Tom and his eighteen-year-old twin sisters sat before the television in the dark. Tom hoped that they would go to bed soon so that he could sneak out of the house and go back down to the beach. The thought of the sound of the waves in the darkness frightened him but he had no choice but to go back. The twins had made themselves beetroot sandwiches and were talking about the sizes of breasts, bellies and backsides of people that they knew. They had switched on a film with frequent scenes of lovemaking and he had called them fucking eejits for looking at that crap. They replied "shut it asshole!" simultaneously. His eyes avoided the images of the writhing, damp bodies and his legs jerked as he wanted to leave the room on hearing the eerily familiar sounds like cries of agony coming from the television set.
But he knew if he went to his bedroom that he would fall asleep and not wake until morning. He had been sleeping very heavily recently, as if he died at night, except that he had been having long and vivid dreams. At school he used to envy classmates who spoke of dreams because up until the age of thirteen, he was convinced that there was something wrong with him because he did not have any.
He remembered one dream in particular that a classmate had told him. In it, his classmate's mother had driven to the North Pole in her mini and the car had been surrounded by polar bears and every time he opened the car door, the polar bears grew taller and taller until they were the size of skyscrapers. Last night Tom had dreamt that his teeth were loose and barely hanging from his gums. He had heard on television before that dreams about teeth had something to do with sex. He remembered also that in it, he had gone for a swim in the sea, which was cold and choppy and the colour of the grey mottled clouds above. He was followed by large, black, sluggish eels with faces like monkfish. He had awoken exhausted the next morning, although he had slept for over ten hours. As the film continued, the sounds of sex and the twins chattering gradually became faint echoes and the day began to play back in Tom's head.
The street was littered with last night's beer cans, chip punnets and splashes of vomit. It looked drab and hungover as if the buildings would tremble at the sound of traffic. Electric pinging sounds came from the amusement arcade beside the church. From outside in the sun, the coloured lights of the machines were barely visible in the dark, smoky interior. On the other side of the church, there was a take-away restaurant where a young, sleepy looking woman supported her head, her two hands cupping her chin and her elbows propped on the windowsill, beside a ninety-nine machine. She turned around lazily as Tom and his mother, Margaret, came through the entrance. The twins, who wore shorts over swimming togs, waited outside. They tried to look over their shoulders to see who was getting a better tan on her well-padded back. Tom, who was thick-lipped and freckled with blue eyes shadowed by a frown, came out the door holding two ice-cream cones after being handed them by his mother. She had not looked at him and had ordered him to bring them out to his sisters. They took them from him silently. Margaret walked out, slowly licking around the sides of the ice-cream which shone white in the sun and wagged the other cone in Tom's direction at the end of an outstretched arm. He took it and said thanks. He tucked the small picnic hamper under his arm, and picked up his mother's bag after she had looked at him, and pointed her finger at it. They began to walk.
On the way to the promenade, they passed a small and shabby shooting gallery, which lay in from the street, in which there were moving-target camels. Music with a lonely twang of the desert floated from it. Tom remembered how he had read that if a record was played in the desert and no one was there to hear it, no music would come from it. An elderly nun shot with a rifle at the camels while her veiled companion foraged enthusiastically through a small purse. Tom noticed at strange, soft smile on his mother's face. She turned her head to her children, and her eyes grew smaller and her mouth tighter. She began to walk with a sniff and a jiggle and they followed. Her body was shapely and compact and she took small unfaltering steps.
Natasha complained of there being stones in her shoes and insisted that they stop to sit on one of the benches along the promenade for a moment while she emptied them. As she banged her fashionable trainers against the ground and then squinted inside them, Margaret and Eleanor's sun-pinkened faces looked out across the bay. The hazy mountains across it were like the corpse of a giant who had collapsed upon the landscape and was losing colour and substance until it would fade away into the air. Tom sat on the corner of the bench making semicircles in the sand, which had been blown up from the beach with his scuffed shoes.
Large-bellied walking babies went clumsily about and stumbled in the sand from which broken pieces of glass jutted in places. Older children splashed each other and jumped out of the way of jellyfish, while some swam out further than they were supposed to and were pulled this way and that as they tried to swim in a straight line. Most stayed away from the rocks covered in silky, crunchy seaweed remembering stories their mothers had told them of boys and girls who had slipped on them and their heads had cracked open like coconuts. Between the sea and the bench where Margaret and her children sat, a dog pushed himself into another vigorously.
