Saltwater Read online

  It is a city of constant renewal and in the clamour of pop-ups and shut-downs I began to lose sight of who I wanted to be. I lay in bed watching the sun melt into streetlights and back again, tracing my fingers through the patterns the shade made on my skin.

  17

  When she was sixteen, my grandmother found a job on the fish stall in Jacky White’s Indoor Market. She spent the next thirty years gutting mackerel and slicing salmon, scrubbing surfaces with bitter chemicals until she could see the pale shape of her face in the counter. There was a record stall opposite and she twisted her hips to the music, sliding around on the slimy lino and laughing.

  ‘It’s tearin’ apart my blue, blue heart,’ she sang along with Neil Diamond as she set up the stall, her gold rings skittering across surfaces and an Embassy Regal cigarette dangling from her fingers. In the evenings she delivered fresh fish to the boarding house, wrapped up in newspaper and carried in red and white striped plastic bags.

  Everything about her was silver; her voice as she sang along to the radio in the mornings, the shiny fish scales caught on her tabard at the end of the day and the hole that she left in our lives when she died, edged like a fifty-pence piece.

  18

  I spent invisible days watching strands of sky get trapped in the windows of office blocks. I walked past the mobile phone men playing music from plastic booths and ran my fingers over fruit and vegetables rotting in the daylight, filmy with dirt from passing buses. I wandered hungry through markets bristling with raw meat and vinegar, the smell of hops bulging from pubs. I craved grimy light on sun-starved shoulders and the thrill of that hot Hackney jerk chicken tang in the summer months.

  19

  My auntie trained to be a beauty therapist and went to work in a salon in Yorkshire. From Monday to Friday she waxed eyebrows and plucked ingrown hairs from the creases between ladies’ thighs in an attempt to make them feel like they were in control of something.

  My mother went to nursing school and lived at home. She kept my auntie’s gold slingbacks under the radiator in the hallway because it made her feel safe, as though my auntie had just come in and kicked them off by the front door.

  On Friday afternoons, my grandmother wandered around Jacky White’s on her lunch break. It was the eighties and the clothes in the market crackled with static. She sighed over Madonna blouses with bloated shoulder pads and fingered pastel legwarmers wrapped in plastic. She didn’t have much money, but everyone knew her so they gave her special discounts.

  As soon as my grandmother came home, my mother laid the treasure out on my auntie’s bed. She positioned blouses or dresses over jeans and tights and picked out colour-coordinated bras and knickers with lipstick to match, a pair of high heels propped on the pillow. She called her sister from the phone box at the end of their road.

  ‘What time will you be back?’ She twirled the cord around her fingers. My auntie raised her voice above hairdryers.

  ‘I’m on the six o’clock train.’

  After she had swept up the dead hair and turned off the sunbeds, my auntie rushed home, drank a vodka tonic and put on whatever clothes were waiting for her. They watched bands play at the Borough and danced to Orange Juice and Depeche Mode. They woke in the mornings with curry sauce and chip grease smeared across their bedsheets.

  ‘Get up, you lazy beggars!’ The stench of my grandfather’s kippers wafted up the stairs and sneaked under their blankets.

  20

  When I was a child, there was a council estate behind our house that was evicted and demolished in order to make way for a new development of identical Wimpey show-homes for different kinds of people. The clapped-out cars and broken bicycles disappeared to make way for diggers and breeze blocks. There was a couple who refused to move and their house stood alone in the rubble, their windows boarded up and a St George’s flag floating resolutely from their front door.

  My dad took me out riding on his motorbike, flying over football fields and turning circles around the abandoned estate. I slotted onto the leather seat and wrapped my arms around him, breathing in smoke and oil laced with Midget Gems.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ he warned as he started the engine. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let go.’

  I loved the way the wind tore my hair from my skull and it bobbed out around us like dandelion fluff. We got home full of the sting of it, dirt-piles and goalposts rippling under our skin. My mother breathed through her nose as she dished up potato smiley faces and beans for tea.

  ‘I don’t want to know about it,’ she said, soaking her cracked hands in the kitchen sink.

  21

  I am trying to work out why my mother did not stay with me in London when the sky was cracking. Why she boarded a train and left me to look for my father alone. I think it is about taking the things that are yours and not holding back for the sake of other people. I think it is to do with letting things go.

  22

  Burtonport is full of multitudes. There are traces of my past here, in the damp that permeates my grandfather’s house and the flashes of places that hold the secrets of my childhood. The curly ferns and the rough, mottled rocks stretch backwards through the years, away from my adult life here now, towards a smaller version of myself.

  I hated it sometimes as a child, when rain fell relentlessly and the beaches seemed to stretch on forever, vast and unchanging. I sat in the corners of pubs while the adults sipped away the days and I sucked the salt from soggy crisps and slurped Cavern Cola, feeling the weight of the afternoons, heavy in the back of my skull.

  Summer is ending and autumn is creeping in. I have a different sense of this place, one I could not detect before. There is something fast beneath the earth, brown and dirty. It is charred and dangerous, like whiskey and bonfires. I can sense a dark shape just outside of my grasp, calling to the reckless parts of me.

