The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  About halfway between the Great Island and the mainland at Dunmore Head, probably not even a mile from shore, Thomas and Isabelle found what they’d been seeking. Elevated to some fifty feet or so above the tide and, at thirty relatively flat acres, little more than a good-sized farm, Beginish was ground abandoned to weather and wildlife, providing a safe haven for grey seals and summering Arctic terns. It seemed ideal; small, safe, private, with the crumbling stumps of a single cottage and shed the only indication that people had ever inhabited the place at all, and yet within easy enough reach of civilisation, should a sudden need arise.

  By May, after fully committing to the decision, they had begun attending to practical details. Rather than having to waste a month’s rent, they gave notice on the bedsit, agreeing to move out on the last day of July. Work, for Thomas, on a multi-storey car park on Union Quay, was due to finish in the middle of that month, which worked out nicely; and arranging time off proved no great obstacle for Isabelle, either, especially once she explained that this was to be their first getaway as husband and wife, something she’d been yearning for, without really believing they’d ever be able to afford it, since the day of their wedding. On hearing this, the bakery allowed her two weeks’ paid holidays, and a fortnight more unpaid, while the restaurant, which employed her on nothing more than a casual basis anyway, simply put her job on hold, ready and waiting to be taken up again on her return. Furthermore, her friend Liz, who worked with her at the bakery, had a spare bedroom and insisted on stowing their meagre belongings: some clothes, shoes, a few books, a small photo album and a laptop computer, all of which fitted with ease into two medium-sized cardboard boxes.

  The final piece of their plan clicked into place when a short online search turned up a man in Dingle who agreed to sell them a small rowboat on the condition, put forward by Isabelle, that he’d buy it back from them within six weeks for half the twelve hundred that he was asking. And for an extra fifty, he was even willing to haul it to their chosen collection point. Isabelle spoke with him on the phone and told him of their intentions, her enthusiasm making a torrent of her words, and he listened through it all, gurgling what sounded like laughter into the silences between her sentences, either thinking her a touch mad or else assuming that the entire scheme was a cover for some hare-brained smuggling racket. But with the money already on his mind he didn’t much care what they were about. ‘Your man can row the distance easily enough,’ was all he said, his broad accent making a soft hush of his S’s. ‘It’s not that far if he just goes nice and steady. Take a bit of free advice, and try to catch a high tide, if you can. But don’t start out if the water’s any way rough. She’s a grand little boat, solid out, and she probably wouldn’t roll in anything less than a storm, but you don’t want to be taking risks.’

  * * *

  On the first day of August, a Thursday just ahead of the holiday weekend, they stood each with an arm around the other’s back on the almost deserted beach at Dunmore Head and looked out over the water at the small green platform of land that they’d be calling home for the next few weeks. They were tired and happy, having spent most of the night awake, packing rucksacks with sleeping bags, a couple of scant changes of clothes, raincoats and a warm jacket each, as well as their various supplies of knives, spoons, a sewing kit, a small hatchet, matches, tinned and vacuum-packed food, and two bottles of whiskey that they’d bought as potential defence against the rawness of the nights to come and which, Isabelle knew, Thomas would delight in rationing with an almost ritualistic fervour. All the way here, through a long, stifling day of travelling, by bus to Dingle, where they stocked up on fifteen two-litre bottles of water in one of the supermarkets, and then the last twenty miles or so by taxi, their minds were overrun with thoughts of what lay ahead. But it was only now, standing here on the sand with the sea and the island actually in sight, that the whole adventure felt truly, finally real.

  The boat was waiting down near a small outcropping of reef. The seller, Paudie Joe, in a tobacco-coloured suit and a whitish shirt with three-quarters of its buttons undone and a brown homburg screwed onto his head at a hard tilt, was sitting on the bow, reading a brutally dishevelled newspaper. He looked up only when they approached, shook hands with them both and, with a slight nod of his head, folded away Isabelle’s cash in an inside jacket pocket.

