Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Stephen gives Elsa a big smile. He starts to laugh. “Put shoe on,” he says, and jiggles his legs up and down.

Elsa leans farther toward Stephen and pushes her face close to his. “You look like a little monkey in that suit.”

“Elsa, stop that,” Nanny Anna says gently.

“Monkee!” Stephen laughs. Then he says, “Li-li looks like a monkee!” and he points at Elizabeth.

“I don’t look like a monkey. That’s a rotten thing to say,” Elizabeth says dolefully.

“He’s only joking,” says Elsa in his defense. Then, feeling the need to humor Elizabeth a little, Elsa says to her “Would you like to play ‘blue car, brown car’?”

Now Maureen starts to cry. She draws her long hair over her face so that no one can see.

Elsa sits back into her seat. She looks out of the car, squeezing her nose against the glass. From where the car is now, on the steepest part of their road, she can see the city spreading out below her. It reminds her of the burning bus, of the two alphabets she needs coming home from school, of the angry man with the stick in his hand and the look of vengeance on his face. As the car turns around the bottom of the street, Mr. McGovern’s shop stands empty and black. Someone has painted a new slogan on the side wall of the shop above the words TAIGS OUT. The new slogan is painted in big white letters and it says The Past Is Not Quite Past. Elsa wonders what it means. Then she puts her hand up against the window and blots it out. Now she can no longer see it.

With her hand against the glass, Elsa turns to look at the hearse in front of her. The woman in the coffin did not look like her mother, she thinks. That woman was just a little gray bird. The woman in the photograph that Charlie Copeland left on the hall table did not look like her mother, either. But her eyes were bright and her lips were pretty. She was dangerous and lovely at the same time, Elsa thinks. So which is she? And where is she? Where is her mother now?

Elsa looks up at the sky. There is a flat fluorescent light upon the day. Gently, a thin curl of sunlight slips through the pearly gray clouds above, as though someone is gingerly pulling back a curtain in the sky, and soon sunlight falls on the cortege. Elsa drops her hand from the car window and rests her head against it. The sunlight widens and intensifies as the clouds continue to separate. Elsa feels the sun on her face like a warm caress. She sees her reflection in the car window. Where the sun falls on her face, it looks as though there is a light coming from her mouth and she feels her breath like a light rising up inside her. She hopes that calling her mother a bitch at the blackberry bushes didn’t make her sick or make her die. She feels the hot air blowing from the car heater and warming her ankles. She thinks for a moment. She knows what she will do to find her mother. She knows what she will do. She closes her eyes. This is her plan. She imagines herself at her bedroom window, the headlights of the cars in the distance dripping like raindrops into a black pool, and she sees herself walking quietly through the door, leaving Maureen and Elizabeth still asleep. There is no light on the landing. Her father has switched it off on his way to bed. She moves past the bedroom where her father and Stephen are sleeping, down the stairs, and through to the kitchen end of the back room, where she feels the cool linoleum under her bare feet. She is wearing the white nightdress handed down from Maureen with the tiny blue m embroidered on the cuff. Her hand reaches up to pull back the curtains of burned honey revealing a key hanging on a little hook. She lifts the key off the hook and inserts it into the lock of the back door. It turns easily and she leaves the house.

Outside, a thin drizzle has just begun to fall and she can feel the fine needlepoint droplets delicately cool against the skin on her hands and feet. The air smells only of rain, all other scents suppressed. The night is calm and cold and the moon obscured by clouds. Elsa sees herself walking down her driveway and through the front gates, turning upward to the top of her road. Nicotiana, honeysuckle, night-scented stock runs like a song through her head.

She joins the main road and walks along it, past the power station, past the blindman’s house, until she comes to the blackberry bushes. There she steps into their midst. There is not a sound, not a person. All dark and all shades of dark. A mysterious world of no color through which she moves.

Now it is the feel of earth beneath her feet, and now, faintly, she can hear the tiny trickling of the little river. Light falls from the nearby streetlamp on the main road. It is her electric moon. She winds her way through the bushes, along the little pathways, and crosses the river by the stepping-stones, three rounded boulders, each one a lover’s stone chapter, one — two — three. On the other side of the river, the ground opens out into a grassy meadow where the flowers grow. These are the plants that attract butterflies by day and moths by night. Where children run breathless with nets on the ends of long bamboo canes to catch the butterflies and moths on balmy summer afternoons and in the summer evening dusk.

She sees herself walking through the grass, the hem of her nightdress skimming the wet blades as she goes. She finds a spot where the ground dips. She lies down on her back and spreads her arms and legs out on the earth.

The earth feels silver under her body, as though it is smooth, curved metal she is lying on and not the earth. She is nestled in the slight hollow in the ground, her throat exposed to the tilt of the dark above her. She hears the gentle glip of the night water from the river. Her long white cotton nightdress is now spread out as wide as a tent. Like a great white skin. I will be irresistible to them, she is thinking. She looks up at the night sky and everywhere there is cloud. Everywhere there are dense indefinable purple-gray folds and curves, whether moving or not moving, she is not sure. I will be irresistible to the ghost moths, she thinks, in my white nightdress among the night-scented stock, among the honeysuckle, among the nicotiana, nestled in the hollow.

All she has to do is wait. Wait even until she will perhaps wake up in the gray-lime dawn. She will wait and she will lure the hovering moths and trap them and take them home. The souls of the dead. Wait, wait, they will come!

She lies in the grass amid its inky black blades and, guided by her electric moon, looks up at the night sky, which is not there. She is a child trap for the ghost mother and she is cradled in this small hollow of the world. She will lure her and trap her and take her home. Wait, wait, she will come, she will come!

Elsa opens her eyes.

M Y SINCERE THANKS to Christine Dwyer Hickey for all her support and advice; to Anne Enright and Declan Hughes for their encouragement. To Sara Hollwey, Sarah-Jane Scaife and Rose Henderson for their responses to early drafts. To my editor Leslie Hodgkins at Bellevue Literary Press for his commitment to this novel. Thanks also to Erika Goldman, Kent D. Wolf at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, Molly Mikolowski at A Literary Light, Joe Gannon at Mulberry Tree Press, to copy-editor Carol Edwards and to Ailish McKenna from Bray & Krais Solicitors. My thanks to John Killen and Ita McGirr from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast. To Belinda McKeon, Bert Wright and Vanessa O’Loughlin for all their help. To Jack French for his digital wisdom. To fellow travellers and treasured friends Hilary Fannin and Maureen White. Thanks to Ebony, Robert, North, Winter, Persia, Daniel, Amelié and Michele Campbell. To Nicky for the Vaio. To Ernie, Mary, Roma, Errol and Lisa for all their love and for sharing the journey. To Owen, Megan and Ethan, for your constant faith in me, thank you. And to Eleanor — missing you still.