Ghost Moth Read online

  “It’s full of fucking turnips!” he had said, glaring at her red-faced, as though it had somehow been her fault that he had found them. “There must be hundreds of them!”

  “Surely not hundreds,” she remembers saying, but George could not be humored.

  “I’ll have to grow a bloody new lawn from seed,” he had muttered through jagged breaths, and then had resumed his frantic digging. He had stayed out all evening, until the last lip of daylight had slipped into dusk, and had then worked on into the night. She had called him to come in to eat, but George had insisted he stay outside and dig. So she ate alone.

  The rest of the evening was spent quietly unpacking and placing their shared things about the house. In the back room of the house (which opens out into, and is really part of, the kitchen), she installed the two-bar electric fire that had been given to them by her mother, plugging it in to test if it still worked—why wouldn’t it? The little fan whirred above the red bulb and made the light flicker through the scratched painted coal shapes (it was all pretend) and released the smell of heated dust into the evening air. Across the back of the brown leatherette sofa, which they had picked up from a secondhand furniture shop three days before, she placed a gray woolen throw with mint green edges. It slid off the sofa immediately, as easily as syrup off a hot spoon (as she had predicted it would—she remembers having made a mental note to sort it out; she had yet to get around to it). On the brown linoleum, which had been included in the price of the house, she placed a rug with regular little patterns of green-yellow flowers caught in serrated borders of crimson and blue. With some effort, she hung the long, heavy drapes, which she had made herself, either side of the back door, covering its glass with a milky net curtain. The drapes would come in useful for the winter—she realized she was a little ahead of herself hanging them in summer—and she fussed over their tidiness so that they fell on either side of the door like two long pillars of burned honey.

  On the mantelpiece above the electric fire she placed a favorite and edge-worn photograph of herself with her father in Tollymore Forest, a place they had regularly visited on holiday when she was a child. Beside it she put an ever so slightly out-of-focus photograph of herself and George on their honeymoon in Mexico. Under a Latin American sun, they stood together, George’s arm placed awkwardly around her shoulders. Their flimsy salt white straw sombreros were pushed back a little on their heads, so that they squinted into the new light with an embarrassed awe.

  Finally, after checking that George’s supper was still warm enough, she unpacked a sheet and two blankets and, leaving a light on in the kitchen, took herself up to their cold new bed and lay listening to the thwat-thwat-thwat of the garden spade outside, wishing that the first evening in their new home together had held a little more tenderness.

  And the turnips kept coming. Just when George thought he had dug up the last of them, more would appear like stubborn, blank, disembodied heads. They forced their way up through the lawn and flagged their long, slender turnip tops. To her, the turnips were an unexpected harvest, and whether they were boiled, roasted, diced, or mashed, she made sure that every one of them was eaten. “Think of the starving black babies of Africa,” she would say to George as she handed out yet more bowlfuls of turnip.

  After many seasons of frenzied digging, the reluctant turnips disappeared, leaving the soil dry-brown and broken. Yet George, for months after, would stalk the garden, head low, like some horticultural vigilante, eyes intent on finding just one more, finding the one he had missed, ready with his spade. She would stand watching him from the kitchen window, see the sweat break out across his forehead and down his temples. He would walk slowly across the stunted earth as though he were trying to stalk and kill something. Buried things that he needed to unearth and destroy. Buried things that he needed to empty himself of. Too many buried things.

  In time, the garden became theirs and the grass grew back without George’s having to sow one single seed. It gracefully became a verdant cradle for their young children, Maureen and Elizabeth, where on summer afternoons they would sometimes be found among the long and tender new blades, curled, baby-fleshed, asleep, like soft blackberries having fallen from the bush. Katherine had often said that she would have made pies from them and eaten them. And George had seemed more at ease, more sure of his step. Becoming a father had been good for him, Katherine had thought. Since Maureen and Elizabeth had been born, he had been happier.

  It was when Elsa was born, however, that she saw George’s irascibility rise again. More intensely this time. Perhaps because Elsa was born at home, perhaps because of that, she kept telling herself, George had appeared more vunerable and had begun to behave as though he believed that the whole house was under siege.

