Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“I can’t sleep. Can I have a drink please, Mummy?”

Katherine, although knowing she should show her disapproval at Elsa being up out of bed at this unearthly hour, cannot help but feel relieved that her daughter has now joined her.

Katherine pours Elsa a glass of milk and then a cup of tea for herself. They both stand in the kitchen without switching on the overhead electric light, so reflective are the steely shards of morning as they fall in around them through the window.

Katherine looks out to check the sky.

“I’d say it’s maybe four o’clock.”

“Isabel didn’t think the fair was very good, Mummy.”

“Really? Well, she’s wrong, don’t you think?”

Elsa shrugs her shoulders. Katherine turns her head to look out the window again.

“Look. Madam Maureen’s tent is still standing.” Katherine puts down her cup of tea and pulls back the curtain that hangs by the kitchen door, taking the key from a little hook on the wall behind it. When she opens the back door, both she and Elsa stand together on the back steps.

The fortune-teller’s tent looms in the cool, transparent haze of the garden in front of them like the last surviving pavilion of a lost crusade, tilting on its axis, a rickety vestige of defeat, its lank flaps subdued further with light droplets of morning rain.

“Get the cover from the sofa, Elsa. We’ll sit out awhile.”

Elsa brings out the gray woolen throw with its mint green edges and gives it to her mother. Katherine wraps it around them both, and they sit on the back step, huddled together. Elsa drinks her milk in tiny sups. Katherine strokes Elsa’s hair for a moment and then turns to look around her.

“Wasn’t this Elizabeth’s nightdress?” Elsa asks.

“What, my love?” Katherine drinks her tea.

“This nightdress I’m wearing, did it belong to Elizabeth or to someone else?”

“I think it was Maureen’s.” Katherine lifts the cuff of the garment back a little to examine it.

“Yes, it was Maureen’s. Look, she embroidered a tiny blue m, just here.” Katherine shows it to Elsa.

“Does that mean that it’s still hers?”

“No, love, it was Maureen’s, then it was Elizabeth’s, and now it’s yours.”

Elsa laughs. “Then it’ll be Stephen’s, and he’ll look like a girl!”

Despite her tiredness, Katherine smiles at how her daughter finds humor in Stephen’s getting his sisters’ hand-me-downs. As she watches Elsa now, she marvels at the inconsequentiality of time. In an instant, Katherine can look at her daughter, as she is, the contours of her young face elongating and changing with each slight shift in her understanding of the world, and also see her, at one and the same time, as a baby, all rounded flesh and soft bones and wisps of fluffy hair. Two images of the same child completely at one, completely preserved and still living, still breathing, still available to her at any moment.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, Elsa?”

“Isabel said she felt sorry for me because I was a Catholic.”

“Really?” Katherine looks at Elsa. “And why did she say that?”

“She said because Catholics are dirty and stupid and poor.”

“Isabel said that, did she?” Katherine cannot hide the concern in her voice.

“And she said that lots of people hate Catholics and so they’ll hate me, too.”

“Isabel should watch her tongue. And what else did the little blurt say?”

“Just that she’ll still be my friend because she needs someone to get sweets for her in Mr. McGovern’s shop because she doesn’t like going into the shop because Mr. McGovern’s a Catholic, too.”

“That child needs a good talking-to.” Katherine shakes her head.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, Elsa?”

“Why does it matter if you’re a Catholic or a Protestant?”

“It doesn’t — unless you’re Isabel, of course!”

“But it does, Mummy, ’cos sometimes I get frightened coming home from school in case I get stopped, ’cos that happened to Mary Feely and she got beaten up and she had to move to a different school.”

“Well — that’s not going to happen to you, Elsa. Don’t worry, love.” Katherine can feel her throat tighten. She feels anxious now, forlorn even.

Elsa pulls the gray woolen throw around her shoulders and drinks her milk. “Anyway, I feel sorry for Isabel.”

“Do you now, love, and why’s that?” asks Katherine quietly.

“Because she has a webbed toe and that needs an operation to put it right.”

“I think it’s more than her webbed toe needs operating on,” Katherine mutters to herself; then she turns to Elsa and pulls her close. “We are what we are, pet, and that’s all right, don’t you think?”

Elsa nods in agreement.

Night falls back as the morning sky slowly opens like a huge door. Shafts of apricot light appear behind the silhouettes of the gardens shrubs, which splay their long leaves as though they are giant black insects stretching their long legs.

Katherine and Elsa sit like two pilgrims on the steps of a new day.

“I could catch ghost moths in this nightdress,” Elsa whispers.

“You could.”

“Where did you hear the story about them being the souls of dead people again?”

“My father told me.”

“Granda Jack?”

“Yes, Granda Jack.”

“And where did he hear the story?”

“I suppose he always knew the story without knowing where he had heard it or where it came from. Like lots of stories.”

“I like those kind of stories that you don’t know where they came from. They’re not so scary.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because they mightn’t of even happened yet; they might have just been dreamed. And that means that there’s a chance that they’ll never happen, if you don’t want them to.”

“And what if you want them to happen?”

“You have to keep dreaming them.”

With morning’s inevitable growth, Katherine and Elsa become less like specters and more like themselves.

“And if they were the souls of dead people,” Elsa continued,

“and you caught them, would you have to hold on to them forever, or could you just let them go when you wanted to?”

“I don’t know, Elsa.”

“Because you might get to like them too much; you might get too used to them, like pets. Moths could be pets, couldn’t they, Mummy? And then you wouldn’t be able to let them go.”

“Perhaps.”

“Could we get a pet, Mummy, a hamster or something? I’d love a hamster.”

Katherine is becoming more and more soothed by Elsa’s company, carried by her daughter’s unconscious grace to feel the eloquence of ordinary things. There is no other sound on earth like it, the voice of a child who sees the world as God’s safe harbor.

Katherine gives Elsa an affirmative pat on her knee.

“Let’s get two hamsters!”

“Really?” Elsa is amazed.

“Yes, why not. I’ll talk to your father about it, shall I?”

“Yes, please.” Elsa beams at her mother, then looks out into the garden, the huge smile remaining on her face.

“I wish I had met Granda Jack. Do you miss him, Mummy?”

“Yes, I miss him. Every day I miss him.”

“He looks funny in the photograph on the mantelpiece.”

“I know, but he was carrying on to make me laugh.”

“Why’s he holding you up with one hand?”

“It was a trick for the camera. My mother took the photograph in Tollymore Forest. I was actually sitting up on a wooden post, but it looks like he’s holding me straight up in the air with one hand.”

Sunlight tongues of pinky apricot now lick the edges of the garden shrubs, giving them back the dimension that the nighttime shadows had stolen. The day looks nearly ready.