Eggshells

Eggshells Caitriona Lally WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE 2018A modern Irish literary gem for anyone who has felt like the odd one out.‘Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving’ GUARDIAN ‘Wildly funny’ THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW‘Beguiling’ THE IRISH TIMES‘Delightfully quirky’ THE IRISH INDEPENDENTVivian is an oddball.An unemployed orphan living in the house of her recently deceased great aunt in North Dublin, Vivian boldly goes through life doing things in her own peculiar way, whether that be eating blue food, cultivating ‘her smell’, wishing people happy Christmas in April, or putting an ad up for a friend called Penelope to check why it doesn’t rhyme with antelope. But behind her heroic charm and undeniable logic, something isn’t right. With each attempt to connect with a stranger or her estranged sister doomed to misunderstanding, someone should ask: is Vivian OK?A poignant and delightful story of belonging that plays with the myth of the Changeling and takes us by the hand through Dublin. A poetic call for us all to accept each other and find the Vivian within. Copyright (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) The Borough Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in 2015 by Liberties Press Copyright © Caitriona Lally 2015 Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) Book design by Fritz Metsch Illustrations by Karen Vaughan Caitriona Lally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008324407 Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 9780008324414 Version: 2018-09-25 Praise for Eggshells: (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) ‘Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving’ Guardian ‘Full of action and humour as its beguiling narrator takes her surreal jaunts around the capital in search of a portal to another world … The black comedy gives the book a jaunty quality that complements the dazzling trip around Dublin’ The Irish Times ‘Delightfully quirky … Vivian’s voice alone is enough to keep us reading, charmed by her unique brand of manic, word-hoarding wit’ Irish Independent ‘The book’s style calls to mind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Engaging and humorous’ The Dublin Inquirer ‘This urban fairy tale delivers something that is both subtle and profound in its examination of the human soul. Magically delicious’ Kirkus ‘Highly original, Lally has a unique voice as a writer’ Sunday Independent ‘A whimsical jaunt through Dublin and a modern take on many old Irish folktakes … Humorous, charming, and original’ Booklist ‘Eggshells expresses a Joycean sense of the ordinary. A brilliantly realised first-person narrative … a memorable debut’ Totally Dublin ‘Caitriona Lally has created a character of almost maddening originality’ Wales Arts Review ‘A highly impressive debut … a touching account of difference, showing how life must feel for somebody who cannot conform’ Books Ireland Epigraph (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) Sometimes the fairies fancy mortals, and carry them away into their own country, leaving instead some sickly fairy child … Most commonly they steal children. If you “over look a child,” that is look on it with envy, the fairies have it in their power. Many things can be done to find out if a child’s a changeling, but there is one infallible thing—lay it on the fire … Then if it be a changeling it will rush up the chimney with a cry … —W. B. YEATS Contents Cover (#ufd6ac539-d5c8-53cd-b19c-36bdefda92b5) Title Page (#u74e70933-ef02-539e-8fd3-6990a55fe1d2) Copyright Praise for Eggshells Epigraph Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 About the Author About the Publisher 1 (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) WHEN I RETURN to my great-aunt’s house with her ashes, the air feels uncertain, as if it doesn’t know how to deal with me. My great-aunt died three weeks ago, but there is still a faint waft of her in every room—of lavender cologne mixed with soiled underthings. I close the front door and look around the house with fresh eyes, the eyes of a new owner. My great-aunt kept chairs the way some people keep cats. There are chairs in every room, in the hall, on the wide step at the bottom of the stairs and on the landing. The four chairs on the landing are lined up like chairs in a waiting room. I sometimes sit on one and imagine that I’m waiting for an appointment with the doctor, or confession with the priest. Then I nod to the chair beside me and say, “He’s in there a long time, must have an awful lot of diseases or sins, hah.” Some of the chairs are tatty and crusty, with springs poking through the fabric. Others are amputees. There are chairs in every colour and pattern and style and fabric—except leather, which my great-aunt said was the hide of the Devil himself. I go into the living room and sit in a brown armchair and examine the urn. It’s shaped like a coffin on a plinth—I chose it because death in a wooden box is more real than death in a jar. I shake it close to my ear, but I can’t hear a thing, not even a cindery whisper. I prise open the lid. The scratch of wood on wood is like a cackle through the ashes, the last laugh of a woman whose mouth never moved beyond a quarter-smile. I’ve seen people on television scattering ashes in significant places, but the only significant places in my great-aunt’s life were her chair and her bed, and if I scatter them there, I’d be sneezing Great-Aunt Maud for years to come. I take the address book from the shelf and sift through it. There are a few A’s and C’s, a couple of G’s, an H and some M’s, but my great-aunt seems to have stopped making friends when she hit N. I take some envelopes out of the desk drawer and write the addresses on the envelopes: twenty-two in all. Twenty-six would be a symmetrical person-per-alphabet letter ratio, so I take the telephone directory from the shelf and flick through from the end of the alphabet. The pages are Bible-thin, and my fingers show up as ghostly grease-prints. I decide on Mr. Woodlock, Mrs. Xu, Mr. Yeomans and Miss Zacchaeus. In school we sang about the tax collector who cheated people out of money. “Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus, Nobody liked Zacchaeus,” I sing, or I think I sing, but I don’t know what other ears can hear from my mouth. I open my laptop and type: Hello, You knew my Great-Aunt Maud. Here are some of her ashes. Yours Sincerely, Vivian I print twenty-two copies of the letter, but it looks bare and mean, so I draw a pencil outline of the coffin-shaped urn in the blank space at the bottom. Now I type a different letter to the four strangers. Hello, You didn’t know my Great-Aunt Maud. You probably wouldn’t have liked her, unless you’re very tolerant or your ears are clogged with wax. Yours Sincerely, Vivian I print four copies of this letter and fold all the letters into envelopes. I add a good pinch of ashes to each envelope and lick them all shut, my tongue tasting the bitter end of gluey. The pile of envelopes looks so smug and complete, I feel like I’m part of a grand business venture. Now I peer into the urn. The small heap of ashes, probably an elbow’s worth, looks like a tired old sandpit after the children have gone home for tea. I close the lid, put the urn on the bookshelf between two books, and sit down. I look around the room. The idea of owning something so unownable is strange: owning a house-sized quantity of air is like owning a patch of the sky. I laugh, but the sound is mean and tinny, so I take in a lung of air and laugh again—this one is bigger, but too baggy. I’ll save my laughs until I have worked on them in private. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that I’m between laughs. My glance keeps returning to the urn; I’m expecting the lid to open and the burnt eye of my great-aunt to peek out. When they were deciding how to bury her, I said she had always wanted to be cremated. It was a lie the size of a graveyard, but I wanted to make sure she was well and truly dead. I spot a thin slip of a book on the middle shelf and pull it out, wondering how a book could be made from so few words, but it’s a street map of Dublin, its edges bitten away by mice or silverfish. I unfold the map, spread it on a patch of carpet and write in my notebook the names of places that contain fairytales and magic and portals to another world, a world my parents believed I came from and tried to send me back to, a world they never found but I will: “Scribblestown, Poppintree, Trimbleston, Dolphin’s Barn, Dispensary Lane, Middle Third, Duke Street, Lemon Street, Windmill Lane, Yellow Road, Dame Street, Pig’s Lane, Tucketts Lane, Copper Alley, Poddle Park, Stocking Lane, Weavers’ Square, Tranquility Grove, The Turrets, Cuckoo Lane, Thundercut Alley, Curved Street, The Thatch Road, Cow Parlour, Cowbooter Lane, Limekiln Lane, Lockkeepers Walk, Prince’s Street, Queen Street, Laundry Lane, Joy Street, Hope Avenue, Harmony Row, Fox’s Lane, Emerald Cottages, Swan’s Nest, Ferrymans Crossing, Bellmans Walk, The Belfry, Tranquility Grove, Misery Hill, Ravens’ Court, Obelisk Walk, Bird Avenue, All Hallows Lane, Arbutus Place.” I close my eyes, circle my finger around the map and pick a point. When I open my eyes, I see that my finger has landed nearest to Thundercut Alley. If a thunderclap or lightning flash can transport characters in films and fairytales to other worlds, visiting Thundercut Alley might scoop me up and beam me off to where I belong, or cleave the ground in two and send me shooting down to another world. When my parents were alive, they tried to exchange me for their rightful daughter, but they must not have gone to the right places or asked the right questions. I crouch at the front door in the hallway and listen; I can’t hear my neighbours, so it’s safe to go out. I walk to the bus stop and stand beside a man wearing a grey jacket with a hood, holding a bottle of cola. He nods at me. “Baltic, isn’t it?” “Yes.” I give an exaggerated shiver, because one word seems a fairly meagre response. I think about the seas of the world. “It’s really more Arctic than Baltic,” I say. “Surely the Arctic is the colder sea.” “Yeah, yeah love.” He unscrews the cap from the bottle, pours some on the ground in a brown hissing puddle and balances the open bottle on a wall. Then he takes a brown paper bag containing a rectangular glass bottle from inside his jacket, pours the clear liquid from the glass bottle into the cola bottle, and puts it back inside his jacket. When he takes a sup from the cola bottle, he smiles like he has solved the whole world. The bus arrives. I get off on O’Connell Street and walk in the direction of the river, passing the bank on the left, which has a carved stone skull of a cow over each side window. A blue-and-white football is wedged beside one window, as if the dead cows had a kick around in the dark of night. I cross the street near a building with the look of a fairytale, and a sign that reads “E Confectioners Hal.” It’s a shoe shop now, but maybe they sell shoe measures of jam or sweets, and the people with the biggest feet have the rottenest teeth. I cross Bachelors Walk to the boardwalk, and head west. The river and the traffic flow east on either side of me, which makes me feel the wrong way around. I stop and sit on the wooden bench and look at the other side