Fanore
Chapter 1 - The Bed and Breakfast

SETTING - An unusually calm if also humid summer morning in a guest house just above the crossroads at Fanore in County Clare. Out one side of the breakfast room, a mist is doing its best to rise off the sea and slowly slide over the house and then out of sight over the Burren on the other side. From up there, the sun shines periodically through a set of smaller windows. The woman of the house, still occasionally referred to as ‘Bean’an’ti’ by those who appreciate the meaning, is ably assisted by two young girls, who could be students on summer holidays. They are busy serving breakfasts to a room full of guests.

SOUND - An old analogue radio is tuned into a national radio station, but the volume is set too low to hear the detail of what seems to be quite a heated discussion involving at least three people. The reason, along with the intermittently fading signal, is the dominating sound of heavy knives and forks on thick sounding plates and cups sliding on saucers. Conversation is politely subdued but just then succumbs to a child being scolded in public, sulking and then threatening to cry. A set of fatigued parents on holiday move to immediately shush the child into silence, using bribes that could also have been threats.

LIGHT - Light is natural and bright, though with deep shadows and bright sunlight passing periodically from one side of the house to the other.

ACTION - A young, athletic looking man who could fill out any XL Football Jersey plays his natural part as half of the most physically impressive couple in the room, but he isn’t happy. He’s been waiting for confirmation of his medical for more than six months and he simply cannot believe that he could have been miraculously overlooked for the draft. He now knows that bad news pending can often weigh more than the bad news itself.

He speaks gruffly and with an accent that Mrs. McNamara can’t quite pin down except that it may have a trace of New York’s Bronx thrown in. He is obviously of exotic extraction made even more curious by some quite familiar aspects. A man who is the product of two old worlds cast adrift to replace his way in the new one.

His general unease blooms into unmistakable annoyance at replaceing himself the apparent recipient of unwanted attention and his face darkens considerably. Mrs. McNamara prides herself on missing little and apart from noticing that he is unusually handsome, with an emphasis on unusual, his eyes betray a possibly short temper. She is dismayed to discover that his scowl is directed at no-one else but her.

“Shit.” It isn’t excessively loud, but the word’s gutter nature renders the room abruptly silent. He then receives a hostile glare from the father of the young child who has stopped complaining about her sibling. His obvious embarrassment is enough to dilute the animosity but not the unspoken demand for some form of mitigation. So he leans closer to his breakfast companion. “It’s got to be worse here than that it’s ever been back home.” It was said loud enough to be heard in the silence beyond the offended parent, but that fact confers even more attention on him than his original outburst. He lowers his voice and asks no one in particular. “Why is everyone staring at us?”

Mrs. McNamara’s face instantly flushes bright pink as she begins to appreciate the reason behind the disturbance. She’d let her gaze linger too long on the even more exotic looking woman accompanying him, but she decides not to make a worse issue of it than it already is, and scurries into the sanctuary of her kitchen. Once there, she is immediately diverted by countless automatic prompts and settles for topping up the plates of toasted bread on each table. No matter how hard the toaster is made to work, there is perpetual demand for fresh toast at breakfast.

“Ease up Ethan. It’s already the seventies for god’s sake and as far as I know the KKK never got around to setting up a branch here. In fact, they probably don’t even know this place exists and these people are just curious. I don’t see anyone that isn’t, or at least wasn’t smiling before you opened your big mouth. Anyway, if anyone is upset it should be me. I mean, you don’t look that much different from these folks, which is to be expected if as you say, your great grandaddy was from around here. But since we left the airport, the only other black person I’ve seen is the vaguely familiar woman who looks back at me from mirrors.” She smiles at her own joke, which displays her perfect set of teeth. She then reaches across a table that they initially thought might have been reserved for children, such was its limited surface area.

Mona couldn’t avoid being seen but she was seldom heard. She was also adverse to public displays of affection, so she just patted the back of his hand in the narrow space between his saucer and his half empty plate.

“Yeah. I suppose.” He says, subdued by the metaphysical combination of eyes he could too easily get lost inside and a velvet voice he is sometimes convinced can bypass his ears and talk directly to his mind. Of the many physically striking aspects to Mona, he is just then captivated by something that can’t be seen until close up. The minute disparity in darknesses between her irises and pupils could often take time to define, but it was always time well spent.

Mrs McNamara decided that she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if one of her guests thought they’d been deliberately insulted. It just wasn’t done and the need to be seen to rectify the disaster was far more than some glib compliance with the mantra of ‘the customer is always right’ or the Tourist Board equivalent of ‘Chead Mille Failte’, or 100,000 welcomes. She couldn’t let it be said that people from West Clare could insult a guest without trying to put things right. So she strode purposefully back to the small table with several pieces of freshly made toast threatening to slide off a plate that she seemed to have forgotten she was carrying.

Her breakfast room had just one family table, which she placed in front of the long window so they’d have a view of the rocky coastline below. Because there would invariably be a child or two, less light would be blocked by adults and it offered the illusion of more space than there really was. She liked to think her small guest house catered more to couples celebrating honeymoons, anniversaries or just the survival of love in a world that seemed increasingly alien to the concept. The result was that her breakfast room, which was considered quite large in Fanore, could also look quite cluttered when all the smaller tables were in use, as then.