"It's probably done the same thing already twenty times today, the dirty thing," Margaret said with a curling lip. "Just like men, can't get enough of it. They'd stick it in a hole in the wall so they would." The twins looked over at her admiringly and giggled. Their mother's face broke into a smug smile. Tom seemed to ignore what his mother had been saying and stared at a screeching seagull hovering above them. He thought for just a moment that the bird called his name. A man on the beach ran up to the dogs and threw escaping handfuls of sand at them. They came apart and scampered off down the beach, kicking sand behind them as they went.
There were lots of holidaymakers on the promenade today. Margaret and her daughters walked in a straight line through the crowds while Tom went in a crooked line falling behind them. They passed the diving tower on the way to the stretch of beach that lay beyond the end of the promenade. Margaret had told her children about the diving tower when they were on holidays here the summer before. She told them that this is where the queers came out at night. The twins sat open-mouthed looking up at their mother's knowing face while Tom looked away. She said that men were such dirty things that they would stick it into each other if they had nowhere else to stick it.
"Brigid Farrell is a dyke," Tom said loudly.
"Any wonder," his mother snapped.
A narrow sandy path broke off just at the end of the promenade. The beach here was more secluded. Couples lay around the strand, stroking each other's skin which would flake and rot from the stinging dry rays. They listened to each other's ghostly voices bounce and echo off the sand. Margaret chose a spot for them to sit, near a large rock and behind three topless women who lay in a row, eyes closed with expressions of deep concentration. His mother placed her towel in a dent in the sand and sat on top of it. She took off her blouse and sat with her back straight, her bikini beginning to slip down her breasts, surveying around her. Eleanor and Natasha undressed, somewhat careless of whether their towels concealed their young women's bodies and then ran into the cold, salty water, flapping their arms like giddy babies.
Tom placed his mother's bag and the picnic hamper beside her and then sat himself down on the sand like an old man might have done. He was dressed in shorts and a black tee shirt. His mother had given out to him before they had left telling him to go and change from his jeans and the same black tee-shirt because he would start to stink soon he wore them so often. Her nose curled as if bombarded by some foul smell when she said stink. His legs looked pale and brittle.
He lay down on the sand and listened to it. Sometimes he thought you could hear the sound of the inside of the earth, like men roaring, in the distance. He wondered why it was called Mother Earth when it had the voice of a man. He preferred to think of the earth as having a steel structure underneath its surface, and instead of faraway roars he would hear the sound of deep metallic creaks. He sat up then. His mother looked at her two half-naked daughters splashing and screaming in the water with the same smug smile. Tom glanced quickly at the three topless women and scowled as he looked back. His mother shoved a bottle of sun-cream at him. He rubbed it on her back and shoulders quickly with the tips of his fingers and then sat away from her silently.
Natasha and Eleanor ran up to them shivering and saying to their mother how freezing the water was, but that it was okay once you got in. Natasha hopped from one foot to the other, drops of cold water flying from her hair, before spotting her towel and diving on top of it. Eleanor looked down at what lay scattered on the ground looking for hers. She stood with her hands on her waist, her belly pushed forwards and her podgy thighs squashed together. Her head blocked out the sun from where Tom was sitting and her face looked darkened and blurred. He thought of a large animal shot suddenly and collapsing on top of him.
"Move over!" he said crankily pushing her leg with the side of his arm.
"Fuck off!" she gasped, "you're just mad because I'm in the way and you can't get a good look at those girls' tits!" Tom noticed that one of the women who had turned to lie on her stomach raised her head and looked at them with a cross and bemused look.
"Shut up you fat bitch!" Tom muttered digging handfuls of sand and squeezing them tightly.
"Mammy!" Eleanor demanded. Margaret leaned over to her son, near enough so that he could feel her breath upon his face.
"Just like your fucking father! If you ever lay a finger on either of your sisters, I'll kick you out on your arse and you can go and live with him. We'll see how you like that. Do you hear me? Do you?" she hissed.
"Yes".
"Ha!" jeered Eleanor, sticking up her middle finger at him. Tom looked out at the sea, his neck twitching, careful to avoid looking the three women and unable to move though he felt like getting up and walking down the beach.
