The Summerhouse

It stirred in me as soon as we rounded the final bend in the narrow road from Cahirciveen, as the sea and sky swung into view, vast and deep dark blue in the gathering evening. An old feeling like a tingling half-heard tune far off played through me, and I shivered. Past the shop, the church, Rosie’s pub. Nothing had changed. She woke in the passenger seat beside me, yawned and stretched.

“Are we there?”

“We’re there.” A hundred yards past the pub, I turned into the driveway, over the clattering cattlegrid and up the crunching gravel path to the house. Around the house was nothing: fields — wet, streamcrossed, stonecrossed fields that dropped quickly away down towards the sea. Behind the house, the sea and sky, a deeper and deeper blue. I stood for a moment, just leaning on the car, and staring off into the horizon, where they ran together, indistinguishable. She took my arm.

“Come on. Let’s get the stuff into the house before it gets dark.”

I blinked and went to help her as she pulled our bags out of the back, hauled them to the back door.

Dan had given me the key the night before in Cork, when we met them all in Nancy Spain’s for one. They were all there, all the old crowd, the ones who hadn’t left. The pub had been almost empty, the regular clientele of students all off making and spending fortunes in America for the summer — Boston, Nantucket, Cape Cod, San Francisco — or backpacking around Europe without a penny. The less fortunate ones would have gone home for the four month holidays, working in local pubs or restaurants, owned by uncles and old friends. I’d spent summers all these ways.

Dan and Mary couldn’t stay long, had to go home to the kids. I can’t believe friends of mine now need to employ babysitters. The rest of us ended up settling down for the night, as you do. No such thing as going for one drink. Before he left, Dan handed me the keys.

“There should be still a few bits and pieces in the fridge down there. Just help yourself to stuff. The milk’ll be gone off, though. I think we forgot to throw it out before we left.” Mary murmured agreement, and took his arm. They smiled their goodbyes, and I watched them as they left. I turned to her, beside me in the wooden bench seat in that dim alcove, and she took my hand and held it a long time.

We finished unpacking as the night sealed the windows blank, and our pale doubles sat reflected in an unreal other kitchen outside, drinking cups of darkness held in pale hands.

“Hey. What’s up with you? You’ve hardly said a word since we got here.”

I looked away from staring at the window and blinked sleepily.

“I suppose I’m just tired. The drive was a bit rough after last night.” I yawned, and wondered why I felt I needed to do it, to reinforce my statement.

“Aren’t you glad to be back here? After all those times?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course I am. I’ll appreciate it better in the morning. C’mon and we’ll go down to Rosie’s for a pint before last call.” I stood and she took the hand I held out to her.

Nearly ten years now, since I had been down to Ballinskelligs. I’d meant to go. Every time I came home, I’d plan to head down for a weekend, get a load of us together and head to the summerhouse, a weekend of drinking, talking, walking on the beach, playing cards, getting caught in the rain, drying off by a turf fire. But I never made it. There was always something else. The visits home were always so short too: whirlwinds of faces and places, trying to crowd years of catching up into single nights, then each night the same, trying not to miss anyone out, trying to make sure we found out who was home for Christmas, trying to find out who wouldn’t be coming home again. The old crowd are all spread out now. Jack is in Kuala Lumpur. Not sure what he does. Sarah sent me an email from Edinburgh at the beginning of August. They’re putting a play on in the festival. Cooper still sends her postcards, sometimes months between them, thousands of miles between their points of origin. She decided to take a year off to travel when we all finished college, and she just never really stopped. The last one was from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, where she was working in a restaurant that has shark and chips on the menu. We get Christmas cards from all over Europe and the States, but still going back to Cork is going home. There are still a fair few of them there, the ones who never left, or, like Martin, who left and came back. He’s running a cafe just near the house some of us shared in second year, under the grey-gold night spires of St. Finbarr’s Cathedral, in the winding lanes off Barrack Street. The old house is gone now though, knocked down just after we moved out.