of the river. From this angle, the buildings on the south quays look like they were dropped from a height and shoved together, with the Central Bank sticking up behind, like a Lego brick they forgot to paint. When the boardwalk ends, I cross the street and pass solicitors’ offices, bargain furniture shops and dark pubs, until I reach the museum in Collins Barracks. I come here when I need to look at furniture and containers; I’d rather look at the things that hold other things than at the things themselves. I take out my notebook and walk through the museum, collecting names: “Posset Bowl, Mether, Pitcher, Tankard, Water Bottle, Sweetmeat Box, Chalice, Salt Cellar, Monstrance, Sugar Bowl, Goblet, Vase, Trinket Box, Ewer, Jug, Inkstand, Flagon, Hot Water Urn, Decanter, Snuff Box, Patch Box, Cruet Stand & Bottles, Finger Bowl, Carafe, Pickle Jar, Sweetmeat Cup, Chocolate Pot, Coffee Pot, Teapot, Kettle, Cream Ewer, Strawberry Dish, Sugar Basket, Egg Cup, Butter Dish, Tea Caddy, Salver, Cigar Box, Needlework Box, Correspondence Box, Bridal Coffer, Blanket Chest, Calling-Card Box, Travelling Box, Writing Cabinet, Log Carrier, Coal Scuttle, Double-Compartmented Meal Bin.” Every item in the glass case is labelled with its function. It knows what it’s supposed to hold; its task has been assigned. It is clear and ordered and contained. I peer closely at the snuff boxes. If I tried some snuff, I’d probably sneeze ferociously, but they would be pleasant-smelling sneezes. The ornate chests and trunks are behind glass. The caption says that the bridal coffer is decorated with mother-of-pearl and gilt inlays, brass escutcheons and lacquer. I would like to be decorated with escutcheons, but I probably should find out what they are first. My gravestone could read: “Here lies Vivian Lawlor: She wasn’t Quite the Thing, but She was Decorated with Escutcheons.” In the Irish furniture section, shelves of chairs face me expectantly, waiting for me to perform; I disappoint. The museum has not half so large a collection of chairs as my great-aunt has, but these ones have names and written histories: “S?g?n, Carpenter’s Chair, High Comb-Back Chair, Spindle-Back Chair, Comb-Back Hedge Chair.” I can’t match my great-aunt’s chairs exactly to any of these, she seems to have discovered some odd shapes and sizes that fit under no labels. I walk back to the quays, turn up Queen Street, and approach Thundercut Alley from the back, not from the Smithfield side, because I want to take it by surprise. It’s a curve of an alley, all draught and shade, lined by new buildings that don’t speak of magic. I stand in the middle with my eyes shut and wait for thunder. I open my eyes: nothing has changed. I need to rouse a thunderstorm, so I shout “Boom!” and flash the light on my phone: “boom”—flash—“boom”—flash—“boom.” I open my eyes but I’m still standing in the alley, un-thundered and un-spirited away. This is clearly not the right opening, so I start walking home through Stoneybatter. Some of the white letters on the street signs have been coloured blue to match the blue background: Manor Street reads “MAI_O_ STR_ _T.” “Maiostrt” sounds like a combination of mustard and mayonnaise that would taste good on ham sandwiches. I pass boarded-up houses with small trees growing out of their chimneys, and a supermarket that sells used cars. At “Prussia Street,” the “P” on the street sign has been blue-ed out to read “_RUSSIA STREET.” I picture a band of Smurfs combing the city in the black of night with tins of blue paint, daubing over the street letters that offend them. For the higher-up signs they step on each other’s shoulders to form a pyramid, placing the most agile Smurf with the best blue head for heights at the top. When I walk by the greengrocer, my eyes are pulled to a pile of lemons on display outside the shop. I bundle them all into my arms—I need this exact quantity to replicate this intensity of colour—and go into the shop to pay. I walk back to my great-aunt’s house, which I have to start calling home. When I enter the house I catch the beginning of my smell, an earthy tang that I plan to grow into. There won’t be many visitors to dilute my smell. My sister called over in January but she didn’t stay long—I think I was her New Year’s resolution. She bothers me to clean the house and get rid of chairs and find a job. Her world is full of children and doings and action verbs, but I’m uncomfortable with verbs; they expect too much. Since our great-aunt’s death, we have nothing to talk about, and our conversation is jerky with silences the size of golf balls. I check the answering machine for messages, the numbers on the screen are “00.” They are accusatory; I wish they would act more like their round cuddly shape. I put the lemons in a glass bowl, then I take one out and pull the nubs at either end, imagining that my hands are the hands of two different people playing a peculiarly zesty kind of tug of war. I unfurl the Dublin map onto the kitchen table, and draw black blobs with a marker along the route that I walked today. Then I take out a roll of greaseproof paper, tear off a piece, place it over the map and trace my route with a pencil. I hold the paper up to the world map on the wall: today I covered the shape of an upside-down and back-to-front Chad. I put the greaseproof map in the top-left corner of the kitchen table and sit in the rocking chair, hurling to and fro, to and fro. The chair clacks against the wall on the “fro” movement, and this is good: I am causing effect, I am cause and effect. 2 (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) I WANT A friend called Penelope. When I know her well enough, I’ll ask her why she doesn’t rhyme with antelope. I would also like a friend called Amber, but only if she was riddled with jaundice. I take down the phone directory from the shelf and look through it, but there’s no easy way to hunt for a first name. After too many Phylises, Patricias and Paulas, I concede paper defeat and go to my laptop. I type “Penelope Dublin” into the search box and an image of a girl appears, but she’s wearing only her underwear and she wants to be my date. I close the lid of the laptop. I need to turn the search farther afield—or farther astreet, seeing as I’m in a city. I will search for a Penelope-friend the old-fashioned way. I take a black marker and a sheet of paper from the desk, and write: WANTED: Friend Called Penelope. Must Enjoy Talking Because I Don’t Have Much to Say. Good Sense of Humour Not Required Because My Laugh Is a Work in Progress. Must Answer to Penelope: Pennies Need Not Apply. Phone Vivian. I choose the plural “Pennies” instead of “Pennys,” because the “nys” looks like a misspelt boy band, and “ies” is like a lipsmack of strawberries and cream. I put the poster in a see-through plastic pouch, then I stick pieces of Sellotape around the edges. I leave the house but I forget to check for the neighbours, and Bernie sticks her head around the front door as I pass her house. “What’s that you’ve got there?” “Just a poster.” “Show me.” She grabs it out of my hands. “Mind the Sellotape,” I say. She holds it an arm’s length away from herself and squints, muttering the words aloud. They sound different in her voice, different like I never wrote them, different like they came from another language. I snatch the poster from her hands. “Why do you want a friend called Penelope?” She stares at me, her face contorted. Even her nose frowns at me. I don’t know how to respond. I never know how to respond to people who want small complete sentences with one tidy meaning, I can’t explain myself to people who peer out windows and think they know the world. “I just do,” I say. I turn onto the North Circular Road holding my head high because that sounds dignified, but I trip on a bump in the footpath, so I lower my head. The first tree I pass looks unfriendly so I walk to the next one, which has kinder branches. I mash the poster hard against the bark and stand back. It looks a bit bare without a photo of a missing pet, but I can’t add a photo of Penelope until I know what she looks like. Two men walk by speaking in a foreign tongue. Their consonants come from the backs of their throats, and their words run headlong into one another like boisterous children. I try repeating their words aloud, and think how I would like to learn a language that almost no one else speaks, especially if the few who do speak it are old or almost dead. I start walking home, but home feels empty without Penelope and I’m distracted by the neon sign of my local fish bar. I’m not sure that I can call it my local anything if I’ve never gone into it, so I press my middle fingers alternately against the heels of my hands and whisper “safe safe safe” and walk inside. It smells bright, it smells hot, it smells good. A man with a shiny forehead looks up. “What can I get you?” I look at the menu on the wall behind the man, but there are too many choices and the words blur into one. “Do you have chips?” “Just put on a fresh batch—five minutes.” I would like to drop pronouns and verbs as readily as this man, he seems so comfortable with his language. “I’d like two bags please. Himself is hungry.” I throw my eyes up to heaven and give a little snort, the way I’ve seen women do when they talk about their boyfriends and husbands. I won’t have the belly space for two bags of chips, but the man will think I have a “himself,” and I can reheat the leftovers tomorrow. I walk to one side and read the posters on the wall. There’s an ad for discounted meals, a programme for a local festival and a notice about a fundraiser for a smiling woman called Marie. More people come in and I sneak peeps at them to see how they’re dealing with this wait. One leans against the counter and two lean against the window; they look as if they were born to stand in fish bars. I try leaning against the wall, but I haven’t moved my feet and the top part of my body strains at an uncomfortable angle from my hips. A couple of the men are looking at their phones, so I reach into my pocket and pull out mine. I open my inbox, it contains one old message. I read it again. Vivian, Maud is getting worse, come to the hospital quickly. Vivian. This is the only unprompted message my sister has ever sent me, so I can’t delete it; it’s like a line from a family poem. My sister and I have the same name. She was born first and has more rights to the name; I whisper mine in apology. I would like a nickname, but nicknames must be given, not taken. I hear the soft thud of chips on paper. “Salt and vinegar?” “Yes, please.” He hands me the bags and I pay. I clasp them tight, one in each hand, and walk home like I have won a grand potato prize. Next morning I wake to the voices of my neighbours, Mary and Bernie, talking outside. I get out of bed and open the curtains a jot, then I stand behind the curtain and watch. Mary and Bernie live on either side of me, like a sandwich. They are white sliced pan because they know everything, and I am mild cheddar. “Lauren’s communion is on the twenty-first, I’m putting a bit by every week,” Bernie says. She has the most great-grandchildren so she is superior. “I’m looking forward to Shannon’s christening,” Mary shouts over her. “They’ve booked the Skylon, should be a lovely day out—” “—then Ryan’s wedding is on the twenty-eighth,” Bernie says. “I’ve the dress got and all.” They each talk as if the other wasn’t