Sanctuary

Colleen picked up a piece of toast, got it halfway to her mouth, put it down again. “I can’t bear to go into my own kitchen,” she said. “We had it exactly the way we always wanted. One of those fridges that does your shopping list; bamboo blinds; a beer cooler that can take 145 cans. I don’t even drink beer, that was always Stanley. All those Saturdays spent in DIY stores. And now I’m left staring at all that beer. It makes you wonder what it’s all about.”

Emily reached across the table, took her cousin’s hand. The flesh around Colleen’s wedding band bulged as she gripped Emily’s fingers. Was Roy expected to take her other hand? The free hand rested, fingers splayed, on the table, and while he hesitated over what to do, she began to talk about the January 6th hearings. How those good people on Capitol Hill had only been on a day off, a bit of praying, a sing-a-long, some of them were grandparents for Pete’s sake. Her teeth tore at the toast in angry little bites, the way a cheetah from a nature documentary might rip the flesh from the rump of a gazelle.

When he was a child, parcels arrived at irregular intervals from America, sent by an aunt who had emigrated in the sixties. He remembered an exquisitely patterned fabric bear, three or four feet long, with a multitude of pockets sewn to its front. Today it would be called a storage solution. The sheer abundance it had suggested! He hadn’t had many things, at first, to store in those pockets. He began by keeping chestnuts and stamps torn from envelopes. On a school tour, he bought an old coin, thinking that could go in a pocket, and if he asked Santa for a fountain pen at Christmas that could occupy another. Inherent in the gift of this fabric bear was the presumption that he would have, or would soon acquire, enough things to merit it. This was what America gave him as a child: the tantalizing promise of plenty.

And now America had sent him Colleen.

they were spending three days at a B&B in County Clare before bringing Colleen to their home in Cork where she would stay another week. Emily had planned the itinerary, and today they were visiting a seal sanctuary nestled in a valley. Inland, which had left him feeling wrong-footed. The cashier at the entrance handed Emily three tickets and a map and pointed them in the direction of the main seal enclosure. The transparent barrier around the pool was just over a meter high. Even he could easily scale it. Well, maybe not easily, but, if called upon, he could probably manage to swing one leg over first, a bit of huff and puff, then the other. The barrier would deter only a small child. Or a seal. Perhaps deterring seals and small children was all that was required of it. Roy wanted to tell the barrier that it would be blamed regardless.

at the office on Valentine’s Day, three weeks ago, he had presented a girl, no, not a girl, he must remember to get that right, a young woman, with a foil-wrapped chocolate in the shape of a heart. A woman young enough to be his daughter, as the Human Resources manager, a man young enough to be his son, had pointed out. “Yes, exactly,” Roy had said eagerly, because the girl, woman, had reminded him of his daughter. She had that same way of chewing the ends of her hair, of biting her lip when sad, and she was sad that day, Roy had been sure of it.

He bought the chocolate hearts for Emily, two of them, on his way to work that Valentine’s morning. He had an idea that they could eat them together when he got home. The hearts were in the pocket of his cardigan draped over the back of his chair, and on impulse, he crossed the office, past all the bouquets of roses, stuffed pink-hearted teddy bears, and placed one of them on the girl’s desk, bare except for paper, staplers, the kind of things that were supposed to be on desks.

He received a written warning for pitying the young woman at his office, though pitying was not the word HR used in the let­ter. It wasn’t the girl who had reported him, but one of the other men, a younger man already snapping at Roy’s heels in seniority though he was barely in the corporate door. HR had, in Roy’s opinion, become disproportionately fixated on the chocolate: How much did it cost? Did he have more of them? If it was purportedly a friendly gesture, why hadn’t he given one to any of his other col­leagues, the man at the desk next to him, for example?

