Eileen couldn’t have been sure how long she spent in that shelter after her mid-morning swim. She had sunbathed for a while, making a cushion for her head from her towel, letting the sun do the job the towel should have done. She had then draped the towel over her bare shoulders and shared a flask of coffee, offered to her by one of the old-timers in the men’s section.
‘You immersed the corpus,’ he said, the kind of statement that didn’t need a reply.
‘Nothing like it,’ he added and she saw the Viking, now clothed in one of those Velcro bicycle suits, fixing a helmet, awkwardly, to his cropped head. Oh dear, she thought. How disenchanting. And she realised, with a whimsical, inner smile, that her husband Jim would never be seen dead in leisurewear. Small mercies.
It must have been a while, though. A good half an hour, at least, maybe even an hour. Long enough for that dreadful thing to happen, whatever it was, on the dunes behind. Anyway, after her thanks to the old-timer for the coffee, after peeling off her swimsuit underneath her towel, after dressing and drying her hair into what she hoped was a fetching tangle, she finally emerged from the shelter to see the figure of a girl staggering from the sandy dunes on to the cement pathway, one heel on her sandal broken, her body covered in patches of damp sand, and what seemed to be a personal cloud of midges swirling round her head. For a moment Eileen thought she was wearing a veil, or a hijab, one of those Muslim headscarves. But then she recognised Carmen, who was swatting the air desperately with her hands, hands that had visible streaks of blood on them, as if to ward off an attack of bees, or hornets.
‘Carmen!’ she called, and saw her turn, eyes wide with a strange kind of horror.
‘No,’ Carmen was saying, ‘Oh God—’
Carmen staggered then, and almost tripped over one of the cement blocks designed to stop the cars. Eileen reached out and gripped her elbow to steady her.
‘His fucking mother – get away from me—’
And that’s when Eileen heard it. the buzzing, or the pulsing, like the intermittent drone of cicadas in a horror movie. But they weren’t cicadas, they were midges, or some kind of flying ants, and Carmen was flailing with her bloodied hands at her own barely visible cloud. She ran then, tripping on her broken heels, towards the bridge beyond, crashing into a cyclist on the way. It was the velcroed swimmer with the hourglass waist. Eileen turned from the splayed bike and the clacking heels to see the silhouetted figure of her Andy, walking from the dunes.
There were many rumours, afterwards, about what had happened. About a clinch, an adolescent embrace on the dunes, that turned into ‘something else’. But what this something else might have been changed in the telling, as in one of those courtroom dramas, where the victim herself is the least reliable of narrators, where the trauma suffered leads to exaggerated fantasies that create other traumas in turn. it didn’t help that as the legends blossomed, the infestation of flying ants began.
‘What’s wrong with Carmen?’ Eileen had asked, when her son finally reached her, only to be shocked into silence by his terse reply.
‘Something happened, Andy. You have to tell me—’
‘Nothing happened, Mother. She just doesn’t like me – did she ever?’
Was that a question? Eileen wondered. Surely he would have known, would have remembered. She took his arm, as they crossed the wooden bridge, and remembered passing them both on the same walkway as children. There was a dusting of sand all over his shirt. She brushed it off. She saw a flutter then, from the folds of the cotton, and realised it wasn’t sand. It was tiny, winged creatures, like ants. She felt them brush against her face, and rubbed her face, her hair; she felt an itching in her scalp and shook her head, looked up and saw a cloud of them around her, like fine, Saharan sand, blown in the summer wind, but it wasn’t sand, it was an infestation of those winged things, filling the air, all glittering in the late-morning sun. She felt afraid, suddenly, the hyperventilating surge of panic she had felt out in the water, and wanted to cling to his arm for comfort, but then she realised she felt afraid of that too. She took a deep breath and realised she was inhaling them, and almost gagged on the dark sleepers of the walkway, beneath her feet.
And as the rumours circulated in the small grid of bungalowed streets adjacent to the football pitch, the clouds of flying ants circulated as well. There were reports on the news, something about Mediterranean winds and alates, females that create a sexual attraction, bringing the males in swarms, creating clouds that block the sun and moon. For they swarmed at night too and after them came flocks of seagulls, gorging on the swarms of flying ants.
Carmen avoided her glance in the subsequent days. Brushing her face to clear it of the clouds of tiny predators, mouthing a cigarette, turning to the chip-shop window to manage a light, out of the persistent breeze. Andy stayed locked in his room, watching the piles of dead creatures build against his windowpane like blown sand. And Eileen, on the few occasions she ventured outside, felt shunned. Something had happened on the dunes. No one would tell her what it was. Neighbours would cross the street ahead of her, as if she herself had brought this strange infestation with her. And one evening when she entered his bedroom and saw him standing by the open window, enveloped in a dark cloud of minuscule flying creatures, she knew that, somehow, he had.
What had happened on the dunes, as Carmen confided to Georgie, Georgie who had once been Andy’s friend before all the mad stuff began, was that a simple snog or shift became something different, something other, something way beyond what the American TV shows called first, second or third base, what the local boys called a wear, a feel, a ride.
Carmen lay beside him first of all in the long grass and offered up her lips for a kiss. She has learned things on her summer holidays that she wants to teach him. How to kiss with her mouth open, how to tangle her legs around his, how to press her hips into his and get things moving. She learned this from a Protestant boy in Kilrush who walked her down by a different set of dunes. The boy had a packet of condoms, but she never let him get that far. And she had just begun her instruction here in the Dollymount dunes when she felt something stroking the stocking of her leg. She had been careful about those socks, rolled them down behind her knees, just so, and when she felt fingers rumpling the edge of one of them and creasing the skin behind she smiled to herself and whispered, ‘Where did you learn that?’ He answered, ‘Nowhere in particular,’ and she thought to herself, saucy, saucy as the stroke of the fingers continued upward, underneath the flap of the kilted skirt she was wearing, and she thought, oh dear oh dear, no Protestant boy ever got that far, and she tries to remember a song her father used to sing about Protestant boys and an old orange flute and she felt another touch then, around her blouse on the right side, probing beneath the summer bra she was wearing for the nipple, and another on the left side, and he was all hands suddenly; she wondered how many hands a boy could have to find a way to nuzzle closer and saw when she opened her eyes, that they were not hands but creatures, creatures she didn’t have a name for, furred creatures, with ears like probing brown-haired fingers, and she pulled her face away from his then, so rapidly she almost bit his tongue, and she saw a larger one between her outstretched knees, staring at her, the same colour as the sedge grass behind it, its brown furred ears erect, as if surprised by suddenness. And she remembered the name then, hare, a hare, this was the father of hares and the tiny furred family were burrowing all around her. As if she was the earth, she thought, to be probed, tunnelled, penetrated. ‘Get me out of here, Andy,’ she murmured and that was when she heard the buzzing. Of tiny things like ants, obscuring the hares in a wave of wings and she pushed him off and stood and the hares leapt – that was the only word for it, leapt – like a surprised phalanx of furred spears, and they ran, obscured by the clouds of flying ants. And she knew then something was wrong, very wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.