Niamh has her eyes closed and is breathing hard, as if she is just about to go in for the home stretch and push a baby out.
‘It’s not so bad, is it?’ Laura says.
‘Dddde… pp… ends what you’re comparing it to,’ Niamh says.
I’m about to tell Laura she has to be having a laugh when I feel my body relax and that numbness Peggy promised start to take over.
Okay. This might actually be okay after all. I’m finally able to take my eyes from Laura, Niamh and the other swimmers and look around me. Here I am, this one person at the gateway to this vast ocean between Ireland and America. Yet in this second, bobbing up and down in the water, a smile now unexpectedly wide across my face, I feel a sense of belonging. I am part of something bigger. We all are. That’s quite amazing, really.
‘Okay, ladies,’ Peggy shouts. ‘Time to get out and get warmed up!’
‘That’s it?’ asks Niamh, who has already pulled herself up to standing and thrust her hands back under her armpits, with incredulity.
‘Yep. Any longer and we risk hypothermia kicking in, which is absolutely shite craic by all accounts!’ Laura replies.
I stand up, the wind coming in off the ocean whipping around me as I walk back to shore. It’s the strangest sensation. I do not feel cold. In fact, what I feel is something quite euphoric instead.
So of course I do what anyone in a state of euphoria would do – and I burst into tears.
24
BIG GIRLS DO CRY
‘It’s a release,’ Peggy assures me as I sniff and blubber my way through getting out of my wet swimsuit and into something warm and cosy. I am incredibly grateful at this moment for changing robes and the advances that have been made in beach apparel, which allow us to fully strip off, dry and dress, under the protection of a big super-warm coat.
‘It’s existing in its purest form. We don’t have the physical or mental capacity to carry the weight of our worries when our body is in survival mode. All our energy goes into controlling our breathing and our body temperature. The tension we are carrying on our shoulders – and us women carry a lot of tension – slides away even if just temporarily. That release can be powerful,’ Peggy says, sagely.
I wonder how she knows this stuff. Who taught her? Is there a school for being a cool and chill human being? Whatever, she seems to have this Bean Feasa thing down pat. She’s definitely not being forced to wipe her nose and dry her eyes on the edge of a towel anyway.
‘It’s incredible,’ Laura says. ‘I wasn’t convinced to start with, but you know, sometimes you need to go down before you come back up, so I thought it was worth a shot. But I didn’t expect it to be that good.’
Peggy smiles warmly at her. ‘I’m so happy you got something positive from it.’
‘You’ve no idea. That’s the first time I have felt a sense of peace – proper peace – since my mum died. Probably even since before she got really sick. I felt as if I could breathe again.’
Laura doesn’t cry as she says this, even though her words unleash a fresh torrent of tears from me. Instead she just seems happy. Younger even. It warms my heart.
‘And what about you, Niamh?’ Peggy asks. ‘How did you find it?’
Niamh has already started to change into warm, dry clothes.
‘Yeah, it was… well, it was an experience anyway.’ There’s about as much enthusiasm in her voice as there would be if she was next in the queue for a cervical smear test.
‘Right, everyone, back to the meeting house for breakfast! Yoga with Eimear is in just over an hour!’ Peggy calls, just as my stomach rumbles. I’d grabbed a banana first thing but it had done little to satiate my hunger. I was more than ready for breakfast.
‘I’m ravenous,’ Laura says. ‘You’ll have to stop me going full Cookie Monster with the croissants.’
‘Bear in mind that yoga is next,’ Niamh says. ‘You might want to go easy on the heavy carbs. And most definitely no beans.’
Oh, God, I think. We’re about to enter a room where twenty women, who have just been fed and had their morning coffee, are going to twist and stretch their bodies in ways that are guaranteed to get their guts rumbling.
* * *
It seems like we needn’t have worried too much. The breakfast on offer was not a smorgasbord of flaky pastry delights, hot buttered toast or even a full Irish. Breakfast was, as declared on a whiteboard just inside the meeting house, a ‘Refreshing and Detoxifying Super Smoothie, with Chia Seeds and Collagen Powder’. Someone had drawn smiley faces and flowers around the words in what I can only imagine was an attempt to soften the blow.
My stomach plunged. I knew before I even saw it that this was going to look, at best, like green sludge. It was likely to taste like green sludge too. I could feel Niamh tense up further beside me.
‘Well… this will be interesting,’ Laura says. ‘At least we’ll be filling our bodies with good, nourishing food.’
