Dazzlingly, like tropical birds, thousands of reflections floated in the river. Green and yellow and electric blue in the inky water. Flamingo pink. It lifted the heart to see them. ‘Lifted’ isn’t the right word, Darina thought. She knew lots of words; since she’d been in school she’d been making lists of words and phrases and idiomatic expressions and learning them off by heart because that was the path to fluency. Even so she often couldn’t find the word she needed, for lots of things. But, cheer up, it wasn’t just English words that failed her; there were things she couldn’t find the right word for in her own language, too. The heart leaped up? It jumped, it bounced, or maybe what it did was more like what a water ski-er does, flying over the waves at high speed with the foam rising around her, like champagne bursting from a bottle, celebrating. Darina had watched them, at Golden Beach, at home, in the harbour below the hotel where she’d worked as a chambermaid. They looked hardly human, the water ski-ers. They looked as glamorous and brave and fast as gods. It was hard to believe that some of those superhuman creatures transformed into the holiday makers whose rooms were left like the wreck of the… what? Spartacus? That was a line from the classroom. Those gods were the very same tourists who swayed around the bars of the town in the small hours of the morning.

Pissed out of their heads.

She hadn’t picked that idiom up in school, but from Mark, her boyfriend over here. He was to meet her here outside Tara Street station. He was to have met her, he should have met her, he ought to have met her, twenty minutes ago. The lights down the river sparkled, pink and green and yellow, and the big wheel down at The Point rotated slowly against the sky, and the city looked like magic in the snow, but her feet were feeling the cold. Oh it was a bitter night, the north wind doth blow and we shall have snow and what will poor robin do then, poor thing? Again. Mark was always late, that was an Irish thing, Natasha who worked with her in the café said. Being careless about timekeeping. Darina shouldn’t take it personally.

Her phone vibrated against her thigh. He couldn’t meet her, she should make it to the party on her own and maybe he’d be there.

Maybe.

What Mark forgot was that the buses didn’t run after nine o’clock tonight, New Year’s Eve. And Darina had never known that because she didn’t listen to the news. Didn’t even have a radio. Half an hour later her feet were really frozen. She was wearing her high heels and her black lacy stockings with the spots, she wanted to look good tonight, she’d high hopes. Of a proposal, actually. If she was honest, and she usually was, she wanted to get married to Mark. Getting engaged wasn’t cool, even at home in wasn’t cool. But if they got married she’d belong here. More. A bit more. Plus she really loved him. She loved him so much that she felt he was her other half; when he was away that time during the summer and hadn’t got in touch for a week she felt that she hardly existed. The minute he walked through that door at the airport something snapped back together in her, just like a fastener on a duvet snapping into its hole. She was complete again, everything felt just right. That was the sign, the sign that he was the one for her, her soul mate. Like the sole of her shoe, snapped onto it. Barefoot she’d be, without him, her feet frozen, her heart frozen, the whole country of Ireland a frozen meaningless place.

A taxi.

Such a waste of money – she earned the minimum wage at the café and now after Christmas it would be down forty Euro a week, Natasha had said, or else they’d be sacked and there were plenty who’d be glad to take their places. They all knew it, the boss and the government and Natasha and Darina. This one taxi ride would cost what she would lose in wages next week. Or nearly.

‘About thirty,’ he said, nettled, when she asked – Darina always asked, she wasn’t one bit Irish in that way, the asking way.

‘OK, it will have to do,’ Like an iceberg. She dived into the front seat.

The taxi man gave her one of those sideways looks people gave her often. His head hardly moved but his eyes slid to the side of their sockets and looked her up and down, from her long black hair with the tiny red cap on top, to the scrap of yellow silk at her throat, to the black spotted stockings. Probably could not see her shoes, black patent, strappy, more sandals than shoes.

‘Did anyone ever tell you you shouldn’t sit in the front seat?’

They had but she’d forgotten because she seldom took a taxi in Ireland, because they were such a rip off. Her room was in the city centre and so was the café. Mark had a room in Trinity and she met him there. He was at home with his family for Christmas, out in some suburb, where she’d never been; hence the train and all this mess.

‘I forgot.’

‘No offence, just tellin you for next time.’

He laughed and his laugh was a little snort such as some animal might make before it pounces on its dinner.

‘Some lads would take it as a come on, do you know what that means?’

She smiled tightly and a black arrow nipped her somewhere between the chest and the stomach but she said nothing.

