The China Factory. Mary Costello

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The China Factory - Mary  Costello

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      THE CHINA FACTORY

      Mary Costello grew up in County Galway. Her collection of short stories, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Her debut novel, Academy Street (2014), was the winner of Irish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. She lives in Dublin.

       Also by Mary Costello

      Academy Street

      THE CHINA

      FACTORY

      MARY

      COSTELLO

Image

      CANONGATE

       Edinburgh · London

      This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by

      Canongate Books Ltd., 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Mary Costello, 2012

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      First published in 2012 by Stinging Fly Press

      The Stinging Fly Press

      PO Box 6016

      Dublin 1

      Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in The Sunday Tribune, The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction and in The Stinging Fly

      The author and Canongate Books gratefully acknowledge the financial support of The Arts Council Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon

       British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available on

      request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 601 1

      eISBN 978 1 78211 602 8

      Set in Palatino

      Contents

       The China Factory

       You Fill Up My Senses

       Things I See

       The Patio Man

       This Falling Sickness

       Sleeping With A Stranger

       And Who Will Pay Charon?

       The Astral Plane

       Little Disturbances

       Room In Her Head

       Insomniac

       The Sewing Room

      And night by night, down into solitude, the heavy earth falls far from every star.

      We are all falling. This hand’s falling too—all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

      RAINER MARIA RILKE

      THE CHINA FACTORY

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

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

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

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

      At lunch time every day we clocked out and walked down the curved driveway and up to the shops at Mervue for Snack bars,

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