Surge

by Frank McGuinness

  ‘About thirty,’ he said, nettled, when she asked – Darina always asked, she wasn’t one bit Irish in that way, the asking way.

  ‘Okay, it will have to do.’ Like an iceberg. She dived into the front seat.

  The taxi man gave her one of those sideways looks people gave her often. His head hardly moved, but his eyes slid to the side of their sockets and looked her up and down, from her long black hair with the tiny red cap on top, to the scrap of yellow silk at her throat, to the black spotted stockings. Probably could not see her shoes, black patent, strappy, more sandals than shoes.

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you you shouldn’t sit in the front seat?’

  They had, but she’d forgotten because she seldom took a taxi in Ireland, because they were such a rip-off. Her room was in the city centre and so was the café. Mark had a room in Trinity, and she met him there. He was at home with his family for Christmas, out in some suburb, where she’d never been; hence the train and all this mess.

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘No offence, just telling you for next time.’ He laughed, and his laugh was a little snort such as some animal might make before it pounces on its dinner. ‘Some lads would take it as a come-on, do you know what that means?’

  She smiled tightly, and a black arrow nipped her somewhere between the chest and the stomach but she said nothing.

  She couldn’t see the taxi meter.

  ‘It’s broken,’ he explained, when she asked. Darina always asked.

  ‘Oh!’

  You would think it would be visible anyway. She asked how he would figure out the fare, if he didn’t have a meter.

  ‘I’ll figure it out, never you fear. It’ll be a fair fare,’ he laughed, and his laugh was hard and impatient.

  Then it was his turn to ask. He asked her where she was from. He asked her how long she’d been over here. He asked her what she worked as. He asked her if there was work in her own country. Then he stopped asking and started preaching. He had nothing against foreigners. They were as entitled to be here as anybody else, the Irish had gone everywhere looking for work so who were they to criticise anybody?

  He was all in black, black shirt and black hoody and black jeans, black as a crow. But he smelled nice. That was strange. Some nice soap or aftershave, flowery. There was another undersmell in the car that she couldn’t identify, not as pleasant, maybe an apple rotting under the seat. But it was warm in here, so lovely and warm, her toes pained, but in the nicest way, as the life rose back into them like sap in the hyacinth Mark had given her at Christmas.

  Then, hey ho, she was running into the sea with her brother. The big high-rise hotels behind, but the blue sea they called the Black Sea in front, the white boats and the white birds, the women in their bikinis, like tropical birds, and out there, far away, the waterskiers, speedy and glamorous and brave as seagulls, with the surf spraying around them. And how curious, because her brother was dead. The black shaft again, piercing. He had been killed in a car crash a few years before she left. She’s only dreaming, but why is her bed so hard and so cold?

  It’s freezing cold, and there’s snow on it. He’s hurting her – that’s not the word, she knows the right word but doesn’t say it even in her head, as if not saying it will make it not be happening. She asks him to stop. Darina always asks. But no sound comes out because his hand is over her mouth and the yellow silk scarf has tightened on her throat. In the snow she sees something red glittering, and that is maybe her red cap. Or maybe it is her red blood. The stars glitter in the dark blue sky like sparkling champagne while he works at her as if she were just some machine.

  She closes her eyes, though she knows this is not a dream now, not a nightmare. She can’t believe it’s happening, but she knows. Somehow you do know, always; even while you are in a dream you know somewhere in your bewildered head that it’s a dream. After you are six or seven you can tell the difference.

  The asphalt is hard and freezing under her thin coat, and her stomach heaves, and then her eyes shut anyway though nobody would ever sleep on a bed as hard and cold as this. Her eyes shut and switch out the light of the stars.

  From the dense silence of the frost, a familiar sound.

  Shush, shoosh, shush, shoosh.

  The shingle scrambles after the sucking surf.

