Issue 155 |

Spring 2023

Thresholds

And this will be her, a lonely woman on the threshold of the ocean.

Early morning and the tall waves will break in black and white and mauve. Quickly, she will bury her dress in the sand so it won’t blow away. She will feel her body acutely aching from the night before, from the sex and alcohol and conversation.

And slowly, she will edge into the water, the cold biting at her feet then thighs then waist. She will gasp for air before plunging below.

But now it’s the evening before; two cats are fighting over a fish head in the street, and she sits alone in the doorway of a cafe wearing that linen dress and unwashed hair tied back with a child’s scrunchie.

“What is your choice?” the barista asks.

She has been considering her own death, so it takes a few moments to extract herself from the wreckage of an imagined car crash.

“Wine?” she says.

“Red or white?”

At the age of forty-two, she is too old to die young but by asphyxiation, choking on a flesh-colored prawn, say, or running out of water on a hike through inland Spain, and surely both these options are preferable to the more likely cause, cancer.

“Surprise me,” she says to him.

The cafe is empty apart from the two of them. There’s a fan whizzing overhead and the hum of a fridge.

It began with the ocean, her fascination with death. In a murky rockpool, she found a mermaid’s purse, brown and slippery. She ran home with her prize held aloft, but when she burst into the kitchen of the holiday home, her older brother took it and sliced it open with a steak knife, and out slid a thing, a translucent eel-fish-baby-type thing.

“It’s a shark egg and you’ve killed it,” her brother said.

She was six years old, and she wept. She wept often as a child. What a sweet release that had been.

The barista delivers her a small tumbler of water. She notices the sweat patches on his white vest before downing it, newly aware of her thirst, and admires the way the knots of his muscles move beneath that silky snakeskin. There is blood pulsing underneath that skin.

She was fearful of strangers when she was his age, but then she met that girl, the one with purple lipstick and chewed nails, and she didn’t want to be afraid anymore. She was still young enough to think you could know someone entirely after just a few hours. She had ended up at the purple lipstick girl’s place at 2:00 a.m., smoking and talking shite until the morning, and then they took it into their heads to go out to Salthill, buying donuts and chicken rolls on the way to soak up their hangovers. Despite the fear in her throat, she followed purple lipstick girl into the sea, and when she came up from the water, all the world seemed shiny and perfect. She could hear the girl hooting with laughter, and the sound rang in her ears like a damp finger running on the rim of a glass, and the light—well, it was as if she’d never seen the color blue before.

“Where are you from?” the barista asks and hands her a glass of red wine.

“West Cork.” It’s been a long journey to get to Porto. She’s crossed much of mainland Europe in the last two months, stopping in capital cities and remote towns, choosing destinations almost at random but always staying inland and avoiding the ocean, burning sixteen years of savings on tapas, sleeper trains, and hotels with views of mountains.

“I was in Donegal last year,” the boy says.

“Of all the places. What were you doing there?”

“It has really good surfing. The waves, you know, are some of the best.”

“You must freeze.”

“It’s cold, but I’m used to it. It’s the same ocean as we have here—it’s all connected—and I wear a wetsuit, which helps a bit, but also when you’re in the water, catching waves, you don’t notice so much.”

“I don’t think I could bear the pain of it. The few times I swam back home, I always felt as if I were being stabbed by a million little knives.”

She was expecting him to laugh but he looks at her seriously. “That’s why I do it,” he says. “It’s the closest thing I know to death. You should try it.”

She’s the one to laugh.

“A Donegal man told me,” he says, “that surfing, it’s not that big in Ireland. But he said you all go for a swim on New Year’s morning. That is how you catch sickness, in my humble view.”

“You’re not wrong there. Half of us get pneumonia that day. Great way to start the year, eh? I guess I’m in no place to judge, as I have done it since I was a child.”

This year had been the first she hadn’t joined in the tradition, but no one back home could possibly blame her. They could hardly expect her to go near the water now.

“If you’re here for a few days,” he says, “one of my friends has a surf school on the beach.”

She had thought that two months would surely be enough, but she’s been here four days and still hasn’t stood on the beach, still hasn’t stood on her balcony, with its view of the beach, still hasn’t even opened the shutters.

“Surfing isn’t my kind of thing.” She sips her wine. The condensation drips over her fingers. She’s definitely not going to tip him, even though he’s beautiful.

“Tell me, what is your kind of thing?” he says.

“Sex,” she says, but she doesn’t show her teeth. She doesn’t smile at all. She just looks up at him, curious, challenging.

He nods, but she can’t read his expression. She thought she knew young men well, but she’s fallen out of the habit of reading them. He could be turned on or repulsed, and she wouldn’t know the difference. She feels a headache pricking behind her eyes and gulps the rest of her wine.

“You’re traveling alone?” he says.

“Yes. I’m alone.”

That morning she had watched boys leaping from the Dom Luís bridge, and she had turned away, wincing.

She’s read somewhere that boys can’t assess danger. Something to do with their prefrontal cortex developing slowly. It’s a problem they have into their twenties. That’s why their car insurance is so much more expensive than girls’. They’re reckless. She thinks it must be something to do with them once being hunters. She is certainly a gatherer. She stays on the edge of danger, never quite facing it. She’s been thinking about this lately.