there. They would shove their words into the ears of a cockroach if they thought it would listen. “Any word from herself?” Mary nods in the direction of my house. “Last I heard she’s advertising for a friend,” Bernie says. “Jaysus.” They shake their heads. At least they listen to each other when they’re talking about me. I stay as still as I can, still as a wall, still as a girl in a painting. I used to win musical statues in school, but here the prize is to be not-noticed. When Mary and Bernie have gone into their houses I watch the daytime people pass: elderly people in beige, women with prams, men in tracksuits. There’s a sudden smack of blue and the postman comes out of a house further down the terrace. He’s moving in and out of houses like a needle stitching a hem. He stops at my gate, looks at his bundle of letters and walks to the front door. I listen for the clatter of the letter box, then I run downstairs and look at the hall floor. There are two envelopes: a large white one and a smaller brown one. My name is handwritten in looped, slanted letters on the brown envelope: “Vivian Lawlor.” It could be the name of a film star or a businesswoman in a suit or an Olympic gymnast—it could be anyone but me. I open it. A man called David from the Social Welfare office will pay me a visit on Wednesday. I put it down and pick up the second envelope and sniff, it doesn’t smell of people at all. I open it and stop reading after “To the House-holder.” Even though I don’t like the dead hope the envelope gives me, I like the fact that circulars are delivered to a street off the North Circular Road. I’d like to use this topic of conversation at the bus stop, but I can’t find a way to introduce it casually. I would need to get to a second conversation before I could announce those kinds of things. I go into the kitchen and take a red bowl from the cupboard, because I need some red in my day. Then I take the least battered-looking spoon from the drawer—I want to wear out the cutlery evenly. Next I take out the box of cornflakes, scoop up a fistful and scrunch hard. I bring my fist to the bowl and open it, watching the orange silt form a small heap. I repeat the process three times then I pour in a good dash of milk until the corn dust is sodden, and eat. After breakfast, I go up to my bedroom and climb inside the wardrobe. I tap the wood at the back, but the door to Narnia hasn’t opened today so I close my eyes, feel around for a jumper and pair of jeans and climb out. I get dressed without adding water to my body or looking in a mirror. I want to grow into my smell. I want to grow out of my appearance. I want a smell-presence and a sight-absence. The mirrors were covered with sheets when my great-aunt died, and I haven’t uncovered them since. I pick up my bag, go downstairs and stand in the hall, listening. I time my comings and goings around my neighbours’ Mass trips, pension collections and shopping expeditions; I time my life around theirs. I can’t hear anything, so I let myself out and pull the door quietly behind me. I repeat safe safe safe in my mind, and it seems safe safe safe until Bernie’s head pops up—she’d been kneeling down, weeding the garden. “Ah, Vivian, there you are!” I think, Where else would I be? And I stand still and clenched, waiting to soak up her paragraphs. She speaks whole troughs of words, words about the priest who upped and died in the middle of his sermon and the neighbour who had a stroke and the other neighbour who’s been diagnosed with cancer and the jobs that aren’t there and the foreigners that are taking the jobs that are there and the social welfare benefits the foreigners are getting and the benefits the likes of me and you aren’t getting. Her sentences leave no gaps for me to fill, so I take advantage of the word-torrent and start to creep further and further away until she is shouting louder words about the government cutting her pension and my feet are walking down the street away away away and I am free. “Poor Vivian,” I’ve heard her call me, but she is the poor one, with her rage and conniptions. I walk through Phibsborough and head down towards Constitution Hill, passing King’s Inns Court. Some letters have been blue-ed out so that it reads “K_N_ _ _O_RT.” “Knort,” I say aloud—a lovely word, but only if the “K” is silent and reassuring. One arm of the “T” has been blue-ed out—it looks like an upside-down and back-to-front “L”—so I try saying it some place between a “T” and an “L.” I turn left onto Western Way, and then right onto Dominick Street. I don’t go into the church today, because I’m too unsettled from Bernie’s ravings to enjoy the silence. I have no religion, but I like big silent echoey buildings with seats all facing one thing. I would like to believe in that thing they are facing. I would like to believe in something so much that I would turn myself inside out for it. I wave at the carved stone heads staring down from the church spires. Some of them look quite serious, as if they don’t approve of my doings, but one of them looks like she’s on my side. I call her Caroline, a nice open name with a gaping “C,” like a gum-filled toothless grin. I cross Parnell Street and head onto O’Connell Street. The statues this end of the street have outstretched arms—Parnell, Larkin, Jesus at the taxi rank—all have arms agape in half a hug. I walk down the middle island of O’Connell Street, by a group of taxi drivers chatting at the rank. When the first driver on my left gets into his car and drives around the island, the other drivers go to their cars, open the drivers’ doors, grip the insides of the cars and push them forward to close the gap. They might be birthing calves or playing tug of war or straining against the weight of an automated world. I cross at the Spire onto North Earl Street, passing the statue of James Joyce with his legs crossed. He looks easy to topple and, if I had to read Finnegans Wake, I’d probably try to topple him. I skip the bustling caf? on the corner—it’s all show-face and windows—and go into the long narrow caf? a few doors down. I order coffee and a chocolate eclair. The staff here know me and are kind; they greet me with short sentences that end in “love.” I like living in a city where I am mostly unknown, and going into small places where I am known. There are metal knives and forks in the cutlery holder but only plastic teaspoons, probably to deter the masked spoon thief who steals spoons from the city’s caf?s to build a gigantic spoon tower. I sit at the table nearest to the toilets, at the back, and take out my notebook, which has kind blank pages that don’t scream at me to stay within the lines. I make a List of Things That I Like: “Conkers, Sherbert, Gold Ingots, The Smell of Petrol, Dessert Trolleys, Graveyards, Sneezes, Terrapins, Scars that Tell Stories, The Number 49, The Smell of Pencil Parings.” Now I imagine I can smell pencil parings, so I sniff deeply. The man at a nearby table turns to look at me. He has three mobile phones laid out like playing cards on the table in front of him. One of them rings and he turns back to answer it. I continue with my list: “Donkey’s Tufty Heads, Marshmallowed Silences, Butter Lumps, Elephants, Zoos in Winter, Pencils that Write Sootily, The Name Aloysius, Anything Egg-Shaped, Moths that Think They Are Butterflies, Hospital Noises, Liquorice Sweets in the Shape of Pink Toilet Rolls, The Smell of Garden Sheds, Damp Canteen Trays, Marbles with Coloured Swirls.” I’ve smeared some chocolate from the eclair onto the page, so I include “Chocolate Eclair,” with an arrow to explain the stain. The man in front of me is still talking on his phone. I take out mine and put it on the table. There’s a greyish tint to the screen: I have a message! I open the message and an unfamiliar number appears. It reads: “Hello, Vivian, I am Penelope. Can you meet me in the tearooms beside the hardware tomorrow at eleven?” As I re-read the message, my belly feels like a pot boiling over. I have a new friend called Penelope who spells out her numbers; it just can’t get much better than this. Now I decide to make a List of Words That I Like. I start off with “Propane and Butane.” I want to go on a camping trip just so I can use these words. I don’t know exactly what they are, but I imagine myself saying to the person in the next tent, “My propane’s running low, mind if I borrow some?” Or I could show off my camping experience with an abbreviation, “I’m all out of bute, have you any to spare?” I’ve written down “Propane and Butane” because they go together, but now it looks like “and” is one of my favourite words, which would be like saying that flour is my favourite food. I scratch out “and” and write: “Propane, Butane, Smear, Pufferfish, Trodden, Eiderdown, Plethora (but only the way I pronounce it, pleh-THOWE-ra), Beachcomber, Mischief, Bumble Bee.” I like the words “Bumble Bee” so much that I once said them over and over until they stopped making sense as words, and became meaningless babble. I drain the last of my coffee—I love meals that are all puff and froth and little else besides—and walk up North Frederick Street, my knees crunching like overcooked biscuits. If I have biscuit knees, maybe I have chocolate blood and a blancmange brain, a Hansel and Gretel house of a body. When I get home, I trace my route. Today I walked the shape of a head with a hollow scooped out of the back, and a quiff of hair blown flat to the front. I place it on the kitchen table, next to yesterday’s route. To celebrate my success in finding a Penelope, I pour a dash of my great-aunt’s wine into a mug. It tastes sweet and sneezy but it isn’t cold. There’s no ice in the freezer so I drop some frozen peas into mug; now it looks like a diseased pond. I sit on the blue velvet armchair, the kind of chair an off-duty policeman might sit in, and drink with my lips pursed to keep the peas out. After some large gulps, I feel garrulous and wine-smug. I don’t want to waste this fruity connected feeling, so I call my sister. “Hello?” She whispers the word, as if the phone has threatened to bite her ear. “Vivian? Hi, it’s Vivian,” I giggle. Never has this sentence sounded funnier. “Vivian? Is everything alright?” “Everything is better than alright,” I say. “I tried to make thunder, and I advertised for a friend.” My sister sighs, a sigh so long that I snatch it up in my mouth and spit it right out again. “What are you doing?” “I’m cancelling out your sigh.” “Oh, Vivian.” Her voice sounds like it’s coming from another century. “How are Lucy and Ois?n?” “Oh, they’re great. Lucy is … Ois?n is …” Her voice has plumped up again, and she sends a clatter of words down the line. In between sups of wine, I say words like, “wow, ooh, mm, really, oh, aren’t they great, ah that’s nice.” The small words seem to be the most important, but I’m not sure if they count as actual words. “I’d better go, there’s something in the oven,” I say, when I have run out of new words to use. “This late?” “I’m making midnight cake.” “Oh?” She has managed to make a full question out of a two-letter word. “Good night,” I say and hang up. I write “Call my sister” on a blank sheet of paper, and put a line through it with a pencil. A pen is too neat; a smudged grey line is more like my relationship with my sister. I check the oven, hoping that a cake has magically appeared from my lie, but there are only crumbs and stalactites of old cheese that