‘Uncommon Spring’ by Julianna Holland
That year summer came before spring. It scarred the meadows with ewes’ blood, birthing still lambs in its premature heat. It ordered the mountain snow to flux and to descend. The rivers swelled and their mouths belched spawn, unripe, rubbish to the tide. The cherry blossom, supposed to stamp colour about us, to heave a delaying gulp of endurance to our chests in the final slush of winter, rained down before time and nestled pink in the arid gutters. The sun’s rise bled carmine on to the dying night skies and washed the land in a parroting tincture. Eyebright and forget-me-not flowered and insects feasted as the nectar flowed and the bees slept. Nightjars trilled at each angelus and slept on the wing through the night.
Nothing was as it should have been.
*
I was born on my mother’s twenty-first birthday. That year, at twenty-eight and I seven, she would remark that I was a fraction of her. I hoped she meant this with delight rather than derision but I know that I was as proud as anything to be a part of her, however divided.
That morning she upended my school bag, tossing onto the hall floor my books and uneaten apples. I stiffened with worry as they rolled dully to the doorsills. The waste went unnoticed as she was intent on rooting in the monk bench. Determinedly she dug and flung boots and coats aside, pills of sweat purling on the back of her neck. My spell of anxiety was broken when she turned around in triumph holding treasures aloft of the mess.
Her finds were our swimsuits. Mine pink gingham with daisies at the collarbone and cotton pinion at the back. Hers was green, sea-weedy, marbled brocade.
‘We have to make the most of the day,’ she said. ‘We’ve wasted enough.’
Lunch would be the egg sandwich made for my school day and those wayward, wizened apples. She gathered them up and we went to the roadside.
We caught the 9.40 bus, the grown-up one full of men and women with library books to return or grandchildren to visit. I brimmed with pride to be aboard this, out of school hours with my mother. It was infectious – the otherworldliness of those short February days when the sun shone brilliant and hot, and the clocks and buses ran to wintertime.
We got off at the end of the line and walked along the narrow path to the seaside. Taking a shortcut before the beach, we scrambled down the escarpment and found a tier of smooth slab of rock to settle on. Here we escaped the beach wind and were within reach of the bathing pool. I recall a moment of deflation as I realised that all other children were at school. That the beach was deserted and the shelves of rock empty. The diving board stood still and there was no gatherum anywhere of shells or flat stones for skimming. Instead I saw an elderly couple sitting on a seaward bench on the upland holding hands, a tartan bag and matching flask at their feet. Below them the absurd sight of abandoned crutches, alone but for a towel and strewn clothes. It took me a while but I found their owner out beyond the buoys. Far too far I thought as I watched him swimming, struggling, slowing and then hauling himself back onto land with his arms. Pale, withered legs dragged behind him.
I looked away. To the left of him, beyond, sat a nun. Her back was to me but I could see the silhouette of her habit in the breach of cliff and stone. My mother had curled on her side on our rug, reading and fanning herself with her book in turn, the heat cloying in the swelter. My palms were a mire of sand and sweat. I slicked them on my tummy and crouched down to rub my legs, itchy and scored from the tines of marram on our walk down. I had an urge to get to the water, to clean off, to slip away from that stifling heat. I traipsed down the path and steps, birching the occasional straining clump of barbed grass with a stick. At last my dusty feet met the water.
Heedful of the glassy moss on the steps and the exquisite bite of the wintry water, I climbed slowly down. Once in, the needle pricks on my legs smarted at the abrupt cold and I fought for breath as it flooded up, sinking into my swimsuit, bracing my flat chest, settling finally, serpentine, at my dipping throat and nape.
I became accustomed to it by degrees and swam around in circles wallowing in the relief. Although the sun beat down still scorching my face I gladly crawled and dog paddled about taking rest now and then on the downy bed of sargassum. It was deathly quiet other than my splashing. Feeling the nip of loneliness, I gave my friends’ names to the metal rings and rusted handles along the wall and to the line of orange and white buoys out beyond and chatted to them. They watched me swim lengths, and in between races I taught them school from the top rung of the ladder, drawing shapes and sums on the pool’s edge with some chalky pebble.
Too warm again, surrounded by the parched stone, I slid back into the water. Without notice the sky darkened; a pall of dull clouds flocked in and blotted out the sunlight. I took fright at the murky lour and, disoriented, fixed on the gleam of the remote buoys and began to swim towards them. I wanted to be at school then, to be doing what I should be doing at midday, to feel safe. I thought of a poem that we were learning by heart and tried to recite it.
