I carried the teapot to the table.
“There’s an architect looking for me for some work,” Liam said, “and I’ve put him off twice already. It’s a good job, and there’s others will jump at the chance if I don’t turn up and show willing.”
Liam went on talking about this architect, enthusiasm in his voice. I poured the tea, schooling my face to say nothing.
“A new house, no expense spared,” Liam said. “The client’s rich—seriously rich—wants the fireplaces hand-carved in Kilkenny marble, plus balustrades and fountains and garden ornaments as well. God only knows what it’ll look like, but I’m not about to argue. With luck it’ll pay for my own work for at least a year.”
I hardly listened. I’d thought there was no time limit, no end, that it was only me that had anything to decide or go back to. And I wanted him to ask would I come home with him to Kilkenny. Ask—so I could turn him down.
I buttered more toast and slathered it in marmalade and ate it without speaking or looking at him. He said later he was watching for the slightest sign, but I didn’t let on.
Why would I? His body told me I was the world to him, yet here he was, chatting away, fireplaces and features and to hell with me.
When we’d finished breakfast we left the dishes in the sink and went out. Dandy wasn’t at the door, but we weren’t five minutes down the road and there he was, trotting along, business as usual. He’d adopted us, waited outside the door most mornings, but when we came back he’d go off home up the hill. I wanted to feed him, but Liam said no, somebody owned the dog. He only came with us for company and a walk.
It was a perfect day, the first we’d had, the sun shining down on the blue sea and everything looking subtly wrong in the calm, clear light. The sounds were different too, fine-weather sounds—the cack, cack of a leisurely gull, the fizzle and pop of seaweed drying, the drone of a bee in the lazy air. Strangest of all was Slievemore, no longer a black looming mountain half lost in the shifting cloud, but a big bony hill against sky that was far too blue.
I took my shoes off and made for the water. The tide was out; little low waves ran over my feet, and off to the left three cormorants sat on a rock and held their wings out to dry in the sunny air. A big curlew was strolling about at the sea’s edge, but Dandy bounced and danced along beside me, ignoring the curlew, the curlew ignoring him, both of them too much at ease for the effort of chase and flight.
Ease. And I in my turmoil.
I glanced back. Liam was squatting down, staring at something—a crab or a bit of old wood, I couldn’t see. Liam was always stopping and looking; he’d get excited at things no one else would bother their heads with—a heap of old stones or a rope of brown seaweed laid out on the sand. It was all new to me, this standing and looking. The devil and idle hands, that would have been the way I was reared. My family went to Portrush for a week every summer when I was young, but then Daddy died and she said that was that, there was no more money for holidays and going away. She took us on day trips to Donegal instead, but they were all action: pulling and squirming, strictly no dawdling, the freezing plunge, the scrape of the towel, wet sand in your knickers and socks. I didn’t know grown-ups ever just stood around and gawped at things; I didn’t know they were allowed. Not that I thought myself grown up, but Liam was four years older than me, and that made him nearly ancient beside my twenty-three.
But now I’d discovered I liked doing this looking; sometimes I’d find myself getting near as excited as Liam did himself. Sometimes. Not that day. Liam called out to me, but I didn’t stop or let on that I’d heard him; I was too busy putting space between us. I glanced back once, but by then I was round the headland and Liam had dropped out of sight and sound.
It was different round there, rougher and stonier, with long piers of rock that marched out into the sea. The sun still beat down steadily, but it was much more exposed and the water was ruffled with hundreds of tiny blue ripples all running in fast from the west. Oyster catchers picked around among the weed, ringed plovers scuttled in the stones, winds pulled at the pools so they shivered and shone, and there wasn’t a sinner in sight. My feet were soft from city shoes, so I hopped from rock to rock, watching my step and thinking of yesterday and the seal.
And today it was Liam and leaving here that were twisting me over and under like string in a cat’s cradle. The confusion of it all. One minute I couldn’t stand the sight of him, and the next I wanted to be here with him forever, standing about and looking at things, never far from his side. This new confusion was nearly worse than the seal confusion, and the two falling so close together was a whole lot worse than either on its own. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get anything sorted or straight.
Bird sounds, wind sounds, the lapping of water. It was all so quiet and far away it felt as though there was no one left on the face of the earth but me. But for all the absence of people, I wasn’t alone. The cracks in the rocks beside me were crammed with whelks and winkles; further down they were spiky with blueblack mussels and clogged with drying seaweed that shifted before my eyes. The more I looked, the more I couldn’t stop looking. There were limpets everywhere, and between the limpets, barnacles, and crawling over them glistening flies as big as the nail on my thumb. Huge blue-grey sea slaters scuttled the rocks, sand fleas hopped on my feet, and the seaweed laid down by the tide in heaps was heaving with questing birds. Everywhere you looked everything was jam-packed with life, doing nothing at all with itself except living.
And the more I saw how alive it all was, the more I got this creepy feeling that it was way too alive, it was all too busy and strong for me, and if I went on looking another minute it might do like the skull had done and turn into something else.
So I stopped looking. I scuttled across the rocks like one of the slaters, and when I found Liam, I flung myself at him, demanding a bus.
“A bus?” he said, his hands on my shoulders, pushing me off and holding me there. “Where to?”
“Belfast,” I said.
“Back to Robbie?” he asked, the anger showing in his eyes and tightening his mouth.
“None of your business.”
“What if I think it is?”
It’s nearly three in the morning, very dark, for the cloud has thickened and crowded out stars and moon. I’ve been a long time remembering Achill; it’s been strange to see it so close up in my mind when I haven’t really thought of it for years. I suppose I was already deep in love with Liam, but I didn’t know it, I thought it was only my body responding to his. And I thought I could live rationally, could make that body give up what it wanted and do whatever I told it to do.
But I didn’t go back to Robbie. Liam was angry enough to say what he thought of him, and somehow after that I couldn’t make him big enough in my mind to submit again to that life.
Instead I went running home to my mother in Derry. Did I say that? Here am I, sleepless with dread at the thought of the morning and what it will bring, when back then Derry was home and my mother and refuge of sorts.
A delusion that even then was short-lived. After a week of her I was so beside myself I walked into the town and had all my mass of flame-red hair cut short in some sort of crazed, inarticulate protest. I came home near bald and wild with dread that I’d driven Liam off from me for good. Which was what I wanted and what I couldn’t bear.
I looked in the mirror. This poky white face like a rat’s with tufts of red all around it looked straight back out at me. I got out the antidepressants and sedatives they’d given me in the hospital and shook a whole load of tablets into my hand. That felt good; it felt painful and dramatic. Then I caught myself on. There were neighbours of ours, RUC men, who’d been shot at their own front doors. I knew what death looked like—I didn’t want to be dead.
I picked up the nail scissors and eased the sharp points in under the flesh of my palm till the blood began to come. It hurt, but at first I liked that because it made me forget how I was