The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(26)

He thought he heard the crash of his head on the stones, imagined he felt warm blood seep about the cold stone. He knew that he was going to be sick, very sick. And then, as a heavy weight pounded against the back of his head, someone switched off the power and Niall fell into unconsciousness. The worst thing was, not a living soul knew about it.





11


Dan


Dan caught the last of the fresh sea breeze before the downpour began to spit in tiny spiteful daggers from the hooded clouds overhead. He wasn’t sure what he thought of this place yet. So far, all he’d seen was rain, green fields, and grey skies and seas that might easily be mistaken for each other, such was the depth of colour in them both. The people were nice. He’d only met a handful, but Mr Singh, the shopkeeper and the doctor’s widow, Mrs O’Shea – their welcome was genuine. He could sense it and it warmed him when he’d picked up enough provisions to do him until the following morning. All the same, he probably couldn’t have picked a more depressing day to arrive back in Ballycove after taking a short trip back to the city for little more than distraction and printing supplies, There was a storm pulling in over the Atlantic. He could feel it, in that shop, when the sergeant had arrived in to ask about the missing boy.

‘That’s right,’ he confirmed gruffly for Mr Singh, ‘Jo’s grandson, a city boy, he has no idea of what a strom in Ballycove can do. Mind you, it’s probably half the reason he’s missing. If he’d known what he was about and made some friends, he mightn’t be sitting with his legs dangling over the sea wall in an oncoming gale.’

‘Poor Jo and Lucy.’ Mrs O’Shea shook her head. ‘She’s taken over from my husband, you know, in the surgery,’ she said filling in blank spaces that really made no sense to Dan who’d only just arrived.

‘That’s nice,’ he said rather uselessly and then caught the shopkeeper’s eye.

‘Her husband was the GP. Poor Doctor O’Shea – unfortunately he passed away and we were all so sorry, but we’ve been lucky enough to get someone to fill in. Of course, we all still miss the old doctor,’ Mr Singh said diplomatically.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Mrs O’Shea said before turning her attention to the sergeant. ‘So there’s still no news?’

‘They think the boy has gone into the sea?’ Mr Singh whispered.

‘It looks that way. Last time he was spotted was sitting on the wall opposite his grandmother’s cottage. You know what those winds were like last night: one swell and he’d be washed out in a flash.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Dan said.

‘I don’t know how a kid can sneak out a doorway and no-one notices until hours later. It makes you wonder, and the mother a doctor too. It goes to show you…’ The sergeant might have been up for a bitching session about some of the locals, but remembering Dan was standing there made him stop up short. ‘Well, let’s hope that he moved off beforehand and he’s met up with some kid and lost track of time,’ the sergeant said although his expression was enough to know that he thought this was unlikely. ‘It’s a lot of time to lose track of, since last night, mind,’ he grumbled before heading off into what remained of the storm.

‘Is there a search party?’ Dan asked as his few groceries were run through the checkout.

‘There won’t be tonight. It’s too dangerous to put a boat out in that and, let’s face it, if he’s out there, he’s already lost.’ The shopkeeper sighed.

‘I suppose if there’s something organised tomorrow we can all give a hand, right?’ Dan said paying in euros before heading out in the darkening evening.

It caught him up, the idea of such tragedy occurring in a place that seemed to be so far removed from the violence and crime of London life that he’d become accustomed to seeing on his news every night. Over here it was different; from the way the shopkeeper had taken the news; the loss of one of their own, it was personal. It turned out that they hardly even knew the boy, in the end.

It may have been dark and overcast, but there was no denying the drama of Ballycove. The coastline sat in a jagged crouch, leering out across the Atlantic. The cottage on the headland might be the centre middle seat, looking down on the most spectacular theatre imaginable – the living, breathing ocean. Dan knew it was just the weather that made the place feel as if a foreboding character was lurking somewhere just out of sight. He put it down to the missing boy. Something like that stirs a place up, filling even the emptiest of places with impending tragedy. It set Dan’s imagination on end, a bristling sense that there were ideas, if not always very happy stories lurking just beneath the surface.

Soon he was turning off the main road up the narrow track. When his headlights skirted across the rough patchy land, he spotted a dozen rabbits scattering away into their burrows in response to his unwelcome intrusion. The cottage was not big. Rather, it seemed like a bent geriatric, pinned to the hillside, facing off the Atlantic stoically. Dan pulled up at the front door. There was a small window either side of a deep porch and a whistling chorus of rattling shells hanging from the gate caught in the ferocious wind. There wasn’t a soul about for miles, and yet, it didn’t feel lonely here – an odd thing, since he’d felt tragically isolated so recently in the middle of London.