Read winning entry to Dublin: One City One Book short story competition

The winner of the short story competition is 'Coole' by Jimi McDonnell. The winning entry was chosen by Joseph O'Connor and will receive a €100 book token.

'Coole' by Jimi McDonnell

There was the sound the ground made underfoot when you were at Coole Park. He had tried to explain it her, had asked her to listen but she would just laugh at him and tell him he was a spacer. That was during the time when the slightest brushing of their hands had them tingling. They were mad and ravenous for each other.

He had brought her here a few days after they both said ‘I love you.’ And, after five years as a couple, this was where they had said their goodbyes. The idea had been to celebrate their trips around the sun, to have a romantic farewell. But it handed in tears and recriminations, and silence on the drive back to the house they were leaving.

Now, on the day of his thirtieth birthday, Martin had come back to Coole. Alone. He went to the tree where Yeats and Lady Gregory had carved their name. He wanted to run his finger through the groove they had made in the bark but it was covered by a latched metal box.

The tears were coming again, unbidden, as they had been during this, the year after their break-up. Martin had done all the sensible modern things. Removed her from his Facebook news feed; deleted her name from his phone so that, if he wanted to get in touch, he had to put in the digits.  Doing this meant he was usually able to stop himself from hitting the ‘call’ or ‘text’ button.

He was looking at those names on the tree, wishing himself and Lorraine had left their mark in time. Something that said ‘we were together on this day, and we loved each other, and what happened afterwards doesn’t matter. Because this endures, what you’re looking at now; it’s the only thing that lives.’

The only physical record he had of their relationship was the lamb’s wool hoodie on his back. He had considered handing it in to a charity shop but it was the warmest thing he had. And though prone to getting maudlin, he wasn’t a total martyr.
‘What do you dream about?’ she asked him on the first day they went to Coole.
‘You,’ he told her. And it was true – she was roaming through his sleep already, always in the house they now shared. The place she returned to still, in his fitful periods of rest.
‘No, ya clown! In the future, I mean. What would be the best thing that could happen to you in the next few years?’

He knew that if told her he wanted to be the father of her children, that he had reveries of marriage and the country life, he would get a snort and a playful puck in the arm. So he told her that he wanted to write. Fiction or poetry, he wasn’t sure yet.  Readings, lecture tours of the US, being interviewed on The Late Late Show. A Booker nomination – not the prize itself; he wasn’t greedy.

Lorraine’s face lit up when he said that, she held his face in her hands and told him he was magic. She told him he knew he’d do it, that all he had to do was find himself a desk and glue himself to a chair. He was the most intelligent man she knew, and he was too kind, too sensitive, but that was why she loved him.

And he believed he could do it; for a few days, at least. The rhythm of a working day was applied to his writing and characters began to emerge from the screen of his laptop. He even had a crack at writing a villanelle.

At the end of his first week of his new found vocation, he decided it was time to get re-writing. But the second draft never happened. Martin found his fictional creations to be dim-witted, dull clichés. They all met up in bars, they were generally men, and they all thought they were misunderstood and heroic.

Lorraine found him asleep on the sofa, empty cans of cheap beer on the carpet in front of him. The computer flickered into life when Martin’s leg kicked against the coffee table. An application for teacher training college glared back at the couple.
‘So, that’s it? A six pack and a safe job? Jesus, Martin.’

The next summer he was working in St. Joseph’s, welcomed into the staff room as a decent sort and a hard worker. But Lorraine’s disappointment always lingered and surprise trips to Florence and Paris were just shuffled embers in a dying fire.
‘I don’t love you any more, Martin. I’m sorry.’

He looked again at the tree in Coole and moved his fingers past the car keys in his pocket. There it was - a tiny scrap of paper he had kept since their first trip here. It said, in his loping scrawl:
‘He was the sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.’

It was lit and perished within seconds. Martin put the lighter in his pocket, turned his back to the tree and walked away. The dry autumn leaves crunched, crackled and fell apart beneath his feet.