took the shape of a concrete bunker as they approached. On both sides steel shutters glinted in the dark from the closed toilets. There was a narrow exposed entrance at the side of the shelter and a large open space at the front overlooking the sea. Most of the bench against the wall inside had been hacked away, but occasionally a strip of wood still ran between the concrete supports. When Hano struck a match he saw the walls covered in graffiti before the wind choked the flame. Sand and litter had been blown in across the floor and from one corner the smell of urine lingered. Yet when he squatted below the open window at the front there was shelter from the breeze. Katie was standing beside him, leaning on the concrete sill to gaze out at the waves.
‘How do you know this place?’ he asked.
‘What does it matter?’ She replied and huddled down beside him in silence. But after a moment he heard her voice.
‘Seems like a lifetime,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know, so fucking long ago. Often lads would steal a car at night, arse around the streets in it, looking for a chase. But sometimes, you know, they’d just drive out into the country. You’d be with them in the back, killing time, seeing what the stroke was. I loved it and hated it…brought back things I didn’t want. We were so spaced you wouldn’t think I’d remember any of it. But I know every laneway here like the veins on my wrist. They’re the only shagging things that do seem real.’
Katie laughed and leaned against him.
‘Last day I went to that kip of a school some teacher starts looking over my shoulder. We’d taken tablets the night before and things seemed to be shooting across the room. My eyes kept jerking round to follow them and I couldn’t hear a word the old biddy was saying. She screamed at me and when I looked up she was like some bleeding ghost you know, all the features indistinct, out of focus, like. But they were all that way by then…figures from another world, days rolling together in a blur, nothing real about it.
‘But I remember every second driving out here—it was vivid, Hano, you known what I mean. One time we almost drove as far as Leitrim. I was shouting directions from the back, like a lost animal finding its way home. I got frightened when we got close, screaming for them to turn the car round. They thought I was fucking cracked. “Faster,” I kept shouting as we sped back. “Faster! Faster!” Just like that little girl running through the night again, only this time I was racing away from her.’
She was silent and, just when he thought she wasn’t going to continue, her voice came out of the darkness again.
‘No matter where we went we always wound up here on the coast. I don’t know why. Walking down the pier in Rush in the dark or outside the closed-down amusements in Skerries. The cove at Loughshinny or out along the arches of the railway bridge. Out here was my favourite, around Portrane and Donabate. Watching dawn break, you know, all sea-birds and grey light over the water.’
Her voice softened as though the litany of names were soothing her. The edge of hysteria was gone that had always been present in the flat, except for the nights when she just sat sullenly for hours wrapped up in her duffle coat.
‘What happened when you reached the coast?’ he asked, taking his jacket off and spreading it over both their shoulders. They leaned close together as she searched in her jeans for cigarettes, lit two and handed him one. He watched the red tip burning upwards towards her lips as she inhaled.
‘Fuck all,’ she said. ‘That’s the funny bit. All the screaming and slagging stopped when we hit the shoreline, like we were at the end of a journey. When the wheels touched the sand there’d be silence, all of us just staring out at the sea. It belonged to nobody, no little bollox in a peaked cap could come along at midnight and turn it off. We’d get out then and throw sand, skim stones, that sort of shite. Git and Eileen could swim so we’d smoke a few numbers waiting for them. And you know, blokes who were half-animal in Dublin would talk to you about things they’d normally be ashamed of, mots they had fancied or nightmares or the future stretching away before them. They were too thick to know how bleeding short it was.’
Like a cancer gnawing inside, the stab of jealousy shocked him and he hated the words even as he spoke.
‘Have you spent a night with someone here before?’
‘What if I did?’
‘Who was he?’
Her shoulders hunched defensively and she became that huddled figure in the flat again. Her voice was hard, almost contemptuous.
‘For fuck sake Hano, what does it matter to you? You’re not a child any more. Aren’t we screwed up enough without raising old ghosts? The past is as dead as Shay, you can’t own it or change it. So don’t explain yourself to me, Hano. I don’t want to know what the fuck you were at in that room back there. And don’t ask me questions, right. You’re still alive, I’m still alive. That’s all that bleeding matters for now.’
She was right, but after what she had seen he still needed to prove himself. But the gesture of placing his arm around her shoulder which would have been so natural a moment before now felt awkward and contrived and her shoulders stiffened beneath his touch. He moved his lips down and while he encountered no resistance, there was no life in her mouth. He knew he should stop, yet like an overwound spring, in his exhaustion and self-disgust, seemed unable to prevent himself—though he knew she would twist away, hurt and withdrawn, with her back turned to him. He laid his head against the wall, his eyes closed, and sighed. The only sound in the hut was of the waves carried in on the damp air. Then, to his surprise, he felt fingers in the dark searching for his hand again.
‘What are you trying to prove Hano?’ she whispered. ‘That you’re better than them, or the same or different? You don’t need to. Listen, this place is full of ghosts for me. Git and Mono, they’re both doing time now. A vicious attack—no reason for it, no excuse. They shared a needle with some junkie inside. They’re locked in the Aids unit, wasting away, waiting to die. Beano’s up in St Brendan’s after burning every brain cell out. Six months ago the world looked up to them in terror. Now the kids on their street wouldn’t want to recognize them. Burned out so fast, Hano, like violent, brutal stars, you know what I mean. Never heard them laugh those last days, just sitting there, no brains, no words, slumped on the canal. “Hey Beano,” I said last time I saw him, “remember the night we crashed the car up in Howth?” He looked through me like that drunk back along the road. They’re gone now Hano, like dada walking across fields to work, Tomas with no light in his cabin. This place was theirs Hano, let them rest here. We’ll find our own maybe, somewhere.’
Then she leaned back until her head lay snugly against his chest and, rolling on to her side, drew her legs up against his and was still. Hano could feel the frustration draining from his body and knew that he was tumbling downwards into a warm drowsiness where sleep would come, as unstoppable as the waves below, crushing on to the wet strand, fainter, and fainter, and faint…
Hano dreamt of whiteness. Winter time. He was walking from a grey estate of houses down an embankment towards a new road. It had been snowing in the night. Now a single set of footprints curved downwards towards the noise of water. A new steel bridge bypassed the old hunch-backed stone one which was cut off by a row of tar barrels. A circle of Gypsy caravans squatted on the waste ground around it.
Hano knew the place now, the Silver Spoon, the bathing place Shay had often spoken of. The summer evenings when mothers from the West had sat on the grass, watching children in short trousers splashing in the water, their hands
