Rockadoon Shore

by Rory Gleeson

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

' Rockadoon Shore is terrific' Roddy Doyle 'One of the most exciting Irish storytellers to have emerged in years' Gavin Corbett Cath is worried about her friends. DanDan is struggling with the death of his ex, Lucy is drinking way too much and Steph has become closed off. A weekend away is just what they need so they travel out to Rockadoon Lodge, to the wilds in the west of Ireland. But the weekend doesn't go to plan. JJ is more concerned with getting high than spending time with them, while Merc is humiliated and seeks revenge. And with long-ignored tensions now out in the open, their elderly neighbour Malachy arrives on their doorstep with a gun in his hands . . . Honest, moving and human, Rockadoon Shore is a novel about friendship and youth, about missed opportunities and lost love, and about the realities of growing up and growing old in modern-day Ireland. Highly energetic and tensely humorous, it heralds a new and exciting voice in contemporary Irish fiction.

Release date: February 19, 2019

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 352

Sample

Malachy

They had that look about them, that self-important snarl of youth that said, ‘We’re going to give you no peace, and you’d better get used to it.’ He was finishing the building of a rock wall on the edge of his field when he spotted their car arriving. He stared from up on the hill as it crunched across the gravel car park, past the little church and the graveyard with the slanted headstones, and pulled in to the large white house opposite, the Rockadoon Lodge. A nervous-looking girl with thick, curly brown hair slid out of the back seat. She walked to the long gate blocking the driveway and opened the latch. One fella, big and tall and hardy-looking, though with a droop in his shoulders, followed her and helped swing the gate open for the car to drive in.

Though it was still early enough in the afternoon, the sky was grey and the day dark. A thick mist had formed in the valley that morning, and now the air was wet, the ground soggy. Malachy watched as the car advanced into the drive and jolted to a stop. Once the engine was cut, a skinny, fidgety lad wearing a small vest stepped out from the passenger seat. He beat his chest and gave a wild howl that echoed across the car park and into the fields around.

—YEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!

His shout faded away, then he started to shadow-box in the misty air. Behind him, the driver’s door swung open and a blonde girl emerged. She brushed herself down and slipped a big pair of sunglasses from her head onto her nose. Though the sunglasses covered most of her face, Malachy could tell she was gorgeous. She seemed to snap at the skinny fella and immediately he stopped boxing and let his hands fall. An athletic lad in trackies jumped from the back and started doing leg stretches on the gravel. A shorter, pudgy girl followed him clumsily, catching her jeans on the car door and tugging them free. She seemed to hide inside her hoodie. After a few moments to themselves, the six of them drifted towards the front door of the house as the brunette started to point out features of the property. There was an air of excitement about them as they looked over everything, kicking at the gravel drive and slapping the white walls of the Lodge like the side of a horse.

Malachy felt himself sinking in the mud, his wellies planted. He still had one large rock left in his barrow, so he squeezed his knuckles in under and felt the weight of it slippery and muddy in his hands. He hefted it up and placed it into the wall, wedging it firmly in beside the other rocks. He made sure it was steady then started trudging back to the gate. His front field and house overlooked the church, the graveyard and the Lodge. The Lodge’s back garden sloped down to a rock wall, then opened out to gnarled, twisted trees and overgrown hedges, ferns and bog land. Both houses had a view of the lake, half a mile or so down the way.

When he reached his front gate, Malachy leaned forward on it and watched the new arrivals unload their car. The skinny fella put a crate of beer on his shoulder then stood waiting as the brunette searched under some flowerpots outside the front door for the key. Fifth on the right, Malachy knew, in a little plastic Ziploc bag to stop the rust. He understood how things worked in the Lodge. After several moments looking under different pots, the brunette found the key and let them in.

As used as he was to watching the house, to seeing all kinds of people coming and going, there was something about these ones that bothered Malachy. Whatever that fucking look was, they had it.

Cath

She started off searching under the flowerpot she remembered from the last time she’d been round, five years before, but that didn’t work out, so then she went down systematically looking under every pot that lined the front wall of the Lodge. It was her suggestion to come out to the house in the first place. That meant the responsibility was on her to make the weekend work, but now she couldn’t even find the key to let them into the frigging thing. Not the greatest start in the history of mankind.

They’d enough money pooled for two nights in the house and the drive home. The last few months had been rough with all the exams and DanDan’s trouble, so Cath just wanted to clear her head of all of it. She wanted plenty of things, but DanDan wasn’t one of them, no matter what anyone said – he was her mate and she was his and it wasn’t that way.

