Carrying Her Wings

Walking the dog on Blackrock beach, I saw three people picking their way over the sharp rocks: two men in dark clothes, the bearded one shouldering a couple of cameras, and a long-blonde-haired young woman in a coat and short blue spangly skirt, carrying what appeared to be a pair of large, shaggy black wings. She stumbled and I asked if she was ok. She was. 

The other man seemed younger, and Asian: wearing a kind of black smock or kurta; neat, coiffed hair and a strong, not unpleasant whiff of something perfumy, cologne perhaps. 

A photoshoot. I figured they wouldn't mind if I hung around, so long as I didn't crowd them. I kept in step with the Asian guy (their assistant?), who was trailing the woman and the photographer. 

The tide was quite a bit out, though there were shallow lagoons we splashed through. When we got to slightly deeper water the woman and photographer removed their shoes and socks and kept walking. I stayed back with the Asian guy. I asked him who the woman was and he answered rather vaguely: a singer. He said he didn't know her name, which seemed improbable. She had made the wings herself. Naturally. And where do you go to be photographed wearing your wings if not that luminously reflective amphitheatre, that great saucer of metaphor that is Dublin Bay? 

 About 50 yards out, the photographer was crouching, photographing the woman, who had now removed her coat and donned her wings. Standing, her reflection in the sea opened a dark, capital X.

I had already lifted my iPhone, as had the Asian guy. We stood at the edge of the water like tourists snapping some innocuous tourist sight, so that we could safely forget it.  

Now the woman was kneeling then lying on her side in the water, then rising like some Fellini mermaid-Venus. 

And now they were heading back towards us, she lightened, hurrying ahead, carrying her coat so as not to get it wet, he following, bearing the wings on his back. The show was almost over.