Bord Dulra

This day started vacuum-packed and white.
Inside the air hung damp, and outside gloopy glass windows clothes suspended static on the line undry.
We woke late and at the same time, our bodies rising from stillness on hard desks we had made our beds.
The sounds woke us, the business of the middle of nowhere. The quiet countryside should have been a quiet place, and it was, until interrupted by cow shouts and the machinery of birds making love with the world.
The toilets smell lemon-strong of cleaning products and make us wish for the mystery of carpet.
Dressed for escape. I am out the door alone pass the tended schoolhouse grass. Up behind and over a barbed wire fence that rips a cigarette-diameter hole in my jeans. That’s ok. I learned about a lurcher who leapt over barbed wire once and cut its stomach open and its guts fell out. The father of the person who told me this story took the guts and put them back in and held them there until the dog got to the vet.
Guts, I’m lucky.
Heather, brambles, rocks leapt and landing in hidden water. This day had not expected to be like this.
The previous one set a series of unexpected events in motion that led to my being here, tearing through the bracky growth of a picturesque cliff top. Yesterday I was in the suburbs and had wanted to buy some meat that no one else would have. I started asking after it and then realised that all meat is unique and was both relieved and excited by this. In my asking though I learned some things, met some people and found myself sent to a train station with a butcher’s name scribbled on a faint receipt. On the way I saw a man and woman kissing, both dressed in black. One black mass of closed affection. The woman was wider and longer than the man and enveloped him. I looked back as I passed by to see if his eyes were closed. It is an oyster of a treat to see someone in full kiss with their eyes open I can never resist checking for it. They were closed. I would have been sated to find they were of very different ages but they seemed to be peers and so I kept walking. On the train platform a shiny young man waited with a racer bike. His arms were crossed across his chest and he wore a cycling cap and clothes like a laptop case. When the train sighed up to the platform and its doors slid open he seamlessly led-followed his bike onto the carriage and I followed him distracted, feeling at that moment I preferred him to myself. I watched him in the train carriage, staring absently away from the window. He stood just the same inside the moving train as he had while waiting for it I noticed, leaning back protectedly over his bike, with one leg bent and his arms crossed, one hand tucked inside and the other holding the muscle that protruded unexpectedly veiny from his otherwise skinny arm. I saw a little band of boys roaming the train. Some of them seemed tiny. The smallest of all was eating a demi baguette stuffed with something. I thought chips probably but it was actually a load of corn snacks and seemed inedibly dry.
After roping down steep stones there’s a pebble beach. Going down is getting warm in wool.
It is flat here, it is some kind of destination, there are two caves like the mouths of monsters.
Used to clawing my feet over roots I am unsurely footed on the smooth. All kinds of seaweed lie corpsed and straggly on the stones. I begin to collect it in the pockets of a jacket that doesn’t belong to me.
Soon I have too much seaweed and, wondering why, I lay it out on the pebbles and sift through it, making up categories for it and arranging it accordingly.
The caves make monster sounds for a while and when this gets less exciting it is time to leave, back up the steep stones and onto grass and roots and knots in the ground and knocking feet and twisting ankles and pounding soles. At the top I look back down the rocks.
On top of the sea a cloud of scum foam, the danger floating to the surface from below.
On the rock edges I imagine a version of me fallen, ragdoll with limbs going the wrong-way, hair strewn rocks and blood across stones.
Sugary sweet hot tea.