Chapter 1 #2
This morning, for the first time in a long while, she knew that Heather was no ghost – that dream had made her feel alive in a way Constance hadn’t felt in years.
And she knew that for certain when she looked up and saw Oisin’s face looking back at her from the photograph on the wall.
She turned slightly away from his broad and happy expression watching her, smiling out from beneath a floppy fringe, holding up a small salmon, frozen in time from a happy day so many summers ago.
She’d taken the photograph herself. Happy days, indeed.
‘What would you make of me now?’ she asked his image.
A little old woman, hair whiter than sea foam, still thick and wavy, but pinned these days as well as she could manage it with slightly arthritic shoulders.
Oisin would probably always know her by her eyes.
He always said she had eyes that held the forest, even though there was little more than a sheltered copse at the centre of the island.
It was too long; over half a century, years since they’d looked into each other’s eyes.
She turned away. It did no good thinking of things that you couldn’t change.
This house was full of memories. When she turned back to take a fresh cup from the dresser, she found herself staring at a photograph of Dotty.
Oh, Dotty . She murmured that so familiar name like a prayer and, once again, she wondered if it was too late to reach out to her childhood friend.
In spite of their divide, some things bonded you beyond friendship, perhaps to eternity.
Even with distance and time washing out what went before, they would always be bound together.
Perhaps, if the world turned long enough, one day none of it would matter.
Wasn’t that a comforting thought to wrap up in on a sleepless night?
But she wasn’t doolally yet. The past was always there.
Sometimes, it took only the aroma of wild woodbine to cast her back to that summer, when they’d swum in waters far beyond their depth and innocence was smothered utterly.
That summer, in 1957, had been the start of everything, its fingers reaching through and clawing out the things that mattered most to Constance and perhaps to Dotty ever since.
All that time.
She and Dotty Wren had been like sisters.
They were closer than sisters, at one point.
They’d grown up together, essentially in the same house, but more than that, they’d saved each other.
And for a while, Constance had truly believed that Dotty had been saved, but then, as the years went on, she could see it.
Dotty had changed, the past was eating her alive and she was drinking just to stay ahead of it.
Well, too often, without proper help, that was the way, wasn’t it?
Was it better or worse to destroy yourself or stand by and watch fate exact the price and more from you for your sins?
An eye for an eye. Because Constance had always believed that had been her own lot.
Constance had watched as her future happiness was snatched from before her eyes, while Dotty set out to destroy the best of life before it could take root.
By their thirties, Constance’s best friend had settled into what she considered to be an unsatisfactory life in Fulham.
Dotty had married a man called Bobby, who was going to be an actor, until he ended up working in a factory.
Their divorce was messy, their marriage over before it even got a proper chance.
Dotty had wrestled with the fact that life had launched slowly, without fanfare, into a dull version of the dreams that had pushed her from the island when she was still a girl.
Constance always knew she drank, maybe a bit too much; she struggled with her health – her mental health.
There had been a breakdown, years earlier, when Heather was just a kiddie.
Dotty insisted it was baby blues, but there was more to it than that.
They both knew it. Some ghosts never rest. Then there were a few years when it seemed that things had settled down, or Constance hoped so, at least. Her own life filled up, she married and, for a while, the horizon dazzled. Until it didn’t.
She smiled, remembering her friend.
It was Dotty who had come to her rescue all those years ago, and found her when everyone else but her mother had given up hope of ever seeing her alive again.
Search parties had trawled every street and laneway of Galway.
It seemed they’d looked everywhere else, but it was Dotty who, from her bedroom window, noticed something was amiss and thought to check the well.
Later, her mother told Constance, it took ages to get her out. Mr Gillespie and some of the other men from along the road had made up a pulley contraption and winched Maggie (by far the slightest of the adults) down to rescue her daughter.
Constance was hardly conscious by the time they got to her. Luckily, she was in need of little more than sustenance, rest and reassurance to be back to herself.
It seemed for ages afterwards all her mother could talk about was covering over that well. Someone needed to do it. My daughter could have died down there . If Maggie Macken said that once, she must have said it a hundred times.
Usually, the morning was Constance’s favourite time of day. She’d realised it late in life, but once she did, she made the most of it by pushing through the back door sometimes even before her breakfast and scattering feed out for the birds who visited the garden earlier each morning.
She closed her eyes for a moment. The sea was calm today.
She could hear it, just the background noise of the waves, washing in and out at the shore far below.
No matter what it robbed from her, she had to admit it would never be any less splendid.
In the distance she thought she saw a shadow lurk beneath the water.
A shark or a whale? The sea was already a very dark grey thanks to pewter clouds blocking out whatever sunlight spring might have had to offer.
She squinted slightly, leaning against the scraggy wall.
All of this fencing had been brilliant white once.
A series of breakers crashed over the shadow, but after each had passed, she knew it was still there.
There had been a flutter on the island for the last week or two, some pilot whales spotted off the southern coast. Constance hadn’t expected to see one.
Usually, the only time anyone on shore saw them was when they ended up beached in one of the tiny coves and, by then, it was too late to refloat them again.
