The sun was high and its light caught in the gold of your small-hooped earrings as the world unpeeled around the fast-moving car. Tiredness crept into you. One earring tinkled against the passenger window as you slept. When you woke, the ocean rolled into view and you nudged my elbow, placed your palm on my thigh, left it there.
We started setting up the tent on the last ledge of sandy grass before the pebbles. The tide was going out and the stones still clung to the damp stains of the retreating water. Wind blew through a forest of silver birch trees on top of the surrounding cliffs and in the silence between breaking waves we could hear it, a faraway crackling, rushing through the autumn leaves like a great fire burning somewhere out of sight.
A coolness came into the air. You went to the car for an extra layer as I unrolled the floor mats, unpacked the sleeping bags. When you didn’t come back, I looked to the car. There you were, sitting in the passenger seat with my red jacket on. I put my palms out in front of me. You threw back your head, laughed a laugh I couldn’t hear.
We left the tent door unzipped and watched the ocean unfold itself over the pebbles. The sun hung low above the horizon. There were whitecaps on the waves and small seabirds were dive-bombing the water. Your head was on my chest. I held your hair in my hand. We were silent together for a long time. Then you said you needed to tell me something. We shifted and sat cross-legged across from each other like children in a playground. You were looking down, turning that blue bead on your bracelet. Your lips started to move. They said the name McCarthy. I heard McCartney and said I’d always preferred John. Your hand slapped my knee. You let out a strange laugh, said no. Your lips said Dr McCarthy. They said the word tests. I asked questions but you didn’t answer. Then more words. Words like spread, like metastasis. They moved through me, seeped a heaviness into my bones and I tried to beat them away by wincing my eyes, shaking my head. Questions stuttered out of my mouth then. Each syllable stumbled around the stillness of the tent. Outside, ocean water pushed and pulled on the pebbles. A high wind moved through a shivering forest.
I said it can’t be.
A silence opened up between us.
You were nodding. And the blur of you, nodding as light from a sunken sun lingered in the sky. The blur of my arms around you, of your arms around me. The strength I could still feel inside them.
An oil lantern hung above us. It spilt its glow over your sleeping body as rainclouds smeared stars from the sky. The quiet dark was outside. I imagined a thickness growing into the canvas of the tent and floating us away into the belly of the night. Fine drops began to fall. They freckled the calm ocean water. When they reached the tent, they tapped the canvas like poppy seeds pattering a flagstone floor.
It was the tent door that woke me: open, flapping. Eyefuls of silver sky. I turned to one side, but you weren’t there. Pangs of panic transported my thoughts to the sea. Did you? But then your voice was there, shouting my name from a distance away. I crawled outside, saw your shape crouched by the shore, the entire ocean in front of you, white and raging in the gathering wind as flecks of foam floated the gusty air. Again, my name — flying to me from your shouting lips. Pebbles skittered away beneath my bare feet. I was running. You had your hands on something, something brightly coloured that the tide had tugged in and left behind. The scratch of stones skidding as I stopped. My hands went to my head. Your entire face gazed up at me. I said, my God. My God.
He was zipped into a lifejacket, orange against a world of grey. A boy, just a boy. His jacketed arms were small poking out of it. His palms were open but his eyes were closed. You unzipped him from the lifejacket, lowered a cheek to his salt-crusted lips, pressed your fingertips to his neck. Ocean foam swirled around us. Flecks caught in your hair. When you looked up you said his heart was still beating.
I ran to the tent. My phone was cold against my cheek and a serious voice told me an ambulance was on its way. I grabbed both sleeping bags, hurried back towards you and the boy. But I stumbled. My face collided with the ground. One sleeping bag came loose and the wind took it up into the air, flung it along the shore like a flag that had lost its mast. I rose to my knees. That’s when I saw them. More shapes; dumped and slumped across the stones. Shapes that were people. A big-shouldered man, shirtless and chest down, one cheek to the pebbles with scars the length of his back. A woman also, lying motionless on one side with seaweed woven through the black of her hair. And beside her another child. A girl, flat on her back and naked but for two different colour runners on her feet. One was blue, the other pink. Both pointed upwards as her glassy eyes gazed a colourless sky.
When the ambulance arrived, we had already carried the boy to the car. You’d taken off his wet clothes and wrapped him in blankets. You were clutching him to your chest and kissing the top of his head. You urged your body heat to travel all the way to his core. You would not let him go.
As the paramedics came running, you turned your back on them, shouted that they needed to get down to the shore. Clumsily they moved away across the pebbles. The wind lifted strands of your hair across your face. The ocean churned against the cliffs. All the birch trees were waving. And your voice came through the space between us in a tone I had never heard before.
You said this was our son.
Our son.
Pádhraic Quinn, the December 2024 selection for New Irish Writing short story
About the author
Pádhraic Quinn lives between Ballynahown and Barcelona. His short fiction has been published by Reflex Press. Short non-fiction can be found in Catalan with Vallesos. He is currently finishing his debut novel.
