Southpaw

By JR Hughes

Nina Hekla Thera Toba Ransome, a hand-therapist, living in Dublin and named after volcanoes, is living a mundane life compared to her exotic childhood. As she recalls how she came to be where she is today her story is enmeshed with that of others: Harry, obsessive volcanologist and her absent father; Helen, her lover, and daughter of an Olympic athlete; Katja, her mother, who died when Nina was three; and now, Southpaw, found washed up on a beach in Ringsend, naked, unidentified, memory-less, on Nina’s hospital rounds - and about to change her life forever. In 2012 Southpaw was Highly Commended in the Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Competition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JR Hughes
• Release date: Oct 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311491190

JR Hughes

I was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1973 to an artist mother and scientist father and currently live in a hut made of woven coconut palm leaves in India.I have a BSc in Natural Sciences and during a successful eighteen-year career in communications I wrote and edited numerous articles for award-winning websites including Science.ie, PrimaryScience.ie and TinyBuddha.com. I have also worked in business and management and in 2007 helped set up renewable energy company, Cool Power Products, with which I worked for several years until it was sold in 2012.Much of my writing inspiration comes from travel. I have spent time working and writing in Ireland, England, Spain, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Spain and India. In 2012 I spent three months in silence - and completely out of touch with the news and the outside world - in a lay-Buddhist retreat centre in Devon, an irreplaceable experience to have.I have since finished my first and second novels, Southpaw and Hibernia, and am continuing to focus purely on writing - in particular completing my third novel and finding a publishing deal for all three. In the meantime, to help pay the bills, I do some proofreading and article writing and sell some artwork.Like many women I seem to have permanently cold fingers and toes so in 2013 I left Ireland for the warmer shores of Ibiza, then India, where I can write without getting chilly. I now live in Goa in a one-roomed hut with one socket, two light bulbs, three cats and my graphic-designer husband.When not squinting at manuscripts I can be found running, hiking, swimming, learning a few words of the local language, painting and turning bits of coconut palms into artworks that I can sell. I'm also trained in krav-maga, the hand-to-hand combat system used by the Navy Seals and Israeli Defence Force.

Book preview

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.

Rumi

"It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall."

Mexican Proverb

1

The day he washed up on the shore at Ringsend, clothes-less, tired and limp as a piece of seaweed, his life turned like the tide that had placed him there. Green with cold and nausea and a stomach full of seawater, he grimaced at a yellow-eyed seagull, then fell asleep with a mouthful of sand. People came. Loaded him into the back of a white van. Images. Staccato like the waves that have held him forever. A foil blanket. Nakedness. Heels in the sand.

A rumour goes around the hospital that he does not know where he comes from, does not know his own name. Did he fall from a cliff or boat? Did someone throw him, did he throw himself? Drug runners ply these shores. Light aeroplanes sometimes tumble from the sky, wings twisting like sycamore seeds. Fishermen fishing the night tides get washed out to sea by waves sent ploughing to land by the ferries. Is he one of these? Was he swimming the fifty-six miles of the Irish Sea? He bears no evidence of lanolin or suncream, the balms openwater swimmers use to give safe passage to their skin.

They cut his hair right back to see if he has any identifying marks underneath. A birthmark perhaps, a scar, a tattoo. Any sign of ownership or belonging. They clip his nails, his stubble, aspects of him that grew in a time he no longer remembers. It is as if they are cutting back a problem hedge, trying to shoehorn him into some sort of recognisable shape. Plumping him like the hospital pillows. But no, he came with no clothes, no paperwork, no label of origin. Like stolen goods off the back of a lorry.

The nurses have seen many casualties in this hospital whose injuries and trauma have no explanation, but none quite so goodlooking or intact as this, his skin abraded but otherwise unbroken. They study his body again, but he has no distinguishing marks and does not know himself and is not too sure of these women with the nametags, of their attention either. His eyes plum dark as he eyes them across the room. Still smarting from all the salt.