  23

  When my mother was twenty-one, her boyfriend took her on a trip to Paris. They spent twelve hours on a coach to walk along the Seine in trench coats. She has a Polaroid picture taken under the Eiffel Tower. She stood at the top of the steps by the Sacré-Coeur, looking out across the rooftops, and wished that her sister was there.

  On the last night of their trip, they went for a meal in a tiny French restaurant. They both chose pasta because they didn’t know how to pronounce anything else on the menu. Over complimentary crème brûlée, her boyfriend took a ring out of his pocket and pushed it across the table. He looked at her for a long time.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Oh, God. Yes?’ She shuddered as she picked up her spoon to crack the sugar crystals.

  When she arrived home, she told the story to my grandmother with salt-speckled cheeks.

  ‘I don’t want to marry him, Mam,’ she choked. ‘I didn’t know what else to say.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Susie. We’d better call your Auntie Doris. She’ll know what to do.’ Doris was believed to be an expert on matters of the heart, having been married and divorced three times. She came round reeking of tobacco and cheap perfume. She heaped three sugars into her tea and fixed her niece with a lipsticked smile.

  ‘You’re just gonna have to tell him it’s off, Susie pet. Why on earth did you say yes in the first place?’ My mother shrugged and fiddled with her hair. Doris’s big gold earrings glittered through the cigarette smoke.

  ‘Shame, like.’ She picked up the ring and attempted to jam it onto her swollen finger. ‘Proper pretty piece of metal. Must’ve cost him a bloody fortune.’

  When my mother told her boyfriend that she didn’t want to marry him, he threw the ring over a cemetery wall in a fit of rage.

  24

  A few years later, an Asda superstore was built backing onto the cemetery. My mother liked to imagine that the ring was mixed into the cement and those tiny French sapphires were buried under stacks of Kellogg’s Cornflakes and jumbo bottles of Fairy Liquid.

  25

  My grandparents went dancing, drinking and to the cinema. He wandered ar
ound the market when she was at work, pretending that he didn’t know her.

  ‘I’ll have ten prawns, six mussels, four crab claws and a kiss later.’ He winked, adding and subtracting whelks while she rolled her eyes and a queue built up behind him, snaking past jars of strawberry bonbons and piles of lacy underwear.

  ‘We haven’t got all day, pet,’ someone wheezed in the background.

  One day as he passed her some coins to pay for a cod, he slipped a shy diamond ring into her palm. She gasped and dropped it under the counter, where it sank into the shaved ice. She had to wait until the end of her shift to retrieve it, when they packed up the fish and drained the day away. She boiled it to get rid of the smell of seawater.

  They moved into a council house in Pennywell. They steamed the dirty carpets and repapered the walls with delicate roses. Her mother gave them the mismatched crockery from the boarding house and my grandfather bought a knock-off electric blanket, ‘To keep us warm in the winter, doll.’

  Their next-door neighbours fought and swore and screamed sex through the walls but my grandparents just turned their radio up, giggling and smoking their way through the dark nights.

  On Wednesdays she finished work early and went to meet him by the docks. Oily men in overalls with thoughts of home smeared across their faces shouted to each other above the wind.

  ‘Alright, Linnie?’ They nodded to her, small beneath the cranes in her long coat.

  His face always softened when he saw her. Sometimes he welded bits of metal together to make birds and flowers that fit into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Got something for you.’ He kissed her gently and pressed his latest masterpiece onto her. They walked along the seafront and had fish and chips for tea. He licked the salt and vinegar from her fingers.

  ‘Gerroff!’ she squealed, pretending to bat him away with her handbag.

  My grandmother gave birth to twins on the bathroom floor. One of the babies died instantly and my grandfather wrapped it up in a bedsheet and took it to the hospital, blood seeping through cotton as he hurried through the quiet streets.

  A year later she had another daughter, fracturing her narrow pelvis with the effort. The baby turned blue and had to be resuscitated in front of the fire. My grandmother went to bed with two tiny people tucked up beside her.

  ‘Brought you a tea, Linnie.’ My grandfather crept into the room and kissed his daughters on the soft tops of their heads. Their scalps smelled of milk and something deep and rich and dangerous he couldn’t understand.

  26

  My parents bought a bungalow in a cul-de-sac in a Sunderland suburb with an enormous hole in the sitting room floor. All the neighbours were old people, tottering to and from bus stops with their blue rinses, passing the days before it was their turn to die. My dad paced from room to room, knocking on the walls.

  ‘I’ll just do it up, and then we can sell it, like. We’ll get somewhere better in a few months.’

  They went to work painting and stripping and knocked down the rotten porch with a rusty hammer. They papered the kitchen in fat brown hens and found a second-hand sofa in a mossy velour. My mother made her own curtains from Laura Ashley fabric, spending her evenings hand-sewing the hems because they didn’t have a sewing machine. She squinted to see in the dark because the electricity hadn’t been turned on yet.

  ‘You’ll look at them stitches and remember me when I’m dead,’ she joked.

  They had friends round and showed them before and after pictures of the giant hole.

  ‘You’ve done a lovely job.’ They clicked and tutted as they walked around the house, touching surfaces and sniffing potpourri.