could feed a family of three gerbils for a week. 3 (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) I WAKE EARLY and it’s cold, so I decide to keep my night clothes on under my day clothes like stealth pyjamas. I get up, open my wardrobe, close my eyes and feel around for enough clothes to cover all parts of my body. I go into the hoard-room and take a fresh notebook from the pile. My great-aunt allowed me to keep all my treasures in the small box room, which I call the hoard-room. No dragon guards my hoard because there isn’t a nugget of gold within it. I collect: stationery, sweet wrappers (only the jewel-coloured ones), old milk bottle tops, newspaper photographs of animals, bows, ribbons, wrapping paper, stamps, bus tickets with symmetrical dates on them, maps, old Irish punt currency, jigsaws, dolls, teddy bears, toys, games, knick-knacks and everything anyone has ever given me. I’m missing a dice from Snakes and Ladders, the candlestick from Cluedo and an “H” and a “V” from Scrabble. If I replaced the pieces, though, the newer ones would be too clean and unused and might be mocked by the older pieces, so I do without. My hoard is made up of things from my childhood and early teens, with a big gap from my adulthood that I am trying to fill. I don’t like to separate it into containers, so it piles up in two large mounds with a Vivian-wide path running through the middle. I see a small cloth foot sticking out from the left mound and pull out my sister’s old doll. She has dangly limbs filled with sawdust, a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other. I put her on a chair in the landing and sit on another chair facing her. I suck my pencil and try to remember what people on buses and in caf?s talk about. I write: 1. Weather 2. Transport I could say “Traffic was a NIGHTMARE.” People always speak in capital letters when they talk about traffic, but I’ll be walking to the caf?. I’ll say that I noticed from the footpath that traffic on the road was terrible. I continue: 3. Favourite Colour 4. Favourite Sweet Food 5. Favourite Salty Food 6. Favourite Zoo Animal 7. Favourite Farm Animal I need to practise using my voice aloud because sometimes it squeaks and gets pulled back into my throat if it’s been out of use for a while. “Hi, Penelope,” I say, holding out my hand and shaking a small sawdust hand. “Lovely day, isn’t it?” I lean forward and look out the bedroom window. The coat of a passer-by is flapping and an empty crisp packet is a salty whirligig around his feet. I turn back to the doll and start again. “Hi, Penelope, bit windy, isn’t it?” The doll just smiles. “No sign of spring yet.” I turn the doll around, and her crying eyes face me. This is my cue to stop the conversation. I go into the bathroom and wash my hands with a fresh bar of soap in preparation for a handshake with Penelope. I feel like saying some kind of prayer or performing a ritual dance—the occasion feels this big—so I stand in the living room and roar “Gaaaaaaaaah!” from the bottoms of my lungs, and slap each hand in turn across my chest. I put my notebook in my bag, leave the house, sprint past Bernie’s and then turn the sprint into a calm walk. I huddle and tighten myself against the wind, and think up ways to describe it to Penelope. Is “a rape of a wind” too strong for the first sentence of a first meeting? I push the door of the caf? and the bell jangles. There are men in navy overalls eating fried breakfasts and elderly people sitting alone or in pairs. I walk up to the counter and order coffee and a coffee slice. “Normally I wouldn’t double up,” I say to the lady in the white uniform with the white cap, who looks like a medieval wench. She stares at me. “Double up how?” “A coffee drink and coffee-flavoured bun might seem excessive, but today’s a special day.” “Yeah, okay, love,” she says. “I’ll bring them down to you, have a seat.” I have wasted this topic on someone who doesn’t like it, but no matter, I can reuse it on Penelope. I sit in the corner table facing the window. The lady brings my coffee and cake, and I squash the coffee slice flat so that the cream oozes out the sides. Then I scoop it up and add it to my coffee. A couple of pastry flakes poke out of the cream, like planks of wood in a miniature snow scene. I look out the window. Potted plants and huge tubs of paint and garden ornaments are laid out on the footpath in front of the hardware next door. A woman comes up to the caf? window, a thin woman who should be fat, with the kind of face that looks like an empty sack when it’s not smiling. Her clothes are red and yellow and screaming. This must be Penelope: only people with three “E”s in their names could dress so loud. I wave. She smiles, the kind of smile that could reheat cold coffee, with yellow gappy teeth in need of a power hose. She bustles into the caf?, sweeping in leaves with her long skirt. A net bag swings from the crook of her elbow, and she is carrying a melon. In two giant steps, her feet eat up the floor and reach me. “You must be Vivian, I’m Penelope.” She grabs my hand and thrusts the melon into my chest, as if playing some kind of new fruit sport. “Hold this, I’m going to get some tea. You’re alright for everything?” I open my mouth to speak but she is gone, and I’m left holding the melon. It’s yellow, the kind of yellow that seas should be made of, or swimming pools at least. I sit down and put the melon on Penelope’s chair. She scuttles back in a breeze, squeezing between tables and knocking a salt cellar off a table: smash! Penelope doesn’t look surprised; smashes must soundtrack her every move. I take a breath to warn her about the melon, but she sits straight down on the yellow hump and doesn’t seem to notice. “So, Vivian, what possessed you to go on a Penelope hunt?” She guffaws and her breath hits me, a stench so powerful it could fell trees. It’s too soon for this question. I hadn’t prepared for it, so I stick to my original conversation plan. “Bit of a nip in the air, isn’t there?” Penelope’s forehead bunches and warps, and she squints at me. “I wanted to know why Penelope doesn’t rhyme with antelope.” “Right.” She stares somewhere above my right eyebrows and nods. Then she shifts in her chair, raises one haunch and pulls out the melon as if she has just birthed it. She takes the little packets of sugar out of the bowl on the table and balances the melon on top of it, like a golden fairytale egg in an ordinary egg cup. She looks like she does this kind of thing every day. “What’s your favourite colour?” I ask. “Red.” The lady brings Penelope’s tea. She looks at the melon, but says nothing. “Favourite animal?” “Cat.” I feel a twinge of unease, as if a cat has slunk between my ankles and curled its tail around my leg. “I don’t like cats,” I say. “Oh, you’re one of those.” She narrows her eyes and spits out “those.” “Those what?” “Cat bigots. Catists. Member of the anti-cat brigade.” I start to sweat. We haven’t spoken many sentences to each other and an argument is already forming. I jerk my arm and knock over the remains of my coffee. A grease-bubbled liquid flows across the table; Penelope grabs a napkin and wipes the stream. The cat conversation has vanished. “Do you work?” I ask. “Not a suit-and-desk job,” she says. “I paint.” “What do you paint?” “Cats, mainly.” She grins at me, and my eyes are drawn to her tooth gaps. A piece of corn is wedged between two particularly wonky teeth. “Did you have corn on the cob for breakfast?” “I had it for dinner yesterday.” “It’s in your teeth.” “Oh.” She digs it out and puts it on her saucer. “Sometimes I forget to wash my teeth. I believe hygiene is overrated.” The way she drawls her “L”s rips through my ears, but I allow her this fright of a vowel, because we have found common ground. “I agree,” I say. I look at the piece of corn—it’s yellow and inscrutable. “Do you think it’s lonesome without the rest of the cob?” I ask. “Probably. It’s like separating thousand-tuplets.” “Are frogspawn called million-tuplets?” “I don’t see why not.” This is the kind of conversation that I’ve been dreaming of, or half-dreaming of, in that part of my brain that conjures up the nicest most suitable things, things that never enter my mouth or my waking brain, things that I feel for a few seconds somewhere on the edge of my eyeballs, on the edge of my waking. “What do you do, Vivian?” I haven’t prepared this question and I start to feel sticky. “I had a job once but the company put me out of my desk.” “I’m sorry. The job hunt can be a bit grim.” “I used to hunt,” I say, “but I’ve had hundreds of silences from employers, so now I regard my job seeking as more of a hobby, rather than an action that could produce results.” Penelope laughs, the sort of laugh that makes me think of wolf cubs being reunited with their mothers: it’s the tail end of despairing. I think about how to end our meeting and my heart thunks faster. I hate arriving, but I hate leaving even more. Penelope gulps down the rest of her tea and claps her hands. “Must rush, Vivian, I’ve to bring one of the cats to the vet. Come over to my place next week?” “Yes, please.” She says her address and I say mine and she says, “It’s in the computer,” which must mean her brain because she taps her temple with her finger. We say goodbye and her body seems to be shaping up for a hug, so I move backwards and wave. I walk home and close the front door behind me. “It’s in the computer,” I say, in what I think is a light-hearted tone, and then I tap my left temple, but the two need to be done together so I try again. “It’s in the computer.” I’m so happy about how my Penelope meeting went that I consider burning down the house with me in it, so good things can’t unravel. My legs are too excited to sit down and the day hasn’t yet been emptied of light, so I decide to visit my thin places—places in which non-humans might live, potential gateways to the world I came from. My parents used force to try and shunt me back to this Otherworld; I will use willing. After the Phibsborough crossroads, I walk down the steps into Broadstone Park. A sign tells users not to drink alcohol or cycle and to keep dogs on leashes; in this part of the park alone, people are disobeying all of these rules. At the end of the park, I close my eyes and pass through a black door in a wall into Blessington Basin. Doors in outdoor walls remind me of the magic door of a red-haired puppet in a children’s television programme that I used to watch as a child. No magic world opens for me now. I emerge facing the basin and walk to a bench to sit for a while and watch the birds. I like pigeons; I like their greed and their laziness and their determination to avoid flying if at all possible. A sign says: DON’T FEED THE PIGEONS, which seems unfair. I don’t understand how people are supposed to feed the swans and ducks without feeding the pigeons. I watch a thin pigeon eating a chunk of bread. A fat pigeon comes along and pecks him until he drops the bread. I wave my arms to shoo away the fat pigeon, but both fly off and I’m left with a half-pecked chunk of bread. When a woman in a fluorescent yellow vest passes, I stop her. “What’s your policy on bird bullying?” She looks at me like I’m Christmas in July. “Sorry, what’s that?” “I’m just wondering how you deal with the issue of big pigeons bullying smaller ones.” The woman checks her walkie-talkie. “I’ll have to get back to you on that, excuse me.” And