After Margaret and her daughters sunbathed for an hour or so, while Tom sat silently beside them, Margaret opened a picnic hamper. Eleanor and Natasha bent down and rummaged for two egg sandwiches each, which Margaret's boyfriend Brendan had made for them earlier on that morning. He had arranged to play golf with an old friend from school and would be back in the house he had rented for them later on.
"Well, do you want a sandwich or not?" Margaret asked Tom. He leaned over and took one quickly from the basket not looking to see if it were ham or egg. The bread stuck to his retainer as he chewed. He took the retainer from his mouth and slipped it sneakily into an old handkerchief he always had in his pocket. He liked the dirty smell of it, reminding him of when he was a child and he used to carry a scruffy teddy bear's head around with him. An eye and ear had been missing from the head. When he had told his mother that the orthodontist had told him that he would have to get braces, she had replied, "Well you'll be asking your father for that so you will". She said that she had not got the money and that he would probably go out and get legless some night like Ann McGuire's son who had fallen and smashed half of his teeth three weeks after getting braces removed.
"Go like this," Tom's father had said baring his teeth, after Tom had told him about what the dentist had said. Tom copied him. His father looked quickly at Tom's teeth and then stared ahead. It was night and they were parked outside a take-away restaurant and as the car in front of them revved up, his father's face was lit red and Tom's heart missed two beats as he thought of a snarling dog, his father breathing deeply and his teeth still bared.
Tom turned to look as he heard a group of people coming down the beach. Some of them shuffled slowly through the sand. Some held each other's hands. One woman whose age it was hard to tell looked at them. Her tongue hung slackly from her mouth. Eleanor and Natasha's faces seemed to grow larger and they grinned saying, "Tan me bottom! Tan me bottom!" speaking with their tongues pushing out the lower part of their faces. Margaret told them to shush, trying not to laugh at them. She had told her children a story before of how when she had been sitting in Brendan's car one evening, waiting for him to come out of the centre for the handicapped where he worked, a young retarded man had approached the car. He came to the window with a lollipop stick, then a twig and then with a large branch, saying "Tan me bottom!" each time. Margaret had told her children that she had to roll up the window she had been laughing so much. She finished her story and her laughter with, "Oh they're all the same!" and told them not to mention it to Brendan. Tom had listened nervously to his mother's laughter, which could have been the sound of someone sobbing loudly. Before this, the only time that Tom had seen tears come from his mother's eyes was when he came into her bedroom one day as a child. She lay across the bed, skirt crumpled high up around her legs. Her back shook. He walked around to the other side of the bed and touched her hot dribbly face with his hand with dimples for knuckles and she told him to leave. He never did understand what exactly she found so funny about that story.
Tom noticed a girl in the group who wore a white tracksuit with a dolphin crest above her heart. At first he thought she must have been a helper like Brendan, but then he saw her overbite like a slightly open drawer with a tongue stuffed inside. His eyes stayed on her as he noticed her red, or more orange, hair that brushed against the milky skin of her long neck. She had short legs and a tiny, tiny waist. She looked out at the sea and he wondered what she was thinking about. He wondered if because her brain was different whether she had memories. Years from today, would she remember a hot day on the beach or would it be like it never happened. He thought of her watching the present around her like an observing baby left sitting on the floor. He felt insubstantial suddenly, like he was in a memory being remembered by a future self and like this girl was also a white ghostly memory.
"Are you coming or not?!" Tom's mother asked him suddenly looking down at him. He had not noticed them getting up.
Brendan had opened the door of the house before they had rung the doorbell. He was a thin-armed, pale man with a taut neck and twitching cheeks. When Tom had met him first, Brendan had been wearing beige and reminded Tom of people on television when they are halfway through becoming invisible. He kissed Margaret's cheek as she brushed past him on the way in.
"Hi kids," he said to the others.
"Hi," said the twins not looking at him.
"You didn't win?" Margaret asked him, cocking an eyebrow.
"Win?" he asked with a puzzled smile.
"The golf."
"Oh," he laughed, "no, sure I hadn't played it in years."
She turned and went down the hall to the bedroom she shared with Brendan and then came back up again.
