Dawn drips in bright rivulets across the black sky. The sun pulls itself over the horizon and lifts the shadows of night like a mother opening the curtains of her child’s bedroom. Choruses of birds strike up tweeting jigs and reels in rustling, conspiring trees. The land rolls, a bunched, wrinkled brown and green tablecloth stretching into the misty morning distance. A grey church breaks the untempered fields with stubborn realness. Time could never eat a thing like that. A city of headstones slant in the strange light of early morning. Weak yellow seeps into the worn letters. An ancient round tower tilts smugly, wedged deep into the ground.
Leaning against its base, a young man smokes. A leather coat swirls around his ankles. Under the coat, he wears an ugly, hole-riddled brown jumper and black cargo pants. His hair is black and limp, dead straight over his ears and brushing his shoulders. His eyes are tiny behind his thick black glasses, watery blue and squinty. He’s tall and thin like an awkward pale crow, and he croaks like one too when he opens his mouth to speak.
“It’s dawn now, thought you said you’d be gone,” he says to thin air, pointy chin jerked over his shoulder, like he’s talking to someone standing alongside him.
Reality distorts beside him, as though a person-shaped mass of water has just appeared in front of the worn grey stone, warping it. It gurgles.
“What do you mean it’s not here!” He drops his cigarette and grinds it into the dirt under his heel. Turning to look at the ghost (because what else could it be but a ghost?), he glares and adjusts his coat irritatedly.
A burbling, wet babble of incomprehensible words. A breeze elongates into a gust of wind and cackles across the dawn-drenched land. It whips his coat into a flapping leather terror, nearly flailing off his shoulders.
“I’ve only these two days to get you back to your grave, Ms Fitzgerald” – an irate gurgle and he corrects himself – “Síle, sorry. Don’t be calling me young Connors then, my name’s Éamonn. I haven’t the time to be going across the country in a mad tear, Síle, just so you can have a look at the sea. Will you just tell me where you’re buried, all this guessing is wasting both of our time.”
An exasperated sounding gurgle and the ghost disappears. Éamonn calls after her.
“No use telling me you were buried at sea! I know full well you never saw the sea when you were alive, you just got a longing for it when you drowned in the Shannon.”
Silence.
He mutters to himself, “Nothing for it, I suppose.” Stalking back to his battered car, his black coat flaps in the wind like misshapen wings. He has to thump the dashboard a bit but the car eventually sputters to life. There’s a bite to the air and he shivers, but rolls his windows down. He gingerly backs off the muddy grass and rejoins the unkempt boreen, phone in hand. The howling wind through his open windows sets the whole car rustling.
“Hi, Au ... Oh. Is Aunty Órla there? Can you put me on to her, please? Thanks. Hi, Aunty! Sorry, I think I’ll be a bit longer with this job. Síle Fitzgerald’s being a bit uncooperative.” The car rocks from side to side and water splashes from nowhere on to the windscreen. “Yeah, that was her. Can I’ve another day? Sound, thanks. I’ll be seeing ye Saturday then, slán.”
The landscape narrows around the road into a series of hills, then folds out into a sprawling expanse of patchwork fields. Godfingers of sunlight break through the weak blanket of light grey clouds and caress the sparkling landscape. The car bumps along a road that winds through silver streams and rivers. A purple and green mountain looms to Éamonn’s right, native trees interspersing swathes of homogeneous spruces that sweep down the distant slopes.
“Listen,” he says reluctantly after a while. “I like the beach too. If I bring you to see the sea, will you tell me where you’re buried? I’ll even buy you a nice bouquet, leave it on your grave, yeah?”
Reality inverts in the passenger seat, before resolving into the damp apparition. The passenger seat is slowly sodden, a dark patch of water on the seat and headrest. A burble, and a fleck of water on Éamonn’s face, and they’re off happily to the beach. It’s a slow journey, with Éamonn determinedly avoiding every motorway and bypass that could shorten the trip.
The dry weather holds, midday burning into a nice, sunny sky as the car chugs across the country. Fluffy white clouds complete the picture.
“‘S fair nice,” Éamonn remarks to Síle’s ghost. A gurgling agreement answers him.
A while later, “We’re here now.”
The beach is deserted. Éamonn drives right on to the shore, deep tire tracks scouring the otherwise flawless white sand. It’s high tide and the waves swirl only a metre in front of the car. He tugs off his wellies and leaves them between the rocks that mark the boundary of beach and field. Marram grass scratches his bare feet until he moves back on to the warm sand.
“Síle?” he calls. Two damp footprints darken the sand in front of him as Síle warps from inside the car. He walks past her, stepping into the shallow waves. Green seaweed swirls around his feet. The sea is translucent as glass. Seashell shards and bright pebbles stretch under the waves as far as Éamonn can see before the rippling sunlight off the water blinds him. “Come on,” he says and turns back to her. The bottom of his coat drags through the water. “It’s lovely and warm.”
Hesitant footprints pad to the edge of the shore. Síle seems more there under the stark sun. Through her silhouette, the landscape is a sloshing, undulating swirl of fields and distant hills. Green blends with blue in a kaleidoscopic distortion.
“Come on,” Éamonn beckons again, gently. Síle’s feet disappear into the water of the sea as she steps forward. Another step, and she’s past Éamonn. Another, and another, and her indistinct waist has disappeared. She stands motionless, torso and head contorting the horizon.
Éamonn splashes around for a bit, picking up mostly intact sea shells and dropping them into his pockets while Síle watches the sea roil and crash into itself. The tide inhales the water further and further, the shore recedes. They move deeper out from the car as the sea takes itself away for a bit.
“Síle, should we be heading soon?” Éamonn ventures after a while. Silence answers him. Surprised, he wheels around to see Síle’s ghostly water form tighten before bursting into a shower of droplets. He sputters, pushing his dripping hair off his glasses. He casts about for Síle but can see no ghost. Where she was standing, a brooch glitters and sways under the gently rolling water. He rolls his sleeve up and plucks it from the sand.
It’s an ornate bit of jewellery, gorgeous and delicately crafted. It’s a cabbage butterfly, the thin metal painted white with black dots where a real butterfly would have them. Éamonn turns it around in his hands for a bit, head bent intently. A seagull wheels close by him, squawking loudly, and he jumps. He pins Síle’s brooch to the front of his brown jumper and walks slowly through water back to his car.
Behind the wheel, he watches the sun slip closer to the horizon, afternoon cooling into evening. He rings his aunt.
“Hi, Aunty – yeah, I’m grand. Listen, I won’t be needing another day. I think Ms Fitzgerald was another case of someone drowning in a river then the body washing out to sea and that being counted as the resting place. Yeah, it would have been nice if the parish had recorded that, rather than leaving all the work to us. Yeah. That’s good news! I’ll be seeing ye tonight, so. Thanks. Bye!”
Éamonn tucks the phone into his coat and stays in his car for a bit, watching the sea dance in the evening light. His passenger seat dried off while they were in the water. He takes the seashells out of his pockets and lines them on the dashboard in front of the passenger seat. A flock of birds too distant for their species to be discerned sweeps in front of the sun, black dots in a cawing swarm. He sticks the wrong key into the ignition, fumbles the right one in and gives it a twist. The car coughs to life, no thumps necessary this time. He wheels back on to the rocky road, engine sputtering like mad.
The car disappears towards the hills, and the beach is silent again. The waves sluice in and out. A gentle whisper. In. Out.
In. Out.
In.
Out.
In.
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