‘The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat...’
My mind froze. Unable to go any further it became an incantation, repeated over and over as I trod the water.
I drifted out of the horseshoe of the pool and was pulled south to where the sun once was. On rounding the corner I heard a sound apart from my babbling. I heard the clamour of children younger than me, their mewls and whimpers faint, stifled by a nearby blare. A primal memory came to me of my infant self lying fetal on my mother’s chest, our skin stuck with sweat, my weary body assailed by croup. Its indelible rasp seared through me and then, emerging from my trance, I saw the sable, fevered eyes of a seal inches from me. Stone-blind with panic, I realised that the distraught bark was hers.
*
I never swam again.
My mother slept while the young nun I had seen earlier jumped in and saved me. I must have weighed her down, her tunic and veil anchors too. I only remember waking on my side on the rocks, my salt-burned throat purging water, my chest heaving with yet more. My mother was screeching and hauled me onto her. We stayed like that as thunder clapped and warm rain poured at last. My wheezing body slumped on hers as in my mirage, our skin stuck with rain and tears this time. The nun, shy with her clothes tight to her skin, her short hair exposed by her torn veil, sat dazed beside us and my mother held her hand.
*
My mother was a volatile mix of remorse and gratitude in the days following. Instead of sleeping, she watched over me at night, and throughout the day begged my forgiveness for having slept when I could have drowned.
But I didn’t, I reassured her, and we kissed and held each other a thousand times.
On the fourth day she seemed more at ease and allowed me out of her sight for the first time. Ours was a three-tiered garden behind the house. What we called a cat’s ladder gave way upward from kitchen garden to pond to orchard. She sent me up to pick as many irises as I could find among the apple trees. She was wrapping other gifts and we were to take all to the convent.
My mother looked drained but beautiful in a pale yellow dress and I her counterpart in lemon, a chaplet of primroses in my hair. We walked to the convent and up the manicured sweep of its avenue. Her hand delayed on the ring of the doorknocker and fogged its burnished brass before she rapped. In time the door sighed open to a woman in a floral housecoat and a drench of beeswax. My mother falteringly told her why we were there and was ushered in solemnly, leaving me alone on the step holding the posy of irises. On her return, her face was mottled pink and ashen and she was impatient to leave. I trailed along behind her hurried gait, pestering her with questions.
‘Did she not want to see us?’
‘Is she cross with me?’
‘Are you?’
They hung in the air, now clear and crisp, as February’s should be. We walked out of the convent’s imposing gates, past the church, the boatyard, the harbour master’s office and down along the harbour wall. Below, within its arms, two fishermen dredged the supple white pelt of a baby seal from the water’s edge. Only in my imagination then I heard the wretched cry of its mother. I pulled a flower from the bunch and threw it down to the dead pup and we walked on. My mother took the rest of the flowers from me further up the road and crossed through the turnstile of the cemetery. A gravedigger took rest and leant on his spade as she laid them on the clay of a new grave. We went home then, hand in hand, and although it was lunchtime she took off her shoes and got into bed. I pulled her velvet ottoman up close and began my watch over her.
*
Only later in life did I discover the source of her collapse. At twenty-one I was a fraction of her once again, her half. I had been on hand ever since and had learned the ropes of her distress. Of her drapes. Drawn wide for night air, shut tight to the days.
The nun who saved me, whose hand she had held and whose gifts were still wrapped on the dressing table, had returned to the convent that day. A bath was run for her and a flannel nightgown warmed. She managed half a boiled egg and some dry toast. She sat silently through a rosary said in my honour, her beads still in her hands. Shock, they agreed, and put her to bed.
That night as she slept, the salt water she had swallowed dammed her airways and choked her. A secondary drowning. She had lain since in decay, her postulant beads still at her hands, a bunch of irises dust above her.
That year nothing was as it should have been.
From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017
About the Author
Julianna Holland lives and works in the north west of Ireland. She studied Film and Psychotherapy in Dublin and Galway. She is a member of the Sandy Field Writers’ Group based in Co. Sligo. Julianna has previously been shortlisted by Fish Publishing, the Bridport Prize, placed third in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and was a finalist in Best Small Fiction 2017.
