Page 14 of The Women at Ocean's End

A bellow of thunder, somewhere in the distance, made her heart jump. Dotty was looking out her bedroom window in Galway as her father and a few of the men who lived along the road worked in the sleeting rain to once more unfasten the cover of the well in Mr Morrison’s garden.

‘That rain is going to wash us away if we can’t drain it out,’ her father had complained earlier. True enough, their garden was currently under about a foot of water, which if she’d seen it in the newspaper she might have thought,oh, goody, our own swimming pool, but the reality was, it was mucky and murky and smelled of drains and dirt. So, her father had the brilliant idea that perhaps if they opened up the old well again, the water might drain away and run through, emptying all of their gardens of the dirty water that had pooled stagnantly until now.

The well had been sealed across after Constance fell into it at the start of summer. Mrs Macken had insisted on it, not that Constance was ever likely to go near it again. She wouldn’t even venture through the hedges into old Mr Morrison’s garden to pick blackcurrants with Dotty, even though they were practically bursting out of their skins.

Dotty had a clear view from her bedroom window, and she now rushed upstairs to watch the men work the opening free. Constance had told her that when she fell into the well, she felt she wasn’t alone. Dotty’s mother said it was probably a grave to more unfortunate cats and rats than you could shake a stick at. Dotty pressed her face to the window, half expecting something grisly to float up to the top, finally freed from its watery grave.

Dotty watched, fascinated, as the men worked together, their hands buried in the brown water, their arms and backs twisting this way and that, until finally, her dad stood up, raised what looked like a huge crowbar above his head in victory, and Dotty shivered, even though she couldn’t say quite why.

The men’s laughter and backslapping were enough to tell her he had managed to prise it open. And Dotty looked away, suddenly not wanting to think about what might float to the top of that well or how easy it would be to end up at the bottom of it without a trace of you to be found.

It was a week later when the garden had just about dried out after the heavy flooding. If it hadn’t been for the smell, Dotty thought it might be fun to pretend they were looking at a rainforest, to play make-believe that they were deep in the Amazon, somewhere far more exotic than St Patrick’s Terrace in Galway. It might have been too, but Constance had gone to some island with Maggie for a week’s holiday. You could see she was still pale; if Dotty had been hailed as a hero for finding her, poor Constance was still being treated as if she was convalescent from some awful catastrophe. In any event, the garden reeked of mud and dirty water, but Dotty had spent days cooped up inside and her mother had sent her out to get fresh air, which was not much fun on her own.

‘Hey?’ Lickey Gillespie called out to her from across the fence. For a moment, she thought he was in Constance’s garden, but when she peered through the hedges there was no sign of him.‘Up here,’ he called to her and when she looked up she saw him, sitting on the low roof of the shed in Mr Morrison’s garden.

‘What on earth are you doing up there?’ she asked, but she couldn’t keep the giggle from her voice, because as much and all as Lickey terrorised Constance, he could be funny. Certainly, life was never dull around him.

‘Come over and see…’ he called and he popped a fistful of blackcurrants into his mouth before walking to the end of the roof and sliding down the side then dropping to the ground. Boredom more than curiosity edged Dotty through the hedges. As she crossed Constance’s empty garden she spotted the kitten, who eyed her lazily from an old pillow wedged beneath a makeshift cat cubby. She couldn’t say he’d grown on her; she still blamed him for Constance almost dying in that bloody well and it was perfectly obvious he’d fallen on his feet as a result.

‘So?’ she said, eyeing Lickey with the sort of disdain she knew was the only way to handle him. ‘I’m not climbing up on that shed if you think I am.’ Her mother would kill her for one thing and, for another, she wasn’t about to let Lickey know she was afraid to stand on anything higher than a kitchen chair.

‘No, here, it’s this, look what I found.’ He went into the shed and she followed him. She’d never been in here before, but if she’d thought about it, there was hardly a surprise to see last year’s onions hanging from the rafters and all of Mr Morrison’s old gardening tools lined up against the walls. Lickey spun round now to face her, his eyes shining in the way they did when he managed to play a trick on someone. ‘Here.’ He pushed a bottle towards her. ‘It’s poitín.’

‘It’s not.’ Although Dotty would hardly know if it was or not, because she’d never actually seen the stuff, far less had a bottle of it in her hand. She’d heard about it from her mother’s people, who seemed to drink it by the gallon. It was one of the reasons her mother never really went to visit her family any more.

‘It bloody is. Smell it.’ He wrinkled his nose as if to show her how to get the best whiff of it. She put her nose over the bottle. It smelled sweet, not unpleasant. Uiscebeatha – fire water, that’s what it was called – it seemed pretty harmless to Dotty.

‘Go on, take a sip.’ Lickey was watching her now, as if testing her in some way. They’d always had a funny relationship, a sort of mild mutual respect. He never picked on her and she never told anyone that Mrs Gillespie had once asked her mother for advice in taking stains out of her best sheets because Lickey wet his bed.

