From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  So Connie was given a free rein to gallop about the house, organizing and bossing and screeching and cornering Henry whenever he came into her view to tell him he was nothing only a burden on the whole family and an embarrassment and a gimpy pup who should have been drowned at birth only Mammy and Daddy hadn’t had the heart and so they’d fished him back out of the trough outside beside the haggard wall and let him live and didn’t they regret their foolish kindness now that they had to look at him creeping about the place like a horrible crawly yoke? And Henry would say nothing back ever, only cringe, eyes closed, his shoulders hunched up so high and tight that it seemed as though he were trying to draw his whole head inside his body, like a tortoise. He’d stick an elbow straight out from himself as a static and ineffective defence, his lips drawn back from his little white teeth in a deathly grimace. I watched with glee while she dissected him. I had no brother only Edward in my child’s mind; Henry was an impostor, an aberration, he didn’t deserve a life. I willed nightly that Edward be resurrected and his place in the ground taken by Henry, or for time to be folded back on itself and for Henry’s heart to be cursed with the aberrant flame and not Edward’s. I promised votive offerings in my prayers, all sorts and sizes of them, if I could wake some morning to the sound of a sliotar being pucked against the end wall of the barn.

  The odd day she was left fully in charge of us, Connie would assemble us, me and Julie and Henry, on the green couch with the sculpted wooden legs in the good room and she’d close the muslin curtains behind us so that the yellow-filtered, watery sunlight would spill onto our heads and she’d stand before us and pour scorn and fury on us. Look at ye. Fucking turnip-heads. Thank God I’m not related to ye. I’m adopted, you know. A friend of Daddy’s who works for the government telephoned to know would he and Mammy come and bring Edward and me from our real parents’ castle on a mountainside in Bavaria. I was only a new-born. Our real father was an archduke. Our mother was a Russian princess. They went against Hitler and were captured and sent away to a labour camp. We were hidden by the servants down in their village. Ye have nothing to do with us. Ugly little fatsos. Ugly little Irish pudding-faces.

  And Julie’s eyes would widen and she’d break into giggles and clap a little hand over her mouth to stifle herself and Connie would kick her full force into the shin or slap her pretty face or pinch her tender underarm and make her scream, a silent exhalation, the sudden, shocking pain stripping the sound from her roars. She’d jab Henry in his weak little concave chest with a savage, aristocratic finger and say, You killed my brother, you disgusting little creature, he was carrying you around on his shoulder the morning of his county final, you dirty little animal, he strained his heart carrying you around the yard that morning to please you and you oinking like a piglet and pissing in your breeches all over his back, you smelly little murdering bastard, you killed the handsome son of an archduke of Bavaria who faced down the Nazis and you’ll pay dearly some day.

  And then she’d stand and draw out her full height and there’d be a haze of muted light around her, rendering her even more unearthly, motes of dust dancing around her head like startled fairies, and she’d regard us silently: Henry sobbing, Julie caressing her shin or forearm, her breath hitching, her narrow little back shuddering, and Connie’s gaze would fall on me. And you, you changeling. You’re evil. I saw you from the kitchen window that day Daddy drove into the yard. You stepped out of the car and walked over Edward as he lay dying and you barely glanced at him. You smelt your dinner cooking, all you wanted was to fill your greedy guts, you creep, you shit, you rat from Hell, you have no heart and no soul and some day soon you’ll be going back to Hell where you belong and the devil will stick a big roasting fork up your greedy arse.

  But I was well able for her. I enjoyed the good-room speeches. That pierced her. She could say what she wanted to me because I knew the truth of who I was and what I felt; Julie and Henry hadn’t the same sense of themselves. I thrilled as she scourged their souls, I drank their blood. I’d tire of her and break the spell, though, eventually: Go way and fuck off, Connie, you’re no German princess, you’re a big fat Irish heifer. And me and Edward were forever calling you a mad cow behind your back and laughing about your big fat arse. And she’d fall on me in a frenzy, scratching and biting and slapping with all her might, growling and spitting and hissing and pulling clumps of my hair out by the roots, and Julie and Henry would spirit themselves away from the vicious melee to their rooms where they’d curl into balls and read their books and hug their teddy bears. And I’d just throw my forearm across my eyes so she wouldn’t blind me and let her wear herself out. I don’t know what name you’d put on that sin, my not minding little Henry, but it torments me still and there it is confessed anyway.

  There was a boy whose mother had been a beauty queen in my class at school. I saw him one day walking with her on a street in Nenagh. She was laughing at something he was saying and the sound of her laugh was like thin glass breaking on stone and she had most of her looks kept and she wore no headscarf but her hair was blonde and wavy like a film star’s and she touched his arm as she laughed and he looked pleased with himself and a man approached them and they all three stood talking and laughing and the man put his hand on both their arms and gestured with a nod towards the other end of the street, and he guided them back the way they had come and they walked towards the door of the Hibernian Inn and I watched from the shadow of the central pillar outside Gough, O’Keeffe and Naughton’s department store as the boy from my class whose name was Sanders held the door for his mother and his father and the three of them stepped in to take their lunch.

