Saltwater Read online

  ‘Which shoes, Lucy pet?’ she wondered, pulling up the cuffs of her boot-cut jeans to reveal a chunky mule on her left foot and a delicate sandal on her right. I lay on my stomach beside her feet, tracing my fingers along the gold straps and polishing the nail varnish she had pasted over the cracks with my spit.

  ‘The sandals,’ I declared, fingering a buckle. A car horn sounded outside and she shooed me away, shrugging her denim jacket onto her shoulders.

  ‘I’m off, Dad,’ she called in the direction of the sitting room. ‘Call me if Josh needs anything. Bed at nine, remember Luce. I won’t be back late.’ My grandfather raised his eyebrows and kept his mouth shut. I heard the car pull away and lingered in the cloud of her perfume.

  My mother and father didn’t sleep in the same bed any more and the boundaries between them seemed blurred. I wasn’t sure whether or not they were together, or what that meant, or whether it mattered. My mother’s freedom made me light but the spell was punctured by the thought of my dad passed out somewhere, his calloused, dirty fingers twitching into sleep.

  17

  I think about the man when I am home alone. He is Red Bull and cheap cigarettes. He swirls my thoughts in his glass with a straw and they dissolve into the night. All the tight, closed parts of myself drift away in his mouth like sand in the wind. I listen to my body and I let her do what she wants. Here is a space for her to grow, up into all that sky.

  18

  Hands raw with mooring rope and stubble rashes on soft cheeks. Aftershave and morning sweat and smells that are not our smells spilling onto bedsheets. Creaking springs and strange gasps in the night seep scarlet through my summer. The sun coaxes sunspots from your shoulders and strange lips kiss them in ways that are unfamiliar to me. He slips his fingers into our days with a pace that makes me green. I want your skin soft just for me. His hand falls in and out of yours too easily. I know he is not hungry enough to hold onto us.

  19

  News travels fast in this small place. Neighbours rustle curtains and turn on driveway lights in the night. They take note of cars, and hours, and at what time the blinds are rolled up. They see us drinking whiskey in Jimmy’s, note my unkempt hair, the candles flickering at my window well into the dawn.

  There are smirks in the post office and eyes lowered in the street. The owner of the shop across the road twinkles at me in the morning. Paranoia pricks my edges.

  ‘Like mother like daughter,’ I think I overhear someone say, but I cannot remember exactly who, or where, or when.

  20

  Types of fish I’d never heard of started creeping onto our kitchen table in the evenings. We tasted monkfish, light and round on our tongues like balls of cotton wool, and briny mackerel that left a sheen of oil streaked across our lips. There were crab shells served with teaspoons whose insides we scooped out and soft salmon that fell apart on our tongues without chewing. One night Patrick turned up with a live lobster and popped it into the pan, laughing at my horrified face as it squealed in the boiling water, struggling to free itself from the elastic bands tied tightly around its claws.

  ‘Pass us the salt, will you, babe?’ Patrick winked at my mother. She passed the jumbo-sized table salt over to him, its lid crusty with ketchup. He leaned over and kissed her and she pulled away, looking meaningfully towards me. I stared at the lobster as it stopped struggling.

  Patrick showed us how to break the shell and slurp the tender meat from the bottom of the claws, where it was the sweetest. The kitchen was steamy and our faces were pink.

  ‘What do you think, Lucy baby?’ My mother stroked my hair.

  ‘Delicious,’ I told her. Bile rose in my throat. Bits of lobster shell littered my plate, broken and inconsequential. I couldn’t imagine how it could ever have contained the lobster, scuttling from predators beneath the sea. It seemed too fragile to keep anything safe.

  21

  He leaves traces of oil and dirt on my sheets. I like smells that are heavy and industrial, reminiscent of building sites. I wrap myself up in his smell for nights on end. I dream of chimneys with smoke billowing out of them in grey clouds and feel safe.

