2023 OPEN SHORT STORY COMPETITION WINNER

and the winner is…

Mary Ethna Black

STEAM

There’s a picture postcard view of Cromane Beach through the window of the mobile wood-fired sauna. Springtime in Kerry: a stretch of white sand against a backdrop of grey-blue shifting sea, long brown hills and a blustery sky. A black and white collie tears past a clump of women in voluminous dry robes and rubber swimming hats. Two thirty-something lads from Killorglin emerge from the shallow waves, adjust their red board shorts, and amble up the sand.

‘Look, it’s Baywatch,’ I say to the packed cabin.

A minute later, the two lads yank open the wonky wooden door and the rest of us shuffle up to make space for them to sit down. That makes ten of us in total, five on each side, packed in like the mackerel that have long been sucked from the bay by offshore factory boats. 

‘I was waiting for you two to run along the sand in slow motion.’

‘Huh?’ says Mr. Killorglin Baywatch No.1.

‘In your red board shorts?’

‘Ah yes. So who’s Pamela Anderson?’

‘Emilie over there can trot after you with one of her extra-large pizzas,’ I say and Emilie grins at the universally understood reference to Baywatch and I wonder if I’ve offended the lads and watch carefully. No, it’s fine. They’re amused.

I’ve got culture shock being back in Ireland, a place that is familiar yet has changed in my absence. I’m one of the so-called Porsche Paddys, the educated generation who emigrated in the eighties in search of work. We followed the same routes taken over the ages by the poor, the starving, the desperate, the labourers, who also sought a living on the rich streets of London, Liverpool, Boston, Sydney. They left with the clothes on their back and practical skills, but I’m a NIPPLE, I tell those who ask. A Northern Irish Professional Permanently Living in England, no longer among the labourers, but like them we return bearing our holiday money. We spend it in bars and restaurants, and we ramble through fields with stone ruins abandoned during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and 50s when there was no food and the people had lips stained green from eating grass. We, the Irish who have descended or returned, inhabit the spaces and gaps those poor souls abandoned. And when we, the diaspora, long for the green fields of home, we understand that those fields are dotted with destructive sheep and punctuated by badly built bungalows, memories and ghosts. Returning never quite works, for home changes while you are away, so you can never actually return to what you left.

I landed yesterday at Farranfore Airport and picked up my rental car—green, a sign, for it’s my favourite colour and will go well with the grass. The teenager who handed over the keys smiled politely at my little joke, but mostly looked past me because I’m over sixty and not so interesting. Then I crossed Kerry, camouflaged. At her Airbnb, Emilie the Glenbeigh Baker plied me with her own Guinness brown bread.

‘I’m off for a beach sauna later,’ she said, stuffing swimsuit and beach robe into her backpack.

‘A what?’

‘Bébhinn tows the cabin to the beach and you can rent a place by the half hour or hour. I’d live in it if I could, especially in winter.’ 

‘I’ve got to see this,’ I said, and Emilie gave me a ‘one of us’ smile.

Growing up, I knew Irish beaches as cold, windy and veering between bracing and freezing, so I took it as another sign that there was a space for my well-traveled and changed self when I snagged the last hour-long sauna slot. Now I’m in my speedo (with extra support for the mature body) swimsuit scrunched up against the window by a wood-fired heater, an Airbnb quality towel softening the wooden slats beneath my well-padded bum. Emilie is opposite, and the Killorglin lads are in the coolest spots on either side of the door. In between are a silent, dark-haired young couple, and an older woman celebrating a birthday along with her sister, her sister’s husband and her best friend. Special rules apply; we are in limbo, lightly but intimately connected as we settle in for a steady poach and I truly wish I had removed my dangly gold earrings. They are anointing my neck with pinpoint burns, just enough to notice.

‘Isn’t this great?’ I say.

Emilie ladles water onto the hot rocks and steam belts me so hard in the face that I can barely breathe. My skin turns red in patches and my neck hates the tiny burns from my metal earrings, so I take the blasted things off. I hope I can find the tiny holes later without my trifocals and a mirror.

