The China Factory (16 page)

‘Bob, are you drunk yet? Start us off on a song there.'

They laughed and argued and finally hit on a song. Romy looked out the window at the forest. All day long she had coasted on the brink of tears. She looked down to where the trees parted and a river flowed, and for an instant she saw a campfire in the clearing. Men and women and children were laughing and dancing, as if there was music there. The flames licked the trees and shadows leapt on the children's faces. She pressed her face to the glass. Her heart beat faster. Then the car climbed and rounded a bend and the fire and the dancers disappeared.

They emerged out of the forest onto a high moonlit road. She felt her mind remote. She thought that by now she would have had the key to him. She would like to be able to say things to him. To be able to say,
You are mine
. She would like to be a different woman, a strong strident wife, one who would reach into a briefcase and turn her face hard towards her man and say,
What's this, then?
She would like, for once, to shock him, shame him, shake that indifferent heart of his.

He reached across and took her hand. His face was lit by the dashboard. For a second his eyes were desolate. Had he loved that woman, that mother? Had he been wounded? Had he loved enough to wish her, Romy, dead?

The song ended and they started to descend. Bob asked a question and Michael answered. She listened to his voice. His words trailed out of him with strength and clarity and certainty and instantly it came to her. This is what he had carried for her—this is what he had afforded her. He had gone ahead of her and tested the world. He had verified it for her. Outside, the forest was bearing down on the car. Suddenly she felt doomed and everything
run to ruin. Perhaps there is no key, she thought, perhaps there is no key to anyone, not even to ourselves, least of all to ourselves, to our own terrified hearts. The singing started up again and the words swirled around her. She longed to climb down into the forest, and walk in the river and succumb to the sound of water tumbling over ancient stones.

INSOMNIAC

It is Saturday evening and below his window Andrew's two daughters are playing Hospital with their friends. Occasionally he hears the whine of a siren and their pretend voices calling out orders. They rush around the garden tending to patients on trolleys. They race out of the house every day and rush headlong into these other roles.

His room is small and cramped. He has a large drawing board with compasses and squares and pencils lying in the well at the bottom. It takes up most of the space so that he is forced to the edge. Some nights he comes up here to work and he draws the curtains and switches on a lamp, throwing sharp light on the paper. Outside the street is always quiet, with the neighbours all enclosed behind walls. He sharpens his pencils—he is eager, optimistic, then. He rolls up his sleeves, his head teeming with ideas. Then at the very point of commencement he loses momentum and his plans slip from him and he stands looking down at the paper without a thought.

He opens the window and leans out to look at the girls. They have the garden hose out and when they see him, Rachel, the eldest, aims the jet of water up at him and they both squeal. He tells her to water the plants in the border. A neighbour up the street is mowing grass, over and back, starting and stopping. He thinks of the tiny spindles of grass flying out from the blades. Rachel is struggling with the hose. She is serious about her chores. He tells
her to straighten the twist and when she does so the water shoots out at her sister. He likes to watch them. Sometimes he wishes they would fall over lightly so that he could comfort them. There is always some hesitation in him. Ann is easier with them, she knows what to do. When he drives into the street some evenings she is on the footpath dragging toys and bicycles and children back towards the house.

Ann comes out of the house now with Ian, fat and placid, in his pushchair. She is going to Saturday evening Mass. She looks up at him and squints. ‘Do you want to come?'

He makes a doubtful face. ‘What about the girls?'

‘They'll come if you do. We'll only be half an hour.'

He shrugs and she says, ‘Okay, Okay.' He watches her go out the drive and along the footpath. She is tall and slim and wears a green dress with small flowers, and white sandals, and, for a moment, there is nothing in her back that he recognises. She belongs to the street more than to him, to the milling and spilling of children and neighbours and gardens. She slows, checks her watch, then quickens her pace down the street.

