“Now?”
“Only if it suits?”
“Em, yeah?”
“Great, I’ll just go pee.”
* * *
Xanthe emerges from the bathroom looking like a woman in a perfume ad. She’s wearing wide-legged trousers, a blue knitted jumper, and a flat cap that could have come out of Billy’s caravan but somehow manages to bring the look together.
“How’s the commuting going?” she asks as we slide into the slipstream of people going down the stairs.
“Grand,” I say.
“How long does it take for you to get to Dublin?”
“It’s about forty minutes by train. But we live, like, a twenty-minute drive away from the train station, so about an hour altogether.”
“So you’re out in the proper countryside?”
“Yeah. I live on a farm.”
“That’s amazing. What kind of animals do you have?”
“We only have cows. It’s a dairy farm. My uncle owns it.”
“Do you ever work on it?”
“I milked this morning.”
“Oh my God! How long does it take?”
“Around an hour and a half.”
“Do you milk them on your own?”
“Yeah, but James kept an eye on me while he was cleaning out the sheds.”
“Is James your uncle?”
“No, James just works on the farm. My uncle wouldn’t get out of bed. He was out last night.”
“Haha, out on a Tuesday?”
“Every night is a night out for Billy.”
I follow her out a side entrance I’ve never noticed before. An ambulance flies past. I go to cross the road but she is still standing at the curb, looking at me.
“What?”
“Did you just bless yourself?”
I blush. “Oh yeah. It’s a habit.”
“It’s really cute.”
I want to tell her to fuck right off.
“Sorry, that’s condescending,” she says.
“You’re grand.”
“It’s a nice thing to do, is what I mean.”
“I’m not really religious,” I say.
“I know. I mean, I don’t know. I’ll stop talking now.”
* * *
We cross the road into a café. The place is so packed with students and tourists that there’s condensation on the windows. The coffee machine sounds like a building site.
“I’ll go grab us a table,” Xanthe shouts.
I’m not sure where the queue starts.
“Are you in line?” a woman asks me.
“Sorry, no,” I say, and move to the side.
Xanthe is in my ear. “I got us a seat over there.”
“Great, thanks. Do you know what you want? Do you want to go ahead of me?”
Ordering food is an ordeal. I’m starving. I want lunch, but it’s too expensive. Xanthe orders herbal tea so I go for tea and chocolate cake. I apologize to the girl at the till for not having a loyalty card.
* * *
I push my slice of cake over to Xanthe. “Do you want to share?”
“No thanks.”
“Seriously, help me eat it.”
“I can’t. I have a nut allergy.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I used to be one of those people who didn’t believe in allergies. I thought they were for weak people. Turns out, I’m weak.”
“Do you like peppermint?” I say, pointing at her tea.
“No, actually.”
“Then why did you order it?”
“I’m trying to get into herbal tea because they’re meant to be good for you.”
“Herbal tea reminds me of the daisy perfume I used to make when I was a kid. Smushed flowers in water. Even back then, I wasn’t stupid enough to drink it.”
“That makes me feel a lot better about spending a fiver on this.”
“Are you joking?”
She points to the chalkboard above the counter.
“Daylight robbery,” I say.
* * *
An hour into the conversation, I’ve given Xanthe my life story.
“Your mam is going out with a twenty-four-year-old?”
“Yep.”
“What age is she?”
“Thirty-six. She had me when she was eighteen.”
“Wow. And your dad must be young too?”
“She never told anyone who my dad was.”
“Not even you?”
I shake my head. “I’m not even sure she knows, to be honest.”
“She sounds amazing. Wait until you decide to get married. It will be like a culchie version of Mamma Mia.”
Xanthe overuses the word amazing. She doesn’t like talking about herself. The only thing I know about her is her nut allergy.
“What happened to your fingers?” she asks, as though she’s sensed I’m about to catch her out with her questions game.
I hold out my left hand. “A childhood accident,” I say. “I got them caught in a door.”
* * *
Every spring, Mam picks reeds in the field beside our house and makes St. Brigid’s crosses for the whole parish. At the beginning of February, she brings a wicker basket full of crosses to mass and the priest thanks her from the altar.
When I was seven, I tried to help her. The field where the rushes grow is called the swamp—a childhood, in-between place where my boots squelched and I was never sure if the grass surrounding me was land or lake. I used to imagine hippos submerged in the mud behind a clump of reeds.
Mam snipped the reeds with scissors, tied them in bunches, and put them into a hessian sack. I trailed along behind her, trying to pull the reeds up myself, but they were too stubborn to move. Usually, the more I tried to please Mam the less patience she had with me, but she tolerated me this time because Grandad was moving fences nearby. When I asked if I could help she let me drag the sack of reeds after her.
We went back inside the house with the rushes. I tried my best not to make any noise but even my silence annoyed her.
“Go outside and play, Debbie.”
“But I want to help.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“Please, Mammy, I’ll be very good.”
“I haven’t time to teach you how.”
“I already know how, we made them in school with pipe-cleaners.” I smiled at her, triumphant.
She picked rushes off the table and started to walk toward her room, carrying the bundle into her chest like a baby.
