The China Factory (8 page)

‘Who were you calling?'

‘No one. I wasn't calling anyone.' She saw the gold flecks in his eyes and they were jumping.

When he went out she pressed the redial button. A woman answered, ‘Hello.' And again, ‘Hello.' In the background there were children, a TV, a kitchen maybe. Ruth hung up and redialled and the woman on the other end was silent.

There were other signs too, that made her insides quicken, and eventually she knew he wanted to be found out. He showed no remorse. She, Ruth, had grown distant. He had felt her silent blame every day—with her dead eyes she had accused him. For months she did nothing—she could not countenance being without him. Then, when the woman in the kitchen began to call and calmly ask for him by name, Ruth left.

The congregation stood and there was a rattle of chains, and a cloud of incense rose to the roof. The coffin was wheeled outside and they walked behind it down the hill to the graveyard. Was it Solomon's chariot that was fashioned from cedar wood? Was it the cedars of Lebanon that wept? She pictured his house back in the city—bills on the table, dishes in the sink, his bike in the hall. She
thought his death had imperilled her, too. She thought how its timing had hovered over him, hidden from him. How he had risen each morning for weeks, months, years and moved through each day and lain down each night, but the countdown had begun—he was already hurtling towards this moment, as she was towards hers.

Flocks of seagulls circled and shrieked above the grave as the mourners gathered close. The waves lapped on the shore and the murmur of the Rosary rose and fell and enclosed her. Across the open grave Paul's head was bowed, a son on either side of him. She closed her eyes. She should not have come. She should not have listened out for Matt's echo, or let him summon her here like this.

In the distance the church bell rang and she looked up and saw Anna with tears slipping down her face, and she was thrown. Their eyes met and lingered for a second, and Ruth, feeling herself weaken, searched Anna's face for a moment and then the face of the woman next to her, and then slowly, abstractedly, face by face, other random women in the crowd. She might be here, she thought, the woman in the kitchen with the TV on, might be here. I might have always known her. I might have walked down the hill beside her now. She peered at each woman's face.
Is it you?
she mouthed across the grave.
Or you? Or you?

And then something on the edge of Anna moved. Her son's arm dropped by his side. Ruth shifted her gaze to his face. Paul Junior, the second son. He had been a small boy when she knew him, seven or eight, no more. Now he had the thin face and raw features of a mid-teen, before the bones are properly scored or perfected. He is still in the making, she thought—and she began to study his face and eyes and body for some resemblance to Matt, or for how the child might one day have looked, or borne himself. The boy was staring straight ahead. Then his eyelids flickered and his eyes rolled back, and a damp patch appeared and spread down the
front of his trousers. He fell to the ground heavily and his head hit the edge of the grave. Paul and Anna dropped to their knees beside him and the priest stumbled in his prayer and paused. And then the boy's limbs stiffened and jerked and his whole body began to vibrate. His teeth clenched and his face beat against the clay. Paul half-stood and signalled to the priest—a look of reassurance and a plea to continue. Then he bent and laid a hand on his son's convulsing back, and waited. A hush descended on the mourners and the priest's words were barely audible. The boy's body shook and thrashed and Ruth stood paralysed, caught in its hazard, as if wired to the boy and his tender taut brain, as if the neurons that misfired and hurled through him were escaping and crossing and alighting on her and she, too, would be felled in this neurological strike.

Then the storm passed. The thrashing eased and his limbs slowly stilled. Ruth held her breath. For a few seconds all was quiet and she felt a part of her shift, lighten, enter a new dimension. She had a vague sensation of Matt's nearness. She saw the boy, foetal, on the ground. His completion had been interrupted, logic and memory momentarily wiped out. Scorch marks left on a delicate cerebral membrane. He opened his eyes and raised his head and Paul and Anna lifted him up and he stood pale, dazed, resurrected. The crowd stepped back and the three of them, stooped and leaning into each other like one body, sleepwalked away.

