Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

A few days after taking Elsa on her own to see her mother at the Royal Victoria Hospital, George takes all three girls, but this time the usual chatting is absent from the back of the car. The three girls seem isolated and in their own space. They sit looking out of the car window. There are plumes of smoke rising up to the cold sky at the end of their street. There is the smell of burning rubber. Then Elsa sees it — a black shell, a strange black cave. The large front window of Mr. McGovern’s shop has been completely demolished and Mr. McGovern’s groceries — his neatly stacked packets of tea, his thoughtfully arranged fruit and vegetables in their baskets, his appetizing selection of cooked meats — have all been hauled through the gaping hole and left smashed and spattered and burned on the pavement. The “open” sign hangs desolately from the edge of a shard of glass on the door of the shop. Smoke still rises from the burned wood. The words TAIGS OUT have been painted in large red letters on the outside wall.

“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. McGovern’s shop?” asks Elsa, alarmed. “Are Mr. and Mrs. McGovern alright?” Maureen and Elizabeth turn to look out of the car window.

“Apparently, someone threw a petrol bomb into their shop last night. I was just talking to Isabel’s mother before we left.” Elsa makes a face at the mention of Isabel’s name. “She had heard about it this morning,” George continues, “and, yes, they’re alright, thank God, they’re alright.”

“But who would do that?” asks Maureen concerned. As George drives on the girls hear him muttering “Thugs” to himself and see him shaking his head.

Elsa now imagines what it might have been like for Mr. and Mrs. McGovern in the burning shop. Her father had always told her how quickly a fire could spread, how it could destroy a whole room in seconds, how the smoke could choke and kill you before the flames would even reach you, how you would never have time to collect and bring with you all of your favorite things. She imagines Mr. and Mrs. McGovern sleeping soundly between their crisp sheets in their full nightclothes. She in her seersucker nightie and rollers, he in his plaid maroon pajamas and his cotton bed socks. His thorax rattling and cracking under the strain of his great snores and then the sound of the smashing glass. What in God’s name?

The smash, Elsa imagines, is followed by a low thud, and then all falls flat and quiet. In her mind she can see Mr. McGovern jump up from the bed and in a cold confusion grab whatever clothes he can find, pulling his trousers over his pajama bottoms, struggling to find his shoes, calling to his wife. Now Mrs. McGovern groans, but she still remains a large static lump under the blankets. Mr. McGovern thumps her in panic, telling her to wake up! He reaches for his teeth in the glass beside the bed, spilling the water everywhere, hurting his gums as he thrusts them into his mouth.

And then he smells it, the acrid, foul smell of smoke. Mr. McGovern shakes his wife harshly. Mrs. McGovern stirs. Voices can be heard on the street. He pulls at his wife until she is at last upright. Then she is wide awake, staring wildly about her, bewildered and frightened. Quick! Get out! The bloody place is on fire! He is almost screaming now. Mrs. McGovern goes to grab her dressing gown, but her husband pushes her toward the door. Mrs. McGovern, terrified, waddles, as quickly as her stiff hips will allow, down the narrow staircase of their flat into the parlor. Black smoke is streaming in under the rim of the closed door that leads from the shop. Inside the shop, everything is catching fire easily, the wooden shelves, the linoleum floor, the paper blinds. The new glass fronts on the shelves are cracking loudly. Mr. McGovern’s white nylon shopcoat, hanging on the door at the back of the shop, is a blazing beacon torchlighting the demise of a livelihood.

Elsa imagines it all.

Mrs. McGovern is making small moans and shaking her hands at everything she cannot take with her as she moves toward the back door — her new settee, her documents, the photographs of the grandchildren. Mr. McGovern slips on the stairs as he trundles down them, banging the back of his head on the wooden handrail, like he is in a cartoon. Then he is beside her, twisting at the lock on the door, desperate now. Mrs. McGovern is giving out a childlike whine. The smoke is easing into the parlor, filling it up, engulfing them. They are coughing and spluttering, pulling at the safety chain, twisting at the lock.

Dear God, this bloody door! And then the door opens. They stagger out onto the laneway at the back of the shop, coughing loudly. They stand there, bewildered, wondering what they have lost.

And in the back parlor, its door wide open to the night, the paper-thin Christmas-red, vinyl tablecloth on their parlor table dissolves in the flames.

And the jars of sweets are cracking and splitting. The rock-hard clumps of sticky sweets all melting, Elsa imagines. The chocolates, the raspberry ruffles, the black jacks, the bonbons, butterscotch, caramels, lollipops, Jujubes, the Sugarmines and the flying saucers, all melting in the blistering heat to become one huge molten mass of glistening, sugary, burned sweet lava flowing through the sweet shop like an enormous sweet, sticky river. A gorgeous sticky river.

“Look at that!” Elizabeth nudges Elsa as she sits beside her in the back of the car. Elsa rouses from her daydream and stares out of the car window to where Elizabeth is pointing. By this stage, they are close to the hospital, but there is a large burning bus ahead, splayed across the middle of the road like a great steel carcass. It sits like some petrified, cornered circus animal bleeding fire and smoke. More things burning, thinks Elsa, everything’s burning. She wonders if anyone has been burned in the big bus.

“Is it an accident?” she asks her father.

“No,” says George. The annoyance in his voice at having to find another route to the hospital is mixed with concern. “Just some trouble ahead. Just an isolated incident.”

“What’s an ‘isolated incident,’ Daddy?” asks Elsa.

“Something that there’s just — one of — just one thing that’s happened. It’s fine. It’ll all settle down again and be forgotten about.”

“But that’s two things I’ve seen burning in the one day — that’s two isolated incidents,” continues Elsa.

“Will you have to put it out?” Elizabeth is suddenly taken with the realization that her father may have to step out of the car and try to put out the fire single-handedly.

“Of course not, love. I’m sure the machines are already well on their way.”

But there is no fire brigade in sight.

Now around the burning bus, clusters of young men are wielding sticks and holding beer cans, stoking up the temperature of newly found intentions, whooping with each stone that they hurl into the burning bus. The stones rattle and split the last slivers of glass left in the window frames and drop into the belly of the fire.

As George begins to reverse the car, two youths lurch off the pavement toward them. George makes his maneuvers in the car very deliberate, reversing as far as he can in order to swing the car around. The two young men suddenly backtrack to follow the car. One of the men has the leg of a table in his hand, and as George turns the car, the man hits the car with the table leg on its rear fender. The girls jump.

“Daddy, I’m scared.” Elizabeth starts to cry.

“It’s okay, love. It’s all right. We’ll be out of here in a minute.” George rotates the steering wheel to straighten the car, and as he turns his head to check clearance from the curb he finds himself looking straight into the face of one of the young men. The young man glares at George, his vengeance resting on a cusp, waiting for a trigger.