  ‘It’s just for now, like. We’ll do it up and sell it, then we’ll get somewhere better. Somewhere in Durham, maybe. Isn’t that right, Tom?’ My father smiled vaguely from the doorway with his cigarette.

  27

  Years later my mother looked out of the window at the squat stone houses across the street and felt her youth had drained out of her. She rearranged her hand-stitched curtains with a panic-stricken look in her eyes.

  ‘I feel like I’m going to be here forever,’ she said to me. I pulled cushions from the sofa to make icebergs for my teddy bears to float on.

  ‘I want to live here forever,’ I told her. ‘It’s our home.’

  28

  In Donegal, people are identified by the names of prominent members of their family. Auntie Kitty brought my grandfather up, so he was known as ‘Micky-Kitty.’ When my mother is here, she is known as ‘Susie-Micky-Kitty’. When I was younger I found this stifling, whereas now the transparency is comforting. I have been floating, without edges, waiting to be snagged on the next jagged thing. The names of my ancestors anchor the cottage to the ground like rope.

  29

  When I first moved to London, I didn’t have a smartphone. Every day before I unlocked my bike and set off, I tore a page from my notebook and copied a wobbly line map of my route from my laptop screen. My pockets were stuffed full of inky squiggles linking parks and libraries with landmarks that meant nothing to anyone but me. I Blu-tacked them to my wall so the lines matched up. They wriggled around my room like a heart monitor, mapping my pulse across the city.

  30

  Now that I am in Ireland, I am screaming on vast beaches when there is no one else around. I am swimming in the sea, spreading my body wide in the water, feeling my limbs and my lungs stretching as far as they can. I am lying in the grass in the cottage garden and watching the stars at night, letting my thoughts wander, limitless, without cutting them short, or backing them up, or squeezing them into too-small spaces.

  31

  There are traces of my grandfather in this house. A bottle of holy water. A plate with a painting of a pope on it. A china dish patterned with tulips. I walk from room to room touching objects. I like the way they are solid in my hands. They are my things now, and yet they do not seem like my things. This house is part of my history, yet it is so unconnected to my life in London. This is my story, and yet it is not my story. I water my peace lily with his holy water, just to see what will happen.

  32

  When my mother and her sister grew older, they started ice-skating. Their drainpipe jeans were so skintight they had to lie on their beds and pull them up with coat hangers. They bundled up in scarves and hats under my grandmother’s watchful eye, then stuffed them in the bush behind the bus stop, so they could pick them up and put them on again on their way home.

  They skated forwards and backwards and spun in circles on one foot, moving so fast they left ice gathered on the surface of the rink like snow. They drank Coke from glass bottles through candy-striped straws, silver blades flashing as they swung their feet from fold-up seats.

  33

  The council eventually knocked the ice rink down. They got rid of the leisure centre with the slide and the wave machine to create a cultural quarter that would regenerate the town. My mother and I walked through the empty space and she started to cry.

  ‘That ice rink saved us,’ she said.

  ‘From what?’ I asked her.

  ‘Other things.’ She looked at the ground around her feet as though that time were a stray coin she could pick up and put back in her pocket, if only she could find it.

  34

  By the endless sea, beneath the infinite sky, I am craving fat tower blocks. I want gutters filled with rubbish and streets lined with cigarette butts and broken shoes; neon lights and violent, man-made things. The canal filled with sludge and smog settling over the river and the stench from the back of the bus getting into my lungs and staying there. When you breathe in dust you can never expel it. Everything important contains its opposite.

  35

  When my grandfather came home in a rage, my grandmother locked herself in the bathroom with her daughters. She ran a bath so the rumble of the back boiler and the gurgle of the water blocked out the shouting from downstairs. She sank into the hot suds and the girls rubbed Lifebuoy soap into h
er back, tracing their small fingers over the ridges of her spine. They stayed in the bathroom until their skin whorled and pruned.

  36

  My father is tall and gentle. When he was young, he bleached his curls with lemon juice and a bottle of Sun-In. He wore a gold hoop earring and wrinkled shirts rolled up at the cuffs. He had a home-made tattoo at the base of his left thumb and he liked David Bowie, walking on the beach and drinking lager. He wrote funny poems in capital letters with all of the words misspelled. He smoked Lambert & Butler cigarettes leaning against sticky nightclub walls in dank Sunderland basements, rolling his eyes in a midnight haze and smirking shyly through the dark, disco lights snagging the silver bangles he wore lightly around his wrists.

  He lived with his parents in a house in Tunstall that had ivy blooming across the porch. He and his brother made their own surfboards from pieces of wood and went on holiday to Scotland to try them out, playing the Beach Boys in the car at top volume. They rescued an injured barn owl and it lived in their garage. There’s a newspaper cutting of them somewhere; my uncle with his dark, naughty eyes and my father so small under white-blond curls, curved talons digging into his arm.

  He had a knack for fixing things. He could take anything broken and within minutes he would have pulled it apart and worked out what the problem was. He fused wires and fiddled switchboards and wound the electricity meter back so that we could sit in front of the electric fire for as long as we wanted without having to worry about the bills.