"Turn down that damn thing," she shouted suddenly at Tom who was lying on the couch opposite the television. "I don't know why you have to look at it anyway. You look at it morning, noon and night when you're at home."
"Did you remember to turn on the hot water?" she turned to Brendan and asked him flatly.
"I did." She left the kitchen again to take a shower. Brendan lifted the lids from two saucepans on the cooker and peered inside anxiously. He put the lids back on with a sigh and turned to the kitchen window and looked outside it. Tom continued to look at a wildlife program, which was the only thing on apart from the news. He knew Brendan was going to say something.
"So," Brendan turned to him and stuck his hands in the pockets of his trousers. "How was the beach?"
"Fine," Tom replied not looking up from the television and thinking "beachy".
"Did you go in for a swim?"
"No."
"What's for dinner?" Natasha asked loudly, walking into the kitchen. She lifted the lids of the saucepans and squinted though the steam.
"Spaghetti bolognese," Brendan said in an unconvincing Italian accent.
"Aw-ah! I'm sick of spaghetti bolognese. Anyway don't you know you're not supposed to eat beef?"
"Arra, that's a load of rubbish," Brendan snapped in a warbling voice, looking out the window as if speaking to someone standing in the back garden. "Sure if we didn't eat all we were supposed not to eat, we'd die of the hunger. What the hell do they expect us to do? Starve and wear frigging masks in the street?"
Natasha laughed, amused at Brendan's outburst and left the kitchen to go back to the bedroom she shared with Eleanor to listen to music and chat.
"Fuck!" Tom shouted suddenly.
"What?" Brendan turned towards him quickly.
"Nothing. I just forgot something."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Tom had left his retainer on the beach. His mouth felt empty and draughty now without it. He ran his tongue frantically along his teeth and they felt crooked and loose. He pictured it lying on the seabed with jellyfish hovering above it. They had been sitting fairly high up on the beach however and it would probably still be there. He would sneak down later on that night. He wondered how much it had cost his father. He thought of the way his father hesitated over the last note of money he gave him when Tom went out with him, though it was the same amount every time. The twins never went out with him. They said they hated him. Tom used to pretend to them that he just went out with his father for the money, but the truth was that he could not break the feeble tie between himself and his father. Although sometimes as they ate meals from plates on tablemats with a picture of the restaurant in which they ate, when his father sat silently with a look of cynical amusement upon his face, Tom swore to himself that he would not go out with him again. Tom would gulp, barely chewing his greasy food and looking at his father's hands which were small but strong, with square nails and dark, flat hairs on the edges.
Tom had turned seventeen at the start of the summer. His face had grown an expression of suspicion by that time and he looked around him shiftily as if doubting that what he saw was real. When he had been a boy, time was a big clock which told you when it was time to go home from school, have your dinner, go to bed and get up for school again the next day. Later, in catechism class, before he made his Holy Communion and got his first watch, Tom was told that heaven went on forever and ever and he thought this is what time is, forever and ever. Thinking about forever and ever was like a game of holding your breath under water because you always had to give up. This summer, years later, however, he began to think about time wanting to have to stop, but without being able.
He began to wonder about the gaps in between what he remembered. His first memory was of his mother pushing his arms hurriedly into a coat taken from a high-up rail in a huge shop, and his second was of being in baby infants and wetting his pants. But the time between these memories only existed because of photographs and between the photographs, days had passed and things had happened which were lost forever somewhere inside his head. He began to wonder if muzzy visions of the familiar soles of the shoes of a woman who lay fallen across a bed and then knots in the wood of a slammed door, along with snatches of sounds of a key turning, a man groaning down and up and a muffled "no" were shreds of a threadbare tapestry that was a half-lost memory or a dream.
He thought of his father's hands now and of how they may have touched his mother roughly. His eyes stung with sudden tears. He walked quickly out the back door and into the garden. Brendan asked him if he was all right from the back door step and he shouted "yes". The world shimmered around him and his breath was quick and rasping. His mother would think he was filthy and disgusting if he ever asked her about it and she would make him go and live with his father. He thought something then that he wished he had not. Maybe he had been formed inside his mother after she had been pushed onto a bed with shoes on her feet behind a woodknotted door. Tom whimpered and looked around him like a lost child. He knew that this could never be forgotten or unthought. This must be the awful point to where his thoughts had been leading. Maybe the noises and images inside his head were a memory of his own conception. And then he was calm suddenly knowing that he could think no worse and that he could be no worse. His mind felt like the house where they all used to live when his mother, with a bitter grimace, would open all of the windows to get rid of the smell of drink and the lace curtains would bounce and billow softly on the breeze.
