Читать книгу The China Factory - Mary Costello - Страница 8

THE CHINA FACTORY

The summer I turned seventeen I worked as a sponger in a china factory. I walked to the end of our road every morning to catch my lift to the city with Gus Meehan, and every evening I came home with a film of fine dust lodged in the pores of my skin. From the back seat I had a view of Gus’s broad shoulders and the china clay caked in the creases of his neck and in his grey hair. The air inside the car smelled of cigarette ash and stale masculine sweat. Gus’s other passenger, Martha Glynn, was a woman in her thirties from his end of the parish, and was engaged to be married to a local man for over twelve years. Martha worked in the office of an electronics factory in the industrial estate. Gus was shy and deferential to everyone but more so to Martha, sitting beside him in her good skirt and white blouse. He had a slight stammer and drew his meaty hands close to him on the steering wheel, as if they might cause offence.

The spongers’ station was at the lower end of the factory between the moulding area and the kilns, close to the yard entrance. All day long I stood in my white coat at a wooden table, first paring, then dampening and sponging off the symmetry lines that the moulds left on the clay cups. The cups were cool and damp to the touch, and brittle enough to collapse at the slightest pressure. My hands, dipping in water for hours, were pale and crinkled and spotless by evening. All day long the radio churned out the pop hits of that summer and the sun spilled in through skylights and fell in yellow pools on the factory floor. I would sigh and think of home and the farm work and when the thoughts grew lonesome and a small ache began to surface, I would carry my basin over to the big steel sink near the entrance and spill out the cloudy white water. I smiled when I passed the other girls those first days, and longed to speak, but feared that words would betray the yearning for friendship that I felt inside.

Gus was the only soul I knew in the china factory at the start. We parted in the car park on my first morning and I caught sight of him later on in heavy boots and dirty white overalls, rolled down and knotted at his waist. He lurched in from the yard, leaning forward as he hauled a wagon laden with bags of clay. His face glistened with sweat. When he passed the sinks and the sponging tables, dragging his wagon like a beast of burden, he did not raise his head or look for me. He did not seem to be the same Gus I’d known that morning.

That summer was hot. The kilns fired all day long, burning the air dry, irritating our skin and leaving us hot and cross and exhausted. Further up the factory the cups and plates and vases were transformed into white glazed china and further along again they were decorated with flowers and Celtic designs and gold-leaf rims. The girls in the art and admin departments floated in and out through a white door at the far end that led to the elegant showrooms, with their high ceilings and antique furniture and chandeliers.

At lunch time every day we clocked out and walked down the curved driveway and up to the shops at Mervue for Snack bars, Coke, cigarettes. The first few days—before I knew better—I sat alone in the dank basement canteen and bought a 7-Up and ate the sandwich I’d brought from home. The quietness amplified my isolation and after two days the smell of dirty oilcloths drove me outside. I sat under a tree and read a book. The lawn was wide, perfectly mown, with old oak trees along the high wall, and shrubs and flowers in the borders. The driveway curved up from the gate and then split, with one fork leading round the back to the factory and the other to the main house and Visitors’ Centre at the front. The house was Georgian with rows of high paned windows and pillars and granite steps up to the front door. Inside, the hall was carpeted in deep navy blue. Day trippers and coach loads of Americans arrived each day and traipsed through the showrooms in search of dinner services and cake stands and wall plates.

When the other girls returned from Mervue they dropped onto the grass beside me and lit up their cigarettes. They were older than me, harder, funnier and more robust in their dealings with each other than I was accustomed to.

‘I’d never go all the way with Francis,’ Marion said.

Marion was the senior sponger and the self-appointed leader, the one who complained to the supervisor about the heat or the infrequency of our toilet and cigarette breaks. She was four or five years older than me, shorter, plumper, stronger. She spoke in pronouncements and I saw her future—Francis handing over his pay packet on Friday evenings, the two of them rearing decent reliable sons who’d work in the factories, marry young and start the same cycle all over again.

‘Jesus, what are you? A nun or something?’ scoffed Angela. Angela was blunt and a little frightening; she would call the men over when they passed at the end of lunch hour and tease them. But Marion was immune to Angela, to all of us. One day she said, ‘If I as much as eat one Rich Tea finger I can feel it going straight to my hips.’ I was lying on the grass watching a jet cross the sky. I thought of the journey of the little biscuit down the short lumpen body to her hips. She lived with her widowed mother and her older sick brother in a terraced house in Bohermore. She was the sole breadwinner. I had known girls like her in school—old beyond their years, tough, proud, cunning, who would hold things together for others, no matter what. She was the kind of girl who wore flesh-coloured tights and pencil skirts but never jeans, and would grow into the kind of woman I never wanted to be.

