The China Factory Read Online Free

mind when he staggered out to the barrel that cold night, or as he strode across the factory lawn that summer’s day, bearing all of our realities in each stride. I think that something must have escaped and drained out of him into the other man that day. I wonder if he’d had an inkling that a gap would open and he would lever his way in between two orders, two domains, and when he reached out his hand and leaned his head towards Vinnie’s, was it to the man or to the madness he spoke?
    I think of our blood tie sometimes, mine and Gus’s, and the ties that bind us all. I would have liked to have taken him with me that autumn, taken my own family too and the factory girls and made them all fit into my new world. I would have liked to have mitigated the loss and the guilt I felt at leaving them behind, the feeling that I was escaping and walking away. It is not an easy walk, I longed to tell them, but I’m not sure anyone was listening.

YOU FILL UP MY SENSES
    She loves when she is alone with her mother in the car, like this. They are driving to check on the cattle and sheep in the summer grazing seven miles away. They stop at Burke’s for petrol and buy loose pineapple cubes and cigarettes. Her mother smokes two cigarettes very quickly as if she’ll be caught. Her mother never smokes in front of her grandmother. At night when her grandmother has gone to bed, and her mother and father and all the children are together in the kitchen—a normal family at last—she is happiest. Then her mother puts her youngest sister up to bed and afterwards walks along the landing calling out Holy Mary Mind Me so that her little sister will hear her voice and not be afraid, and her sister calls back Holy Mary Mind Me too, and they keep up this singsong as her mother comes down the stairs and in along the hall. Then her mother is in the kitchen making the supper. She is humming softly. The television is on. She watches her mother putting out the bowls and spoons, the sugar bowl and the milk jug. She loves her mother very much. When she grows up she wants to be exactly like her.
    They walk to opposite ends of the land—her mother to count the cattle and she the sheep. She is nine now. As she tramples through the fields she forgets all about the sheep. She stands under a tree looking up at the undersides of the leaves and the little veins almost make her weak. She walks on, avoiding the thistles and thecow dung until she gets to the hill. There are crooked stones on the far side where unbaptised babies were buried long ago. She stands at the top of the hill. She opens her arms wide and runs down the hill, her hair blowing, her eyes watering in the breeze. She goes up the hill again and stands still and starts to sing. She raises her face to the sun. She would like to be a singer on TV. She would like to make her mother and father proud. She would like to bring tears to their eyes.
    Her mother is not cross when she finds her—her mother is never cross with her. Together they start to count the sheep. How many are in the other field, her mother asks her, and she runs to the gap and counts them and runs back again, breathless, and the number is right. They walk back to the car. She hands her mother a pineapple cube from the paper bag and as they drive home they make sucking noises and laugh. Her mother is not like other mothers. She is young and girlish and runs in the mothers’ race on sports days and tickles her and her brothers and sisters at bedtime and grinds sweets as hard and fast as they do. On Sundays when they have Neapolitan ice cream for dessert, her mother takes spoonfuls from her own bowl and drops them into the bowls of her younger brother and sister until her own ice cream is almost gone. She does not know how her mother can bear to give away her ice cream. She does not mind not getting any from her mother’s bowl, and her mother knows this. Her mother understands everything about