From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  How could he tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different? Not linked to money or to sport or a road in a town. Or was it the same everywhere? He wanted to have no past, no address, to just be from Ireland. Not this town, or the Villas, or the house at the end of the terrace with the broken gatepost. He wanted to tell a romantic story to explain his father, to say that he was missing somewhere, in action maybe, last seen crossing an Afghan pass or a desert or a flooding river. Only Dean would know him in the mine and he’d go along with any story. Dean wouldn’t judge him or think it was strange that he wanted to rewrite himself. Jesus, man, you’re some liar, he’d say, and he’d be impressed. Anyway, he’d chickened out and so it was all the one now. Dean went on his own. He was sound enough about Lampy not going. Ah, fuck, Lamp, he said. I should have known you’d bail on me. Fuck, man. And Lampy just said he was sorry, he couldn’t leave Pop and his mother alone, and Dean had said, All right, don’t worry, I’ll be grand, but he wondered afterwards exactly what Dean had meant when he said he should have known he’d bail. He saw a picture of him on Facebook in navy overalls and a heavy-looking helmet, standing smiling in a group of men before a mesh door. Going underground, it said beneath the picture, and Lampy wished when he saw the picture that he’d had the balls to go. To lower himself into the mantle of the earth.

  He parked beside the door of the hydrotherapy centre and he got out and walked around and slid back the minibus door and he looked at Mr Collins, who was smiling at him, and he looked at Mr Driscoll, who was sitting behind Mr Collins, and Mr Driscoll was shaking his head at him and saying, They won’t take us now, you should have rang them the minute we broke down, it’s all gone to pot now, and Mrs Coyne was saying, Yerra will you whisht up out of it in the name of God, all you’re going doing is dipping your arse in a pool of water, they’ve plenty water, it won’t be dried up. And Mr Collins and Mr and Mrs Chambers laughed wheezily and Lampy laughed too and Mr Driscoll said nothing back to Mrs Coyne but he looked more shamefaced now than cross and he got up slowly from his seat, leaning heavily on his stick, and he followed Mr Collins to the side ramp and he held the bar tight while Lampy lowered it and Lampy put his hand on Mr Driscoll’s arm as he stepped off the ramp, and Mr Driscoll looked straight into his eyes and Lampy could see something there, something he couldn’t put a name on, some sort of an appeal for something but he couldn’t say what, and then the thing was gone and his eyes narrowed and Mr Driscoll said, Thanks, Bighead, and he followed his bent comrade through the door of the hydrotherapy centre, stopping for a moment to coldly appraise the brawny attendant who was holding the door open for them.

  Mrs Coyne’s physio appointment was in a different part of the same building and they probably could have walked there because she was sprightly enough in spite of her arthritis or her healing hip or whatever it was she needed physio for, but he couldn’t risk leaving Mr and Mrs Chambers in the bus on their own, and so he drove around and brought her to the reception area and she held his hand for support and he was embarrassed, then realized how ridiculous it was to feel embarrassed, and she called him lovey and told him not to mind that horrible old man, he hadn’t an overly big head at all, nor had he big ears, he was a lovely-looking boy so he was and that old man was only jealous. And as he left her, she caught his hand again, and she drew him down so that he was stooped over her where she was sitting, and she craned her neck so that she could whisper into his ear, and she said, Because he’s near to his death, you see, and he’s afraid, and you’re far from yours, and he wishes he had his life to live again, the way you have all of yours ahead of you to live.

  Mr and Mrs Chambers’ daughter’s house was fifteen minutes away and they were already fifteen minutes late so Lampy knew he’d have to ring the home to ask them to ring the daughter to tell her he’d be late, because if it happened the other way round there’d be a faff and he’d have to explain about the broken-down bus and he wanted just to get the drop-offs and collections done and to get back to the home and do his day-room duty and then drive back around six to collect the Chamberses and he’d tell the Grogans about the bus in his own time because he couldn’t listen to James Grogan’s fake posh accent now, asking, What exactly happened, Laurence? and he’d draw out the a in exactly and the noise of it would be like brake callipers with worn pads closing on a disc, the kind of a noise that would madden you. Fuck the Grogans and their new shitbox bus. They probably bought it from a write-off merchant, it was probably written off up the North or in England or somewhere and cleared through Customs for half nothing and stuck back together and re-plated. Just like they cut corners on nurses and care assistants and food and cleaning equipment and God knows what else and stretched everyone to their limits and asked him to supervise the day room and drive the bus and he not really qualified to do either thing, and probably not even insured if it came to it, but James Grogan was from a long line of crooks, white-toothed, shiny-shoed priests and politicians and shopkeepers and auctioneers and accountants and landowners and builders; and Lampy had no such pedigree, no such august lineage.