before I can ask about the possibility of kitting out Thin Pigeon with a helmet and wing pads, she quickly walks away. The gate leading onto Blessington Street isn’t as good as a door in a wall, but I make a wish as I pass through, just in case. I walk straight down North Frederick Street and stop by the Gate Theatre, in front of a small grey metal box that could be a small hut (or hutlet) for elves. It’s rectangular, with a slanted metal roof and two metal doors, the perfect size for a shin-high elf couple. I picture rocking chairs on either side of a stove, and a spiral staircase leading to a four-poster bed covered with a patchwork quilt. I stop and crouch down on my hunkers, pretending to fix my shoe and peek in, but I don’t look too closely in case I see wires and circuit boards and no elves. My elves wear tracksuits and play Scrabble when they’re tired, or Twister when they’re full of energy. I whisper goodbye, straighten up and head south to D’Olier Street. I cross at the lights, follow the curve of the college around to College Green and stop outside an ivy-covered house at the edge of the college, facing the hotel that used to be a bank. I imagine a kind of everyday Santa Claus and his wife living in this house, plotting ways to rid the world of its problems. The ground floor is a control room, with lots of maps and gadgets and wires and devices all connected to enormous screens. Everyday Santa and Everyday Mrs. Claus wear headsets and hold remote controls and joysticks to give the superheroes the coordinates of their missions: “Delta Spiderman, bike thief on the quays, Roger that” or “Oscar Superman, girl weeping in front of Central Bank, bring tissues, stat.” I leave before I catch any detail that would sully my imaginings, and walk up Grafton Street, turning right onto South King Street and into Zara. I take the escalator up to the first floor and walk to the left, to the opposite wall. I pick up a shirt from the rail and drop it like a hot mistake. Then I kneel down to pick it up and catch sight of the small door in the wall. I saw a shop assistant step out of that door some years ago, and I’ve kept it on my list of thin places ever since. Inside that door I picture a kind of candy-laden paradise, a combination of the Hansel and Gretel house made of sweets, the mountain the Pied Piper led the children into and the chocolate factory that Charlie visits. I put the shirt back on the rail and leave before I can be disenchanted by a glimpse of a non-chocolate reality. I head west along St. Stephen’s Green and down Kildare Street, passing Leinster House and a small band of protesters outside carrying posters of foetuses or foxes. A man wearing a cycle helmet walks up and down holding a small black-and-white sign on a stick, a paper lollipop that says “Close Sellafield.” I go into the library, leave my bag and coat in the locker, and climb the stairs to the reading room with my pencil and notebook. At the bottom of every recessed bookshelf lining the room is a small wooden door coated in mesh. I pretend to look at a Welsh dictionary and bend down and peek through the mesh. Behind these doors I picture a maze of tunnels that house living examples of creatures believed to be extinct. There’s a dodo, of course, and an auk and an Irish elk, along with others I have written in my notebook: “Pygmy Mammoth, Stilt-legged Llama, Shrub-Ox, Pocket Gophers, Dwarf Elephant, Cave Bear, Spectacled Cormorant, Heath Hen, Golden Toad, Cebu Warty Pig, Caspian Tiger, Gastric Brooding Frog, Sharp-Snouted Day Frog, Pig-Footed Bandicoot, Toolache Wallaby, Laughing Owl, Narrow-Bodied Skink, Big-Eared Hopping Mouse, Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse, Chadwick Beach Cotton Mouse, Christmas Island Pipistrelle, Scimitar-Toothed Cat, Giant Aye-Aye, Quagga.” They have duped the human race into believing they’re extinct, so that they can live un-pestered by zoos and breeding programmes, animal versions of death-faking tricksters. I sit down and open my notebook on a fresh page. I read somewhere that the words “month,” “silver” and “purple” cannot be rhymed with. I stare hard at my silver pencil and try to come up with rhymes, but I can only invent words: Pilver: To quietly steal from one’s wealthy hostess. Bilver: A dry retch at the end of a vomiting bout. I try “month.” The problem with “month” is that I pronounce it “munth,” so my definitions are: Bunth: A collective noun for a group of flags. Thunth: The noise a jaw makes on contact with the bottom step of the stairs. They don’t quite reach the essence of the thing, so I have a go at “purple”: Gurple: The sound of a baby post-feed when it’s full of wind and joy. Vurple: The chief of a fox clan with jaunty taste in clothes. I could keep inventing words, but that is not my place. I stare at the backs of the other library users. They seem to know what they’re doing and are getting on with doing it, instead of making up words that will never be used. I stare up at the domed ceiling. The coloured ceiling panels run from white through peppermint to old-library green, like a swatch of paint-colour charts. When my stomach rumbles, I gather my belongings and head downstairs to the caf?. I sit at the table nearest to the cash register, from where I can see the inner workings of the caf?. I see the waitresses spill milk when they pour it into the coffee machine, and I see their faces get red and tense when lines of lunchers form, demanding all manner of breads I have never heard of. Where do they hear about such breads, and why does it matter so much? Bread is beige or white fluff that will be swallowed in as much time as it takes them to complain. I like seeing the mismatched delph scattered about the perfectly matched Tupperware tubs of dry foodstuffs: a tinge of disorder in an ordered system. I don’t want to seem nosy so I act as if I’m staring thoughtfully into the middle distance, then I scribble some words in my notebook. But the words I write are just “mischief mischief mischief,” over and over again; “mischief” should always be spelt with a lower case “m”—it seems more mischievous than its sensible big sister, upper case “M.” And “mumps” should never be capitalised, but “Measles,” its spottier cousin, should. “Rubella” works either way. We should be allowed to choose when to use lower and upper case letters; having to use a capital letter at the start of a sentence is like saying the firstborn son gets all the money, no matter how vile he is. Some words should be spelt entirely in capital letters: TORRENTIAL, BELLOWS, RIPPED, FLED, GLEEFUL. And if letters have capitals, why don’t numbers? I could invent capital numbers, but schoolchildren would hate me for increasing their learning-load and they would throw eggs at my face. My brain has got carried away with crossover branches and twigs, all grabbing and twisting and outgrowing each other, and my hand can’t keep up with writing these knotted thoughts, so I finish my food and leave the caf?. I’d like to be the type of person that calls a cheery farewell to the caf? staff, but I settle instead for a skulk. I make for the Liffey. As I wait to cross O’Connell Bridge, I see a sign at the bottom of a tall red-brick building with a curly roof on O’Connell Street saying: “Witches’ Attic.” I look up and see a man wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt in the attic window, near the weather vane. I wish he was wearing a cape and a pointy hat, but maybe the modern warlock needs to go undercover. When I enter my house, the waft of myself hits me. I sniff around me, turning my nose to different pockets of air. The smell from upstairs is strongest, because I haven’t changed my sheets for a long time. I like them to smell properly of me, and I like to find papery shards of foot skin and debris from my body in the bed-nest. I heard on the radio that the rise in asthma is caused by an increase in the use of cleaning products, and I don’t want to get asthma. If I have to get a disease, I want one that contains multiple syllables and a range of vowels. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. A pleasant sort of lived-in smell comes from my body, of meat and sweat and damp newspaper. I sit at the kitchen table and map my route and trace it onto greaseproof paper. Today I walked a slice of batch loaf with an aerial poking out. 4 (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) I LOOK OUT the kitchen window at the giant pear tree in the back garden. I don’t like pears, so when the fruit falls in autumn it rots, and the garden is full of wasps and squelches. Now that the tree is bare, it’s as if pears don’t exist and autumn never happens. I open the back door and go outside to look at the treetop. I once read a children’s book about the magical lands at the top of a tree in an enchanted wood. I swing one leg onto a low branch and hoist my other leg up. I climb up a few branches, but there are no signs of elves or fairies or the little man wearing saucepans who appeared in that book. In Bernie’s garden I can see gnomes and ceramic swans, and a small concrete boy who used to piss into a concrete basin. Mary’s back door suddenly opens. I try to hide, but the branches are wintry-bare. “Jaysus, Vivian, what are you doing up there? Are you stuck?” “No, I’m fine, thanks. Lovely day, isn’t it?” These are the wrong weather words, no sooner are they out of my mouth than I feel the damp chill of the air. “Ah, Vivian, would you look at yourself, a grown woman up a tree on a day like today.” Even if it wasn’t a day like today—if it was a day like yesterday or tomorrow—I don’t think she would have liked to see me up a tree. “I’m looking for the lands at the top,” I say. “The what?” She says “what” like it hurts her teeth. “In the book The Magic Faraway Tree, the Land of Spells and the Land of Dreams and the Land of Topsy-Turvy appeared on the treetop. I’m trying to find those lands, you see.” Mary doesn’t see, and she doesn’t really hear either. From this angle she looks neckless, like an up-tilted face mashed onto a body. Her mouth hangs open, and while she’s stuck in the gap between questions I climb back down and escape into the house. I look around the living room to decide which chair I will sit in today. The one with the plastic cover is quite scratchy so I say “No” to that one. I don’t want to hurt its feelings so I stroke its plastic back six times. I have to comfort the chairs in strokes of three, but three itself is uneven and unsatisfactory so I double it and stroke in sixes. Some of the chairs give off a homely smell, of boiled cabbage and unwashed great-aunt. I choose the dark green armchair. It’s ripped and the stuffing peeks through and there’s a great-aunt-sized dent in it, but it’s comfortable. Today I will search for jobs, but first I need to conjure up some company in the room. I turn on the television with the sound down. If I squint and stare at the laptop, the people on the television look like small live people on the other side of the room, a silent gathering which I am sitting apart from. The soap operas are best because the characters spend lots of time in kitchens and on living room sofas, but they argue a lot and even though the sound is down, it causes tension in my living room. I open the laptop. If I’m in a serious mood, I type “Assistant” into the search box of the job website. I have no particular skills or experience, so I can’t be in charge