He goes downstairs and takes a can of beer from the fridge and stands drinking it at the kitchen window. She has asked him to mow the grass. He will have to cross the garden and lift out the mower from the shed. He imagines revving it up and turning it onto the lawn, like an assault weapon. Unseen things, worms and snails, will be mown. He remembers the neighbour's grass and the thought of its dispersal grieves him. He goes into the living room and switches on the television and zaps it to mute. He glances at the clock on the mantelpiece every twenty or thirty seconds. In an hour or two the light will fade. He knows already—it is a feeling he gets—that tonight will be sleepless. It is worse in summer. The stillness of summer nights unnerves him. He fears he will stumble
on something. He thinks he could sleep through a storm, that his sleeping self would sense the elements fully at play, fully occupied, leaving him free to fall into deep forgetful sleep. On quiet nights everything is singled out under the moonlight, and he sits ambushed and conspicuous in the middle of it all, and it is this visibility, this awareness, that causes his sleeplessness.

He lies on the couch and drifts off. He awakes to the sound of Ann's key in the front door and the girls' chatter in the hall. She will feed the children and put them to bed and then they will sit side by side on the couch and watch TV and eat supper in silence.

For over an hour he has lain awake listening to Ann's breathing. His thoughts are profuse tonight. There is expectation in his body. He gets up and goes into the study. He is reminded of Monday morning, the office, the endless cycle of work and home and long nights. It will go on and on. He goes downstairs to the living room and flicks through the TV channels. He finds a foreign film with subtitles. A man is walking along a beach at dusk. A boy on a horse passes him. The man walks to the end of the beach, then over rocks until he runs out of land.

He sits back with his arms folded across his chest. He remembers the dead horsefly on the windowsill of his study. He came upon it earlier, its legs in the air, its thin wafery wings lying flat. The heat of the sun will dry its body outright. He thought he could smell its deadness, and the smell of warm dust that never leaves that room. Some nights he thinks it's his own dust that he smells, that specks of him rest on the shelves and the windowsill and on the spines of books. He thinks that he is atomising particle by particle, and he is getting a preview of his own dissolution each night.

He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Before it is finished he flicks it into the fireplace and returns to the study. In the rooms around him Ann and the children sleep. He can hardly remember a time before this life, this house, this marriage. They have all toppled
in on him. He remembers a moment from school years before. Something funny had made him laugh in science class and he could not stop and the teacher, a young woman named Pearl, grew angrier and angrier. The angrier she grew the more he laughed. And then, without warning, she raised the textbook she was holding and brought it down on his head.
Thwack, thwack, thwack
. And he laughed on. He looks around the office some days, at his colleagues, searching for telltale signs in them, of some slippage in their lives. There are days when he feels they are all watching him, waiting for the breach. He puts his head in his hands. Lately it has hit him. All new worlds of possibility have closed off, utterly. He fears a loss of faculties. He thinks he has already lost some foresight or insight. He knows it is happening and that he is beginning to shed, and that the dust particles are visible only to him.

‘Andrew?' Ann is standing at the door.

She sits in the armchair opposite him.

‘Why are you up?' he asks.

She shrugs and curls her feet up under her. Suddenly he likes having her there. A soft hope spreads over him. He has an image of the two of them at the kitchen table, talking, drinking tea, until the sun's rays break over the back wall.

‘You need to see someone,' she says.

He shakes his head. ‘More pills, more Prozac—no thanks!'

‘You're worrying too much. Why are you worrying?' Her voice is full of mercy.

He looks at her and considers something. ‘You remember Brian Sinnott? From the tennis club?'

She shakes her head and yawns.

‘Pete knew him from way back. We used to play him and his friend sometimes, go for a drink afterwards. He was a bank manager in town. He was a nice guy—
is
a nice guy, he's married with a couple of kids. ‘

‘What about him?'

‘He lost his job.'

‘God. What happened?'

‘Fingers in the till.'

‘You're joking!'

‘The bank is going to take a case.'

‘Jesus… Why do people do that? How old was he? What kind of guy?'

‘Dead normal. Mid-forties. Just… flipped.'

‘God… his poor wife.'

