We present the stories from the RTÉ Short Story Competition shortlist 2023 – read Off Season by Jamie Samson below.
About the story: Jamie says: "The Costa del Sol in late winter has a very peculiar atmosphere, with its cold palm trees and vacant boardwalks. It seemed like the perfect setting for a story about love and nostalgia, and the disappointments that arise when we try to revive the past."
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This was Torremolinos in March, and it was barely even March, and it was barely even Torremolinos. A stretch of coast called La Carihuela, in fact – about two kilometres down the promenade from the rowdy centre of town. Certainly a kind of paradise, but a freakish, menacing, off-duty paradise, all dead beaches and shivering palms, boarded-up casinos, dark shops plastered with peeling inducements. The bodies that trundled across the playa belonged not to the young and beautiful but to blitzed-out pensioners in winter coats. It was my kind of place.
Chloe and I sat at a beach bar over wasted mojitos, watching it all happen. It was the last night of our trip, though neither of us were in the mood to mark the occasion. Don't you find, on a holiday, that you keep ending up back at the same bar out of laziness or disorientation? This was ours. It was called El Tiburón Peregrino, the Basking Shark.
Chloe was meticulously stabbing the crushed ice at the bottom of her glass with a straw. I watched her do this with an ever-deepening scowl. We hadn’t spoken in five minutes, maybe longer. An old man with a metal detector was moving between the parasols nearby, probing for pennies on a stretch of sand as desolate and windswept as the sea it clung to. We looked on in silence as he squatted over a promising hole to investigate some potential find. Rare coin? Golden ring? No, bottlecap. He flicked it away and moved on.
"That’ll be you," Chloe said.
I looked at her inquiringly.
"Your man there?"
"Yeah, that’ll be you."
"I mean, that wouldn’t be so bad. He seems happy enough."
"You think? I don’t know. Seems like a sad way to end your days."
"If I was him, I bet I’d find a trove of Roman silver. I’d find the keys to Atlantis. And I’d use them to buy one of those hotels right there."
I pointed to a row of ghastly white slabs that loomed gigantically over the shoreline. They looked like enormous fridges and washing machines at some rubbish dump for giants.
"I knew you’d say something like that," Chloe said. She slurped noisily on the slushy remnants of the cocktail. "The only thing I hate more than someone who can’t take a compliment is someone who can’t take an insult."
I didn’t laugh but sniffed sharply. I knew Chloe hated this, the sniff. In my bored mood I found myself deliberately provoking her just to get a reaction. She liked to do this too. Her thing was flaring her nostrils. Mine was the sniff. Only when you’ve been through hell together can you routinely and reliably annoy someone USING ONLY YOUR NOSE.
We decided to get another drink.
What were we doing in Torremolinos? That had been the question bedevilling us – sniffing, flaring its nostrils at us – throughout our four days here. I had my reasons and she had hers. But it was apparent now that we would not be comparing notes.
We had been in love once. We had, in fact, been THE LOVES OF EACH OTHER’S LIVES once. It had played out as these things usually do. There had been a series of apartments in Dublin and London with both our names above the buzzer. There had been under-the-duvet discussions about spending forever together: the where of it, the how of it, and ultimately the when of it, though rarely the why of it. There had even, briefly, been a ring. But we only got as far as the first ring, not the second, and we’d definitely never got as far as children. Because there had also been other things. There had been other things. You know, the usual stuff.
No children, thank god, but the love itself had sometimes behaved like a child – probably a son, if we had to gender it. We had seen it learn to talk and walk and lose its innocence and eventually morph into a hideous and delinquent grown-up, complete with halitosis and a criminal record. Finally, we had found ourselves sitting patiently at its deathbed, graciously accepting condolences while we waited for the doctor to touch its throat, looking for love’s last pulse – and sigh, and sadly shake his head.
Or something like that.
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Jamie Sampson tals to RTÉ Arena about Off Season
So yeah, we broke up. Life went on. She met someone. I met someone. The years elapsed. Now and then there was a friendly text or enquiring email but otherwise life did its thing and just went on. And I learned to ignore that biting homesick feeling that would now and then hit me by surprise – upon opening a bottle of shower gel that somehow contained her scent, or seeing an old haunt of ours from the back of an end-of-night taxi, through the shimmering rain. I learned to ignore it, or at least distrust it.
I don’t know what prompted me to reach out to her, but it had something to do with a sudden loss of confidence in all the decisions I had made down the years. Perhaps some backpedalling was in order. Looking her up on social media one day, I established that we were both currently single – though I suspected I was a little more single than she was.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I sent her an email suggesting a trip to the Costa del Sol. I was living in Spain at the time, so it didn’t really count as a holiday. I didn’t frame it as an invitation to get back together or even as an invitation at all. I said, more or less, that I would soon be in Torremolinos; perhaps she would be there too. It was the kind of casual tone you can only achieve after forty rigorous and manic drafts.
To my infinite amazement, I got a response. Even more amazingly, it was a positive one. She said she might indeed be in Torremolinos too; in fact, she was quite sure she’d be passing through during the given dates. We briefly discussed travel plans. We booked a hotel just off the beach. And a few weeks later I found myself standing outside the Torremolinos train station, peering through the crowd in search of a familiar face, and absolutely sick with anticipation.