  Bridie answered. No problem. She’d let them know he was on his way. Lampy breathed in and out and relaxed into the drive. There was a sparkle here and there from the tarmac and the reading on the dash was minus one, and Mrs Chambers hummed behind him, a tuneful hum, a familiar song though he couldn’t name it, and he could see in the rear-view mirror that her eyes were closed and her husband was looking out the window and smiling to himself, and her head was inclined towards him so that her forehead was almost resting on his shoulder, and they were gone daft, the both of them, he knew, but he liked looking at them all the same. How must it feel, he wondered, to be at the brink of death, and still to have to live each ordinary day through? Does a panic rise unbidden now and then, a terror of the moment of passing? It’s the moment before he’d be most afraid of, the moment of complete and terminal awareness, the constriction of his lungs, the burning want for air, or the shuddering of his heart or the popping of the valves inside his brain or the breaking of his neck or the impact with the bridge abutment or the rush of the air past his face as he fell or the coldness of the black rushing water flowing back from the city and up towards its own source, its own point of beginning.

  The Chamberses’ daughter stood beside the idling bus in the front yard of her house. Monstrous evergreens lined the driveway and fortressed the garden from the road, and the house was massive, red-bricked, many-windowed. A child of eight or nine stood in the open door, three steps up from the gravel. Lampy got out to assist with the couple’s disembarking, and the daughter thanked him; she looked pretty and weary and she was wearing a tight hoodie over skinny jeans and she seemed younger than he remembered and she was in wicked shape and he hadn’t remembered noticing this about her on previous drops or collections. Maybe she’d been wearing looser clothes. She had her arms folded tight below her breasts against the cold and she looked at his T-shirt and she said, You’re very hot in yourself, and he took a moment to realize that she meant he was wearing clothes you’d wear on a hot day, and she looked at him a second or two longer than seemed normal and he wondered was she one of these middle-aged women who have rich husbands who can’t get it up because they’re too stressed or too fat, and he felt himself hardening again and he nearly pulled Mr Chambers down off the ramp before slamming the sliding door closed.

  And Lampy Shanley had an empty bus, and all he had to do now was drive slowly back to the orthopaedic hospital and wait for Mrs Coyne at the physio outpatients centre and then swing round to the hydrotherapy unit for Mr Happy and Mr Crappy and collect the Chamberses and then he could pop them back to the home and park up the wagon and leave a note for the Grogans about the Merc being in Con Kelleher’s yard and they might actually praise him for his smooth handling of the whole thing, his decision not to bother them with it, just to ring Mickey Briars and sort it sensibly and efficiently, and then he could go home and check the oil and the coo
lant and the brake fluid in the Civic and give it a bit of a clean-out on the inside and check how many condoms he had in the glovebox and have a shit and a shave and a shower and a good careful wash of his bits because he didn’t know yet what kind of shapes Eleanor might make, what moves she had waiting for him, and he felt a fizzing thrill of pleasure, and he looked up at himself in the rear-view mirror and he looked back at himself from the mirror and he looked all right, like a lad doing a good day’s work who had a good night’s work ahead of him, and then he heard, as though she were there in the minibus with him, sitting beside him, pushing her blonde hair back from her face, blinking her blue-green eyes at him, Chloe, saying, I’m sorry, Lampy, It’s not you, it’s me, I just don’t love you, I don’t love you.