We walked hand in hand down the short dark road between the house and the cluster of buildings huddled up in the lee of the church, with the shop and the pub. Warm  light and laughter spilled out the windows of Rosie Sigerson’s pub, and beery, smoky air hit the cold night and mingled with it as we pulled open the door. I wished I could walk in and be greeted with a welcoming roar by the locals, a chair pulled up for me, a pint pulled as I walked in the door, waiting black and creamy at the table as I sat fielding greetings from every quarter. But we slipped in quiet, into the hum and clatter of eleven o’clock on a Friday night in early September. Just another two tourists, young Americans lusting after roots and belonging, after rain and mist, after treading softly by the crooked, illegible graves of years. No one gave us a second glance, and I left her at a table, recently relinquished by a group of teenagers, no doubt off to catch the bus to the Harp nightclub in Cahirciveen. The table was left covered in torn up beermats, spills, crushed cigarette packets. I worked my way up to the bar and carried back our drinks: Guinness for me, Heineken for her.

Even when we were fifteen, they’d serve us in here, Rosie casting a sceptical eye over our sweaty-palmed skinny selves as we ordered our first ever pints. She’s not here anymore. Died about three years ago, Dan tells me. We’d sit outside of a warm summer night, on the wall outside the shop. Laughter alternated with wide-eyed, deep-felt talk, blue-clouds of never quite inhaled cigarette smoke hovered above us. In those dark leafy lanes I kissed a girl for the first time. She drew away and with the moonlight falling across her beautiful face, she pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. I can’t remember if we spoke, or think what we would have said if we did.

At the table in Rosie’s we sat sipping our pints, and I said nothing. She looked around her, taking in the scene. A small trad session was starting up in the corner by the fire, a fiddle tuning up, a bodhrán’s goatskin rubbed to warm it. There would be singing tonight, and this not for the tourists, but only because they could never keep the music inside them too long. I catch myself doing that now, romanticising the country, the people. Being away so long does that to you. When we first moved to New York, I even bought a Cranberries album, so much does distance make all things of home dearer to the heart. Every time I come back it’s the same though. Nowhere else is real, only here. You stand on the headland between sea and sky and there’s nothing but Atlantic between you and America. And there’s only you and the wind, and grey earth, grey sky reflected in the grey sea, and you might scream your name into the hugeness of it, but you’d get no answer only plaintive cries of wind-borne sea birds, flying to far off homes. 

“Why are you so quiet?”

“Bad case of nostalgia, I’m afraid. Sorry.” I smiled weakly through the ghostpain of memory in my chest, tightening my throat. She shrugged and finished her drink.

“Let’s go back to the house. You don’t want to stay for another one, do you?” “No. I’m shattered. Let’s go.” We picked our jackets up and pulled them on in the doorway. I put my arm around her shoulders and we held close as we walked through the chill night air back down the road to the house.

Dan’s family would spend the whole summer down here most years, and the house would be full from June to September, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and assorted hangers-on like me. A three-and-a-half bedroom bungalow can hold about twenty four people without too much of a stretch if  none of you are too particular about how many share a room, or how hard floors are. The room I shared one year with Dan, his brother, a cousin, and a couple of the brother’s friends had bunk beds and two mattresses on the floor, and salt-hard socks hanging over the radiators, mounds of clothes spilling out of half unpacked bags, a lingering smell of young boys’ feet. 

We used to go down to Maine’s pub, the one further down from the village, right near the beach, and hold the pool-table until a couple of twenty year olds would come and beat Dan, our designated champion. Then, claiming we had “had enough of pool anyway”, we’d go round to where they sold ice-creams and walk with our spoils down onto the miles long curve of the beach, maybe strip to our swimming togs and race down into the waves, gasping with the cold and hurling taunts at anyone not man enough to join us. Sometimes, in a good summer, the water would be fine for swimming the whole time, but often it was too chilly to stay in for long. We’d run out and swaddle ourselves in towels for a while, then start up a soccer match with a load of the local kids and the other holiday cottage people, to dry off and warm up. 