  They learnt the line at school, far away from this place, when her brother was alive and when they all still lived at home. It was about that time that she wrote the poem into her copybook, with the line about the surf in it, when she was fourteen and he was fifteen, just before their father taught him how to drive.

  Sometimes their sea, the blue sea that is called the Black Sea, takes on a pale, milky colour, where it meets the sky. The sky then too is a pale bluey grey. This happens when the sky is cloudy, at start of the day. She loves the sea best at those times. She loves that colour, which she could never find a word for, maybe because there is no word for it, in her language or in any other. It is just a colour that the water has at certain moments, that reminds her of things she can’t name. Pearly, maybe, pearl blue. She was in love with the sea at those moments, more than when it was bright and brash and glamorous, electric in the late morning sunshine when all the tourists of Golden Beach were zipping through it like gods on silver skis.

  No One Knows Us Here

  Claire Simpson

  When the sun dips behind the Botanical Gardens, he unlocks the gardeners’ shed and flicks on a light. His heavy gloves are wet and leave a smear on the light switch. Quickly, he separates the blades of his secateurs, wipes them with an oily rag and picks up a fine sharpening stone. He rasps each blade, then tests their edges against his thumb.

  Wind rattles the loose window. Tomorrow he will look for any hanging branches that are ready to fall, prune the rest of the trees and make a start on chipping damaged branches into mulch. He checks his phone for the weather forecast, hoping it will stay dry.

  ‘John? Did you not hear me knocking?’ His friend Robert walks in and raises two paper coffee cups. ‘Got you some rocket fuel.’ Robert is only thirty-four but has the hollow, desperate face of a Victorian bushranger headed for the gallows.

  ‘Are you finished?’ John says. The younger man smells sour, as if he has worn the same work clothes for a few days.

  ‘I’ve done enough for today.’ Robert hangs up his reflective jacket on a hook, pulls off his muddy boots and throws them into a corner. ‘So, are we going out for a beer?’

  ‘I need to stay. Half of the trees in my section are damaged.’

  Robert chews on a callous on his thumb; his white teeth worry at it until a chunk of skin peels away. ‘Are you getting overtime?’

  ‘There’s a lot to do. I haven’t even had time to cut up that fallen oak.’

  ‘Come on,’ Robert says. ‘That place near mine was decent, wasn’t it? You didn’t seem to hate it too much.’

  John feels a muscle twitch in his back. He pushes out his elbows and stretches his arms above his head, but it does not help. ‘One drink, okay? I want to come back at seven.’

  He puts the secateurs into his toolbox, locks it, then firmly slides the bolt over the shed door.

  On the road, the traffic moves slowly. A motorcycle in the inside lane backfires, making them both jump.

  ‘I tried to ring you this morning to see if you wanted a lift but couldn’t get through,’ John says. ‘You still have your mobile, don’t you? It hasn’t been cut off again?’

  Robert flicks on the radio and jabs at the search button until ‘Thunderstruck’ screeches from the speaker. ‘I already told you the phone company made a mistake about my bill that time.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He notices Robert shivering and turns the heater on full. ‘So you’re all right for money?’

  ‘Fine.’

  John follows the car in front until the turn-off to the coast road. On the seafront, he spots a space close to the pub and pulls into it. In his rear-view mirror, grey waves swell up, fall and slap against the harbour.<
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  ‘Are you sure this place won’t be too busy?’ John says, but Robert is already pushing through the double doors.

  Coming in from the dark street, the pub feels bright. Strip lights reflect off the brushed metal tables and the yellow flashes on Robert’s trainers. Young men, office workers in shirts and undone ties, are shouting at a football match on television.

  ‘We’re not serving food tonight,’ the barman tells John. ‘The chef’s gone home sick.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘There’s just some curly fries.’

  ‘They’ll do.’

  John orders two pints and watches the barman draw back the tap and fill each glass. Bubbles filter through the yellow liquid and pop on its surface.

  ‘You’re not from here are you?’ the barman says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anywhere I’d know?’

