Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“Really, love?” Katherine’s voice is hardly audible.

“Mummy?” Elizabeth rubs the back of her hand across her mouth as she speaks.

“Yes?”

“D’y remember when you were an opera singer before you got married?”

“Well, not a proper opera singer, Elizabeth. It was just a hobby,” says Katherine, making an effort to engage in conversation.

“That was in the olden days, wasn’t it, Mummy?” Elsa has a serious expression on her face.

Katherine smiles gently and nods her head.

“Daddy keeps telling us that you were so good that you could have done opera singing for your real job,” Elizabeth says respectfully.

“I know he does.” Katherine glances briefly over at George. George turns around to Katherine from the front seat of the car. Unusually, his large arms are bare. His wet shirt is in a canvas bag in the boot of the car, so he wears only his vest and trousers. “Well, that’s the truth of it, isn’t it?” he says to Katherine and bites on his cone.

Katherine remains silent.

“Well, why didn’t you, then?” Elsa chirps.

“Sorry, love?” Katherine says quietly.

“Why didn’t you do opera singing for your proper job?”

“Your mother had a family to raise.” George offers Katherine a paper napkin to wipe Stephen’s face, but she refuses it with a shake of her head and uses instead the edge of her towel.

“Tell us again about the stage,” says Elizabeth.

Katherine knows how much the children enjoy the familiarity of the stories she tells about her amateur musical-theater days, but, cold and shocked after her encounter with the seal, she now struggles to find the energy.

“Well. . there were lots of different sets to show different places…. there were street sellers’ baskets and wooden wheelbarrows for the marketplace and—”

“But the fruit in the street sellers’ baskets wasn’t real fruit, was it, Mummy?” Elsa delights in the pretense of it all.

“That’s right, love. It was only rolled-up paper painted to look like fruit.” Katherine continues slowly. “And there were lots of fancy costumes and—”

“But you already had a proper job anyway,” says Elizabeth, interrupting her mother as she bites on the end of her cone.

“Oh, yes — a very exciting job as an accounting clerk in the Ulster Bank.” Katherine attempts humor. The girls smile. “That was when I was walking out with your father, but when we got married, I had to leave.”

“‘Walking out,’” Maureen repeats, laughing to herself.

“Nanny Anna said that that’s how people used to talk to each other in the olden days.” Elsa takes over the conversation with an authoritative tone.

“What do you mean?” Maureen makes a disparaging face at Elsa.

“She said people didn’t talk like we talk now; she said people sang everything in them days.”

Maureen starts to laugh at Elsa. “No they didn’t.”

“Yes they did!” Elsa glares at Maureen, then shoves her tongue down into the end of her ice-cream cone. Maureen starts singing in a mock operatic style, “Can I have another ice cream please, Mother!”

Now Elizabeth begins to laugh.

“Shut up!” Elsa says sharply to her sisters, embarrassed now that she may have been fooled a little by Nanny Anna.

“Manners, Elsa,” says George.

“That didn’t sound like opera singing to me,” Elsa snaps at Maureen.

“How would you know what opera singing sounds like anyway?” Maureen snaps back.

Conscious that Katherine is still tired and distant, George wants to lighten the tone. “I’ll have you all know, young ladies, that your mother was the finest singer the length of the Castlereagh Road!”

The three girls chime together, “We know, we know!”

Katherine fixes the towel around her shoulders. She feels removed from all the chat in the car, as though something is pulling her away from it.

“Mummy?” Elizabeth sparks with a new thought. “Maureen saw a plop floating in the water.”

It takes Katherine a moment. “She saw what?”

“I did not!” Maureen is instantly annoyed that Elizabeth has mentioned this. “It was seaweed, a lump of seaweed! I thought it was something else, but when I looked at it again, it was seaweed !” Maureen says the word seaweed very emphatically. She shakes her head at Elizabeth.

“But you said it was a plop. You said!”

“I only thought it was one, but it wasn’t.” Then changing the subject quickly, Maureen says, “Mummy, can I have a packet of crisps?”

Katherine doesn’t answer.

Maureen registers her mother’s solemn mood and so rummages in one of the picnic bags to get the crisps herself.

“Whose plop was it?” Elsa has apparently not followed the course of the conversation at all, her imagination having been so arrested by Elizabeth’s initial image.

“It wasn’t a plop. It was nobody’s plop!” Maureen replies, exasperated.

“Easy girls,” George chips in. He looks at Katherine to check on her.

“Can I have a packet of crisps, too?” asks Elizabeth gently. She has clocked Maureen’s reaction to their mother and now is a little concerned.

“And me,” says Elsa.

Maureen throws a packet of crisps from the picnic bag to each of her sisters.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” says George, attempting to draw Katherine out of herself. “I’ve found a few things floating in there myself. Haven’t I, Katherine?”

Katherine doesn’t answer.

“Like what, Daddy?” Elsa becomes interested now.

“Only last summer, I went in for a swim—”

“Daddy, you can’t swim,” Elsa chirps.

“Ssssh! Let daddy tell.” Maureen is beginning to doubt her own judgment about the seaweed.

“Elsa’s right, he can’t swim.” Elizabeth has found the little paper pouch of salt in the middle of her bag of Perri crisps and is biting it open.

“My arms and legs are really itchy,” Elsa complains to the air, scratching herself.

“—and just as I was coming back to shore, just by the shingly part of the beach, I lifted my head up out of the water and there bobbing up and down right in front of my eyes, was — a hand! You remember this story, don’t you, Katherine?”

Katherine remains quiet.

“Ugh!” Maureen grimaces. Elizabeth and Elsa’s expressions are held in a curious, hardened stare.

“Can you believe it,” continues George “a hand.”

“A human hand?” asks Maureen, checking.

“Oh yes.”

“That’s horrible, Daddy.”

“So, I thought that I had better get out of the water quickly and go tell the police.”

“Pl-op,” shouts Stephen.

“But just as I stood up in the sea, the fingers of the hand started to wriggle. Like this!” George moves his fingers ominously, imitating the severed hand. The three girls visibly shrink back. Their grimaces are identical now.

“I was petrified. I began to move quickly out of the water, but the hand began to move quickly, too.” George ripples his fingers. “The hand began to quiver and turn and then it began to swim! I moved as fast as I could, but the hand was swimming after me. I got out of the water and began running up the beach. I looked around and the hand was running after me, and then suddenly the hand jumped off the sand and grabbed me like — THIS!”

George flings his wriggling hand out and grabs Elsa by the shoulder. Elsa’s body jolts and then she screams. All the girls scream. Then Maureen laughs. Elizabeth shakes her arms out in front of her as if to free herself from the fright. Stephen gives a nervous cry at all the commotion, but he is comforted by Katherine. After a few moments, the noise settles and the air in the car becomes once again a natural quiet.