Heather opened her eyes and found herself in the car looking out across the narrow mouth of Trawbreaga Bay to the long wind-whipped strand and steep cliffs on the other side. It was raining, as it so often was in this part of Donegal, and the wind was keen and insistent. She should get out, she told herself, and take a walk down to the water’s edge. Blow away the cobwebs. Such an odd expression. It wasn’t cobwebs she needed to blow away but painful, anxious thoughts. She felt the dryness in her throat and the ache in her jaw that was constant these days.
Come on, she said to herself. One, two, three. Heather stepped out of the car and into the wind and rain. Still battling with her hood and gloves, she started to make her way down the sandy path to the near shore. Halfway she stopped and looked out to sea. The five fingers of rock that gave the strand its name looked black and weighty in the stormy light. Further out sat the great mass of Glashedy island, uninhabited bar a few hardy seabirds.
Shoving her hands into her pockets Heather was surprised to feel the compact form of a pair of binoculars. She pulled them out and, wiping away wind-tears from her eyes, took a look at the island. A barren plug of rock in a treacherous bay, the white streaks of seabird waste were the only contrast to the dark, bare quartzite. The lough mouth itself was perilous with hidden depths and dangerous currents. Every year or so there was a drowning when someone thought they could walk across the sandbar to the other side.
Sweeping the binoculars along the cliff top she could trace the line of the road to Malin Head. She had driven the route many times over the years on her visits to Inishowen. Opposite where she stood now there was a carpark with spectacular views across the northerly coastline of Donegal and then out and away across the Atlantic. She paused, her attention caught by a flash of colour. At first she could only make out the hazy outline of a person standing against the low barrier but adjusting the focus, she saw a woman in a red coat looking out to sea. It was mid-afternoon but the winter sun was already low, lighting up the western sky. There would be a spectacular sunset in an hour or so. Something about the woman’s stillness captured Heather’s attention and she kept watching her. Then the woman turned and at once was staring right at her. Heather jumped, her hands shaking, and the image veered. When she steadied herself, the woman was still looking at her, left hand now raised in greeting. Then she smiled and moved her arm in a beckoning gesture. Was she asking Heather to join her over there? As this question formed in Heather’s mind, the woman seemed to nod and then turned her body back to the sea. Heather panned left and followed the woman’s gaze. Already the sun’s light was seeping out in reds and yellows along the horizon and the sea beneath it was glittering.
#
Heather was on the road north of Malin, approaching the place where she had seen the woman. She couldn’t remember getting back in the car and driving the ten or so miles round Trawbreaga Bay to this point. She must have passed through Malin village with its triangle of grass flanked by the hotel, the butchers, and the general store but she had no recollection of doing so. As she drove, her tinnitus started up. A high-pitched beeping inside her head that infiltrated her thoughts and her rest. Occasionally there were voices along with it but she refused to acknowledge those and pushed them away from her conscience. She pinched her nose to pop her ears and the noise seemed to fade. The road tracked the water’s edge for another mile and then climbed up and away from the shore until it reached a small carpark with a viewpoint. No other vehicles were parked there.
She pulled up slowly and got out of her car. She’s gone, she thought to herself. But then, way over to the right beyond the safety barrier above the cliffs, she spotted a shape silhouetted against the early evening sky. The figure moved slightly and the light around it shifted revealing the redness of a coat. The woman’s back was to Heather and she was looking out to sea. Heather moved slowly across the carpark towards her. She felt insubstantial somehow. There was nearly always a wind up here but the air around her was unusually still and warm. At the low barrier Heather climbed carefully over and stopped on the other side. She could hear the rhythmic rush of the sea as it crashed onto the shore. The woman was standing perilously close to the edge of the cliff that dropped some hundred feet down to the sand and rocks below.
Heather called out to her softly, “Hello?” The woman didn’t react and Heather tried again, a little louder. “Excuse me, hello!”
The woman turned and looked at Heather with warmth – or was it relief? – in her eyes. “You’re here too,” she said happily. “When I saw you over on the other side, I wasn’t sure you’d come. I’d have understood if you hadn’t wanted to. But it’s nice to have company.”
