Orchid & the Wasp Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  ORCHID & THE WASP

  ‘Gael, the young heroine of Orchid & the Wasp, is a magnificent and assured creation, breathtakingly smart, never self-pitying, impossible for others to manage, my favourite discovery this year. Hughes’ characters are rare, like no one you’ve read before. This is an entirely original novel, dazzling and beautiful, disturbingly cold and insistent.’

  David Vann, author of Legend of a Suicide

  ‘Orchid & the Wasp is a gorgeous novel told in an onrush of wit and ferocity. Art-forging, smack-talking, long-distance-running Gael Foess, three times smarter than everyone around her, proves to be an unforgettable heroine, and her journey will rattle your most basic assumptions about money, ambition, and the nature of love. Caoilinn Hughes is a massive talent.’

  Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

  ‘Orchid & the Wasp is an ambitious, richly inventive and highly entertaining account of the way we live now. Caoilinn Hughes writes with authority and insight, and her novel is as up-to-date as tomorrow’s financial-page headlines.’

  John Banville, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea

  ‘Orchid & the Wasp is a tremendously engaging novel, brimming with sparky humour and astute observations. Caoilinn Hughes’ prose fizzes with wit and intelligence. A joy to read.’

  Danielle McLaughlin, Saboteur Award-wining author of Dinosaurs on Other Planets

  ‘Caoilinn Hughes is the real thing – an urgent, funny, painstaking and heartfelt writer. Orchid & the Wasp is a startling debut full of the moral complexity, grief and strange bewilderments of humanity. As the world spins ever more quickly in response to the demands of grifters, parasites and liars, this book offers a troubling, beautiful and wise response.’

  A. L. Kennedy, Costa Prize-winning author of Day and Serious Sweet

  ‘Fresh, playful and exuberant: Hughes has arrived with a heady style that is full of surprise and invention.’

  Paul Lynch, author of Grace

  ‘Caoilinn Hughes has given us an unforgettable character in Gael – an unflinchingly wise and wise-cracking guide through our fractured times. Hers is a story that holds the fun-house mirror to the society we have built of greed and twisted finance. From the doomed Irish boom to the Occupy movement, the novel lays bare the impoverished spirit that led to economic collapse while providing us a path out of it. By turns poetic, hilarious and raw, this novel gives us hope that love and the retrieval of spirit are not only achievable, but worth pursuing to the very last sentence.’

  Ana Menéndez, Pushcart Prize-winning author of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

  ‘A razor-sharp wit and an astonishing psychological and emotional perceptiveness combine to yield uncommonly rich portraiture in this bracing book by a deadly talented writer, in prose so refined one slows to savour each beautifully unfolding sentence… An unsentimental and sneakily moving novel given to surprising bouts of joy.’

  Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

  ORCHID & THE WASP

  CAOILINN HUGHES

  For Paul

  ‘I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.’

  Anna Julia Cooper

  ‘With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  ‘The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.’

  Simone Weil

  1

  The Mediocrity Principle

  April 2002

  It’s our right to be virgins as often as we like, Gael told the girls surrounding her like petals round a pollen packet.

  ‘Just imagine it,’ she said. ‘Louise. Fatima. Deirdre Concannon.’ She pronounced their names like accusations. She snuck the tip of her index finger into each of their mouths and made their cheeks go: pop. pop. pop. ‘I did mine already with this finger,’ she said. The girls flinched and wiped their taste buds on their pinafores. ‘Blood dotted the bathroom tiles but it wasn’t a lot and it wasn’t as sore as like … piercing your own ears without ice,’ she concluded ominously. ‘And now I don’t have to obsess over it like all these morons. You should all do it tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow and I’ll know if you’ve done it or not.’

  Tiny hairs on their ears trembled at her inaudible breath, like Juliet’s. Gravely, she confessed: ‘Some of you will need capsules all your life. All the way to your wedding night because of being Muslim or really really Christian. Wipe your snot, Miriam. It’s a fact of life. It’s also helping people. Boys will think they’re taking something from you, when the capsule cracks. But you’ll know better,’ she said. ‘You’ll know there was nothing to take.’