  ‘It’s a small place. Not like here,’ John says.

  He takes the pints back to their table. The cold beer spills over the lips of the glasses and drips onto his fingers.

  ‘Hey. Don’t waste it,’ Robert says. ‘I’ll take mine before you drop them both.’

  John allows himself a small mouthful, just enough to swill around his mouth. He sits back in his chair and taps his fingers against each knuckle.

  When the barman brings over the fries, they are undercooked and lukewarm, with a thick crust of salt. John tastes one, then pushes his plate away.

  ‘Do you know, it’s my fifteenth anniversary on Friday,’ he says.

  Robert looks blank.

  ‘At the gardens,’ John says.

  ‘Christ, that long? I must be there fourteen years then.’

  A fruit machine chatters in a corner close to the bar. The office workers cheer when a goalkeeper kicks away a ball spinning towards his net. A clock on the wall ticks past the hour, and John shifts in his seat. He must leave soon.

  ‘Do you remember when I came over and you met me at the airport?’ Robert pulls the shiny film off a bar mat and begins to shred the cardboard layers. ‘I was thinking about my lost bag. I never did get any compo. Do you think it’s too late to chase the airline for it now? They might still have me on the system?’

  ‘Bit late now,’ John says.

  The match finishes, and the men at the other table call out to the barman to bring them another round.

  On television, a woman in a shiny red jacket reads through the news headlines. A missing child, politicians arguing, a crash on the main motorway. John takes another sip of his beer and, when he glances at the screen, sees police leading a man in dirty blue jeans into a marked car. He takes in the man’s lined face and his grey hair, the hard set of his mouth and the hands clasped in handcuffs. The man climbs into the car. John feels that if he closes his eyes he will see the imprint of that face on the inside of his eyelids.

  There was snow on the ground when the war began. It was November, and he was old for a conscript at the age of thirty-two, sitting in an army lorry on the road to a village he had never heard of. They passed tall poplars tipped with snow and fields where workers were harvesting the last crop of winter cabbages. He shifted his gun and imagined that the past few weeks, tanks moving down his street, his call-up and shooting at empty beer bottles in a football stadium had happened to someone else.

  They stopped halfway to the village, and some of the men pissed into bushes by the road, steam rising in the air. Their commander, Marcus, got out of the driver’s cab and chatted to the men about basketball. He could have been a professional, he said, and jumped on the spot, pretending to slam dunk a basket beside John.

  The rifle was cold and blunt in John’s fingers. He looked at Robert and the other men in his unit, all teenagers, all drawing on cigarettes clamped between their thumbs and forefingers.

  Too soon, the lorry moved over the brow of a hill towards a cluster of red-roofed houses. Through the plastic window slit he saw a woman throw down her washing basket and run inside a house. Marcus called the order, and John climbed out with the others, the taste of metal in his mouth.

  The men dragged people out of houses and made them kneel on the road. Marcus fired the first shot into the papery skin above the neck of a man’s blue shirt. Soon the snow was pockmarked with bullets. More men fell. Blood spread and thickened. An old woman collapsed. Robert fired at a teenage boy at the other end of the line. John fired at a man in the middle, then another.

  A woman, older than him, began shouting, dragging at his sleeve. John pulled her by the elbow, past where soldiers were piling up dead bodies. A barn door was lying open. He pushed her into the dark and drew a bolt across the door. Straw prickled his knees. He clutched her clumsily, both hands digging into her shoulders. She did not make a sound, not even when the smell of burning bodies filtered into the barn.

  When he opened the door, the houses were alight. He stood for a moment, his hand pressed against the wall, when the woman’s mobile phone began to ring. The first few bars of a pop song played until he pulled it from under the woman’s stomach and smashed his heel against it.

  Robert is staring at the television set. His thin lips are the same colour as his face. ‘Is that Marcus?’ he says.