Gus lived about three miles from us at home but I had never once spoken to him. I used to see him in his car after Mass on Sundays, waiting for his mother, as my mother steered us kids to our car and my father stood in a huddle of men at the side door of the church. I saw him in the village, too, at the petrol pump or coming out of the shop with his messages. One evening in May my mother drove me up a dry rutted lane to his house to ask for the lift to the city.

‘Tell him it’ll only be for the summer, it’s only a summer job,’ she said as I got out.

‘No, I better not,’ I said. ‘Come in with me.’

We walked up the path under trees, between two strips of overgrown garden. There was a line of smoke coming out the chimney. The two-storey house had once been handsome but the paintwork and masonry were flaking and crumbling and the wood at the base of the front door was rotten. At the side of the house there was a row of slate-roofed barns. An old bicycle lay under a tree and a wooden barrel stood at the gable end of the house to catch water from a downpipe. My mother rapped lightly on the door and then stepped well back. Inside on the windowsill I could see a pile of ancient looking paperbacks, their spines faded from the sun. I tilted my head to read the titles—The Big Sky, The Virginian, Hopalong Cassidy, Riders of the Purple Sage.

There was a shuffle and the door scraped open. He wore no shoes and his grey woollen jumper was stained. A black and white sheepdog sheltered timidly behind his legs. In the dark interior I saw the white banisters of the stairs. At the sight of us Gus’s eyes grew panicked. He and my mother knew each other and after they had exchanged greetings, she told him what we wanted. I think that he’d have consented to almost anything just to close the door and be left in peace again.

We walked down the path and the sunlight fell through the trees onto my head. I thought of the lines of a poem I had learnt in school… Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. But I remembered it now as Dapple-dawn-drawn light, because the light flowing through the branches touched me and enveloped me in a new and strange way, as if I were encountering trees and leaves and light for the very first time. I thought of that poem and all the poems in my book, and felt the pull of all the books that would cross my path if I went to college that autumn. I felt a sudden calm, a sense of promise, and I’d like to have remained there for a little while under those trees.

‘That’s an awful way to live,’ my mother said when we got into the car. ‘The people who went before him would be ashamed.’ She reversed the car and faced it onto the lane. ‘D’you know we’re distant relations?’

I turned to her. ‘How distant?’

‘Oh, second or third cousins—my mother and his mother were second cousins, I think.’

‘Well, B-Baby Face, were they all nice to you in there today?’ Gus asked me one Friday evening as we set off to pick up Martha. His arm was almost touching mine. I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. There were other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.

He had dubbed me Baby Face from the start. Little by little we had grown accustomed to each other, and when we were alone he spoke in a slightly conspiratorial voice.

‘They were,’ I replied. ‘They were grand.’

‘I hope Marion is nice to you.’

‘She is. She’s very nice.’

And then my heart sank and I reddened. One day under the trees the factory girls had quizzed me about where I was from and what school I’d gone to and if I had a boyfriend. They were all from the city. Then Marion said. ‘You get a lift with that Gus fella, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘Jesus. You’re some girl! And you don’t mind sitting there beside him in the car?’

I shook my head and felt all their eyes on me.

‘How d’you stick it—the BO? I’d say that fella never took a bath in his whole born life. Every single girl that ever came into the place here was afraid to go near him, d’you know that? He’s like… something out of a zoo!’

She kept looking at me. ‘They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?’

My heart took fright. ‘I don’t know. Are they?’

She tilted her head. ‘Oh, you get pockets of it everywhere, indeed,’ she said, and for a second she had a soft look and I thought I was safe. But then she said ‘We had a guy here a few years ago. He was a porter up at the Visitors’ Centre for a while. Came from your part of the country too—he knew Gus. They used to go up to Coen’s at lunchtime every day and knock back a few. He got shown the door eventually because you couldn’t have that kind of thing—the smell of drink—you couldn’t have that kind of thing and the tourists walkin’ in the door past him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Seanie Ryan… that was the porter. D’you know him?’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t know any Seanie Ryan.’

‘Anyway, on our staff night out that Christmas he told me a story. He was well jarred but I believed him. He said when he was young he knew Gus’s father, and that he was an alko too and spent his whole life drinking and fighting. I said to Seanie you’d never guess from Gus, would you!’ The others laughed. I wanted to say that Gus doesn’t fight.