Heather didn’t know how to respond. “I’m Heather,” she said after a pause.
“Meabh. We haven’t met before, have we? I almost felt I knew you.” She was striking, Heather noticed, with green eyes and thick black curls. “I’ve beenwatching the seabirds”, Meabh went on. “They take off from here and soar out across the bay and on to that rock. I think they land there although I can’t quite see.”
“It’s Glashedy,” said Heather, comforted by a fact she was sure of in this strange conversation.
“That’s right, it means ‘green cloak’. For the grass on top, I suppose. But I always imagined a cloak that might sweep around you and hide you away.”
Heather shivered but Meabh looked elated as if anticipating something. She was standing right at the edge of the clifftop and her body was leaning out. “I thought I might try,” she said. “Like the birds. It feels like the right time to do it. It’ll be dark soon and I’m not too tired yet.”
Heather was frightened by Meabh’s words, although she wasn’t sure she had fully grasped their meaning. The tinnitus had begun again and was louder than ever, she couldn’t ignore the voices this time, poking into her head with urgent, insistent tones. She tried to speak to Meabh, to tell her she couldn’t fly like the birds, not to go, but her tongue wouldn’t move. Something hard and heavy was pressing on it. She gagged a little and clutched at her throat. The golden sun on the horizon narrowed into a single white light and she lost sight of Meabh. A chessboard appeared before her eyes, the black and white checks of unconsciousness. She knew she was about to fall and tried to remember which way the cliff edge lay. Her hand reached out and she felt Meabh’s fingertips hook her own. Who grabbed who? As she fell back, onto soft grass, there was a thud as Meabh’s body landed next to her.
#
Heather woke and couldn’t see anything. A light shone brightly in her face. The air was warm and dry. A hand held hers and, as she tried again to open her eyes a voice called out, “Oh! Someone please, come quickly!” Then, hurried footsteps and people talking around her. The light moved and when her eyes adjusted she could see her husband in a hospital gown and mask standing at the foot of her bed.
That afternoon Heather learned of the five weeks she had lost, the virus that had attacked her system, the coma intended to protect her body, and the machine that had breathed for her. The outlook had been bleak, her husband told her, and he thought he’d lost her until one night, a few days before she woke, when she’d moved and tried to speak. The next day her stats improved and they’d slowly brought her out of the coma. She’d need physio for some time but she was going to be ok.
One day, as she drifted out of a doze, Heather noticed the nurses preparing the bay next to hers. She caught snatches of their conversation about the patient who would be arriving; a transfer from another hospital who had also recently woken from a coma. When Heather’s husband came in to see her he told her about the guy he’d been chatting to at the coffee machine. An Irishman whose wife had been even sicker than Heather until a few days ago when she suddenly turned a corner and surprised even the doctors with her recovery. She was still pretty weak and was being transferred to the unit where Heather was to continue her recovery. The man’s relief at finally being allowed to visit his wife had been palpable, her husband told her, his own eyes filling with tears. Heather pictured these two men, complete strangers talking at a hospital vending machine, bound by parallel horrors and near-loss.
She slept again but woke with a bang of doors as a bed was wheeled into the room. A nurse pulled the curtain between the bays and the dark green cloth billowed as it enclosed the space on Heather’s left. Through it she could hear the nurses working quietly and efficiently to settle the new arrival and talking through the cannulas, drips and machinery that would power and monitor her body. Heather dozed fitfully and at some point a man with red hair and dark circles under his eyes came into the room and disappeared behind the green curtain around her neighbour’s bed. She heard him whisper softly and say, “I’ll just pull back these curtains now Meabh, you’re all hidden away in here.”
Heather started at the name. It was unusual enough, especially over here, but surely it had to be a coincidence. The pulse of machines became a sea-roar in her ears as she looked at the bed next to hers and saw the head of tangled black curls.
February 2021
A green cloak was first published by Glittery Literary in their Anthology Three which came out in October 2021.
Hilary Coyne 