  Outside the window of the bedroom, where she was in labor with Elsa, bees had made a hive. With the impending birth, the busyness of the bees had barely been noticed. But that evening, as contractions began and she felt herself opening, as a freshly healed wound might be opened, reopened, accidentally, irreversibly, the bees night-gathered. She felt the impending force of her baby’s descent as a thousand honey-laden bees hummed a melodious and rhythmical welcome song, a droning lullaby for the buttery baby. Daylight had soberly nudged its way in and Elsa was born. George had stood at the bedside of mother and baby as though he were a visitor in his own house, respectful and distant, his tender attention tempered by puzzlement that he could father a child so fair, so golden.

  After the birth—her thighs blood-streaked and purposeless from the long labor—Katherine had wept from exhaustion and joy and had kissed the blue-hued skin of her pointy-headed baby. But George, it seemed, could only worry about the bees.

  “The bees have to be killed; the hive has to be destroyed,” George had announced with a defiant anger.

  “Bees? What bees?” Katherine had said, holding their new baby, the cadences of labor still fresh and warm.

  And so the bee killer had been called in to smoke the bees out, a little man in a big hat. “I’ll put on my bee suit for protection,” the man had said to George like a child reading aloud, as though, in a final act of courtesy, he himself dressed up as a bee to do the deed.

  For weeks after Elsa’s birth, dead bees could be found all over the house, singular, sad, furry, redundant cases. Their still wings a thin transparent film, the color of gently caramelized onion. Light, dried bodies semaphorically cut short and with the quietness of their purpose frozen. They lay around the house in corners, behind cupboards, reminders of a cruel and unnecessary demise. Some were even found outside, scattered by the fuchsia bush that grew by the coal shed. Under the cardinal purses of sickly nectar, they were little dark dots of death.

  By eight o’clock, Stephen is settled and Maureen and Elizabeth have their faces washed, their teeth brushed, and are clambering willingly into bed. The paper blind in their bedroom is pulled closed, but the curtains are left open so they can still see in the milky evening light without having to turn on their bedside lamp.

  Unusually, no decade of the Rosary is said that evening. Katherine has seen clearly, despite the curtailment of the picnic, how tired the day has made them all. She herself feels curiously emptied.

  Before she goes in to say good night to the girls, Katherine slips into her own bedroom, taking care not to wake Stephen, who is fast asleep in his cot in the corner of the room. She tidies away the towels and her white swimsuit, which she had left on the floor (she had had to find her warmest clothes to wear, so chilly had she felt since her swim). She kneels and picks up the broken pieces of the statuette, which are still lying by the wardrobe, and wraps them in the paper that has the lyrics from Carmen written on it. She places the paper parcel back inside the box and she covers the box with the cloth. She places it deep in at the back of the wardrobe and closes the wardrobe door. But this time, the statuette doesn’t feel hidden enough. It still feels visible. Present. If she had a key for the wardrobe door, she would lock it. Keeping everything in. Layer
upon layer. Skin upon skin.

  Katherine goes in to kiss Maureen and Elizabeth good night, their bodies heavy now with approaching sleep. Then she turns to Elsa.

  After George had left for the station, Katherine had found Elsa lying on top of her blankets in bed like a small sea animal exposed by a departing tide. Elsa had said she felt nauseous and dizzy. Katherine had placed a glass of water by Elsa’s bedside table.

  Now she sits Elsa up in the bed and brings the glass of water to her lips.

  Elsa wants to sleep, but the heat of her body is keeping her awake. Her own skin has hidden it from her until now, and now it is sheer intensity. The delay of sunburn, how it fools us. Katherine cannot believe how burned Elsa’s body is. The back of her limbs and torso are still white, but the front of her body is an increasing red. Katherine helps Elsa stretch back out on top of the blankets, a rubric in her white cotton vest and pants, as though she is an offering to the gods. Elsa’s arms and legs are splayed in her effort to avoid them making contact. She feels her skin might split and crack in the bends of her arms and around her knees. Nothing is turning down the temperature of her veins. Even the air above and around her body is rippling and eddying like a mirage, shimmering purls of hot air. She is a road on a hot day, giving it all back. Make it stop, Mummy, Please, make it stop.