‘Anyway this guy Seanie tells me this story… he says that Gus’s father himself used to tell it in the pub… It was a summer years ago and your man—Gus’s father—was in the bog, cuttin’ turf, and it was an awful hot day and of course your man got thirsty, and he set off across the bog in the direction of the nearest pub, two or three miles away. And when he got there he told the barman how a terrible thirst had come on him in the bog. “So I tied the young fella to the cart,” he said, “and headed off walking…” And he did, too, Seanie said, he did, too! He tied the son to the cart and left him there all day in the sun. And that was Gus! Gus was the son!’

I had grown used to seeing him cross the factory floor, and come to know the intervals of his crossings. In the first weeks I timed my own little trips to the sink so that our paths might cross and I might hear a familiar voice from my own country. He never spoke, just nodded and turned his eyes down and continued on his way. There was something vague and distant about him inside the factory. Other men would pass with their trolleys or machinery and they’d wink and flirt and say ‘How ya doin’, sweetheart?’ and make me blush. Gus would plough on, lugging his wagon past the sinks and the tables and the kilns, purple-faced and sweating, as if he’d drawn the clay up from the bowels of the earth.

When she finished her story Marion turned to me. ‘He’s an oddity all right… And you’re a great girl to stick that car every day…’ Then she peered at me. ‘You’re not related to him or anything, are you?’

‘No! Jesus, no! No way! Are you mad!’

Angela, lying lazily against a tree, drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. ‘He’s a fuckin’ freak, that Gus, a fuckin’ freak,’ she said.

I watched his large hands and dirty nails on the steering wheel as we set off. His breathing was laboured and I thought any minute now his sweat will come seeping through the jacket and drown the two of us.

‘D’you like the rhododendrons?’ he asked.

I looked out the window as we rolled down the drive. ‘Which ones are rhododendrons?’

‘The pink ones, with the shiny leaves.’

‘Yeah, they’re nice.’

‘They grow wild in some places, people think they’re a scourge.’ After a pause he took a deep breath, and exhaled. ‘It’s like an oven in there… So much for the earth, water, air and fire. There’s not much air in there these days, that’s for sure.’

I gave him a puzzled look. I never minded revealing my ignorance to Gus. His eyelashes were caked with clay and I wondered if, when he blinked, he heard the tiniest sound, like a butterfly might hear from its own flapping wings.

‘Fine bone china,’ he said, ‘made with the four elements…’ He looked at me again, and nodded out the window. ‘That’s what the brochures in there say. Earth, water, air and fire—that’s what goes into the china. Who’d ever have thought it?’ And then he looked out the window ‘The same stuff we’re all m-made of, or so they say… I read once that a man is really only a bag of water.’

‘Will we stop for a mineral?’ he asked after we passed Carnlough Cross. We were miles into the country now, Martha, Gus and I, our own little tribe, regrouped and reunited again.

Every Friday evening we stopped at the Half Way House, ten miles from home. I had not yet started to drink so Gus bought me a 7-Up. Martha got the second round. I did not know what to do, or how to be, or if, in the eyes of Gus and Martha, I had crossed far enough over the threshold into adulthood to buy a round of drinks.

‘James and I are going to Dublin this weekend,’ Martha announced when we were all sitting around the little table in the empty bar.

Gus smiled and nodded at me. ‘Oh, Baby Face, I hope you have a hat!’

I looked from Gus to Martha, lost again. Martha stiffened. ‘We’re going up on business actually. James has to go for work. We’re making a weekend of it.’

Gus looked chastened.

‘D’you go up there often?’ I asked Martha.

‘Now and again. We go to a hotel a few times a year.’ And then she forgot herself. ‘I love walking down Grafton Street on Saturday mornings with James. We got the ring in Appleby’s—well, it’s a good while ago now. They bring you into a private room at the back, and they have these lovely velvet tables and armchairs, and dishes with sweets and they serve champagne, and you can take your time choosing.’ Her eyes shone in a way I had not seen before.

‘It must be very nice,’ I said, and then nearly gave myself away by saying I’d probably be going to Dublin to college myself soon. I had not told anyone in the china factory of my intentions. I had been taken on as a bona fide permanent employee. ‘Do you go to Dublin much, Gus?’ I asked.

‘Ah, only a few times ever, Baby Face—I used to go to Croke Park to an odd hurling match when I was young. The last time I was up there was for a funeral… well, a sort of funeral. There was no coffin and no grave. A first cousin of mine who died in London, and they brought him home in a small pot. Me mother was alive at the time. There was just the Mass, and the pot of ashes was left above on a small table beside the altar.’

‘I didn’t think the Church allowed cremation back then,’ Martha said.

‘I don’t know now… That was about fifteen years ago.’