  ‘You found the place, so,’ he said, after wiping his face and the back of his neck with an oily handkerchief. ‘Well, ye’ve a grand day for it, anyway.’

  The early afternoon had finally caught the lightest breeze, and the water ahead of them was a bed of light: pale blue in the distance beneath an only slightly deeper and immaculately unblemished sky but in close a shimmering white fire so brilliant that it branded echoes of itself into their vision.

  Paudie Joe helped drag the boat down the few yards of beach, and held it steady on the water’s edge while Thomas gathered their belongings and lifted Isabelle aboard.

  ‘Right, I’d say you’re about set, so.’ He straightened up, and shook hands with them both again. ‘This weather, there won’t be any great pull, but if you’re new to the water you’ll still likely be surprised at how much there is. Just take it handy. Even at a crawl you’d cross there in fifteen, twenty minutes. And ye look like ye have all the gear. I suppose there’s no point in me asking if ye know what ye’re doing.’

  From her place in the boat, Isabelle smiled. ‘None at all,’ she said, and after a second he smiled too, and tossed his head and shoulders in a quick shrug.

  ‘Well, take care, so. And I’ll see ye in a few weeks’ time, please God.’

  For a minute or two, until they’d settled themselves properly, they let the boat drift. Even in the first few feet of water, and with the sea as tranquil as it could ever be, their balance felt compromised. The waves this close to the beach were low but quick ahead of breaking, and the task they’d set themselves seemed suddenly immense. Thomas sat just forward of the boat’s centre, facing the strand, and settled the oars into their locks but didn’t yet begin to pull. His hand shifted and re-gripped the handles, seeking comfort and stability. Isabelle, perched in the stern barely an arm’s reach away, huddled forward with her elbows on her knees, and had to take her balance from him. She wasn’t smiling now, and the skin at the corners of her mouth held little brackets.

  To put her at ease, he grinned. ‘Fifteen or twenty minutes, the man said. What does he think I am? Some kind of pirate? A mile’s a hell of a distance for the likes of me.’

  ‘He’s the pirate, I’d say.’ She considered the boat with an exaggerated scepticism.

  ‘Well, there are a couple of life jackets, if we need them.’

  But the fun of the words relaxed her, and after Thomas had hauled them a hundred yards out from the beach, she shifted her position, leaned back and stretched out her legs so that her feet settled between his. She was barefoot, dressed in denims cut off in a rough fringe high up along her thighs, and her legs were long, the flesh milky after the long winter. He had an urge to reach out for her, to drop the oars and run his hands up over her, and when he met her eyes again he saw by the way she was looking at him that she had read his mind.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I lost my bearings for a second.’

  ‘They’re not lost,’ she said, lifting a foot up along the inside of his bare calf and arching it to rest against his knee. ‘I know exactly where they are. And where they need to stay, at least until we reach land.’

  At the halfway point, he stopped rowing. The shoreline had become a golden stripe of sand, back among the darker ridges of the headland. Out this far, the breeze was soft and deceptive, masking the afternoon’s fire, and the exertion of rowing had coated his arms and face in sweat. The muscles across his shoulders and back felt good in their flexing, but he and Isabelle had made it almost to within touching distance of their destination now and there was no need to hurry. He raised the oars and, one-handed, awkwardly, slipped out of his T-shirt. Isabelle watched, then foll
owed suit. Then, after just the briefest hesitation, she pulled the string of her bikini top, too.

  ‘Pretty nice view from out here,’ he murmured, with a little teasing cough inside the words.

  The sea was a constant hush, splashing in slops where it caught the sides of the boat. Isabelle leaned back onto her elbows, in a way that flattened her small breasts to her chest, and closed her eyes. The rods of her ribcage latticed her skin, and shallow but obvious trenches emphasised her collarbones, but she’d never looked more relaxed or more beautiful. Out here, with the beach so far away, they might have been the last two people left on Earth.