“Are you still awake?” 

I felt her turn towards me in the darkness, felt rather than saw her lean up on her elbow. 

“Yeah.”

“What are you thinking about?” 

“How things used to be. The things we used to get up to down here.” She sighed, and stroked my hair. We fell asleep with our arms around each other. 

Thirteen years old, I sat at the kitchen table biting my lip, head in hands. Dan’s Aunt Nora was wandering round the kitchen, half-doing I don’t know what. 

“Did you not feel in the mood for playing then?” I didn’t look up at her. 

“No. Not really.”

“Just right too. You do your own thing. They can all go out and run after a ball up and down the field til they’re puffed out. You have a night in.” Outside, the sunset blazed over the ocean. They would all be down beyond the village in the field by the school, the lads throwing themselves around in a twenty-a-side soccer match, the girls sitting over on the wall and leaning on the gate, each group studiously ignoring the other for the moment. Later they would mingle and stand in subtle groups and gangs as the sky paled off to nothing above. Maybe they would go to the beach and light a bonfire, or sit up in the sand-dunes under the stars. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go and try to look comfortable standing on peripheries, straining to catch their quick sharp words, laughing uneasily along. Couldn’t go and run puffing and panting after a ball that was always further from me, scarlet-cheeked and sweating, while tall, athletic boys would breeze past me unruffled, time after time, the ball bobbing in front of them on an invisible thread. Nora gave me a cup of coffee, which only we two in the house ever drank, and sat down beside me. She asked about my family. It was the first time I’d been away from them for that long. Night fell outside unnoticed, and Nora left me with a book she’d finished, to read by the lamp in the living room while she and her husband Tommy went off to Rosie’s with the other adults. 

When I woke, I was alone in the bed. I went to the kitchen, bright morning light streaming through the windows. There was coffee made, but she wasn’t there. I took a cup outside, and sat in one of the deckchairs on the back patio. Two cups later, she came round the side of the house, hair wind blown, eyes bright with sea and sky. 

“It’s beautiful down on the beach.”

“What time did you get up?” She sat down beside me as I spoke. 

“About seven. It was such a gorgeous day already I thought I shouldn’t waste it.”

“Good plan.” I leaned and kissed her lightly, and she stood then, and went back inside. I went to the low back wall and looked off to the right, where you could just about see the Skellig islands juttting up out of the sea and mist of distance. There’s a photograph of about ten of us, friends, cousins, local kids, lined up against this wall. I’m on one end, in pale jeans despite the sunshine, my eyes half-closed against the glare, as tall at fifteen as I am now, but skinnier, my face smooth, untouched by beard, narrow-chested under my black t-shirt. Then there was that time when I ran out here, jumped over the wall and sat down behind it, hiding from everything, choking sobs and holding myself, arms wrapped around me to hold myself together. I sat there until I could see clearly again, until the shaking died down. I smoked a cigarette and wiped my red-raw eyes, and went back inside to face them. That time. Sat until my eyes looked only tired, went back inside.

She and I sat outside in the morning sunshine for a while, lazy unnecessary words passing between us at times. We decided to take a drive up the coast road to Kil Reilig, on the far headland, on the edge of the world. Stopped at the shop in the village for milk, bread, and newspapers. I recognised Kathleen, behind the counter. She worked there even back then. I suppose she’s a couple of years older than me. Has she been working in this shop for the last fifteen years? She smiled at me, and for a moment I thought she remembered me, but as she handed over my change, she asked how we were enjoying our holiday. I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t think we were Irish. Has my accent changed that much? Do I look so out of place? I went out to the car where she was waiting for me, leaning on the door. We headed off through the village and up the cliff road. 