  It is not lost on me that I desire this man who smells of oil and metal, a smell that has always coated the edges of things. It is the smell of the north-east, of the factories and the warehouses, the cobbles and the terraced houses and the low, heavy skies. It is the smell of my dad at the end of the day. I think of my mother growing up by the shipyards and marrying an electrician. I think of Patrick tying his boat to the dock and my grandfather building tunnels beneath the sea. I imagine their hands reaching out across the years to grab her, silvered and sore.

  The man reaches over to hold me in the night and I roll away and sleep against the damp wall. My life is very removed from the cogs and machines that brought me into being but they are somewhere deep inside of me, scaffolds stacked around my core.

  22

  This afternoon, I go to buy some milk from the small shop by my house. As I am standing in the queue, I realise that Patrick is standing in front of me. I study him closely. He still wears the same old work boots with faded orange laces. I look at the tattoo of a Hawaiian dancer sticking out of the sleeve of his T-shirt; the same figure I ran my small fingers over in fascination countless times as a child. When he flexes his bicep he can make her dance. I breathe in his smell, oil and cigarettes. He brushes my shoulder accidentally as he leaves.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mutters, without recognition.

  23

  We sit in Jimmy’s watching the day die through the window.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks me.

  ‘Mmmm,’ I say. ‘Not really. Are you?’

  ‘Starving. Chuck us a menu.’ I hand it over to him and he scans the list with his eyes.

  ‘Crab claws,’ he declares. ‘Have you had them before?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘But years ago. I don’t eat fish now. I’m a vegetarian.’ He rolls his eyes.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he says, and goes up to order.

  The crab claws arrive arranged in a flower and seasoned with garlic. He holds one up to my face.

  ‘Have one,’ he tells me. ‘Go on.’ I look at the crab claw and I look at the delicate hairs on his arms. I think about my dinners in London; sad bowls of lentils and chickpeas seasoned with vegetable stock. I want to learn abundance; how to have things without fear.

  I meet the man’s eyes and take the crab claw from his fingers. I bite into the flesh and tear it with my teeth. He looks at me with interest. I suck and chew and it is like the sea in my mouth. A whole world comes flooding back to me, a time when I ran freely over beaches in shorts and T-shirts and was hungry for things and ate sausage sandwiches, ketchup dripping down my chin. I remember the giddiness of my mother growing young and alive again.

  ‘Well?’ he asks, smirking.

  ‘Good.’ I blush.

  ‘Have another.’ He pushes the plate in front of me. My bare arm brushes against his and both of our hands are dripping garlic and something is shifting with the tides.

  24

  I am weightless in the water. Light falls in shapes and salt stings my eyes, wet-cold and sun-dappled. I spit silt from my lips and feel the ocean floor under my feet, hard and reassuring. Scrape my knees over rocks and soothe nettle spots in the spray. Fingernails digging into body-board foam and the giddy of the waves moving under me. Eyelashes leaking light prisms and limbs trickling gold. I run straight to you from the water. Brush my feet before socks with my Ariel towel. I shriek at the grit of it but I like the safe of your fingers, slippery warm between my toes.

  25

  My mother leaped out of bed in the mornings with an itinerary of things to see and do; beaches to lie on and great-aunts to visit, the sunlight caught in her hair and on the glittery letters emblazoned across her T-shirt. Josh and I sneaked Nutella for breakfast and drank Coca-Cola at teatime, getting caught up in the sweet heat that seeped from her as she pencilled her eyebrows at the table next to us, p
ursing her lips into a hand-held mirror. Something ached in my belly when she kissed Patrick chewily on our beach towels, his big hand resting on the small of her exposed back.

  ‘How would you feel about moving here, Luce?’ she asked me one afternoon as we walked back from the garage with 99 ice creams, balancing sherbet sprinkles and monkey’s blood expertly along the dirt path to our cottage.

  ‘Moving here?’ I looked at her. ‘But what about school?’

  ‘You could go to school here. You’d get to learn Irish.’ I made a thinking noise and bit off the end of my cone, sucking the ice cream down through the hole.

  ‘Could I get a dog?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. A nice sheepdog, maybe. You and Josh could take her for walks on the beach.’