  ‘I wish this could last forever,’ she sighed, without opening her eyes. ‘Isn’t it just perfect?’

  He sat watching her, watching how her stomach flattened and hollowed to the unhurried tide of her breathing, and thinking about something he’d once read or been told, which was that everybody had to decide for themselves what happiness looked like. Nobody had ever lit him up like she could. She wore her hair, that woody shade of hazel which in some clouded light seemed to shine almost grey and in others possessed a nearly greenish tint, cut up in a short, dense pageboy style that lent small magnificence to the sculpture of her face, the strong cheekbones and even the gentle overbite, and she stretched out in pencil lines against the boat’s old wood, her upper body’s weight set back on her elbows causing her narrow shoulders to jut. There’d be nothing without her, he decided, at least nothing worth knowing.

  And just then, for barely an instant, something shifted inside the day, the slightest waning, the insinuation of a shadow. For that half a heartbeat, the water lost the apex sharpness of its glimmer and turned instead steely, and the heat within the day grew overwhelming. Everything was quickly right again and as before, but even so, he set the paddles of the oars back in the water.

  ‘Hold off on that thought,’ he said, trying to put a smile into the words, but not fully feeling it. ‘Let’s wait until we have solid ground beneath us before you go saying things like that. We can wait a few more minutes for perfection.’

  And feeling once more for the rhythm, he began to drag at the oars again as, out ahead of him, and behind her, the land lay in a smudged line above the water and looked less and less like a place they’d ever known.

  The easiest place to land on Beginish was a snug strip of beach on the far side of the island, which meant a further ten or fifteen minutes of rowing. In close to the rocks, the current had a stronger and less predictable grasp, and once they rounded the jut of reef and were faced, away to the west, with nothing but open sea, the pull on the boat became increasingly significant. From all he’d read on the subject, Thomas had expected as much, and so he’d believed himself prepared, but now an anxiety settled into him and wouldn’t let go. Isabelle sensed his tension too and she straightened up from her slouch, fixed her stare on the island’s stony barricades and studied the rippling water for some treacherous flash of reef. All along this side of Beginish, the water broke in small white explosions against the rocks, shredding itself open and apart against the island, and then the stripe of strand rose into view and Isabelle gave a little gasp of relief and lurched forward, straining to focus on something out past her husband’s left shoulder. ‘I can see it,’ she said, her voice gleeful, and she let her hand settle in a loose grip around his right wrist. ‘A gorgeous white piece of beach. We’re here, Tom. We’re almost home.’

  They dragged the boat high up onto the sand and Thomas lashed its lead rope to one of the rocky outcroppings. Care in all things, he’d read, even though August was just breaking and it seemed an unnecessary precaution. The beach was a beautiful spot, the very definition of ‘private’, a discreet horseshoe cove sheltered all along its back side by a towering ridge and with unbroken views clear to the western horizon. The water, even just a few yards out, was very deep, with currents and rip tides that made swimming a risk, but the sand was clean and fine and, on days like this one, it seemed nothing short of paradise. He gazed out at the water and was tempted, just for a minute, to simply throw himself down and sleep, because the fatigue which stress and the need for exertion had held in check all morning now closed in around him.

  ‘There’s a path,’ Isabelle said, coming to him at an easy jog. ‘I didn’t think there was at first, but you can definitely make it out if you look closely.’

  Thomas considered the sweep of footprints that rumpled the sand off towards the nearer, northern end of the beach, but when no path was immediately obvious he started away in that direction. Isabelle remained by the boat, then changed her mind and skipped after him.

  ‘See,’ she said, pointing out where the vaguest suggestion of a track wound its way up through a smothering of briar to the ground above.

  ‘Christ, Izzy,’ he said, ‘we’ll be torn to rags. If there even is a path there, I doubt it’s been used in decades.’

  ‘Well, from what I can see, it’s either this or trying to climb that wall of rock. But if you can see another way, I’d love to hear about it.’

