Elizabeth Brennan

The rocks are chewed-up bits of giant chewing gum, the sand around them satin-like and creased with tiny rivulets trickling after the sea. Eve and Harry climb them. 

She knows she can leave Eve to herself more-or-less – she is seven and methodical – even when she’s climbing the highest and least hospitable rocks. But Harry needs her hand. She steers him off the wet side of the rocks which the sea has only recently vacated. 

‘This side is less slippy.’ 

Eve is in her own world, the one she escapes to after the relentless obligation of school. Her mouth is moving. She is speaking to one of her characters or they are speaking to her. Harry is testing the length of his leap and the strength and grip of his feet as he climbs a rock.

‘Is it deep?’ he says of a rock pool.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Too deep. The water would come in over the top of your wellies.’

He places his foot in at the edge. Once she senses his body urge forwards she says, ‘Let’s find a better rockpool. See those rocks over there?’ She points to the cluster of rocks at the other end of the beach. 

The beach encloses them in a neat crescent between the land and the sea – the other end is not far. Eve runs, still in her own story. The sand is smooth and scattered with small stones, each with its own elongated shadow. She urges Harry to run after Eve. He does but then stops and turns back for her. 

‘Go on,’ she says. ‘I’ll run too.’ Before she does she takes a photo of them with her phone and looks at it. Red hat and green hat. Purple wellies and navy. The February sun – reassuringly appropriate: not too hot. The stretch of empty sand and the glimpse of the sea. The lope of the children. Her own shadow long, reaching between them. She sends the photo to her husband, who is away on a work trip. 

She is aware of how ridiculously idyllic it all is. She does not miss the tap-tapping of computer keyboards and the shaking of the old windows of the office as the daily police helicopter flew low overhead. 

‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ her mother said to her recently. 

That had irritated her in a profound way. Of course she knows how lucky she is, but it’s not as if it’s just luck. She chose this. How much she had had to learn to be able to enjoy it.

Her husband texts back: ‘Looks like they are in their own world. Thank you x’

These rocks, when they reach them, are black with the appearance of slates stacked on their sides. They are sharper than the others, though overall safer being mostly on a level. A haven for rock pools. 

She and Harry discover these while Eve spins and hops on the sand.

Harry says, ‘Is this one deep?’

‘Try it.’

He jumps into the centre of it, slopping some water into one boot.

‘Are you wet?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Let’s walk through them instead.’

‘Is this one deep?’

‘It is. Too deep. This one is too deep.’

Harry studies it, frowning. 

‘It’s too deep, Harry.’

She calls Eve over and the children sit down at the edge of the rocks and have a snack. She hunkers down to their eye level. They are making trenches in the wet sand with the heels of their wellies. Down low it is a different beach. More remote and untouched. More sheltered and protective. The sea bobs at its brim. 

She points out the slit in the low cliff behind them. It looks man-made with stones packed in together like those ice-houses the wealthy built into hills. More likely, here, it was a place that smugglers used to store their loot, or the opening to a souterrain. A network of Iron Age souterrains had been found recently, when they were building the nearby distributor road.  

‘Is that a cave do you think?’ she says. ‘Will we explore?’

Up close it looks more like a deep slit in the cliff made by the sea. They go down on their hunkers and peer in. It occurs to her that it is the perfect size for two children to hide in. They do not want to go in. It is too strung with cobwebs. 

‘Is it a cave?’ Eve says. 

‘A little one.’

‘Did pirates use it?’

‘Probably not.’

Eve, preoccupied, goes back to the sand.

‘Harry, look,’ she says. ‘Grass.’ She points to the strip of grass at the top of the cliff. ‘Soil.’ She points to the next layer. ‘Pebbles. Now larger stones all packed together. See?’ 

Harry has asked before, ‘What holds up the soil?’ He has asked, ‘What is under the grass?”

But now he is unmoved. Maybe he can’t quite buy it when it’s served up to him like a cross-section of cake. He begins to lift the large stones at their feet and drop them, with calculation, about an inch from his toes.

There are three more people on the beach, coming in their direction. A man and two children, a girl around Eve’s height and an older boy in the uniform of the secondary school. The boy does not look up from the sand. He and the man are in step. The girl is a loose thread whipping around them.

Eve is suddenly beside her loud whispering in her ear, ‘That’s Molly from my class!’ Eve mumbles, ‘I don’t talk to her.’ It is not that Eve doesn’t like Molly. Eve stays away from the kids she feels would be unreceptive to her. Her instinct is strong. 

In the next second she realises who Molly is. Molly’s mother and father had separated last year and the father had moved out. This gossip had reached her months after the event. She looks at the three again. The man carries a takeaway coffee, the girl a slushie in a plastic cup. They are climbing the bank on to the cliff path, heading for the old swimmers’ shelter.

We are actually lucky, she thinks. These children are lucky. She feels a counter tug of dismay. Dread.

Sometimes she worries that the children’s lives are too protected, that she is setting them up for a catastrophic fall. So she tries to stick to the truth when they ask for it. If there is a distressing news report on the TV from the war regions or the countries struck by famine or drought or extreme weather she keeps the TV on.

‘What’s to die?’ Harry asked earlier today. She was wheeling her bike through the gate into Eve’s school to pick her up, Harry sitting in his seat on the back. 

She said, ‘It’s when you close your eyes and go to sleep and you don’t wake up again.’ 

‘You go to sleep,’ he said slowly, ‘and you don’t wake up again.’

‘Yes.’ 

She watched his face. It seemed to go through a number of subtle changes. He looked up to the sky. He said, ‘What are the clouds made of?’

Eve is digging in the sand with her hands. She is digging for treasure, she says. Right here, on account of the writing on the rock there, see? Something akin to an X marks the spot. Harry joins Eve in her digging. 

She hands them both thin flat stones to use as shovels and joins in too. Eve seems genuine in her pursuit of treasure and she feels a slight apprehension at the fact that there will be none. As they dig they reach rougher, more textured sand and then pieces of shell and stone. She is reminded of what sand is.

There is the sound of a faint drone coming from overhead. She has always been conscious of sounds from the sky. She looks up but can see nothing. The drone becomes higher pitched but it is still faint. The man, the boy and the girl are standing outside of the swimmers’ shelter looking up. She peers upwards too, shielding her eyes with her hand. There is a thin layer of high cloud. She can discern shapes flitting above it. Thin arrow heads. Black, rapid, many. As they pass over they don’t make a sound.

The children are still digging.

 

Elizabeth Brennan’s work has been published in UK and Irish publications including TOLKA, Lunate, Prole, Crannog and The Irish Independent. It has also been anthologised in The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction and broadcast on RTE’s The Book on One.

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