“I want to help, Mammy, please.” I started crying and she began to run. I chased her down the corridor, put out my hand to stop her from closing the door, but she slammed it. A black pain shot up my hand.
* * *
I lost the tops of two fingers that day—the middle and ring fingers of my left hand. Billy brought me to the hospital. When we arrived back home, Mam didn’t acknowledge my injury, but she made me a cup of tea. Later that night, she slid a letter under my pillow while I was sleeping. It was disguised as an apology, but really, she explained how the situation was my own fault.
Mam brought the St. Brigid’s crosses to mass that Sunday and the priest thanked her from the altar. People took one home on their way out of the church. The crosses were put over doorways to protect houses from harm.
Where Water Dreams
Mam twisted James’s arm into bringing us to the beach. It’s windy and raining. A day for ducks. She would never entertain the idea of going to the beach on a sunny day. The worse the weather is, the more excited Mam gets about swimming in the sea. Zeus’s lightning strikes the idea into her head and his thunder eggs her on. Today is wild enough for Mam to want to go and harmless enough for James to agree to bring her.
“Turn left. Left!” Mam says, turning on James’s indicators for him.
“You mean my other left? As in right?”
“No, left!”
“Do you want to drive the car, Maeve?”
Mam pushes James’s hand away fr
om her knee. They’re both in bad form now. The only thing Mam and James ever fight about is Violet. Violet is a ’98 purple Toyota Starlet. Billy went to see a man about a dog one day and came home with Violet instead. Mam says novenas for her every year when the car test comes around. She always manages to scrape a pass and James comes home with the certificate in his hand, patting her bonnet and beaming like a proud father. Mam likes Violet. She just doesn’t like to drive her.
James’s dog, Jacob, can drive the car better than Mam. Jacob sits on James’s lap while he’s driving, panting happily with his tongue lolling and his head out the window. He is an idiot beyond belief. He’s supposed to be a sheepdog. James was all talk of the great servant Jacob would be when he was a puppy, but as he grew up he just got fatter and lazier. If he was human, Jacob would be a male model—you know, the ones who don’t even have to try. His attractiveness isn’t ruined by a poor diet and exercise regime. He’s got good genes. There is a bit of husky in him and his coat is thick and glossy—black and white with a tinge of brown. He also has huge golden eyes.
But my God does he fuck up on a colossal level. He once chased the cows out of the field in the middle of the night, scaring them so much that they broke two electric fences and ended up stomping around the graveyard, shitting all over headstones and flowers. When Billy woke me up that night saying that the cows had broken into the graveyard, I imagined the heifers trying to squeeze their hips through the side-gate, their eyes bulging in embarrassment like larger ladies getting stuck in a turnstile. You still can’t say a bad word about Jacob around James though. He defends him almost as much as he defends Mam.
Ever since I can remember, James has been teaching Mam how to drive. Technically, Mam knows how to drive a car. She knows a lot about cars in the same way some people are obsessed with world wars: she can talk about them in an abstract way but doesn’t necessarily want to be in one. Lift the bonnet and she is able to name every part and what it’s doing there. Ask her to turn on the ignition and she freezes. She gets defensive. James calls it an irrational fear. She calls it a reasonable one. Every now and then they have the same argument.
“Maeve, if you’re so frustrated by the way I drive, why won’t you drive the car yourself?”
“You don’t get it.”
“So why can I drive and you can’t?”
“You are able to see the lines between things. I’m not. When I look out the windscreen, I can’t see the lines that separate one thing from another. Things melt together in my brain.”
* * *
Mam only drove the car to mass once. It was only two hundred meters but it was a big moment for her. She parked the car outside the church and gave James a massive hug. He kissed the crown of her head.
After mass, as she was turning into our gate, she overshot the corner and crashed the car into the wall, smashing into the exact same place where the nineteen-year-old boy died. We sent Violet down to the mechanic and she bounced back, but Mam never recovered. James stopped giving her lessons after that.
* * *
My stomach sinks when we get to the car park. I hate the effort of the beach. I balk at the thought of sand between my toes. Mam, on the other hand, rolls around in the sand. Throws it on top of herself. A few days after going to the beach she’ll put her hand down her pants and smile when she discovers sand hiding in her arse crack.
The only thing that can surpass Mam’s passion for sand in her arse crack is her love of the sea. She babbles about how amazing your body is to be able to adjust to the temperature of the ocean. As soon as the water hits her toes, her lungs wake up. She recites the names of the levels of the sea as she descends into the water. “Sunlit zone, twilight zone, midnight zone, abyss . . .” She waits until she is ready to dunk her head under to whisper, “The hadal zone of Persephone, the winter queen.”
* * *
Mam says that she loves swimming in the sea but she doesn’t actually swim at all. She can’t. She just stands in it. James made the mistake of buying her swimming lessons for Christmas last year. He tried to hide his disappointment when she only lasted one swimming session and came home sulking. The instructor didn’t like her, she said.
“And we had to wear condoms on our heads—those latex yokes that yanked hair from my scalp. The water was dead. And everyone was staring at me.”
“Then don’t go back,” I said.
“Do you think James will understand?”