  He looked at her. ‘Did I at least think to pack some pairs of jeans?’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said, stripping out of her shorts down to the most indiscreet of bikini bottoms and stretching herself out on the sand. ‘For the sake of those lovely legs.’

  After a few seconds spent glaring at her and being wilfully ignored, he sighed theatrically and began to rummage through his belongings, burrowing to the bottom of his rucksack for the hatchet, then pulling on his denims and, after the briefest hesitation, his second pair.

  Even though there was evidence up close of a trail beneath the brush, the first few paces into the slope met with considerable obstruction, by clawing fronds of briar woven into a thick mesh across the mouth of the path. The hatchet proved inefficient, and useless against anything that hadn’t set solid, so Thomas’s best option was to simply trample his way through. It wasn’t easy either, but it worked, and within an hour he’d flattened a basic path to the top fields. He stood on the higher ground then, surveying the acreage in a lazy sweep, the land one long, gently undulating roll of grass apart from where the rocks poked through. Off to his right stood the skull-and-bone leftovers of the island’s single dwelling, a ruin of what had once, and probably for a century or even two, been a shepherd’s cottage. First glance suggested it to be nothing but rubble, but the gable end remained standing, putting a strong back to any wind that might swing in from the west. That wall, he decided, would serve as their back, too, in supporting their shelter, and he let his mind fill up with thoughts of how good an idea all of this was, how idyllic the time they’d spend here would be. There were no sounds apart from the frothy coughing of the waves breaking against the reefs back along the island’s high end and the occasional call of a passing gannet or petrel.

  * * *

  Towards the end of their first week the weather started to turn. Isabelle was again down on the beach – enjoying the sun, as she did for a couple of hours during the hottest stretch of most afternoons – when she felt the shift: something subtle about the glow of the light, and a guttering to the slightest breeze that plucked small peaks into the ocean’s surface. She wasn’t afraid. Instead of hurrying back to their shelter, she stood for a long time just where the tide rolled up onto the sand, feeling the electricity in the day and how it seemed to move against her in walls, not wind yet, not exactly that, but a definite shift in atmosphere. She knew without ever having seen this before that the sea was set to roughen and that by the following morning, or maybe even the arrival of night, the waves would be rolling in high. When eventually she climbed the path she saw Thomas over on the island’s highest point, also looking westward. He’d felt the difference, too, he said, when she came to stand beside him, and was trying to read the signs, to make out what mattered and what didn’t, because even though whatever was happening hardly bothered the day in a visible sense, and even though the sky remained clear, at least for now, there were more gulls than usual down among
the rocks, and out in the water vague, crawling shadow lines seemed to stripe the distance, as if something huge was rising from the depths.

  Dusk was already upon them by the time they returned to their camp to prepare supper. Until then the tent had gone largely unused except as a place of storage because, most nights, they’d chosen to sleep outside, finding comfort against one another in a large shared sleeping bag and lying awake in one another’s arms deep into the smallest hours, listening to the sound of the waves lapping at the island’s fringes and gazing up at the stars sprayed with such density across the sky. Thomas checked the tent’s ropes and stakes, and further secured any that had begun to slacken, then set about building a fire, using dried kelp and dead grass to catch the flame and stoking it in sparing fashion with a few small pieces of the driftwood that he’d salvaged from the rocks their third or fourth day here. Out of habit, he lit the fire behind the stone stumps at the far end of the ruined cottage, so that it would be mostly shielded from both the mainland and the other islands.

  Once the flames took hold, Isabelle set down a pot with water to boil for coffee, and a small pan, into which she laid a chunk of butter and four thickly cut strips of bacon. While the bacon was frying, she emptied a tin of baked beans into the pan, and readied two plates.

  They ate without hurry, sitting cross-legged on the grass, the cast of the fire brightening their faces.

  ‘It’s a long time since I remember food tasting this good,’ Thomas said, using the pad of his thumb to wipe his plate clean of tomato sauce.