Mrs McNamara also considered herself a reasonably well travelled woman. It was something that could often become evident, particularly when she talked with people from the U.S. and a distinct Boston twang could surface to alternate and then combine with her homely Clare brogue.

“I’m sorry Missus.” - she always called them Missus, even though this one was certainly a Miss. The diplomacy was appreciated by couples whose marital status was anything other than conservatively settled and experience told her that it put everyone at ease.

“Uhu.” Said Mona, who could have been caught between feeling sorry for the flustered but kindly looking woman with the red face, and the need to express some solidarity with Ethan. He could get quite testy and the slightest thing could get him going. She sometimes wondered if he wasn’t overly protective of her, or of their relationship. There was something about predominantly white company that provided all the catalyst he needed to vent some steam.

“How was it -,” she often asked herself, “- that he could get so mad at people for looking at her or at them both, but then invite even more attention by making a scene of it?”

“You’re black.” Stuttered the blushing white woman, wiping her free hand nervously in her short apron.

Mona was pre-occupied observing the gyrating plate and wondering how long it could be before at least some of the toast slid off. It took a second or two for the woman’s statement that sounded like a question to fully register. That gave her time to deliver what she considered was the only appropriate response. “Well, we know there’s nothing wrong with your eyes lady.”

She seemed amused but also curious to see how their hostess was going to get out of dropping a clanger like that. A quick glance beyond the waitress, who’d begun to shift nervously from one foot to the other, confirmed that their conversation was by then very public. Children included, their audience instantly complied with a protocol that demanded the pretence, quite poorly as it happened, of having heard nothing and of total disinterest in any case. The apparently default response to a silence that dropped like shroud. Far from being angry with that development, Mona could no longer suppress her smile, though she continued to exercise the discipline of stillness.

The extended hush was enough to tighten the virtual noose the older woman had placed around her own neck and she began to stutter. “Oh no no no. It’s not that. It’s just that you call yourself black and your husband thinks I insulted you for not being white. Oh my God … this is terrible.” Mrs. McNamara pursed her lips tightly and decided on a damage limitation exercise. This created some space in which she could gather her thoughts.

When Mona saw the obvious distress of the waitress, her face went from severe to quizzical, before softening. Conscious of the additional attention she was attracting, she opted to bring the matter and the embarrassing silence to an end. “He’s not my … well never mind. Why don’t you just relax and say what you came over here to say Ma’am.”

Mrs. McNamara looked around the room to confirm her worst fears of all eyes studiously avoiding her, but there was no way she could back out. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “You’re not black. What you are is the most amazing blend of not white but also not dark chocolate.”

She paused as the whites of the dark woman’s eyes opened wider than she thought possible and then added. “I know that genuinely black people are not that easy to replace and the reason you caught my eye is because you seem to be almost precisely half black … even if that would also make you half white I suppose.” Her voice trailed off.

Ethan Murrew almost choked on the chunk of sausage that his abrupt intake of breath decided he should ingest whole into his lungs rather than further chew and swallow. To help him recover, he reached for a cup so he could wash the food down its originally assigned duct, but he was instantly on his feet. The drink was far hotter than expected and practically scalded his unprepared palate. The resulting pain overrode all other genteel considerations. A tall man seated at a small table and in already cramped conditions can’t expect to move that fast without incurring some collateral damage.

His knee caught the underside of the table, which severely rattled the crockery and the utensils on top of it. He then spilled some tea when he missed his saucer on the first attempt at returning the cup and placed it instead on the side of his plate, where it teetered precariously, inviting some alternate destiny.

Mrs McNamara intervened immediately and caught the cup before it tipped over to make even more of a mess on her new red and white checkered table cloths. She then smiled her appreciation for the impromptu round of applause that on reflection, may have been intended for her cumbersome but nevertheless effective handling of the upset guest. It also told her that she was not alone in being guilty of looking too long at the dark woman, or possibly the unusual sight of a ‘black’ and ‘white’ couple who in reality didn’t fall into either category.

Mona’s already extravagant smile grew until it transformed her face to such an extent that for a horrible moment, it was unclear if she was about to burst into tears or laugh. She chose to join Ethan as his whoop for joy bordered on euphoria.

Mona wasn’t conceited but she also wasn’t oblivious to the heads she often turned by simply entering a room. That morning was no different, though in this rural setting it probably had a lot do with being the only dark woman in the entire county. Mona was stunning in every sense of the word and while the looks of the men and adolescent boys would normally be appreciative if also covertly short, women tended not to be so coy.

She’d seen jealousy as often as admiration in female eyes, except maybe when they settled on her hair. Hair with an obviously Afro dimension had to be the one aspect of any ‘so called’ black woman that no woman of any other colour could ever want. Mona’s relationship with her own hair was a war of attrition in which she had long ago accepted that she would only win an occasional battle. Judging by her reflection in the bathroom mirror earlier, there wasn’t going to be any kind of victory that day.

Mona was resigned to her discovery that there was a mysterious agent in Irish water or rain that simply neutralised the softening and straightening agents representing millions of dollars worth of research and development. In just three days, her hair had grown as voluminous as the essential range of hair care products that she brought along to suppress it.