Originally published in print February 2021.
This story is part of TN2’s ongoing flash fiction series, which aims to give a platform to exciting new writers from Trinity. If you would like your fiction to be considered for publication, simply submit it to literature@tn2magazine.ie along with your name and a one-sentence bio.
Tugboat Alex gets the Navy ship by the bum and pulls it out into the middle of the channel. This is Navy ship P62, which Danika tells me used to be the new one but now they send to pick up migrants in the Mediterranean, like a slotted spoon. I correct her and say refugees but she corrects me back, with definitions. Danika is a better person than I am but you won’t get to see that here. I watch Alex do her business so Danika won’t feel pressurised, but I give up after a while because they’re just sitting there, midstream, while someone goes and does something.
“I don’t know if I could choose a last meal, but I could definitely pick the side dishes,” says the TV chef on Danika’s laptop. They are both making a hollandaise sauce you can keep overnight and then reheat, but the chef never finishes his because Danika pegs him back to the start.
“Danika, did you hear that? Did you not think that was hilarious?”
“What? Oh yeah, yeah. I’ve watched it a few times.” Danika is good at everything except cooking, which is what she’s doing now. When you’re good at almost everything, you most enjoy doing the things you’re bad at. She is standing at the countertop now with another version of herself, one who’s bad at things and of whom nothing is expected. Her house is quieter than mine even though she lives closer to the city. Her father once insinuated that their windows are so good and so soundproof that they’re technically illegal, or he outbid the children’s hospital for them or something. He’s gone now, he and his wife, chasing sunbursts round the Cape of Good Hope. Danika reckoned this was the right time for her first serious boyfriend – the cat, as they say, being out – and Kasper obliged and he is deadly, deadly serious – so serious that he is, in fact, a man, of almost thirty-one, and says things like I Understand.
I go back to the bay window in the hope something’s gone wrong out there but all that’s happened is P62 has turned a broadside to us and its sailors are hanging little stoppers off the edge. They’re turning it, I realise. It’s a manoeuvre. P62, like any Navy ship, is painted grey so it blends in with the Irish Sea. I point out to myself that Tugboat Alex is really more of a ship than a boat. Danika has lived in the harbour’s lower reaches long enough that she knows things like this already. The river is very high today, after the rains, and probably Tugboat Alex is reversing like crazy to keep P62 on track against the wash of wind and water that’s coming downstream against them. Tide also maybe, who knows.
We’ll hand in our dissertations soon and it has come to my attention that Danika may be just someone I look at and smile at and wave at as I pass out to sea.
“Colin, come here.” She wants to show me something: the stringy bit of the egg, ribbonish and too white. “This is the chalaza, which anchors the yoke to the shell. We remove it to ensure uniform texture.” She says chalaza like Hebrew scripture.
“That’s crazy. All of what you just said there is crazy.”
“I’m concerned about the Thai green curry. I don’t know does Kasper like spice.”
“You like spice,” I say. It is easy to be brave on someone else’s behalf. Kasper cooked spinach soufflé for the two of them on their first proper date, which means he’s in the lead. Danika is always trying to make herself disappear, and you have to make her reappear, like throwing paint at the Invisible Man: you can’t acknowledge her without smearing her. One afternoon a lot like this one, she lay next to me and I heard her eyelash scrope the pillow. I made my excuses and went home. “To be honest that man seems like he could handle anything.”
Danika doesn’t tell me that really he’s sensitive under all that, which I was expecting her to. When her dad is home, she forgets that he likes me and she keeps me away from the garden studio, where he paints, blindfolded. People I suppose reckon the action of his wrist has something to tell them about the meaning of life or art or suffering or “the embouchure of experience,” as someone once actually put it. I believe that was Ger Kaufman. A foghorn goes off and I belt back to the window, thinking maybe some sailboat has interposed itself between Alex and her charge and will tangle its mast in the unsnappable rope between them or get plucked from the water by a mechanical arm distending from somewhere hidden aboard P62 and hauled up to be scowled at by the captain through the window of the bridge. The captain will have jowls, which say something about a man before he ever opens his mouth. It’s OK to judge a man like that by his appearance.
“They are only testing, you muppet.” The foghorn goes again and the water turns blinding white. Tugboat Alex has little helper boats that are the same colour as she is. They circle her, looking to nudge. I’m jealous.
“Will you see her again, Colin?”
“Nah, we’re not right I’m afraid.”
Jealous not of others but of other selves who lead lives equally bursting with satisfaction. Or who’ve snapped their hawsers or curdled in the bay or gulped their way upriver. Or joined the Navy and are out there now in the cold, whorling around with Alex in tow.
“Tugboat Alex is really more of a ship isn’t it?”
“My dad did a show once where he ferried sixteen people called Alex out to that tugboat and had them each smash a small bottle of champagne over the gunwales.”
“What did that one mean?”
“It was part of the Dredger Trilogy. Kasper was there, taking photographs.” She shows me a picture of Kasper, when he was our age, on a RIB off the side of and below the Alex, pretending to smash his own camera off its steel underbelly. He is leaning out very far, dangerously, and must have hooked his feet into something, or have someone holding him, hidden out of sight for a moment. “It was in a sense our first meeting.”
“For a photographer Kasper is a great man for the posing isn’t he?”
“Yes, he has a great sense of occasion.”
“You should let me do this before I leave. You need to shower, you look horrible.”
“Thank you.”
There is still something the matter out there, some hold up. There may be a crisis: sirens shut out by the glass. There are sailors on board who’ve not found themselves in untended waters and are thankful for it. Danika goes to get ready and I will receive Kasper if he comes early, tell him the one about Danika falling asleep under a car outside the Sagrada Familia; she specified I am to tell it and she is to protest, later, when he brings it up. It is possible that if I open the window the scene before me will be one in which there is much panic and shrill voices or just the sound of wind through stick trees or a raucous shanty yon deck.
“Bang!” says the TV chef. “There’s your hollandaise.”