She wanted to taste the poitín. She really did, had always wondered about it, because her mother only mentioned it quiet tones. It was another of those things in her house that was mildly swept beneath the carpet. Her mother’s family. Backward. Country people. ‘Stocious drunks,’ her father said once, but then he’d reached out and patted her mother’s hand and said in a soft tone, ‘no matter, better out of it, better here with me.’

‘Are you scared?’ Lickey’s face had turned almost puce, as if he was expecting something extraordinary to happen.

‘Course I’m not scared,’ Dotty said and she upended the bottle, swallowing a huge slurp before she realised why they called it fire water. ‘Bloody hell, Lickey,’ she said between splutters. In that first moment, she thought she might die, the heat of it racing down through her was shocking. The sheer sweetness of it, pleasant and unexpected. Then a wave of abatement that washed from the pores at the top of her head right down to the very tip of each of her toenails with delicious ripples unfettering the boredom of earlier and the niggling worries that she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Every fibre of her slackened, as if someone had come along and unknotted her. It felt sublime, as if she had submitted to a greater power, and it was heavenly. She sipped again, slower this time, breathing deeply the woody sweet aroma of it. She closed her eyes. Bliss.

‘Here, come on, you can’t have it all, there’s only a small drop in the bottle.’ Lickey pulled the bottle from her.

‘I wasn’t… I was just…’ she said but a little part of her didn’t want to see it go. It felt as if he’d wrenched something necessary from her. For a while, she sat in the little shed, enjoying the feeling of the alcohol in her system, watching as Lickey poked about the shelves, prodding things and picking them up and examining them. It didn’t take long to finish the tiny drop of poitín between them, but at the end of it, Dotty knew one thing. She couldn’t wait to be grown-up, to drink and smoke and have grown-up adventures. Wouldn’t life be wonderful if she could always feel this bliss.

10

Heather

Heather couldn’t remember the last time she’d finished a book within twelve hours of beginning it, but that was what happened with the copy of Maggie Macken’s battered old paperback. It wasn’t exactly high literature, but it was well written with an unexpected intensity that carried Heather along so she was invested in the characters to the final page. It was the setting too, painted with such a loving hand, the descriptions of the coastal village, drawn, Heather guessed, from the island where Maggie, Constance and indeed Heather’s own mother had lived at the time it was written. Heather could remember quite vividly the beautiful art deco house overlooking the sea. When she closed her eyes, she was almost transported back to its startling form against the cliffs. She remembered clearly walking along the beach and looking up at it with her hand in Constance’s hand; feeling happy – that way only children can, when there was no question about how long it could last. By the time she finished the book, she wasn’t sure which she wanted more, to travel to the island immediately or to track down every book Maggie Macken had ever written.

She settled on the latter and by the following morning when she should have been getting ready for breakfast, she was still rubbing the tiredness from her eyes after an online search that ended up with nothing to show for it. Maggie Macken books were rarer than daisies in the desert, it seemed. This morning,since she didn’t have a place that felt like a real home of her own or a job or a husband to answer to, she decided that she’d take a trip around the city’s second-hand bookshops and see if she could track down any more copies.

Heather set off for the markets first but, as she had half expected, they turned up nothing. None of the booksellers had heard of Maggie Macken, much less carried copies of her out-of-print novels. It was as she was walking about Charing Cross that she noticed a small pop-up bookshop at the front of a coffee shop. It was little more than a table and a few racks and, if she was honest, the aroma of good coffee drew her in as much as the lure of the books. She was dead on her feet and suddenly realised it was late afternoon and she hadn’t eaten anything since a slice of toast for breakfast.

‘Ah, Maggie Macken, is it?’ the woman on the bookstand said. ‘I haven’t thought of her in years, I read all her books, used to count down the days until the next one was due to come out. I worked in Foyles, back then, different days, you know, she was a real author –old-school, real class.’

‘You met her?’

‘Of course I met her, didn’t I just say? Different times, she would call into the shop and her publicist would be flapping about the place. One time I remember, it was a really hot day, the sort where you think we should all be having siestas, like they do on the continent.’ She pulled the fleecy collar on her coat closer, because warm temperatures were quite a bit away for a few more months yet. ‘She sent the publicity girl out to get us all ice-creams. The kid didn’t know what Maggie meant and so she arrived in with just two ice-creams, one for each of them.’ She cackled, a deep rattling sound that probably spoke of too many cigarettes over the years. ‘Maggie Macken wasn’t having that and she went out into the street and ordered them herself and there, in the middle of the shop, all of us shop girls werelicking our ninety-nines and happy as clams. I loved her after that, honestly, she could do no wrong as far as I was concerned.’

‘Do you ever come across her books now?’

‘Nah. They’re probably all out of print at this stage, but I’ve often wondered why they’ve never been reissued. I mean, you see the likes of Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie and even old Conan Doyle gets more than his fair square yards in all the big shops now.’

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