When he reaches shore, he looks back. Where is she. He scans the horizon, everything quiet, streaks of dawn now visible to the east. She’ll be grand. Might’ve reached land somewhere else, might’ve scrambled up the rocks at Cloosh, or drifted on towards Mutton Island. Christ, that’s at least five kay away. At fucking least. How far out were they anyway? Not that far, they weren’t past Cloosh Head surely.

  He plods back to their belongings, gets dressed. He starts to fold her clothes away before realizing what he’s doing. Maybe there’s people watching. Doggers. Probably hiding in the dunes. Saw the whole thing. Watching him now. He gets to his feet, calls out towards the dark sea. Then again, louder, his hands splayed rigid either side of his mouth, fingers pointing skyward like pearl-tipped exclamation marks. ‘Hey!’ he shouts, and again, ‘hey where are you!’ because he doesn’t know what else to do.

  ***

  Three am, we were driving home. We saw discs glowing by the strand, so we pulled into the car park, to walk the dunes, to suck on some cold sea air.

  Parking under the lone lamp post, we laughed about the dogging rumours. Wouldn’t it be funny if we came across some fuckery. Yes, wouldn’t that have been something.

  On the dunes, we pulled greasy fistfuls of marram, scattered them behind us, some Hansel and Gretel thing, how to get back home, how to return (we didn’t want to go home) (we were hoping to find people making El-Oh-Vee-EE, just for us). Our feet sank, cool sand filled our shoes, it felt good.

  A yelping fox in a far-off field saw us standing there, and fled. The ocean grumbling over its worn pebbles reminded us of ourselves (we didn’t want to be reminded). We stripped, then on into the waves.

  The water felt no different than the air. We pushed past the little tongues lashing warnings at us (get back, back). We kept going, then floated, holding hands, X-X.

  (close our eyes and fix it here, silver waves trapped solid)

  This water shifted beneath us.

  And on shore, what?

  The yelp, so far away it barely exists (what was it, was it tomorrow).

  This water shifted and we were not where we should be and we were trying to get back to what we were, but this keen, we found no foothold and our limbs, their sad frenzy, remember, but the water’s no different than the air, and we left our limbs behind and we left our pink lungs behind and the cold ocean got into us and we were left behind is what it was.

  ***

  Three am and we’ll finally be heading homeward, spent. But when the beams catch something by the strand, we’ll decide to pull in.

  The sea will beckon us, gurgling baby-soft. When water whispers round our ankles, we’ll keep walking. When water reaches the tender heat of our armpits, it’ll seem that we’ve crossed a threshold. We’ll let the waves rock us, forgive everything.

  and you’re trying to write about that last night you spent together in Silver Strand, and you’ve chosen to present the idea of tapetum lucidum in the eyes of nocturnal animals, trying to do the inexplicable justice, this miracle of a thin iridescent lining laying just behind the retina, a sheath that glows when light shines on it, reflecting back directly along the light path, an echoing disc enabling night vision, and without which clear sight would be impossible

  and you’re closing your eyes to picture a creature, hiding in a hedgerow

  on a damp spring night, to bear silent witness to it there, hiding

  from the overwhelming beams of an advancing car

  a creature trying to get to the other side trying to go back, back to its mate

  and at the back of your eyes can you find forgiveness

  SKY AN IRIS

  Three barrettes jut from Eily’s mouth. Bathroom light humming in the dawn, she coils her plait into a silvered black bun at her nape. Her teenage son Cassius stands behind her, watching her in the mirror, covering one eye with his hand, then the next.

  That what you’re wearing to town, Cass?

  Yep.

  How ’bout your jeans instead of your shorts? You’re a big boy now.

  Nah.

  Well, tie back your hair and go eat some muesli. Don’t forget to screw the lid back on good and tight.

