Mary Costello: The China Factory

We walked down the path and the sunlight fell through the trees onto my head. I thought of the lines of a poem I had learnt in school… Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. But I remembered it now as Dapple-dawn-drawn light , because the light flowing through the branches touched me and enveloped me in a new and strange way, as if I were encountering trees and leaves and light for the very first time. I thought of that poem and all the poems in my book, and felt the pull of all the books that would cross my path if I went to college that autumn. I felt a sudden calm, a sense of promise, and I’d like to have remained there for a little while under those trees.

‘That’s an awful way to live,’ my mother said when we got into the car. ‘The people who went before him would be ashamed.’ She reversed the car and faced it onto the lane. ‘D’you know we’re distant relations?’

I turned to her. ‘How distant?’

‘Oh, second or third cousins — my mother and his mother were second cousins, I think.’

‘Well, B-Baby Face, were they all nice to you in there today?’ Gus asked me one Friday evening as we set off to pick up Martha. His arm was almost touching mine. I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. There were other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.

He had dubbed me Baby Face from the start. Little by little we had grown accustomed to each other, and when we were alone he spoke in a slightly conspiratorial voice.

‘They were,’ I replied. ‘They were grand.’

‘I hope Marion is nice to you.’

‘She is. She’s very nice.’

And then my heart sank and I reddened. One day under the trees the factory girls had quizzed me about where I was from and what school I’d gone to and if I had a boyfriend. They were all from the city. Then Marion said. ‘You get a lift with that Gus fella, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘Jesus. You’re some girl! And you don’t mind sitting there beside him in the car?’

I shook my head and felt all their eyes on me.

‘How d’you stick it — the BO? I’d say that fella never took a bath in his whole born life. Every single girl that ever came into the place here was afraid to go near him, d’you know that? He’s like… something out of a zoo!’

She kept looking at me. ‘They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?’

My heart took fright. ‘I don’t know. Are they?’

She tilted her head. ‘Oh, you get pockets of it everywhere, indeed,’ she said, and for a second she had a soft look and I thought I was safe. But then she said ‘We had a guy here a few years ago. He was a porter up at the Visitors’ Centre for a while. Came from your part of the country too — he knew Gus. They used to go up to Coen’s at lunchtime every day and knock back a few. He got shown the door eventually because you couldn’t have that kind of thing — the smell of drink — you couldn’t have that kind of thing and the tourists walkin’ in the door past him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Seanie Ryan… that was the porter. D’you know him?’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t know any Seanie Ryan.’

‘Anyway, on our staff night out that Christmas he told me a story. He was well jarred but I believed him. He said when he was young he knew Gus’s father, and that he was an alko too and spent his whole life drinking and fighting. I said to Seanie you’d never guess from Gus, would you!’ The others laughed. I wanted to say that Gus doesn’t fight.

‘Anyway this guy Seanie tells me this story… he says that Gus’s father himself used to tell it in the pub… It was a summer years ago and your man — Gus’s father — was in the bog, cuttin’ turf, and it was an awful hot day and of course your man got thirsty, and he set off across the bog in the direction of the nearest pub, two or three miles away. And when he got there he told the barman how a terrible thirst had come on him in the bog. “So I tied the young fella to the cart,” he said, “and headed off walking…” And he did, too, Seanie said, he did, too! He tied the son to the cart and left him there all day in the sun. And that was Gus! Gus was the son!’

I had grown used to seeing him cross the factory floor, and come to know the intervals of his crossings. In the first weeks I timed my own little trips to the sink so that our paths might cross and I might hear a familiar voice from my own country. He never spoke, just nodded and turned his eyes down and continued on his way. There was something vague and distant about him inside the factory. Other men would pass with their trolleys or machinery and they’d wink and flirt and say ‘How ya doin’, sweetheart?’ and make me blush. Gus would plough on, lugging his wagon past the sinks and the tables and the kilns, purple-faced and sweating, as if he’d drawn the clay up from the bowels of the earth.

When she finished her story Marion turned to me. ‘He’s an oddity all right… And you’re a great girl to stick that car every day…’ Then she peered at me. ‘You’re not related to him or anything, are you?’

‘No! Jesus, no! No way! Are you mad!’

Angela, lying lazily against a tree, drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. ‘He’s a fuckin’ freak, that Gus, a fuckin’ freak,’ she said.

I watched his large hands and dirty nails on the steering wheel as we set off. His breathing was laboured and I thought any minute now his sweat will come seeping through the jacket and drown the two of us.

‘D’you like the rhododendrons?’ he asked.

I looked out the window as we rolled down the drive. ‘Which ones are rhododendrons?’

‘The pink ones, with the shiny leaves.’

‘Yeah, they’re nice.’

‘They grow wild in some places, people think they’re a scourge.’ After a pause he took a deep breath, and exhaled. ‘It’s like an oven in there… So much for the earth, water, air and fire. There’s not much air in there these days, that’s for sure.’

I gave him a puzzled look. I never minded revealing my ignorance to Gus. His eyelashes were caked with clay and I wondered if, when he blinked, he heard the tiniest sound, like a butterfly might hear from its own flapping wings.

‘Fine bone china,’ he said, ‘made with the four elements…’ He looked at me again, and nodded out the window. ‘That’s what the brochures in there say. Earth, water, air and fire — that’s what goes into the china. Who’d ever have thought it?’ And then he looked out the window ‘The same stuff we’re all m-made of, or so they say… I read once that a man is really only a bag of water.’

‘Will we stop for a mineral?’ he asked after we passed Carnlough Cross. We were miles into the country now, Martha, Gus and I, our own little tribe, regrouped and reunited again.

Every Friday evening we stopped at the Half Way House, ten miles from home. I had not yet started to drink so Gus bought me a 7-Up. Martha got the second round. I did not know what to do, or how to be, or if, in the eyes of Gus and Martha, I had crossed far enough over the threshold into adulthood to buy a round of drinks.

‘James and I are going to Dublin this weekend,’ Martha announced when we were all sitting around the little table in the empty bar.

Gus smiled and nodded at me. ‘Oh, Baby Face, I hope you have a hat!’

I looked from Gus to Martha, lost again. Martha stiffened. ‘We’re going up on business actually. James has to go for work. We’re making a weekend of it.’

Gus looked chastened.

‘D’you go up there often?’ I asked Martha.