The girl, for her part, had confirmed all the facts when asked. She also volunteered that Roy always fixed paper jams in the copier instead of leaving them for someone else and unloaded the canteen dishwasher when it was his turn. As well as the written warning, HR had sent him to a training course. On the first day, the facili­tator got everyone to sit in a circle before asking: How would you describe yourself? Roy felt like a metal top that had been spinning, spinning, now listing sideways, wobbling as it slowed, the wob­bles knocking it off orbit until it came to a jerky, spluttering stop. He answered: dependable, hard-working, punctual.

The remaining chocolate heart he had left in his cardigan pocket. He found it several days after the incident, in the cracked saucer Emily kept on top of the washing machine for items salvaged from the laundry.

by the edge of the pool, several seals slouched languidly, roll­ing occasionally onto their sides to bark. The website said that it “rehabilitated” them, which made the seals sound like juvenile delinquents, though they were closer to a gaggle of old gents lounging on sunbeds in Lanzarote. A seal dragged itself on its belly like a slug, dropped into the pool and vanished. Awkward on land, they were torpedoes in water. Maybe this was where Roy had been going wrong. Choosing land. All these years and maybe this was all he needed: to spend large portions of his life underwater, con­trolling his breathing. Because it turned out that seals needed air. He read it on one of the displays dotted around the complex. He had thought seals were like fish and could do without, when actu­ally their trick was knowing how to ration it.

A seal called Babyface reclined, alone, in a separate enclosure. It had onyx eyes, and pelt dappled like a Dalmatian. Presumably a visitor had complained about the creature being kept in solitary confinement, because a handwritten notice pinned to the gate said—rather baldly, in Roy’s opinion—that it was because Babyface had been bothering the female seals. Yes, really! someone had scrawled in different colored ink at the end. Difficult to categorize the look Babyface was giving him. Accusatory? Smug?

He hurried on across the cobblelocked square with its seal statue on a plinth, its wooden benches. Emily and Colleen had walked ahead and reached the entrance to the Interpretive Centre, a flat-roofed rectangular building with glass walls through which he watched the two women merge with other visitors. Inside, the pol­ished surface of the tiles mirrored the overhead lights, so that the floor appeared to glint with dozens of minor spillages. Facing him was a wall of seal merchandise: key rings, magnets, pencils, mouse pads. There was no longer any sign of the women. He forced the corners of his lips upwards to form what he hoped might pass for a smile. Last thing he needed was someone noticing his confusion, asking him in concerned tones if he was all right or if he was lost. There would be one of those announcements over the loudspeaker: A sixty-two-year-old husband has been found in the store, his wife may collect him at…He took three brisk steps to the left, tried to look purposeful before a display of silver-plated seals, their eye color varying according to birthstone. It was his sister’s birthday soon.

Might this be an acceptable present? When he had been in the shop a full five minutes with no sighting of the women, he noticed an overhead sign pointing down a flight of stairs.

Each step was tiled with mosaics of baby seals, white and fluffy like a flock of angels traveling the wrong way, down to Hades. It felt irreverent to walk on them; he must have crushed ten small skulls on the way down. He was Orpheus following Eurydice into the underworld, if Eurydice had been accompanied by a middle-aged woman sporting a MAGA cap. He arrived in a low-ceilinged green-hued room, its back wall painted with an eye-catching mural that created the sensation of being underwater. A seal in the foreground of the mural shot suddenly upwards out of sight, and he realized he was not looking at an artist’s impression but the actual seal pool, revealed now from an entirely different perspective.

in the underground room, people pressed themselves against the viewing wall, watching. Here they all were, next to a body of water, separated from it only by a sheet of glass, hopefully of industrial standard specification, but even so. It reminded Roy of that swim­ming pool he saw once in an architecture magazine; constructed in the air space between two skyscrapers, dozens of people splashing happily in a glass tub thousands of feet off the ground.