After the film, a priest expressed a thought for the day to which Tom did not listen. The twins went to bed. Tom sneaked quietly out the back door. It was cooler now than it had been during the day. The moon looked trillions of miles away through the dark sky. The seagulls rested somewhere in the darkness and it was quiet except for the distant cheers and shouts coming from the street at the end of the promenade. The houses he passed were dark and silent as if deserted, with spiders crawling freely across huge webs. He felt like the Omega Man from the film, the only man left alive on earth after nuclear fallout, except for the mutant casualties brainwashed by their cult leader, and except also for one woman who he meets towards the end of the film. If he were the Omega Man, the only woman left alive on earth would probably curl her nose like his mother had done as she said the word stink to him, and that would be the end of the human race unless she were to be an Eve taken by force. The road met with the promenade and shortly afterwards he passed the diving tower. At night you could see how large amounts of white paint had fallen off and it looked ragged and shabby. He imagined the moonlit backsides of lusty-eyed prowlers at the base of the tower.
He reached the end of the promenade and took the turn-off down to the beach. He took his shoes off as if trying to sneak noiselessly across the sand, his back blushing at the tower behind him. He could not see far ahead. He peered into the darkness waiting for the rock they had been sitting beside to appear. He drew in two breaths at once as he noticed a figure before him. Whoever it was, was taking off white clothes and wore blue swimming togs underneath. It was the girl with the red hair. She had not noticed him. He stopped and stared at her. He breathed the salty air in deeply, feeling suddenly that he was the fleshy future self that he had imagined earlier on that day when he had felt himself to be a memory and she was here again, real now too and not ghostly. The sand was soft and cool between his toes and the summer breeze tickled between the grainy hairs on his arms. After his awful revelation earlier on that day, his mind was crisper and sharper. He thought then that time today made sense and was like a wave running gradually up the shore until it stopped in a crescendo. He saw that the water had swept around her feet before retreating.
"Hello," he said. She turned her head and looked at him unsurprised.
"I won a gold medal in the competition today," she said. He did not reply.
"Can you swim across the bay?" He shook his head, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
"They wouldn't let me do it today. I'm going to do it now so I am."
It took Tom a moment to realise her intention.
"You can't swim across the bay. It's dangerous and you'll drown."
"I can if I want to," she answered defiantly.
"You'll be pulled out of the other side of the bay dead."
She looked puzzled at the word dead as if she had just remembered an old aunt whom she had been told away to live with God who lived far, far away up in the sky. She began to walk into the water, not seeming to notice its coldness. She was up to her knees and continued to wade in further.
"Look, come out. You'll fucking drown!" Tom bellowed. She looked back at him and tried to push her legs faster through the water, her arms swinging around her. Tom walked into the water. He caught up with her and grabbed one of her arms as it swung back. She fell under the water while he pulled her back in and she gasped and heaved when her head came up. Tom found himself still holding onto her after they had come out of the sea. He looked down along her white neck, which sloped gently into her shoulders. She looked back at him confused, her head drawing back and blinking her eyes quickly. His temples throbbed. He reached his hands behind her and pushed her against him. He plunged his tongue into her startled mouth. His hand rubbed between her legs suddenly. She started to squeal. She tried to push herself away but Tom pushed her back against him. She pinched and clawed him hard and frantically then through his wet clothes and he stumbled away. She ran down the beach away from him. Tom stood arms out slightly as if trying to balance not knowing if the roaring in his ears was the sound of the waves.
He did not find the retainer when he looked for it that night. He discovered the next day, however, when he rang the orthodontist's office from a phone box that it would cost only forty pounds to replace. He would make that in a weekend collecting glasses in the bar at home. He decided immediately that he could not replace it with money given to him by his father. After the holiday, he looked for a sign of knowing and disgust in his mother's face. He waited impatiently with a choking, sandy throat for that night to become a foggy memory, so that he might eventually wonder if it had really happened at all.
(c) Anna Boner 2001