Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

She ran back through the dunes to discover her mother in the sea, up to her waist in water. The hotel swimmers were making their way toward her, calling to her, their red bathing caps bobbing like stray buoys as they approached. Aileen ran down the beach, sliding and stumbling over the stones. She saw her mother tumble face forward and disappear for a couple of seconds beneath the surface. The instructor and one of the women had reached her now and were attempting to lift her, the water churning white in a mess of flailing arms and limbs. As Aileen waded out to meet them, they faced for shore and began to make their way back in, carrying her mother between them. They laid her down on the jetty wall and Aileen looked on as her mother coughed up water, spluttered, choked, coughed up some more, her hair plastered in wet strands to her skull.

They carried her mother to the hotel, up a long, straight avenue, with mature trees bordering the lawns on either side. Two peafowl, a hen and a cock, were foraging along the grass verge; they gently nudged and butted each other and raised their heads in lazy ambivalence as the party went by. Her mother was brought to a bedroom, and the hotel manager organized a robe and a pot of tea. One of the women offered a change of clothes — underwear and an oversized cardigan and skirt — which Aileen promised to return by post. Feeling nauseous again, she excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she vomited a little and splashed water on her face. She came out of the bathroom to hear her mother reciting her local pedigree to the other women as if she were a stud animal, delivering it in a singsong voice, like a poem learned at school. Aileen thought she could probably recite the list herself at this stage, she’d heard it often enough, though over the years her mother had become a little devious. Every so often, by way of erratum perhaps, or downright lie, she would slip in something hitherto unheard-of, some small, brazen embellishment.

When they were left alone, her mother ran a bath, refusing Aileen’s offers of help. Every so often, Aileen knocked on the door to ask if she was all right, if she needed help washing her hair, but her mother said she didn’t. “Call me when you want to get out,” Aileen said through the door. She sat in a chair by the window and watched gulls stalk the lawn outside, and a group of children play tag on the beach, moving amphibiously between pools, cliff path, and rocks. After a while, she heard the gurgle of water down the plughole and pictured her mother attempting to clamber unaided from the bath, slipping on the wet floor. She went over to the bathroom, but when she put her hand to the door, she discovered it was locked.

Later that evening, back at the nursing home, Aileen got her mother into a nightdress and helped her into bed. At her mother’s insistence, she went downstairs to the matron’s office and fetched some brown paper to package up the borrowed clothes. “You’ll send them tomorrow, won’t you?” her mother said. “They’ll only go missing here.” Eily, mercifully, hadn’t yet made an appearance this evening. Aileen topped up her mother’s water glass. Beside the bed was a softly rounded groove in the floorboards. They were the original boards — eighteenth-century oak, according to the nursing home’s brochure — and were peppered with small knotholes that spiraled away into blackness. Toward the end of the bed was another, identical, groove. A different bed must once have occupied this space, its ordinances closely but not exactly mirroring the one in which her mother now lay. Some other woman, perhaps a whole series of women, had lain here, night upon night, year upon year, mouths parted slightly in sleep, all the time pressing this memento of their existence into the timber.

Her mother took a sip of water, then lay back on the pillows, closing her lips tightly against the offer of more. “You forgot to take that book last night,” she said. “Don’t forget it this time. There’s nothing safe here.” And as Aileen picked up the book and put it in her bag, it occurred to her that these might very well be her mother’s last words.

On the way back to her hotel, she took the slip road for Ballyphehane. Her mother’s house was a modest two-bedroom townhouse in a not-so-fashionable area, and she wondered now how Janet had managed to find a tenant for it. She parked directly outside. She would be polite, she told herself; calm and polite. The tenant — the girl — would understand; Aileen would understand if it were her. She would say that she knew it was the girl’s home now, that she, Aileen, only wanted a look around, that she had come all this way. As she sat in the car, she rehearsed two speeches: one for if the girl turned out to be pleasant, the other for if she was rude. All the time she was rehearsing, she saw the girl as clearly as if she were standing in front of her, still fine boned and blond, still dressed like a cat burglar.

She was about to step out of the car when she noticed that the front garden was straggling and uncared for, her mother’s precious lupines listing sideways and choked by weeds. She experienced a sudden burst of anger toward the girl, who she decided now would most likely be rude. To one side of the front door an overflowing trash bin was disgorging its contents onto the path. The curtains were missing from the living room window — she could imagine what her mother would say about that — and she could see beer cans on the coffee table and the silhouette of someone on the couch watching television. But the silhouette was not of a girl, fine boned or otherwise. It was that of a man and when, perhaps having noticed the car, he stood up and came to the window, she saw that it was Janet’s husband, Richard. The garden was small, no more than half a dozen yards from porch to gate, and she knew he must have recognized her. She waited, wondering if he might go to the door and invite her in, but he remained at the window, and after a moment she turned the key in the ignition and drove away.

At the end of the street she went east, skirting the edges of the city as she made her way back to her hotel. Tomorrow she would say goodbye to her mother at the nursing home and would catch her flight back to London. The nausea that usually renewed its onslaught at this hour was missing this evening; her doctor had told her it would go in time, that she shouldn’t worry when it did. She found that in its absence, without its bittersweet niggling, she felt nothing, no sense of anything beyond herself, and so she tried to summon an image. All that offered itself was a grainy composite of other women’s scans, a shadowy thing floating in a sea of amniotic fluid. For a moment, as she waited at traffic lights, it took on features, morphed into a girl, fair-haired and fine boned. Its eyes were tightly shut, the way her mother’s eyes had been when she came out of the water that day, steeled against the sting of salt. Her mother, who, it had seemed to Aileen, had been striking out with the last of her strength, her arms raised in resistance against her rescuers, her face set to open sea.

At Kinnego the light was silver, the sea and sky gray, and the wind that snatched at her breath had a sharp, almost metallic, edge. Anytime he had spoken of this place he had always spoken of the light and now, early morning, the beach deserted, she understood what he meant. They had traveled from Dublin the day before but had left late, then stopped too long in Derry, so that it was dusk before they drove north along the Foyle. The sea was already slipping into darkness then, the cabin lights of a boat carried like a lamp up the estuary, and as they passed through Quigley’s Point, Moville, Greencastle, small dark shapes cut the air above the water: birds, perhaps, or bats from the trees that grew along the shore road.