She looked the same, save for the hair, which was shorter, and her eyes, which age and experience – or perhaps just seeing me – had tightened into a sceptical scowl. We said hello. I couldn’t call it romantic, that first embrace, those first few minutes. It was awkward. It was worse than awkward: it was POLITE. We walked towards the hotel, almost – but not — touching.
The small talk part came easily enough. I heard about the turbulence on her flight, she heard about my delayed train from Malaga. But soon we stumbled into that conversational gorge where small talk gives way and the prospect of big talk takes terrible shape. We couldn’t quite climb out. So by the time we reached the hotel we were walking in silence. "What a beautiful couple," the receptionist declared, and was almost knocked off his chair by the waft of tension that struck him in return.
The tension didn’t let up when we stepped into the suite. The double-bed was smaller than it had appeared in the photos; it just sat there, bluntly awaiting use, like a toilet, or a tombstone. Coldly Chloe regarded its petal-strewn folds, and something in me sank. Her unwillingness to even consider intimacy was confirmed later on, at dinner, when her foot rubbed briefly against mine under the table. She instantly sat up straight and broadened her shoulders and apologised in a brisk, stately tone that made it very clear indeed that our skin would touch this weekend only by means of an accident.
It was around then that the question nosed in: What are we doing here? Why did she agree to this trip? Why did I PROPOSE this trip?
We lay down side-by-side that night for the first time in six years. As I slept, my arm – yielding to some unconscious craving for the old familiar warmth – came softly over her body.
"Don’t do that," her dark form commanded.
"Sorry, I didn’t…"
"It’s fine. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Just… don’t do that."
I obeyed by rolling so far onto my side of the bed that half my body dangled over the edge, a position in which I remained, like a chastened sloth, until the following morning. And when the morning came, we didn’t talk about it. Instead, we remarked on the selection of fruit and the bitterness of the coffee while poking morosely at our phones.
The point of the trip, I suppose, had been to simulate the beginning of our relationship, when everything was charged with potency and possibility and hilarity and gratitude. But all we could do was the last part, the end, the bit where we looked and felt like the walking dead, zombified by repetition and resentment.
The rest of the trip passed as a succession of tense lunches and dinners and aimless walks between the same five or six points of interest. We played a grim game of mini-golf in which I tried to let her win but somehow still managed to beat her. At an arcade I fed a coin into the mechanical fortune teller. It told us both of our fortunes, individually. Chloe’s: "You will soon win the big prize." Mine: "No problem is big enough that it cannot grow bigger still." I thought about complaining. But who was there to complain TO?
And now it was over, it was all over, and I didn’t know what to think or what lessons to draw. The sun above El Tiburon Peregrino was dissolving into a vivid mineral redness, like a lava lamp. A ferris wheel turned against the fading light at the far end of the corniche, just behind Chloe’s shoulder. Had she adjusted her chair a little, it would have fit perfectly behind her head like a bright pink halo. I thought about telling her this, but chose not to.
The waiter came by with our drinks.
"Dos mojitos," he confirmed as he set them down.
"Grathia," I said.
I smiled wisely at Chloe. "In this part of Spain, you don’t say gracias. You say grathia."
"You already told me that," she said.
We tapped our glasses together and said cheers, salud, sláinte.
I let out a long decisive gust of breath. "This was a bit of a flop, wasn’t it?"
"Complete dud."
"Waste of time."
"I should have stayed home in my pyjamas."
"I should never have sent that stupid email."
"Well, at least now we know."
"That’s true. Now we know."
We shivered together with a kind of grisly contentment, like two old soldiers drinking from tins during a brief and much-needed lull in the gunfire.
"Where are you at these days, by the way? Do you still, I don’t know, do you still have any time for it?"
"Any time for what?"
"Any of it. For love, I suppose."
"Jamie, I have all the time in the world for love," she said, and smiled mysteriously.
Down the bay, our treasure hunter was still scanning away even as the darkness made a ghost of him. I wished him well. Perhaps he wouldn't go home empty handed after all. Perhaps he might still find some treasure worth keeping. I don’t mean a trove of silvers or anything like that. Just some other, more ordinary kind of treasure. Not enough to buy him a villa or unlock the gates of Atlantis. But enough to keep him searching, or at least to have made the search, when it did come to an end, reasonably worthwhile.
Yeah, I wished him well.
About the author: Jamie Samson is a writer from Dublin. His fiction has been published in The Irish Times and The Ogham Stone. He was a finalist at the 2019 Hennessy Literary Awards in the First Fiction category. He currently works as a copywriter and has lived in various countries, including France, Spain, Israel, the Czech Republic, and Canada.
Off Season by Jamie Samson was read by Rory Nolan on RTÉ Radio 1 at 11.20pm on Wednesday 18 October, as part of Late Date.
Read more stories from the shortlist on rte.ie/culture, hear updates on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1, and tune in to Arena's RTÉ Short Story Competition special which will go out live on RTÉ Radio 1 at 7pm on Friday 27th October 2023 from Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, with all 10 shortlisted writers in attendance.
Judges Claire Kilroy, Ferdia MacAnna and Kathleen MacMahon will discuss the art of the short story and the stories from this year's shortlist with host Seán Rocks, there'll be live music and performances from leading actors, and we'll find out who's won the top prizes.
Why not join us in person? Audience tickets are now on sale via the Pavilion Theatre.
And for more about the RTÉ Short Story Competition in honour of Francis MacManus, go here.