I’ve worked it out; it was almost exactly nine years since the last time. It was the last weekend we would all be together, all my friends from school. Everyone was heading off  to various different universities the next week, or going into the long hard slog of sixth year, and Dan had proposed one last trip down to the summerhouse for us, one last blast. Though it was only early September, the chill winds of autumn turned breath visible some late nights. Summer was over. For most of us school was over. We might never be together like this again. Everything was over. I arrived with Jenny and Crowley late in the afternoon. We had got a lift from one of Jenny’s many brothers as far as Kilorglin, and then hitched lifts in the pouring rain all the way to Cahirciveen, and beyond. We were picked up by a couple of mad hippies in a purple van at one stage; she was Australian, he South African, and, we later decided, stoned off his head. Their rickety van (“We found it in a junkyard! Isn’t it the greatest?”) was flung around the snaking curves of the cliff road, while we in the back were thrown side to side, clinging on to tenuously anchored fittings, trying to stop the cupboards letting fly their contents all over us. On our left was a sheer cliff-face, on our right a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the sea. Breath-taking, especially when taking the bends at 70 miles an hour and barely avoiding the equally reckless drivers coming the other way. They brought us all the way to the village though, dropped us right outside Rosie’s. Crowley was all on for going straight in there for a drink “to calm my nerves”, but Jenny and I prevailed upon him to come up to the house first. A sniff of alcohol would have had me puking my ring, I have no doubt. Jenny still looked green from the hippy-van rollercoaster ride as well.

We parked the rented car up in Kil Reilig, and got out to wander round the little group of tiny thatched cottages. This was once a ghost village, deserted after the Great Famine. There was no choice then; either leave or die. They piled into the coffin ships, cheap passage to America. Many more of them died in the disease and scurvy ridden holds of these floating tombs. The village was left back to the land, and some of the cottages became indistinguishable from the ground around them, the thatches growing thick and wild with weeds, the walls crumbling, melting into the hillsides. Far below us was the sea, and the islands. The sun was hot on my head, and she walked ahead of me a slow and easy stride. I stopped and watched her, her long tanned legs, her sun-bleached hair tied up loose behind her head. I shut my eyes. 

We used to do this walk at least once each summer, whole crowds of us, walking all the way up to Kil Reilig and beyond. It’s about six miles from the village, all uphill. An all day project. Up on the headland, we’d wander among the tumbledown cottages, through the crazyleaning wind and rain worn gravestones in the cemetary that gives  the place its name. Kil Reilig: the church of the graveyard. I don’t know where the church is. Maybe demolished. This long walk we’d make, and it was worth it for the views on a clear day of the sea and sky and back along the whole peninsula, of the sea-bird haunted spires of An Sceilig Mór rising out of the ocean far below. 

These days, a small community of artists, potters and painters, has made its home up here. They’ve bought and rebuilt the little cottages, as closely as they can to the way it used to be. They come from all over, Germans and French, Australians and Americans, making beautiful things in this magic place. Once upon a time, when the rest of Europe was overrun by the barbarian hordes, and plunged into the Dark Ages, the monks on Sceilig Mór, on the very edge of the world, kept their records, sang their masses in a degenerate but still recognisable Latin, scratched a bare living from the bare rock of the island where they lived in isolation, echoed up and down the thousand steps they carved into the rock. They would eventually send their missionaries back all over Europe, spreading Christianity and the learning only they held onto back through the dark and pagan continent. But they made their home there, the impregnable fortress rising out of the sea, and lived with silence, and the roar of wind and waves, and nothing to hear when they spoke their names but the storms that tore away all sound, and, when it was calm, only the answer of the scratch of pen on vellum, as they illuminated their precious manuscripts, for the greater glory of their God. “Ár nAthair, atá ar neamh . . .”  It scares me how hard I have to reach to dredge up the words of the prayer, drilled into us since we were five years old, the same incantation the monks intoned, in their stone and silent cells a thousand years ago. 