We were quiet then. On the wall above the pool table the clock chimed six times. I thought of home and the evening ahead, my mother getting the tea, my father and brothers coming in after baling a field of hay, all of us around the table. I imagined Gus at his own table, bent over his books, straining to catch the last light of evening. I imagined empty bottles thrown out the back, stuffed into fertiliser bags and thrown under a tree. I saw him rising from the table and standing at the back door gazing out across fields or up at the sky.

‘There’s a lot to be said for that cremation business,’ he said in a slow, thoughtful way. ‘I don’t know about being buried. I don’t know if I’d like that. Unless maybe I could have three coffins, like the popes get. To keep the worms out!’ and he turned to me and winked.

‘I’d like to be buried up on the hill in Clonkeen,’ Martha said. You’re getting married, I wanted to tell her, not dying.

I proved to be a prize sponger. Annie, the supervisor, a neat middle-aged woman with glasses, called me Miss Feather Fingers. One afternoon in August she came whizzing towards me with word that I was to go to the Office. The next morning I was seated at a desk at the other end of the factory, with a turntable by my side, learning how to apply gold leaf to the rims of large china plates. The plates were glazed and decorated with blue cornflowers. My hands grew hot and pink and swollen from gripping the narrow brush. The art staff smiled and offered help, but I was confused and out of my depth. I missed the gossip and banter of the spongers and there was no radio to absorb my turbulent thoughts. I struggled with the turntable and with my conscience—I had a heavy heart—my guilt for having accepted this promotion and not revealing the truth about my future plans. I kept looking around me. I did not know how to stop things advancing.

I’d had no sightings of the spongers all morning. I longed for lunch hour when I would sit with them on the lawn and explain everything. I slipped into fantasies of long days in the future among library stacks and the sound of pages turning and my pen racing furiously across white paper. My heart pounded at the thought of it all and I knew then the arc my life would take.

‘Where’s Marion?’ I asked when I joined the girls on the lawn.

No one answered and I felt their disdain. After a moment someone said she wasn’t back from Mervue yet, that she’d gone to the post office. The others ignored me. I said I hated my new job, that the art girls were stuck-up and it was too quiet and boring as hell up there.

‘Huh, the money won’t bore you,’ Angela said.

‘No one said anything about money. I’m only on trial. I might not be kept at all.’

‘Yeah, right!’

In the distance a loudspeaker cracked open the air. The voice crackled indistinctly—some local politician canvassing support, I thought—and it stopped and started and then moved off. I closed my eyes for a moment. I knew I would have to re-earn my place among the girls. An engine roared out on the road. I turned my head. A car with a trailer hitched to the back swung in the gate. It travelled up the drive and then revved and swerved and bumped over the stone kerb onto the grass. Someone said, Jesus, as it came to a stop in the centre of the lawn. The driver’s door swung open and a man hopped out and began to throw lumps of iron from the trailer onto the grass. We stood and stepped forward into the sun.

‘Jesus, that’s Vinnie,’ Angela said.

‘Vinnie? Marion’s brother? What’s he doing here?’ someone asked.

‘Quick. Get Marion. Go on!’

‘She’s not back yet.’

A small crowd began to form. He was thin, with pale skin and jet black hair. He flung the iron heavily onto the grass. I squinted. They were iron sculptures, in human form. I saw a head, a hand, square shoulders, a sea of limbs landing on the grass. Their weight made gashes in the lawn. He stopped then and looked up. His eyes moved slowly along the line until they met mine. He looked directly at me, into me, and said something that I could not hear. Suddenly I felt doomed. I backed up a few steps to the low perimeter wall. He turned and walked to the car, opened the boot and lifted out a shotgun. Small cries went up, and I heard running feet around me. I bent low behind the wall, but my eyes remained rooted to him. He released the bolt and loaded the gun and fired three shots into the air. He circled the car and jumped on the bonnet and surveyed the whole place. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth. ‘Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God, cry mightily unto God, for the Day of Judgement is at Hand…’ He spoke slowly. The porter ran along under the trees, bending low. ‘I hear the sound of the Angel’s trumpet…’ His volume increased. ‘The angel of death will drag your souls from your mouths and will smite your faces… For the seventh seal has been opened by the Lamb of God… and the great harlot has been destroyed… and the beast has been set loose… and the oceans have turned to blood.’

A shot rang out and then another, and he jumped to the ground and fired a volley into the sky. I covered my ears and sank lower. There was silence then. When I looked up he was walking over the windscreen and onto the roof of the car. His steps were delicate, graceful.