‘Lavender! Bébhinn puts essential oils in the water,’ says the birthday woman’s best friend—no, sorry, her sister. 

It’s hard to sort out the various bodies packed into a barrel when you’ve only just met and are all in swimsuits. If I saw these people again wearing clothes, I mightn’t recognize them. Mum would be right into this, winkling out all their stories, remembering their names. Everyone has a tale to tell, she would say in that measured way of hers, brooking no objection. I say that too and probably got it from her. It’s not always a good thing. As a child I sometimes wished she would just shut up—so embarrassing mum, eye roll. Sometimes I should too, but I can’t help being definite. Pity Mum’s not here as this sauna is shaping up to be interesting, and I can’t help my nosiness. Or my Irish affability, which is a cover-up, a cloak. Hides the bumpy bits.

‘It’s lovely,’ says Birthday Girl, as if she has just been presented with an aromatic, candle-covered cake.

In the time B.S. (Before Sauna), I overheard Birthday Girl conversing with her sister as I changed into my swimsuit on the scrubby grass beside my green car.

I don’t like these pebbles and I’ll have to cross them to get to the water. 

Sure it’s your birthday, why not give it a whirl? 

Oh, I don’t know…

What a drawn out palaver, Mum would have whispered to me under her homemade toweling changing robe that never quite worked but did the job. Why would you waste time worrying about something before it happens? That woman should hurry up and make up her mind. Life’s too short to waste. Then Mum would have inserted her toes into her new-fangled beach sandals and taken a steady pace over the pebbles. I admired her, and I dreaded being like her. So definite. Very capable. Somewhat judgemental, but always moving forwards. I’ll do that now. Move the conversation on so that the poor woman sitting opposite me doesn’t sink into self-recrimination.

‘Which birthday is it?’ I ask.

‘A zero one,’ says Birthday Girl. Her voice tails away as she looks down at the floor and then out the window in anticipation of reassurance. Oh God, now I’ll have to hand some out.

‘Really? Which zero?’ 

‘It’s the big six-oh,’ explains Best Friend.

I would have believed anywhere between fifty and seventy, but age is a relative thing. I brought Mum to dinner once with a bunch of my fifty-something friends and she thought it was great to hang out with all you young people. 

‘The sixties are your greatest decade,’ I say in an upbeat tone. ‘When my mum said that, I didn’t believe her, but it all came true.’

Because I believe this and have picked the right tone (also, the sauna does take the edges off awkward moments). Everyone nods, Birthday Girl smiles and there’s a friendly silence as we monitor our sweat and watch for 15 minutes of sand to slide through the egg-timer on the wall and I don’t enlarge my statement about what is wrong with your sixties. Better not to. There are worse ages. Mum was in her prime then, children discharged, the last blast of anaesthetic gas delivered, her white coat returned to the hospital laundry. She made a good breast of retirement, paced herself well. 

‘How cold is the water today?’ I ask.

‘Around 12 degrees,’ says Emilie the Baker, who is Swedish but went to school in Paris, and has a 16-year-old daughter who doesn’t like parties or presents for her birthday because she is autistic and so Emilie will be bringing her to the Cork Zoo tomorrow as a special treat.

‘Take her to see the penguins,’ I say. Then I realise that I am thinking of London Zoo. ‘Does Cork zoo have penguins?’

‘Yup,’ says Mr. KB1. ‘They have a penguin parade in the afternoon. They throw mackerel. Kids love it.’

‘I did the penguin count at London Zoo once,’ says Birthday Girl’s husband, and this elicits admiring noises from us all.

Top that, Mum would whisper in my ear if she were here.

‘Looks there’s a penguin running along the beach,’ I say, and everyone peers out the window then catches on, except for Emilie.

‘It’s a dog,’ she says, and we think that is even funnier than my penguin stunt, because it is quite Scandinavian and has to be explained. This takes a while.