  Her phone bleeps full charge from the hall stand below. She heads downstairs, pushes her arms through her husband’s coat slumped damp over the banister where he left it earlier when he came in from tending the mare. It’s still warm. She tips her fingers in the holy water font by the front door and sprinkles the framed photograph above it: her mother and father holding hands across a gleaming tractor engine at the Galway Ploughing Championships. She inherited the house and land from them after they died within three months of each other. The youngest sibling, she’d been the only one who promised not to leave.

  Outside, the motion-detector light flashes on, illuminating the pea-gravel farmyard and the colour-coded rows of recycling bins where a slurry tank used to be. The air is still weighted with night; she feels it, ice across the forehead. Sinking her chin into the coat’s musky collar, she pulls out the cart then fetches Bessie from the plywood stall in the garage beside her husband’s car. Two of the mares look out the stable doors as she walks the doe-eyed ass to the yard and hitches her to the cart. She secures bit in mouth, the animal rolling its tongue over the chilly metal. In the dark dawn sky, shafts of car light shoot across rushes in waterlogged fields: neighbours striking out to Roscommon for work, or on to Galway to their cloud-computing jobs in IBM, Oracle, SAP, Cisco. Narrowing her eyes, she evaluates the heavy clouds in the distance, then pats the animal’s rump before bending to inspect each oiled hoof.

  She’s never learnt to drive. That particular freedom, she’s decided, is not for her. She understands this puts pressure on her husband. She’s told him she just could never picture herself behind a wheel, reversing, indicating. And if she can’t picture it, she can’t do it. Her will is strong, he knows enough not to challenge it. Both of them having been brought up on the land, he accepts her preference for the dependable strive of a working animal, the simple dialect of whistles and clicks, snorts and whinnies.

  Since early adulthood, since just before she met him, she has struggled to trust any car’s set mechanism, has considered their machinations daunting. The language itself unnerves her – coolant, clutch, alternators, the mystery of batteries, of spark plugs. To steer, to aquaplane, the stark rev of engine in the stillness of a country lane, the slick acceleration, the slip-slap of wiper blades on a sodden stormy morning, the dry hum of heater, the navy flash of school uniform, the slither of braking tyres, a thin scream.

  The trip to Roscommon this morning is unavoidable; she needs to sell her week-old chicks at the artisan market. There are always fresh-faced young couples, IT recruits eager to start a self-sustaining life in the country, beginning with a chicken coop which they’ll learn is no deterrent to foxes or minks. Whatever chicks Eily has left, she’ll sell quarter-price as fresh feed to the Captive Raptor Research Centre on the Roscommon–Sligo border.

  She has watched over the eggs in her henhouse incubator, has hearkened to the little beaks tip-tip-tapping from inside their shells. She has moved each of the newly hatched to the receiving box above, warmed with an infrared bulb. She has fed to the pigs the eggs that remain silent, holding every one of the shrouded puzzles up to the light before throwing it into the swill bucket.

  At seven days old, the hatched need to go. In the henhouse beside the stables, Eily packs the chirping chicks into two cardboard boxes and carries them out to place them in the cart. His hair hanging lank over his face, Cassius stands by the cartwheel, kicking the spokes, listing at each strike:

  Silkies. White an’ black.

  Phoenix. Silver an’ gold.

  Rhode Island Red. Red.

  Born too early, born too late, it’s held Cassius shouldn’t have been born at all. Why had he come, five weeks premature, to a delighted Eily, a first-time mother at forty-five? To a father who’d spent years yearning for a child he knew could never happen, knew it even before, still childless after their third wedding anniversary, the doctor took him out of earshot and explained to him about fickle genetics, about the treason of hereditary infertility, about how he should consider carefully before deciding whether to tell his fragile wife.

  After the birth, it had been a slow dawning for them: Cassius wasn’t going to follow the template. At three, he struggled to walk, to feed himself. At five, only his parents could comprehend him. At eight, it was understood he could never attend school, never sit in line, never use a pen without smearing the page with shocks of indigo, never understand a computer keyboard or join in song without slapping hands to eyes, wailing. On his last journey home from school, he’d recited the classroom songs, cocooned beside his father in their car. He was homeschooled from then, trailing his parents around their organic farm.