‘And I saw a great white throne, and the earth and the heavens fled away. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened and the dead were judged according to their works…’

His voice had begun to tremble and I thought: He will cry, and we will be saved. He leapt down and started to reload the gun.

And then I turned my head and saw Gus in his overalls come striding out of the factory yard, with his arms swinging by his side. He stepped onto the grass and crossed the lawn, and, as he drew near, the madman raised his head and smiled. ‘Here come a man, here come a man,’ he called out, and he snapped closed the barrel of the gun and I felt the echo of its chamber inside my head. The madman’s eyes opened wide, and then Gus put his hand on the madman’s shoulder and drew his head close and said something, and then the two heads were bent and moving and talking. I thought an army of soldiers would leap over the wall in that second and wrestle the madman to the ground. But nothing stirred. Everything had ground to a halt. And then the two men turned and began to cross the lawn side by side, and they stepped over the kerb and onto the driveway and as they walked Gus put out his arm and the madman placed the gun in Gus’s open hand. They walked to the entrance and passed through the gate and turned left up the Mervue Road and disappeared out of view.

I see news clips on TV sometimes of men going berserk in public places, men’s minds going awry, and I think of how close it came that day. I don’t know what Gus said to the madman. Ten minutes later he strolled back in the drive, walked up the granite steps of the Visitors’ Centre, crossed the blue carpet and handed the gun in at Reception. Then he walked down the steps and around the back and for the rest of the afternoon he hauled his wagons back and forth across the factory floor until the hooter sounded at five o’clock.

I worked out the rest of the summer in the art department. Martha set her wedding date for July of the following year and I bought a round of drinks in the Half Way House on my last Friday of that summer. Marion stayed off work for two weeks and when she returned the girls closed ranks around her. I tried to imagine the two men strolling up the Mervue Road that day and Marion’s incomprehension when she came upon them, and then the slow dawning reality at the sight of the gun, and the look that she and Gus must have exchanged as he handed Vinnie into her care.

Sometimes in the months following I’d be sitting in a packed lecture hall and I’d think of the spongers at their tables and the water turning white in their basins and every minute and hour unfolding, interminably, day after day. I’d think of my own family in the warm kitchen at night with the noise and the arguments and the TV blaring and Gus, alone with his Western novels, finding fidelity in far-off men, and I’d think of his hand reaching out and touching Vinnie’s shoulder that day and the rarity of that, for Gus, the rarity of any human touch.

And then in my last year in college, during the coldest winter of my youth, my mother wrote me a rare letter. I sat at a table by an upstairs window in a redbrick house on Dublin’s northside. I had spent the evening in the college library and my head was brimming with lines from John Donne’s God sonnets. When I opened the envelope a fifty pound note fell from the pages of the letter. She wrote of the comings and goings on the farm, of my father and my younger siblings and their school work. And then:

I am sorry to tell you that your old friend Baby Face was found dead the other day. It was an awful sight, I believe, Lord have mercy on him. They think he went outside to get water from a barrel and he must have collapsed into the barrel somehow—he must have had a massive heart attack and fallen over, and that night was the start of this freezing cold weather we’re having and didn’t the water freeze solid, and that’s the way the poor fellow was found. Everyone is talking about it. The funeral is tomorrow at eleven. Your father and I will go. He had no one left belonging to him. An awful ending entirely, the poor creature…

The sight of a bible in a hotel room now, or a drunk in a doorway, or my mother setting down her china cups, or even King Kong, all call Gus to mind. Or the word meek. Or a boy, any boy, any boy’s eyes, evokes the small boy tethered in the sun and the thoughts that must have assailed him all day long. I remember Gus’s aloofness inside the factory, and I know now that he was sparing me, that he understood how our association would contaminate me in the eyes of others. I remember the car journeys, the odours, and my own Judas moment. I think of him standing at his back door at night looking up at the drift of stars, pondering last things. I try to imagine what went through his mind when he staggered out to the barrel that cold night, or as he strode across the factory lawn that summer’s day, bearing all of our realities in each stride. I think that something must have escaped and drained out of him into the other man that day. I wonder if he’d had an inkling that a gap would open and he would lever his way in between two orders, two domains, and when he reached out his hand and leaned his head towards Vinnie’s, was it to the man or to the madness he spoke?

I think of our blood tie sometimes, mine and Gus’s, and the ties that bind us all. I would have liked to have taken him with me that autumn, taken my own family too and the factory girls and made them all fit into my new world. I would have liked to have mitigated the loss and the guilt I felt at leaving them behind, the feeling that I was escaping and walking away. It is not an easy walk, I longed to tell them, but I’m not sure anyone was listening.