She couldn’t see the taxi metre.

‘It’s broken,’ he explained, when she asked. Darina always asked.

‘Oh!’

You would think it would be visible anyway. She asked how he would figure out the fare, if he didn’t have a metre.

‘I’ll figure it out, never you fear. It’ll be a fair fare,’ he laughed , and his laugh was hard and impatient.

Then it was his turn to ask. He asked her where she was from. He asked her how long she’d been over here. He asked her what she worked as. He asked her if there was work in her own country. Then he stopped asking and started preaching. He had nothing against foreigners. They were as entitled to be here as anybody else, the Irish had gone everywhere looking for work so who were they to criticize anybody?

He was all in black, black shirt and black hoody and black jeans,black as a crow. But he smelled nice. That was strange. Some nice soap or after shave, flowery. There was another undersmell in the car that she couldn’t identify, not as pleasant, maybe an apple rotting under the seat. But it was warm in here, so lovely and warm, her toes pained, but in the nicest way, as the life rose back into them like sap in the hyacinth Mark had given her at Christmas.

Then, hey ho, she was running into the sea with her brother. The big high rise hotels behind, but the blue sea they called the Black Sea, in front, the white boats and the white birds, the women in their bikinis, like tropical birds, and out there far away the water ski-er’s, speedy and glamorous and brave as seagulls, with the surf spraying around them. And how curious because her brother was dead. The black shaft again, piercing. He had been killed in a car crash a few years before she left. She’s only dreaming but why is her bed so hard and so cold?

It’s freezing cold and there’s snow on it. He’s hurting her – that’s not the word, she knows the right word but doesn’t say it even in her head, as if not saying it will make it not be happening. She asks him to stop. Darina always asks. But no sound comes out because his hand is over her mouth and the yellow silk scarf has tightened on her throat. In the snow she sees something red glittering, and that is maybe her red cap. Or maybe it is her red blood. The stars glitter in the dark blue sky like sparkling champagne while he works at her as if she were just some machine.

She closes her eyes, though she knows this is not a dream now, not a nightmare. She can’t believe it’s happening but she knows. Somehow you do know, always; even while you are in a dream you know somewhere in your bewildered head that it’s a dream. After you are six or seven you can tell the difference.

The asphalt is hard and freezing under her thin coat and her stomach heaves and then her eyes shut anyway though nobody would ever sleep on a bed as hard and cold as this. Her eyes shut and switch out the light of the stars.

From the dense silence of the frost a familiar sound.

Shush, shoosh, shush, shoosh.

The shingle scrambles after the sucking surf.

They learnt the line at school, far away from this place, when her brother was alive and when they all still lived at home. It was about that time that she wrote the poem into her copy book, with the line about the surf in it, when she was fourteen and he was fifteen, just before their father taught him how to drive.

Sometimes their sea, the blue sea that is called the Black Sea, takes on a pale, milky colour, where it meets the sky. The sky then too is a pale bluey grey. This happens when the sky is cloudy, the at start of the day. She loves the sea best at those times. She loves that colour, which she could never find a word for, maybe because there is no word for it, in her language or in any other. It is just a colour that the water has at certain moments, that reminds her of things she can’t name. Pearly, maybe, pearl blue. She was in love with the sea at those moments, more than when it was bright and brash and glamorous, electric in the late morning sunshine when all the tourists of Golden Beach were zipping through it like gods on silver skis.

+ + +

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin in 1954 and is a graduate of UCD. She has written novels, collections of short stories, several books for children, plays and non-fiction works. She writes in both Irish and English.

Her short story collections include Blood and Water, Eating Women is Not Recommended, Midwife to the Fairies, The Inland Ice, and The Pale Gold of Alaska. Her stories appear in man anthologies, most recently in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010) and Best European Fiction (2011). Among her literary awards are The Bisto Book of the Year Award, the Readers’ Association of Ireland Award, the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, the Butler Award for Prose from the Irish American Cultural Institute and several Oireachtas awards for novels and plays in Irish. The novel The Dancers Dancing was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her stories are widely anthologized and translated. Her latest novel for young people, Dordán, was published in autumn 2010, and her next collection of short stories, The Shelter of Neighbours, in autumn 2011.

Éilís is Writer Fellow in UCD (University College, Dublin) where she teaches on the MA in Creative Writing. She is a member of Aosdana.