Lagan & Derelict by Jess Worsdale

The city is an island.

Beneath the steady beating of the seagull’s tired wings, Dublin huffs its stale breath upwards, sun-flayed skin of tower blocks humming in the late October heat. The bird tilts, considers, spirals up thermals. A scavenger. A hunter. A pirate of the concrete, snatching flotsam from the streets. The gull swoops a hundred stories, talons scrabbling the Meath Street skybridge, before rising again to perch on the wall that seals the city from the sea. The brined air is cooler here. Tethered below, a bright shoal of barges, tiny from this height. Easily swallowed. The bird opens its beak and screams at the vast blue nothing of the North Atlantic. The next city, too far to fly.

Down on the jetty, the boy from the barges shades his eyes against the sun. He hears the gull’s lament, the long promise of the horizon.

Boy and bird, marooned.

He looks away. A clatter of wings.

Offices. Flats. Stacked cubes of human lives. The gull wheels back over Dublin, dreaming of nests and fish and scraps and —

The man pulls the bowstring tight. Aims. Releases, and plucks the bird from the sky.

From a tower block window, the woman watches it fall. A bloodied snowflake, if only she’d known snow. Palm to the glass, she imagines the bird’s broken body thunking in the dust. Dead, she thinks, experimenting.

Dead.

Cold.

 Gone.

It works. She feels the sting of sorrow. Smiles.

ONE

When Colm came in from the jetty, the door stuck as he pulled it behind him. He ran his hand down the lock stile, frowning at the salt-bloated wood. Sanding it was a job handed down from Granda to Da to Rian; he supposed it was his responsibility now. The barge swayed and he stood for a moment watching the shadow puppets cast by the oil lamps, steeping himself in the familiar cadence of the ocean. Now he was spending more time over the wall, he noticed his legs made constant micro-adjustments tensing, balancing, predicting changes in the currents. He didn’t feel it when he was home, but on Dublin’s asphalt the twitching
marked him alien, his body anticipating a movement that wasn’t going to happen. Landsick, Ma called it. He shoved his shoulder in to the door and banged it closed.

‘That you, Colm love?’ Gran called from the aft saloon.

A fly hurled itself at one of the portholes then crawled a circle, legs tickling the waterproof seal. Through the glass, stripes of green, brown, navy: ocean, jetty, sky.

‘It is you, isn’t it, Colm? Or…?’

‘Yeah,’ he said quickly, picturing her face slipping from hope to disappointment to practised neutrality.

‘Found places handy enough, did you?’

‘No bother.’

He’d binned the posters as soon as he was far enough into the city that nobody from the barges would stumble upon them, but Gran didn’t need to know that. Posters. In the privacy of the galley, he rolled his eyes. He’d seen how the city-dwellers let their gaze slide over the photocopied faces, their minds half-skimmed or focused on their own lives.

He hooked his knapsack in the press and downed a chipped glass of water. It tasted brackish; the filter must need changing. Under the sink, entrails of tubes and valves and wires were patched together with generations of peeling tape and crossed fingers. Colm poked his hand through until it met the plastic surface of the desalinator. He prodded at it, wrinkling his nose. A vague recollection of Rian lying face-up underneath, saying something about back flushing, a roll of electrical tape clamped between his teeth. Colm withdrew his hand. Ma would sort it later.

The back of his neck throbbed — yesterday’s sunburn scalded with the heat of today — and when he stood upright, dark spots danced across his vision. He’d learned early on that hunger was like a whining dog; if you could ignore it, heartless, it might slink away, for a while at least. He’d passed that point hours ago, but now, the galley air syruped with stewing apples and thyme, it had returned, scratching at his insides. A wire rack of curd tarts was cooling on the counter and he swiped one, dipped his finger in the blood-warm centre. Fraughans, bottled in the summer, July perfume on his tongue.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, Colm Maguire.’

JESS WORSDALE grew up in the New Forest, spent her twenties in Dublin and now lives in Belfast. She studied Chinese at university before fiction took over, and writes in the corners of time around her job at a charity. In 2022 she undertook an MA in Creative Writing at UEA, where she wrote the first draft of Lagan & Derelict – literary speculative fiction set in near-future Dublin, for fans of Emily St. John Mandel, Jessie Greengrass and the TV series Severance. The novel asks: are emotions what make us human, and how far can happiness be a choice?

Lagan & Derelict has since been longlisted for the 2024 Discoveries Prize, was a finalist in the 2023 Mslexia Novel Competition, and was awarded mentoring support from Arts Council NI and the Irish Writers’ Centre. Away from the desk, Jess enjoys long-distance hiking and wild camping. She is happiest halfway up a hill, eating dehydrated meals in the rain and embracing the type-two fun.