When the rumour reaches Nina she bounces from the hail of giggles at the nurses lockers and goes to the ward where he is being kept, her soles padding the white tiles of the long corridors, passing the rhubarby disinfectant smell of room after room after room.

She finds him sitting up in his bed against a snowdrift of pillows, his skin tanned and face weathered after so long an immersion in water. How long nobody knows. His hair is a short, dark sward, and the profile of his face could be anywhere from Albanian to middle Eastern, with a nose that is naturally slightly flattened or was once broken.

'You turned up on my rounds,' Nina says. He looks caught in headlights, unwilling for her to be here, but she knows it is okay for him to have visitors, three days after he slipped like a selkie from the skin of the water.

'No more diarrhoea' the Australian nurse, Jessica, had told her that morning. 'He'll be right. Everything down there is back working.'

Nina pulls a chair up beside the bed and slips off her Claddagh ring, puts it on the bedside cabinet. From the pocket of her uniform she draws two small bottles.

'If you don't mind?' she smiles, gesturing to his hand. It is resting on the sheets by his hips. He tilts it as if indicating the opening of a door, permitting her to go ahead.

She lifts it, his hand, feels its warm dryness, presses her thumbs hard into the wad of flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He winces, pressing his neck and head back into the pillows.

'Just checking,' she says.

The man shakes his head and clears his throat as if testing whether sound still comes to his call. She knows that he probably thinks she is a real nurse, but she only comes to tend to his hands.

She holds his wrists and fingers and studies his hands. The back of them spread like deltas, broad and strong. His nails are cut crudely and his skin is dry, like all skin after too much water. Too much washing of dishes. She takes one of the bottles and drips oil from it onto his desert of knuckles, palms it across his skin, then presses her thumbs in again. He flinches. His hand hot now. Oily. She smiles kindly.

'It is only pain,' she says, 'It cannot hurt you.'

She soothes all her patients with this line. Most are elderly and respond with a knowing smile or laugh. This man doesn't. He has maybe thirty years on him she thinks, as she surfs her fingers along his palm. His flesh bunches and glistens. She uses only the pads of her fingertips now, to be gentle, keeping her shell-like nails away.

'So, what happened to you?'

'What?' he says slowly, as if her presence has yet to dawn on him fully, 'To me?'

'The sea. How come you were in it?'

'The sea.'

'Yes.'

'The sea... I don't know.'

'No? Don't you remember how you got there?'

'No.'

'How long were you in it?'

'No.'

'No? Nothing at all?'

'No. I don't know.'

The conversation crashes against the white walls, the hard glass of the window. Her hands stops moving on his. The woman with the nametag, Nina.

He looks at her fingers holding his, paused a moment. Their hands, resting on each other, like starfish.

She looks at their hands too, wondering if oil is the best thing for such recently grazed skin. Perhaps not, but it will keep it soft, stop any healing from drying and rifting open like cooling and cracking lava. She adds a few more drops from the bottle of oil, but none from the bottle of lavender oil lest it sting, then does a few long massage strokes from his wrists to fingertips, pulling oil along his fingers as if stretching them, as if milking the teats of an udder. The corners of his thumbnails are sharp. She finds a nail file in her pocket and rounds them into moonlike crescents. The radiator ticks to itself under the window.

'So, do you remember where you came from?'

'No.'

'Or where you were going?' Silence. 'Your name? Anything?'

'No,' he stops her, lifting his hand into the air in protest then letting it fall slowly, 'I just remember foam.'

It has been doing this for three days now. The foam, drifting into his mind like it had across the grey water. Appearing, disappearing, shifting constantly. Forming into clumps which he recognised as the shapes of continents, land, elephants, other animals, before they disappeared again. The foam had been soft, substanceless, slid weightlessly from his knuckles, and if he touched it, even lightly, with a fingertip - his whole hand when a wave bucked him - it went. Everything was like that out there. The foam, the light, the waves, the topology of the ocean. All gone as soon as it arose.

