Stan is based in  Co. Donegal, Ireland. A parent of three grown children, an organic farmer and wind farmer, his writing takes inspiration from a rural environment, and his Irish Antrim and Leitrim roots.

After a career, encompassing engineering, teaching and farming, Stan started creative writing in 2019. Having produced a series of short stories, a mixture of memoirs, family-related tales and fiction, his work has been published in the Leitrim Guardian,  Fingerpost, The Corran Herald, The Bangor Literary Review, The Galway Review, and in the Ulster-Scots publication Yarns. He has contributed to the Bloody Sunday 50^th Anniversary Community Writing Archive, and to readings at Tenx9 and at Culture Night events. He was awarded a bursary to the John Hewitt Summer School 2022 and to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

A member of the Derry writing group “this writing thing …”, drafts of the stories are in his regular blog www.thecurlewscall.com  

Email: stanmcw51@gmail.com

Let’s Meet at Carnlough

They travelled down from Belfast separately. Feigning diversions for family errands. Ryan had put off meeting Sarah until he could get a definitive on Jamie’s whereabouts. Or rather, where he was buried. He had come to think of him now, simply as a loyalist terrorist, not as his cousin. That’s what he told himself anyway. He had searched the papers. Nothing. When he gave up, it was an article on the killing of a young woman outside a British Army base in Germany that stayed with him. The fuzzy photograph reminded him of Sarah in her student days. Something in that innocent smile, that expected life to go on and on. Sarah’s life had fractured five years earlier, Jamie, the chief suspect Ryan disclosed the last time they met. Then Ryan had pleaded Jamie’s innocence to the point of choking Sarah’s pain and anger. How petty, he later realised, one enormous mistake. And one that couldn’t be mended. Yet, she had agreed to meet again. Carnlough, her choice. This, he guessed, his last chance.

He arrived at the quiet seaside town first. Pulled his grey Ford Sierra off the Coast Road and in beside an old shed at the end of the narrow quay. Sitting in the car, his gaze wandered across the small, once-bustling harbour with a handful of modest pleasure boats and wooden half-deckers moored on the glassy water, to buddleia growing between the dirty limestone blocks of the redundant railway embankment that doubled as the seawall.  The North Channel beyond.

Next to him a decaying building. Crumbling lime mortar loosening black basalt stones. The curved corrugated roof with rust patches growing through layers of pitch. Some money needed here, he thought. Though, wouldn’t it make an attractive coffee room? Great location. A grant from The Ireland Fund, perhaps.

Ryan got out of the car into the quiet sea-chill freshness of a late spring morning. Above the solid terrace of the small seaside town, a white scrim marked the old lime quarry, as the gentle hills of The Glens fell off towards the sea. He sat against the coarse stone cappings of the wall, that separated the Coast Road’s footpath from the car park. Looking around seeing how few people there were on the late spring Bank Holiday. Four strollers across the harbour on the embankment at Hurry Head was all. Customers that might sample scones and coffee. A foolish notion, he quickly concluded.

            An elderly woman, slightly stooped under the weight of two large jute carrier bags, was moving slowly towards him on the other side of the low wall. She was wearing a heavy, aged tweed coat and a thick woolly hat; a small, dark, huddled form. She stopped. Put the bags down next to Ryan. Straightened for respite.

            ‘Hello son,’ she said to his back. And not waiting for a reply went on, ‘A Ballymoney lad that doesnea wanta spend the holiday at the Port? Cannea blame ya.’ Ryan turned to her. Studied her face for someone familiar.

            ‘Hello,’ he nodded, seeing deep dark lines on her face. Her green eyes radiant and alive, that held his attention. But he’d never seen her before.

            ‘It all goes to the Port. Ya know?’

            ‘Sorry?’

            ‘The money. Aye, the money. The world’s ill divid. So it is.’ Steve smiled not sure where this was going. ‘It’s complicated son. Very complicated.’ She brushed down the front of her coat with her two hands as if wiping them clean. ‘Waitin for the girlfren?’

            ‘No no. Nothing like that.’ She looked at him directly, latched his eyes and sighed for what she might have seen. Ryan swept back his black hair, felt how nervous he was about seeing Sarah. Each time, in fact. Yet harbouring a veiled excitement, despite the possibility that her wounds could again spill into a wild rawness,   here on the water’s edge.

Down the street, towards the redundant railway arch, a man got out of a small dark blue van trailing a newspaper in one hand. He raised the other arm to lean on the car’s roof. He was wearing a soiled navy boiler suit and a similar woollen hat. Ryan could see a sheen on the top half of the suit, from work, or age.

            ‘Ellen! Common! Common!’ the man shouted. Ellen didn’t reply. Instead, she raised an earthy hand and scratched the back of her neck with strong yellow nails. She turned to Ryan, smiled and nodded as she picked up the heavy bags.

            ‘Aye. She’ll be here shortly. It’ll be alright.’  Steve watched her tramp down the street away from him, feeling as though his younger self had just dropped out of another life. Back into place, but not completely. This woman, this stranger, who seemed to know more about him than he did himself.

From a distance, the man’s gaze gathered Ellen and her bags. ‘Wait! Wait!’ he called, holding up a hand. He threw his paper into the van and dragged himself and his hindering leg up the street towards her. Ryan thought about his granny and granda in Fermanagh. A fondness expressed one time that he barely remembered, after some minor row. Then, Sarah’s Mini pulled into the car park and reversed in beside him. Unbidden, an image of himself in a striped apron, at a barista coffee machine, his back to the counter, turning to see Sarah standing there with bags. Sarah pulled herself out of the car and smiled over its red roof, a look both cautious and hopeful.

            ‘Hi Ryan. You here long?’ Then a drawn sigh. ‘I really could do with a coffee.’