‘I spent a week in the Masai Mara when I worked out there,’ says Mr. KB 2, quietly because he doesn’t want to show off, except he really does. We give him a clap and interrogate him about the Savannah. It’s amazing what you can learn from people inside a mobile sauna. I would never have placed him in Africa. There are few people from Killorglin who have seen such a wide variety of game, although there is much expertise in sheep, cattle, pigs and pets. There are expert bird and hare watchers. Mr. KB 2 knows a lot about ferrets, and these are related to pine martens, one of which visits Birthday Girl’s garden. Pine martens are a deep glossy auburn and bite the throats of smaller mammals in a dramatic and disturbing fashion. My mother loved them, said the colour reminded her of my hair. Warned me that redheads fade as they go older and never quite turn silver.

‘I’ve got weak hair, but yours is lovely,’ she would say. ‘Any my nails break, but yours are strong.’

They are not, I have found, but she believed that they were, and perhaps there is such a thing as imaginary keratin. Perhaps your mother strengthens you through sheer belief.

The sand trickles through.

‘Right, I’m off.’

Thanks to my red all-terrain sandals, I cross the pebbles easily and stroll over the damp sand to the edge of the water in a superior manner. I’m not self-conscious because I’m in my sixties and life is pretty good, although my midriff isn’t, and I have mixed feelings about that. Mum both chided and reassured me about my weight, and mentioned structured girdles, but I didn’t listen to her then (or for most of my life). Still, I’ve forgotten what I used to be worried about when I was young and will have a go at most things. For example, I always wanted to be a writer, and I stuck my toe in that particular water aged some fifty. Late, but not too late. In with a chance, but I might be rubbish or average. I am developing a creative mindset, and now every conversation is grist to my mill, but you can’t take a notebook into a sauna as it would get soggy. So I burn the drift and flow of the conversation into my brain, and arrange it there, pinning it to my memory with every step on the lumpy stones. Remember this, remember that. Weave it all together and don’t forget what she/they said. Or were. I miss her.

‘At least run a bit,’ I call out as the Killorglin lads overtake me on the way back, and they obligingly pantomime Baywatch moves amidst the miniscule waves, which is a good laugh because they’re white as milk, have spare tyres, and there’ll be no one to rescue, for the sea is calm and the path back to the sauna is perfectly clear of danger. And penguins. And Mum.

The Iveragh Peninsula was a place of horror during the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s, when the crop was blighted, and over half the population starved or emigrated, many of them dying en route. You would hardly feel this history now if you visited, but for Irish people, the stories reverberate and we walk the stone boreens alongside ever present ghosts. We have been instructed to remember. The people that went before us linger on amongst the rocks, and you can’t sweat them out. You co-exist.

After I leave this sauna and spend a night at Emilie’s house, I’ll live for 12 days in a stone cottage on the side of a rocky hill. Cill Rialaig is a hamlet of stone houses on Bolas Head abandoned during the famine and now restored as an artist retreat and I have a writer’s residency there. I’ll write up a storm, bake potatoes and make awful coffee without my own fancy equipment from home, and I’ll stand on the rocks above the inlet and watch for basking sharks while the rain pours down, as it usually does, and I’ll wonder what it was like in those days when Cill Rialaig was still a living village. I don’t yet know what I will write about or if it will be any good. But that’s tomorrow and not today.

Today I’m in a wooden barrel with a bunch of strangers getting roasted like peanuts. Or coffee beans. You might say we’re having a practice run at dying, for a wood-fired sauna runs on the same principle as cremation, just at a lower temperature: it heats up to a degree that will make you sweat yet is never hot enough to make fat melt or skin crisp. Also, there are no red velvet curtains to close over the wooden box as it moves on little rails towards the flames, and when you’ve had enough, you can shift your arse out of here and cool off in the Atlantic. I’m hot now, and the sensation is worthy more than pleasant. I’m sticking to the wooden seat, so I rearrange my towel. If I lean back and relax, I can feel my joints easing. I’m stiffer these days, no longer twenty, no longer young. I’m 65, which is old in terms of history and Ireland and women in general. When I think of my mother, I’m still a child, but a well-qualified one who has enough presence and experience and money to be a writer. A child with plenty of stories, and more to gather. If she were here, she would want to read those stories, to see things through my eyes. She would be my best audience and yet… would I share what I think with her? And why did I not when she was alive?

