Racconto inviato | Submitted story 2

Racconto inviato | Submitted story 2

A boy from Northern Ireland

Kev and his family had been staying in a caravan across from the beach every summer since I was old enough to play with a bucket and spade. He was my yang from the other side of the border, dodging soldiers and bullets on his way to school while I sat on the bus that meandered twenty miles of green fields, not a checkpoint in sight. Kev’s stories were always in my head, the soldiers raiding his school, the pat-downs on the long walk home. My day dragged out until I got back on the bus that always turned up, was never hijacked or burnt out.

The four of us met up under the big rock at the side of the beach that day. We were old enough to go out in the morning and not to be expected back until the blue dark, but not too old to be told to get summer jobs. Not that there were any, even for adults. The factory had closed after the oil shocks. The other tourists came less and less because of the price of petrol and the troubles on the other side of the border. We didn’t count the Nordies as tourists, they were more like nuisance neighbours or embarrassing relations. The cliffs were too high for the tourists then, this was before the ones in hiking boots were invented. But swimming was free and that end of the beach was ours.
I had met with Kev at the beach carpark the night before, alone. Somehow we had shaken off my two cousins, Mike and Liz. We went down into the jagged grass of the dunes for a fag and ended up curled into a sand hollow together, our bodies joining for the first time, hot and heavy, the taste of cigarettes and sweat. That next day we had acted like it never happened in front of the others, like we were the old muckers we always had been. But everything was different, the sun shone brighter, there were no clouds, the sea sparkled like a postcard. Just a glance at the dark vertical of hair between his trunks and his belly button made me shiver in the heat.
I was first to scramble up to the top, shouting at the others to come on. Kev was right behind me. We stood high on the rock, our nearly naked bodies almost touching. He put his hand on my lower back, the tops of his fingers caressed my warm skin. The others were still on the ledge below, their bare feet on the jagged rocks a distraction, shouting for me to jump. Our towels were waiting on the shore where we’d swim in, dry off, and start up again. The sun’s white heat beat down on the marram grass. I stood at the peak, my bare feet crushing the patch of bleached pink flowers that grew there. But when I looked down at the sea far below me, I froze. Then Kev touched my lower back again, letting me know he was still there.
‘Stop it. They’ll see,’ I said, looking back around at him.
‘Och, sure, they know.’
‘Naw, they don’t.’
‘Well, I’m gonna shout it down to them so I am.’
‘G’on wise up.’
‘Stop laughing or I’ll push you so I will.’
I turned away smiling, shut my eyes tight, threw my arms up, my chest forward and jumped out into the blue sky, pedalling air, arms wheeling, falling, flying, for seconds, for hours. I hit the surface with a slap. I yelped, closed my mouth and plunged down through the freezing water below. Kev hit the water next. As I rose he sank and his face was swallowed beneath the circle of ripples I had caused, setting off another. Mike landed to my left. Liz shouted. I squinted up to her silhouette, she hadn’t jumped yet. I adjusted my togs and spat, pinched my nose and blew down, shook my head, water out of my ears, all the while treading water, waiting. Mike’s black flattened hair rose like a seal’s head, then Liz landed. Kev never surfaced.

They never found his body. I didn’t go to the service, my parents didn’t want me to go to the Bogside, there had been too much trouble. I suppose I could have made my own way there, got a bus to Derry and walked up behind the Littlewoods to the church, but I couldn’t face them all. I knew his parents blamed me for what happened. It had come out that it was my idea to jump.
Kev’s death only got a by-line in The Derry Journal. I wanted to see it on the news, like the other funerals, coffins draped in flags, marched to the cemetery with men in balaclavas behind.
His family never came back. On the last day of the summer holidays Mike smashed the small window of their caravan door and we crawled in. We sat in there away from the rain, smoking the cigarettes Liz had bought, four singles from Jack’s shop. I lit the last one off mine and left it burning in the ashtray. We shared the warm cans of Harp we had found in the bow of one of the summer boats by the pier. Swallowing the beer, listening to the waves crashing against the rocks, I waited for the summer to leave.