Renwick weekend, Saturday

Now Playing: Rosemary and DEF (Daphne).

April 26, 2008.

I woke up at nine o’clock, slept more, woke again, and got up at about ten. EMM was sound asleep. I dressed and tiptoed downstairs with my laptop to the common room, where I did my devotions sitting in the window. The morning was cloudy, and as I sat reading, rain came down, silvering the sidewalks. As I was typing up yesterday’s entry on my laptop, Ian came in. We were all supposed to be going to brunch at noon at Springsteen’s down Botanic, but of course no one had made an appearance yet, so we sat and laughed at everyone. At about noon, Emma arrived, fresh off the train. We filled her in on the fun so far, and when we told her about the breakfast plans, she plugged her iPod into the speakers and got some energetic music going. Daphne and CMAM came downstairs, and the three of them bounced to Room 2 to wake Matthew by singing at him through the door. Pretty soon, everyone was up. Outside, the rain had blown away, and a warm spring morning was glowing through the young elm leaves. We practically frolicked to Botanic, the girls singing down the sidewalk, to the amusement of passers-by. At Springsteens, I sat in a booth with CMAM, EMM, Samuel, and Matthew. After breakfast, we danced back to RH again, the girls swinging their feet in step up Elmwood Avenue. Back at RH, EMM, Rachel, CMAM, and I piled into EMM’s car. The afternoon was warm. We drove up the Lisburn Road to a butcher’s, where we stopped to buy meat for the barbecue tonight. It was a bit strange to walk into the shop with its white walls and gleaming tile floor, and the long counter full of stacks of red meat, while in the back we could see two men hacking up big joints of meat with cleavers. Rachel and EMM ordered a dozen burgers and a dozen sausages. EMM took the meat back to RH to start cooking it, while the rest of us walked down to Tesco to buy other necessities—bread, sauces, dessert for afterward, etc. In RH, while we waited for the meat to finish cooking, I crawled upstairs and lay down for about half-an-hour. I was just drifting from doze to deep sleep when Daphne called me. We were mostly ready to go. Emma bravely elected to ride with Ian, Matthew, Simon (who was along for the afternoon), and Samuel, while Daphne, Rachel, CMAM, and I went in EMM’s car. The girls’ car had to stop to buy charcoal and lighter fluid somewhere. We made a tour of several garages on our quest, and at one of them, EMM, Daphne, and Rachel ran inside and bought drinks and sweets, while CMAM and I sat in the car, listening to Coldplay. Daphne had bought popsicles, sour apple on the outside, purple pear on the inside, with a stripe of pineapple ice cream twisting around the outside. We finally found a Tesco that had charcoal and lighter fluid, and from there it wasn’t far to Crawfordsburn Forest Park. At the beach, the others were throwing a frisbee and a nerf around. The beach was fairly empty. The afternoon had become overcast. Out on the lough, three huge tankers were standing at anchor. A sailboat went scudding down the bay like a white butterfly, and a motorboat churned up the water closer to shore. The beach stretched in a long brown line from the eastern headland, over which we’d climbed from the parking lot, and which was crowned with a ridge of tall sycamore and oak trees, to the western headland, which again was crowned with tall trees, but which also had houses built along it, and sprawl of low grey rocks beneath it. Simon suggested we try to build a human pyramid. Of course the boys were on the bottom row, then Daphne, Rachel, and EMM, then CMAM and Emma on top of that—theoretically, but Emma and CMAM kept sliding off and choking the row of girls under them as they tried to stop themselves, so it didn’t work very well. We did succeed in making an all-girls pyramid, with me on top, and then we tried again, but we never could get a pyramid with everyone in it. So the boys went back to throwing the frisbee around, and the girls had a round of ankle wrestling, which EMM won hands-down. All of us stood in a big circle and threw the frisbee around—the boys threw it as far out into the ocean as they could so that Daphne and Rachel would have to run, squealing, into the icy waves to rescue it. After awhile, Simon suggested shoulder wrestling. So everyone paired up and climbed on each other’s shoulders: CMAM on EMM’s, me on Emma’s, Rachel on Daphne’s, Samuel on Simon’s, Matthew on Ian’s. It was a wobbly, ridiculous process, lots of screaming, squealing, and apologies, at least on the girls’ side. We swapped around, and I ended up on Rachel’s shoulders. We were fairly successful in staying “alive” until Matthew and Ian snuck up behind Rachel, at which point both Rachel and I went sprawling in a laughing tangle in the sand. Us girls played a game of freeze tag, and finally we organized ourselves into a game of ultimate nerf (exactly like ultimate frisbee, but with a nerf instead). Ian, Matthew, Emma, EMM, and I were on a team together, “Two boys, two wee girls, and one big girl,” as Rachel put it. Ian and Matthew turned out to be a fairly unstoppable combination, especially with EMM to help them out, while Emma and I scurried up and down in the “endzone” to catch the nerf in case Matthew was being covered to closely by Simon. We had a blast, running up and down the sand, shouting and jumping. The sand was full of pockets of crushed shells, places where the waves had tossed up millions of tiny yellow and black fragments, which didn’t make running very comfortable, but no one minded too much at the time. We played until it started to get ominously dark in the southwest. Ian and Samuel went to fetch the barbecue, while Rachel, Daphne, and EMM went to bring the car around to the closer car park. Left alone, Simon and Matthew mucked about on the beach. CMAM found the bottles of bubbles that she and I had bought at Tesco, and she, Emma, and I sat huddled on the edge of the embankment above the beach, on the footpath, blowing bubbles, and watching them skirl away over our shoulders, through