‘House of hope, house of grief’ by Armel Dagorn

... Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress ...

– ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, Edgar Allan Poe

Neasa lands at the kitchen table, in her hand a cooling cup purchased by the landlord dozens of tenants ago. It’s Alvaro’s laugh, a snort-like thing coming from the living room, that does it. Blows apart her reverie, sends the airy house of her mind crumbling. She wonders if this isn’t the dream. The unlikeliness of it. It’d be too much to make up though, too many details. The muffled noise of the TV that by now feels as much Alvaro’s as his voice, the dull steps of Kate above as she stalks from wardrobe to mirror to her bed and back again, readying herself for the night to some blaring Brit rock band. A much too sophisticated personal hell. She downs the rest of her cold tea, and goes to her bedroom to tinker with her broken daydreams, those wonky off-shoots of her old ones that won’t fit her newly single life.

*

‘She said mean things,’ Ellen says today. She pouts, as if to make sure Neasa understands the importance of the affront. Neasa has to make an effort not to laugh.

‘Just don’t listen to her. The best defence against mean things is to ignore them.’ This has become, against all expectations, Neasa’s favourite part of her work day. There’s something about Ellen. It’s hard to believe that just that morning she hit Caoimhe over the head with a dictionary.

Ellen yawns, then closes her mouth to chew on the grey pencil she’s colouring the roof with. She took a bright yellow one first, but Neasa remarked that wasn’t the colour of roofs. She felt bad as soon as it came out, this pulling back into line, taking down her vision because of a harmless liberty.

‘Are you tired?’

‘Yes.’ Ellen resumes colouring, thick dark whirls, blunting the nib in a way that makes Neasa wince. She sing-songs: ‘I was up at four, in the mooo-rning!’

‘Four?’

‘I slept before that,’ Ellen says, putting down her pencil on the table. ‘But I woke up when Mom and Dad came home.’

‘They came home at four?’ Neasa pauses, tries to rearrange her face, check the questioning tone that has crept into her voice. ‘Where were they?’

‘Gone out.’

‘And ... you don’t mind being on your own?’

‘I wasn’t on my own, Claire was there.’

‘Claire.’

‘My cousin Claire.’

‘So she minded you?’

‘Yah. Until I went to bed, then she went home. She lives across the green.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I always wake up when they come home.’

‘Always?’

‘Yah.’

Home that night, in bed, Neasa thinks of her. Ellen awaking, like a fairy tale princess, her ears perfectly attuned to her parents’ motions, the slightest creaks of loved ones moving about. Neasa falls asleep figuring the imaginary workings of another household.

*

Most mornings Neasa gets to the school early. She tours the classroom, setting the tables straight, bringing the chairs neatly underneath. Not that Múinteoir Gráinne ever notices.

As with many other things, Neasa didn’t mind her job as a special needs assistant until she and James broke up and the whole fragile edifice of her life came crashing down. Neasa’s patience used to be infinite. She could take time, take life one brick at a time. She cobbled plans together out of hints she wished into promises, and imagined that soon they’d take the next step and move out of their small rental apartment. Buy a house, like real grown-ups. After a while, they’d start trying for a baby. The plan, then, would be to get her HDip, and return to school a fully qualified teacher.

Instead she finds herself single and sharing a house with a barmaid and a call-centre monkey and, at 32, in the same job she started at 26. Maybe that’s why she agreed to work with Ellen. Maybe she welcomed the extra responsibility, never mind that it didn’t mean extra pay.

The principal mentioned her background. Neasa minored in psychology, and had not only mentioned it on her CV when she applied for the job, but brought it up in the staff room early on – commented on some of the students’ behaviours through the lens of concepts she’d had lectures on. It hadn’t gone down too well. Teachers with a couple of decades’ experience didn’t particularly appreciate being lectured by a young one not long out of college.

Now she spends an hour with Ellen after classes end in the afternoon, going over the day’s lessons and homework, trying to make Ellen focus on her copybook. To carefully tease out of her the feelings that make her hit her classmates over the head with dictionaries, or lash out for the slightest reasons.