  And he looked down at his hands on the steering wheel, and at the dash where the temperature reading was minus three, and then at the cold, empty road where ice was forming in the rivulets between the tarmac’s stones, smoothening the surface, divesting it of grip, so that it could coolly reject the advances of the old bus’s threadbare tyres, and he saw the corner of the gable wall of the old mill at the bend of the road ahead, the arrowed V of the corner of the gable, thick block, ancient and unyielding, and he couldn’t hear the engine any more, or the swish of the tyres on the road, or the wind blowing through the dried-out door seals; all he could hear was his heartbeat, and it was strong and regular and loud in his ears, a boom-booming sound, and briars poked like long fingers from the hedges on both sides, crooked in accusation, or in mockery, or both, and the hedges were whitening fast and the grass was flecked and frigid on the verges, and all things in the world were still but him, and he was hurtling through that still world and his right foot was pushing downwards and he could hear Jim Gildea at the door of his house, telling Pop and Mam there’d been an accident, it was Laurence, he skidded on ice, the bad bend by the mill, it was a terrible accident, a terrible, terrible accident.

  And the corner of the gable of the mill wall was still a hundred yards away. And he saw his mother standing by the window looking out, looking for him. He saw her ageing, shrinking, curling into herself, lines forming on her face. He saw her at sixty-five, twenty years a grieving mother. Her hair gone white and wispy, pulled into a bun. Her looks gone. He knew she was a looker: the lads all slagged him over it. Some of their mothers were awful heaps of yokes. She was careful about herself, she went to a spin class and she walked and swam. She went on dates now and then with red-faced apologetic men. There was a foreigner from the hospital she went for drives with. He thought of how little he knew about her, for all the time they’d spent beside each other, for all the nights he’d slept curled into her. He thought of her saying, He’s twenty years gone. He saw her sitting at the table with Pop, silent, and then without Pop, saying, Daddy never got over it, you know. It killed him. And his heartbeat eased and the noise of the tyres on the road came back and the clattering engine and the wind through the perished seals. And he eased his foot back up from the throttle and he braked gently into the bend and he drove smoothly out of it, and the mill wall’s image diminished in his mirror and his mind, and he wondered would he waste much diesel if he left the engine running while he waited at the centre for the passengers, because if he killed it he’d have no heater and he’d only brought his hoodie and no hat, and he wondered why he was worried about the Grogans’ diesel, fuck them, but it was probably from force of habit because he was always worried about the petrol gauge in the Civic, and whether he was going to make it home. He often used the petrol from Pop’s jerry-can in the shed when he was stuck and he’d hear Pop cursing out the back when he went to fill the mower or his strimmer or his chainsaw and he’d shout in the back door, Hye, cuntyballs, did you use the last of my juice? and Lampy would always laugh at the word cuntyballs, Pop’s worst insult, the one he used for only the most terrible of offences, and he’d walk to the Topaz and refill the can and Pop would yank it from his hands when he got back and call him a bollix but he’d be over it by then, he’d have roses deadheaded or corner weeds pulled during the wait for the petrol, or a sparrowhawk spotted across the fields, high and still, wings spread, waiting to thrust itself downward, to pluck some tiny creature from the earth.

  John

  THERE’S GOD. THERE’S God now, do you see Him? I know it’s only Venus, but I may as well call her God, a perfect ball of blooming fire in the sky above us, winking over at the early risen moon. If God is everything it may as well be Him there when I look up, His presence centred on that shining whiteness. The Muslim boys say all is divine, every miserable and mundane and magnificent thing, and who am I to argue, after all I’ve done? The frost makes Him brighter. I could say I’m only a tool of omnipotence, a wretched object beset by Fate. I could say no importance should be ascribed to me or to my thoughts or deeds: I’m only an actor who learned by rote and said what lines were given to him. Lord God, I wish that was true, then there’d be no confessions needed, and we could rest here and keep each other company in peace.

