Saltwater Read online

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she moaned, upending knickers and toothbrushes onto the scratchy carpet.

  ‘What?’ I asked her, sitting on the face paints while Josh tried to claw them from underneath me.

  ‘I’ve forgotten my make-up bag.’ She looked as though she was going to cry. I didn’t understand what the problem was.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘It must just be at home.’

  ‘We can’t go out,’ she said. Her lips were pale. ‘We can’t go.’ I come from a line of immaculately turned-out women, experts in dusting make-up over their faces to conceal the tremors that ran through their lives. It was as though my mother had forgotten her armour, and without it all of the other families would be able to see how she was crumbling.

  ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said into her hands.

  ‘I want to go to the disco,’ I whined, wiggling my hips. ‘Please?’ She sighed.

  ‘I’ll ring Leanne’s mam from the pizza place. She was nice. She’ll take you. I’ll stay here with Josh.’

  ‘But. No! I want us all to go together.’ Josh wailed like a fire engine. ‘I know!’ I brightened, pulling the crayons out from underneath me. ‘It’s Halloween! We can just paint your face instead.’ I had a long, black wig in my backpack in preparation for my carefully planned Wednesday Addams costume. My eyes shone with my own genius. ‘You can be Morticia!’ My mother snorted.

  ‘I don’t think so, Luce.’

  ‘Come on. It’ll be fun.’ Josh screamed and lunged for the face paints, knocking over the coffee table in the excitement. My mother looked at us and saw pumpkins and spider webs lurking in our faces. She closed her eyes for a second and sighed.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, quietly. ‘Okay. I’ll be Morticia.’ I helped her chalk her face and ring her eyes in black. I traced the outline of her Cupid’s bow with the sticky crayon, thrilled by the softness of her cheek under my hand. She looked in the mirror and grimaced.

  ‘You look great, Mam,’ I told her. Josh and I dressed and we went to the disco and she sat at the table with the other families while we were ushered onto the stage by eager entertainers.

  ‘You look mint!’ Leanne’s mam gushed. ‘You’ve really got in the spirit of things. You’re braver than me! Younger too though, eh? I’m getting too old for all this carry-on.’ My mother smiled and took a sip of beer.

  I twirled in circles on the dance floor in my long, dark wig, raising my hands to ‘Reach for the Stars’ by S Club 7 and half-closing my eyelids as glitter from the disco ball was tossed around the room. The silver discs blurred into stars as I spun faster and faster. I was an astronaut, the room was a galaxy and gravity pulled everything towards the biggest and brightest planet, stardust caught in her hair and the moon reflected in her bottle of beer. I would forever be in her orbit, moving towards her and pulling away while she quietly controlled the tides, anchoring me to something as the universe expanded further and further away from us.

  Part Two

  1

  A fresh kind of freedom between my bones. Denim shorts on the washing line; yours bigger versions of mine. Grass streaked up my legs and across my face, mud beneath my fingernails and barefoot in the marshes. Sludge horrible delicious between my toes. Red lemonade bubbles make us prickle-tongued. Midge bites and jellyfish stings. Angry kisses reminding me that I am a body. Blisters and jelly shoes, bruises in the afternoons. We curl into bed at night all peat smoke and sunburn. Hair strung up in salt and brine. You stroke my arm hairs in the same direction, tiny and golden, soft with sun.

  2

  One night I take a walk down by the old fish factories. It is overcast and swathes of mist drift over the water, obscuring the lights on the islands from view. I walk right out along the rocks to the edge of the land and look down at the sea. It is black and churning. Watching the waves shatter is like dancing at a punk gig. There is catharsis in noise and violence.

