The Boy from the Sea

by H L Macfarlane

  But Cian kept talking, completely oblivious to my shock. “Total nut jobs, clearly. I was too young to understand what happened back then, though, so I just thought Lir was odd for no reason. And then his aunt –”

  “Cian.” Lir's voice was friendly when he interrupted his friend, but there was an unmistakable bite to it that warned him not to continue. I hadn’t even noticed him getting back from the bathroom. “Next round was on you, if I remember correctly.”

  To Cian’s credit he looked wildly uncomfortable at being caught out both telling me about Lir’s parents and having his arm around me once more. He pulled away, head bowed slightly, and left the table to buy the promised round.

  Lir slid in beside me without saying a word. He looked at me through locks of messy, overgrown hair yet remained silent as if waiting for me to talk first. But I didn’t know what to say, so all I did was stare right back at him.

  It was like I was looking at Lir in a new light. Suddenly the innocence in his grey eyes – so at odds with the sharp planes of his face and his punishingly fit body – made perfect sense. He was a child who had lost his parents too young. A child who had witnessed something nobody should have ever had to witness. And that child was still there, hiding beneath the façade of an adult.

  Searching for something. Longing for something.

  As he reached out his hand for mine I realised he was shaking.

  “I don't need to know,” I said in an undertone. “You don't need to talk about it.”

  He squeezed my hand too tight. “Thank you.”

  As I rested my head against his shoulder I couldn’t help but wonder: was I that something? Could I ever fill the hole Lir's parents left him with, which I had always noticed but never fully comprehended until now?

  I wanted to. I sincerely, desperately wanted to, now more than ever before.

  After another hour in the union I let out a yawn, and Lir laughed softly when he ruined it by sticking a finger in my mouth. “Why don’t you head back home?” he suggested.

  “What about you?”

  Lir indicated towards Cian, who was too busy talking to his friend John to notice Lir pointing at him. “I want to have some words with him, then say goodbye to the team properly. I won’t see them again until after summer.”

  I nodded in understanding. I was glad that Lir was going to talk to his former friend. I hoped that he called him out on being inappropriate as well as a complete and utter arsehole.

  “I’ll see you back at mine soon, then?” I asked, leaning forwards to kiss Lir on the cheek. He turned his face so the kiss landed on his lips, instead, and we both giggled.

  “Of course,” he said. “Hopefully I won’t be long. Get home safe.”

  “You, too.”

  As I left the union I struggled to comprehend what I had learned from Cian. Lir’s parents had committed suicide in front of him. It was sick. It was cruel. They really must have been mentally unwell to do something like that. Either that or they didn’t care for their son, though I dismissed the notion immediately.

  Lir had been loved, that much was obvious. But that love had been taken from him by the sea.

  The sea.

  Was that where his obsession with it all began?

  Lir, Age Twenty-Three

  After Grace left the bar Lir was quick to buy another drink for his childhood friend. Cian was only too happy to accept the offer of free alcohol. He was a student, after all. His stipend only went so far. He did not notice that for every vodka or pint or shot he did, Lir drank only water.

  It was in this way that, by the time the bar closed, Cian Byrne was so drunk that he blearily agreed to Lir’s suggestion of breaking into the university gym to use the swimming pool.

  “It’s not really breaking in,” Lir assured him as they reached the side door into the building. “I have all the passwords for the doors, alarms and cameras.”

  “H-how?” Cian hiccoughed.

  Lir flashed him a grin. “I have my ways.”

  When they reached the swimming pool the cavernous hall that accommodated it was lit only by the orange glow of the street lamps filtering through the narrow windows high up on the walls. Lir was quick to strip down to his underwear so Cian followed suit.

  “What we gonna do? Race? We both – hic – know I can’t beat you,” Cian said, knowing his own limitations against his childhood friend even in his wasted state of drunken overconfidence.

  But Lir laughed easily. “You give me too much credit. I’m drunk, too. You could win.”

