THE CHINA FACTORY
Mary Costello grew up in County Galway. Her collection of short stories, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Her debut novel, Academy Street (2014), was the winner of Irish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. She lives in Dublin.
Also by Mary Costello
Academy Street
THE CHINA
FACTORY
MARY
COSTELLO
CANONGATE
Edinburgh · London
This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Canongate Books Ltd., 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Mary Costello, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in 2012 by Stinging Fly Press
The Stinging Fly Press
PO Box 6016
Dublin 1
Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in The Sunday Tribune, The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction and in The Stinging Fly
The author and Canongate Books gratefully acknowledge the financial support of The Arts Council Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 601 1
eISBN 978 1 78211 602 8
Set in Palatino
Contents
And night by night, down into solitude, the heavy earth falls far from every star.
We are all falling. This hand’s falling too—all have this falling-sickness none withstands.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
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