  Eily’s husband can’t drive them to town, their eldest mare having gone into labour last night. It’s proving to be a difficult delivery. She has to face the journey alongside Cassius without him. She checks the battery on her phone then refreshes once more the local weather site. She cuts a thin rod from a sally tree.

  They’re no more than three kilometres up the Roscommon road when Cassius lunges at the reins. Eily flicks the sally rod, snatching the leather back.

  No, Cassie! It’s dangerous, sit back down, good boy.

  I want a bring Bessie a town!

  Watch me do it.

  Nah, Mum! Let me!

  Stop! You’ll frighten Bessie. If you’re good, I’ll let you take her home. Now watch me work the reins. Watch Bessie’s mouth, her ears moving. Watch her hooves, which one leads. Listen to my clicks, she knows them.

  But Cassius has turned away towards the open back of the cart, staring sullen through his tangled locks at the retreating road.

  Eily’s husband is as charmed and wary of her as he is of his black-eyed child. He both monitors and embraces their peculiarities: his son’s pressing inventories of minutiae, his wife’s terror of a darkening sky. Just before he met and married her, there’d been an incident during a morning thunderstorm. She’d been a giddy front-seat passenger being driven home from an all-night party, her own twenty-first in Roscommon. Water had built up between the tyres and the road. There was no traction. Unchecked, the car would respond to neither steering nor braking. A neighbour, the young McLaughlin girl walking to school, had been killed.

  Having rejected her parents’ devotion to prayer in her teenage years, he watched her take it up again not long after this incident, embracing it with more fervour than her parents ever had. His wife’s day now seems hinged around appeals for redemption – the morning prayer, the evening rosary with him and Cassius. He stoops to her rituals, however senseless he deems them to be.

  During the day, he spends most of his time outdoors, tending to his animals, while she darts between henhouse, polytunnel and home. His son shadows from a distance, moving at regular intervals between them both, following some internal clock. The family of three come together in the evening, and he reunites finally with his wife at night, their bedroom door ajar. Their son lies awake in the adjoining room, his door jammed open with a three-legged Buckaroo. Every night, his lanky teenage body reaching from headboard to base, Cassius lists his neighbours’ names, counties of origin, dates of birth, zodiac signs, eye colours.

  Mister Eugene McLaughlin.

  The County Roscommon.

  March thirty-first, one-nine-six-five.

  Aries.

  Black, an’ gold flash.

  As their cart passes the jennet’s field, the crossbreed whinnies. The sound ends in an ass’s bray, a throwback to its mother. Cassius stands, faces the sound.

  What? What you want, Blood? You want a be going down the road?

  Quit with the shouting, Cass! And sit back down before you fall off, there’s a good lad.

  Cassius covers his mouth with his hand. His mother taps the space behind her with the sally rod.

  Come on, Cassie, don’t stand in a moving cart. And don’t draw that poor creature over, it’s gone bad.

  From behind his palm, Cassius calls out to the animal, a high, lingering whistle. The crossbreed flattens its long ears and gallops towards the hawthorn ditch, shaking its mohawk mane, its swish tail high. Cassius swings his arms out.

  Whaat! What you waant!

  Straining on the reins, Bessie searches the jennet’s field, trying to see past her blinkers. She stops sudden mid-trot, and veers in towards the ditch. The boxes slide across the tilted cart. A panic of chirps rises but the stiff cardboard lids remain folded. Eily yanks the reins.

  Cassius! What kind of a bloody fool are you! Sit down, before I wallop the nonsense out of you, and by Christ I will!

  Pulling the ass back onto the road, Eily whacks the dark cruciform stripe along the animal’s spine with the sally rod. Bessie counters with a sharp tug before trotting on.

  Move those boxes back up here behind me, Cass, and sit yourself down right now please.

  Cassius sees the despair in the jennet, its dark-eyed stare from behind the white hawthorns. He wipes his nose with his sleeve and settles between his mother and the boxes.