*

Neasa knows this: we live in rooms. Every morning, we drag our sorry asses through the long draughty corridor to the west wing, to cohabit with our managers and underlings. We keep apartments of the mind, man caves or precious succulent-filled conservatories, cluttered with old thrills and fantasies we don’t dare to think might one day be. Our hot presses overflow with worries, ticking bombs in our imaginary homes. We compartmentalise, don’t we? Close doors on what we just can’t see right now, treat the tremors of our own bowels like the annoyance of a raucous neighbour. Wall stuff in, like some exotic queen of yore who greatly offended us. And at the centre, echoing through our hearts’ chambers, that camera obscura in our cores – the primordial, central heating murmurs of our souls.

*

The green isn’t much of a green in fact, but more of a mangy lawn – more earth than grass, more litter than daisies – where crushed cans and unidentifiable rusty remnants of machinery make the kids’ racing around dangerous.

Neasa stops the car before she knows what she’s doing. Ellen said her parents were going out for someone’s birthday, and Neasa looked up Ellen’s address, scrawled on a tag slipped in the back of the girl’s school bag. She drives there – drives past, really, is what she tells herself – but once there she lets the car creep to a stop by the side of the quiet main road. She sits looking at the houses that line the muddy green. All peeling paint and sad facades, anemic hedges and even a boarded-up house, its windows eye-shadowed in the telltale black of a fire. Yet there’s life. A trampoline stirs a pair of siblings into sight at regular intervals, and a few kids poke a ball around the cleanest half of the green, bursting into a run now and then before losing interest.

Neasa must have stayed there a while, zoning out looking at the kids fighting against the dusk. A chill has crept into her car now that the engine is off, the collected heat seeping out. Nobody seems to notice her, though. And nothing’s waiting for her at home.

There is movement in the front yard of one of the houses on the right, and Neasa sees Ellen, her head sticking out above the wall, resting her chin on it, her arms bare. Neasa shudders. A young couple comes out into the street, kissing Ellen on the head as they pass her. There’s a young girl in the doorway, and Neasa squints to try and see. She doesn’t look more than fourteen. The older girl leads Ellen in, and Neasa is still looking at the house when the couple walks past her car. She looks up to see Ellen’s father, a young fellow, looking straight at her. She fumbles for her bag instinctively, trying to find something to fiddle with that would explain her presence there, her sitting still in a parked car.

The two pass without looking back, but Neasa still puts her phone to her ear for a pretend call before checking in the rear-view mirror.

*

Seeing Ellen’s house makes her think of her own childhood home. It’s still in her mind a fanciful place, a wide dominion she used to stalk like a queen. She trod the plush carpets from empty room to empty room, her brothers out playing ball or later drinking cheap cans in the corner of some field; her parents out at work or shopping. She read children’s books looking over the shoulders of princesses, beyond their problems, the meanders of plots towards their happy ends. She stared at the tapestries in the ballrooms, the high, heavy chandeliers and canopy beds.

There’s one book in particular she remembers. The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, a heavy leather-bound volume filled with beautiful, grim illustrations. It sat on one of the shelves which lined the wall of the living room and boasted a few fancy hardbacks in between biographies of rugby players and golfers. Those heavy books had sat there unread for years, but they tempted Neasa when books aimed at her age range started boring her.

She’d always liked ghost stories and unusual tales, and once she’d found the Poe she often came back to it. There was one story that was her favourite – she couldn’t think of the title, but she remembered crowds of masked dukes and duchesses, princes and debutantes waltzing their way from one lush room to the next. It was a prince, she recalled, who’d wanted to escape from the ugliness of the world and built a palace for that purpose, then peopled it with his friends. A mansion of infinite rooms, of beautiful people navigating grand halls that gave into ballrooms, ballrooms into boudoirs ...

Thinking back now she knows there has to more to it than that, that this display of riches doesn’t constitute a story, but still all that stayed with her were the dressed-up dancers, the successive ballrooms of different colours, the magnificence of the stained glass windows.

