...

Michael buys a ticket and walks up the stairs of the railway station, thinking of how as a boy he kept returning to the idea of Bridget’s buried breast, hating the thought of it lolling in the earth under the window -- a squalid white tongue. At night he dreamed of it floundering about malevolently in the sky, like one of those huge German blimps he’d seen in a movie about the London Blitz.

Sometimes Bridget was better, ‘remission’ they called it, sometimes worse. She had treatment that made her sick and her hair fall out. Michael felt he couldn’t grow up any more until she got well. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. It was like having to swim under water forever holding your breath.

Michael steps into the train, shoves his pack in the corner and sits down. He wonders how long it takes to reach the coast. His mother loved the sea.

‘Grew up with it near Dun Laoghaire,’ she said, ‘that’s why I like it here in Sumner, living so close to the beach.’

On the afternoon Bridget came back from the hospice in the ambulance, Michael hid across the road in the bushes. Dad walked along beside the stretcher holding Bridget’s hand as they carried her into the house. Michael could just see his mother’s face. Skin hung desolate on the bones, curving inwards, like batter sliding off a spoon. Michael knew his parents would want him at home. Instead he carried his surf board into the breakers and lay in the waves until it was dark.

The first page of Coral's short story Dublin Bay, as it appeared
in The Dubliner (October 2001).