  3

  My grandfather moved back to Ireland when my grandmother died. He inherited his Auntie Kitty’s small stone cottage and went to live in it. There was no hot water and the wardrobe was riddled with moths and worms, but he didn’t mind. He walked three miles to town and back again every day and refused to accept a lift from anyone. He swam in the sea and picked seaweed from the rocks, drying it out on the roof of his shed so he could snack on it later, licking the sea from his lips. He spent his days tending the fire and listening to the radio. He read Brian Friel stories and walked down to the port to collect fresh fish to fry for his tea. In the evenings he went down to Jimmy Johnny’s pub and shared whiskeys with men he knew from his childhood.

  4

  The coastal air is damp and goes right through my bones. I pull my turtleneck up to meet my mouth and fasten the top button of my jacket. I didn’t have a winter coat to bring with me to Donegal and I don’t have any money to buy one. It is getting dark quickly and as I turn to leave a set of car headlights swing towards me through the fog.

  ‘Jeeeeeysus.’ A man’s voice drips through the open window into the night. He sticks his head out. ‘I almost did away with you! Sorry, didn’t see you through all this cunting fog.’ I blink in the glare of his headlights, squinting to see his face through the dusk. He seems young.

  ‘Where you off?’ he asks. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘Yeah, alright. It’s freezing. I’m just up the road.’ I slide into the passenger seat. The man cranks up the heat. Chart music throbs through the speakers.

  ‘What you doing down there in the dark?’ I turn to look at him properly. He is swaddled in a black sweatshirt, the hood pulled up over his head. He turns to face me, then winks as though we have a secret.

  ‘I was just out for a walk, actually.’

  ‘A walk? On a night like this? Fucking header, you are.’

  I roll my eyes at the road. ‘I like walking.’ My lips curl. He drives up the road without looking out of the window or touching the steering wheel, his fingers texting frantically. I am always putting my life into the hands of strangers. We have the inevitable conversation about who I am and where I’m from and what I’m doing here.

  ‘What about you?’ I ask him.

  ‘Oh, I’m a port man meself. Born and bred.’

  I look at him again. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five, too. I wonder if I would have known you when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time over here.’ He brushes off his hood and looks at me properly. We seem to be avoiding each other’s eyes.

  ‘Fuck off! I know you. You used to stay up beside the Skipper’s.’

  ‘Yeah!’ I laugh. ‘Have you got a brother?’

  ‘You mean Declan? Aye, so I do. Right stuck-up little English cow, you were.’

  ‘I was not!’ We drive on in friendly silence.

  ‘I’m just up here,’ I say, as we turn onto my road.

  ‘Aye, I know who you are, now.’ He swings deftly into my driveway and spins around so his headlights light my path to the front door.

  ‘Well,’ I say, opening the door. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘No bother, pal. You should pop down to the pub sometime. You must get lonely here all on your own.’

  I make a non-committal noise.

  ‘See you, then.’ His car careers off into the night.

  Later, in bed, I think back to his jerky driving and the awkward angles of his limbs. I feel something cold and wet settling in the bottom of my stomach like fog. I close my eyes and see the sea spitting white lace onto black rocks.

  5

  The simplicity of life in Ireland appealed to my mother. She spent summers visiting Auntie Kitty as a child and in the uncertainty of her adult years she started looking for places that held an echo of the person she used to be.

  Every school holiday we packed up the car. We crammed bodyboards and fishing nets into the roof box and stuffed our favourite clothes into straining suitcases. We left in the early hours of the morning to make i
t up to Scotland in time for the ferry. My mother always had cartons of juice and Rice Krispies cereal bars ready for us on the back seat.

  We spent every day swimming in the sea, climbing onto rocks with the local kids and jumping into the water with a splash, dodging the jellyfish that flowered around us. We ate sausage sandwiches and pink marshmallow biscuits when the sun went in and fished in rock pools for shrimps and tiny crabs that we carried all the way home in seawater buckets. We searched for fairy rings among the bracken and the heathers and stayed up late to look for nymphs in the grass. We lay on our stomachs and watched the boats clink in and out of the harbour with the tides. The air tasted different away from the schools and suburbs and low-slung clouds. There was so much sky to get lost in. It felt as though we were at the edge of the earth, away from the order of things.