  “Bull shit. You should be on the Olympic team, you son of a bitch. Why are you wasting your time here?”

  “I like being at university,” Lir replied simply. He rolled both of his shoulders back until his spine popped in an entirely satisfying kind of way. “And I never wanted to swim competitively. I only joined the team here to make my folks happy.”

  Cian frowned. “Your mum and dad?”

  “My aunt and uncle in Campbeltown,” Lir corrected.

  “Ah, so they’re the ones who took you in after –”

  “Do you wanna swim or not?”

  Even drunk, Cian could see he’d crossed a line. He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair, walked over to the edge of the pool and prepared to dive in. When Lir did the same thing he turned his head to stare bleary-eyed at him. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by telling your girlfriend about your parents, Lir. I thought she knew.”

  “It’s fine.”

  It wasn’t.

  “And…” Cian laughed awkwardly. “I’m sorry for hitting on her. She’s hot and I was wasted. Still wasted. No harm no foul, right?”

  Lir gave him a practised smile. “Of course. It’s all good.”

  It really wasn’t.

  A dozen blue tetras, Lir thought as he poised himself above the water, muscles tense and ready to dive right in. When the second hand on the clock looming over the pool hit twelve the two swimmers crashed into the water and began their race.

  Ten threadfin rainbow fish.

  Lir cut through the water well ahead of Cian until he reached the deepest part of the pool. Then he paused, taking a deep breath as he watched Cian reach him.

  Eight blood orange mollies.

  Lir launched himself at his former friend, locking his arm around Cian’s neck before he had a chance to work out what was happening.

  Cian’s bloodshot eyes widened. “What the fuck are you doing?!” he spluttered, scrabbling at Lir’s arm with alcohol-slow fingers.

  Four red swordtails, who tried to jump out of the tank whenever the lid was removed.

  Lir said nothing, using all his energy and focus to tighten his grip on Cian’s neck when he tried to kick him beneath the water.

  “This isn’t – let me go, let me go!”

  Three stripy loaches, who rooted around the plants and gravel like dogs picking up a scent.

  Cian’s movements were slowing and losing their strength. Lir knew he had to hold on just a little longer, so he swallowed back the bile that rose in his throat as he watched Cian’s eyes grow ever more scarlet from broken blood vessels.

  Two dwarf gouramis, that were inseparable from one another.

  Lir pushed Cian’s head beneath the surface of the pool so the water could finish him off. It seemed only fitting. When his childhood friend stopped twitching and grew still Lir let out a slow, staggered breath. Tears stung his eyes: the product of rage, disgust and relief instead of sorrow.

  A mad grin spread across his face as Cian bobbed, lifeless, across the surface of the water.

  “That was for the fish.”

  PART THREE

  Lir, Age Six

  Though Lir was supposed to start primary school the summer after he turned five, Orla grew increasingly concerned that he was not yet mentally ready for it. Lir was sensitive, imaginative and quiet, and she loved him fiercely, but onlookers knew there was something not quite right with the boy.

  Orla did not want to admit that she agreed with them
. But, to be sure, she decided to keep him back from school for a year. She reasoned that a few extra months to help Lir develop before throwing him into such a loud, demanding environment would do him good.

  This led to the third and final moment that defined Lir’s childhood – his sixth birthday.

  Lir had become embroiled in fairy tales and folklore surrounding the sea, which Orla knew she had a heavy hand in enabling. She was the one who told him the stories, and bought him the books, and found all the television shows airing about Greek and Celtic and Norse mythology for him to watch. So when she asked Lir what he wanted to do for his birthday Orla was not surprised when he responded that he wanted to go to the beach.

  “Which beach should we go to?” she asked him. “There’s –”

  “I want to go to the one mum and dad took me to.”

  Orla did not like the sound of that at all. But Lir was looking at her with big, hopeful eyes, and she knew that as he got older he’d have to process the death of his parents for what it was. Perhaps visiting the place where they’d left him would give Orla an opportunity to broach the subject in a more direct manner with Lir.