  His father and my father were friends, I don’t know why. Shortly after that day I saw him with his parents in Nenagh he read out a poem in Brother Alphonsus Keane’s English class he’d composed about the Norman invasion. I remember the words of the first verse to this day.

  Armoured they came from the east,

  From a low and quiet sea.

  We were a naked rabble, throwing stones;

  They laughed, and slaughtered us.

  He read it sweetly; there was a kind of music in his voice. You could nearly imagine the naked Irish watching in dumb wonderment as the monstrous Norsemen, all metal vests and flashing broadswords, swept regally up along the beach towards them, while the ignorant rabble scrabbled around on the ground for something to fling at them.

  There were long, silent seconds in the classroom after he’d finished. Brother Alphonsus broke the quietness. That’s beautiful, Jonathan. Old Alphonsus was mad for it, of course. I pushed that Sanders boy into a corner of the yard after. There were four or five lugs behind me, sensing blood, giddy and giggling. I’d become a bit of a schoolyard bully in my early teenage years. Who’s we? I asked him. He was tall, tending towards lanky, he hadn’t the full of himself yet got, and his customary assuredness was after leaving him in short order. A sudden redness bloomed in his pale cheeks and moistness blurred his eyes. A fog formed on the lenses of his glasses. From my breath or the heat of his fear, I wasn’t sure. Who’s this we in your beautiful poem? I asked again. Who’s this holy fucking us? He kept his head up and stayed looking at me from under his glasses, down along his long, thin nose. He was frightened but no coward. I wanted him to feel scorned; his haughty silence scalded me.

  You’re nothing to do with us, I said. And then I stepped back and drew a kick square into his balls as hard as I could. He doubled over and fell slowly forward, clutching himself, making a low, whiny noise. I hit him again as he fell, with my fist on the back of his head, but my heart had gone from it. My point was made; I walked away. I spat on the ground as I went, like I’d seen someone do in a film, a tough guy who was after winning a fight. The lugs all laughed. That Sanders boy who wrote the lovely poem, who was born and reared not three miles from my father’s yard, lay moaning softly on the frost-hardened muck behind me. I kicked him in the balls that day because he said we but he meant me. I kicked him because of his goodnes
s, too, and because he put me in mind of the things I wasn’t, because of his beautiful smiling mother and his affable dapper father and his calm untroubled air. That Sanders boy got an awful time from that day on. I always had a fiendish knack for making people hate each other. I made out to all who’d listen, and nearly everyone listened to me, that his ancestors had been given land for favours done for and information given to Cromwell’s officers; he was a son of a son of a son of colluders with the Roundheads, the filthy Cromwellites, who pitched babies into the air and caught them on the bayonets of their muskets, who nailed priests to rough crosses, who raped and ravaged and murdered all up and down this land. In those days, not so many days ago, and in that place, not so many miles from here, factiousness was rampant, hate came easy.

  It was from the experience of blackening that boy that I learned an important and valuable lesson: if you say something enough times, the repetition of it makes it true. Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact’s chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable. Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth. Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion’s metamorphosis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself. I said an ancestor of his was one of the notorious Limerick businessmen who sent a million sides of bacon and a million firkins of butter and ship after ship after ship near capsizing with corn off to England and to Europe and to God knows where else during the famine, during Ireland’s great hunger, while country people and city people alike died in ditches, their mouths all green from eating grass. That’s his stock, I said, that’s them all out, and are you surprised he’s writing love songs to Strongbow?

  Some of the boys with more independent minds argued the long and the short of it. Two sides formed but one side gave ground quickly. He’s a traitor for sure. He’s not, he’s grand, what did he ever do? He wrote a poem about how great the English are. That’s not what it was about. His people were landlords; they only turned Catholic years ago to spite their own. They weren’t, his father has only thirty acres. Their big house was burned by the rebels long ago and most of their land taken off them by the Land Commission. What big house? It’s gone, sure, it was burned to the ground. They’re all traitors all back along, that crowd. What about his poem? Calling us all naked savages and making out the Normans were the bee’s knees? He’s a queer too, I’d say. He’s a traitor and a queer. He is, so he is. A traitor and a queer. And so that’s what the boy became in the minds of his schoolmates, by virtue of constant repetition.