That morning they’d travelled three and a half hours west from Dublin out to Carrig, and she’d kept catching him looking at his own reflection in the car window, his eyes slicked over like he might weep at any moment. She’d no idea how to deal with him. Which did you address first, the part of him that was grieving or the part that was dumped? She wondered if she could get him to cry. Cath enjoyed a good cry. You got this amazing, fresh feeling into your body afterwards, like the tears had washed every bad thing away. If she could make him cry then maybe it’d cleanse him, give him a rebirth. Make him less frigging mopey at the very least. It wouldn’t take all that much, no more than a gentle nudge, to push him over the edge.

As she checked under the first pot to the left of the door, she looked around and found him staring off into the distance. He was tall and big-shouldered standing behind her in his grey T-shirt. Though he was still slim, Cath could tell he’d put on weight since Jess had died. His height and build carried the weight well, concealed it, though his face, the edges and angles of it, had softened, and made him appear only sadder still.

Maybe if she got him high, maybe that would loosen him up. Get his tongue going, his tear ducts swelling. JJ had brought a bag of weed and some pills he’d gotten off a lad on Camden Street. She’d never tried pills. They’d been given drugs awareness meetings a few years before in secondary school. A sweaty counsellor told them that if they took pills their brains would shrink. They’d dehydrate, try to pull their veins out of their arms then jump out a window thinking they could fly. This was followed by a cautionary tale about a teenager who’d gone down to the tracks to smoke weed and a train knocked his arm off. They’d heard that same story in Sex Ed but with blow jobs subbed in.

She began to feel a dry heat in her chest as she came up from the left pot empty-handed. Behind her, Merc tut-tutted and checked his phone. She ran one last time to the pot she remembered and tugged the whole thing out from the earth, rolling it to one side. She found the front door key lodged in the dirt underneath. The pressure in her chest flooded out. She unearthed the key and turned to the five people waiting behind her, brandishing it, turning it like a display model.

—Now. Hardly a wait at all.

She wiggled the key into the lock and let them in.

The house hadn’t been used in a while. It belonged to her mam, who’d always said it made her feel sick whenever she came back. Bad memories. They normally just let the house out as a holiday home to tourists or allowed relatives use it as a getaway for dirty weekends and post break-up retreats.

She stepped through the hallway until it opened out to the main living room. It was better than Cath had hoped for, actually. Dusty and damp but liveable, and still very much like how she remembered it from years before. A big mouldy sofa and some creaky chairs were circled around the stone fireplace. A massive oak dining table stood in the middle of the room, with a vinyl record player placed in the corner. The walls were decorated with oil paintings and bits of things other houses didn’t want: an old 1950s framed ad for HP sauce, a yellow deer-crossing sign. A broken sewing machine. There was an old bookcase filled with big piles of yellowed childhood books from earlier, more manic times when it was a holiday home for all the young cousins aged five to fifteen. Cath wouldn’t be surprised if some of her baby pictures were down here; her mam habitually gave them away to relatives. There was a supply of briquettes already there, and firelighters for the fire. Less prep than she’d thought.

There were three bedrooms upstairs. Two of them had double beds, while the third was a games room with a bunch of mattresses heaped up and a table tennis table in the corner. Cath and Lucy would share the main bedroom; they didn’t mind spooning. Steph liked her own space so she got the other bedroom to herself, and the guys would share the mattresses in the games room.

They were used to sharing accommodation. They’d all met for the first time when they were housed together on a freshers’ surfing trip. In the shabby front room of a seaside cottage, three hundred metres away from the main cluster of the other surf houses, they’d managed to make some connection through an experience going wrong, when the heating broke and they’d had to keep the fire going all night to keep warm. Their shared reluctance to brave the windy path to the rest of the houses had also helped bond them. They were comfortable being in close proximity from the very start, and that physical closeness had led to a kind of shamelessness among them, a lack of embarrassment about acting out or being a bit grotty. Their group friendship had lasted them even after they left the surf house, cold, tired and grinning. On their return to Dublin, they went for a drink that turned into a night of drinking, and then that was it, they were together.

In the kitchen, grimy plates were propped beside greasy cutlery and burnt pots. The fridge had been switched off, the door left wide open, but there was still a smell of gone-off milk coming out of it. Old five-litre bottles of water were stacked beside the back door. Good job they’d brought their own. Couldn’t have people getting typhoid on her watch.

The LPs by the record player were mostly trad music, bluegrass, old show tunes and musicals. The soundtrack from Chicago, The Carter Family. Every now and again there was some classic stuff – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Clash – hidden among multiple copies of The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers and records of obscure Donegal fiddlers. The sleeves were all covered with a film of dirt.