The mourners closed in and the priest started up again. Out on the road she glimpsed Paul open a car door. She imagined the three of them in the back seat, Paul Junior in the middle, a hand from each side touching him, earthing him again. His absence now left her more deeply alone. The priest intoned the prayers and the mourners responded louder and harder than ever, and the coffin was lowered into the grave. She watched it disappear. Her only link to the child was going too.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners
. The volume shocked her.
Now and at the hour
. A day would
come when there would be no trace of Matt left, either. Clods of earth fell on the lid and she looked up at the sky and became, suddenly, bereft. Once, their eyes had ached for each other. Their hearts had chimed. In one another's silence they had known joy and loneliness, in equal measure. In the end he had accelerated away from the reach of grief, and from his own unfathomable self. What he had done, his betrayal, was not unforgiveable. She knew then it was easier to be the one hurt, than the hurter.

Strangers reached out and embraced her and strong hands gripped hers, and there was no escape. She wished the heavens would open and drive the mourners back to their cars. She wanted to flee the graveyard and find their island out in the bay and run all day over the long grass and the dunes until she reached the pristine beach with the immaculate sands. There she would lie down in the dark. She would whisper his name to the sands; she would tell him there is no giving like the first giving, that what is given first cannot be regiven, what is first taken cannot be retaken. She would tell him she would never be the same again, or give the same or receive the same or love the same, that it was in him that all possibilities were first encountered, all beauty, all hope concentrated, that he had gone now and taken something and it could not be recovered and she was left here, now, impaired, diminished, she was left wanting.

In the evening rain swept in from the Atlantic. She left Mayo and drove east through the dark. The lights of oncoming cars began to dazzle. She pulled over onto the hard shoulder and stared out the window. She would see him everywhere falling. The wipers thumped back and forth. They are all dying, she thought, the males are all dying around me.

She edged back out into the traffic. It does not matter, she thought, what can one do? She imagined the car as a tiny dot on the map of Ireland, crawling across its centre, and behind, moving
further and further away, Mayo, the black night and the rain seeping down, dampening and darkening the clay, the stones, the grain of the wood.

SLEEPING WITH A STRANGER

He left behind the warm waters of the bay, the seaweed, the blue of the Burren. He swam in a current of his own and hovered, like a skydiver in the dark. He would swim out far, underwater, to the Continental Shelf. He no longer felt man, but marine. He had a need to reach the depths, to glide to the silent darkness and feel the cold brush of luminous sea creatures.

When he came up for air he was blinded by the sun. He turned his head and saw the yellow diving platform and the concrete roof of the changing shelter, saw that he had barely moved beyond the rocks. In the distance the sun glinted on a car roof moving along the Prom. He swam back in and hoisted himself up onto the path, dripping seawater, his body tight and sinewy and vigorous again.

It was October. The morning was bright, cold. In the shelter he dressed and wrung out his swimming trunks. He combed his hair and felt himself coming back to the world. Mona would be in the kitchen at that moment, clearing away the breakfast things. In a while she would leave the house and take the Knocknacarra bus into town for her Saturday morning coffee and then, later, lunch with friends. He took his bag and began the walk to his car. He felt a slight uncertainty since leaving the water, as if the day was not to be trusted. A woman in dark clothes and long hair walked ahead of him, looking out to sea. He turned his head to the same angle and followed a wave until it merged with the grey water in the bay. As
he drew close to the woman he felt a faint quickening. He came level and turned his face to hers. Their eyes met and she looked away quickly. She was not who he thought she was.

