Adrift
A wave lifts me up, answers the heavy slice of my arms arcing through the saltwater on either side of the board. The cold sea makes room, strikes a bargain as it catches the fins and propels me towards the glittering swash of Keel’s long white shore.
Raw fingers press down on fibreglass. Teeth grit. Muscles ache. I haul myself forward in an attempt to pop up too late. My knee catches. Ankle drags. I’m searching for a strength I’ve forgotten.
The bargain goes unfulfilled.
I’m thrown off, tipped unceremoniously into the white clouds of bubbling sea foam. My body rolls in slow motion, tugged by the velcro-strap that links me to the fibreglass fish still riding the wave.
My fingers twitch as seaweed brushes against my skin and I imagine cold hands clutchingmy wrists and hauling me down, hear a siren whisper: isn’t the world more manageable when viewed through seawater?
My lungs give out earlier than I want them to.
I emerge slowly, cautiously, like I’m afraid I’ll catch the bends coming all the way up from waist-high water.
I blink salt from my eyes, take a reluctant gulp of air as I search around for my board.
A group of girls are trying to learn how to bodyboard around me. One of them shouts at the others, the barrel wave of her vowels revealing her South Dublin roots. Ignorant to my presence, she readjusts her ziplocked phone, begins to video the others for a TikTok. They shift from scrambling about in the water, organise their bodies, find a studied posture, remain ignorant to surf etiquette.
As I reel in my board, it occurs to me I’ll probably end up in the background of one of their videos, wiped out and revealed as the novice I am, unaware my failure was being filmed. My cheeks sting with salt and shame.
I want to sink back underwater, to disappear into that aquamarine underworld, but then, behind the girls, I spy my sister. She is sitting on her board out back, completely at home in the sea, in herself. Her body is slouched; unimpressed with what the water is offering.
It’s been a glassy morning. When we looked up the surf forecast over breakfast, discussing terms that made us feel somehow different from this gaggle of Dublin girls on holiday, somehow more authentic in our purpose here, we’d been disappointed by the damning rating of POOR TO FAIR.
My sister lifts her hand, raises her thumb in question. Are you alright?
She’d seen my crash out. I shrug, feign apathy as I offer a shacka back before focusing on paddling out, putting the beach and the bodyboarders far behind me as I lean into the burn of my triceps.
A wave rolls under me, and I want to drink it all up until I am indistinguishable from the Atlantic.
I paddle out past the lineup of local surfers, towards the open horizon of blue-green ocean and clear sky. The stacked, sharp edges of Achill Beag and Clare are faded markers in the distance.
I avoid looking in the way of the mainland.
I force myself to stop paddling after I pass the swell, just beyond the lip where the waves begin to pick up, into a pocket of pointlessness. My arms are on fire but they shift in the water as I sit up and watch the world. There are a pod of dolphins – near fifty making their way out towards Keem and beyond. Together. My lips part and I smile at the sight.
The sun’s light warms my face, the top of my head, tickles the water that blinds back.
I just watch the dolphins, their slick skin shining in the harsh August sunlight. One after the other jumping together, diving in sync, nattering at each other, keeping contact.
“Amazing, right?”
I tear my gaze from the pod, seek out the owner of this imposing voice. I expect it to be one of my cousins, but then I realise it’s male and I sit straight, my skin stinging.
“Yeah,” I clear my throat, “that’s the second time I’ve seen them in two days now.”
“Pretty lucky.” He flashes a smile, teeth white against freckled skin as his blue eyes meet mine before turning back to the pod. I look at his dark hair, study the way the sun catches on the silver chain out over his wetsuit, at the beads of water collecting in the shift of his collarbones as he guides his board steady, hips holding it true. “You a local?”
I so desperately want this to be another scenario, to be another dimension where I get to say yes, where I get to point to all the surfers in this line up and list off their names. Instead, I just huff a laugh and shake my head as I try to casually shift my attention back and forth between him and the pod, unsure where to rest my eyesight. “If I was, I probably wouldn’t be out here staring at the dolphins, you know?”
His voice is full serious as he watches them and murmurs, “no, nobody gets tired of dolphins. The sheep on the roads now, maybe just a little.” He turns back to me and holds his fingers up to demonstrate the tiny amount Achill’s flocks of sheep frustrate him. I laugh. “Only a little bit though.”
“You’re not from here.” The words are tripping out of my mouth with an ease I didn’t know I had within me. I think back to the library in Dublin, the stacks of books surrounding me; a princess in a self-constructed tower.
“Caught out,” he simultaneously admits and accuses. We dig our hands into the sea, bodies bracing against the rise in the water.
My chest tightens as much as my core.
“From the North Side as well. Skerries. But, Mam and I go about the place.”
“Oh yeah?”
He nods, pushing his wet hair out of his face.
I notice we’re shifting back towards the throngs of people. It’s like the Atlantic, as if realising we weren’t raised in it, is trying to put us both back in our place. But the swash and rolling wipeouts will only spit us out anew, reborn so that we can’t quite find our footing anymore, the grains of sand shifting underneath our feet.