“Of course,” I said, though I wished that he wouldn’t.
I hoped it would be something they would fight about. But of course James understood. He even found it endearing how she hated other people seeing her in a swimming suit. That was another thing. Mam had to buy a swimming suit for lessons. When she swims in the sea, she goes in as naked as the day she was born.
* * *
James is on at me to come in with them, but the thought of going skinny-dipping with Mam is just too much. I try not to watch her strip off, but I can’t pull my eyes away from her flat stomach, the dimples at the base of her spine, the curve of her back, her weirdly perky breasts. She has scant pubic hair—fine and blond like the hairs on her arms.
James doesn’t go in naked. Not until he gets into the sea, anyway. I don’t know what happens in there, whether she rips the shorts off him or not. They kiss. She wraps herself around him. He loves it.
* * *
I come to the beach for the shells. The windowsills of our house are littered with beach booty—cockles, razor shells, scallops, clams, whelks, periwinkles . . . There’s a bowl of cowries in the bathroom. Mam saves the best shells for the windowsill of the Tabernacle—a striped Venus, spindle shells, and tellins that open up like tiny porcelain butterfly wings. I once stole a pelican’s foot from the Tabernacle and put it under my pillow. When I woke up the next morning it was gone. All that was left under the pillow was the tiniest trace of sand. I imagined the tooth fairy prying it from my closed fist and returning it to the Tabernacle where it belonged.
We found a queen conch once. Mam said that if I put it against my ear I would be able to hear the ocean. Then she told me that what I was really hearing was the sound of my own pulse—the sea inside of me.
* * *
The tide is out. Mam and James are only knee-deep in the water but the waves are the crashing kind—collapsing walls that try to knock them off their feet. I lower my gaze and start to comb through the clutter. Some of the shells are as thin as eggshells; others as thick as teeth. I skim over the razor shells, mussels, and cockles—the pawns of the sea. If I was younger I would have my arms full by now—each and every cockle was a marvel—but I’ve become more of a connoisseur, only stooping to inspect the most curious. Some aren’t shells at all. Fragments of glass from beer bottles are taken in by the sea and cleansed of their generic beginning. I think I found a bone once. I was afraid to show it to Billy in case he told me it was something more normal.
* * *
I’m thinking about the boy who stands at the back of mass. Sitting down is too much of a commitment for him. He’s cooler than that. He prefers to loiter, making a point of his agnosticism. I flirt with him at mass. I mean, try to flirt. I sneak glances at him. Whenever I succeed in making eye contact I panic and look away. It’s stupid and terrifying. Embarrassing, really.
We were in the same class in school but I never talked to him. I still make a point of avoiding him. Whenever we are forced to interact I have a fear that I’m breaking something between us, like I’m afraid to trespass into reality. I’m not even being original in fancying him—everyone does. So I’m angry with him for turning me into a cliché, even though we’ve never had a proper conversation.
We used to lean our school bags against each other every morning next to our lockers. I liked the thought of them lying next to each other all day. It was comforting. I miss it now that school is over. Billy always said the Leaving is a sad name for an exam. Finishing school is a strange kind of grief.
It’s the boy I never talk
ed to who I miss the most. The fantasy of him stays inside the school walls, decaying like a memory mausoleum. The only way that I can resurrect the daydream is by seeing him at mass and transporting him to places like here, the beach. I look out at Mam and James and try to imagine him and me. I can’t bear to talk to him in real life but I strip naked for him now in my mind’s eye. I kiss him in the sea.
I bend down to pluck a white feather from the sand. It’s small and fuzzy. I wrap it in a tissue and put it in my pocket like I’m giving myself a secret to keep.
* * *
I sit on a towel on the stonewall and hug my knees into my chest. The wind sucks the hood of my jacket to one side of my head and makes me feel like I’m in a tent. Mam and James come out shivering and reaching for towels. James rushes to get the stuff from the car.
“How was it?” I ask.
“Amazing,” Mam answers.
“Fucking freezing,” James shouts.
He brings the big shopping bag out of the boot. Triangle ham sandwiches in tinfoil with cheese-and-onion Tayto. A teapot. A packet of chocolate digestives. Two flasks of hot water. He fills the teapot and sits Mam’s woolly hat on top of it like a tea cozy.
I avert my eyes away from Mam getting dressed and crunch up the Tayto in the middle of my sandwich. She zips up her fleecy jacket. Last to go on is the woolly hat that has been toasted by the teapot.
“Are there good shells down there, Debs?” James asks.
“They’re OK.”
“I spotted some nice dog whelks,” Mam says.
“They were badly bashed around though.”
“Remember the time I got called into school about the beach story you wrote?” Mam asks.
“Yeah.” I’m surprised she remembers. I’m looking forward to hearing how she’ll twist it into an amusing anecdote for James.
* * *
I was around eight years old when Mam caught me with a handful of shells at the beach. I asked her if I was allowed to keep them and she said only if I learned their names.
“Names are magic,” she said. “It’s important for things to have names—otherwise they don’t exist. Can you imagine if I called you Fiona or Louise?” I shook my head, my eight-year-old self terrified at the thought of other mes.
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