BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Sculpture by Liz Cullinane

Watercress abundant, pooled, fed by a freshwater stream that leaks a channel, a winding furrow  carving an arc across the sands. Joining the Atlantic salt waters. Diluted. 

Conas ta tu a stor? How’re you love? Bhfuil tusa ann?  Are you here? Where are you? 

                Under the rocks……..caught in the weed………….? A remnant of yourself…. a fragment, flotsam, tiny bones  bleached out over time. 

                First child, the one and only first, spent in the sands and carried away unseen.

Pause, sigh, and breathe. Slow. Clearing. In and out breaths. Fuck it …

The stream’s absorbed when it reaches the sea. Red standing stones guard the shoreline. Dug in, bulk undiminished through the years. Smooth blank faces peppered with tiny lives. Living creatures  in spiraling whorls, paint-box colours distinct from the rest with their blend of muddy greys, blacks and browns. The discreet, minding their own business ones.

Keeping to the low formation, leaning into these sentinels, pushing up hard. Limpets impress their determination into my back, encouraging them to leave their marks on my skin, through the layers of time and guilt. Tiny bruises, kissed into my shell.

Cá bhfuil tu mo stor,  where are you my love? Still here? Shape shifting your small self, half formed baba deas, lovely baba? Or have you vanished into mists of salt water and weed? Níl fhios agam, I don’t know, may never know.

Sins for which I alone hold no charge, spoken in my head. Not then, had no clue back then. 

Busy in the kiddish world of long summers, heat hazed early mornings blended into same grey days. School and holidays, home and here, the Red Strand. First beach out of Clonakilty, Cloich na Coillte, stone castle of the woods.

The brother, older but no wiser through the passage of summers, collects the tiny vivid shells under instruction from his know it all little sister. All through our early rising summers for as long as it pleases him. Mostly in the absence of anyone else. (He’d prefer the other boys, tardy, sleeping-in boys, almost always with a ball). 

We sort  the shells into currency for our long playing games, oblivious to any lives inside the whirly chambers. Red, yellow and green defining value, same as fruit pastilles or wine gums;sticky pleasures.  Flavours imparted by the power of suggestion. 

In truth  they all tasted much the same, the richer the colour the more they’re desired, sweeties and shells. No truth to either.

He is obliging, patient and generous, prepared to share a vision of the day, playing shop? Or being rich for our new life ahead. Content til he gets a better offer……at least til then. 

A big brother like no other, he is dark to my fair, tall where I am slight, brave while I am cautious. Protective and free running altogether in one certain self. His infectious self-belief sweeps us into his limitless foolhardy world and we’re away. Climbing rock faces, out of windows and trees, into danger without looking back. Running for miles with no sense of the dinner time clock. It chimes without our ears to mind it. Into trouble over and over he brought me, with no regrets. 

                                        Not true, baba deas. My one regret. The original sin.

Hours we spend under the towering protection of this headland. Obscured from view by the remains of an over-ground tunnel. Giant concrete slabs scattered about, fallen, impotent, discarded. Marooned in the sands. 

A hidey hole, a place of travel from one gloomy tunnel end to the other, between the stream and the sea. 

Fresh water and salt, fishing in both, crazy laughter and messing, all the way to tears and squabbles on rare days, high days and holidays, tense sort of days.

Status Quo, the quo, ruled the roost for his whole gang, while we, the girls, follow the Bay City Rollers. Uniform in our tartan trousers, Baby love, oh baby love, skimming our thighs cutting into our vain attempt to hold the boys attention. All the while loving our idols, the special one, he who holds our gaze on the telly. A band member for all the seasons of our pre-teen crushes.

Teenage years we return to the Red Strand with beer and tents. The sea is the place to be rather than the shore. Trailing friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, cousins once from overseas, to share the magic that no longer exists. Red Strand’s too full of childhood and original sin. Better beaches round the corner, further along the coast, closer to the shore life of pubs, craic and caravan parks. 

All these places we never saw as children, never knew were there, so determined was this family not to mix with the noisy ones, the drunken ones. The families that might know us from life at home ones. The sleeping in, lying in their beds half the day ones. 

Mothers and fathers equally corrupt longside their offspring, in the gospel of our English origins. They lined up daily at the chip van for their tea. We ate freshly caught mackerel with bread and butter, the food of the Gods, and so it was. Free, from the sea.

We ate mussels plucked from the rocks. Sometimes lobsters, captured in pots thrown off the shore. Squealing their way from blue black to bright scarlet in a pot alive with boiling water, delicious, with butter dripping from our chins, stinking of garlic. No one ate that stuff, famine food still reeking of the sea but we did. Set apart, positioned above, looking down, while trying to squeeze in.

We were blessed, apparently.