  Eily promises her god daily that she’ll carry with grace the heavy blessing he has bestowed after her years of silent pleading. Every evening, before bed, she has her husband and son join her to recite the rosary: the Joyful, the Luminous, the Sorrowful or the Glorious Mysteries, depending on the day. Facing her St Anne and Child statuette placed on top of the television, she leads and they follow.

  We fly to Thee, O Virgin of Virgins, our Mother. To Thee do we come, before Thee we stand, sinful and sorrowful.

  Head bowed, her husband mouths the incantations. Listening to his wife’s voice skim soft through the words, he hovers over those silent spaces in between, over truths hidden beneath the worn prayers. He has forgiven her a long time ago.

  Cassius pulls threads from his shirt and pokes the tiny honeycomb of speaker holes on the side of the television. The sound is muted; lips form words on the screen, opening and closing, stretching and pouting. He waits for them to sync with his mother’s prayer; they always do, eventually, even if just for a few seconds. He drones ‘prayfrus, prayfrus, prayfrus’, only falling into line with his father at the conclusion, when saints are invoked.

  O Holy St Anthony.

  Pray for us.

  Saint Therese of Lisieux.

  Pray for us.

  At the end, Eily presents the statuette to them. Her husband’s lips brush over St Anne’s feet. Her son blesses himself with both hands, slapping forehead, chest, shoulders. Her heart cramps as he kisses St Anne’s plaster head and strokes the veil-draped head of the Child.

  Several cars pass them along the road, drivers waving cautiously out the window, buckled children staring motionless. Eily looks straight ahead, lifting one finger in curt greeting from her tightly balled fist around the reins. Bessie trots on, ears swivelling, grey head nodding. Cassius taps the cardboard lids in time with the hoofbeats.

  Red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet.

  Eily stiffens.

  Where? Where’s the rainbow, Cassius?

  There. Behind. Over Blood’s field. And look a big black sky round it, Mum. A big black lid round the lot of us, and us in a big pot, and not a one of us can get out.

  She hears the first heaving trundle of thunder. Pulling Bessie up, she stands, listening, searching the sky, her hand trembling on her son’s shoulder. The next swell of thunder blasts overhead as a flare of lightning bursts, its crackled light fizzing around them.

  Home! We’re going home! We’ve to go home, Cassius!

  She pulls hard on the rein, turning back. The twisting bit cuts Bessie’s lip. Grinding teeth, the animal shakes her stiff mane, shunts back and forth in a series of awkward moves, and breaks into a trot homeward. Eily’s phone bleats in her pocket.

  She’d known Cassius was touched by the hand of her god long before her husband did. She’d noticed early the baby’s closed stare, the limp puppet hands, the slack mouth. She’d kissed her tiny son, caressed him, crooned to him, cajoled him, but never once had the infant broken into a smile, never once had her child slipped a hand in hers, never nestled in her lap or answered her rhymes: ‘Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the? … Cassie … Ran up the? …’

  As he grew, she’d fixed on her son’s darkening eyes, seeking to steer them towards some shade of blue. The halcyon blue of a clear and cloudless day or, God, please, her husband’s raw blue, his iris a pure sky.

  But as the years passed and her son’s eyes continued to darken, she suffered Cassius’ impenetrable stare as a just yoke. Hadn’t her prayers been sufficiently answered, lying under McLaughlin in a neighbouring shed? She’d been his childhood crush, she’d always known how he’d longed for her. Brittle as their covenant was, McLaughlin got a retribution he was marginally satisfied with, a flimsy redress for his dead sister mangled by a car years before. And Eily got her child. Neither could ask for more.

  For the first few years, she waited for her husband to hold the child up to the light and see within, see right through, to her. After a while, for both child and husband, she learned to take one day at a time.

  She tackled her son on each misconception as it happened.

  You can’t eat your dinner with a bread knife.

  For why?

  You can’t leave your bed at night to wander among the horses.

  For why?

  You can’t put the chicks in the kettle.