  On the screen, a man’s fuzzy outline peers from the police car as it pulls away from a clapboard house. Just in shot is a black dog, jumping and barking behind a wire fence. The car moves down the street, past trees growing too close to overhead power lines.

  ‘I know that road,’ Robert says. ‘It’s only ten minutes away.’

  The screen flicks back to the woman in the red jacket.

  ‘Why was he here?’ John says. His palms sweat and slip against his pint glass. His stomach contracts, and he swallows. ‘Did you know he was living here?’

  ‘What?’ Robert says.

  ‘Marcus. Did you ever see him?’

  John drains the rest of his pint. The newsreader speaks about threats to the Prime Minister’s Immigration Bill, monkeys that escaped from the city zoo and the football match that has just ended.

  In the toilet, John runs cold water over his wrists, splashes it on his neck and swallows some of it.

  His face is hot, and he wipes it with a paper towel, not wanting to look at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He feels as if he is recovering from an illness. He imagines police arriving at his house, battering the door down. Or, worse, a squad car turning up at the gardens, officers dragging him handcuffed through the main gates.

  When he sits down at his seat again, Robert is still staring at the screen.

  ‘What if they find us through immigration?’ Robert says. His right leg jiggles against the underside of the table and almost knocks over an empty glass. ‘Why didn’t we change our names?’

  ‘Stop,’ John says. He hunches forward and covers his cold fries with a napkin. He thinks of coming to this strange country, flying over the sea and a desert that stretched for miles. Why did he choose here? Because there was nowhere further from home.

  Robert pulls his chair closer. In the heat of the bar, his sour smell is stronger. ‘Do you ever think about those people?’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘In that village.’

  ‘I can’t have any feelings about it,’ John says. ‘It was years ago.’ He wipes his finger around the top of his glass.

  ‘Marcus made me fire,’ Robert says.

  John looks up at the television again. He thinks of the few bars of that song on the woman’s phone, how he smashed it before the tune could finish.

  ‘You were conscripted. So was I,’ John says.

  ‘We could have said no.’

  The other men get up to leave, their laptop bags knocking into each other.

  ‘It will be okay,’ John says. ‘Do you want another pint?’

  ‘I’m going to go,’ Robert says and puts a note on the table.

  John crumples the note into his friend’s hand. ‘I will ring you tomorrow. Nothing is going to happen. No one knows us here.’


  ‘Marcus was here,’ Robert says.

  John sits in the empty bar, and one beer slides into another. By eight o’clock he is too far gone to drive back to the gardens, so he drinks, and the backs of his eyeballs slowly dry out. Blood spins in his skull. He thinks of how long it has been since he was last drunk, not for years, not since he left home. The fruit machine powers down, and the lights in the bar go out, one by one, until only a bare bulb over the till is shining.

  Outside, wind whips the trees on the seafront and the sky is a dark block. He sits on a wet bench and looks at the sea slipping away from the smooth, grey beach. The longer he sits, the easier it will be for him to fall asleep, so he stares down the road at the trams and the headlights of cars and tries not to blink. A gust of wind tugs at his T-shirt, and he lets his head fall back until it touches the back of the bench, slightly spongy from the winter rains and sea spray kicking over the harbour wall. He thinks of the woman and the meaty smell of burning bodies. His eyes close, and he hears the tram pull smoothly away, like a bolt sliding over a door.

  Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness

  Darran McCann

  Terry watched it happen as if in slow motion, but he was too slow to react. By the time he processed what was taking place before his eyes, it had already happened. His daughter Elle dug her little fists into her bowl and threw them up into the air, sending cereal and spilled milk raining in all directions.

  ‘Damnation!’ Terry cried. The gloop of lukewarm milk and oats was splattered against his clean white shirt and the pink-and-green stripy tie that Elle had bought him for Father’s Day. (Actually his wife Rebecca had bought it for him and signed Elle’s name to it. Elle was thirty months old.) Rebecca saw the mess Elle was making and tossed a wet cloth over to Terry.