'And?' Nina asks bringing him back to the white room.

'And.'

He shakes his head to dismiss her questions and falls silent. He will say more about the sea in time, what he remembers of it, but for the moment it is like talking about someone who is in the same room.

~~

He had second degree sunburn when they brought him in. A tongue so swollen that he could not speak. Temporary blindness from sun reflecting on the water. Welts from jellyfish stings. The sunburn had lent a superficial heat to the inner cold that mild hypothermia and exposure had left lingering in him. Its redness braved the top and back of his body like pink icing. The nurse with the Australian accent had examined it, bending over him, her nametag, Jessica, pinned to the chest of her uniform, pressing against his cheek.

'Jeez, would you ever wear sunscreen next time you decide to go swimming? You're going to look like a paperbark in a few days.'

'A what?'

'Oh, never mind, you'll see.' She sighs and stands back, her perfume billowing across his face. 'The only cure for this is beer.'

She appraises his red forehead, removes her plastic gloves.

He considers a moment. His thirst ceaseless.

'Can I have some?'

'What?'

'Beer.'

'Beer? Are you joking pet? You're dehydrated enough. You're lucky you don't still look like a prune.'

It was true. His fingers and toes had stayed wrinkled and bed-metal grey for a whole day after he came in.

'Just one.'

'No.'

'Two.'

'Can't do that poppet. Sorry. Another time maybe. Now, give us your hand.'

She had rubbed salve on his skin then bandaged the knees where the sea had abraded them like sea glass, except they didn't polish up smoothly like these nails Nina is filing now, like pretty, shiny glass, the skin had turned ugly and red like torn paper.

~~

Nina goes home to Helen. She asks if they should cook chicken as usual for dinner because it is Friday. If it is Friday they definitely don't eat fish. Never again. Helen had insisted on that from their very outset, nearly ten years ago now, having just freed herself from being made to eat fish every Friday by the nuns at their school.

They cook, eat, wash up and discuss what they should do to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their getting together which is approaching in February, four months away. Their conversation is lethargically about this decennial, their year of tin and aluminium, and the party they ought to hold because last year, their year of pottery and china, they did not have one. Next year will be steel. Each year a little less malleable.

When the conversation ends they leave their little terraced redbrick and run around the block three times. Helen beats Nina in the last hundred metres as always. It takes exactly twenty-two minutes.

~~

The nurse Jessica asks the stranger to sign on the dotted line of some form, but he does not know his name.

'We'll call you John,' she quips, 'John Doe.'

'I am not John.'

'Well what shall we put? James Bond?'

She is flirting, he can tell.

'No.'

The woman laughs.

'I don't know. But I'm not John Doe.'

She tells him that he has to make some sort of mark and draws a red x on the line indicating where he is to sign.

'And when you decide, or come to remember your name, just write it here, pet, will you.'

She leaves the clipboard down on the bedside cabinet, puts a hand on his shoulder and looks at him openly. But he never does think of a name. Nor remember. So that evening he makes his mark, echoing the one she made. So he becomes Xx for a time, until another name is found.

~~

She tells me later. Jessy. That he has written his name as Xx.

'One x by me, one x by him. With any other man this could be romantic,' she sighs. 'Anyway, whatever about his name, he has taken particularly well to the loss of his clothes.'

She looks at a doctor who has appeared at the end of the corridor and her voice drifts away. 'All his belongings,' she says. She looks down at her nursing clogs then back at the doctor in the distance. 'Don't you wish we could wear our heels in here somedays? Anyway, it is the people he misses, I think. His life. What is it? A week now? You can see it in him, how he doesn't laugh. He can fart and drink and eat but he doesn't laugh. Even when he first came in, still coughing up salt water and I joked with him about the irony of his saline drip he didn't laugh.'

'Maybe he doesn't understand your accent.'

