Hayley Louise Macfarlane

Lir, Age Four

There were three specific moments that defined Lir Murphy’s childhood. For the first six years of his life the Irish seaside town of Bundoran had been his entire world, though Lir could remember nothing of the place prior to his fourth birthday. In another life – another reality – he would have had no cause to remember this specific birthday, either, for his early years had been decidedly happy and, above all else, unremarkable. But this was his life. His reality.

And this reality began on Lir’s fourth birthday.

He was on the beach with his parents. Later he’d discover that it was their favourite place to go because they couldn’t afford to take him to caravan parks or zoos or even to the cinema. Lir, of course, had no concept of the fact his little family was poor. He was four: what did money matter to him?

They largely had the beach to themselves, for though the tenth of May that year was particularly warm and sunny it was midweek and the local schools were not off on holiday yet. There were a few surfers out on the water – the waves were great by Bundoran – and Lir delighted in watching them ride a wave, crash, then invariably get back up to start all over again.

When lunchtime approached Lir and his parents ate buttered bread and nothing else. It was another sign of their poverty that he could not possibly have been aware of. Besides, Lir liked buttered bread. He was an easily satisfied child.

The afternoon was dedicated to making sandcastles and playing in the shallows. His father took Lir in his arms and charged through the waves until Lir was screaming in delight, urging him to go faster and deeper. In his arms Lir felt safe from the rest of the world. He thought that feeling would last forever.

His mother watched from the beach as she searched for rocks, holding a straw hat to her head as she did so. The hat had holes in it, though when Lir asked why she didn’t get a new one she merely replied that she loved this one specifically.

As the sun drew closer to the horizon and the wind picked up, Lir was bundled into a blanket and given the last of the bread and butter to eat. His parents watched the final two surfers leave with bright, attentive eyes, though by this point so late in the day Lir himself had lost all interest in them. He was growing sleepy; he wanted to go home.

The sun had almost set and the air turned chilly when his mother finally gave Lir her undivided attention, stroking his curly hair away from his face with tender fingers. “Stay here, Lir,” she said. She began to fill the pockets of her jacket with the rocks she’d sourced earlier, after which his father did the same thing. “Be a good boy. I love you.”

“We love you,” his father added on, kissing Lir’s forehead for just a moment. Then he nodded at his wife, taking her hand as they stood up and walked towards the sea.

At first Lir assumed they were going to play in the shallows without him and almost cried out in protest. But then they walked in deeper and deeper and deeper until the small boy on the beach could hardly make out his parents at all.

Then, between one blink and the next, a wave engulfed them and they were gone.

Lir played with one of the remaining rocks his mother had collected for an interminably long time, turning the smooth, unbroken surface over and over in his tiny hands. He bit at it, curious as only a four-year-old could be about how it tasted. He stuck out his tongue in disgust when he realised all it tasted of was gritty sand and salt.

When he heard sirens it was well and truly dark. Lir was cowering from the cold inside his blanket, slipping from wakefulness to unconsciousness just as frequently as he breathed air into his lungs. He wondered where his parents were. He wondered why the police were running towards him, shining torches into his face until he cried. He wondered why he was gently placed in the back of a car and taken to the hospital, where his Aunt Orla took him in her arms and burst into tears.

“Good lord,” she wailed, stroking Lir’s hair so hard that it hurt. He pulled away from her hand, tilting his chin up to stare at her tear-stained face.

“Where are mummy and daddy?” he asked. The question came out as a croak. “Where did they go?”

“They went home,” she said, though Lir thought she didn’t sound in the least bit happy about this. “Their real home. That’s all.”

Lir frowned at this concept. “In the sea?”

Another sob.

“Yes, sweetheart,” Orla replied. “In the sea.”

This answer was enough for Lir. He was only four, after all, and very, very tired.

His parents had returned home to the sea.

Chapter One

The first thing that came to mind whenever I thought of home was always the smell of the sea.

Not the vanilla and sandalwood of my parents’ house courtesy of locally-made, beeswax candles my mother religiously bought at the market.

Not the green, heady scent of the trees and moss and freshly cut grass of Kelburn Country Park, nor the dark and loamy smell of the waterfall hidden within the forest there as it crashed into the glen.

Not even the intoxicating mixture of sugar, dairy and chocolate that permeated the air outside Nardini’s Café, carrying on the breeze along the promenade and enticing tourists to overindulge on ice cream for their lunch.

No, it was the sea. The tang of it. The salt on your tongue; the brine in your nose. Every time it crashed into the shore – waves breaking on the rocks, filling the air with foam – a fresh dose of the smell hit you as if you had submerged your head in the water itself. Then the foam would dissipate, and the waves would recede, and the smell would fade until the next toss of the sea brought it back into your nose once more.