  But all Katherine can do for Elsa is to give her skin a momentary distraction. Katherine dabs clumps of cotton wool soaked in calamine lotion along the length of Elsa’s arms and legs and across her throat and chest. The cotton wool has drunk the lotion in and is loath to share. Elsa’s red skin is becoming patchy. She looks like an Indian fakir, her body caked in chalky paint.

  Elsa does not say too much; her voice has lost its pace. And so the bedroom is quiet, as though it is the quietness that heals, and maybe it is. The delicacy of the child’s downward gaze, the glassiness of her stare, her body preoccupied with her burning skin. The sun has altered her, making her a peculiar child, and now, as it dips in the pearly evening sky, her skin has ignited in its absence. Poor Elsa, Katherine thinks. It’s her fair skin; it’s her golden hair. Maureen, Elizabeth, and Stephen—none of them got burned by the sun.

  “How did you get so burned, pet?” asks Katherine.

  “When you went swimming, I pretended I was a starfish. I lay in the sand, waiting for you to come back. I wanted you to see me.”

  “Oh, Elsa.”

  “But you were ages—Daddy was worried.”

  “I’m so sorry, love.”

  Katherine sits beside Elsa, as she does not sleep. They are quiet and still together again. Elsa gradually calms as Katherine gently strokes her hair.

  “Mummy? . . . Mummy?” Elsa’s voice croaks.

  “What is it, love?” Katherine replies, slowly turning her head to Elsa.

  “Can I have some more lotion?”

  “Of course . . . here, pet.” Katherine pours the calamine lotion onto a fresh clump of cotton wool and presses it gently against Elsa’s skin. The simple action brings Elsa relief. Katherine looks at her daughter and smiles at her. Elsa’s face is immobile, as though it is a fake face and she is just looking out of it, and she does not smile back. Perhaps, Katherine thinks, she could distract Elsa a little more with some easy conversation. Perhaps she could even distract herself after the strange day she’s had.

  “Do you know what you remind me of, Elsa?”

  “What?” Elsa replies.

  “You remind me of the way, when I was little, I used to wait and watch for moths in the garden of our old house.”

  Elsa casts her eyes up to look at her mother. Katherine continues to dab the wet lotion-soaked cotton wool against Elsa’s skin.

  “Well—it was a patch of grass beyond the garden of the old house, the one we had before we lived over the chip shop. I would sneak out there at night in the summertime when everyone else had gone to bed. I don’t know how I heard about the moths, how I knew they might be there. I think I remember my mother telling me that they were attracted to the plants that grew among the grasses there—the nicotiana, honeysuckle, the night-scented stock. . . .”

  Katherine’s voice, though tender, has a settled, dark quality to it. She places her hand gently on Elsa’s forehead. “Anyway, I remember the first time I saw them, I couldn’t believe it. . . .” Katherine takes a deep breath. “Oh, they were beautiful, so they were, Elsa. Pure-white moths rising and falling above the grass, as if they were dancing, moving toward me, hovering over me. I remember lying down in the grass on my back in my white nightdress—just like you are now, just in the same shape that you’re making. I somehow believed I would be irresistible to them, that I could trap them, as though I were a light in the dusk.”

  Katherine brushes her hand over Elsa’s hair.

  “And sometimes, believe it or not, they would actually settle on me; one or two of them, maybe more, they would settle on me if I kept really still. And then I would tilt my head up to look at them, but their white wings would blend into the white of my nightdress, so that it looked as though we were all the same. Then suddenly they would fly away from me, up above me again.”

  “We learned at school that moths are moths because they shed their old skin.” Elsa’s voice sounds gravelly. “That there’s a new them hiding inside a little case that comes out when it’s ready. Meta-mor-phosis is what it’s called. We learned that from Sister Marion.” Elsa seems pleased with herself for remembering what she had learned in biology class.

  “Yes, love, yes, that’s right,” Katherine says gently.

