Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

—

WAKING THAT MORNING IN his brother’s bungalow, she had pulled back the bedroom curtains to get a proper look at the sea and had found herself staring at a concrete wall, roughly plastered, set no more than three or four feet back from the house. Beneath the window, filling the space between it and the wall, was a tangle of orange netting, half a dozen crudely cut lengths of galvanized sheeting, and a stack of plastic boxes stamped with the logo of a fisherman’s co-op.

“It’s a boat shed,” Jonathan said from the bed, and she had turned to see him raised on one elbow, watching her in amusement.

“But why here?” she said, gesturing in disbelief to the wall. “Why block out the sea, the light?” It was cold in the bedroom, her breath misting the glass as she leaned closer to the window. The net held remnants of the sea: strips of black, leathery seaweed, thin as bootlaces, and a handful of barnacles. “Imagine,” she said, conscious of his eyes on her as she shivered in her nightdress, “what a view like that would be worth in Howth.”

He had laughed, patting the pillow next to him. “You’re not in Kansas now, Dorothy,” he said, and as she climbed back under the blankets he put his hand on the jut of her hip and pulled her close.

They drove to Kinnego first thing after breakfast, before anyone else was up. They parked at the top of a rocky headland, and as she stepped out of the car the wind almost pulled the door from her grasp. Below them the bay lay wide and empty, the cliffside a tangle of green, bushy vegetation sloping to the water. She held his hand as they descended the steep path to the beach. “A ship from the Spanish Armada was wrecked here,” he said, putting an arm around her waist to steady her. “An old Venetian trading ship, converted for battle.”

She stopped and tucked her hair down the back of her jacket to keep it from blowing about her face. “Did many people drown?”

He nodded. “Aye, and the locals ate the ones that didn’t. Or so we were told as children.”

“That’s a myth, obviously,” she said.

“Wait until you’ve met the locals.”

“You’re a local,” she said, but already he had dislodged her from the crook of his arm and was striding ahead of her across the sand, over to the tidal pools where rocks, black and sleek, broke the surface of the water.

A dog was loose on the beach, a long-haired black-and-white creature, and now it came tearing across the sand toward her, its ears flat to its head, its tail swinging like a rudder. It skidded to a halt in front of her and, opening its mouth, dropped something at her feet. “What’s that you’ve got for me?” she said.

It was a crab, the shell a buttermilk color with a sprinkling of green, like mildew, and a darker green along its scalloped rim. It wriggled as she held it between thumb and forefinger, its grayish legs slow and jerky, like the legs of the old men in bathing trunks at the Forty Foot on Christmas mornings. She tapped the shell and the crab stopped wriggling, drew its legs up into its belly.

The dog leaped in the air, snapping at the crab. “Now I get it,” she said. “You want me to throw it.” The dog whined, skittered back and forth on the sand. “That wouldn’t be very nice, would it?” she said. She held the crab above her head with one hand, ruffling the dog’s ears with the other. The dog barked. “You don’t understand, do you?” she said. She walked to the edge of the waves and, bending down, released the crab into the water.

The dog yelped and tore into the spray. When the crab was carried back in on the next wave, he seized it and dropped it again at her feet. “No!” she said, snatching it up. “Bad dog!” The shell was slimy with dog slobber and a crack had appeared, running top to bottom. This time she took a couple of steps into the sea, her new suede boots wet to above the ankle, ice-cold water seeping through to her socks. She flung the crab as far as she could in a high, curved arc and once more the dog charged after it.

She was coming out of the waves, her boots heavy with water — ruined, she thought, the salt would ruin them, they would never be the same — when she saw Jonathan walking toward her, his shoulders hunched against the wind. His stride was long and easy, and he had his hands in his pockets, his hair blown back from his forehead. He reached her just as the dog emerged from the sea, dripping and victorious, and deposited the crab at his feet.

“What’s this?” he said. “Some sort of Dublin pastime? We mostly use sticks here.”

He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away and bent to pick up the crab. The dog retched a couple of times, then coughed up something small and gray, and she saw that it was a crab leg. “Scram!” she said to the dog, and she stamped her foot. “Shoo! Go home!” but the dog just barked and hurled himself at her, almost knocking her over. The crab was split open, pearly white flesh visible where the shell was lifting away from the body. Two legs were missing, another hanging from a sliver of tissue.

She handed the crab to Jonathan. “You throw it,” she said. “It needs to go farther out.”

He inspected the crab as it lay motionless on his palm. He poked it with his finger but still it didn’t move. “I’m afraid it no longer has any needs,” he said. He tossed it over his shoulder, where it shattered against some rocks, and the dog was away like a rocket, snuffling around in shallow pools after bits of shell, pieces of leg.

—

THE TIRES SPUN ON wet grass as she reversed the car onto the road, and they headed back toward Greencastle, past the lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, past an old schoolhouse, converted now, hanging baskets straggling with last summer’s flowers. Looking down at the beach, she glimpsed a streak of black and white: the dog darting back and forth along the water’s edge. Though it was autumn, the cliffside was still green, fuchsia bright in the ditches, heathers blooming rust and orange in the bogs beyond. It was almost too beautiful, she thought, the colors too pure, the light too fantastical. It was as if she were driving through the landscape of a computer game, the steering wheel her console, and the walls of the too-white cottages might crumble as she passed, revealing dark, monstrous creatures with the gristle of Spanish sailors between their teeth. She glanced at Jonathan in the passenger seat beside her and for a moment she did not know him, and Dublin, her home, the university, all seemed very far away.

His brother’s bungalow stood with its back to the sea in a sloping field of briars and reeds accessed by a narrow side lane. There must once have been a gate, but only a pair of hinges, thick with rust, remained, set into wooden posts on either side of the entrance.

“I’d knock it all down,” he’d said, when they arrived the night before, “all,” as far as she could see, being the bungalow, a concrete shed with a domed roof that turned out to be the boat shed, and a wooden coal bunker. “I’d level it and start again, take it closer to the water.” Everywhere they went, this was what he did, and she had come to understand that he couldn’t help himself. He was an architect, one year out of university, where they had met in his final term. He saw derelict outhouses and boarded-up petrol stations and, almost instinctively, ghosted up their future, measured it out in his head in steel and wood and light.

Outside the back door, a blue Fiat without tires or windscreen was raised on a platform of concrete blocks. Its roof was covered in a mulch of dead leaves and rust dappled the paint. It’s the salt that does that, she thought, pleased that she understood. It’s the salt that causes the rust, because how often in Howth had she listened to her father complain about the very same thing, although the rust on her father’s car was never as deep an orange, never as widespread.