Jessie Keane: Ruthless

‘Through the front. It’s the only way. The windscreen. Come on.’

Not giving her time to answer, Redmond took a couple of deep breaths and plunged under the black churning water.

Orla was left there, alone, the water lapping around her face. Terrified, she didn’t want to move. But she was alone here. She would die here. Redmond was gone.

She took a desperate, despairing breath and dived.

Orla swam, lungs bursting, pushing herself along to the front of the little cabin. In horror she saw with salt-stung eyes the dim outline of Fergal in his short-sleeved white shirt, his arms floating aloft, his hair billowing around his shocked, bug-eyed dead face. He was still strapped into his seat at the controls. She saw the hole where the windscreen had been. She couldn’t see Redmond.

She wanted, so badly, to breathe. Her head felt like a balloon, pumped full of air she ached to release. Just to inhale one wonderful mouthful of air… only she wouldn’t. If she breathed in, she would draw the savagely cold salt water into her lungs and that would be the end of her.

Somehow she reached the windscreen. Fighting against the downward plunge of the little plane she wrestled her way out through the gap and was suddenly in the open ocean, her ears hurting with the pressure, a strong current pulling her. All around her she saw only Stygian milky-green gloom. Above her… was it possible?… she thought she saw fainter light.

She glanced down in sick horror and saw the plane sinking, sinking, sinking down to who knew what monstrous depth. She turned, and kicked for the surface. She knew she wouldn’t make it. Her lungs were exploding with pain. Soon she would have to suck in that last, fatal breath. And Redmond was gone, swept away; he must be dead.

Despair grabbed her as she swam upward. She could see nothing, hear nothing but the bubbling rush of the sea. The current buffeted her. Soon she was too tired even to kick. Her limbs were frozen with the cold. She stopped moving and hung in the water, rising inch by inch. Heart bursting, lungs screaming, she surrendered. She lifted her head and opened her mouth and gave herself up to death.

But when she breathed in, she breathed in air.

She was on the surface, the wind knocking her from side to side, the churning waves tossing her left and right, slapping her in the face.

Orla gasped in mouthful after mouthful of incredibly sweet salty air. Shivering, sobbing, she looked around her. The moon was still up there, still casting its placid silvery glow over the turbulent white-capped sea.

She was alive.

But where was Redmond, where was her twin?

She tried to scream his name, but all that emerged was a breathless croak. The sea was too cold, the currents too powerful, constantly dragging at her, numbing her, filling her mouth with sickeningly strong salt water.

From time to time, over the pummelling waves and the relentless power of the sea, she could make out a low shape to her left, an outline of black against the dark grey of the skies. A long way away. Two hundred yards, maybe?

It took a while before she understood what it was.

‘Oh shit.’ She wept with weak gratitude, spitting out water, shivering with shock and cold.

It was rocks.

It was land.

Minutes later, the sea flung her on to the shore. Scraped and bloodied by rocks, she lay there as the foam surged over her, trying to lift her head, failing, gulping down mouthfuls of salt. She was gagging, vomiting, coughing. Slowly, painfully she dragged herself up the beach until at last she was lying on wet sand, and the water couldn’t reach her any more. Its roar, like an angry lion, filled her head. But she had survived. By some miracle, she had been spared.

Finally she was able to raise her eyes, look around her. The moon plunged behind clouds and then emerged again, illuminating the landscape. What she longed to see, prayed to see, was another form lying here – Redmond, her twin, her life.

There was no one.

Away in the distance, inland, she could see lights. A house. People who might help. But she was alone on the beach and for the first time she realized in panic that from here on she would be alone in life too.

She broke down and cried then, unable to believe that he was gone, that he was lost to her. How would she go on without him? Sodden, shivering, bleeding from many small cuts, she pushed herself to her feet and stood there, taking in the thundering sea, the ghostly moonlit sand and glossy wet pebbles, the sheer vast emptiness of it all.

‘ Redmond! ’ she screamed.

But no one answered.

No one came.

Walking away from the beach felt like a betrayal, but Orla knew that if she was to survive, she would have to get out of the chilling wind that was flattening her wet clothes against her skin. And she might yet find him alive. She clung to that hope as she stumbled through the dark, trembling and falling and crying, towards the lights of the house. Her shivering had intensified, and she knew that hypothermia was setting in, it was all she could do to resist the overwhelming desire to simply lie down and surrender to the cold, to sleep and never wake again.

The massive roar of the sea sounded a counterpoint to her frenzied heartbeat as she forced herself to walk on, to survive this. She passed a stack of lobster pots, a pile of nets and old chains, ropes and weights. Tripping over something in the sand, she sprawled head-first on to a narrow walkway beside an upturned rowing boat, its paint peeling off. Using the boat for support, she pulled herself upright and staggered painfully on. Her shoes must have fallen off in the sea; when she glanced down her feet were bloodied and her tights were in shreds. Her feet were so numb she couldn’t even feel the pain of the gravel biting into the soles.

Redmond.

She was at the cottage now, gulping, trying to compose herself. An old bike was propped against the wall. There was no sign of a car. Instead of a doorbell there was a miniature brass bell suspended on a bracket, a brass gnome crouched beneath it, holding a chain. She yanked at the chain, and the bell rang.

Nothing happened. She yanked it again.

Jesus, please, please, will you open the fecking door?

It seemed like an age before she heard movement. Bolts being thrown back. Then all at once a small man was standing there. He was sixtyish, with a thick mop of springy grey hair. His face was as gnarled and weathered as driftwood. Bright hazel eyes stared out at her in surprise from under dark brows. He wore a white shirt, pulled up to his elbows to show sinewy workman’s arms, red braces, and black trousers shiny from wear.

‘Can you help?’ said Orla in a cracked voice that was high with strain. She knew the one thing she couldn’t afford to tell anyone was that she’d been in a plane crash. The flight hadn’t been authorized for take-off. It wouldn’t take the Garda long to realize that something was amiss, and they would be on to the English police before you could say knife. ‘My brother and I were out in a dinghy. It capsized. Can you help me look for him please?’

The man stared for a long moment. Then he stepped back and said, ‘Come along in.’

Orla entered the warm cottage interior. It felt unreal, this cosy normality, like a dream. A woman was watching TV at the kitchen table. The newsman was saying that British troops had sealed off the Catholic Bogside area in Londonderry after clashes with rioters. The woman looked up in wonder at this half-drowned young woman standing there dripping all over her clean floor.

‘What…?’ she breathed, coming to her feet.

‘There’s been a boating accident,’ said the man. ‘Cissie, get the brandy out.’