of anything or anybody, but maybe I can assist with something. Today, however, I am looking for dream jobs. I type “Bubble-blower” into the search box. The computer doesn’t even pretend to search, which is a bit rude. A blank screen appears almost instantly saying: “The search for ‘Bubble-blower’ in Dublin did not match any jobs.” The bold type is mocking me, and the language is harsh. It advises me to “Sign up for email updates on the latest Bubble-blower jobs in Dublin.” I try “Walker” next because I’m good at walking, and two jobs appear: a vacancy for a “Dog Walker” in Lucan (I have enough bother controlling my own limbs when I walk, never mind an additional four) and a “Commercial Analyst and Management Accountant” for Walkers Crisps. I’d best not apply for jobs whose titles I can’t understand. Next, I type “Changeling” into the search box. A vacancy for “Graphic Design Print Manager” comes up. It’s suitable for someone who wants “Changeling Roles,” so I scour the print for a description of me. The applicant must have a: “Personality for Sales and Upselling to Clients. Great Personality with Energy. Excellent Communication and Interpersonal Skills.” None of those things sounds like me. It must be a different kind of changeling they are looking for. I close the lid of the laptop; I never switch it off because that seems so final, like writing a will. It’s between mealtimes, so I will cook a fry. Somebody has decided that breakfast + lunch = brunch, but I think lunkfast suits this meat-heavy meal better. I melt butter in the pan and cook sausages, rashers and black pudding. The sausages hiss and I’m glad. I like food that sounds like itself. I don’t know when the black pudding is starting to burn because black can’t get any blacker. When the skin of the pudding has hardened, I heap the fry between two slices of white bread. The bread turns soggy with grease—a damp towel of a sandwich—but sog is good in food. I think of other black foods: burnt anything, liquorice, black pepper, half a bullseye boiled sweet. Then I go through other coloured foods in my head until I’m struck with a plan: I will eat only blue foods for the rest of the day. I search the kitchen cupboards but they are bare of blue, so I put on my coat. It’s a heavy coat, packed with wool, and it feels like I’m putting on summer. I put my keys and some money in my bag, but it still seems empty, and I’m not quite sure what else to put in. I’ve seen women carry such big bags—what big lives they must have!—so I take two books from the shelf and put them in my bag. Now I’m someone who could pile six planets on her shoulders and carry them off. I bang the front door loudly when I leave the house, to rouse the neighbours. I want to tell them about my plan, but no heads pop up from flower beds or peer out from behind doors. I walk to the supermarket, take a basket and move slowly up and down each aisle. I feel like I’ve won a competition where the prize is blue food. I find: blueberries, which are more of a nunnish navy; blue cheese, which smells of socks and tastes of wet dust; blue freeze-pops in mouth-ripping plastic tubes; and a blue sports drink the colour of an ambulance siren. I also pick up several multipacks of Smarties and M&Ms, so that I can sift out only the blues. At the till, a heap of giddy rises up my throat. The shop assistant starts scanning my food. “Do you notice anything about my items?” I ask. She looks like she doesn’t want to play my game, so I make it easy for her. “They’re all blue!” “Oh yeah, why?” “I’m having a blue party!” The snarl on her face melts a little. “Is it his favourite colour?” she asks. “Whose favourite colour?” She looks confused. “Your little boy, are these not for his birthday party?” I think for a moment. “Yes, they are. And I’m making a Smurf cake!” The woman behind me in the queue pokes her head into the conversation. “Ah, that’s lovely, what age is he?” “They’re six, I have boy twins.” The words glide out of my mouth like a silk thread. “You must have your hands full with them,” the woman behind me says, but the shop assistant only stares. “How come you never have them in here with you?” “Oh …” I think for a minute. “They’re in wheelchairs.” “Ah, God, that’s terrible, terrible!” “Who minds them?” asks the shop assistant. Her face is squeezed into strange shapes. “What?” “When you come in here to do your shopping, who minds them?” “Oh, they’re fine on their own.” “You leave them alone?” Her voice sounds like a cup shattered on a tile. I look from one angry face to the other. “They can’t get out of the wheelchairs, they’re fine.” They look at each other the way that girls in school used to look at each other: an eye-lock that doesn’t include me. Then they look at me with a purity of hate that stiffens me. I pack my blue items into my bag—I wish I’d remembered to bring a blue plastic bag—and pay. The woman behind me is muttering to the woman behind her, and I catch the words “… social services … shouldn’t be let have kids … something wrong with her …” I take my change and hurry off with great big gulps of marbles in my throat. When I reach the house I rush in, close the door and bolt it. If social services come, they might be angrier that I’m not neglecting children I don’t have than if I was neglecting children I did have. I feel sadder than I’ve ever felt before, sad like the end of the world has come and gone without me. I crawl under the kitchen table with my bag, and crouch among the chair legs. This is the perfect picnic spot with no chance of rain, and it isn’t too uncomfortable if I lean forward. I lay out my blue feast on the black tiles, empty out the M&Ms and Smarties, pick out the blue ones and put the rest away. I start off with the sweet food then I eat some blue cheese—a horror of a food, so I stuff spongy blueberry muffin into my mouth to cancel out the stinking taste. This feels like cheating, because the muffin is mostly beige with only an inky blue stain. It seems right that on the day of my blue feast I’m feeling blue myself. My belly feels bruised inside, as if all the blue foods were having a fist fight among themselves. The underside of the table reminds me of the inside of a coffin lid, so I decide to practise being buried alive. I crawl out from under the table, take the thickest cushions from the sofa and lay them out under the table. I pile them on top of one another until they nearly reach the top, then I squeeze between the cushions and the table and lie down, with my nose tip touching the wood. I lie staring at the table-ceiling, in the muffled peace of the cushions. I don’t know why people talk of the terror of being buried alive—surely the terror is in being alive. When my mind has settled, I get out and look up world news on the Internet. The news is: “Possibility of war,” “Terror Threats,” “Elections,” “Bomb Blasts,” “Nuclear Threats,” “Global Downturn,” “Anti-Government Protests,” “School Shooting,” “Potential Chemical Weapons Attacks,” “Alleged Murder,” “Suspected Abuse.” My neighbours like to speak of these potentials and possiblys as definitelys and certainlys. Next I look up national news. A politician is calling on another politician to do something. I would like to call on someone to do something, but I don’t know if anyone would listen. A dossier has been compiled about an organisation. I wonder if there’s a dossier about me somewhere. I close the laptop. The news stories are bouncing off each other in my head and words are producing more words and I picture reams of paper hurtling out of printers, filled with unspaced, unparagraphed, unchaptered words. I switch on the radio and turn the dial to the static between stations, but this isn’t enough to fetch me out of a jangle: I must walk. I put on my coat and pick up my bag. I need some gold in my life because blue has not served me well; I will buy a goldfish. I put on my great-aunt’s double-glazed spectacles as a disguise, in case I bump into anyone from the supermarket, and leave the house. I don’t bump into anyone from the supermarket, but I do bump into the garden gate and the kerb, my eyes watery and blind behind the thick glass. I walk through Phibsborough with my arms outstretched in front of me, feeling for obstacles, then I take off the glasses when I turn onto Western Way. This street makes me think of the lifestyle choices of country singers. I head down Dominick Street and swing left onto Parnell Street. A burly man stands at the door of the taxi company smoking. “Taxi, love?” “No, goldfish.” I go into the pet shop and head for the fish tanks. The man behind the counter comes over with a net. “Looking for a goldfish?” “Yes,” I say. “Right so.” He lifts the lid off the tank and dips in the net. “Wait!” I say. “For what?” “I haven’t decided which one I want yet. I need to see their personalities.” The man’s top lip curls up. “You want one with a good sense of humour?” I laugh to show that I have a good sense of humour, even though I don’t think his joke is very funny. I lean over the tank. The fish are all swimming in the same direction, except for a slightly slower fish drifting at the bottom. He’s more yellow than orange, and some of his scales are missing. I turn to the man. “I’ll take the yellow one, please.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” The man scoops out my Lemonfish and puts him in a plastic bag of water, then ties the top of the bag in a knot. I buy some goldfish food, pay the man and put the plastic bag in my handbag. Lemonfish will be happier in the dark of my bag than in a moving house with a see-through floor and a knotted roof. I walk back home, putting my great-aunt’s glasses loosely on my nose so that I can see out from over them. Then I let myself into the house, add water to the bowl containing the lemons I bought yesterday and pour in Lemonfish. At first he keeps crashing into lemons, but soon he swims around cautiously and noses the fruit. Maybe he thinks they’re obese, bitter-smelling new friends. I sit at the table and trace the route I just walked onto greaseproof paper: it’s shaped like a fishing rod that has caught another fishing rod. I DECIDE TO sleep on chairs in the living room tonight. They will be kinder to me than the bed, which creaks and hisses when I can’t sleep. Tea is a comfort but it keeps me awake, so I boil the kettle and make tea in my hot water bottle. The smell of tea and rubber is a good solid combination, like grandmothers and classrooms. I go upstairs and swallow a blue pill from the bathroom cabinet, one for coughs and colds that makes me drowsy. This will be the last of the day’s blue party. I go downstairs and arrange two soft chairs in front of the red chair in the living room. This way, I get to use three chairs and hurt fewer chairs’ feelings. I take up the spongy cushion from the red chair, and put the hot tea bottle on the chair top. Then I lie face down on the chair, pull the cushion over my head and press it down over my ears. The inside of the chair is musty and my nose is tickled by dust-clumps and crumbs, but it smells of something close to home. I count “One-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six” until I fall asleep, a sleep so delicious that it has the quality of toasted peaches. 