  She couldn’t let him believe they ‘went home’ forever.

  So, after eating cake for breakfast and packing up towels, buckets and a huge lunch, Orla took Lir to the beach. The weather wasn’t as glorious as it had been on his fourth birthday – dark, ugly clouds intermittently covered the sun, and the wind promised rain in a few hours – but Lir didn’t care.

  He was on a journey. A mission. A quest.

  The weather didn’t matter.

  “Do you think selkies come to this beach?” he asked his aunt as they built a sandcastle. He carved an octopus into the moat with a skill that belied his young age.

  “Maybe,” she said, smiling when Lir pretended to strike the castle with lightning, obliterating it. She hadn’t seen him so content and genuinely happy in months; the excitement in his eyes was infectious. “What do you think?”

  “I think they do. All kinds of magical creatures live along the shore here.”

  “Is that so?”

  Lir nodded seriously. “Someone in town could be a selkie.”

  “Like Miss Campbell in the post office?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s boring and ugly.”

  “Lir!” Orla chastised, though she couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “It’s true, though,” he muttered, staring at his hands. Then he jumped to his feet and tried to pull his aunt up, too. “Let’s go swimming.”

  When Orla scanned the sky she didn’t like the look of the clouds looming overhead; they had the beach largely to themselves because of them. The waves that crashed into the shore were anything but gentle. “I don’t know, Lir…”

  “Please?” Lir begged, hopeful and desperate as only a child could be. “Please, please, please, please?”

  With a sigh his aunt relented. “Only for a little while, okay? And we’re not going in far. Do you understand?”

  But Lir was already gleefully running towards the sea.

  “Slow down, Lir!” Orla called out as she splashed through the waves after him. “I said not so deep!”

  But Lir didn’t stop. His tiny frame travelled out further and further, Orla beginning to panic even as she marvelled at how quick the boy was. He’d been able to swim even before she took him into her home, so she had signed him up for swim club at the local pool in the hope he would make some new friends. He never made any friends, but clearly he’d gotten even better at swimming.

  “Come on, Aunt Orla!” Lir shouted over the noise of the wind and the waves. “Mum and dad are waiting for us.”

  Orla’s blood froze in her veins. “They’re…what? Lir, come back, stop swimming so far out!”

  When she finally reached him they were far from the shore, and Orla could no longer feel the seabed beneath her feet. She grabbed Lir’s arm, pulling him back with all the strength she could muster. But Orla was frail. She always had been. Though Lir was only six he had a boundless amount of energy and a drive in his eyes to reach something Orla knew did not exist.

  “We have to get home,” Lir insisted, spitting out a mouthful of water when a wave tumbled over his head. “Which way is it, Aunt Orla?”

  “We’re going back to the beach,” she scolded, trying to sound firm even though her voice was shaking. “Lir, come on – Lir!”

  Lir slid out of her grasp and dived down, down, down into the water, and Orla screamed. Taking a deep breath she plunged beneath the surface after him, salt stinging her eyes as she searched for her nephew.

  When she finally spotted him he had a large rock in his hands. Orla tried to take it from him and failed, twisting around to try and catch Lir when he swam around her. But she needed air, so she swam back up to gulp some down, instead. And then –

  A dull thump to her head. Then another, and another.

  “We have to go home,” Lir said again, though his voice was hazy and faraway. “Don’t be scared. Mum and dad will get us soon.”

  When Orla sank beneath the waves she did not get back up.

  “Aunt Orla?” Lir wondered aloud, diving after her only to see the current pulling her away faster than he could swim. But he swam after her, anyway, excited that the sea was now helping them on their journey. Soon they would be reunited with his parents. Soon they’d all be together again.

