Was the ferry late? She checked her watch. It should be coming around the head by now. That sense of foreboding again, as if her body were being gripped by a huge fist.
She’d been calmer across at the Tesco mini-store, looking for cars with Irish number plates, reading which county each was from. One or two accents floated over: your man was from Cork, your other, might that be Kerry? What’d brought them to Wales? Had any of them had to flee like her?
Daily she stood outside the store, a hat covering her red hair, a scarf around the lower part of her face. There was a risk she’d be recognised, and then mightn’t he get word and come over from Dublin. Even over the water she didn’t feel safe. But she had to come for the arrivals and departures. It was contact with the forbidden land.
On the Parrog she glanced at her watch once more. A quarter to eleven as a rule it would suddenly appear, like a conjuror’s trick, racing towards port, a large white blur, before it slowed and turned into the harbour. Then it would disgorge cars and foot passengers, and welcome the new batch.
/
‘You’re not going out, OK? I want you in the flat. And you can give up that pub job. All them fellas gawping at you and you encouraging them.’
It was the day of her twentieth birthday. Eight months earlier she’d served Bren in the pub and he’d asked her out. He had the chat plus the action to go with it. He was twenty six, a fireman, the sort who ran towards danger, carrying people from burning buildings, cutting them out of crashed cars. That was attractive. His upbringing had been difficult, childhood traumas with his mother’s various men.
‘Throwing myself into life is my way of kicking the shite out of the past, Abi.’
But when he started grabbing her by the throat, she began to be scared. She was never seriously injured but she had to be very careful around him, not provoke him at all.
The police started coming round. A road rage incident when he attacked a woman driver; knocking a woman unconscious in a bar. All women seemed to wear his mother’s face.
‘I need to get away,’ she’d told cousin Nell down in Wexford. ‘I wouldn’t be safe with Mammy and Da`’
She stayed there till one day he’d rang Nell, shouting, ‘I know she’s there.’ Nell had driven her to the ferry at Rosslare, saying, ‘Don’t tell me where you’re staying.’
/
Two o’ clock the ferry was departing. She watched it sail towards the headland, then her mobile pinged. Nell. Oh God, would he be on the next crossing? The text just said: Bren stabbed in a pub last night by a guy whose girlfriend he assaulted. He died this morning. Safe now.
She was crying. For Bren? The ferry had disappeared, westward travelling. The sea was empty.