5 (#u13dc72c3-8b18-5605-b83b-0fdfea2f6a5c) I WAKE TO the sound of me grinding my teeth. I should probably sleep with cotton wool or marshmallow in my mouth to soften the attack. David from the Social Welfare office is visiting today but I don’t want to think about that just yet, so I lie in bed snatching at my dream-thoughts before they vanish through my eyelids: I am in a tunnel that’s split in two, each side rising up to the roof in turn, crushing anything on it. I have to keep jumping from the rising part to the falling part until that too starts to rise. No wonder I feel tired, I saved my own life in my sleep. My throat feels scratched where the scream clogged, I only wake from a nightmare if the scream scrapes through. I wish it were a song and not a scream. Or a laugh. My sister laughs in her sleep. When I used to share her room I would wake in the night to hear her laughing, eyes shut tight, at something that didn’t seem funny in the morning. I get up and root through the wardrobe for a pair of khaki combats that will show David I am a serious job hunter. Then I take a dark-green jumper from the shelf. I bring my clothes into the bathroom, put the plug in the bath and run the taps. I duck my head under my pyjama top and breathe in my smell for the last time—even when I leave it another while to wash, the smell will not be this exact combination of sweat and food emissions. I pick up a bottle of pink bubble bath that my great-aunt left behind. The bottle is heart-shaped and ugly, like two inward-facing question marks with no interest in the world. I tip the bottle into the bath. It pours like a thick gluey syrup, turning the bathwater pink and adding white bubbles on top: beer for little girls. Then I hold the bottle over my head and thrust it onto the floor with all my might. The bottle has been transformed into dozens of shards and pieces. I examine them for a while, then step into the bath, squat on my hunkers and lower myself into the water. I stretch out my legs and raise them out of the water, but they haven’t turned into a tail and my skin hasn’t turned into scales and I haven’t turned into a mermaid. I lie back, the bubbles scrinch scrinching, and try to form an expression of extreme calm on my face like the women in television ads, but I’m so hot my heart is rattling in my chest and my toes feel like they belong to somebody else and I can’t relax when I smell like strawberry bubblegum and feel like dirty dishes. I’m not sure how long I have to stay in the bath to be clean, so I swirl the water around and sluice it over my face. Then I lie back with my head facing the ceiling to wash my hair. The water fills my ears and muffles my world; this must be what Lemonfish’s world sounds like. I pull the plug and sit in the bath while it drains. It feels like I should be dying, like my internal organs are being slowly sucked out of my body and down the plughole. I get out, crouch under a towel and tug my clothes on. Then I blast my head with the hairdryer, breathing in the smell of hot burning dust. I eat breakfast and bring Lemonfish’s bowl to the sink. I slowly pour some water out, trying not to lose fish or lemons. Then I turn on the tap and add some fresh water. I’ve just changed Lemonfish’s liquid nappy. I brush my teeth at the kitchen sink and imagine a toothbrush so small that it could brush each tooth individually. If only there was an elf section in the supermarket. David has the name of a king, so I will clean the house and make it fit for a king-guest. I bring the hoover upstairs and open the door to the hoard-room. A huge toy gun, the kind that stretches across the body and makes a ratatatatatatat noise when you pull the trigger, catches my eye from the childhood-toys pile. It could be useful for a job-hunter so I bring it downstairs. I hoover the landing, then I hoover the stairs, which is like trying to slide down a fireman’s pole in stops and starts, then I hoover the hall and, finally, I bash the hoover in between the chair legs in the living room. I wish I’d made a list of chores so I could put a thick pencil mark through “Hoover House.” Or, to get more pencil strikes, I might divide the chores into: 1. Hoover Landing 2. Hoover Stairs 3. Hoover Hall 4. Hoover Living Room When the doorbell rings, I’m standing in the hall sniffing my strawberry hands, which smell unfamiliar and hateful. I open the door. “Hello, David,” I say. His face doesn’t match his name, David is a gentle name, with soft indecisive “D”s and an open “V,” but this David is pursed and definite. “Good morning, Vivian,” he says, and shakes my hand—a crisp formality of a handshake. “Come on through,” I say, because that’s what people in soap operas on television say to visitors, but the words come out in a Manchester accent. He sits at the kitchen table, and Lemonfish swims bowl-side to look out. “You’re his first visitor, so you must excuse him if he’s shy,” I say. David half-laughs, a cautious kind of sound without much bark in it. “Would you like some tea?” “Please, a drop of milk, two sugars.” He speaks with an admirable abruptness, but his sentences don’t provide enough information. “A big drop or a small drop—like a thundershower or a drizzle?” His face puckers and narrows, as if something under the skin is pulling it back. “A big drop.” “Right. Heaped or level?” “Sorry?” “Your sugars. Heaped or level teaspoons?” “Either.” David waves his hand as if swatting away my question, pulls out a grey folder from his briefcase, lays it on the table and opens it. I fill the kettle and whisper, “Take your time, boil slowly.” I should have added ice to the kettle to slow it down. David clears his throat. “So you’ve been out of work since when?” I don’t like being asked questions that are already answered in grey folders. “Since somewhere between Grand Stretch in the Evening and We Won’t Feel it Now Till Christmas,” I say. “I’m sorry?” David is a lot of sorry it seems. “September.” “Okay.” He writes something on a page. David seems like the kind of man who likes neat black words to fit into neat white boxes. I look at his black biro and try to imagine all the other unworkers it has written about. I wonder if he ever writes things like, “Her house smells of boiled mutton” or “His ears stick out strangely.” The roar from the kettle becomes a gurgle and then a click. I pull the lid off the teapot and—oh no!—there is mouldy fur inside. I scoop it out and secretly sniff it—it smells like soil multiplied. When the tea has brewed, I bring the mugs to the table. “What kind of jobs have you been applying for, Vivian?” “I’ll show you.” I go into the living room to get my list. The toy gun is sitting on the red chair like a gift for a king—now is a good time for my trick. I run back into the kitchen pointing the gun at David and holding down the trigger: ratatatatatatatatat! David jumps at the noise; he turns to face me and squeals when he sees the gun pointed at him. Then he scrapes back his chair and dives under the table, his papers scattering around him. I stop to admire the arrangement of white paper on black tiles, it looks like the kitchen has been paper-bombed. David’s face peeks out from under the table—his eyes bulge, he looks like fear has taken him over. “It’s nice under there, isn’t it?” I say. “That’s where I had my blue feast.” “Jesus Christ, woman, what the fuck are you playing at?” I didn’t think officials were allowed to curse. “I’m playing at Job-hunters, that’s why I’m dressed in khaki. I thought you’d join in the game.” He gets up from the floor with a creak, his black trouser-knees covered in grey dust and cornflake silt. He sits in the chair, but he doesn’t sit up quite so straight. Then he leans his elbows on the table and puts his head in his hands. When he takes a sup of tea, the mug shakes and spills. I put the gun on the floor and gather up his papers. The top page reads, in squat handwriting: “Client appears to have inappropriate—” I put the pages on the table and look away. David is breathing in short gasps that don’t seem to take in much air. I sit opposite him and stare, in silence, until he gives his head a small toss, like a pony or a snooty child, and straightens his papers. “Right, where were we?” he asks. “Well, you were on the chair, until I started shooting, so you moved to the floor—” He waves his hand in the air like a conductor, so I shriek “Lalalalalalala” as loud as I can. He cowers under his papers and hisses, “Christ, what are you at now?” “You were conducting, it’d be rude not to make some kind of music in return.” I like singing—the breath and effort of it—even though I can’t tell from my own ears if I’m in tune. I was told to whisper in my school choir, but maybe I’ve grown in tune since then. I start singing “Doe a Deer,” but I sing quietly so that I don’t scare David. He looks at me like I have bled the last drop of milk from the carton and left none for him, so I drop my tune. “What kinds of jobs have you been applying for?” I push my list across the table. He reads aloud: “Dog walker, bubble-blower, changeling, assistant.” He turns the page over but that’s all there is. He looks at the list again and seems to wilt. “Assistant what?” He has barely enough up-breath to form a question mark. “Assistant anything, I won’t know until I see the job description.” “I see.” His tongue doesn’t quite reach the roof of his mouth, so it sounds more like “I hee.” He picks up the list with his fingertips as if it’s a paper disease, takes a sip of tea and coughs. “Excuse me.” “That’s okay, I put half a cough and a quarter of a hiccup in the teapot.” David closes his eyes and, I think if he had glue, he would have stuck his lids shut. When he opens them again, his eyes seem to have sunk further back into their sockets, as if he’s showcasing his corpse look. “Have you ever pretended to be dead?” I ask. His face doesn’t move and his voice, when it comes, is sealed good and tight. “Have you considered other areas—administration jobs, for instance?” I prefer an example to an instance, but David won’t understand this. “I don’t like telephones, and there are lots of them in offices.” His face twists into a tormented expression, the kind of expression I’ve seen on the faces of war victims on news reports. “Indeed” is all he says, but he says it like it’s the last word before the end of the world. He rustles through his papers as if he’s looking for an official response, then he straightens up and makes a small speech about benefits and credits and signing on and job seeking and computer courses and upskilling and qualifications in pharmaceuticals or marketing or industries where they are hiring. I nod my head and say “hmm yes” and “oh I hadn’t thought of that,” but I know this is all a cod. Employers won’t hire me to work in their offices when they can hire a shiny woman who speaks in exclamation marks. “It’s important to keep an open mind,” he says. “I am open-minded,” I say. “Sometimes I wear my slippers on the opposite feet to change my worldview, even though it makes me hobble.” David takes a deep breath. He looks like a faded mural in a children’s ward. “Right, I think we’re all done here,” he says on a new gust of breath, and he bundles his papers and stuffs them into his briefcase. He says half a goodbye and leaves in a great hurry, such a great hurry that it makes me think there’s a fire, so I follow him outside and look up at the house. There are no flames, but the house seems more menacing now that David’s been in it. The smell will be all wrong: the smell of fake strawberry and David and fresh paper. I regret my bath—David didn’t even ask to smell me. