Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Katherine then brushes back a few strands of brown-black hair that have fallen softly over Maureen’s face, unveiling a young woman, not a child. The contours of Maureen’s face have been altering continuously through these summer weeks, so that now it is all future. And on the other side of Elsa lies Elizabeth, hidden under the blankets, so that only tufts of light brown hair stick out.

Katherine leaves the girls’ bedroom like a lioness reluctantly leaving her cubs, and before she goes downstairs, she pushes her own bedroom door back a little so she can get another quick glance of Stephen. He lies sprawled in his cot like a basket of spilled fruit, arms splayed alongside his head and open to the world, legs stretched over the little mountain he has made of his blankets, head settled into the downy hollow of his pillow. Katherine pulls his blankets up over his legs and chest. She can’t resist kissing him.

As Katherine makes her way to the kitchen, she looks out the window. It is as though there are two skies in one. Where the sun has set, on the far side of Cave Hill, the sky is an intense ball of golden light, bleeding beads of orange and fiery pink. The rest of the sky is a cool blue, peppered only here and there with dots of purple cloud.

Looking at the garden under this indecisive sky, she can see how overgrown it has become. Somehow during the resilient ring of daylight, she had not been so aware of this, as though growth checked itself under surveillance and issued forth only when the eye was averted. For now in the pearly streams of evening light, she can see how much the ivy has spread itself over every wall of the garden into the uneven flower beds, seething, it seems, right in front of her as it grows, and stretching its viny fingers down and under the honest chins of the nearby shrubs. What started as a tender touch has tightened and overtaken like an eager, parasitic love. A porraceous palette she sees through her kitchen window. There, the faint silvery white of the dead nettle. And there, the flat, delicate umbels of the ground elder. And there, in the midst of the falling dark, the ghostly outline of Madam Maureen’s fortune-telling tent, its sides now drooping with the settling weight of the moist evening air. How on earth did she not notice, when she was playing with the girls earlier, that their beds were still missing some sheets and blankets?

Out of the silence, the telephone rings. Katherine moves quickly from the kitchen out into the hallway to answer it. It is George, calling from the station.

“Katherine, I’m sorry, I was called into the station straight from work and I’m going to be home much later than I thought. Okay, love?” His voice sounds agitated.

“I was wondering, George. Everything all right?”

“Ach, reports of petrol-bomb attacks are coming in thick and fast and there’ve been arson attacks across the city, so it could be all hours before I’m back. Don’t wait up.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize things were that bad. Are the police out, too?”

“Yes — yes — listen, Katherine, I have to go.”

“George?”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t get a chance this morning to say sorry about yesterday, about shouting. . when you were leaving. . and the statuette. . I didn’t mean. .” Katherine’s voice is shaking.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Katherine.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I have to go.”

“I’m tired. That’s all it is, I’m sure.”

“ Katherine .”

“All right, George, all right. Be careful, won’t you.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, George, you missed a great day. We had a fair in the back garden and—”

But George has already hung up.

On her way back to the kitchen, Katherine finds the remnants of Madam Maureen’s costume — the green paisley scarf, the mushroom-colored skirt, the soft leather belt — stuffed into a corner under the stairs. She picks them up and throws them over the end of the banister to be put away properly in the morning. She is too tired to do it now. She turns off the lights downstairs, leaving on only the outside light by the front door for George’s return home. She turns off the lights upstairs, in the girl’s bedroom and on the landing, and welcomes night into the house. She climbs into bed, but she does not sleep.

Floating and burning at the same time — Isn’t that how she had explained what love felt like to her daughter?

Floating and burning.

Back with her again. To hold him. To smell his skin. To kiss him. .

A ROUTINE HAD DEVELOPED. Against her better judgment, she knew, for routines served only to consolidate things and then make them feel normal. Yes, she knew that. But she could not help herself. Tom had a hold on her that she could not deny. And there was — if she was to be totally honest with herself — the thrill of this secret world.

The excuse she gave to her mother, to her colleagues at work if they, perhaps, asked her to join them on an evening out, and to George was always the same: She was rehearsing Carmen. And although no one ever questioned her, the lie had its way of niggling at her nonetheless. She’d sense the crimson streaks of guilt along her neck and then the buds of tightness underneath her skin as she tidied up her work and made her way from the Ulster Bank offices onto High Street. But by the time she reached Boyne & Son, Men’s Tailors and Outfitters, all thoughts of her deceitfulness would have evaporated into thin air and she would feel as though she had just burst from a cocoon.

As Katherine would arrive at the tailors’ rooms, the last of the junior tailors would be leaving, having cleared their tables, stacked their rolls of cloth against the back wall, and set their sewing tools in orderly fashion ready for the following day’s work. Only Ivy would remain. That’s what Katherine liked to call her — the girl with the ivy-patterned blouse. Her real name, she had learned from Tom, was Miss Beacham, Miss Celia Beacham, but “Ivy” had become a private joke between herself and Tom and so the nickname had stuck. As Katherine walked toward the anteroom, where Tom was waiting for her, Ivy would be sitting on her roost of ledger books, her back to the room. No hellos were exchanged, so busy was Ivy at her desk, but Katherine was convinced as she walked past her that Ivy’s eyes and ears were taking everything in.

Katherine was content to sit and watch Tom work, there in the coppery light of the room, curled up on a wooden chair, her heels drawn in underneath her, her arms gently wrapped around her knees. And he appeared content just to have her near him. They would chat, as he worked, about music or the weather or about what new film was showing at the Imperial Picture House or at the Classic. She would lift his cigarette from the ashtray on his worktable and take a drag from it, leaving traces of her orange-red lipstick along its length. Or sometimes she would sing snippets from Carmen , but so quietly, it was as though her voice were coming into him from a different room. Tom sat at his worktable, his shoulders hunched forward, sometimes overcasting the braided edges of a blazer or adjusting the buttonholes in a waistcoat. Or sometimes pressing a recently finished evening tailcoat under a hot iron; then the room would fill with the intoxicating smell of new cloth. Like the splintery smell of powdered stone, she thought. Sometimes she would wander around the room as he worked, picking out buttons from their boxes, inspecting paper patterns, half dreamily playing with the spools of dark thread. Some would have found the quietness austere, unsettling even, but Katherine felt protected by it, as though nothing else in the world existed. It was only when she heard the click of the glass panelled door from the main room as Ivy left to go home did she feel the small bite of adrenaline in the pit of her stomach.