‘Isn’t it great that your daughter is looking forward to the zoo and doesn’t want things, like most teenagers?’ says Mr. Baywatch Killorglin No 2, who works remotely from home since Covid, and thinks it’s great that we’re never going to go back to the way things were, something we all agree with and discuss. 

Then the conversation veers back to Emilie’s daughter, like a turning tide, ebb and flow. Ask and answer. Mothers and daughters. How to stay close and let go. Nothing else seems relevant, just the random contributions from the inhabitants of the barrel.

‘Does your daughter like new dresses?’ asks Birthday Girl.

‘She hates clothes shopping most of all,’ says Emilie as she chucks ladles of water—one, two, three—on the scorching stones.

‘I’m with your daughter,’ I say, bracing as steam rises, welcoming the hot wave. ‘I can’t understand why anyone would want to clothes shop for fun.’

‘Putting garments on and taking them off again and not even buying anything is pointless,’ adds Emilie.

Birthday Girl shifts on the wooden slats and looks affronted, as if she doesn’t want shopping for a new dress to be insulted. For her, it’s probably about connection, the chat, the coffee afterwards to discuss your purchases. I wonder why Emilie used the word garment as it is somewhat ceremonial, like vestments, or robes, or raiment. I clothed her, we dressed, we wrapped her in swaddling or a shroud.

‘Technical gear is exempt,’ I say in a conciliatory manner, for no one should be made to feel bad on their zero birthday. ‘I’d like some of the new swimming stuff. A dry robe, for example.’

‘Those things are brilliant, but they cost a fortune’ says Birthday Girl, who is back on familiar territory.

‘Sometimes Dunnes Stores has them at a good price,’ says Sister.

‘But are they worth it?’ I ask.

‘Definitely. You can change under them and stand around and chat. You can even walk the dog in them,’ says Best Friend.

‘They’re heavy, though,’ says Husband, clearly a practical man. ‘Cumbersome to lug around. A divil to pack.’

‘I can’t be having with that,’ says Emilie. ‘I like to travel light, only a wheely bag. Then they can’t lose your luggage.’

‘All the important things in life should be in your carry-on bags, or even better, in your pocket, in case you suddenly have to run,’ I say. 

I feel a bit wobbly, concerned I might betray too much, or start blabbing, or let my mother down by getting maudlin. That never helps, dear, she would say. The sand is almost through, and how did that happen so fast? Sweat gathers in the small of my back, across my chest and under my armpits; it trickles down in rivulets. I’m leaking water and if I cried now, no one would notice, so I could cry, but I don’t. There is no need, for the sweat is washing me clean and the ocean will finish the job. I’m overwhelmed by all this flesh, and I eye the egg-timer.

‘Talking of which… see you all later.’

As I get up, my towel sticks to my damp bottom, so I pull it off and fold it neatly onto the wooden slats. I walk down to the water in my black swimsuit and red sandals. Oh, and my rings—I have five thin interlocking gold ones with green stones, a Victorian turquoise the colour of the sea, and Mum’s plain wedding band, which my thoughtful sister enlarged to fit my sturdier finger. We let most of Mum’s ashes trickle into the ground on the day we buried her, but I kept some in a small cardboard tube that’s been sitting on my mantelpiece for almost six years, waiting for the right moment. I’m not sure what that moment is, or what it is for, but expect that will come to me. I pass the swimmers in their dry robes and imagine my mother standing amongst them, extolling the virtues of a new-fangled acquisition—a dry robe—chuffed that I’d given it to her for her birthday, but annoyed she had to book checked baggage on Ryanair from London to Farranfore.

My daughter, she would say, is full of good ideas but not very practical.