She ran around trying to check that the place was okay, that everyone was happy. The heating worked fine, but Steph kept sneezing because of the dust. Every time someone sat down on the couch a big puff would burst up and float over the room and Steph would start sneezing again. The dust would go away, Cath hoped, once it’d been knocked about a bit. She tried to find sheets and covers for the beds, and get all the lights and appliances going.

Once she had the most important things covered, she paused a moment. A faint rain was falling outside. By the time they’d unpacked the car and gotten everything set up, the mist had set in proper and outside was a mix of grey, black and navy.

The front door had been left open, so she went to close it. As she did she saw a dark shape outside resting in the grass. It was DanDan. Jesus, that woman had done a number on him. He’d always been so energetic, never one to sulk or get moody. Now he was out by himself, lying alone in the garden, getting wet in the rain.

She went out to check on him. As she left she could hear JJ, Merc and Steph shouting at each other from various rooms, and the clatter of Lucy banging pots in the kitchen. The sound was low for the moment, but she knew they’d get louder and start roaring soon enough. It would get completely out of hand before long. She just hoped it would be the good sort of chaos, not the bad, and that it’d knock DanDan out of his fug. Something would happen to him before the weekend was over, she knew that much. It’d either be really good or very fucking bad.

DanDan

The cold closed around him in the garden. He needed the air. Whenever he went inside to the damp, earthy smells of the dusty house, the mould smells and turf smells and fun smells, he longed to be out of it. The lights from the house lit halfway down the garden, shining the grass a bleak yellow. When he looked up into the light escaping from the upstairs bedrooms he could see a soft rain falling down.

Rock walls circled the garden. The rocks were stacked up on top of each other without cement, the tops covered in moss. He sat on the nearest wall, felt how firm and steady it was, and pushed on a piece of moss. His finger came back with moisture on the end. His hair was wet and he could feel the rain coming down his back. His beer had gone flat and a bit milky.

He could hear a river somewhere nearby. The rush of it was so constant that he’d not really acknowledged it when he first came out, but the more he listened to it, the more he noticed little bubbles and trickles that didn’t repeat or varied from the usual sounds, and he felt like he needed to swim. He finished his can and threw it out into the garden.

The grass was long, about a foot high, and completely soaking. What would it be like to lie down in that wet grass? It looked inviting enough. He dived down into it. Straight away the moisture started gathering up through his clothes, chilling him. Now it was cold. He turned onto his back and tried to look up through the rain, to the skies above hidden by clouds. DanDan just wanted to shut everything down. Shut himself down.

He’d promised himself he wouldn’t cry on this trip. He’d never been a crier, not so much as a child and not at all as a teenager. He’d kept himself completely free of tears all through his first year of college. Then Jess had dumped him in an arcade. Took him in behind a row of air hockey tables and told him it wasn’t going to work out, and he’d felt it rising up in him, a gulping wetness that caught in his throat. He’d cried all over her as she said sorry, that she’d made up her mind. She still loved him, she’d said, but not in the same way any more. He’d sniffled and snotted and moaned all the way home, into his bed, and all through the week. Then she’d gone and died ten days later.

His ma had delivered the news to him while he lay in bed, her standing by the door with the mobile in her hand, distraught-looking, and him shocked and useless under his blankets, unable to move or do anything to stop what had happened. She’d had a heart condition all her life, had been already living beyond her life expectancy, though she’d told no one. He’d had to show at her funeral, and everyone there crying and mourning, looking at him like he was nothing, like he hadn’t deserved her, and had wasted months of her life, time she could have spent with them, her friends and family, instead of arguing with him. He’d had to leave the ceremony with his eyes closed, so he wouldn’t see anyone, and they wouldn’t see his tears and his weak fucking face.

He lay back in the grass and squeezed his face tight. The darkness felt so natural when it came over him, so inescapable. When it did he couldn’t feel that happiness had ever been in him, he had no sense memory left of it, and though he knew he’d been happy at one time, remembering it just felt like watching a film unfold of another him in a different time and place, watching another person who looked like him smiling and laughing, but not connecting with it in any way. The misty rain washed his eyelids. Every bit of energy was sucked out of him and he felt he could lie down like this forever, his eyes shut against everything. Like Jess’s eyes. Shut forever. Gone and in the ground. He wished he could sink farther into the ground. Past the grass and into the earth. Sink down and greet her below.

Then he heard a voice. Cath’s voice. It was always Cath.

—DanDan, you okay?

Why was she always asking him was he okay? She’d asked him a hundred times on the drive out. Okay? Okay? Okay? It was like she was trying to get him upset. He felt the lump in his throat turn hot and liquid, rising up through his face and into his eyes. He was going to cry. He tried to breathe.

—DanDan?

—Yah?