  But no matter how fast or how far Lir swam, home never came. His limbs grew tired, and he lost sight of Orla’s body being carried by the current. So he treaded water as he tried to remember everything his swimming teacher had taught him. Deep breaths. Don’t panic. Lie on your back until your strength returns.

  Lir closed his eyes as he floated along on the sea.

  When he opened them he was in hospital, and his aunt was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I woke up on a beach I didn't recognise, though part of me was aware I was dreaming and not, in fact, awake at all. Perhaps it was more accurate to say I was having a nightmare.

  However, after I woke up I wasn’t sure if ‘nightmare’ was an accurate description of the dream after all. Maybe ‘omen’ was a better term, though I’d never been one to believe in anything superstitious before.

  So maybe it was just a nightmare and not a harbinger of doom. A series of chemical impulses gone awry in my brain.

  That was most likely it. Probably.

  The sand between my toes was dense and damp, littered with stones and small twigs that pricked the soles of my feet. I was wearing one of those floaty, almost translucent white night dresses that the heroines from Louisa’s Gothic and historical romance novels often adorned. The material whipped around my ankles as a surge of wind pulled me forwards. I fought against it.

  Everything was dark – the moon and stars were covered by thick, ominous clouds – so I had to rely on my other senses to navigate my environment. In front of me was the sound of waves cresting and breaking on the shore, not very far away from me at all. Behind me I could hear…nothing at all.

  I turned around, peering through the blackness. Was there really nothing there? Had my dream constructed itself only to exist in front of me and never behind? It was a disconcerting thought. My subconscious wanted me to move forwards, into the sea.

  “I will not do it,” I said, so quietly that the words were lost to the howling wind. So I screamed it, instead. “I will not do it!”

  Silence followed my proclamation. The wind died in an instant, my dress no longer flapping and twisting around me but instead obediently lying flat against my skin. I couldn’t even hear the waves.

  Above me the clouds began to clear and the moon and stars were finally revealed. With them came an almost dazzling quantity of light, silvering the edges of the waves and making the sand glitter like a hundred thousand diamonds. My vision was swimming simply trying to take in all the new visual stimuli, and it hurt my head
, so I closed my eyes for a moment to ground myself.

  That was when I heard the voice. A familiar voice. A voice aching with longing and sorrow.

  Lir’s voice.

  “Lir!” I called, opening my eyes and darting around the beach in bursts of frantic energy, desperate to find him. But he wasn’t anywhere to be seen on the sprawling, lonely beach.

  And his voice was coming from the sea.

  Without another thought I closed the gap between myself and the water, the bite of it not bothering me in the slightest as I stumbled into the waves lapping at the shore. Lir’s voice urged me deeper and then deeper still, until the sea was up to my thighs and the wind sprayed me with froth and salt.

  “Lir!” I cried again, trying my best to focus on the exact direction his voice had come from. But the breeze grew stronger once more, carrying it around me until all I could hear were echoes and memories of his call built on top of each other in an endless loop.

  He wanted me. He needed me. Though I could make out none of the words Lir was saying I was sure with every fibre of my being that it was imperative I reached him. It occurred to me, then, that although Lir always called me his siren, in my dream our roles had been reversed. But no part of me could stop moving through the water in search of him even as I acknowledged what sirens were supposed to do.

  Lir would never kill me. He was not luring me to his side to die. He needed my help. He needed me.

  A gust of wind blew through my hair, causing my scalp to tingle. I was up to my neck in the water and yet that gust was somehow all I felt. The smell of the sea followed the wind, all dark, pungent, salty waves, strong enough to throw me to my doom. It was overpowering. Even as I struggled to reach Lir’s haunting, keening call, that smell and the wind on my scalp was all that consumed me.

  A wave crashed over my head, filling my mouth and throat and lungs with stinging, freezing water. But when I tried to cough it up I simply ingested more water, and the current carried me further and further from Lir. No matter what I did I was never going to reach him. The sea was going to drown me first, dragging me down to its dark and unknowable depths.