And then she would regale the almost-strangers about the time I forgot my new school coat on the Ulsterbus between Finaghy and Lambeg. It cost an absolute fortune—nine pounds and 12 shillings—and there was no sign of it when the bus reached its final destination of Lisburn. That might have been because it was a Catholic School Uniform and so this could well have been a Sectarian Theft. They wrote Taigs out on our wall a few months ago, so it’s possible. No-one else knows or cares about that story now, except me, and in a way I’m glad because it makes me out to be a ditz as well as a Catholic, which I no longer profess to be. My sister, who is also no longer a Catholic, still believes I am a ditz, but I disagree. I’m just creative. A dreamer of words and stories. Apt to forget things, apt to make bits up to fill the gaps. An occasional liar and a definite stretcher of the truth. I can put my dead mother into a dry robe and onto a beach and talk to her. I can put her onto a page and into a story and enfold her in sentences.

This time I know what to expect from the cold sea. I turn off my thoughts, wade strongly in and stretch into a long slow swim, more of a glide. Well-padded and sleek in my black swimsuit, I resemble the body of a seal with four pale limbs and two red feet instead of a tailfin. The almost-strangers from the sauna spread out on either side along the bay, keeping a respectful distance. Emilie the Baker does a determined freestyle. Birthday Girl and her coterie paddle in the shallows, chatting away in their decades-long huddle. The dark-haired couple stand side by side, gazing out to sea. The Killorglin lads splash water at each other, but only for a moment because they’re not children anymore, either.

‘Save me,’ I call over to them quietly, as an almost joke. 

I’m not even sure why I say this, as I feel perfectly contented here, and safe, and if needed, I can save myself. I am self-sufficient. Perhaps it is just another surface-level Baywatch echo, or perhaps it is a desire to abdicate responsibility and have someone else control my destiny and make all the big decisions, even though I don’t actually want that. I’ll never be a child again and I’ll be never a living person’s daughter, and that’s a gap. A parent will not wave me off on the boat or the plane and cry because they miss me. My mother is dead and I’m next in line.

The lads from Killorglin don’t hear; that’s just as well because you have to be careful what you reveal to strangers you’ve just met. The trick is to only let out what bit of your life you want people to remember: that, or big fat lies, although those can go badly wrong, and can lead to confusion. Edit your stories, that’s my advice. And save the endings for when you are certain or done. I give myself advice and reassurance as the cold water covers my feet and edges up my legs. It’s just water, cold water, nothing more.

Through the clear water I glimpse dotted nests of thin brown seaweed on the sandy bottom, rolling to-and-fro with the tide. Between them, small translucent crabs scavenge for dead things that are so minute I can’t see them. This is a place of endless corpses and I am surrounded by the dead or soon-to-be-dead, swimming in them, breathing them in. The bodies on this beach, including my own, so full of life now, will one day be ash. 

I won’t tell the almost-strangers in the sauna this: it is almost six years since my mother died, and she was old and ready to go, and I was relieved when she did, for she was sick and had done her days and was intermittently querulous and luminous, quite like the weather in Kerry. I was ready but not ready to let her go, for I was accustomed to having a bulwark between me and whatever comes next. I suddenly remember a moment on Portrush beach when I was six and a terrifying wave, perhaps two feet high, swept me off my feet. Mum caught my hand and pulled me back to safety. Then she told me to stop making a fuss and get back into the water, for the sea was something I had to come to grips with. She was right; over the years, I have learned to swim where I can’t see the bottom, dive among coral reefs and through wrecked ships, and to navigate the shoreline of many complicated things. Some days I still long for a bulwark, but there are none, so there’s no point in wishing for one. I’m it now. Next in line for death, if the world works the way it should. I don’t mind that thought. Actually, I do, but on a day like this I can push it to one side.

