Mary Costello - The China Factory

In the nursing home his mother’s mouth was open, like the little beak of a fledgling. Sometimes on his visits a terrified look would cross her face when he entered her room. He said her name, Mother. Her frame was shrunken and the veins and arteries were visible on the undersides of her arms. Her slippers sat neatly on the floor by the radiator. A nurse came and stood beside him and spoke softly. ‘The doctor saw her earlier. Her lungs are not good… he doesn’t think there’s much time left.’ He felt his mother’s hand. When his father lay dying, his hands and feet and nose, the extremities, had grown gradually colder. His mother had kept touching them, as if temperature, and not hours or minutes, was the measure of time. Soon after his death she herself began to fade. She filled the electric kettle with milk and was frightened by rain. She began to sing the songs of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. She remembered what he had just said, but not the thing before. He thought of her brain as being littered with a hail of tiny holes, like the spread of buckshot.

That spring, years ago, he found excuses to revisit the girl in the classroom. He was touched by her youth and her sympathy. He hoarded up thoughts of her and as he drove home, he let them suffuse him. He would remember her little cough, or the way she forgot he was there and absent-mindedly put her head in her hands at her desk. On the final observation day he sat at the back of her class again, drafting his official report. When he looked up, her eyes were on him, unsmiling, looking deeply into him.

At the end of the day, with the pupils dismissed, he invited her to sit.

‘You have a bright future ahead of you,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘This job is temporary. Jobs are scarce. Do you have something else lined up?’

She gave a slight shrug. ‘No, not really. I’m going to Dublin for the summer. A few us are taking a house there, we’re going to try some street theatre.’

He smiled and indicated that she should continue.

‘I don’t know if we’ll even survive. We have high hopes! We’ll probably be forced back into the classroom in September.’ Her eyes were green. Her neck was smooth and white. ‘Long term, though, we’ll probably go to America.’

He cleared his throat, and moved his papers about. ‘Really? To teach?’

She tilted her head a little. ‘Mmm, I don’t know… maybe… I want to go to New York for a while, hang out there, you know, live through four seasons in the city.’ Her eyes were lit up. ‘Anyway if I do go it’ll be with the gang. There’s a community drama programme we’re hoping to get onto. America’s great for that kind of thing. I had a job there last summer. The people are different, they’re very… trusting. I met a poet at a bus stop one day… he talked to me like he knew me my whole life.’

Under the cuffs of her shirt her wrists were white and narrow. He had a glimpse of her future. She would hear the cries of men and children.

‘So you’re off to the Big Apple for a wild time then!’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say “wild”. I don’t even drink.’

‘No?’

‘No. Don’t get me wrong. I used to. I just don’t like what it can do.’

Suddenly he felt reckless. ‘What can it do?’

She blew out slowly and her fringe lifted in the stream of air. ‘Well… I’d be afraid of losing control. I might end up falling down on the street… getting run over by a bus… sleeping with a stranger.’

Down the corridor a door slammed. Then there was silence. He thought she might hear the terrible commotion inside him. He picked up the report and handed it to her. ‘I don’t usually do this,’ he said.

She read the page silently and then left it down in front of him. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a whisper.

He began to tidy his papers. His hands were trembling. He was aware of time slipping violently by.

‘There’s a job coming up in a school not far from here…’ He could not look at her so he leaned down for his bag. ‘I know the principal, he’s a friend… if you were interested…’ He searched for the right words. ‘You’d be a great asset to the school.’

They looked at each other. He saw her absorb the implications of the offer, and then her eyes softened with too much understanding and it was unbearable.

‘Of course, you may not want to stay around,’ he said. ‘From what you’ve said…’

He had almost lost the run of himself. He had become a small raw thing.

‘Well… thank you. But if I do stick with teaching it’ll probably be in Dublin.’

Driving back to the city that evening he grew distraught. Mona would never know the depths of him. He would die a faithful husband. They were bound together by the flesh of three sons and the dread of loneliness. That night he stood before a mirror. He thought he could hear the sound of his pulse fading. Every morning after that, at every daybreak, something slipped away. He drove along city streets in the evenings and stared at the backs of girls and women. Her name, her face, hovered behind his eyes. He went down to the strand on summer nights with the city lights at his back and stripped off and rolled out with the waves. He worked long hours and drove his sons hard at their studies and sports and exhausted everyone around him, and some days Mona turned on him with bitter, baffled eyes and he knew then they had passed some milestone and there was no turning back.

His mother did not open her eyes. He drew the window blind down halfway, and waited. She lay supine before him, the torso, the bones that had borne the freight of her life, sunken in the bed. A girl with a plain wide face carried in a lunch tray and he smiled weakly and shook his head. She returned a few minutes later and, without a word, placed a cup of tea and two biscuits in front of him. This simple act moved him greatly.

In the late afternoon he walked outside and sat on a wooden bench and texted Mona. He dialled his sister’s number and then instantly cancelled it. He wanted the day, and the death if it occurred, to himself. He walked around the back and stood on the edge of the lawn looking down at the Shannon. Pleasure cruisers were tied up at a small marina on the far side. Further along the bank there was a new hotel, like a large white cube. The water was calm; the reeds made the river patient. He leaned against a tree and looked up at the steel railway bridge high above the river. Just then the Dublin train nosed into view and crossed the bridge, and, out of the blue, he remembered Grace again.

He had come upon her, unexpectedly, just three years before, when he had been addressing a teachers’ conference in Maynooth. The crowd was large and during the morning coffee break, he turned to leave his empty cup on the long table and there she stood, no more than four feet away, calmly considering him. They were instantly recognisable to each other. Her hair was longer, darker, with a stripe of grey at the front, like a badger’s. The stripe marked her out as different, changed, afflicted. We are the same now , he thought, you have caught up .

‘I am forty,’ she said, ‘and married.’ She crossed her hands on her lap. A great happiness had entered him the moment she sat into his car. He could not explain the closeness he felt to her. He was driving towards the city, blind, resolute. He thought of all the car journeys, all the years of remembrance. They floated along the quays in the late afternoon sun. He drove into an underground car park and they climbed concrete stairs and when they emerged out onto the street she let him take her hand. They entered a hotel, and up in the room he stood at the window and looked down at the street. Then he turned and crossed the floor and laid his head on her lap. They did not speak. He felt like a man in a novel — silent, obsessed, extreme in his love. He thought of this moment as his last chance, his only chance, and he felt everything — the past, the future — become almost obliterated by it.