  ‘And what about Dad?’ Hurt prickled my mother’s face like a rash. She pulled a wheatgrass stem from the ground and shed its head into her palm.

  ‘I don’t know, Lucy,’ she said, sadly. ‘He’ll always love you though, you know that, don’t you?’ I shrugged and crunched my Flake between my teeth.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’d better get back. Josh’s ice cream is melting.’ I trailed after her through the long grass, wondering how it would feel to have a sheepdog bounding along next to us. I thought of bungalows in cosy cul-de-sacs, of ballet shoes on cold Saturday mornings and my new secondary school uniform hanging inside of my wardrobe at home, waiting for me to slip into it.

  26

  In my life in Donegal, I am learning how to take what I want. There are unfulfilled desires, curdled inside of me. I have buried things; swallowed them down and turned off the light. I must learn how to listen to my body again. I must learn how to need, how to ask, how to want.

  27

  My grandfather didn’t understand Josh. Left alone in the world by his parents and raised by nuns, he resented the sensitivity with which we treated my brother’s outbursts.

  ‘You need to show him some discipline, Susie,’ he said from his wooden chair during one of our visits, as my mother dealt with a tantrum.

  One afternoon, we all went down to Jimmy’s. Josh and I played with bubble guns in the car park outside, showing off to the local kids as Fairy Liquid rainbows burst over us. After a few pints, my granddad turned sour and started to berate my mother for her treatment of Josh.

  ‘You’re not hard enough on him,’ he told her. ‘He can sense that you’re weak and he takes advantage of it.’

  ‘But Dad, he’s got difficulties,’ my mother answered. ‘He needs my help.’

  ‘He needs a firm hand.’ My grandfather slammed his palm onto the table. ‘A different kind of mother could handle it. You’re much too soft.’

  My mother looked at him in silence. She thought of the weeks and months she had spent alone in hospital waiting rooms with Josh. She pictured my dad, sleeping under a tree in the park. She remembered her mother hiding in the bathroom, as curses seeped through the lock. She picked up her pint and poured it slowly over my grandfather’s head.

  ‘Susie!’ he spluttered. ‘What the bloody fuck?’ My mother got to her feet and came outside to find us. The men at the bar cheered as she walked out.

  28

  I can remember far more of my childhood during those summers in Ireland than at home in Sunderland. I remember our summers with startling clarity, like the edges of polished quartz, whereas my schooldays are blurred beneath rain-clouds and climbing frames. An undercurrent of darkness, gilded in magic. I believed in both of those things.

  29

  Rutland Island is visible from the fishing port. There are a few stone houses huddled together, forming Duck Street. For one day and night every summer there was a party on the street. People piled into boats and were ferried across the water by old men in yellow overalls and teenage boys in tracksuit bottoms, their bare chests shallow in the sea spray. The festival folk band showed up with top hats and magic crystals, wielding guitars and fiddles. They set up their drum kit in the middle of the street. Everyone flung their front doors open and people went from house to house, necking shots of whiskey and winking their way through cold beers, their smiles slipping and sliding across their faces in the summer fug. My mother and Patrick chatted with friends arm in arm as Josh and I hung around the band with the other kids, dying for a turn on the drums. Someone released a bunch of yellow balloons across the island and they floated into people’s houses.

  Tents were put up as night began to fall, and everyone huddled in someone’s kitchen to keep out of the cold. A drunken silence fell and people began to sing and play instruments. An old man recited a poem about a fishing boat lost at sea and everyone clapped. The band sang a capella and people grew pink and misty-eyed. There was a lull in the entertainment and my mother piped up.

  ‘Lucy can play the fiddle.’ I was having lessons at school. I looked at her in horror and shook my head.

  ‘Come on, wee’un,’ someone called from an armchair. ‘Let us see what you’ve got.’ I sucked a sherbet lemon and brushed sleep from my eyes.

  ‘I haven’t got it with me,’ I mumbled. Patrick winked.