Part of her still longs for the house she grew up in. It’s one of those sprawling bungalows that speckle the West Cork countryside, as elegant as decommissioned barracks. She grew up taking the expanse for granted – the endless corridor that linked her en-suite bedroom to the hall, the kitchen fit for a medieval castle, the two sitting rooms.

The largest sitting room seemed to be half made of glass, with views on a scenic inlet and the cows negotiating the slanting field over it. Once a cow fell into the sea. Neasa watched the farmers turned lifeguards try to steer the beast back onto dry land, guiding its trembling legs over the rocks.

She doesn’t often bother taking the bus home now. It’s a drag and a cost, a belaboured ride through a dozen interchangeable townlets, with their Tidy Towns signs exhibited like a fifth-class pupil’s swimming diploma. Their bronze statues welcoming you. Her parents are away half the time anyway. Whenever she does visit, though, she’s shocked by the size of the house. She navigates the space, computes the size of each room with that of her own – this living room, this kitchen, this bathroom, for Christ’s sake, that she has to share with two others.

There is something obscene about it – this wide flat thing, foundations spilling out like batter. Especially now that she and her brothers are gone. The house has always been one of emptiness, though, a monument to the void. Neasa doesn’t have many memories of herself and her brothers

74 ARMEL DAGORN

playing together in those rooms. There must have been moments of busy scurryings, sure, of laughter bouncing around the empty spaces, but they’re gone from her mind, have been left undocumented. In whatever family pictures are unearthed now and then for fancy relatives, the happy young family scenes always take place elsewhere – outdoors, or in the interiors of other people’s homes, as if the mansion they lived in wasn’t worthy of being photographed.

In her recollections, it seems to Neasa that she used to spend her days dreaming her lonely bedroom into a castle, unaware of the manor of sorts she already lived in. She spurned the living room, where her parents sat watching the monumental TV that dreamt of being a wall. She’d hear her father howling in front of the GAA, her mother’s laughter when she had friends over. The sounds bounced around the empty halls, landed in her bedroom like overheard dreams.

*

Her next session with Ellen is one of those that wreck her. She comes home from it and goes straight to her room to lie down. It’s a particular exhaustion, a lasting weariness that comes from not being able to let go, and Neasa replays the hour, eyes closed, until it grows into night, and she comes to her senses in a dark room. She goes down to have a bowl of cereal for dinner, like a teenager, or Alvaro.

After asking Ellen how she is, about what the class did that day, what games she played, Neasa lets her draw without looking at her homework first, as she can feel the girl is a bit edgy.

‘It’s not fair,’ Ellen keeps saying under her breath, so low Neasa at first isn’t sure she’s saying anything.

‘What isn’t fair?’

‘I’ll draw my pets,’ Ellen says, in such a positive little voice that Neasa drops the fairness thing. She tries to focus on the positive, to go along with Ellen’s happy moments whenever possible. It baffles her how brazen she was only a few years earlier, how she imagined a few psychology classes could arm her to understand the maze-like mind of a peculiar little girl. She casts back to those memories now, sitting across from Ellen, but whatever lexicon she can recall hangs useless in her mind.

Neasa places a sheet and coloured pencils in front of Ellen. During their first sessions, she pretended to do things while Ellen drew – looked through her notebook, the attendance book, but she gave that up. Now she just sits and looks at Ellen’s confident strokes. She draws as she speaks, in assured lines that often baffle Neasa.

What seemed at first to be a few scribbles around a circle resolve into figures sitting around a table. Neasa recognises, as more lines appear, a rabbit, a dog, a bird. Ellen redraws the same lines over and over, in such a way that her characters, under her angry-looking pencil strokes, become progressively deeper and darker: their bodies formed of multiple contours, at times so much so the characters seem an overlap of infinite selves. The sensation is of hovering, as if they were floating in the loose-fitting garments of their own bodies. An infinite wearing of oneself, and the consequent possibility of casting off one’s self as easily as a coat.