The seal tank had the pale blue glow of a cave grotto or lagoon. There was something ghostly about the seals swooping and diving, so knowing and able in comparison to their performance on dry land. A seal with a black button nose cute as any dog’s brought its whiskered snout to the glass. Roy couldn’t help thinking that the tables had been turned. In one of those tricks that modern life was always playing, he had stumped up cash for the privilege of look­ing at the seals, and now it appeared that the seals were looking at him.

He glimpsed Emily and Colleen, making cooing faces. Briefly, he attempted, then abandoned, a mathematical calculation of the pressure of water per cubic foot. It would take so little for all of this to change, for a tumult of turquoise to come crashing toward him, a tidal wave spiked with broken glass and the tumbling, surging bodies of the seals, tossed in the air, driven forward by the force of the water, somersaulting, sounding a dull whumph as they struck him. He could almost feel the wet slap of a seal’s body against his.

before the two women could see him, he hurried back up the steps. Outside the air was fresher, the breeze sharper with a tang reminiscent of green apples.

“There you are,” Emily said, suddenly beside him. “We were calling you.”

“I thought it best not to look back,” he said. “In case you were consigned forever to the underworld.”

They stared at him blankly. Emily’s gaze narrowed and he feared she was composing a retort in her head, something about how she’d take her chances, how in the underworld she might at least have some chance of retiring, but when she spoke, she only said, “Yes, Roy.” Colleen appeared changed, happier. It was the cap, he realized, or rather, its absence. She was no longer wearing her MAGA cap. Without it, she was a different person.

“We were thinking we’d go see the Adoption Wall,” Colleen said. “I’m considering naming a brick in Stanley’s memory.”

He had seen a sign for the Adoption Wall. It sounded like a cross between a crematorium and the Wall of Fame at his daugh­ter’s old primary school, but with less glitter.

Colleen clapped a hand to her forehead. “My hat!”

“You must have left it down in the viewing gallery,” Emily said. She looked expectantly at Roy.

Downstairs again, once more stepping on all those downy heads. This time it felt less terrible. Was that how one became inured to atrocities? Was it only a matter of repetition? The crowd had thinned out, and he spotted the cap right away at the feet of a girl, a young woman, in a baby-doll dress of pale blue and boots that looked like she’d walked off a construction site. Her head was pressed close to a young man’s, and they were whispering as she traced a finger across the glass. Her boot was on the cap’s visor, and he considered approaching from behind so as not to interrupt, tugging it deftly from beneath her boot, because she was such a lithe thing, thin and short, that she could hardly weigh much. As he assessed her build, her face darkened.

“Take a picture, Boomer. It’ll last longer.”

The girl was now facing him, hands on her hips. For a moment, he wondered what it was he was supposed to take a picture of. When it dawned on him, he felt the spread of heat up his neck, spilling onto his face. How he wished he had a beard to provide camouflage. Wordlessly, he pointed to the cap by way of expla­nation. The girl glanced down, but her expression of disgust only deepened. She lifted her boot, shaking her foot, as if shaking off dog turd. Roy snatched up the cap. He had an urge to stuff it under his jumper, but in recent years there was no longer that much room to spare, and it was a large cap, made bulkier by badges, or buttons as Colleen referred to them, heavy as war medals.


he pounded up the steps, the cap clenched in his fist. Now he would have to be seen carrying the cap in broad daylight, would have to risk more people thinking it was his. At the top of the stairs, head down, he made for the exit. To one side of the revolving door, within reach of his arm, was a waste bin, the lidless kind, and with­out breaking his stride, he dropped the cap in and carried on.

Outside the sunlight was sharp and reproving. He blinked, exhaled. The fresh air that rushed his lungs brought clarity. He was a terrible person. Colleen was his wife’s cousin, heartbroken, newly widowed, grieving. What business was it of his if she wanted to wear the cap? If it gave her some comfort, who was he to cry foul? She was not the first to trust in what she had been promised, to see what she wanted to see. The fabric bear, he discovered years—no, decades—later, had been intended for storing shoes, which was the last thing anyone would have guessed, because who on earth had that many shoes? Yes, the cap was embarrassing, but people wouldn’t necessarily have implicated him, he could have walked a few steps behind the women just to be sure.

