Vico Road Fog

Today the view, perhaps the most spectacular in Dublin, was closed. Fog was ghosting in off the broad scoop of the bay, snagging in bushes and trees, roiling over the road like damp smoke, the horizon gone vertical, a great blank cliff beetling in.

I had picked up my friend Barry in Dún Laoghaire, where he had waited five hours in St. Michael's outpatients. We stopped in Dalkey to get takeaway teas and flapjacks in that central veggie café, then drove to Vico Road in order to obtain a view for our room.

I pulled in when I saw this woman and got my camera out of the boot. Like ourselves, she obviously appreciated such an impressive non-view. Despite my incessant clicking -- bracketing, trying for exactly the right angle -- she didn't turn once.

Then we parked properly, a little farther on, among the other cars. After sipping our late-afternoon tea and gnawing our healthy snacks, we stepped through the little gateway, near where I used to park and sit after visiting my mum in her nursing home in Dalkey, shortly before she died. And Barry showed me the bench where he used take his mother, in a wheelchair after her stroke, just a few months ago. Both of our mothers are gone now, his own within a month of mine. They were friends, and would have been close friends if they'd kept in contact over the decades. Perhaps they didn't need that, being private or shy by nature. They were aware of each other's lives. That was enough.

People were ascending or descending the steep path to Killiney Beach. Some had obviously been swimming. I could just make out the frayed hem of the tideline, smothered under the fog. The bathers, if they were there, were invisible.