  Gael was eleven. It was her last term of primary school. Perhaps that was why the proposition backfired. The girls were getting ready to fly off to some other wealthy, witheringly beautiful leader. But Gael wasn’t disturbed by this. She no longer needed a posse. It would be tidier if they fell away than having to break them off.

  ‘Really really Christian like your brother?’ Deirdre replied. ‘Isn’t he an altar boy?’

  Gael rolled her eyes so dramatically it gave her a back-of-socket headache. ‘He hasn’t got a hymen, Deirdre, so he’s obviously irrelevant.’

  Deirdre and Louise’s mirth was exacerbated by the fact that Miriam’s tears had now formed a terracotta paste with the foundation she’d tried on at the bus-stop pharmacy earlier. How much would the virgin pills cost, Becca wanted to know. What would Gael price them at?

  ‘What-ever,’ Gael said. ‘What does that matter? Pocket money is what. Everyone’ll want them. Hundreds if not millions of people, Rebecca. So choose.’ She challenged their non-committal natures, looking from girl to concave girl. ‘Well, are you or aren’t you? In?’ She addressed the dandruffy crowns of their heads. Of late, they’d become less worthwhile spending time with. Even playing sports, they didn’t want to sweat. Headbutting nothing, the chimney-black sweep of her hair kicked forward and she thrust them off like a sudden squall that separates what’s flyaway from what’s fixture. Stupid girls, she thought as the lunch bell trilled and they straggled towards their classrooms. Back to times tables: the slow, stupid common operations.

  Turning her back on the blackboard, she took a bottle of Tipp-Ex from her bag and began painting her nails a corrective white. It smelled of Guthrie’s bedroom. Acrid. Concentrated. Tissues fouled with paint from cleaning his brushes. Exoneration. Her little brother: the acolyte. On the ninth nail, she lifted her head from the fumes to find Deirdre Concannon striding into the room alongside the school counsellor, who approached Gael’s desk with a blob of tuna-mayo in the corner of her puckered mouth, a mobile phone held out and a polite invitation for Gael to take her depraved influence elsewhere. The number Gael dialled was familiar. Though, as Mum was out of town, it was to be an unfamiliar fate.

  Jarleth had sent a car to collect them and take them to his work several hours ago. On the phone, his secretary had informed Gael as to the make of the car and the name of the driver. (Both Mercedes.) There’d been no chastisement thus far, other than an afternoon confined to a windowless meeting-room penitentiary in his office building.

  In the same school but two years behind his sister, Guthrie had been encouraged to go home too when his whole class had concluded their post-lunch prayer in perfect unison: ‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, Hymen.’ Gael was already waiting at the school gate when Guthrie had come dragging his satchel-crucifix across the tarmac, in utter distress and confusion.
/>   His blue eyes were red-rimmed as a seagull’s by the time he finished his homework under the artificial lights of Barclays’ Irish headquarters at 2 Park Place in Dublin’s city centre, just around the corner (though worlds apart) from the National Concert Hall, where they often watched their mother yield a richer kind of equity from her orchestra.

  Guthrie spoke quietly into his copybook. ‘You always do this when Mum’s gone.’

  ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you’re not.’ He made a convincingly world-weary noise for a ten-year-old.

  Their mother was principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra – one of Ireland’s two professional orchestras – with whom she gave some hundred concerts a year, on top of guest conductorships where she might perform eight shows in a week, hold interviews, benefits, meetings, recordings, travel … generally returning home prostrate.

  Gael searched for Ys in the ends of her black hair. Absently, she said, ‘How was I to know my idea’d make all the sissies go berserk?’

  Guthrie’s wispy, beige hair kissed the polished pine table where he rested his head on his arm. He was slowly translating Irish sentences from his textbook with his left hand. He was a ciotóg. A left-handed person. Meaning: ‘strange one’.