Perhaps the most troubling thing to Neasa, more than being completely unable to start diagnosing whatever the trouble might be with Ellen, is that those sessions always send her on strange tangents which leave her wondering what the matter might be with herself. She tries to refocus on the drawing, to find some comment to make to bring back the hour towards the professional support it’s supposed to be, and away from the strange hanging out it has become. Ellen is worrying dozens of overlapping little circles onto the bird’s face, where its eyes should have been.

‘Oh, that’s enough,’ Neasa says. ‘We can see its eyes.’

Ellen lifts her pencil from the page, and looks at Neasa.

‘She doesn’t have eyes.’

Neasa looks back at the drawing and sees it’s true. The bird doesn’t have eyes. What she took for a child’s overkill is a precise rendering, and the dark circle on the side of the bird’s head is unmistakably an empty eye socket. And the fact that its head was left blank isn’t a mistake either – no feather crowns that head. It’s an ivory skull that turns into a slightly darker beak. Ellen didn’t forget colours – her bird wears a pink dress, and now, as Ellen turns her attention to her drawing again, she picks a green pencil and traces stalks and leaves on its hem, then crushes the nib of the red pencil into petals over the pink.

The rabbit and dog, despite having ears, have similar voids for eyes. Their teeth show. Their necks, before disappearing into their clothes, are made of small squares.

‘What ... why don’t they have eyes, Ellen?’

Ellen finishes the flowers she’s drawing, then tilts her head to the side a little, considering her work, before putting down her pencil and looking up at Neasa.

‘Because they just don’t.’

*

Once, as Neasa was sitting in the kitchen, a bird landed with a thud on the window pane of the tiny, half-arsed conservatory that grows a few feet out of the kitchen into the back yard, leaving just enough room for the two wheelie bins and a single smoker in that claustrophobic well. She was looking out when it happened. She saw the rushing form crash, and she felt an echo of its dull shock in her chest, an internal thump she imagined might make less lucky people collapse. The bird had fallen on the sill outside. She still heard the fumblings of her housemates around the house, the fulfilment of their petty worries, while this little horror went almost unnoticed. The bird lay on its side, shaking a wing, and she replayed the scene, imagined rising in time and opening the window to let it shoot through and glide around the kitchen. She saw herself closing the window after the bird, trapping it in the house. Would that be wrong? Wanting to trap something beautiful? Neasa looked at the bird convulsing and went to her room. She couldn’t face touching it, didn’t know how to begin to help it.

*

She lies down on her bed, scanning her bookshelf for something interesting. Her current read doesn’t appeal. She thinks of Poe. Ellen’s grim drawing, probably. She’s never bought a copy of the book that she read so often at her parents’. Instead she googles it, types ‘edgar poe story castle’, and quickly finds it. It’s called ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and she even finds the ghastly Harry Clarke illustration her dad’s book had featured. She sits up in bed, draws the duvet over her legs and puts down her purring computer on her lap.

It’s a quick read, and she is shocked that her childhood notion of the story, the idea of infinite rooms, is wrong. The idea of characters waltzing from one room to the next, moving through an endless succession of lavish chambers ... Poe’s story has only seven rooms, she finds now. Relearns. The Prince invites some chosen ones to live it up while death wreaks havoc through the land. There are but seven rooms, and one of them has always been a dark, disturbing one. And death, in fact, is in it. Always has been.

*

One sunny April afternoon Neasa walks home from school. She’s been thinking she could use the exercise, but it has crossed her mind that the real reason might be that it means less time spent at home.

Neasa spots Ellen some thirty metres down the road, her blonde head bobbing up and down behind the parked cars. Neasa follows her down Barrack Street, and soon sees her stop in front of an old dilapidated house. Ellen looks around, a parody lookout, before disappearing behind a car.

Neasa trots across the street just in time to see Ellen’s feet be swallowed by the house. She rushes up to the front door, and sees the lower pane is half broken; the cheap, rotten plywood kicked in. She kneels in front of it and feels the musty dark seeping out to her. She can see the dusty carpet, the ripped wallpaper, the stairs leading up, but no sign of Ellen.

