Eggshells

“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 café on the corner—it’s all show-face and windows—and go into the long narrow café 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 cafés 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 Oisín?”

“Oh, they’re great. Lucy is … Oisín 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.

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