The Off-Season

Chapter One: The Last Bus West

The bus put Orla Hennessey down at the top of the hill in a squall of rain so fine it seemed to come sideways out of nothing.

She stood a moment with her rucksack at her feet and a cardboard box in her arms, watching the tail lights slide away towards Ballyferriter, and then there was only the sound of the sea working at the rocks below and the wind coming up the road to meet her.

September. Late September, the twenty-eighth, a Tuesday, the day the summer officially stopped pretending. The last of the tour coaches had rolled out of Dunquin a fortnight ago. The ice-cream sign outside Nagle's shop had been taken in. The town had folded itself up the way it did every year, like a deckchair, and gone back to being what it actually was: forty-one houses, one pub, one shop, one primary school, one pier, and a lot of water.

Orla hoisted the box onto her hip and started down.

The box held everything worth keeping from three years of her own business. Two glaze notebooks with the covers coming off. A wooden throwing rib worn to the shape of her thumb. A wire cutter, a set of calipers, and eleven finished pieces wrapped in newspaper, which was all that had survived the auctioneer's van and her own temper. The kiln had gone to a school in Mallow. The shelving had gone to a man who made hurleys. The lease had gone back to the landlord, along with a letter from a solicitor that Orla had read forty times and still could not read without her ears going hot.

Marine Villa stood where it had always stood, third from the end of the terrace above the harbour, three storeys of pebbledash painted a blue that had been chosen in 1987 and never seriously questioned since. There was a light on in the kitchen. There was always a light on in the kitchen.

Orla stopped at the gate the way she used to stop at the gate coming home from school with a bad report, and made her face into something manageable, and went in.

"You're wet," Louise Hennessey said, without turning around.

"It's raining."

"It's been raining since Friday." Her mother was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, washing a colander of potatoes with the ferocity she brought to all small tasks. She was sixty-one and built like a woman who had carried linen up stairs for thirty years, which she had. "There's tea in the pot. It'll be stewed."

"I'll make fresh."

"Do what you like."

Orla set the box down on a chair. The kitchen smelled of bleach and bacon and the particular damp of a house that has salt in its bones. The tide chart was still stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a puffin. The clock above the door still ran four minutes fast, a lie the whole family had lived by for two decades.

"You're in your own room," Louise said. "I've the two front rooms and the twin let out for the weekend, a couple from Limerick doing the Slea Head, and then that's it till Halloween, and after Halloween it's nothing at all till Paddy's Day if we're lucky. Aired it out for you Sunday. Window sticks."

"It always stuck."

"It always stuck," Louise agreed, and set the colander down, and turned, and looked at her daughter properly for the first time.

Orla knew what she was looking at. Twenty-seven years of age, a wax jacket that had been good once, hair scraped back, hands with permanent grey in the cuticles, and eyes with the flat shine of someone who had cried in a bus toilet somewhere around Adare and got it over with.

Whatever Louise thought, she filed away. That was the thing about her mother. She never said the thing. She let you say it to yourself, in her voice, for years.

"Well," Louise said. "You'll be glad of the rest."

That was it. That was the whole of the homecoming. Orla stood in the middle of the kitchen and felt something in her chest fold quietly in half.

"I'll earn my keep," she said. "I mean it. Rooms, breakfasts, the accounts if you want, the website's a disgrace, I could—"

"You'll do what wants doing," Louise said. "There's plenty of it." She wiped her hands on the towel that hung on the oven rail. "Room and board and no rent, and we'll say no more about the rest of it."

"The rest of what?"

Her mother's eyes came up. Grey-blue, like weather.

"Whatever it is you're not telling me," Louise said. "You'll tell me eventually. You always do, about two years after it'd have been useful."

Her bedroom was at the back, under the slope of the roof, and it had not been redecorated since she was seventeen.

The walls were still papered in her drawings. Not wallpaper — actual drawings, curling at the corners, held up with yellowed tape: boats, mostly. Currachs and half-deckers and a huge charcoal of the Blaskets in a swell that she had been unbearably proud of at fifteen. A page of hands. A page of hands holding rope. Her own hand, badly drawn, over and over.

A shelf of GCSE-era paperbacks, all sun-faded to the same colour. A cracked bodhrán she had never learned to play. On the windowsill, a small clay dish, the first thing she ever made that had survived a firing, glazed a colour she had wanted to be the sea and which had come out the exact green of hospital corridors.

Orla sat on the bed and did not unpack.

Through the window, past the roofs of the two houses below, she could see the harbour. Slate-grey water and the arm of the wall and four boats on their moorings, moving all together, the way boats do, as if they were breathing. She could see the lights coming on in the houses along the sea road, one, then another, then the pub, and then the last of the day going out of the sky over the islands like someone drawing a hand back from a switch.

She had left at eighteen with a portfolio in a bin bag and a certainty in her chest so bright it hurt. Art college in Cork. Four years. Then three more years, and a lease on a damp unit behind the North Mall, and a sign she had painted herself — HENNESSEY CERAMICS — and a mailing list of eleven hundred people, and one good write-up in a Sunday supplement that she had photographed and sent to her mother, who had said, on the phone, "That's lovely now. And is there money in it?"

There had not been money in it. There had been money in it briefly. Then there had been Dara Lynch, and there had been the loan she had taken out to buy him a printing press because he said he was on the edge of something, and there had been the sixteen months of her life she had spent believing that the reason she felt small was that she was not trying hard enough.

The studio had gone under in July. She had held on until September because she could not think of the sentence she would have to say to her mother.

She still couldn't. She had come home instead and said nothing, and her mother had said nothing, and the nothing sat between them like a third person at the table.

Downstairs, a door went. Her mother's voice, then a man's, then laughter — the guests, back from wherever they'd walked. Orla heard Louise slide into her guest-house voice, half a tone higher, warm as a bath: Ah, you got the worst of it, come in, come in, I'll put the heating on for ye now.

Orla lay back on the narrow bed with her boots still on and looked at the drawings on the ceiling slope, the ones she'd taped up above her pillow so they'd be the last thing she saw. Boats. Always boats.

One of them, top right, brown-edged, was a lobster boat with a wheelhouse drawn slightly wrong and two figures in the stern, one tall, one small.

She had drawn it when she was thirteen, sitting on the harbour wall with her legs hanging over, while a boy called Niall Dempsey stood behind her and told her, with total confidence and no evidence, that she was going to be famous.

Orla reached up and turned that one over so the blank side faced out.

Then she lay there in the dark with the sound of the sea coming through the stuck window, and thought: three months. Get through the off-season. Get a bit of money together, get the shame off you, and go somewhere that isn't here.

It was the last time she would ever be able to think that and mean it.