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. I still smell strawberry-sweet, but there is also the start of a sweaty tang. I go back inside and walk through the house, closing every blind and every curtain and every door. I crouch in the bathroom, pick up a piece of the smashed bottle and stare into it. I will check every shard, surely in one of them there’ll be a glimpse of where I’m supposed to be. 6 (#ulink_a7e6b7d6-352d-5452-8431-cd5821446622) I WAKE ON a damp pillow; my dreams must have leaked. I put my head under the blankets and sniff: it smells aged. I creep out of bed, pull on some clothes from the floor and go downstairs to look at Lemonfish’s bowl. The water is a little cloudy and smells of lemons. I take the lemons out, before he gets too attached to them and knows enough to miss them. He looks at my fingers and the fruit and doesn’t seem to care, but I’m not sure how I’d know if a goldfish cared. I put a pinch of goldfish food in the bowl. I eat a pinch myself—it looks like Brunch ice cream, but it tastes bland and pointless. I eat my mashed cornflakes breakfast and wipe the lemons dry. I’ll bring them to their home in Lemon Street. I leave the house at a run, calling “Bye” to Lemonfish. The lemons take up most of my bag space. I look busy with life plans. I walk to the bus stop and wait. Two old ladies with tartan shopping trolleys are chatting. A woman is making big exaggerated faces at her child. I wish the bus would come, because the wind is skinning. It’s the kind of vicious easterly wind that makes my eyes water and my nose drip, the kind of cold that makes me hate. I bounce at the bus stop to stay not warm but as not-cold as possible. A man jogs by in shorts and a T-shirt; just watching him makes my eyes cold. When the bus comes we rush the door, and the old ladies use their trolleys as moving barricades to get on first. I sit near the back, beside a man who is on the phone. “NO!” he shouts. “I had the score and I was outside the off-license an’ it blew out of me hand an’ I went down to pick it up, but some prick got there ahead of me, an’ when I said that’s my money he said he had a knife and if I didn’t fuck off he’d bleedin’ knife me, I’m tellin’ yeh that’s what happened.” He talks like he’s being chased by words, swallowed up by sentences. Other people in the bus are giving little secret glances over their shoulders at him. “For fuck’s sake, yeh can go and shite,” he shouts, and hangs up. I root around in my bag to look busy in case he wants to tell me his problems but his phone rings again, a blast of shouty music that makes me jump. “Hello!” he shouts as if there is a bad connection. There’s shouting on the other end, and he shouts back: what a feast of shouting. “I told ya, I was walkin’ to the off-license and some prick held a knife to me throat and said he’d fuckin’ kill me if I didn’t give him a score, that’s what happened, I swear on me daughter’s life.” The rest of the passengers are silently listening, and I feel proud to have picked the best seat on the bus; some of this man’s fame has trickled onto me. “Listen, I have to go, me battery’s dyin’, I’ll give yeh a buzz later, alright?” From the shouting on the other end of the line it isn’t alright, but he hangs up. “Fuckin’ prick?” he says, and I wonder if I’m supposed to answer. He turns to me. “Here, you wouldn’t have the lend of a twenty, would yeh? I got mugged, right, by this fucker with a gun, and I owe me friend a score, an’ if he doesn’t get it there’ll be killings.” “I’ll see what I have,” I say, and I open my bag and pull out two damp lemons. “You can have these.” I hold out the lemons. He looks at my hand and then at my face, his mouth hanging open. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with lemons?” He says “lemons” like it has two “L”s. “They’re two for a euro, so if you give him two lemons, you only owe him €19.” “Are you fuckin’ mental or wha’?” He puts two syllables into “you”—maybe it’s an honour to get double-syllabled—but he isn’t looking at me in a pleasant way and other passengers have turned around to watch. “I don’t know,” I say. “All I know is that I have twelve lemons and no money to give you.” He shakes his head and mutters “fuck’s sake,” but it’s a despairing “fuck’s sake,” not an angry one. He sits silently beside me, shaking his head and giving off alcohol and anger fumes until he gets out at O’Connell Street. As I’m waiting to get off at Nassau Street, the driver looks at me in the mirror. “He wasn’t bothering you, love, was he?” “No, he just didn’t think much of my lemons.” “Ah, I see.” I get off the bus and cross the street. I walk up Dawson Street and turn into the little arch with shops that sell Celtic jewellery and paintings of horses and chocolates without wrappers. It’s windy in here; there’s a picnic bench in the middle of the plaza, but only a polar bear would enjoy a picnic there today. I walk through to Lemon Street, check that there’s no one behind me, and drop a piece of fruit every couple of steps. When my bag is empty, I look back. The street looks like it has been lemon-bombed. I come out onto Grafton Street, opposite the red-and-white awning of Bewley’s Caf?. I go inside and sit near the fireplace. It’s cosy here, with red velvet seats and an orange fire and blue stained glass windows. I order black coffee. I prefer milky coffee, but I’ve heard things on the radio about lactose intolerance and I sometimes think that if I stopped drinking milk my life would be a different thing. When I leave the caf? I take Grafton Street at a saunter, and head east along Stephen’s Green. I make for the Natural History Museum. Students walk by in groups, laughing and in no hurry. It must be a weekday—weekdays churn out people in suits and students with large bags. Weekends have wardrobes full of suits on hangers and school uniforms on floors and children moving about in large doses. I prefer weekdays to weekends; there are fewer people around and expectations are lower. I walk into the museum. It smells of something old and musty, furniture polish or mothballs. There are glass cases of birds and fish and animals, most of them some shade of beige or brown, with typewritten descriptions on faded, tea-coloured paper. I’m looking for new names of things, a list of new words in a particular order that could form a pattern and give me a clue as to how to find my way back. I take out my notebook and write out the names of interesting-sounding birds: “Chats, Warblers, Wrynecks, Choughs, Buntings, Pipits.” My list is short: too many names are ordinary and not worth writing down. In the fish section, an enormous goldfish from Mrs. McComas in County Dublin looks healthier than Lemonfish, even though it’s almost a hundred years dead. There are strange specimens in glass coffins and long cylindrical jars, like kitchen jars for foodstuffs. I write the interesting-sounding names: “Natterjack Toad, Butterfish, Butterfly Blenny, Tompot Blenny, Spotted Dragonet, Atlantic Football Fish, Barrelfish, Porcupine Bight, Crystal Goby, Bogue, Poor Cod, Purple Sunstar, Cuckoo Wrasse, Lumpsucker, Boarfish, Comber, Pouting, Beadlet Anemone, Snakelocks Anemone, Dead Men’s Fingers, Sea Pen, Boring Sponge, Smelt, Stone Loach, Shad, Porbeagle Shark, Gudgeon, Darkie Charlie, Leafscale Gulper Shark, Spurdog. Bluntsnout Smooth-Head.” “Bluntsnout Smooth-Head” is like giving an insult and then softening it with a compliment. Next I head for the cases of butterflies and moths, and pull back the red leather covers. I write nearly all these names in my notebook; they’re like patches of words from a beautiful poem: “Purple Hairstreak, Red Admiral, Heath Fritallary, Painted Lady, Pearl-bordered Fritallary, Small Tortoiseshell, Speckled Wood, Pale Clouded Yellow, Brimstone, Brown Hairstreak, Peacock, Silver-Washed Fritallary, Marsh Fritallary, Ringlet, Bath White, Cinnabar, Grayling, Small Copper, Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, The Wall.” The people who name butterflies must be more imaginative than those who name birds—naming a bird Great Finch or Little Owl is like naming a street New Street or Main Street. If I could name things, I’d squeeze chains of consonants together mercilessly without a vowel for breathing room, I’d shove letters together that should never sit side by side in the English language. I’d add numbers and symbols and insist that they be pronounced. I move onto the moths and write: “Ruby Tiger, Puss, Elephant Hawk-Moth, Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, Oleander Hawk-Moth, Bedstraw Hawk-Moth, Eyed Hawk-Moth, Convolvulus Hawk-Moth, Coxcomb Prominent, Sallow Kitten, White Ermine, Pebble Prominent, Buff-Tip, Buff Ermine, Purple-Bordered Gold, Mottled Umber, Scalloped Oak, Early Thorn, Chimney Sweeper, Purple Bar, Magpie Moth, Speckled Yellow, Red Sword-Grass, The Shears, Grey Dagger, The Ear Moth, Burnished Brass, Heart and Dart, Silver Y, Middle-Barred Minor, Flounced Rustic, The Grey Pug, Latticed Heath, Satyr Pug, The Tissue, Plume Moth, The Drinker, Large Emerald, Lunar Hornet Moth, Goat Moth, Vapourer, Red-Necked Footman (which has disappeared and left just a beige stain, probably in a sulk over its name), Northern Eggar, Ghost Moth, Fox Moth, Emperor Moth, Lobster Moth, Figure of Eight Moth, Mouse Moth, Satellite, Garden Carpet Moth, Belled Beauty, Grass Emerald Moth, Straw Belle, Brindled Beauty and The November Moth,” which I imagine is prone to fits of melancholy. I look through my lists for a pattern or code, but all I find are the names of creatures that include the names of creatures of a different species: “Elephant Hawk-Moth, Mouse Moth, Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, Fox Moth, Lobster Moth, Sallow Kitten Moth, Spider Crab, Goat Moth, Cuckoo Wrasse, Butterfly Blenny, Cuckoo Ray, Nursehound Shark, Sea Horse.” The moth-namer seems to be overly dependent on his animal- and fish-namer colleagues; he needs to be jolted into originality. I leave the museum and walk down Merrion Street, past the bookshop on Lincoln Place that used to be a chemist and that sells lemon soap regardless of what else it sells. Either James Joyce or Leopold Bloom or Stephen Daedalus (or maybe all three) bought soap there, so it attracts citrus-seeking literary tourists. I walk down Westland Row to Pearse Street—the clock on the tower of the red-brick fire station tells the wrong time—and cross at the garda station. This would be the worst stretch of street for a botched self-immolation; after the firemen quenched the fire, the guards would arrest you for public disorder. I walk by The Steine which, I have read, is also called Ivar the Boneless’ Pillar, after a ninth-century Viking ruler. Two faces are carved into opposite sides of the base of the pillar: those of Ivar, a berserker, and Mary de Hogges. I like that I don’t have to name these faces—I don’t think I could top Mary de Hogges for originality—and I like that Ivar was a berserker; I think I could go berserk myself if certain things happened to me in a certain order without my consent. I catch the number 4 bus heading north. I wonder if the drivers with the fewest accidents and the cleanest buses are rewarded with the single-digit routes, or the routes with a mixture of numbers and letters, or the even-numbered routes, or if it matters at all. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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