Jessy laughs. 'Or have a sense of irony. Maybe he is American? But, seriously, at times he sounds almost Australian to me .'

'Kind of placeless to me.'

'With a cadenza of Italian,' Luigi, the Irish-Italian doctor interrupts, his eyes shining beneath a tussock of black and grey hair. He puts his hand on Jessy's shoulder in greeting, stealing a glance at her arse which is coquettishly perky, even through the staunchness of her white uniform. 'He's just mimicking our accents,' Luigi says. 'The mind, trying to belong.'

'If he wanted to belong, he could laugh at my jokes,' says Jessy. 'Try some social bonding. Make an effort at that.'

'How can he be social if he has lost whatever society he had?'

'He should laugh though. He is alive. He has to be thankful for that.'

'Has nobody come to see him?' I ask.

'No, nobody knows who he is.'

When I visit him later I jokingly call him Xx. He doesn't laugh. I suppose he does not need a name anyway if nobody is calling or asking for him.

In the room next to him the old man sleeps. I used to give hand massages to him also before he became too ill. Now I just sit with him or hold his hand. It makes sense to me that the two of them are parked in adjacent rooms at the end of the corridor on the topmost floor. Their windows look five storeys down, over valances that shelter the smokers below. They're like lost property. One's skin starting to peel, the other's encrusted with cancer. But it doesn't bother me that the man from the sea doesn't laugh. My job is to massage and manicure hands, sometimes of people who have known no human touch for years, apart perhaps from needles, jostling crowds, skin grafts or security frisks. Each responds differently. This one doesn't laugh. The old man, always says thank-you, his accent a mix of English plum and Irish grit - a West Brit, swaddled in bed sheets so he looks like a big white caterpillar, his hair a plume of white steam. He is perhaps fifty years older than this man who came from the sea, so is more experienced, wiser - yet for what? Both wait for family who do not come.

I look down at this unlaughing man from the sea and take out my bottles of oil. His accent and appearance are as placeless as mine, I think as I massage his hands once again. We are all mixed blood nowadays, in this hospital it seems. Anyone could be from anyplace else.

2

Hekla Thera Toba Ransome, hand therapist, named after volcanoes. Born in Indonesia in 1982 to Harry, an English volcanologist, and Katja - Spanish - who died when I was three. After her death, my earliest memory, perhaps age four and no longer called Hekla, but Nina, is not of the sea, but of opening my eyes and looking at some village huts upside down, a soft blue sky above my feet and my lamp-black hair tangling with red earth beneath my head, my skirt about my armpits, and my hands - not adult hands, but coral-pink girl-hands turning a little blue now - hitting the ground again and again until I finally took a long sudden breath - and when I breathed, being dumped unceremoniously on the ground at a woman - Lufa's - bare feet, stars in front of my eyes. And with stars that is where my world began, over and over again.

Three weeks and there is no news of who he is. He has started to take cold showers. Stands outside in the rain with the flimsiest of singlets on. I see him out there when I leave the hospital in the late afternoons. I think he is trying to return to his earliest memory, that of the sea, its cold, to see if he can trawl back through it to his past.

Helen runs a six minute mile, careering around each corner of the block. Within a week I take it away from her, run five minutes fifty-five.

'Greased lightening,' I say, laughing, almost collapsing as I complete the lap of the block, stumbling to put my hands on the gatepost of our house where Helen is waiting, leaning against the bricks.

'Stealing my thunder,' she says, regret in her voice.

Why did I do this, I ask myself as I follow her inside. She was happy with her six minute mile and I took it away. The daughter of a man who ran for Ireland in the 1952 Olympics, she always ran faster than I did. Running is her thing, her inheritance, not mine.

It is frustration I decide. That was what made me do it. I came home from the hospital, changed into my running clothes and hit the streets because of the day that was in it. I dragged her from where she was sketching flowers on the couch to run with me. Then drove my frustration out like rocket fuel, urged on by a boy who threw a banger at my feet and by this boxed up feeling, lidded with ennui, that always comes back to me at this time of year.