That was how the original tale of The Little Mermaid ended, with the heroine dissolving into sea foam that danced above the waves. She became a ‘Child of the Air’, through which she could gain an immortal soul by performing good deeds for three hundred years. But I never liked that part of the story. It seemed more fitting for the mermaid’s end to be tragic, with her having failed to capture the prince’s heart and yet unable to kill him in order to return to her sisters below the water’s surface.

Maybe I just don’t like happy endings. Or maybe I don’t believe in the existence of one’s soul. Either way, I always stopped reading the story the moment the mermaid turned into foam.

When I moved to Glasgow for university I left behind the slow, easy living of a beloved tourist seaside town for a bustling, high-energy city with polluted air and suffocating crowds. The River Clyde cut right through Glasgow, of course, so I wasn’t completely locked in a soulless concrete jungle. It was a poor substitute for the coast but for the sake of my education I knew I had to make do.

My flat even looked out onto the river, which I knew made me incredibly lucky. Luckier still that it was a private let, and my best friend Louisa and I moved into the place before rent started hiking up and up and up. Since we were good tenants who never broke anything or had outrageous parties our landlord decided to freeze our rent so long as we remained students.

Having entered the final year of my PhD, that blissful arrangement was all too quickly coming to a tragic and inevitable end.

“What have I missed?”

I turned at the sound of the voice, smiling when I was greeted by the not-at-all flustered David Harrod. He was a third year undergrad student and always very late for the molecular methods laboratory I’d helped run since the beginning of my PhD. I used to just help the molecular biology degree group with their version of the lab – an easy three days a week for four weeks arrangement that paid better than my PhD itself – but now that the research part of my degree was finished and I’d entered the dreaded write-up months for my thesis, I’d gladly agreed to help out in the molecular methods lab for every life sciences degree group for the money.

I had no funding left, after all. Unless I wanted to pick up a thankless waitressing job or a few shifts as a cashier in the local supermarket, acting as a teaching assistant was my best and most financially secure option.

For now.

David surreptitiously necked back the dregs of his Starbucks coffee that was most likely the reason he was late, throwing the empty paper cup into the bin before the draconian technician, Jerry, could scream at him for bringing food and drink into his precious laboratory.

Though most of the students were around twenty or twenty-one years old, David had first enrolled in university almost ten years ago, dropping out and working in a Curry’s hardware store for half a decade before deciding to pursue education again. That made him twenty-eight, and three years older than I was. Being closer in age to me than the rest of his peers meant we’d formed some semblance of camaraderie, though we’d only known each other for a week.

“You missed the run-down lecture for today’s schedule, as usual,” I answered in hushed tones so as not to interrupt said lecture as it concluded. “And, hey, no funny business this week. Georgia’s off so I need to cover her lab benches.”

David cocked his head and blinked, the very picture of innocent confusion. “Funny business? Me?”

“You and your entire bench,” I replied, signalling towards the group of seven students in question, who were waving at David. “No accidentally setting Kim’s ponytail on fire or writing swear words into your agar plates with E.coli, got it?”

“Would never dream of it. We’re model students, after all. That’s why we have the most experienced lab demonstrator helping out our bench, right?”

I scoffed at the comment, swatting David’s arm with the manual I was holding to send him on his way. In truth I did like David’s bench better than the other two I was responsible for, and most of the time I found their antics entertaining. But when I had double the number of students to take care of – on the dreaded restriction enzyme digest and agarose gel day – I had little and less patience for anything other than good, old-fashioned molecular laboratory techniques.

If only they weren’t all animal biologists. Marine and freshwater biologists, to be exact.

They were still convinced that they didn’t need to know any molecular biology to pursue their dream careers of working for conservation efforts or national parks. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that those jobs didn’t exist. Well, not enough of them to handle dozens of graduates from Glasgow every year, anyway, let alone the hundreds more that graduated from other universities alongside them.

But willing or not, the students depended on me to teach them how to perform the most essential of molecular lab techniques. And today I had double the number to look after, since the other two lab assistants present hadn’t helped out with the lab before so were functionally useless outside of looking after their own benches, and the teacher, Dr Sophie Spencer, could only handle so much herself.

It was going to be one hell of a long day.

“Right, folks, who needs some clarification on what Sophie just told you?” I asked my new lot of benches, since I was aware there were at least a couple of people in my own section who always seemed to know what they were doing, and would help out the other students whilst I dealt with my new brood. I was not surprised when several hands shot up; though Georgia had helped run the molecular methods lab before she was pretty lazy and never made sure her students actually understood what they were doing.

I pointed to one of the girls who had raised their hand. “What’s your name?” she asked.