“Hey, let’s have a look in here.” She pointed at the low doorway of one of the cottages. In the windows were plates and curl-handled jugs, the colours the same blues and swirling greys as the sea and sky in winter. We ducked under the lintel into the cool darkness inside. The potter was an Australian woman, who I think was there even ten years before. She had found her place, and stuck to it. She watched us, silent-smiling, while we revently paced the confines of her shop, occasionally exclaiming in hushed tones over the solid grace of a curving jar, or the darkly shining glaze of a great thick plate. We picked up a set of chalice-like cups, in greens and browns, with flicks of blue that looked like the hanging autumn flowers of the leafy lanes far below. 

“These would look so amazing above the fireplace in the apartment.” I nodded. They were beautiful. Would they look the same when taken away from here? Or would they shrivel to weeds and dust, like treasure stolen from a faery fort? We bought them from the smiling Australian woman, swishing softly over to us in her flowing skirts and dangling silver chains and bracelets. She assured us that she did indeed take American Express, and would we like to have them shipped home for us, back to New York? 

That last weekend, that time, when the three of us arrived, the house was empty, but the fridge was full of beer. A note told us that they’d all headed down to the beach for a swim, though it was grey and overcast. Jenny, Crowley, and I, still drenched from the rain that had hit us all the way back in Killorglin and dogged our progress at every step, decided to wait for them at the house, dry off, warm up, and lash into the booze. When they got back we were sitting out the back on the deck chairs, a few cans later. The sky had cleared, and we all stood out on the back wall, watching the blue over the sea deepen, darken. I’ve never seen anything like it since. And as the night rolled in from the hills, the lights went on around the bay, and the summerhouse was filled with one last blast of summersound, laughing in and out of the rooms, music blaring from the kitchen windows, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the covered porch.

I went to my assigned bedroom to get I can’t remember what, and, as I turned to go back to the kitchen, there was Claire in the doorway. She walked towards me without a word. We kissed on the bed, and rolled laughing off it, tangled in a mound of sheets and blankets. After a little while, we got up and straightened our clothes, still laughing, and went back to the others. 

We were all fairly well on by the time we headed down to Maine’s, and staggered down the dark country roads in rambling twos and threes, running in ragged lines, holding hands in chains that broke and fell down laughing. Slipping into the ditches as we jumped to the sides when car headlights loomed around the next bend. 

In Maine’s we took over, it was end-of-season empty, and the coveted pool-table and jukebox were ours. It was nineteen ninety four. We blared Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, and, later, some Neil Young and Van Morrison for good measure. Remember that? Ripped jeans and check shirts, same no matter where you went. Doc Martens essential. Things went rapidly downhill after Ollie turned and offed three drinks with his pool cue, and was sent outside, where he passed out on the smooth springy grass of the lawn out the back. We finished our drinks and went to join him, lying there under the stars, a stillness underscored with the rush in, rush out of waves on the beach below, so still you could hear the hiss of the cigarette paper burn as you took a drag. Claire lay down beside me, our bodies barely touching, and I could hear her breathe. 

We drove back down from Kil Reilig to the village, went to Maine’s for lunch. The jukebox is gone now. I wonder why. We ate outside, at the tables on the springy grass, and from far below could hear the waves muted roar, the high shouts of children on the beach. She left me to go and buy a phone-card at the shop around the back, and make a couple of business calls to the publisher she works for in New York. I sat at the table and drank a pint of Bulmer’s with ice, the only thing for a sunny afternoon. You can even get it in New York, if you try. But I don’t like going to the Irish bars over there. They try too hard. The people in them are missing something. There’s a light gone from their eyes, that only flickers faintly when they talk of home. They have no souls left, because their souls never made the crossing with them. They stayed at home, and can be felt lingering outside the village pubs at dusk, sad-eyed ghosts of living people. 

In the pitch darkness of the country roads, Claire and I lagged further and further behind the others, our progress slowed by the way we leaned so close on each other, afraid of falling. Stopping sometimes and kissing each other, smoky, beery breath mingling in deep and shuddering kisses that went right through us. When we came to the turn-off that leads to the beach, we took it, no words exchanged. The others could be heard far off down the road, laughing and singing. We held hands in silence, and picked our way down the pitch-dark, tree-lined path to the sea. The next week, I was leaving, she was staying, one more year of school to do. This was the last. The summer was nearly spent. Everything was over.

