up, she says.

—They don't feel anything, they're only animals. Her mother is frowning. She kicks the laundry basket to move it along.

—They're bleeding, she cries. Below in the field now, they're bleeding.

—God Almighty, will you ever stop! Will you? Will you ever just leave me alone?

The sun is setting. The little birds are sleeping in the trees. She stands at the gable end of the house, her head tilted, listening. Now and then she hears a single bleat in the distance. Soon it will be dark and everything will be silent. They will lie huddled against their mothers, all night long. She goes inside. They are all there, in the kitchen. The nine o'clock news is on. There's a big search for a little girl who has gone missing on a bog. There are men out looking for her, beating down the heather with sticks.

She is afraid her heart is turning. And that her mother will know this, and then her mother's heart will turn too. She thinks there is no one in the whole world as lonely as her mother.

THINGS I SEE

Outside my room the wind whistles. It blows down behind our row of houses, past all the bedroom windows and when I try to imagine the other bedrooms and the other husbands and wives inside, I hear my own husband moving about downstairs. He will have finished reading the paper by now and broken up the chunks of coal in the grate. Then he will carry the tray into the kitchen, carefully, with the newspaper folded under his arm. He will wash the mugs and leave them to drain; he will flip up the blind so that the kitchen will be bright in the morning. Finally, he will flick off the socket switches and pick up his bundle of keys. Occasionally, just, he pauses and makes himself a pot of tea to have at the kitchen table, the house silent around him. I know the way he sits, his long legs off to the side, the paper propped against the teapot, or staring into the corner near the back door, pensive. He drinks his tea in large mouthfuls and gives the mug a discreet little lick, a flick of the tongue, to prevent a drip. When I hear his chair scrape the tiles I switch off my lamp and turn over. Don is predictable and safe. Tonight he is making himself that last pot of tea.

There are nights when I want to go down and shadow him and stand behind his chair and touch his shoulder. My pale arms would encircle his neck and I would lean down so that our faces touch. Some nights between waking and sleeping I imagine that I do this
but I stand and watch him from the kitchen door and I am aware only of the cold tiles under my bare feet. There is something severe and imperious in Don's bearing that makes me resist. He has a straight back and square shoulders and black black hair. His skin is smooth and clear, without blemish, as if he has many layers of perfect epidermii. Beside him, with my pale skin and fair hair, I am like an insignificant underground animal, looking out at him through weak eyes.

Lucy, my sister, is staying with us for a week. She is sleeping in the next room and when she tosses I hear the headboard knock against the wall. I get up and stand at the window. The light from the kitchen illuminates the back garden and the gravel path down to the shed. When I am away from this house I have to let my mind spill over into this room before I can sleep. I have to reconstruct it in the strange darkness of another room before I can surrender. Its window bears on the old fir trees looming tall and dark beyond the back wall. There is the house and these trees and a patch of sky above and these are my borders. They pen me in and I like this. I cannot bear large vistas, long perspectives, lengthy hopes. When we first came here Don wanted us to take the front room; it is west-facing and sunny and looks onto the street. He likes to hear the sounds of the neighbourhood; he likes to know there are lives going on around us. Some nights he sleeps out there. This evening he told me I was intolerant.

Tonight I long to be alone. I would walk around the carpeted rooms upstairs, straightening curtains, folding clothes, arranging things. I would lie on the bed and inhale Don's scent on the pillow and this contact, this proximity to him, would be enough to make me nervous and excitable, too hopeful. Sometimes when Don and Robin are out and I am alone in the house I am prone to elation, swept up in some vague contentment at the near memory of them.

I let myself linger in their afterglow, and then something—a knock on the door, a news item on the TV, the gas boiler firing up outside—will shatter it all. Lately I have become concerned for our future. It is not the fact of growing old, but of growing different. Don gets impatient if I say these things and I see his face change and I know he is thinking, For God's sake, woman, pull yourself together.

I go into the bathroom and the light stings my eyes. I splash water on my face. He will hear my movements now. I rub on cream and massage the skin around my eyes and cheek bones. My eyes are blue, like Lucy's. There are four girls in my family and we all have blue eyes. I go out on the landing and lean over the banisters and check the line of light under the kitchen door. I pause outside Lucy's door. I imagine her under the bedclothes, the sheet draped over her shoulders, her hair spilling onto the pillow. Lucy is a musician; she plays the cello in an orchestra and this evening she played a Romanian folk dance in our living room. Robin was in her jammies, ready for bed and afterwards she picked up Lucy's bow. Lucy let her turn it over carefully and explained about horsehair and rosin and how string instruments make music and she showed her how to pluck a string. Then she whisked her up into her arms and nuzzled her and breathed in my daughter's apple-scented hair.