  I used to be so steady and so strong. No rigour now have I except in thought. This quivering place I occupy, this weak republic, soon will fall. I have to say some things before I go. I feel the breath of angels on my neck. Their breath is foul. They’re from the other legion, I’d say. O Father. Father. Will you hear my confession? If I whisper it to you, will you just hear it? I don’t know the ritual any more, the words that once were scored across my mind, standing out in bright relief each time I closed my eyes. I was always so afraid of saying them wrong, you see. A solecism in my speech would become an erratum on some celestial scroll, I thought, and I’d be flayed for ever for it in the fires of Hell. O Lord God, the things I believed. At one of my earliest confessions, it could have been my first, I suppose, I couldn’t remember my Act of Contrition. Come on, said the priest, I haven’t all day. Say the Act of Contrition. And I was silent, studying the floor before my knees and the toes of his shiny black shoes. He was sitting on the end of a pew and I was kneeling in the side aisle of Ardnamoher Church, the throw of a stone from my primary school and a field from my father’s house. We hadn’t confessionals that time. I paid to have them installed years later, heavy mahogany contraptions with an opaque mesh between compartments, with padding for the penitent’s knees and a soft seat for the confessor’s arse. But this priest wasn’t to know I’d one day be a knight, and he was old and cantankerous, though not a bad man. I thought you were all taught this in school? We were, Father, I whispered. What’s that? We were, Father. Well, why can’t you say it, then? I don’t know, Father, I just can’t remember it. Can’t you, faith. Maybe you didn’t listen while it was being taught. Maybe I’ll have to have a word with Miss Fahy about you. Now, I’ll give you one last chance.

  But not one word of the Act of Contrition could I remember. And I having sung it sweetly only hours before in school, before we were shepherded to our ordeals. His great red face and grizzled jaw, his pitch-black cassock and his burnished shoes, the smell of ferment off him like maggoty windfalls, all conspired to strike me blank and dumb. And he wasn’t of a mind to give a prompt, though I knew if I heard the opening phrase I’d be away, and I’d deliver it straight and clear, without quaver or tremor or pause. Well, if you can’t give me an Act of Contrition, I can’t give you absolution, he said, and so you’ll have to leave this place still heavy with sin. Go on now, gather yourself up and go back to your classmates and see how your burden weighs you down. And I thought of the Commandments I’d broken, and I couldn’t face the suffering Christ as I knelt alongside the other penitents who had known their Act by heart and spoken true, and so I hung my head low so as to avoid the agonied face of the Son of God, the sight of His racked body pierced by nails, and I moved my lips as though reciting my prayers of atonement, and I thought how I was adding sin to sins, by kneeling there pretending to have been forgiven, and I waited for the old priest’s hairy hand to close around the back of my shirt collar and drag me away, out through the door of the church an
d into the cold yard.

  Enough of that, of childish terror and ancient foolishness. I’ll whisper out my sins to you and you can hear them, anyway, and this confessional is fine and wide, not like the upright coffins sometimes used, and the quietness around us here is deep, and the quietness seems to have a purpose about it, the expectant stillness of a held breath, a pause for a search for a felicitous word, a consoling gesture, a heartening smile or nod. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ll tell you them in order, one by one, and the roll of them is short, though each one might be made of a hundred parts or more.

  This is not my father’s confession but mine, and I’m offering this not in mitigation but only by way of explanation. My father lost his first and best-loved son and shortly after started buying land. As though to allow accommodation for the breadth and expanse of his sorrow. He’d have bought the world if it was offered him, and left it fallow and empty. He pushed the boundaries of our farm up the walls of the valley and down the far side, across the main road and the bog in Annaholty to the foot of Keeper Hill. He bought fields of deep rich soil and green grass meant for grazing, he bought acres of rocky scrub and briars, he bought marshy worthless tracts in the floodplain of the Dead River between Keeper Hill and the Mother Mountain. He attended every auction and men would see him coming and throw their eyes to Heaven and their hats at the enterprise; they knew he wouldn’t be outbid. The disinterested nephews of dead bachelors were guaranteed a quick sale and a good price. I watched him one day at the bar of a pub near Newport, drinking whiskey after whiskey with a man whose speech was slurring and whose eyes were glazed and red. I saw him lay a pile of banknotes down, and tap them with his finger twice, and push them under the drunk man’s nose. I watched the drunk man offer his hand and tell my father he was a decent skin and toast his health. And my father smiled and he patted the man’s back as he turned away from the bar and his empty glass, back to his half-life of silent, gentle frenzy.