“So, any news from home?” I asked as she returned to the table, a drink in her hand, and a new packet of cigarettes. 

“Oh, you know. The usual. Carrie thinks she’s pregnant, again. Another false alarm, I bet. Nothing much doing in work. Oh, Pete and Laura look like they’re going to move in together.”

“No great surprise there. I think we’ll be getting wedding invitations from those two within the year.” 

“Yeah. Maybe.” She looked away, and I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses. We’ve been to four or five weddings together now. That age, I suppose. I should change the subject. 

When we reached the stream that barred our way onto the beach, Claire plonked herself down onto the ground and pulled off her shoes and socks. I followed suit, and we gingerly waded across the stream, slipping on the smooth rounded rocks we couldn’t see in the dark. 

“Will they . . . will the others be worried?” I said, and she turned to me, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear, and the moon, freed for a moment from the banks of racing clouds that hurried across the sky, cast a pale wash of light on her beautiful face. 

“Does it matter?”  She dropped back to walk beside me, and we walked along the damp and sloping sand, the waves rushing in out of the darkness to wash across our pale bare feet. Wave on wave, rush in, rush in. Further down the beach, we turned, and headed for the dunes. Weaving slightly, but not laughing anymore. Faster. No longer just wandering, we clambered up the dunes with an urgent something whispering in us, sand in an hourglass somewhere whispering in us. 

“So you used to come here every summer when you were a kid?”

“Well, most summers,” I replied. “First we’d come down for a few days, with the whole family, and we’d stay in a hostel or something, and then, from when I was about thirteen, I’d come down every summer for at least a couple of weeks and stay with Dan’s family. They were like my second family, almost.”

“You’ve talked about this place ever since we first met. It’s so cool to finally see it. You’re right, it is magical.”

In a hollow, high up in the dunes we stopped, and stood there, with only the rush of the waves, and the whisper of sand, and the rustle of the wind through the marram grass. We stood there a long moment, saying nothing. And then turned into each other, our lips met, and we kissed again, like it was the first time, like it was the last time, was this the last time? And we fell to our knees in the hollow, high up in the dunes, and we fell to the ground, and we were everything. Skin tingled at soft touches of fingertips along each other’s bodies, of lips and hands and soft breath, and her hair falling across my face. Our eyes in the dark, each looked into each. And we never noticed the cold, and we never thought of the time, and we fell asleep with our arms around each other. 

We paid for lunch at Maine’s and walked down to the beach, walked along among the children playing their last, the summer nearly spent. The bright sun shivered molten gold along the water, and the salty sea breeze and warm sun made us sit down in the soft fine sand awhile. I looked along the beach to the ruined tower at one end, to the cliffs at the other. I stood, offered her my hand, and pulled her to her feet. 

“This place is so amazing. We don’t have anything like this back home. Beats the hell out of Manhattan in the summer, huh?” She looked around in wonder, just another young American wishing she could call this home. As she spoke I stood looking up at the sand dunes. And turned away. We walked away along the beach a slow and lazy walk, no hurry to get anywhere. She makes me see this place like I’m a stranger too. She makes me feel like a foreigner, with her childish wonder, and her enthusiasm, and her inability to pronounce any of the place names. And even when I gently correct her, I’m not so sure I’m saying them right anymore. 

I don’t want to come home again. I want to be always in a city that never sleeps, where silence doesn’t exist, where there are a thousand echoes to every word I speak, where even waking in the middle of the night, with her breathing beside me, the rush of the street, and the whine of sirens, and the sticky heat, all will help me forget what it’s like to have only the wind and the waves, between the grey sea and grey sky, where you can shout your name into nothing, and nothing will answer, only the mournful cries of the wind-borne sea birds, flying to far off homes.