"As they filed out of the dark cinema, the brightness of the summer evening hurt his eyes and they both seemed a little unsure of where they were going, but with growing self-confidence, he brought her an ice-cream cone in Morelli's and then, crossing the road, they walked along the front."
from The Martyr's Memorial, by David Park (Oranges from Spain, Jonathan Cape, 1990)


On Saturday I paid a flying visit to my mum in Northern Ireland the day before her birthday (I always get the date wrong). It was a beautiful day, suspiciously mild for February and, after a leisurely lunch at the York Hotel in Portstewart, we went for a walk around the convent which sits perched on the edge of the Atlantic and above the town.
It's a walk I haven't done for years, decades maybe. Along the way, my mum pointed out the sights of interest - the decaying building which was once, she said, the best dancehall in Ireland, a cross carved into the concrete of the path that marked the spot where a nun once threw herself down into the sea, and the various housing calamities that pass for property development on this part of the coast.
We walked all the way round to where the path looks out over the breaking waves of the Atlantic and the golden curl of sand that stretches away to the barmouth and Castlerock. In the distance Mussenden Temple sits squatly on the cliff. Then we turned around and walked back to Morelli's for coffee.
The next day back in Scotland I looked out a copy of David Park's debut collection of short stories, Oranges from Spain. It contains a story, The Martyr's Memorial, in which his teenage protagonists, complete the same walk I had the day before. It's set in the past - Portstewart still had a cinema in the story - and not even my past, but my parent's. My mum and dad could have been sitting in the row behind the boy and girl in the story watching The Swiss Family Robinson. I like that idea, of my parents, young and untroubled, in the corner of the moviehouse, in the corner of the story.
I must have read the story shortly after the book came out in 1990. That was in my bookselling days. I can remember reading it in Stirling, sitting on the back wall on a sunny day thrilled silly about the place I spent so much time in as a child featured in fiction. I had read once read a story that mentioned my home town of Coleraine before, but that was a Derek Raymond crime novel and Coleraine only appeared because it was the birthplace of the villain of the piece, a frankly raving psychotic murderer.
The Martyr's Memorial - a story of first love - gave a rather more agreeable reflection of where I called home. And it's made me think of how fiction can legitimise a place's existence in a way. Isn't part of the reason we are intrigued by London or Paris or New York or even Edinburgh the fact that, along with all the obvious geographical and economic factors, they are written about. Stories are set in all of these places.
Portstewar has rarely been interesting or important enough to be a place where story happens. So, no wonder I'm taken with this one, even though it's not the best story in the collection (a little too syrupy and surrounded by rather more peppery fare).
And as of now it's fused now with my own experience of Saturday's walk, the story and the memory feeding off and into the other. The fact and the fiction joined at the hip.