My body is limber and there’s a spring in my step as I tramp back over the damp sand and across the piled pebbles. Bébhinn, owner of the mobile sauna, is having trouble with her jeep—I hear her talking to the garage on her mobile. Bébhinn plants a tree for every one that is burned in her sauna—her website says so and people don’t tend to lie about these things. She has tons of health and safety rules to follow and a licence for two beaches and some festivals, but if the jeep is broken, she can’t pull her sauna around Kerry, and she won’t be able to prepare batches of willing occupants ever so slightly for death. She ends her call just as I reach the sauna, and she pushes her hair back out of her eyes. It is blown around again by the light wind.

‘There’s good energy coming out of the cabin today, Mary,’ she says, and I’m pleased she’s remembered my name from the booking.

‘Can you follow our conversation?’

‘No, but I get the hum and when you all laugh, the wood vibrates.’

‘I like that idea, the hum.’

‘I’m doing a combined sauna and yoga session for Bealtaine, in case you’d like to come?’

‘I’d love to, but I’ll be up at Cill Rialaig by then.’

‘Lucky you.’

Everyone knows Cill Rialaig around here. This is the official story. Cill Rialaig is a stone village on the side of a rocky hill, with seven restored cottages for writers and artists. Before the Famine, it was home to families who lived from fishing, livestock and vegetable patches, but most of them died or emigrated when the potatoes failed during the famine. A few hardy souls scraped a living there afterwards, but the last soul left in 1954. Now this place of stones has given birth to a resurgence of art, literature, and tourism.

‘What are you doing for Bealtaine?’ says Bébhinn.

I trawl my memory banks to remember that Bealtaine is the Celtic May-Day festival that celebrates the bringing of the light. I have been awarded a two-week residency and will celebrate Bealtaine with my inner muse. I am a writer.

‘Writing, I expect.’

‘I’m holding a yoga and sauna session if I can get this bloody car fixed.’

Bébhinn hands me a flyer and there is a picture of the wooden sauna and rows of people in yoga gear who all look thin and young, but so what, I tell myself. Mum would sign up in a flash for yoga on the beach. She found a swami in her fifties, and took up yoga and Spanish, but eventually stopped it all when she became ill and old and couldn’t do mad things anymore. Except for her purchase of an orange mobility scooter on which she terrorised the entire village and exasperated my sister, who lived in close vicinity. Mum wore a tartan cap and sewed on special earflaps to keep the wind out of her hearing aids. The extensions were ludicrous, but she didn’t care about how she looked as long as she was reasonably decent, and none of this matters now, because she’s gone, and the hat went to charity and only a vestige of my mother remains on my mantlepiece.

‘I hope you get your jeep fixed in time for Bealtaine,’ I say, but I don’t add so you can prepare people for death because Bébhinn thinks she is doing exactly the opposite.

‘Thanks’ she says, raking at the ashes.

‘How long does it take for the remains of the wood to cool off?’

‘I have to wait a while. The ashes can’t be disposed of straight away,’ she says, and I almost add, especially if, like me, you are attached to them.

Keeping a fire going at just the right burn is a mixture of art and experience, and Bébhinn pokes another piece of kiln-dried beech into the stove. She might be a figure in a Hieronymus Bosch painting but for the laughter of children making sandcastles and dams that will be overrun by the incoming tide. The small talk of their parents carries easily in the light air as I walk around the wooden barrel and up the stairs to the door of the sauna, where the almost-strangers are waiting.

‘Last session,’ says Emilie the Baker as she turns the egg-timer around and we settle in for a final sweat.

‘It’s pretty hot’ says the dark-haired girl, shifting on her towel, her white chest blotchy.

It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice; low and thoughtful, so she is one of the listeners. Easy to miss them in a crowd, but they are important, for every group needs a listener. Every couple, too. Mum and I didn’t listen to each other much until we started to, perhaps a bit too late. I’d like to just sit and listen to her now, but I can’t anymore; I can only imagine the words she might speak and remember imperfectly what she actually said.

‘Let’s go for it!’ says Birthday Girl.