“Yeah, just living the vanlife. We were in Lahinch, and Inch before that. We move around. Where the wind blows.”
“Sounds great.”
The dolphins are gone now. Gone where the wind blows.
I think of my own self-built walls, heavy like anchors strapped to my ankles, dragging me down instead of holding me up.
“I’m visiting family,” I say, the closest I can bury my fingers into this place, sand crusting around my nailbeds before the backwash sweeps it away.
As if on cue I hear my name being called. We both twist at the sound. Two figures are paddling towards us. “Speaking of,” I explain and I watch his shoulders tense at the sudden surrounding, like we’re orcas moving in for the hunt.
“Ah, you’re sort of local so,” he adds, something catching in his voice. Something I recognise. The ease is still there in his manner, but I don’t delude myself that the moment – whatever it was I was unaware we were silently paying witness to – is gone.
My sister and cousin are talking excitedly about the dolphins when they reach us. They think to ask the young man his name and where he’s staying, things I should have asked, things that are important to ask. I float in the water, silent again as I let them do the conversing, my eyes wandering out after the pod that have now disappeared around the edge of the bay. A breeze tickles the skin of my cheeks I know are windburned despite the thick layer of sun cream.
“We’re staying back that way,” I hear my cousin say. “One of those houses along the road.”
“Oh, do you not live here?”
“No, no. We just fly in from London every few months. Mum’s from Castlebar.”
“Mam and I are in the van.”
I look back as my sister joins in: “A Volkswagen? Very cool.”
He laughs, cheeks going red as he nods. “Yeah, cool until I went for a midnight swim last night only to get in the shower after and realise they turn the hot water off after eight.”
“Jesus, that’s rough.”
Conversation peters out, or at least, I find myself floating away from it until I’m taken back by a gentle set and ride the second. This time, I get my feet under my body and stand up long enough to turn into the right shoulder of the wave. When I have to bail, I’m too close to the shore to fall completely underwater so I end up rolling in the swash instead. I catch myself in the sand, fingers clawing as I glance back and see the three of them still caught up in conversation, unaware of my success at last. Wiping hair out of my eyes, I take a long breath, hoist my board up, and debate heading back to the house. The girls are better talkers anyway. I’ll never stand a chance.
But isn’t failing a fundamental part of surfing anyway? Isn’t that why it’s as much an art as it is a sport?
I go out again. Terrified of everything but the waves. And even though we only exchange small talk, distracted by the improving surf, I don’t regret it, the art of trying.
He catches wave after wave with a nonchalance to his body, but I watch him long enough to catch him grinning as he pulls into a clean face. When he exits over the shoulder, he meets my eye and I think he’s shocked I’ve seen his joy. I want to avert my gaze, but instead, I offer an encouraging smile before turning back to my sister and planning our afternoon as we flop onto our boards. My fingers tingle like there’s an electric current dancing along the water’s surface.
When we finally do go in, we separate as he leaves for the camp. I offer an awkward see you round which I replay over in my head as I peel out of my wetsuit, hanging it on the line to dry at the foot of the misty Slievemore. Stepping into the shower, alone now, I turn the dial down and gasp as I feel the icy water hit my back. I think of him in his shower, skin freed of neoprene, metres and yet miles from my own skin shocked by the same water source. Think of the same cold coursing down his chest, catching at his collarbones and forging rivers in the dips of his rushing veins.
In the afternoon I drive the girls up around the cliffs, the thin road twisting as the earth rises. A beaten metal barrier protects us from the sharp descent down to the water. Our music is loud. My cousin sticks her head out the window, her dark hair swept sideways. She whoops loudly as we pass a cluster of disgruntled sheep perched precariously on the cliff’s edge.
Coming round a bend, Keem with its turquoise water appears before the beginnings of Croaghaun’s high sea cliffs. We spy the abandoned building on top of Moyteoge Head, the one we hope to climb to and sit behind at the lookout, seeking out dolphin pods in the sunset.
“Well now, here we go again,” I mutter as we turn another corner and I shift my feet to quickly press down on the breaks and clutch.
The girls are too busy shouting along to the lyrics to pay heed to the appearance of the six sheep slowly making their way across the road in front of us, busy on their own hike to Croaghaun.
I’m about to shift my foot to the accelerator when my eyes flit across to the van stuck behind the sheep on the opposite side of the road.
I spy a familiar set of blue eyes.
He smiles from the driver’s seat, cap pushing hair out of the way. His gaze is on me and he makes a small gesture again with his index and thumb. Just a little bit.
I laugh, watching his smile grow brighter until the edges of his eyes crease.
A growl, perhaps too harsh, and I manage to get the car back into movement. In my wing mirror, I see him hold back a moment, hesitate, before pulling out and circling around the sheep, disappearing down the cliffside.
I continue on towards Keem, its tucked white sand burning in the raw sun that yet lingers.
He didn’t have to speak to me, didn’t need to acknowledge me again; but here we were, on the edge of the world, bound by water.