the fence and onto the golf course behind us. The wind off the sea was fresh and cold. Simon and Matthew came running up eventually to snap at the bubbles and then sit huddled nearby. CMAM found Daphne’s blanket among the pile of stuff left on the edge of the footpath, and she, Emma, and I stood together inside the blanket. We waited and waited. At last the girls showed up, having gotten a bit lost on the way. They’d brought down one load of things. Daphne, CMAM, and I went back to the car to bring down another load while everyone else looked for a more sheltered spot than the open beach for our barbecue. Daphne, CMAM, and I went up the footpath, down a little narrow lane between high hedges smelling greenly of summer, up a broader lane between vacation houses, and into the car park. I pulled on a hoodie, my own windbreaker, and Daphne’s big school jacket, in order to stay warm. When we went back to the beach, the others were nowhere in sight—until we were down on the beach, and then we saw them, under the western headland, in a perfect little nook made by the rocks. Samuel was scrambling about over the boulders nearer to the sea, while Simon and Matthew were amusing themselves by squirting lighter gel on the coals, making flames shoot up. The wind made the coals smoke and made it difficult to keep the fire going, and when the boys put enough gel on, the wind whipped the flames into a venomous-looking miniature maelstrom, which usually only burned itself out quickly. In the west the clouds began to move away, and the western sky went pale peach and aquamarine behind the trees. When the coals were hot enough, EMM and Rachel put on the burgers. Simon and Matthew, their outlet for pyromania taken away, went to join Samuel on the rocks, and Ian was given the task of slicing cheese with a plastic knife. The meat didn’t take long to cook, and soon we were all eating, the meat smoking in the buns. Sausages came next. We stood around the grill, warm in our little hollow in the rocks. People walking down the footpath above us glanced over the edge at the smell of the smoke. A dozen teenagers, very drunk, staggered down the path, shouting to ask if they could join us. Simon said something politely, but Matthew yelled, “No!”, which made the kids laugh and move on. We watched them in disgust. One of the girls, who must’ve been very drunk, went swimming, though she was only wearing her pajamas. A little later, a girl riding a gorgeous chestnut pony came cantering onto the beach. Daphne and I watched, mesmerized, as the pony went in easy loops, its hoofs thudding softly on the sand. Someone further up the beach let their dog loose, though, and it chased the pony, so the girl had to take it off the beach. The wind had died down, and suddenly through the clouds the leveling sunshine came striking, a vivid, luxurious gold on the eastern headland: the trunks and rocks were copper, and the leaves burned gold, and the water was deep grey-blue. The tankers out to sea flashed white. When we’d finished our main course, Rachel produced marshmallows, biscuits, and roasting sticks. We had s’mores, marshmallows between chocolate-topped biscuits. Sticky and delicious. When we finished eating, the boys ran out onto the sand to throw the frisbee around. Rachel, Daphne, EMM, and CMAM eventually took the nerf. Emma and I sat by the fire, though, to stay warm. Slowly the rich light died from the far headland, from the beach, from the water, the shadows gradually lengthening. Emma and I started to collect the leftover food and rubbish into bags. I spotted EMM washing her shoes off down at the waterline, so I yanked off Daphne’s jacket and sprinted over the sand to push her in—we had a good-natured wrestling match in the water, both of us in almost to our knees at one point, and my shoes soaked. When we turned around, we saw Ian and Matthew coming running over the sand to join us, carrying CMAM between them to throw her in the water. She was squealing, and everyone was laughing—they only set her down on the sand in the foam. Rachel and Matthew had a seaweed fight, flailing at each other with long rubbery pieces of kelp, while the rest of us finished cleaning our campsite. We packed up the cars and drove back to Belfast. As the road curved up over a headland, we got a glimpse of the sunset: the deep living blue of the water below us, the black shoulder of Cave Hill sprinkled with orange lights beyond, and behind that, a saffron sky, aquamarine and turquoise above, patterned with a few deep grey clouds, leftover from the morning’s rain. Back in RH, we unloaded the car. Most people sat around in the common room, but Emma and I took quick showers. When I came downstairs again, I sat next to CMAM in the common room, and we took out the half-empty bottles of bubbles and blew them. Rachel and EMM drew an imaginary line across the carpet and played bubble tennis, blowing big bubbles back and forth, while the boys enthusiastically popped all the little ones. At about half ten, we had dessert, apple strudel hot out of the oven, with custard and tea. EMM polished off the custard, eating the last several huge spoonfuls out of the big serving ladle. We debated what to do next. Simon suggested “one-two-three-I’m-free!”, basically the racing version of hide-and-go-seek. By fiat Ian decided that CMAM was it, and sent her up to Room 9 to count while the rest of us spilled out into the street. The clubs were in full swing in the Students’ Union and at The Parlor, so there were taxis and people going up and down, but it was quiet enough. It was long past twelve by the time we were all collected and sitting on the steps in front of RH. Samuel and Matthew started to try to climb up the doorposts to the ledge above the door. I gave Rachel, EMM, and CMAM back rubs by turns. A few pale stars gleamed down at us through the elm trees. We finally went inside and sat around. Somehow or other, a water fight started, Ian and CMAM throwing water all over each other with shouts and squeals of delight, and everyone cheering them on. At that point, I went up to bed.