He must go back for it. Even as the thought formed in his brain his feet were already returning him to the lobby where he halted before the bin. It couldn’t have been more than a minute since he ditched the cap, but already someone had decanted a bright pink sludge on top. A summer fruit smoothie, if he had to guess. The substance had a regurgitated look, as if it had resurfaced from some slimy deep. Taking the cap gingerly by a badge, he lifted it out and a chunk of something pink slid onto the floor. Holding the cap well out from his body, the way a Victorian headmistress might take a child of the undeserving poor by the ear, he sought out the bathroom.

It was a haven of cool, tiled, white. No aqua effects or murals here, just a pleasing blankness, apart from an advertisement for Annual Membership of the Sanctuary. The air conditioning hummed softly. He dropped the cap in the sink and, beneath the stream of hot water, globules of pink gunk slipped down the plughole, commencing their journey to the sea to be united, even­tually, with starfish and microplastics.

In its sodden state, the cap appeared shrunken, like a kitten after a bath. He wrung it out, twisting it in his hands in a suppli­catory manner. A toilet gurgled, sluiced water along the pipes. He thought he was alone, but now there came the sound of a zip trav­eling along its steel-toothed track, the slick of a belt, the sound of a latch sliding across. He commenced the flurry of hand movements required to coax the dryer out of hibernation. An elderly man shuf­fled from a stall and approached the sink. Roy waved the cap back and forth under the stream of hot air. The other man had finished at the sink and now, in what could only be an act of passive aggres­sion, held his hands dripping over the tiles, staring at the dryer. The hot air had stopped, but the cap was still wet. Roy wanted to start the cycle again, but the other man continued to extend his dripping hands. Roy left, taking the cap with him.

The benches by the seal pool were unoccupied, and he lowered himself onto one. He attempted to smooth out the cap’s wrinkles before they dried; reshape while damp he’d heard Emily say, he’d seen her do it with sweaters. The cap was a different, darker color when wet. Also, the cotton was snagged, and there were two pinholes like miniscule eyes. One of the badges was missing. He pictured someone crushing it underfoot, heard a satisfying crack of spine.

A small girl of about three in a raincoat and pink scarf came towards him in that headlong gallop peculiar to toddlers. She reminded him of his daughter when she was tiny. The child stopped short before the bench like a stocky pony reined in.

“Hat?” she said, pointing.

“Hat,” he agreed, nodding.

She took a step closer. “Hat,” she said again, extending a pudgy hand.

She chortled with delight when he offered it to her. She placed it on her head, and immediately it slid over her eyes. She did a little jig, the sequins of her pink shoes glittering. She took the cap off again, began to inspect the remaining badges, frowning. She tugged at the largest one, but it didn’t come off, so she tugged harder.

The child looked up at him and grinned. She trotted to the edge of the railings. Drawing back her small arm, she flung the cap into the pool, grunted with the satisfaction of an Olympic ham­mer thrower, then laughed giddily, clapping her hands. The cap bobbed on the surface of the water.

A harassed-looking woman came running over, scooped the child up in her arms, scowled at Roy and left. In the pool, a seal snuffled at the cap. Roy approached the edge of the railings. “Easy, fella,” he said to the seal. Or did that only work with horses? The seal clamped its gums down on the cap and disappeared underwater.

Behind him, footsteps rang out on the cobblestones, and, with­out turning, he knew it would be Emily and Colleen.

Emily’s hands were in the pockets of her jacket, thumbs out, gunslinger style. Colleen’s hair wisped around her forehead, har­ried by the wind.

He decided to play for time. “How was the Adoption Wall?”

The women described rows of toffee-coloured bricks engraved with the names of adoptive donors or their loved ones. “No seals’ names?” he said.

Emily frowned.