Mona had left a note on the counter to say she'd be gone all day. She and her friends—all teachers—would linger over lunch and wine and talk of school and family, and the longing for retirement. Mona kept herself well and looked a decade younger than her sixty years. She read novels and played bridge and together they went to the theatre and concerts and occasionally had friends over for dinner. He poured a glass of water and sat at the table, the house silent around him. He licked his forearm and tasted salt and remembered when he was a child how his father placed mineral licks in fields and sheds to ease the craving in calves. They might dement themselves licking the rungs of gates otherwise. He looked around the kitchen, delaying the moment when he would go upstairs to his desk and sift through notes and begin his report on a whole-school evaluation he'd completed that week. He no longer cared for his work. He would like to be devoted to one thing but had never found that thing. He looked out the window. They had lived in this house for twenty-eight years. Mona was a twin and one night in bed she spoke into the dark. ‘If I ever die, you must marry my sister,' and he swore that he would, that he would seek out only those bearing the greatest likeness to her. It had felt like a pact. But she did not die and her sister went to Australia. One morning, soon after, she walked into the kitchen and stood in a pool of light under the yellow cabinets and told him she was pregnant. They had children because they could not be childless; childlessness would have magnified the loneliness of marriage.

In mid-morning the nursing home in Athlone called to report on his mother's condition. She had Alzheimer's and had been winding down for years and now there was cause for concern. He drove east out of the city on the new motorway. He had driven the roads of
the county for twenty-five years as a primary schools' inspector, heading deep into the countryside each morning, past fields with stone walls, and cows being driven home for milking, through sleepy villages an hour before anyone rose. In late spring sheep huddled behind walls, bleating for their lambs, and the lambs, newly weaned, cried out their own terrible lament from nearby sheds. Once, he stopped and stood on the raised verge of the roadside looking over a wall at them, listening to their plaintive bleating. He sat into his car and drove on. How long, he wondered, before the ache of a ewe disappears?

He looked at the land beyond the motorway, at a tree on a hill, a cow, the dome of the sky. He wondered about the existence of these things—a tree, an animal, an insect. He wondered if theirs was any greater, any happier, than his own. He would have liked to talk about these things but it was too late now. He could not broach such things with Mona. They had not made love in a year. He remembered the woman on the Prom earlier, gazing out to sea like the woman at the end of a pier in a film he'd once seen. He saw lone women everywhere. One morning over twenty years ago he had passed a helmeted girl on the roadside. Her motor bike was parked and she was leaning over a dead fox. A few miles further on he arrived at the local school and as he walked up the path with the principal, the girl arrived and he turned and saw her unzip her jacket and remove the helmet and shake her hair free. Her name was Grace. He sat under a map of Ireland at the back of the classroom, observing her. He listened as she told the children that she had passed a dead body on the road. She had touched it, she said, and it was warm. A family of cubs would go hungry that day. All morning she moved among the children and bent her head close to theirs and whispered in their ears. Sometimes she smiled at him and they exchanged little knowing looks. She wore jeans and a white shirt. Her limbs were young, strong, unscarred, her body with its whole sensual life before it. He said her name in Irish,
Gráinne
, and at the end of the lesson he asked, What did you want to be when you were small? I wanted to be everything, she said.

Mona would be in the restaurant by now, settling herself in her seat, lifting out her reading glasses to study the menu. She was not without her mystery. She had a bridge partner, a school colleague named Tim. He thought of them at the card table at night, and the looks that must pass between them. He remembered once watching a TV programme about rock climbing, and how climbing partners grow to read each other's minds, to comprehend each other in some deep silent way. Their lives depend on one another.

In the nursing home his mother's mouth was open, like the little beak of a fledgling. Sometimes on his visits a terrified look would cross her face when he entered her room. He said her name, Mother. Her frame was shrunken and the veins and arteries were visible on the undersides of her arms. Her slippers sat neatly on the floor by the radiator. A nurse came and stood beside him and spoke softly. ‘The doctor saw her earlier. Her lungs are not good… he doesn't think there's much time left.' He felt his mother's hand. When his father lay dying, his hands and feet and nose, the extremities, had grown gradually colder. His mother had kept touching them, as if temperature, and not hours or minutes, was the measure of time. Soon after his death she herself began to fade. She filled the electric kettle with milk and was frightened by rain. She began to sing the songs of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. She remembered what he had just said, but not the thing before. He thought of her brain as being littered with a hail of tiny holes, like the spread of buckshot.