Neasa stands up, looks around like Ellen did. Her heart is beating like a naughty eight-year-old’s. It’s strange to find herself in the middle of a quiet street, on a nice spring day, as if that glance inside expanded into something more than a second, more like a lifetime. She jiggles the rusty padlock, then pushes the door a little into its frame. She makes sure no driver or passer-by pays any attention to her, then crouches like Ellen did and passes, hands first then head and torso, through the narrow gap in the wood. She feels shards tug at her top, plough tiny barren furrows into her jeans. When her feet are safely in, she looks back at the blinding square gap and finds it surprisingly small. As if she made herself a rat, managed to pass through a portal she shouldn’t have been able to. She rises to her feet, wipes the dusty mildew off her palms onto her thighs. Immediately to her right is the front room, which she only surveys from the doorway – an old sunken sofa remains, an island in a sea of empty cans of cheap beer and flagons of cider. The stench of piss nearly makes her crawl back out into the world. She catches a glimpse of the room at the back, a stove like her grandmother’s. The cupboards are empty except for a few pots banged out of shape and shards of plates, some doors hanging limp, one-hinged.

The wallpaper shows its original colour in rectangles, and Neasa spots here and there along the skirting boards broken frames, their paper souls crumpled. Here a Virgin Mary, there a charcoal sketch of a coastal landscape. Neasa sees, from the tumulus of cups and glass around the frames, that they died at the hands of vandals. She picks up a picture of a family – parents, kids, grandmother – at the beach, the faded colours and cuts of swimming suits dating it to the seventies. She slides it back into its frame after having shaken free what remained of the glass. A nail remains in the wall and she hangs the frame up there, a little worse for wear, but otherwise not very different to what it must have been when the occupants of the house left, those victims of God knows what personal apocalypse.

As she steps back into the hall, she wonders when someone last did something creative rather than destructive in this house. Before putting her weight on the first step, she listens to the house, unsure of whether it is silent or not. Can she hear a little tinkle, or is she trying to find something in the void? The core hum of every single atom in the world vibrating? She starts slowly up the stairs, not trusting them, but also wary of what demons their creaking might raise. The landing gives views of the bathroom – every inch of ceramic covered in old dried shit, old piss – and two small bedrooms, one empty, the other with a mattress on the floor. Everywhere, cans. Needles. Cigarettes stubs. The carpet has a burnt hole the size of a plate in it, and Neasa wonders if some bum or kid saved the house, maybe the street, by pouring beer over the nascent flame, or if it was just dumb luck – the fire petering out, death dying before it killed. Finally she faces the stairs that lead to the top floor, and as she climbs she hears, surely this time, a headless tune – a snake biting its tail kind of a tune.

The steps creak with each tread, but the humming continues undisturbed. When her eyes get level with the top floor, she sees, in the middle of the single attic room, a strange dance. The doorway frames two little birds dressed in flowery robes, in the skylight’s diagonal column of swirling dust. Two little hands carry the birds, make them dance. Their heads are bare skulls. She sees Ellen kneeling in the middle of the room. A half-dozen more small bodies lie scruffily dressed in dolls’ garments, but beyond, outside the clearing Ellen herself has no doubt swept, are dozens more bird skeletons, lying among their kind’s shit. For a second, it doesn’t look like generations of them have come in and got trapped, lost track of the gap they squeezed their fluffball bodies through, but more like a long, long time ago the prince of the birds gave a ball, and all the prettiest birds came from nests and canopies far and wide across the land, and they all waltzed in little leap-like steps, and at the stroke of midnight fell on their unused back, and died along with all magic.

Ellen stops humming, makes the two birds bow to each other, and finally looks up at Neasa as if she never doubted one second that she’d be there.

From issue #8: spring/summer 2019

About the Author
Armel Dagorn is now back in his native France after living in Ireland for seven years. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Tin House online, The Stinging Fly, The Lonely Crowd and Unthology. His short story collection The Proverb Zoo was published in 2018 by The Dreadful Press.