She stood for a while, watching the shadow hover, as if it was idling away the time and waiting for something better to come along – perhaps the 39B bus?
That notion made her smile as she watched the shape in the water.
It became clearer the longer she waited and when eventually it decided to flip its tail and raise its body to surface level for just a second, it was almost a relief.
Definitely a pilot whale, she was convinced of it, and even when it had swum away and was probably miles out to sea, she stood there, reflecting on the vastness of it all and yet, how insignificant her life felt within it.
Eventually, she turned back to the house.
She would make tea. Spend a little time writing in her weather journal and maybe later, if she was lucky, she might catch a glimpse of the huge whale again before the clouds creasing the sky against the top of Pin Hill swung back and unleashed a battering of rain against Ocean’s End.
Constance pushed open the back door to let herself into the kitchen.
Her home – Ocean’s End. Her mother had bought it from a Hollywood film director that everyone talked about having lived here once.
Actually, he’d only spent a week on the island after he’d had the place constructed.
It was at the height of his success on the back of a movie remembered more for its stars than its plot.
Sometimes, Constance actually saw the place for what it was: a tragic relic of grander times.
A vessel of little more than memory and nostalgia.
At night, keeping time with the creaking boards and rattling pipes, she thought she heard the sound of voices, long lost, travelling across the years with snippets of conversations they’d never had a chance to finish.
So many voices: her mother’s, Oisin’s, Dotty’s and, yes, maybe even her own.
It would be kind to describe it as faded, but really crumbling would be closer to the mark.
These days, Constance tried to contain her living to just two rooms, the kitchen and a ramshackle sitting room.
They were both on the ground floor and so the leaks that grew larger each year were at least one storey up.
Her bed was set in an alcove which had once been filled with a grand piano that her mother gifted to the local community centre.
It had been a waste having it here when neither of them played and now her bed fitted snugly in the corner.
In the mornings, if she pulled herself up high against her pillows, she could watch the sea crash against the cliffs of Mallory Bay in the distance.
And always, she thought as she looked at it of her darling husband Oisin and asked herself if he still lay silent and alone beneath the waves.
Even then, when the unthinkable had happened, Constance knew, in some fibres knitted too deeply for her to pick apart, that losing her husband, in that way that she did, was nothing more than just wages for the sins of the past. She sighed deeply now.
The past. She needed to wrap it up and put it back where it belonged but dreaming of Heather Banks had somehow unearthed those things that she’d carefully packed away for a long time now.
The sound of the stairs creaking in the hallway stirred her from her memories. How on earth could steps still fall heavily on stairs when no-one had trodden across them in months?
The truth was, Constance hadn’t been brave enough to climb the stairs since early last summer.
No reason why she shouldn’t, aside from aches and pains she was trying to appease by staying put.
When she’d last gone up there it was to check out a scurrying sound that she feared was rats, or perhaps a badger.
It turned out to be a crow’s nest begun on top of a French armoire in what had once been a guest room.
Thankfully, the crows had only managed to get in through an open window and not the roof, which would have been a total disaster.
She couldn’t begin to imagine the cost fixing the roof would bring to her door, far more than she could afford, that was for sure.
Instead, she shut all the windows on the upper floors even though she knew it probably reeked of stale air; the risk of mould was preferable to sharing her home with a family of cawing crows.
This morning, while she waited for the kettle to boil, the old clock in the hallway rang out the hour.
It seemed to lose a minute with each year that passed.
The postman would have been already, while she was watching that pilot whale.
She was lucky. Jay Larkin called in regularly, if only for a short time.
He collected her pension for her and paid her bills when she asked him to and he did both with an easy manner that never made her feel as if he resented it.
That was island living – everyone looking out for everyone else.
Just one letter sat on the hall table inside the door, a bill by the looks of it.
Jay had long given up leaving her post in the box at the gate to Ocean’s End.
What was the point when the door flew open in the gusting winds that surrounded the house for the winter months?
So instead he pushed in the unlocked front door and left any letters on the hall table.
If he had time, some days he’d sit in the kitchen and have a cup of tea with her, tell her about the football match or whatever big race he was hoping to place a bet on.
Constance always made sure to have something fresh from the oven that he could take home to the kiddies.
You have them spoiled , he’d say before making his way to the next house along the road where two German fishermen had settled a few years ago.
They seemed content to live mostly off the rocky garden.
In the summer months, they made what money they needed working in the village pub and supermarket.
Occasionally, if time had weighed too heavily on Constance’s hands and she’d baked far more than was decent to hand over to Jay, she wrapped up scones or homemade brown bread for her neighbours to enjoy.
Two men on their own, she didn’t expect either of them to be up to much when it came to baking, and better to share than endure a lecture from the visiting district nurse about her sugar levels and a fatty liver they couldn’t really prove she had either way.
Constance looked at the letter, feeling that familiar stab of stress bite into her stomach.
It was definitely a bill. Not today. She couldn’t face it today.
She tucked the letter in behind the vase with faded artificial flowers.
Today, she would think only of happy memories with Dotty, not of people wanting things from her that she didn’t have to give.
And she definitely wasn’t going to think of the last time she and Dotty spoke.
It would be too much to bear to think of that awful time.