Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Katherine looks at George, her eyes now filling up with tears.

“No, don’t, Katherine. . please…. I can’t. .”

The telephone rings again. George turns away from Katherine and leaves the room to answer it.

Katherine gathers herself up off the floor, not bothering to put away the porcelain statuette or the music sheet. She blindly follows after George. She catches up with him in the hall.

“What time will you be back?” she asks him solemnly.

George puts the telephone down and looks at Katherine. “I’ve no idea. I won’t know how bad things are until I get there.” He walks into the kitchen. Katherine follows him.

“But they’ll be able to tell you at the station, won’t they? They’ll be able to brief you before you go?” she says.

“Katherine, you know only too well it’s not that simple.”

“Do I?” Katherine’s tone is harsh.

“Yes, you do!” George glares at Katherine. Then, checking himself, he lowers his head. He pushes past Katherine to get the car keys from the kitchen table.

“And why do you have to liaise with two other retainees?” Katherine pursues George, her tone becoming more strident. “When did this start?”

“Any uniform’s a target now! Aren’t you aware of what’s going on?” He grabs the keys.

“But there’s always trouble around this time of year,” she snaps. “Always trouble around the Orange marches — and then all that trouble with the Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry — you just expect it.” She’s almost shouting at him now.

“This is different — something’s building. I don’t know — it’s — it’s very tense in the city.” Georges tries to steady himself.

“You’re overreacting, George! It’ll all blow over as usual and we’ll all be back to complaining about the unemployment and the weather and—”

“How the hell do you know!” George barks at Katherine, pushing past her toward the front door.

Suddenly, Stephen walks into the corner of the kitchen table with a wallop. After a moment of silence — the air heavy with what is to come and his mouth having fallen open like that of a drowning fish — he pitches into his cry. Katherine lifts him up in her arms, rubbing and kissing his head. His cry is piercing and he squeezes his eyes tightly at the unfairness of it all, making two deep, wet creases around his mouth, as though it is melting with saliva.

“So what time will you be back?” Katherine follows George, Stephen in her arms.

“I told you, I’ve no idea.” George strains to talk over Stephen. “Let me see the situation first — see how many of us have been called — I don’t know.” He addresses Katherine over his shoulder as he moves. Katherine pursues him back out into the hall and stands in front of him.

“Then you’ll ring me.” Katherine is biting at her words now.

“If I’m near a damn telephone!”

“Of course you’ll be near a damn telephone, George. You’ll have to be in contact with the station. You’ll—”

“Mum!” Maureen calls from upstairs. “Elsa’s not feeling well.”

Stephen is still crying. He is feeding off the energy around him. The pitch of his cry is getting higher.

“Mum!”

“Wait!” Katherine shouts up to Maureen over the crying.

“Don’t just walk off like that!” she shouts at George now. George stops.

“‘Walk off?’” He repeats her words sharply. Then he turns squarely to Katherine. His face is hard, incredulous.

“Don’t just walk off without—” Katherine is becoming increasingly agitated. “Don’t just walk off like that George — don’t!” Her words, like her thoughts, are fragmenting now.

George turns away from Katherine. His lips are tight with anger. He says nothing. Katherine persists.

“George!”

George turns to Katherine and thrusts his head in toward her, the blood draining from his face.

“What exactly do you expect of me, Katherine? What exactly is it that you want from me? How exactly do I disappoint you?” It all comes out in a rush. There is a moment’s silence. Katherine looks startled.

“What? What do you mean, George?”

George holds his look at Katherine; then, almost immediately, he moves away from her again. “Nothing, I mean nothing. It’s nothing.”

“George, don’t say that. Talk to me!”

George opens the front door.

“Mum!”

“George, come back! Don’t walk away from me like that! Talk to me!” Katherine moves quickly onto the front steps.

“Mum — Elsa feels sick.”

“All right!” Katherine snaps at Maureen. “George!” She moves down the steps. Stephen is still crying in her arms. “George, what do you mean?”

George turns abruptly to Katherine, “You know what I bloody mean!”

Katherine stops and looks at George. She says nothing.

George holds a hard stare. “You know exactly what I bloody mean!”

He swings away from Katherine and, opening the car door, adds between gritted teeth, “And I have a bloody job to do!”

Stephen is pulling at Katherine. His back is arched and his head is thrown back. His face is red. He is crying to the sky.

“George,” Katherine says quietly, and watches as he drives away.

Slowly, she walks back into the kitchen with Stephen’s body squirming on her hip. He kneads his tiny fists into his eyes as though he were rubbing them out. He flings his head on Katherine’s shoulder again, a sleepy, sad cygnet tired of holding his height.

It was true that the very life events that should have brought Katherine and George closer together as a couple seemed to have edged them further apart.

Katherine remembers that even on their wedding day, a pensiveness had followed them like a dust breeze at their backs, creating around them the sound of an almost-detectable pulse. She remembers the church small and quaint, like a doll’s house. There were lilies in wide vases, settled in their symmetry, giving out a creamy, heady scent. There was the smell of frankincense and myrrh. There were white ribbons on the ends of the pews. Six tall candles graced the altar. As she walked up the aisle, the congregation passed their coughs along the pews as if passing a collection basket. She wore two rows of neat pearls around the lace neckline of her white silk wedding dress. George waited at the altar for her, shifting nervously from foot to foot. The priest had the pink glossiness of a skin not used to daylight.

At the reception afterward, they danced together as tentatively as they had danced the first night they had met at the Belfast Palais de Danse, introduced to each other on the grand staircase by a mutual friend, who then fled to recover a dropped glove by the circling glass doors. But, by the end of their wedding day, it had felt as though they were still waiting for the wonderful thing to happen.

Ever since Katherine had known George, he had always exuded a sullen determination in the way in which he approached things — a sense that life was a series of tasks that had to be done. This trait in him she had found attractive when they first met, as though it offered her stability and reassurance. However, since their honeymoon, she had noticed that there was a different edge to his determination. There was a darker, more destructive quality to it.

Katherine remembers the evening they moved into their new house (this small semidetached two-bedroom house in which they have lived now for fifteen years). George had walked out to the back of the property, brimming with new purpose, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings with a deep breath, and rolling his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. But, ten minutes later, he had returned to the kitchen full of irritation. With his shoulders hunched and his brow furrowed, he had pulled roughly at the stacked cardboard boxes in the hallway, tripping over a rolled-up offcut of linoleum that they had purchased for the new house, and had then stomped back out to the garden with a large spade clutched firmly in his hand. Katherine had followed him, and had found him savagely hammering the back lawn with the edge of the spade.