Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Elsa wonders where Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby have gone. For a few moments, she indulges in her favorite daydream, where she can go into McGovern’s shop and take as many sweets as she wants to, all for free.

Above her head, blackberries, like clusters of swollen bruises, hang from the angular, fibrous stems of the brambles. The stems are streaked with an inflamed red and pulse deep pink at the point where their sharp thorns sprout. Dust has settled on the fruit, stirred up by a steady, if modest, flow of traffic from the adjacent main road, and has covered the druplets in an unappetizing grainy film.

The bush shudders and a loose blackberry falls on Elsa’s head like a tiny baptism. So the girls have come back — Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby. They have come back with thin smiles on their faces. They’re going to play a dare game, they say, and Elsa says okay. Karen can go first, Isabel says. “Karen, we dare you to call your mummy a bitch.” They huddle under the blackberry bushes together and Karen Kirby calls her mummy a bitch, and Isabel and Julie Driver laugh. Elsa laughs, too, even though she doesn’t really want to, because that isn’t a very nice thing to say. And then it’s Julie Driver’s turn and Isabel says that Julie Driver is to throw a stone at a passing car. And Elsa asks, “Isn’t that dangerous?” and Isabel says, “Well. .” And Julie Driver scoots out from under the blackberry bushes and quick as anything goes to the edge of the road and lifts a stone. Isabel, Karen Kirby, and Elsa watch from the bushes. Then a car comes along and Julie Driver throws her stone and it hits the wheel of the car, but nobody in the car seems to notice. Isabel says that it’s her turn, and Karen Kirby and Julie Driver start to laugh and Julie Driver says, “Isabel, you have to show your knickers to a passing car,” and Isabel has a strange look on her face, as though she is surprised and, then again, not surprised. So when the next car comes along Isabel, lifts her blue gingham dress and shows her knickers, but the woman on the passenger side of the car just looks at Isabel and looks away again, and the expression on her face doesn’t change at all, as if she doesn’t really care one way or the other if Isabel lifts up her blue gingham dress and shows her knickers. And then the car is gone and all three of the girls, Isabel, Julie Driver, and Karen Kirby, turn to Elsa and say that it is her turn. And they all have those thin smiles on their faces again. And Isabel says, “I dare you to go over to the house across the road and show your knickers to the blind man.” And Elsa can feel her throat get tight almost immediately and she says, “No, I won’t.” And Julie Driver says, “You have to; we all did our dare.” And Elsa says again, “No, I won’t,” and Isabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby all look at one another and smile. Elsa says that their dares were easy and to give her one of their dares, and Karen says that Elsa has to do the one she is given and she has to hurry up, or else they will have to punish her. And Elsa can feel her face getting hot and a heat rising up in her stomach, as if there is a red knot there, and yet she is shaking as though she is cold. And she doesn’t know if she is hot or cold and she feels as though she is going to cry and can feel the huge wet beads well up in her eyes and she needs to swallow, and she says, “Please,” but very quietly this time, because the thought of the blind man frightens Elsa, frightens her so much. Elsa is sure that if she walks through the always-open front door of his house and walks as quietly as she possibly can to stand in front of him and show him her knickers, the blind man will see her and choose her and grab her and push her head into the fire. The blind man waiting for her and somehow seeing her and somehow seeing her knickers and grabbing her head and pushing it into the fire.

Just then, Isabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby move toward Elsa and say that they are going to catch her and hold her and drag her over to the blind man, because they all did their dares and Elsa has to, and they seem to be still laughing, even though they are serious. And Elsa can feel her heart beating hard and her head tight and the hotness in her getting hotter and she wants to cry really loudly and she just can’t stop herself from saying it. She says, “Let me call my mummy a bitch instead, because she is,” and so she says it, says, “My mummy’s a bitch,” and then she turns and runs. She runs straight into the blackberry bushes and the wild hawthorn and she pushes her way through them, even though the curved thorns scratch and hurt her. She raises her arms to cover her face and keeps going, keeps pushing through the bushes, and she feels the thorns scraping off her skin, but she can’t stop. And she can hear Isabel and Julie Driver and Karen Kirby calling after her “dirty Fenian Catholic” and laughing their hard laughs. Because she must look silly. It must look all so stupid. The hot panic making Elsa run and her getting caught in the brambles and the whole bush of brambles shaking like something alive and terrified, and Elsa pushing her way, all the way through the blackberry and hawthorn, and not taking one of the little paths that are right there, right beside her, because the thought of the blind man has frightened her so much. And then she gets through the bushes onto the road on the other side, somehow. And she doesn’t even look to see if a car is coming on the road, she just runs onto the road, and a car is coming, and the man in the car blows the horn so loudly, it makes Elsa feel sick, it is so sharp and sudden, and she is shaking and running. She runs all the way to the top of her street. She wants her daddy to come home. She wants her daddy to be home when she gets there. She runs home feeling frightened and sick and feeling stupid for feeling frightened and feeling ashamed of herself.

T HE RAIN HAD FALLEN IN RELENTLESS SHEETS on the Friday night of Carmen, but by morning the air had cleared and the sun had appeared like a large egg in an empty sky. As though rinsed clean, the new day had lived to belie the storm. Only the rushing sounds of the swollen rivers persisted to fill the air.

The events of the previous evening had left Katherine distraught, but what else could she have done? As much as she felt crushed by her rejection of Tom, she realized on reflection that it had been the right thing to do. Everything else could be forgotten now, everything else, as her father used to say, was water under the bridge. She would apologize to Tom wholeheartedly when she next saw him; she would talk it through with him. It had been wrong of her in her panic to hurt him so badly. She would do whatever it took to make amends, to heal the hurt she had caused him. And she vowed to herself, as she walked, to make every effort to redeem, on her own part, her relationship with George. She would take on any extra work she possibly could in order to pay back the money on the statuette and retrieve her engagement ring. She would rectify her rash decisions. She would bring her life back around to the way it had been. And there was something at least to be grateful for, the fact that George, throughout the whole affair, had been blessedly blind to it. At least there was that. He had remained unaware of how her passions had run amuck, of how she had been foolishly caught up in her own flights of fancy, of how she had been careless. She swallowed hard at this last thought, for her period was still late. No, nothing would come of that; everything would be fine, she reassured herself.

There was no one in the church hall when she arrived. The onstage curtains were closed. The wooden chairs that had been set out for the audience had yet to be straightened back into their rows and the floor had yet to be swept for the performance that evening. She was suddenly calmed by the quiet atmosphere of the hall and by its familiar dusty smell. She stood for a moment to allow her thoughts to settle, lifting her eyes to take in the details around her. A single sheet of music had been left on one of the stands in the tiny orchestra pit, some of the fabric flowers from the street sellers’ baskets had fallen onto the floor of the hall, and a handkerchief had been left behind on a chair. Feeling a little more at ease with herself, she walked to the door at the side of the stage and slowly climbed the small staircase that led to two narrow dressing rooms on the upper floor.