  ‘There’s one up at the pub,’ he said, pulling on his jacket. ‘I’ll take you over on the boat to get it, sure.’ I looked at my mother uncertainly.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged, smoothing my hair away from my face. I buttoned up my cardigan and walked with Patrick into the dark. He swayed unsteadily on the rocks at the edge of the island as he untied the boat. The lights from the fishing port spangled in the distance.

  ‘In you hop!’ he said, helping me over the side as it bucked below us. He started the engine and we took off without speaking, listening to the water bubble and gulp as we cut across it. The sky was thick and heavy and there wasn’t a single star. I shivered at the scope of the darkness, enjoying the weight of Patrick’s jacket around my shoulders, warm and smelling of cigarettes. The sea was spilt syrup and the night was ours.

  30

  The man and I go for a long walk along the beach. It is wet and windy and we hope the cold air will blow our hangovers away. It is getting dark and everything is a different shade of grey. It becomes hard to distinguish grass from rocks and sand and sea from sky.

  ‘Do you feel like we’re walking on the moon?’ I ask him.

  ‘If we were on the moon then we’d be walking like this,’ he says, taking wide steps along the shore. We moonwalk all the way back to the car as stars appear around us.

  31

  There is something between us that was not there before. Loose secrets in the dark and the snag of you pulling away from me. His hands threaded through yours in a shade of red that is strange. Your body, puckered and sore. His lips, chapped and hungry. Things you do not want me to know. You are turning away from me, tucking us into places I do not want to go.

  32

  At the end of the summer we packed up our car and drove home, shyly leaving sticky kisses in my grandfather’s stubble and promising to call him on Sundays.

  ‘You be good now, Lucy,’ he called to me as we pulled out of his drive. ‘You’re our wee hope.’ I drew angels in the condensation on the car windows as Josh snored in his booster seat.

  ‘Stop it, Lucy love,’ said my mother. ‘You’re only making more work for me.’

  It was a long drive from the ferry and we passed the time by playing ‘The Mile Game’. My mother watched the miles slide away on her milometer and it was my job to shout when I thought one had passed.

  We were less than a hundred miles from home when it began to get dark. My mother saw the sign for Scotch Corner and she pulled into the services and turned off the ignition. Josh woke up and blinked in the dusk.

  ‘Can we get McDonald’s, Mam?’ he asked from the back seat. My mother put her head on the steering wheel and started to cry. I watched the freckles on her arms quiver with the force of her sobs.

  ‘Mam?’ I pulled at the neck of my T-shirt and looked at Josh. She wiped her eyes and spoke from behind a tissue.

&nbs
p; ‘I don’t want to go back, Lucy love,’ she mumbled.

  ‘It’s okay, Mam,’ I said, smelling the end of the summer through the open window. ‘We can go to Ireland again, next holidays.’

  ‘I want to go back now,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s turn around. We can get back on the ferry. We could stay with your granddad for a while. He won’t mind.’ I looked at her.

  ‘But we’ve driven all this way.’ Josh undid his seatbelt and started to clamber over the gearstick and onto my knee.

  ‘Josh!’ I groaned as his fingers slipped between my ribs and jabbed at my soft insides.

  ‘I want to go home, Mam,’ I said quietly as she checked for smudged mascara in the rear-view mirror. She exhaled through her nose.

  ‘I know, Luce,’ she said, sadly. ‘I know. We’ve got to go home, really. Come on. Josh, get back in your seat.’ We shoved and squabbled back onto the motorway as the catseyes spluttered into life. I kept my eye on the milometer, silently counting the miles as they fell behind us into the night, leading us closer to home.

  33

  There is a wind turbine at the end of the fishing port. I like that wherever I am, whether in town or at the beach, I can use it to orient myself. In the early days when I was drunk in London, I used the Strata tower with the windmills in Elephant and Castle as my marker. Later, it became the Shard. I feel an affinity with the Shard, even though it is a symbol of the wealth and status I am so far removed from. It was just an idea when I first arrived there and it grew up into the city at the same rate I did. I like that I can remember a time when it did not exist. It is proof that time is moving forward, especially during those days when I am sliding backwards.