Free The China Factory by Mary Costello Page A

waves lapped on the shore and the murmur of the Rosary rose and fell and enclosed her. Across the open grave Paul’s head was bowed, a son on either side of him. She closed her eyes. She should not have come. She should not have listened out for Matt’s echo, or let him summon her here like this.
    In the distance the church bell rang and she looked up and saw Anna with tears slipping down her face, and she was thrown. Their eyes met and lingered for a second, and Ruth, feeling herself weaken, searched Anna’s face for a moment and then the face of the woman next to her, and then slowly, abstractedly, face by face, other random women in the crowd. She might be here, she thought, the woman in the kitchen with the TV on, might be here. I might have always known her. I might have walked down the hill beside her now. She peered at each woman’s face. Is it you? she mouthed across the grave. Or you? Or you?
    And then something on the edge of Anna moved. Her son’s arm dropped by his side. Ruth shifted her gaze to his face. Paul Junior, the second son. He had been a small boy when she knew him, seven or eight, no more. Now he had the thin face and raw features of a mid-teen, before the bones are properly scored or perfected. He is still in the making, she thought—and she began to study his face and eyes and body for some resemblance to Matt, or for how the child might one day have looked, or borne himself. The boy was staring straight ahead. Then his eyelids flickered and his eyes rolled back, and a damp patch appeared and spread down thefront of his trousers. He fell to the ground heavily and his head hit the edge of the grave. Paul and Anna dropped to their knees beside him and the priest stumbled in his prayer and paused. And then the boy’s limbs stiffened and jerked and his whole body began to vibrate. His teeth clenched and his face beat against the clay. Paul half-stood and signalled to the priest—a look of reassurance and a plea to continue. Then he bent and laid a hand on his son’s convulsing back, and waited. A hush descended on the mourners and the priest’s words were barely audible. The boy’s body shook and thrashed and Ruth stood paralysed, caught in its hazard, as if wired to the boy and his tender taut brain, as if the neurons that misfired and hurled through him were escaping and crossing and alighting on her and she, too, would be felled in this neurological strike.
    Then the storm passed. The thrashing eased and his limbs slowly stilled. Ruth held her breath. For a few seconds all was quiet and she felt a part of her shift, lighten, enter a new dimension. She had a vague sensation of Matt’s nearness. She saw the boy, foetal, on the ground. His completion had been interrupted, logic and memory momentarily wiped out. Scorch marks left on a delicate cerebral membrane. He opened his eyes and raised his head and Paul and Anna lifted him up and he stood pale, dazed, resurrected. The crowd stepped back and the three of them, stooped and leaning into each other like one body, sleepwalked away.
    The mourners closed in and the priest started up again. Out on the road she glimpsed Paul open a car door. She imagined the three of them in the back seat, Paul Junior in the middle, a hand from each side touching him, earthing him again. His absence now left her more deeply alone. The priest intoned the prayers and the mourners responded louder and harder than ever, and the coffin was lowered into the grave. She watched it disappear. Her only link to the child was going too. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners . The volume shocked her. Now and at the hour . A day wouldcome when there would be no trace of Matt left, either. Clods of earth fell on the lid and she looked up at the sky and became, suddenly, bereft. Once, their eyes had ached for each other. Their hearts had chimed. In one another’s silence they had known joy and loneliness, in equal measure. In the end