Mary Costello: The China Factory

‘Now and again. We go to a hotel a few times a year.’ And then she forgot herself. ‘I love walking down Grafton Street on Saturday mornings with James. We got the ring in Appleby’s — well, it’s a good while ago now. They bring you into a private room at the back, and they have these lovely velvet tables and armchairs, and dishes with sweets and they serve champagne, and you can take your time choosing.’ Her eyes shone in a way I had not seen before.

‘It must be very nice,’ I said, and then nearly gave myself away by saying I’d probably be going to Dublin to college myself soon. I had not told anyone in the china factory of my intentions. I had been taken on as a bona fide permanent employee. ‘Do you go to Dublin much, Gus?’ I asked.

‘Ah, only a few times ever, Baby Face — I used to go to Croke Park to an odd hurling match when I was young. The last time I was up there was for a funeral… well, a sort of funeral. There was no coffin and no grave. A first cousin of mine who died in London, and they brought him home in a small pot. Me mother was alive at the time. There was just the Mass, and the pot of ashes was left above on a small table beside the altar.’

‘I didn’t think the Church allowed cremation back then,’ Martha said.

‘I don’t know now… That was about fifteen years ago.’

We were quiet then. On the wall above the pool table the clock chimed six times. I thought of home and the evening ahead, my mother getting the tea, my father and brothers coming in after baling a field of hay, all of us around the table. I imagined Gus at his own table, bent over his books, straining to catch the last light of evening. I imagined empty bottles thrown out the back, stuffed into fertiliser bags and thrown under a tree. I saw him rising from the table and standing at the back door gazing out across fields or up at the sky.

‘There’s a lot to be said for that cremation business,’ he said in a slow, thoughtful way. ‘I don’t know about being buried. I don’t know if I’d like that. Unless maybe I could have three coffins, like the popes get. To keep the worms out!’ and he turned to me and winked.

‘I’d like to be buried up on the hill in Clonkeen,’ Martha said. You’re getting married, I wanted to tell her, not dying.

I proved to be a prize sponger. Annie, the supervisor, a neat middle-aged woman with glasses, called me Miss Feather Fingers. One afternoon in August she came whizzing towards me with word that I was to go to the Office. The next morning I was seated at a desk at the other end of the factory, with a turntable by my side, learning how to apply gold leaf to the rims of large china plates. The plates were glazed and decorated with blue cornflowers. My hands grew hot and pink and swollen from gripping the narrow brush. The art staff smiled and offered help, but I was confused and out of my depth. I missed the gossip and banter of the spongers and there was no radio to absorb my turbulent thoughts. I struggled with the turntable and with my conscience — I had a heavy heart — my guilt for having accepted this promotion and not revealing the truth about my future plans. I kept looking around me. I did not know how to stop things advancing.

I’d had no sightings of the spongers all morning. I longed for lunch hour when I would sit with them on the lawn and explain everything. I slipped into fantasies of long days in the future among library stacks and the sound of pages turning and my pen racing furiously across white paper. My heart pounded at the thought of it all and I knew then the arc my life would take.

‘Where’s Marion?’ I asked when I joined the girls on the lawn.

No one answered and I felt their disdain. After a moment someone said she wasn’t back from Mervue yet, that she’d gone to the post office. The others ignored me. I said I hated my new job, that the art girls were stuck-up and it was too quiet and boring as hell up there.

‘Huh, the money won’t bore you,’ Angela said.

‘No one said anything about money. I’m only on trial. I might not be kept at all.’

‘Yeah, right!’

In the distance a loudspeaker cracked open the air. The voice crackled indistinctly — some local politician canvassing support, I thought — and it stopped and started and then moved off. I closed my eyes for a moment. I knew I would have to re-earn my place among the girls. An engine roared out on the road. I turned my head. A car with a trailer hitched to the back swung in the gate. It travelled up the drive and then revved and swerved and bumped over the stone kerb onto the grass. Someone said, Jesus, as it came to a stop in the centre of the lawn. The driver’s door swung open and a man hopped out and began to throw lumps of iron from the trailer onto the grass. We stood and stepped forward into the sun.

‘Jesus, that’s Vinnie,’ Angela said.

‘Vinnie? Marion’s brother? What’s he doing here?’ someone asked.

‘Quick. Get Marion. Go on!’

‘She’s not back yet.’

A small crowd began to form. He was thin, with pale skin and jet black hair. He flung the iron heavily onto the grass. I squinted. They were iron sculptures, in human form. I saw a head, a hand, square shoulders, a sea of limbs landing on the grass. Their weight made gashes in the lawn. He stopped then and looked up. His eyes moved slowly along the line until they met mine. He looked directly at me, into me, and said something that I could not hear. Suddenly I felt doomed. I backed up a few steps to the low perimeter wall. He turned and walked to the car, opened the boot and lifted out a shotgun. Small cries went up, and I heard running feet around me. I bent low behind the wall, but my eyes remained rooted to him. He released the bolt and loaded the gun and fired three shots into the air. He circled the car and jumped on the bonnet and surveyed the whole place. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth. ‘Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God, cry mightily unto God, for the Day of Judgement is at Hand…’ He spoke slowly. The porter ran along under the trees, bending low. ‘I hear the sound of the Angel’s trumpet…’ His volume increased. ‘The angel of death will drag your souls from your mouths and will smite your faces… For the seventh seal has been opened by the Lamb of God… and the great harlot has been destroyed… and the beast has been set loose… and the oceans have turned to blood.’

A shot rang out and then another, and he jumped to the ground and fired a volley into the sky. I covered my ears and sank lower. There was silence then. When I looked up he was walking over the windscreen and onto the roof of the car. His steps were delicate, graceful.

‘ And I saw a great white throne, and the earth and the heavens fled away. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened and the dead were judged according to their works… ’

His voice had begun to tremble and I thought: He will cry, and we will be saved. He leapt down and started to reload the gun.

And then I turned my head and saw Gus in his overalls come striding out of the factory yard, with his arms swinging by his side. He stepped onto the grass and crossed the lawn, and, as he drew near, the madman raised his head and smiled. ‘Here come a man, here come a man,’ he called out, and he snapped closed the barrel of the gun and I felt the echo of its chamber inside my head. The madman’s eyes opened wide, and then Gus put his hand on the madman’s shoulder and drew his head close and said something, and then the two heads were bent and moving and talking. I thought an army of soldiers would leap over the wall in that second and wrestle the madman to the ground. But nothing stirred. Everything had ground to a halt. And then the two men turned and began to cross the lawn side by side, and they stepped over the kerb and onto the driveway and as they walked Gus put out his arm and the madman placed the gun in Gus’s open hand. They walked to the entrance and passed through the gate and turned left up the Mervue Road and disappeared out of view.