When we get back inside, my frustration has tailed out. I just feel guilty with an addled mix of runner's high, and the short temper of over-reaching physically. I take a banana from the fruit bowl by the sink and remove myself to the garden where I start raking the vegetable plot, still in my running clothes, the soles of my trainers growing thick with mud.

A firework arcs over the garden and slices through the buddleia and winter jasmine at the back wall. I go over to check it has gone out and it occurs to me that my father is probably somewhere right now looking, like me, at fire, but him at the fire of a volcano.

I spent my childhood watching him stare into volcanoes. He still spends his days rushing through windows of volcanic quiescence to collect samples of gases and rocks from active vents. Against the volcanoes he always looked as insubstantial as one of the tiny white mites on the snails I rescue from the garden soil and toss over the wall into the neighbours. As long back as I remember he preferred to keep the unpredictable company of his own death rather than other people. To spend evenings with his lungs burning and his breath ratcheting over gin and tonics clinking with ice and shot through with lemon. Though now he drinks whiskey, no longer gin.

I spent my first ten years watching him scurry up and down volcanoes, sometimes stumbling onto his hands, sometimes sliding on his arse, my second ten finding Helen.

For a short time before Harry left me here in Ireland when I was twelve, we lived in a half-way house between volcanoes and no volcanoes, in the UK. In his eyes it was a kind of safehouse, close to the calderas of Scafell, Snowdon and Glencoe yet a suitably benign place to raise a young girl. These calderas interested him not for their raw beauty but because they let him climb into what had once been an active magma chamber, so to, in a way, see inside a volcano, into its womb.

'We use these calderas to infer what is going on deep down in other volcanoes,' he said. 'Use these old ones to work out modern processes.'

'Spots' was how he explained the silent, bracken scented calderas to me, 'That after bursting have left pockmarks on the skin.'

'Like Indian's skin?' I said. I was young, around eleven. My mother seven years dead. I was missing Asia, like him. Central America. Italy. The pungent foods. The volcanic dust. The threadbare mules and kaleidoscopic birds. I missed him cooking for us on a primus stove. Our fragrant days together among the volcanoes' cacophony of scents - durien fruit, sulphur, hot rain, rainforest. I missed the deserts of black ash and grey lava, of snow on black slopes, the thunderous booming. It was, as I say, long after my mother, Katja, died and long after Lufa, went. Long after it had become just me, him and the volcanoes again, huffing in the distance like they were lumbering pet tortoises and the world our back garden.

'Yes, just like that,' he had said.

Two years we spent knotted over my maths homework and the temperate climate of England, fattening like turkeys on takeaway chips. But then Harry took me from the frosts of England, across the griseous sea to a house he had inherited from an aunt in Dublin, the same house that I and Helen live in now. In the three months sandwiched between our arrival in June and my new boarding school starting in September, he and I excavated the pristine lawn and founded a vegetable bed underneath it. Then he returned alone to our peripatetic life.

Every year I rake this vegetable bed until it is frightened of me like a rabbit cornered by a cat. Even fourteen years later. The soil quivering beneath my hoe, afraid to show a stone or clod or any balled up fist of earth in case I beat it out. I hoe the earth like I used to comb matted dog fur in the vets, then pat it down and leave it for the frosts to break up what I cannot.

Truth be told I do this to the garden every year around Halloween. At least since I got the keys back for the house when I turned eighteen. And every year the buddleia - the bush with the purple spears of flowers that the butterflies love so much - and the winter jasmine surge further up around the walls and the cherry and holly trees thicken with branches. This is Harry's birthday and my frustration is not just about his absence, or about where myself and Helen find ourselves now, it is about everything. I rake and work the soil until it is a flawless rug of black.

Alfombra. Rug. That is a word I remember.