She watched their plummeting bodies only just missing the rabelo boats. Someone tapped her shoulder then.

Beaming, white teeth in a hazelnut face pointed over the edge.

“You jump,” he said.

“Do you ever think about giving up on it all?” she asks the barista.

“Do you?”

She thinks about her answer and decides on: “No.”

“You have been drinking too much,” he says.

“You could join me.”

He smirks and takes the seat beside her.

“If you could go anywhere in the world,” she says, “where would you go?”

“Bali or the Canary Islands or—”

“Hawai‘i?”

“You tease me,” he says.

“I am. I’m sorry.”

He pours himself a glass from the bottle and glances out at the street. Night has fallen on them.

“Merda.” He streaks across the tiled floor and ducks behind the bar.

She’s gazing at the place where he disappeared and then she smells lemon and soap. She looks up and there is a girl, no more than eighteen, her unbuttoned dress flapping wide and a baby drinking from her breast. Like a horse, she is all long limbs, thick eyebrows, and swinging hair. She is all wrong for the barista boy.

“You see him?” the girl says.

“Sorry.” She sips her wine and notices the taste for the first time. Meaty with a sweet finish.

“Who is drinking this wine?” The girl is pointing at the barista’s newly filled glass.

“That’s mine.” She reaches across the table and takes a gulp just as the baby yanks off the girl’s nipple and gives her an accusatory glare, and she is sure the young mother will follow this with an accusation that she is lying, and she will be forced to admit that he is hiding behind the bar and so the girl will drag him back to whatever he is running from, but instead the girl marches out, her sandals slapping loudly, leaving them alone with two unfinished glasses of wine.

She had taken a flight over to London, her girlfriend hanging onto her hand the whole way.

Outside the steamed-up windows of the consultant’s office, the day was muggy. Then her girlfriend was sent to a waiting room, left to flick through stained copies of Breathe magazine, and she was taken off to a room where she changed into a surgical robe, and then a stranger led her by the hand into the surgery.

“You know what’s going to happen?” the clinician asked, but before she could answer, the woman said, “It’s a minor procedure so it only takes about fifteen minutes.”

And soon, under ultrasound guidance, a needle removed eggs from her ovaries so that they could be fertilized by a donor’s sperm, kept refrigerated until they could be transferred back into her, charged and ready.

“I’m free at ten,” the barista says.

“Excuse me?” She had been miles away. She’d time traveled back home and had been standing on the shore just beyond her bungalow, searching for a mislaid shoe.

There’s a sad, lost look on the boy’s face that makes her want to lie and say everything will be alright in the end.

And he is so beautiful. He’s waifish with that floppy hair that needs to constantly be flicked out of his eyes in a way that they seem to think is so cool at that age, yet he just lets it hang, obscuring his vision.

“In fifteen minutes,” he says, “I finish here. We can go for a walk. Will you wait? I’ll show you my Porto.”

She laughs.

“You don’t want to go with me?” he says.

It was her girlfriend who wanted the baby. After the first two failed transfers, she was adamant that they should try again, and when one finally clung on and held, it was her girlfriend who booked them in for the birthing class and the breastfeeding course. She was the one who bought nappies the size of her hand and then expensive, washable cloth nappies for when he was a bit older and they’d figured it all out. It was her girlfriend who read the book about elimination communication, leaving your baby nappy-free from birth like people did in some Asian countries and LA.

“Did you know nappies last four hundred years? Can you imagine, every used nappy ever is still sitting in landfill or floating around the ocean?”

It was her girlfriend who cried at the twelve-week scan, and finally, fifteen weeks before the due date, it was her girlfriend who, without a word of explanation, packed a bag and moved to America.

“Let’s go,” he says to her.

Her legs chafe against each other as she hurries to keep up with him. “Wait, will you?”

He stops, turns to look at her, and smiles, holds out his hand. “Sorry. I am not in a good mood.”

She doesn’t take his hand. “The girl,” she says.

“It’s so obvious?”

“You ran away and hid like a child who stole his mammy’s biscuit tin.” He looks so sad she can’t go on. “Here,” she says. “Let’s stop and get you a glass of port. You tell me what’s good.”

They sit in one of the tourist bars by the river, and she can’t help thinking that he’s chosen it so he won’t run into anyone he knows, but she would do the same in his place, and the wine is warm and delicious. She orders more before they’ve finished the first, and she’s vaguely aware that he might be underage, but then she figures she doesn’t know the legal age for drinking in Portugal anyway. How little she cares about these things now.

“Was that baby yours?”

“Ana is mine,” he says. “She has my eyes.”

For the first time, she looks at his eyes, but they’re a nondescript brown, the color of half the planet’s eyes.

Last winter, she received so many cards that when she went into the sitting room she was basically swimming through paper.

People she barely knew dropped over with cold lasagnas and unidentified rice dishes.

For days, she forgot to eat and then found herself sat on the floor, half a tray of lasagna gone and she a vegetarian.

