‘Running out of oxygen, Mum?’ I said.
She gave me a look. ‘Not oxygen,’ she said. ‘Ozone. And my eyes feel better here. As though I could see forever. Mustbe the sea air.’
‘Mum, we have sea air at home. We live on the coast.’
‘Yes, but that’s only the Irish Sea,’ she insisted, disloyally. ‘This is the Atlantic Ocean. It does something to a person does being by the Atlantic.’
‘It does that.’ Finty was handing out mugs.
‘Just breathing it in brings me back to the Peace Camp. Same air you see. It could be twenty years ago. It was only a coupleof miles away, wasn’t it?’
‘Three fields that way.’
‘Good times, weren’t they?’
He grinned at her. ‘I’ve got some great memories.’ He tapped his head. ‘They’re all up here.’
‘How’s the health, Finty?’ I said.
‘Not good, Tabitha. I used to go all over the world, I did. India. Australia. I sailed the North-West passage. Been everywhere. But a few things have gone now. Important things. Heartnot good. Lungs on the poor side. Liver is packing up. Got a good doctor up in Cork, though. He’s about fifteen years old. But a brain like he’s lived a very long time.’
‘We’re all getting old, Finty.’ Nora had moved her stool closer to him.
‘Not you, Nora. You’re just the same. Haven’t aged a bit.’
‘I’m getting creaky and my eyes are going.’
‘No, you’ve got years left. I’ve got a few yearson you. Still swimming?’
‘Every day. You?’
‘You always were hardier than me,’ he grinned. ‘I might go for a dip in the summer. When it’s calm, but for some reason I’ve lost a bit of the foolhardiness I used to have. And now I’m a bit spooked. Deep water is one thing I can’t do anymore.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s funny the things that leave you, isn’t it, when you’re getting on?’
‘I still swim butI can’t do people,’ said Nora, which was news to me. ‘I have to go shopping in the morning. I can’t face buses and cinemas and supermarkets. Everything has to be small-scale.’
He nodded, as though understanding entirely. ‘Goleen is as far as I go these days. Except for when I have to be in the big smoke for my treatment. There’s a little minibus that collects all of the ailing West Corkoniansand brings us up. There’s a few cancers on the bus, two strokes and there’s me with my liver failure. We’re quite the school trip. But before we go, I have to take a deep breath of this air here. Enough to keep me going all the way up, the day in the hospital and then the journey home.’
Rosie and I left them to it, they were reminiscing about the various exploits they’d experienced together,mainly, as far as we could tell, run-ins with police. They barely looked up from their riveting – to them at least - conversation about protesting in the age of social media and Rosie and I went off to the village of Schull to find our B&B.
*
Starving, we first found a café on the hill in the town overlooking the harbour below, which had three little tables outside.
‘Still no signal, Mum,’said Rosie. She’d been checking her phone every ten minutes, waving it around.
We popped our heads inside the door of the cafe. ‘Are you open?’
‘You’re in luck,’ said a woman behind the counter. ‘We’re open until 7 p.m. What are you looking for?’
‘A sandwich?’
‘What about crab?’ she said. ‘Caught this morning. Sit yourselves down, now, and I’ll bring everything out.’
In the evening sun, wesat beside each other. ‘How’re you doing?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ said Rosie. She was checking her phone for signal.
‘I know I keep asking,’ I said. ‘About how you’re feeling.’
