The front garden overlooked the road leading to Monsheelagh Village. A couple of pubs, a bingo hall and a summer carnival offered the only entertainment at night but that didn’t bother us. The weather was glorious and, after a day on the beach, we were happy to stay home at night playing board games, listening to music and talking about Shard. Five of them, Jake, Daryl, Reedy, Hart and Barry, had arrived in a ramshackle van driven by Reedy and they were staying in an old house at the other side of the village. They came to Monsheelagh Bay every day. Its sheltering cliff walls trapped the sun and the cove was a smooth, sandy strand, perfect for volleyball. Jake Saunders stood out from the others as he scooped and dived and ran rings round them, his tanned, muscular body glistening with oil. We planned strategies to attract his attention but walking past in our bikinis or scampering in pretended terror from the approaching waves had no effect on him. He already had a girlfriend, a big-bottomed girl from Galway, who was staying in the caravan park. We watched the two of them strolling hand-in-hand by the water’s edge and sneered enviously over the provocative sway of her bottom in her skimpy polka dot bikini. Sometimes, instead of playing volleyball or French cricket, they’d disappear behind the rocks and later emerge hand-in-hand with reddened blemishes on their necks.
‘Love bites,’ Karin would hiss. ‘She’s such a whore.’
Daryl flopped down on the sand beside us one afternoon and asked if we’d like to join the volleyball team. From then on we were part of Shard’s gang. The Galway girl went home but not before she had bleached Jake’s long black hair with yellow streaks. He reminded us of a tiger and we growled at him, our hands arched like claws. Sometimes the lads would arrive with guitars and an impromptu music session would begin. We raced into the waves, our screams echoing across the cove as we splashed each other before diving headlong into the cold Atlantic swell. Jake would lift Karin up in his arms and fling her back into the water. She was as sleek as a fish, a blonde mermaid with streeling golden hair. Jake never attempted to lift me, afraid, I guessed, that it would not be such an easy task to lightly toss me into the waves.
Max Moylan was abroad for that first fortnight. Somewhere in India, working on another travel book, Joan said in her vague way that made everything outside her range of vision seem irrelevant. She was not drinking and she seemed to enjoy bringing us horse riding through Monsheelagh Forest, playing crazy golf and barbecuing for us in the evenings. One night she brought us to the pub on the sea front where musicians played fiddles and accordions. She drank iced water with a slice of lemon and set-danced around the floor with a local fisherman in a woolly hat, their feet flying in intricate steps too fast to follow.
‘It won’t last,’ Karin said in a voice loaded with knowledge. ‘She keeps the misery for Dad.’
On Monsheelagh Bay she retreated behind her floppy sunhat and read her book while Karin and I competed for Jake’s attention. I was the fastest swimmer in the group, thanks to my father. Eoin believed I could become a champion swimmer. The training programme he devised for me after I won some local championship medals meant rising three mornings a week before school to do lengths in the Gracehills Leisure Centre. I knew my own abilities better than Eoin. I’d never rise above the regional championships but I could outswim the others. Karin nicknamed me Moby Dick. The inference was obvious. I asked her to stop referring to me as a whale. She laughed and demanded to know when I’d lost my sense of humour. We were no longer prepared to swoon together over Jake Saunders. Karin was determined to have him. And so was I.
Joan roasted a leg of lamb and sprinkled it with sprigs of rosemary on the day Max Moylan was due to join us. Karin painted a Welcome Home Dad poster and hung it over the front door. We blew up balloons and tied them to the front gate. The hour of his arrival came and went. The pungent scent of rosemary evaporated from the kitchen and the lamb cooled on its platter. Karin kept going to the gate to check for his car. Darkness settled slowly during those summer evenings and Joan grew increasingly edgier when the lights were switched on. I avoided looking at the locked press where she kept an unopened bottle of vodka. Would she break the seal on it and pour a measure? Karin sulked in her room and played her music too loudly.
‘Get lost, Moby,’ she shrieked and flung a book at me when I entered without knocking. The warning signs were obvious. Karin and her father, when he finally arrived, would side against Joan, who would drink too much, laugh, talk and cry too much. I’d be invisible to them all, except when Karin reminded me that I’d the attributes of a whale.
Afraid of being overheard if I used the cottage phone I left the house without telling them. I rang Jenny from the phone kiosk on the harbour. Our ways had parted months previously and I hadn’t told her I was going on holidays with Karin.
‘Are you having a good time?’ she asked, her life too busy for grudges.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I wish you were here with us.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said. ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Karin doesn’t like me.’
‘Oh, that’s not true.’ I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. ‘She just finds it hard to make new friends.’
‘I know that. When are you coming back?’
‘Not for another fortnight, more’s the pity. Have you ever heard of a band called Shard?’
‘Don’t think so. Why?’
‘They’re here on holiday. We both fancy the singer.’
‘Is that why you’re fighting with Karin?’
‘I didn’t say we were fighting.’
‘One boy. Two girls. Of course you’re fighting.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Who’s winning?’
‘Neither of us…so far. She calls me Moby Dick.’
‘If she can’t treat her best friend with respect that’s her problem, not yours. Don’t let her get to you.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘There’s disgusting raw sewage flowing into the sea at Dollymount. I’m making a video.’
‘Jenny!’
‘Stinky work but someone has to do it. Dad bought me this brilliant handicam for my birthday.’
‘If I was home I’d go with you.’
‘Would you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good luck with the singer.’
As if her words had materialised him from the ether Jake suddenly appeared outside the phone kiosk. It was the first time I’d seen him without the others from the band. He grinned when he noticed me and pressed his face against the glass, flattening his features and clawing at the kiosk with his nails.
‘Oh, my God, he’s outside.’ I whispered. ‘I’d better go. I’ll call into see you as soon as I get home.’
‘Best of luck until then.’
I pushed against the door of the phone kiosk and Jake pushed back.
‘Back off, Godzilla,’ I yelled in mock terror and he staggered backwards in an equally exaggerated stumble.
We sat on the harbour wall, our legs dangling over the water. I smoked my first cigarette. He told me the band had taken the summer house to write songs and firm up their act in preparation for the international fame that awaited them. Their manager Mik Abel believed they were Ireland’s answer to Guns n’ Roses. So far, they’d only played a few venues and Barney, the owner of the harbour pub where Joan had danced with the fisherman, had offered them a gig in a fortnight’s time.