  Fadó, fadó,

  A long time ago

  bhí laoch mór ann, ar a dtugtar Cúchulainn.

  there was a great hero warrior of the name named called Cúchulainn.

  He stopped writing and let the pencil tip rest on the page like a Ouija board marker. After a while, he lifted it and moved it to a blank page where he began drawing Cúchulainn in profile, sword brandished. It was a giant weapon with an intricate hilt. Guthrie gave his hero long flowing locks and a chain-mail vest and shin guards. When all the details had been filled in, Guthrie began to add squiggles all around the figure and wild loops in the air – childish in comparison to Cúchulainn’s frenzied expression.

  ‘Are they clouds?’ Gael asked.

  A barely perceptible shift of his head.

  ‘Trees?’

  ‘Waves,’ he said softly.

  ‘Wait.’ She considered the sketch anew. ‘He’s in the sea? With those heavy clothes on?’

  Guthrie exaggerated the hero’s grimace and drew a twisted cloak in place of saying yes. He strengthened the line of the chin and the nostril brackets, for defiance. ‘He’s fighting the ocean.’

  Watching the pencil go, Gael wondered at this. Cúchulainn battling the humongous Atlantic. An invisible duel, in slow, deliberate motion. Had he no mind for reward or reputation, should he win? Or rescue, should he lose? Maybe he was just proving something to himself; testing the muscle of his character, no thought of audience. There aren’t viewing posts in towers of water. No adjudication. Why else would a person take on the tireless sea but to learn the strength of his own current? Guthrie lifted his head to reveal a pale yellow mark where his cheek had been pressed against his forearm.

  ‘That’s what it feels like,’ he said, evenly, erasing some lines from the drawing and brushing the grey rubber scraps to the floor. ‘The way you get dragged in the white part.’

  ‘What feels like that?’

  Some moments passed without answer.

  ‘Oh,’ Gael said, realizing. ‘That doesn’t sound relaxing.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘But you know it’s only gravity, dragging you down, right? It’s not like, a monster or Satan or anything.’

  Guthrie seemed to think about this. ‘It’s me,’ he said.

  ‘The warrior?’

  He shook his head and Gael half expected feathers of pale hair to come falling off, like when you shake a dead bird. ‘The one dragging.’

  ‘Guthrie! That’s not a good thing to think. It’s not your fault.’

  Gael said this, though she knew it was a lie to make things liveable. Her parents had sat her down a few weeks ago to explain the situation. ‘Your brother doesn’t have epilepsy. He only thinks he does,’ Jarleth had said. Sive had looked dismayed by that explanation and had taken over. ‘It’s called somatic delusional disorder, Gael. I’m sure you’ll want to look it up. What’s important is that he’s physically healthy,’ she’d said, ‘but there’s one small, small part of his brain that isn’t well. The doctors say when he’s older, it might be easier to address him directly about it, with counselling. Right now, he gets extremely stressed and anxious, aggressively so, if we talk to him about the disorder. He thinks we’re telling him he’s not sick. Which he is, just not in the way he thinks. So it’s better for everyone to treat it as what Guthrie believes it to be. And that’s epilepsy.’ What Gael took from this was that her brother was too young to understand the truth and it was part of his sickness that he couldn’t.

  ‘Guth?’ Gael repeated, ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Dad says so.’

  A clout of anger to the chest. ‘Dad’s wrong.’

  ‘He’s mad at me.’

  ‘He’s just … frustrated to see you break something every time you have a fit.’

  ‘It’s not on purpose.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t control it.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘If it was to … If I just wanted to skip PE, Miss McFadden would just let me do extra arts and crafts so long as I don’t plug stuff in or use scissors or knives or strong glue, she said I can. Or even something else.’

  Gael made a shocked face. ‘She must’ve been drunk or something. McFadden’s a prick.’

  ‘She can tell that you think that. You make her mean. She said you’re arrogant but I told her you’re nicer when you’re not at school.’