She wept. She’s sure now that she wept, but she can’t remember it much. She remembers all those swimming classes she drove him to from six months onwards, when she would get into the warm baby pool, her arms and legs all goose pimpled from being out of the water and he splashing and giggling and spitting and shrieking. She didn’t do that thing where you put the baby under the water and they swim back to you. She was too afraid that he wouldn’t swim back.

“Listen,” she says. “Why don’t you come back to the apartment I have rented?”

“Why not?” he says.

And she can think of at least one reason.

In the last few weeks before he was born, she wondered if it was the whiff of death about her that had finally made her girlfriend leave. Working in palliative care had felt perfect when she first started training as a nurse, but after a while, helping people to death wore on her and she was sure that she carried it home every day. Death was a serious and beautiful thing, a sometimes-painful thing—that’s what she thought, anyway, before she started her job. Of course, it could be all those things, but it was also mundane and exhausting and inconvenient. Her girlfriend said it was a creepy choice of job. She was the one who would come home from a day of molding pots at her studio and throw herself at the cooker, delivering up some delicious pasta. She was the one attempting to drag her pregnant girlfriend back to the world of the living, the world of birth pools and bulk cooking to freeze meals for when the baby arrived. Perhaps it was too much work to be so alive. Perhaps all that living for three was why, one day, she stepped onto a plane without a word of explanation.

And then Cian was born, and the days and nights melded, and she stared into those blue, blue eyes of his, her beautiful baby, without ever needing to look away in modesty or shame because he looked back at her with a love that seemed endless, and her own gradually, and then rapidly, consumed her, filling the chasm that her abandoner had left.

They are in her Airbnb. The air is so hot and heavy it feels like there’s no oxygen. He takes off his vest almost immediately and he’s thin and strong and sweating. He reaches to open the kitchen shutters.

“Don’t,” she says. “Please.”

“There’s no oxygen. We’ll drown.”

“No. I’ll open the fridge.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“Yes,” she says. “Come here,” she says, and he does. She kisses him and then she’s crying, great sobs shaking her and him against her.

“You lost someone,” he says.

“Why did you come back with me?”

“You are alone,” he says.

She sits on the floor. “You should go home.”

“I’ll go out, get you some food,” he says.

People are always bringing her food when she’s sad, she thinks, as if sadness can be pushed out of the body by a dozen scones or two frittatas. She wishes she knew whether Cian chose to go or whether he would have liked to stay longer. She wishes. She wishes for so many things.

“A house with a view of the ocean,” she says. “That’s what everybody wants.”

She doesn’t expect him to come back.

She bought the house with her girlfriend when she was four weeks pregnant. It was the perfect family home, a bungalow in West Cork, glass everywhere and a garden that rolled down to the beach. They painted the rooms themselves with Farrow & Ball school house white to reflect all that morning light the estate agent told them would be streaming in.

Soon, those walls were resounding with crying and laughter and the jabber of new words.

He was three and finally sleeping in his own bed, then five and getting night terrors and so she went in to him and showed him how to open the window so they could sit on the ledge and look at the moon, taking deep, soothing breaths, in and out, his back heavy against her chest. Once, he drew his finger along her belly’s scar.

“Did I really come through there?” he said. He seemed unconvinced because he was a child, and as a child, it seems inexplicable to imagine not existing.

“One minute you were swimming around inside, and then you were out. I didn’t notice the moment you were pulled away from me, but I felt it for a long time after.”

“Does it still hurt?”

“Nope.”

“It looks like it does.”

He pressed his fingers against the scar as if the pressure might relieve a pain or open it anew.

She stands on the balcony of her rented apartment and listens to waves breaking apart, but she can’t see them. It’s too dark out.

The balcony is flimsy. She thinks that if she shakes the rail hard enough, it will break and there will be nothing in between her and the water.

Before she knew it, Cian was sixteen, and she was checking his room, and he was gone, the window ajar.

Everything sped up for her then. The scramble around the house and then the garden, the driving up and down the tiny roads, the phone calls, the local Guard sitting on her sofa with his notebook open, yawning, telling her boys will be boys and did she not think to check if he was with one of his friends or out on the lash? And her yelling at him because of course she’d thought of all this, but she also knew her Cian, she knew him, and then the neighbor bringing her a cup of tea with curdled milk and offering her a tissue, which she didn’t need, not yet, and then the driving and scrambling and avoiding the beach because she had a sick feeling in her stomach and cursing that the moon was so big and bright, but still she couldn’t see him. Light coming on all the time. Night gone, and no sign of him at all.

It was some dog walker who found his clothes on the beach. The vest and the shorts and one of his shoes. For several days, boats went out but came up with nothing, and all the while, the tired waves broke, but she had turned away.

This new day is numberless.

He is asleep on the bed beside her, splayed, a child still, really, and on the bedside table, his phone lights up. The world is calling. She gets up, puts on her sandals, puts a towel in a bag, and opens the front door. Behind her, the kitchen window is open. Behind her is a view of the ocean. On the water, two surfers are sitting on their boards, waiting for the wave.