The beach welcomed us back annually, sharing its curves, a safe return into the familiar crook of embracing rocks. The concrete tunnel sheltering our comings and goings from year to year, constant,  never-changing. The strand,, our part in it, had a rhythm, a ritual of its own making.  It bent slightly each year as we grew up, new faces appeared, alongside the familiar caravans. 

Softly whispered voices, rememberings from the sea, in the sand dunes, where courting couples played out their pleasure. Mostly undiscovered, known by all and avoided, quietly sidelined. Not allowed, and still they were always there. Bless me father for I have sinned. Curled up in warm grasses on heated sand that threatened collapse without the tough spines that held it altogether.

All through the early Summers a man ploughed his way, twice a day from the dizzy height of the headland, traveling from his smallholding, along a narrow sunken track. He trailed a donkey and a jennet down onto the strand, on a single rope. Their arrival a Mr Whippy of excitement in the day trippers, our prior knowledge fattening our superior position. Privileged with familiarity, without names, we are known to each other. The donkey man and us, the regulars.

Some days I follow them on their return pilgrimage through the steep channel, the sharp, dry grass nicking my bare shoulders, a minor penance, a small offering. I daydream a change of identity, assuming a place in their holy family on the homeward climb. Shifting from child to blessed mother, to partner and devoted animal whisperer. The donkey man never seems to notice my presence or acknowledge it at any rate.

Codladh samh, sleep safe, a stor, love, where ever you are, under the deep sand or washed clean among the creatures that flow back and forth, in and out of the tides. Three hail Marys and one our father the regular gift for telling lies. How could you not tell lies when caught between the father and the son. I have no idea, only one idea possesses my mind, escape and protection. 

First love learned at the foot of the should be protector and  corrupt for ever after while nuns whispering lies and responsibility into the shell like of every girl child and what would they know about it anyway? Brides of Christ, be lady-like, be Marylike the impossible mantra, the ideal that will never be matched.

They can’t control themselves, they confide,  it’s up to ye to take control, female pleasure, unknown, unspoken.

Is it any wonder a stór beag, my small love, my tiny not fully hatched firstborn that you were conceived and lost on the shore of my innocence. Bless me father, I don’t fucking think so, thank you very much and goodnight.

Transformation, a daily event as the sea wipes out the story of the sand and shore. Washing and rinsing rocks and strand in a matter of hours, filling and emptying the pools closest to the rushing waters.

Anemones, the most tantalising transubstantiation of all. Still to this day, a miracle. Brown jelly mounds stranded in the air of low tide become flowering tendrils of soft pinks submerged in the salt water. Waving gently, they invite  touch, dipping a finger into a shallow pool and softly, softly stroking the water closest to the fleshy petals. Too close, they fold themselves in, abruptly resuming their impenetrable personae. Still here, always here, since the beginning of time. Stuck fast to their ways. 

Echoing through the years, on every return I pay homage to their beauty hidden in the dark  brownness of the rock pools, discomfited in the air heavy world.

Tabhair aire, take care, precious one, watch out for the sidewards crabs lurking out of sight among the weed. Sharp little nipping pincers, painful beyond belief to the unwary, bi curamach, be careful, mind your little fingers and toes. 

A fully grown woman this visit, kneeling in a hollow scraped out of the sand. Lost but keeping watch on the tide, inching closer and closer, washing clean its own. Soothing the grains with the patterns of waves, licking into the holes dug out with plastic reds and yellows. Further out to sea, waves churn up the red sandstone rocks  lining the basin of the strand. Fractured thoughts coming and going rolling back and forth, testing the present with the past, seeking out long gone shapes amongst the weed, carried and tossed, lifted along the breadth of the curve. 

Nothing clear, no single sound, a rag bag of rattling stones to hang from my feet. Uneasy flickerings in the corner of an eye. Glimpses of the jennet’s flashing whites and straining head. His unpredictable nature printed in my memory, a familiar refrain, a chord that echoes in my pulse. He was half donkey and half horse, we said, the mixture of breeding, his magic. Also his devilish power, tempting fate with its unnaturalness. 

The water, freezing, has reached me, frothing at my knees and trickles begin to fill the spaces around and between my legs, my feet folded into the dugout. How long could I last? The cold drove me out half way between head and toes, intimate with my belly. Enough already. This time.

. . .

Inter-disciplinary artist Liz Cullinane is a storyteller in words and pictures. Her Belfast based practice is rooted in community activism, theatre design and film collaborations with poets and musicians. Liz’s academic research on early 20th century Irish women artists focusses on Mary Swanzy (1882-1978). Published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), she has innovated a digital opera on Swanzy. Recent exhibitions & writing reflect her engagement with the Achill Island landscape in Mayo.

https://lizcullinane.com