by Maeve McCormack
Contoured into the paint blistered window frame, Paula sits in the unused boatshed. She inhales the scent of damp salt through the rattling window, as a high tide slides along the banked-up shingle. Pockets of soft foam are created as it swishes around the pebbles. The daily sounds and smell of home. Four years of college in Belfast failed to smother that comforting regularity of the sea. It is as much a part of her as breathing. City streetlights and late-night revelers could be blocked out by closing her eyes and sensing the ripple of the tide within her, its flow lulling her to sleep.
The boat shed has been a place of peace since before Paula’s Man died when she was eight. There used to be a hammock she’d climb into, with a cushion that smelled of Mam. She’d look at the wedding photograph in the warped frame, hanging between window and door, nailed into a gap on the stone wall. Mam grinning up at Daddy, a tall man in a police uniform, transfixed by his bride.
Eyes pulling away from the tide, her focus drifts from the water along the beach, up the derelict slipway, to the curved shadowy profile of the old dry dock. Lumpy grass fronds are lodged in the long-neglected gutters, their willowy tops overflowing. On moonlit nights, they remind her of a row of lighthouses flashing intermittently.
‘Paula! Paula! Where are ya?’
Shifting her cramped legs in the window frame, Paula unfurls herself out of it. Uncle Tom appears at the door. He stands in his dark wool funeral suit, the loose jacked filled out by a polyester V-neck jumper over his shirt and tie.
‘Get a move on girl. Time to pay our respects.’
Standing beside Mrs. Murphy’s coffin, Paula looks into the softly wrinkled face, the black lace mantilla floating on the dead woman’s silver hair. A pair of Ebony rosary beads are twisted around her short fingers. Paula straightens the crucifix slipping off the right hand and looks around to see did anyone notice her touching the corpse. She feels eight again, standing with her chin resting on the edge of Mam’s coffin, looking at a photo of her Dad, tucked in beside the body.
A shuffle beside her reminds Paula that Uncle Tom’s not too steady on his feet anymore. He blesses himself and she walks him to a chair. He says he doesn’t need her help, although leaning heavily on her extended arm. Paula likes this excuse for some physical contact between them. It’s as though he moved her on from his life when she went to college in Belfast. His dismissal reminds her of Mam going off in the flashing ambulance before she died. The men wheeling the ambulance may as well have been undertakers, the way Uncle Tom refused eight-year-old Paula’s pleas to follow in his car.
Settling Uncle Tom into an overstuffed armchair, a little too low for his stiff legs, she appraises the queue of mourners, nodding back to those that make eye contact. Chatter ebbs and flows about Mrs. Murphy. So far, it’s all safe talk. The dead woman’s work with Tidy Towns, her daily mass going, the love of swimming. Funerals are an excuse to relive old stories. Every now and then, something comes to the surface, like a battered piece of rubbish temporarily washed up on the tide, then disappears on the turn. Inevitably talk will turn to the old days, which will lead to guests trying to avoid catching her eye.
Growing up an only child, living with a bachelor Uncle made her unusual. She and Uncle Tom would get casseroles and cakes on the doorstep, and she got invited to all the school pals’ parties. Manners, and Uncle Tom, made her attend. It was as if Ballyboy people wanted to make her and Uncle Tom belong to them, get rid of any traces of her mother’s past.
Paula grew up feeling insecure around whether her school pals really liked her. If she wasn’t Paula of the dead mother, how many invitations would she actually get?
She leaves Uncle Tom loosening his brown tie. Passing through the mourner lined hall to the kitchen, she hears mention of Mrs. Murphy’s long widowhood.
‘He was awful young to die. Up there.’
‘Active duty.’
Someone clears their throat loudly. Eyes glistening, chin angled up, Paula continues to the kitchen where she is greeted by the smell of freshly cut egg sandwiches and the rattle of teaspoons. The Tidy Towns gang are out in force, indoors today. They formed during the time Ballyboy struggled to counteract the strangled street left behind when visitors stopped coming. These locals dress the old, bleached bones of their village with flowers and empty seats, disguising the ad hoc caravan park and now lonely holiday homes overlooking the deserted harbor. It gives them something to do in this place where they feel forgotten. Returning through the hall she notices talk has now turned to GAA. Paula makes no eye contact. She puts Uncle Tom’s tea on a table between them, with a slice of freshly made cream and jam sponge. She runs her thumb along the newspaper cutting in the pocket of her dark green hoodie. She has taken it from the boatshed.
‘I used to swim below with poor Mrs. Murphy and your mother,’ says Uncle Tom. A tone of pride in his voice at outliving another contemporary. Stretching to reach his cake, the breath wheezes out of him. She tries to picture them jumping off the pier. Funny to think of them dipping together there decades earlier. Mam and Uncle Tom told her tales of sunny summers, high dives and, occasionally, a dolphin. Paula can’t remember them telling specific stories, just their joint recollections, true, mis-remembered, or longed for, meshing into a disjointed reminiscence. ‘In a pair of togs, everyone was the same,’ Mam tells her. This bit Paula remembers clearly.