  6

  Yesterday afternoon, I went for a walk along the cliffs. I remembered the afternoons when my brother was smaller than me and we crawled in the yellow grass together. I thought about London moving without me, the network of trains hurtling underground and the pubs spilling punters into the gutters. I pictured all of the girls in the city like me, with winged eyeliner and bitten fingernails, stepping out into the fray in pursuit of unknowable things.

  Time passes differently here. The cliffs and the sea and the long, sandy beaches move infinitely slower than life in the city. The constant rhythm of the water makes the clatter of the tubes and the endless sirens seem trivial and meaningless. The difference is that the cliffs and the beaches will exist for much longer than me. I don’t have time to move so slowly.

  I sat in the grass for a while and looked out at the sea and the curvature of the earth shimmering in the distance. It seems inconceivable that there is no land between Ireland and America. It seems inconceivable that I ever cycled around Elephant and Castle roundabout at rush hour, or subsisted for weeks at a time on instant coffee and cereal. Sometimes, in order to move forward, you have to go to the edges.

  7

  There was a music festival in the summertime and an old lorry was parked in the fishing port with the sides taken off. Bands played on the stage and we stayed up late, running around in bare feet as drunken adults clasped their hands over our ears during the final verse of ‘Seven Drunken Nights’. The music got under my skin. I twisted and wriggled in my seat, desperate for the moment when my mother would appear in the dark and tipsily spin me around on the end of her arm, twirling me faster and faster. Men’s eyes snagged her from across the room, making me feel strange.

  8

  One evening I walk down to Jimmy Johnny’s to have a glass of wine and read a book. Usually I can’t bear the curious stares of the old men but tonight I am feeling defiant. They turn around and nod at me when I walk in then sink back into their bodies, absently watching horses race across the television screen in high definition. I choose a seat next to the fire and settle down to read. The door swings open and a hooded figure storms through it, letting in the cold night. It is him, of course. I focus on my book and take a sip of my wine. He greets the men at the bar and pretends not to have seen me.

  Eventually, he comes over.

  ‘Where’ve you been hiding, then?’ I shrug.

  ‘I haven’t been hiding. I’ve been around.’ He smirks at me and looks at my book.

  ‘What you reading?’

  I put my arm over the cover, feeling exposed. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Read a lot of books, do you?’

  ‘I suppose so. Do you?’

  ‘Fuck no. Can barely even write me own name.’ There is a small silence. Our difference hangs delicious in the air between us.

  ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘Yeah, go on then. Thanks.’

  9

  We sit side by side. The streetlights leak in through the windows. He offers me a cigarette. They are cheap and nasty and scorch the back of my throat. Old men watch us through an amber haze. I look at his arms resting on the bar, strong from carrying bricks and cement, and am surprised by the force of my desire. It is still a revelation to me that I can sit with a person with all of the ordinary boundaries between us, and then with a few carefully chosen words we might end up somewhere else together, all fingers in mouths and hard, wet nipples.

  10

  There was a hole in the sea off the coast of our favourite beach, known as ‘The Black Hole’. It was a dark circle of water rumoured to have currents that could pull you right down into it. There were white wooden crosses peppered on the rocks above, in tribute to teenage boys who dived into the water and were sucked under, never to be seen again. I developed a secret horror of the hole and kept well away from it. Instead, I put planks of driftwood across the bellies of washed-up jellyfish and walked across them in my bare feet as their insides burst and oozed beneath my toes.

  11

  The pub closes and the barman gives us a water bottle full of whiskey and a plastic money bag pulled from the till, filled with dried cloves, to make hot toddies. He drives the man and me up the road in his van and drops us off at my house. I suddenly feel shy. I have been spreading myself out across the cottage walls. There are letters from friends and lines from poems tacked to the mirror. Paintings and scraps of drawings litter the fireplace. My collection of shells and teeth and bits of plastic from the beach is strewn across the table. I have wreaths made from wildflowers drying out on the hearth. I haven’t thought about how any of this will look to someone else. My identity is my own here. He walks around slowly, smoking and taking it all in. I shiver.

  ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ I mutter, pulling the sleeves of my jumper over my wrists. He isn’t paying attention. He picks up a letter and a few others float into the fireplace.

  ‘You seem like kind of a lost person,’ he says to me. I frown at the wall, unsure of the correct reply.

  ‘Can I kiss you?’ he asks, reaching for me.

  ‘Okay,’ I reply, caught in his body heat.

  12

  We often went to the pub after tea and Josh and I would race up and down the port with the other kids while my grandfather supped Jameson and men with rough hands and lined faces lingered around my mother, savouring her English accent.

  I befriended two brothers who lived in the fishing port. They stole money from the barman’s tip jar and pushed it over the sweet shop counter with sugary smiles. We sat on piles of bricks behind the abandoned coastguard station and they pressed squares of Fry’s peppermint chocolate into my hands. It tasted sweeter because they had stolen it for me.

  One afternoon they magicked an unsupervised beer keg from somewhere and we hit it with bricks until we broke the seal on the top. It spurted from the mouth in golden arcs and we shrieked and pushed each other under the spray, delighting in the sticky, hoppy thrill of it.

  13

  One night a strange man turned up at our rented cottage in the middle of fish fingers.

  ‘How’s it going?’ He smiled at us awkwardly from the doorway. ‘Just came to see if the wee’uns might fancy a trip out on the boat tomorrow.’ My mother ran her hand through her hair as we eyeballed him behind mashed potato mountains.

  ‘That would be lovely.’ She cracked open a bottle of beer and handed it to him. ‘What do you think, Lucy? This is Patrick. He’s a fisherman.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I mumbled. Patrick winked.

  ‘And what about the wee man?’

  ‘Say hello to Patrick, love,’ my mother said with her lips, kissing Josh on the top of his head. ‘Be nice.’ She signed in secret with her hands. Josh blew a raspberry. I liked the look of Patrick. He had naughty eyes and a tobaccoey kind of softness. Showing off in front of him, I poked Josh in his side. He knocked his plate over in a rage and orange beans splattered across the tablecloth. I snorted. Josh slipped from his chair and made a dash for the back door.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ quipped Patrick, slipping his hands under Josh’s armpits. Josh screamed a white scream and my mother dropped the dishes in shock. Patrick paled and tos
sed his cigarette into the garden. He had accidentally stubbed the smouldering tip on my brother’s arm. We all looked at it for a second, until my mother swooped down and scooped Josh up, jamming him under the cold tap. He screamed louder. Patrick hopped from foot to foot.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, baby,’ my mother said to Josh, holding his trembling body close to hers. His skin puckered like a surprised kiss. There was a strange feeling in the kitchen, as though something had happened that could never be reversed.

  14

  I think of the day we stole the beer keg. I remember how afterwards my T-shirt stank of lager and I was scared to tell my mother because I thought I’d be in trouble. I went into the pub and saw her standing at the bar. A man had his arm around her waist and the afternoon light fell in shafts through her hair, turning it copper.

  15

  ‘Do you remember the beer keg?’ I breathe, as we move gently to the cottage floor. I can taste the bitter chocolate and feel the fountain of gold raining down onto me. I picture a hairy hand hooked under my mother’s belt loops. I think of the sunlight dripping through the beer and remember how illicit it felt, and how exciting.

  16

  Things were different when Patrick was around. My grandfather came over to watch us in the evenings, his pockets stuffed full of clove sweets. I relished the bitterness of them, the way they tasted medicinal and lovely all at once. They made me feel grown-up, which was a feeling I was beginning to crave. My mother locked herself in the mouldy bathroom and steams and creams seeped under the door, smelling of faraway places. She did her make-up in the hallway mirror, her face shiny from the shower.