The previous week everyone had been told to put on name tags but they’d been abandoned when several of the students – belying their twenty-plus years on the planet – wrote down curse words and inside jokes instead of their names.

“Grace,” I replied, smiling brightly. And then, anticipating the next couple of questions, I added, “I’m currently writing up my thesis about using recombinant proteins for targeted gene therapy, so I know squat about marine biology. Luckily this is a molecular lab.”

I could see the group relax as they realised I was easy-going and had a sense of humour. It was all a carefully-cultivated persona, though, for social interactions very often made me anxious and caused my heart to painfully constrict. But teaching was different. When I was teaching I was someone else.

“Where are you from?” a boy called out from the back of the bench. He had a look about him that suggested he didn’t take the lab very seriously, as did most of his group.

All except one person.

“Um, Largs,” I told him, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Didn’t recognise the accent,” he replied, just as I realised his own accent was distinctly Dundonian.

“I wouldn’t expect a sheep shagger to recognise anything over five miles away from his farm.” I’d taken a calculated risk that the comment would not offend but amuse, and was pleased to see that the risk had paid off. The boy from Dundee snorted, then elbowed the tawny-haired boy to his left.

The one who seemed too serious for this particular group.

“She’s much better than that other lass, Dylan,” the Dundonian told his silent lab partner. “She might even answer your questions about the actual lab.”

This garnered a laugh from the bench; clearly I wasn’t the only one who disliked Georgia. This made the stranger called Dylan appeal to me immediately. His head was bent over the lab manual, so I couldn’t see his face, but there was something about the way he held himself that suggested I’d like it.

Which was a weird thing to think about a person.

The hours passed just as slowly as I’d thought they would that day, though they blurred together just like any other day in the lab. The only moments of focus were when my eyes caught sight of Dylan; I couldn’t stop watching him whenever he passed my line of sight. It wasn’t that he was imposingly tall or broad or comically short, but there was a presence to him I couldn’t ignore. A physicality, maybe. For he was in good shape, that much was clear simply from the way he held himself.

His tousled hair appeared dry beneath the fluorescent lights of the lab and grew blonder towards its messy ends, suggesting that Dylan was a swimmer – the boys on my high school swim team all had similar hair. This was confirmed when I risked asking his lab partner about him when Dylan was putting samples into the walk-in freezer at the end of the day.

“Yeah he is, actually. One of the best members of the swim team,” the boy, whose name transpired to be Max, said. He gave me a stupid grin. “Why, you interested in him?”

“Of course not!” I said, lying through my gritted teeth. “It’s just that I’m friends with a lot of the swim team so I’ve been to a few of their socials and stuff. But I’ve never seen him.”

Max shrugged. “Don’t think he goes to most of them. I’m not even sure he drinks. Spends all his time open water swimming at the weekend and shit.”

That intrigued me for sure. So Dylan was on the swim team but didn’t fit into their decidedly laddish culture, and spent his free time outdoors. I wondered if he swam outdoors in winter – we’d had a bad January so far, full of snow and sleet and high-speed winds. I tried to imagine him swimming in such conditions then immediately regretted it.

Thinking about Dylan dripping wet and naked (though if he swam outdoors a lot he would probably wear a wet suit, which was somehow even worse for my brain) just as the young man in question walked towards me was a terrible decision…especially when he tilted his head to look me straight in the eye, freezing me to the spot.

My initial observation had been right: I really liked his face. There was a kind of innocence there – a softness – that appealed to my very core. It was odd because beneath the messy hair there was absolutely nothing ‘soft’ about the defined lines of his jaw and the sharpness of his cheekbones that gave off the distinct impression Dylan didn’t eat enough.

For a moment I thought his eyes were blue, but when Dylan was but two feet away I realised they were grey. Truly, genuinely grey, like a troubled sea or a stormy sky.

I couldn’t look away.

Dylan was so close to me that for one wild, insane moment I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he simply stood there until I noticed I was blocking the way to his seat. Recoiling as if I’d been slapped I performed a one-eighty-degree spin and headed into the office at the back of the lab, pretending that it had always been my intended destination.

As soon as I reached the office I closed the door and leaned against it, holding a hand over my racing heart as if I had to force it back inside my ribcage. I’d never felt like this before. Not when faced with any boy I’d liked at any age over my twenty-five years of existence. Not even when I was obsessed with Legolas in Lord of the Rings as a teenager and convinced myself I would somehow, some day, marry him.

If somebody told me this was love at first sight I’d have believed them. It felt stronger than lust. Stronger than desire. Stronger than any emotion I’d felt for anyone at any point in my entire life.

I’d completely fallen for a stranger, and he hadn’t spoken a single word.