They finish their tea and Paula walks Uncle Tom past the standing mourners lining the hallway.
‘Men.’
‘Tom.’
Uncle Tom calls to her as she comes out of the kitchen with cocoa for him and hot chocolate for her.
‘Thought you were going to miss the news.’
‘I see my fire took okay.’
He’s sitting in the wooden legged armchair watching the nine o’clock news. His wrinkled worn hands, rest on the arms. The good black shoes have been unlaced and a big toe peeps out of one sock.
Air-kissing the top of his salt and pepper head that is greasy and flat from too much Brylcreem, she sits across from him on the other armchair, kicking off her runners. Neither of them speaks until the end of the weather forecast.
‘Uncle Tom, I was thinking I might put a hammock up again in the boatshed.’
His hand lifts from the wrist, swiping her question away into the air. She leans across the small sitting room and holds it steady. He shifts in the chair. Looks at her. She waits, hearing the weekly current affairs programme coming on the TV. He adjusts himself again in the armchair. His yellowing eyes blink quickly as if he’s seen bad news and his eyes move around the room, unable to settle. He is looking carefully at every object, seemingly hoping to find something new to talk about. He lets go of Paula’s hand.
‘You remember the hammock?’
Paula remembers the night he tore it down. She is upstairs making another ‘get well soon’ card for Mam. Thundering knocks on the front door. Coming down, tugging at Uncle
Tom’s frayed shirt. Three big men in the doorway, a whiff of cigarette smoke off them and of turf smoke off Uncle Tom.
‘Those men. That night when Mam was sick, and you sent me back upstairs? Who were they?’
‘Special Branch.’
Her Uncle sighs, looking into his empty mug as if hoping to find an answer in the dregs.
‘The lads saw the light and jumped to conclusions. Their knocking on the door that night put the terrors on me.’
‘That’s why you took the hammock away? Who was using it?’
‘What did you think? It was your Mam’s. But I wasn’t goin’ to be telling Special Branch anything.’
They stare through the TV. The panel is discussing hospital closures.
‘What was he like? My Dad.’
‘He was a good man. Then he went and got himself killed.’
‘Before that. When they came here. Did you go swimming with them?’
Any information Paula has,came from Mam. And a Belfast Telegraph newspaper cutting, tucked in behind the wedding photograph, now in her pocket. It reports on her Dad’s death in an IRA bomb, but doesn’t mention a widow. If it wasn’t for their wedding photos, the marriage could just be imagined by her, her mother, Uncle Tom.
‘Him and your Mam stopped coming to Ballyboy, after people discovered his line of work, felt it was safest for everyone.’
‘Did you not visit them?’
‘Sure what would I be doin’ crossin’ that border, making trouble for your Mam.’
He drums his finger on the armrest.
Before we know it, she’s back here. Heartbroken.’
‘With me on the way.’
Uncle Tom seems to have forgotten Paula is in the room and keeps talking.
‘She’d go out to the boat shed at funny hours to lie and listen to the sea. Herself and Mrs. Murphy used to share cigarettes there.’
He drums his fingers again.
‘Them two women married very different men.’
‘Didn’t work out too well for either of them.’
His fingers stop. He looks at her directly.
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Or just not talk at all. Like never say that the IRA killed my father. You know I know Uncle Tom. Everyone does. But nobody says it.’
Uncle Tom gets up out of his chair quick enough that it knocks over his cocoa cup.
‘Whist now and don’t be stirrin’ what doesn’t need to be stirred.’
He stomps out as best he can in his socks.
Paula pulls on her runners and heads outside. Light from the new moon illuminates the beach as she walks past the boat shed. It confused Paula as a child how the beach was there one night and covered in water the next. She disliked the unpredictability of not knowing what the landscape would look like when she woke up. So, she watched. Every day. By the time she started school she knew if she was looking at an ebb or a flow. She could always rely on it.
Behind her, she hears the crunch of Uncle Tom’s boots.
‘What did you follow me down here for?’ she grumbles when he reaches her. ‘Afraid we’d kill each other in the house?’
‘Maybe.’ He sighs.
‘Ballyboy was left with two young widows. We kept quiet about the dead husbands. Best thing for everyone.’
‘Really?’
Paula shakes her head as they sit on the beach, looking back at the haphazard profile of the village against the sky. Instinctively, they know the tide is fading. A shining new moon emerges from the clouds. Washing onto a clear beach, the sea absorbs the brightness.
‘Uncle Tom. My graduation. Up in Belfast. Will you come?
‘I might.’
Maeve McCormack has had work published in The Honest Ulsterman, Scrimshaw Journal, The Wexford Bohemian, The Valiant Scribe and The Sligo Weekender. In 2023, aged 56, she completed a Bachelor (Hons) in English Writing and Literature, at Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. She writes mostly about contemporary Ireland and lives in Sligo, along the Wild Atlantic coast line.