Without a particular seal named on each brick, wasn’t it pos­sible that the same seal could be “adopted” many times over? Roy pictured a revolving door of the kind usually spoken about in rela­tion to prisons, a line of virtual seals going in and out, the sanc­tuary collecting a check each time. Babyface had likely been sold several times over.

“There’s a café,” Emily said pointing. “They have potato and leek soup.”

“It’s homemade,” Colleen added. “Comes with soda bread baked in a farmhouse.”

Colleen, he guessed, would believe whatever she was told about the bread, which he pictured emerging from the maw of an industrial-sized oven in some bleak suburban warehouse.

“Did you find the cap?” Emily asked.

A high-pitched noise in the distance, a mewl, more mechani­cal than animal. Sirens, perhaps, but it sounded again and he rec­ognized it as the warning beep of a vehicle in reverse. “I did,” he said. Emily nodded encouragingly. Only the faint trace of a ripple lingered on the pool. As he watched, a sleek gray head broke the surface to bob there, capless.

Emily’s gaze dropped to his hands, her eyes darting left then right before fixing on his face again. “Where is it?”

Perhaps the seal had eaten the cap. He had once watched a documentary about the stomach contents of a whale: fishing nets, rubber gloves, plastic water bottles, nappies. A flip-flop had been retrieved in remarkably good condition, practically unscathed. Of course, the whale had been dead before the flip-flop was extracted. A sensitive topic to broach at a sanctuary. He might have to dele­gate that particular conversation to Emily. Emily who was watch­ing him now with the shallow ridge between her brows deepening.

Wasn’t it possible that the cap was at the bottom of the pool, safe, albeit wet, weighed down by all those badges? He threw back his shoulders, stuck his hands in his pockets, thumbs out. “Follow me,” he said. He walked slowly towards the Interpretive Centre, hoping that the young couple he’d encountered earlier would have moved on. Bad enough to be accused of leering, without the added ignominy of being branded a stalker.

in the ghostly blue of the underwater viewing room, he imagined he heard water slop and beat against the sides of a giant tank, like when his daughter was a toddler and he had lifted her into the tub one bath night, suds spilling over the sides. Emily had shouted at him that time. “Are you out of your mind? Are you trying to drown the child?” The space here did not allow for sloshing. It was floor-to-ceiling glass, then water. Or water, then glass, depending on which side you approached it from. There was no room for any­thing in-between, though he had once heard a physicist speak of the subatomic particles that lurked, invisible, in the spaces between all objects.

And there, a burnt-out flare in the water, was the cap.

He elbowed aside a lanky young lad, pushed his way through a muddle of girls in school pinafores. He stood, feet apart, plac­ing first his palms, then his forehead, on the glass. Only a feathery strand of sea lichen graced the rock on which the cap, badges glit­tering, had come to rest.

“Roy,” Emily hissed. He felt her to one side of him, joined, a moment later, by Colleen on the other. A seal cut through the water at speed, and the cap billowed once, twice, before falling back to pulse lightly upon its ledge. The badges were almost pretty as they refracted light, their meaning diluted to the point of harmlessness.

“How did it get in there?” Colleen’s voice was tinged with wonder.

The seal circled back to approach the glass. It sniffed at the out­lines of Roy’s hands, seemed to snuffle at his fingertips. “It’s okay,” Emily was saying. “There must be a maintenance man.”

Roy became aware of the low muttering of strangers, the clear­ing of a throat. He saw himself as he imagined others must: a man in the act of surrender.

“Roy?” Emily said. “You look pale. It’s only a cap.”

He knew that he should turn around, but he couldn’t bring himself to peel his hands from the wall. Pressing harder on the glass, he thought he registered a corresponding pressure answering back. He was inside a mathematical equation where the slightest movement, even so much as a breath, could upset the equilibrium. Q.E.D. His lungs felt heavy, he had been down here too long. He needed air. The seal eyeballed him, a knowing expression on its face. An expression that, to Roy, looked very much like pity.