When I go inside, Helen at the sink in our kitchen-come-sitting room, washing up. She is wearing blue jeans, white t-shirt, grass-green Converse. Her long hair falls over her shoulders. She places the dried cups upside down on the shelf so that nothing can fall into them. A fine cut of a girl, as the owner of the sweetshop by our school once put it, the same man who told me I had a fine pair of pins. She gets her speed not from angst, but from her father who is eighty-two and who ran marathons into his seventies and has the threadbare cartilage to prove it.

'I'll run faster next time,' she says.

3

Monday. He is sitting on his hospital bed clasping his knees to his chest. His forehead pressed onto them. A foetal position sitting up. He does not move when I come into his room, still brushing raindrops off my shoulders.

'You okay?'

'Headache,' he mumbles.

His face and eyes roll up at me. The rest of his body remains static. He has cornflower blue pyjamas on that do not fit. The bottoms stopping a few inches short of his ankles. He has spread the edges of a sheet and blanket over his feet. His sleeves are rolled up and not a button is done on the pyjama top.

These headaches he gets are from fatigue. The aftermath of severe hypernatremia - the highest serum sodium levels the hospital has ever seen when he came in. Ongoing electrolyte imbalance. Lack of sleep. The legacy of sunburn, hypothermia, exposure, shock. The list of reasons Luigi gave me, when I asked, had gone on. Luigi has slipped a hardback book under his pillows. It makes them firmer so reduces the spins and nausea he suffers from his body's memory of the motion of the water. But the headaches still persist.

'You want painkillers?' I say.

'Already took some.'

'Perhaps you need to get some fresh air.'

'I did.'

I see raindrops on his hair too.

'But all you do is stand in the rain and the cold,' I say. 'No wonder. Maybe it's an ice cream headache.'

People come to take his blood and fingerprints, then return to tell him about himself, what blood type he is, whether his blood counts have gone back to normal. He asks did we find any desert sand in his blood. Beach, maybe, I joke. He says he is sure his blood has desert in it, for he finds the air here strange and cold and the people here do not listen. They tell him that he shouldn't go out in the cold, and that he cannot be sure whether Ireland really is strange to him, whatever he claims - perhaps he is from here after all - and that he cannot be sure where his blood comes from, but that if something about his identity does not turn up soon, DNA analysis may help.

'It's true,' I say. 'Your DNA will have the traces of thousands of generations of your ancestors. It might show whether your ancestry is from Iceland, the Mediterranean, or out of Egypt -'

'But will it tell me where I actually came from?'

'No.'

'Where I was last month? Whether I have a wife? Children?'

'No. Unless you're on a database somewhere and they connect you.'

He shrugs, wordlessly. I told you so.

'I'll wait then,' he says 'Until I remember.'

I drip oil on his hands and massage to the top of his wrists.

4

Helen wants to invite all her colleagues from work to our decennial. I do not. All those legal types. At least she talks about things other than law - art, athletics - but some of her colleagues do not. We struggle in our discussions and find middle ground, a two phased approach that will make for a long, drawn out day I think, but do not say. A formal-ish lunch for workmates, black tie - her bit. Then the pub after, with friends. My bit. In jeans, or whatever else people want to wear. The day will double as the announcement of our engagement. Maybe my father will come in his volcanic protective suit. Maybe I shall wear a nurse's outfit.

I do not want a day like this for either of us. Neither of us wins. With compromises like this we will both end up tired and reeking of oldness before we are old. We have long fallen out of the fire of passion into the frying pan of domesticity. Sitting on our three person couch in the sitting room. Our relationship like a third person we try to sustain between us.

There is a reason for Helen's sudden anxiety to get engaged, to submerge us permanently in our relationship. A new Civil Partnership Bill published in June will allow us to marry in a year or two, or at least come as close to it as possible for a same-sex couple in Ireland. It's a window she can finally dare press her nose against. We'll finally be official, after ten years of casual, hammocked, as Helen wants, in the cat's cradle of law.

