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