Too Old For A White Coffin

Written by Oisin Moran Kenny

Photo by Elizabeth Hunt

Alice loved her mother. She was almost ashamed of how much she loved her, convinced she would never be able to mature properly because of her attachment. She was a remarkably clingy child, first hanging out of her ankles, then her knees, then waist and shoulders until she was taller than five foot Colette, not until she’d grown out of it. Even as a teenager if she was sure no one her own age would be around she would hold her mother’s hand. Alley Cat and Collie Dog. But do picture this as those at the time would have seen them. On a bright and wind carved September day on the slanting sand of Strandhill beach, a tall teenage boy, all lines and edges, daring to walk on bare feet closer to the tide with an outstretched right arm linked by the cold left-handed fingers of a little barefoot woman with elfin features and very long hair that whips like a cat o’nine tails in the Atlantic salted gales, hair milk-white at the roots and Titian red to her thighs. And then when the younger misjudges the waves’ speed and gets wet to the knees the pair of them sit on the round stones that seem painted by a soft hearted artist’s palette, the mother takes the child’s long feet in her hands and puts her own knitted socks on each foot. ‘Can I?’ asks the teenager and ‘Yes’ answers the mother as she lets her son take her hair already twirled around a blemishless hand and make a plait, edge over middle edge over middle from the strands lightened by age to lightened by sunshine. It took an awful lot for that to be one of the last times Alice and Colette saw each other. Two weeks later Alice had revealed herself to be who she was in the most dramatic fashion possible and Colette was on a beach at dusk in Goa looking at the fishing boats come in to shore from the Indian Ocean, holding her left hand out to be filled with nothing but the tropic embers of a red sunset, not her baby’s hand, never again her baby’s hand.