'I'm going to invite everyone,' Helen says gaily.

'Everyone?'

'Yes. An open invitation I thought.'

'Oh, it's just...' All those legal types. 'No it's fine, of course.'

Around us the curtains we chose together eight years ago droop like ballgowns to the floor. They shield us from the vegetable plot and the last of the season's fireworks, drown us in the pink of peonies, a colour Helen loves.

I wonder if I plant beans now, in these first days of November, will they have grown by the time my father visits for the party. If he comes. Will he be able to go out and pick them as if he had never left this garden with me planted in it. Is there such a thing as a winter bean, like there is winter lettuce and cabbage? Will anything grow here over winter?

Perhaps I'll try anyway. I'll get the seeds from the kitchen cupboard, plant beans and cauliflower and shallots, push in a few cloves of garlic to half a finger deep in the cold soil. I'll cover them with fleece and leave them to it. Whatever survives, survives.

I could just not tell Helen how I feel. It would be ok. We would continue to be a clean, sweet smelling, feminine pair, domestic and okay. Humdrum happy. Her with her teeth dug into that old exoticness of mine that I arrived in Ireland with but that has bleached like driftwood since. And me, nails deep into that teenage daring of hers that she has since claimed was only a phase like the urge to travel was for me. Both of us cling to our ideas of who we were once but are no longer.

'Most of all I want Anna-Lee to come,' Helen says.

I smile, try to be at least kind if I cannot be honest.

'Yes, you and Anna-Lee, you'll be the terrible twosome again.'

Anna-Lee, her best friend from college, who she keeps like a reserve tank of fuel. As if she knows someday I might run out on her in some way. Anna-Lee is married to Maurice, Grad. Dip. Oenology, BA Hons - that is what the business card Helen has pinned to the bookcase says - something to do with wines. He is developing viticulture over in Haiti, trialling Deep Ocean Water agricultural techniques to see if they can grow temperate grapevines in the tropics. The theory is neat. They draw cold deep-seawater to the surface and pipe it underground through the soils so the soils cool enough to suit the growing requirements for the roots of temperate vine species. Above ground, the tropical air meeting the now sea-cooled soil condenses on it and so irrigates the vines. When Helen first introduced me to Maurice and told him my father is a volcanologist he reminisced about drinking sparkling wine on the ash-rich slopes of Vesuvius. 'A spumante,' he said, 'Called Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio.'

What a romantic name for a wine, I thought. And I knew what he meant about the fertile slopes of Vesuvius, I had been there myself. And I loved that he loved to travel.

'Are they going to stay in Haiti?' I ask Helen.

'Yes. I was thinking we could go there for our honeymoon. Anna-Lee said we could stay with them.'

'Yes, perhaps,' I say, 'That's a good idea.'

We are both meant to be envious of Anna-Lee and Maurice, that they could get married before us, just because they are a woman with a man, not a woman with a woman. What a difference a penis makes, Helen says from time to time. They are together a decade or so, like us, and their marriage certainly makes Helen envious. I am envious too, in a way, but only because they live in Haiti and we do not.

We we we. I am soon to become one half of a whole. Habitually drinking little more than one glass of wine a night and deciding where to go on honeymoon together. Deciding who to invite to what. Like a northern hemisphere and a southern hemisphere trying to decide which way the winds should go when their winds will never really meet. We would both do it so differently, this celebration of a decade together.

Helen's phone beeps with an incoming text.

'Dad,' she says, looking at it.

I wash up tonight. Take my ring off and place it on the draining board. A Claddagh ring is a Fede ring - both Helen and I wear one. Helen's is silver, mine gold as that's what we chose to suit our skin tones, her vanilla ice-cream, me closer to the colour of wafer. The rings represent us, mani in fede, our hands joined in loyalty. Going round and round in circles. Somedays I wish we could just take them off and leave them off.