  ‘Who cares about nice.’

  ‘She said, “That’s convenient.” ’

  ‘It’d be convenient if she got mad cow disease from a burger.’

  ‘Don’t, Gael.’ Tears surged in his eyes again. ‘I like her.’

  ‘Fine, sorry, I take it back! No mad cow disease for Miss McFadden. She’s probably vegetarian, Guthrie, don’t cry.’

  ‘It’s not–’ he said hoarsely.

  Gael took his hand from his mouth, where he was chewing on the outer heel of his palm. ‘Don’t do that. Please tell me what’s wrong.’

  He tried to explain, but sobbing hampers syntax. Gael pieced together the howled-out word clusters. Dad had warned him he’d have to be moved to Special School if he kept having fits. ‘But it’s … not special … special is … special … means …’

  ‘It’s a euphemism,’ Gael said. A word she’d learned recently and learned well.

  Guthrie blinked at her rapidly. This was new information. ‘A what?’

  ‘A euphemism. Here.’ She took his pencil. ‘You learn it and say it to Dad if he ever threatens that again. You-fa-mism. It means when one word is just a nice way to say something worse. And it’s a lie, Guth. There’s no way you’d have to move schools.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t just say it.’

  ‘He doesn’t see it as a lie. He sees it as a way to protect you. He’ll say whatever he thinks will work, to keep you safe. Does Mum know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Dad said that.’

  Guthrie shrugged. He was looking at the word Gael had written in block letters on the page beside his drawing. Underneath the Irish homework. He was catching his breath. ‘She never said it.’ He took the pencil back up and began to graze it across the whole drawing, diagonally, hazing it in lead.

  ‘Hey!’ Gael pulled the copybook from him before it was ruined. She slapped it shut and slotted it in his schoolbag. It was annoying how often their mother was touring these days. She should be dealing with this. ‘Look at me,’ Gael said. ‘You didn’t have a fit today. Even with … your classmates taunting you … like silly little dipshits.’ She didn’t add: because of me.

  He turned his face from her, to the door, where money missionaries in drab suits and skull-accentuating hairdos passed by the glass panel.

  Gael watched the quiver
of her brother’s shoulder blades. The handholds of his vertebrae. ‘Come on, Guth. If he comes in and sees your eyes all red still …’

  ‘Those estimates submitted this morning–’ Their father’s voice at the end of the corridor carried in as it would through state-of-the-art soundproofing. ‘–having you on … fourteen basis points … thirteen too many.’ With only the length of the hallway to prepare for his arrival, Gael got up and paced the room, checking behind the freestanding whiteboard and testing the wall of locked filing cabinets until one opened. She rooted inside and pulled out a roll of Sellotape. ‘Quick,’ she said, twirling Guthrie’s swivel chair to face her and biting off a length of the tape. ‘Stay still.’

  He pushed back from her. ‘What are you doing?’

  Jarleth’s voice loudened. ‘–who they take their cues from. He’ll call it how he sees it.’

  ‘Trust me,’ she said, wiping his tears with her thumb, which didn’t dry them at all.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Don’t try to talk.’ She plastered the Sellotape across his chin horizontally, so that his lower lip became huge and half-peeled-back and his pink gums showed like a cranky gelada monkey. ‘It won’t hurt. I promise.’ She wrestled him to connect another length of tape from his temples to the base of his cheekbones, packing his puffy eyes into a tight squint. Shushing her brother’s protestations, she braced against his piddly hook punches and completed the collage of his face. On the chair, they wheeled along the table, spinning as they went: the schlepping planet and its beleaguered moon. The last sticky swathe gave him a piggy nose from which mucus-water dribbled, threatening to make the whole composition come unstuck.

  The door had opened and Jarleth stood there, refastening his watch, like an actor stepping onto the stage mid–costume change. He considered his progeny aloofly. The lines would come to him in due course, or some middle-manager would prompt him. This wasn’t an important scene.