The landing light is shining into the room. Her skin is pale. She was always beautiful. He wonders what she thinks about, if she harbours secret thoughts, unspeakable yearnings.

‘We should talk more,' she says.

‘What d'you want to talk about?'

‘I don't know… Tell me what you think about. Tell me what you do here at night.'

He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes.

‘I work,' he says. ‘Sometimes I read.' He glances at the bookshelf. ‘I walk around the house and check the kids. Some nights I look at you.' She looks down at her hands. ‘Other nights I leave the house, drive around.'

‘You leave the house? At this hour?'

He nods.

An upstairs light goes on in the house opposite. He imagines an infant crying.

‘One night I drove into town,' he says. ‘It was a warm night last summer. I was so alert… I felt so alive driving out of the estate… It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning…' His voice is low. He is remembering the hum of the engine. ‘There were girls in short summer dresses climbing into taxis. I kept driving. The city is different at night, bright, edgy… The buildings are watching… I drove along the south city streets… I was stopped at a red light… I
felt something… I turned and this girl in the next lane was staring at me, you know, as if she'd been there all the time. At the next set of lights she was there again, the same stare. So I followed her. We raced each other to the next lights, and the next. She turned onto a side street and pulled up. I got out and the first thing she said was “I knew you'd follow me.” She looked ordinary, in dark clothes. I stood looking down at her. I thought it was a very daring thing she had just done and I said so.'

He stops talking and looks at Ann. ‘For me too… it was daring.'

Ann stares at him.
Who are you?
he thinks.
Who are you with that hard face?
And then,
I don't care who you are
.

‘She was a cop, a detective in the Drugs Squad. She asked me into her flat but I didn't go. I didn't. I couldn't bear the thought of sitting at a kitchen table under a bright light. So we drove. She moved over and I sat in and drove her car out of the city, through the suburbs.'

He remembers her sitting in the passenger seat, their bodies almost touching, as if she were a wife beside a husband.

‘I remember everything,' he says ‘—the taxis, the litter on the streets, the closed shutters, and then further out—the road narrowing, the hedgerows, the foothills… before we knew it we were climbing. I said we could go back if she wanted. I didn't want to frighten her. We skirted a forest… I thought of you and the children asleep here. I thought of the way you sleep, on your back, with your mouth open…

‘We pulled over and looked down on the city. I could see the lights on the coast road out to Howth. We got out and walked to the summit. The moon was out. There were old ruins with beer cans and litter strewn on the ground. She said that kids came up there from the city for drug parties. It was strange… so bright and silent and eerie… Beautiful, too.

‘I told her stuff, about you and the kids, and work. I don't know why I told her… except that she was there…'

He remembers the moment, their perfect stillness. He remembers what he told her. Fears, fantasies, mistakes. She listened, and nodded at times. Her eyes were dead. He talked like it was his last chance at speech, and that she knew this. These nights he thinks of her out there in the city, driving around in her dark clothes and emptied-out eyes.

‘She drove the car back down to the city,' he says. ‘The sky was lightening by then, the streets quieter. She drove past her own street towards the canal and then parked. We walked through a warren of narrow streets to a flats complex. There were old cars and junk lying around. She put on a dark hat—like a beret—and slipped her arm through mine. We went through an archway into an inner yard. There was a clothesline with children's clothes on it. Half the flats were boarded up, scrawled with graffiti. There was an atmosphere… like we were being watched. We climbed a stairs stinking of urine and there was a pale girl sitting on a step, smoking, strung out. A door opened then into some kind of service area on a landing and this huge unshaven guy with tattoos stood there looking out as we passed. On the third floor she took out a key and let us into a flat.

‘She was working. She picked up an envelope from the floor inside the door and went into a back room. She was talking on her phone. When she caught my eye she kicked the door lightly to close it. In the yard below there was a vehicle, like an old milk float from years ago, driving in, and the sun was coming up. I was so weary. I kept thinking, I have to get out of here. I opened the door and hurried down the filthy stairs and through the quiet streets until I came to my car… When I got back here you were still fast asleep.'