  “Maybe I’m having meta-mor-phosis right now, Mummy. Maybe I’ll get a new skin.” Elsa attempts a little smile, but it hurts.

  “I’ve no doubts, Elsa. Your sunburn will be sore for a little while, but then it’ll get better.” Katherine strokes Elsa’s hair again. She can now feel a dark swell rising within her. “And d’ye know, pet, one night a whole swarm of moths came; a whole swarm of pure-white moths covered me from head to toe. I couldn’t believe it. I remember thinking, This must be what it feels like to be in Heaven.” Katherine’s voice falls almost to a whisper. She turns and dips her head to look at Elsa. “My mother scolded me for lying in the damp grass in my nightdress . . . but my father said I must be very special for that to have happened, for me to have seen so many of them, for them to have covered me like that. He called them ‘ghost moths.’ He said that some people believed that ghost moths were the souls of the dead waiting to be caught, and some people believed that they were only moths.”

  “And what did you believe?” Elsa stares at her mother, eager to hear what she has to say.

  But Katherine does not answer. Ever since her encounter in the cold sea that day, the thoughts of him have continued to grow with every hour. Memories flooding through her veins like an electric river. Something she cannot seem to stop. A searing, biddable tide flowing through every part of her, gathering force and pushing her to the edge of a precipice.

  2

  August 1949

  HER APPOINTMENT WITH HIM that night had been an impromptu one. There was the understanding, made clearly by Mr. Boyne’s secretary, that any appointment for a costume fitting for any of the drama or musical groups rehearsing had to be scheduled in as and when the tailors’ rooms were available, either outside of regular business hours or when a last-minute cancellation might arise. In fact, there was a notice clearly stating this on the rehearsal room door. And so when Katherine had been informed of her fitting by a slightly flustered stage manager, she was told to go immediately.

  Boyne & Son, Men’s Tailors and Outfitters, occupied part of what had at one time been a large Edwardian house on High Street in Belfast. The building had been acquired by Mr. Boyne, whose tailoring business now occupied two of its four floors—the cutting and fitting rooms on the second floor, his own office on the first. The third floor he sublet as a rehearsal room throughout the year and that was where Katherine had been rehearsing Carmen with the Rutherford Musical and Dramatic Society, which next mo
nth they were to present at St. Anne’s Church Hall for four performances only. On the ground floor at the back of the building was an accountancy firm and at the front was a photographer’s studio.

  Katherine made her way down the stairs from the rehearsal room to the tailors’ rooms. As she rapped the ribbed glass panel of the door with her knuckles, it shuddered with a loose twanging sound. The door was opened almost immediately by a gray-haired, powdery stick of a woman, whom Katherine assumed to be Mr. Boyne’s secretary. The woman indicated a door on the other side of the room to Katherine and then turned to the large record book at her desk without a word.

  Katherine made her way through the line of young tailors as they worked fastidiously at their sewing and loosening and cutting. At the end of the room, she passed a young woman, barely in her twenties, sitting with her back to the tailors, her hair clipped, tucked, and netted. The hard chair on which the young woman sat was either too low to allow her to work comfortably at her table or the table was too high, for she was perched on top of four large leather-bound ledgers. The young woman wore a biscuit-colored blouse with an ivy pattern on it and sat so still in her dedicated accounting and leather-warming duties that it seemed that the ivy had grown on her while she sat. As though it had wound its way along the barren floors, creeping up the walls, where years of pulverous submission could be found nesting in every tongue and groove, and had wrapped itself around her. The stillness of her body belied the furious activity of her hand, which moved with such speed and evenness across the page that Katherine wondered what on earth the young woman could be writing. Was she documenting every single move that every tailor made at every moment in the room? A stenographer mother hen upon her roost? Assimilating each detail without her even having to lift her head? Was the young woman’s intent to do the right thing and at the end of every day to take the ledgers to Mr. Boyne for his inspection? To allow him to see—as he ran his sweat-tipped fingers over the recently vacated surface of each leather-bound ledger—that everyone was working as they should be, that all was present and correct, that he was right to look so satisfied with his business?