He looked up at her from the ground. The house lights shone behind her through the light rain and he could see individual strands of hair floating away from her head. She was good-looking in her own way. Her face had occasional gawky bits, the snaggle tooth and the bump in the bridge of her nose, but overall she looked well, with her thick hair, the tight jeans and stripey top. They were too close as friends for any nonsense, though. She was waiting for him to answer.

—What’re you doing in the grass?

—Having a think.

—Think about what?

She just wouldn’t leave him fucking alone. He would never have time to himself. She’d be poking at him for the next two days. Poke poke fucking poke. He wanted to scream at her, to use a proper raging, mean voice that belittled her, to turn to her and say ‘What the FUCK do you want? What the FUCK, do YOU want?’ But he managed to keep his silence. She’d stood by him all this time, being there for him, talking late into the night, consoling him when everyone else had just wished him the best and moved on. He owed her for that.

She stepped closer. As she got near to him, he propped himself up on one elbow. He wiped the rain from his eyes, and sighed loud like she’d disturbed him.

—Nothing important, Cath.

He raised his arm and pointed behind her, down the back garden.

—What’s down there?

—Just more fields. A river runs down by the side.

—Where’s it go?

—Down to Lough Gorm. That’s where the pier is.

Her breath clouded around her head, steam rising from her shoulders as she stood in the gloom. She moved forward and rubbed her arms, wrapping them around her body so that she hugged herself as she spoke.

—You can’t go swimming in the river, though. It’s too shallow . . . You okay?

He looked beyond her.

—Go on inside, I’ll be in.

—Okay. I’ll put a drink out for you.

She went inside, back into the warmth. What had she said about the river? Too small or too dangerous? She probably thought he was thinking about drowning himself in it. He liked that at least she was worried. The rest of the lot inside weren’t worried. He could hear them, howling, shouting at each other, laughing. Morons. The lot of them. Not a modicum of respect in any of them. Not a brain cell between the fucking lot of them, just running around laughing like goons, drinking themselves silly, killing themselves stupid with alcohol. He took a breath.

Just ignore it and sink down, down into the grass.

Malachy

He’d spent almost seventy years watching over the Lodge. When he was coming up it had belonged to Billy and Mona Rourke. When they died it went to Billy’s teenage daughter Tara. She had the place painted over, rented it to the Neville family, then moved to Dublin. The Nevilles kept to themselves. Whenever they passed they’d nod at Malachy and his father, but in the twenty years they’d stayed there he couldn’t remember talking to them much. Their children grew, they repainted the Lodge, and moved on. A French couple rented it for a few years as a summer house, letting the garden go to shit in the off-season. Eventually they gave it up and the Lodge went back to Tara Rourke, where it lay silent and small against the valley, and he’d continued to watch it.

Developers had bought his own farmland for a housing estate ten years before. He hadn’t wanted to sell any of it at first. What would be the point at all? All his life he’d been a farmer. What would he do, he asked them, if he couldn’t farm?

But they pursued him and pursued him. They offered him more and more, and every time they did people in the village said, ‘Go on, Malachy. It won’t last forever. Do it now, while you can, Malachy.’ The developers had kept at him, about his age, about what he would do when he grew too old to work, even as they upped their offer. Eventually the money got so ridiculous, so out of kilter with the established order of what he’d always known – that land was worth so much, then sheep and cattle worth so much again – that he’d lost sense of it. He’d never been poor, or down on his luck, but he had the farm and his tractor and the sheds and all the right gear without ever being rich. Any profit went back into the farm, or doing up the house, and anything left over just sat in the bank.

What would happen, they asked, if he hurt himself, did his back in? He’d no family, no one to look after him, no sons to work the land. The farm would go to pot. He’d bankrupt and have to sell the land and the house anyway, only for a much lower price than the one they were offering. Though he knew they were only a cluster of swindlers, saying whatever the fuck they had to to get what they wanted, in a way they were right. He’d no one, and the farm had always been too big for just one to manage. Eventually, he’d signed.

He’d somehow believed that that would be it. He’d sign, they’d go away, and nothing really would change. Then one morning he woke up and his acres were gone. And what was the reason for getting out of bed then? There were millions in his bank account, but he just left it sitting there. So much money he’d no idea what to do with. People in the village told him that it was his time, ‘Time for a wife, Malachy, with that fortune.’

‘Too fucking late,’ he said.

He wondered for a short moment what to do with himself, but his da had taught him, time and again, whether it was work or pain or fatigue, ‘Get on with it, just keep fucking going.’ So he did.

The next ten years he kept himself busy. He got up at the same hour and went out to work as usual, only instead of going to the farm he started t. . .