~~

There is an elephant from Dublin Zoo buried in a park near us. It died in 1922. We don't know exactly how far the distance from the house to the elephant is. We never measured it. We also have to cross roads which makes our running time unpredictable so un-raceable. And the end point is not a fixed line that we cross, just a vague mound. So we run to that now. Side by side, without competing. Out from our house, across the canal towards town and into the park. To our elephant and back.

~~

He stands centred and unmoving in borrowed pyjamas in the cold. Hailstones popping on his skin, shards of icy rain needling his arms, his left side growing colder than his right. The needles of cold turn to broad swathes of cold, then to a dull ache, then pierce his sides as if the thin cotton was not there. It is an interesting process, he thinks. When he opens up to the cold it is not what he remembers. It does not have the solidity it had when he had tried to swim away from it in the sea. To somehow swim out of the slab of water. This cold, in the hospital garden, is gappy, tingly and has holes. It has edges, and beyond them he doesn't know what there is, but it is not cold.

~~

I watch him from a fifth floor window while warming my hands on a cup of jasmine tea. He is sitting on a bench under the furthest filigree reaches of the tree branches, his back to the hospital buildings, his pyjama top off. Today the grass is sugarwhite with sleet and frost and the path near his feet is a snake of black. Even from this distance I can see that his skin is the same sandalwood tone as my own.

Behind me the old man is sleeping. I have brought him a bottle of 7Up which I have left the lid loose on so it goes flat and Lucozade and grapes. Things he might have brought his own children when he was younger and they were sick, things they ought to bring him but have not.

When my tea is finished I put my hands on the radiator, and when my palms are hot I leave the old man and go out to the hospital garden with them clasped. I stand behind where the man from the sea is sitting on the bench and settle them on his shoulders, opening them to drop heat into him like coins into the hospital televisions. He knows what I am saying. Surely I do not need words. Come inside. Come in out of the cold.

But he doesn't move. Leaves my gaze to trickle down the back of his bare arms, to the small hollow above the elbow where the triceps meets the deltoid, a hollow in which my gaze rests for a moment like a mouse in a nest of grasses.

I push him again, with words now, 'Come on, it's freezing out here'.

He doesn't move. It is his right to be out here in his immovable spot, on his cold bench. He has been coming out here for days in some slip-on shoes he has found somewhere, his cracked heels overflowing their soles.

With no answer forthcoming, I look around at the inhospitable cold. The air is bracing, worn like a draughty hospital gown by these lawns with their dormant flower beds, frost-singed roses and butt-naked trees. As cold and undignified as the sea, I think, this hospital garden with its smokers huddling under the awnings that extend from its walls. Birds clinging to the safety of sea cliffs.

Two hospital stacks tower near the gates, smoking like volcanoes against thunderstorm skies. And here I stand, and this man sits, good as naked in the naked cold.

'Come inside,' I say. 'You cannot stay out here'.

He half turns and looks at me but does not see me. He looks through me to the absence of family, friends, himself. To the absence of knowing who these are.

'It will come back to me,' he says.

I disagree but do not say anything. He is choosing the cold of a sea that was black and cold as Guinness the day he washed up. But a man cannot quench his thirst by drinking the sea. Standing in it or its equivalent will not bring back his memory.

~~

At home there is Helen and the warmth of our sitting room and an evening which is a reproduction of so many evenings before. We see tonight's possibilities through what we did all those other nights. Her blue eyes, mine brown, searching the fridge to see what food we have in. Running, cooking, television. No fish on Fridays. Her sketching dried flowers and leaves, me flicking through last month's magazines. We build new experiences out of old so nothing feels new. Everything is familiar and homely which is what Helen draws comfort from. It takes energy to change things, to think outside of what we already know and assume - and friction - and tonight we have no energy. It has been a long week and it is Friday so we just cuddle up on the couch, pull a blanket around us and watch TV.

Tonight