I know she will, because her husband, sister, and best friend will egg her on. That’s what people do who love you; they pick you up when you fall over, encourage you to go for it, look beyond when you get into your habitual dithering, and remember when you lost your coat as a child. Years later, they will buy you a new one, or you will buy one for them and then you will both remember the story about the coat and add another piece of clothing to the tale. Emilie is bound to find love: I am certain of that. The silent, dark couple will live as quietly as they listen, and they may well be the ones whose lives hold the biggest surprise. The Killorglin lads in their red board shorts will be natural born heroes, because in real life they are decent men. I will have a good life, because I have had one so far. I imagine that my mother’s voice will whisper to me from time to time, her voice ever fainter as it becomes my own, and merges with the sound of the waves and the wind.

As the last grain of sand trickles through the egg timer on the wooden wall, ten not-quite-strangers prepare to leave this temporary cocoon. Optimistic from the sauna and the conversation, our pores are open as we step through the door into the glorious vista of Cromane beach and the rest of our lives. All stories eventually end when the tellers and the listeners have gone, but till then, who can predict the coda of any life? All we can do is guess or lie. Or try. Sunbeams glint on the sea as we scatter for one last marine baptism.

Afterwards, on the soft green grass, I wiggle my toes through the blades to get the sand out, the way Mum showed me when I was little. Safe in the anonymity of my age, I change brazenly under a not-very-concealing towel and decide I’ll buy myself a dry robe if I’m still swimming next autumn. I feel soothed by the heat and the steam and the company and anointed by the water. Even though I know this is temporary, I feel safe. From here, the good road leads me onto winding lanes with grass down the middle, and I pull my green car over to merge with the verge and let tractors pass. There are bluebells in the shade and primroses under rocks and I’m a writer in no rush in a grass-coloured vehicle. The ghosts step aside to let me travel on.

Up in Cill Rialaig, the stones of the restored cottages hold up the sky as the murmuring of sea and wind permeates the air. That night, gusts hurl around my refuge and draw flames up from the turf-stacked grate. The warmth of long dead creatures seeps upwards to my bed in the rafters and when I wake, it is Bealtaine—the day of light. I change out of my pyjamas and go outside to sit at a stone table with a view over the Atlantic. I can see for miles. The ocean is a large grey mass, a creature that heaves beneath me and slaps the rocky shore. Look! The black fins of two basking sharks circle below. They trawl between two rocky headlands—to and fro, to and fro—and I imagine their wide mouths hinged open beneath the surface of the water, trawling for plankton, filtering out the nourishment from the cold water. I follow them for an hour as my mind empties of its usual cacophony and the cold seeps into my bottom from the stone seat. An audience gathers around and takes their seats. I am surrounded by those who have watched this ocean over the years and are no longer alive.

‘Look, Mum,’ I say. ‘Imagine the long journey they have taken.’

What are they saying, do you think, she asks, and I do not know if she is referring to the sharks or the people, or both.

‘I imagine they are discussing the ordinary things of life, and the unusual happenings of the day, and they are listening. Every group needs a listener.’

How wonderful, says my mother in a peaceful voice. How wonderful!

And it is.

After the basking sharks move on and the ghosts wander off, I stand up to stretch my legs, then head inside to the seclusion of my writing desk. I pick up my pen and I find a story about ten, or perhaps eleven, almost-strangers in a mobile wood-fired sauna on a Kerry beach, I carry words from one place to another on the page—back and forth, back and forth—and I filter out the meaningful ones and bury others as I braid sentences around each other into paragraphs and then I read aloud, and my mother hears every word. Then I put the top back on my pen.

Afterwards, I search for an ending, for there always is one to be found or made. Perhaps it is this. Three years from now on my mother’s would-be zero birthday—the one with two noughts—we will journey to Cromane Beach. I’ll take the last packet of her well-cooled ashes from my pocket and I’ll tip a grey trickle into the water. Small translucent crabs will bear her between the islands of brown seaweed, then they will loosen their delicate claws and set my mother free in the ocean, letting her swirl there awhile until, under the gentle heat of the sun, she will rise from the water into the air.

Like steam.