  That was the seal broken on my bearing of false witness against my neighbours. And I made an art form of it. I met a man on a narrow street one day years later who was locking the door of his car and I startled him with my greeting, and he swung around and looked me in the eye, and I could see he had an inkling who I was, and I watched as his face washed itself of expression and he stood and looked and I started to try to read him, and to calculate his price, but he had closed himself completely to my view. Can I walk with you? I asked him, and he nodded his assent. We talked about the weather and the closeness of Christmas, and we marvelled at the galloping of time. It only feels like last week it was Christmas, and we laughed. And I asked him had he made his mind up on a planning application in which a client of mine had an interest, and he looked at me and looked up at the sky and he said, I think it’s cold enough for snow. Do you? And I saw the truth of him behind his smile, the settled, attentive, uxorious husband, the loving, interested father, the loyal friend, the timely settler of debts, the steady, honest marker of time, the t-crosser, the i-dotter, the easy sleeper. And I saw reflected in his eyes a bedraggled man, a thing not a man at all. I saw myself as this honest man saw me, and I sensed the pity he had for me, the fear he had of me, and I hated him. I’d say it is, I said. We’ll have snow on the ground in the morning for sure.

  So I met him again at the launch of a book by a man we both knew who’d played hurling. And I asked him to hear a proposal I had about some work he could do on the side, some consultancy work, all above board and quotable to the taxman if he so wished, or the fee could be lodged to an account on an island in the Caribbean and easily and unnoticeably drawn on, and the fee would be two hundred thousand pounds. And this was 1989 and six-figure sums were only fairy stories, and we were standing side by side at the back of the function room and a man was orating the hero on the stage and the hero looked uncomfortable and shy, not like he’d looked when he’d lifted cups, roaring with the crowd, with blood on his face and the muck of the pitch. And the man I had been paid to persuade to make a certain decision regarding the zoning of land coughed a little and caught himself and whispered, How much? And again I said, Two hundred thousand pounds. And I felt a shift, a tiny fibrillation in the air between us, and I saw a tiny movement of his lips as I watched him make his sums inside his head. And he shook his head, and said, If you ever come near me again I’ll call the Guards. And what will you tell them? I asked, and he had no answer, because there was none.

  One evening of the Sabbath day I settled myself at the bar of a pub in West Limerick. The dry afternoon hour was still in force that time and the doors weren’t long open. There was no casual customer there, only the hard core, the dependants, ranged along the counter grimly. I wasn’t known from Adam in that place. I took my time about a pint of stout. Then I folded my newspaper onto the counter and wiped my lips with the back of my hand in a way I never would have done in company. I looked over at the pinched, sun-starved, late-middle-aged woman behind the bar and felt the intensity of her wondering about me wafting from her like a pungent breeze; it almost had a smell, a taste, that craving for knowledge about the intimate things in others’ lives that consumes some people and radiates out from them.

  Lord, it’s a fright, I said. What does be going on? And I gestured to my closed paper. What’s that now? the woman asked. A few faces turned towards me and away again; my gaze was fixed on the landlady, she was my quarry and my prize. Arra you know, I said, allowing an inflection into my speech that would be familiar to her, that would put her at ease, and in turn ease my story’s passage to belief, its sublimation into cold fact. All that carry-on with children, all that, all that, abuse. It’s all starting to come out now, isn’t it? It’s all coming home to roost now for the doers of evil. And she looked me now square into my eyes and I looked back and didn’t blink. Doers of evil, I thought. Too much. But I had her all the same. Oh, there’s a place they’ll all be going to, she said, and you and I both know what it’s called. We do, I said, we do. And I drank deeply from my stout as she poured a whiskey chaser for a crooked bristly man at the end of the bar whose eyes were darting and whose ears were cocked. The scary thing, I said to her as she floated back my way, is it’s everywhere. Look at that man, you know him, he has a house built not a million miles from here, that’s up for interfering with a girl no older than his own daughter, a girl from his daughter’s class in school, I think, Lord Almighty, what would you do?

  She stood in front of me and leaned close to me. There was a smell of Pond’s cream and onions from her. Someone from around here? She was whispering. She was breathless with excitement. Her face reddened; it throbbed with colour, a scorching fever. She shrieked suddenly, FROM AROUND HERE? An old campaigner at the far end of the bar mishandled his glass in shock. Lord Jesus, who? Who? Who? And the hard core were suddenly breathless, deathly, not a drop passed a lip, not an eye blinked. And I pursed my lips and lowered my head and looked to my left and right as though checking for agents of the person about to be denounced, and a name slid softly from my mouth. I finished my stout in two or three slow tips of my glass and bade them all a good evening and, tapping the side of my nose, slipped from my high stool and left.

  I had the world of research done before I drove out west that Sunday evening and drank that pint. Which public house was patronized by the least affiliated clientele, least b
ound by the strictures of association and its attendant senses of loyalty and circumspection, with the least to lose and the most to gain in pleasure by the having and spreading of a story. What was the best time to go there. Where was the best place to sit. Who best to address. And all this discovered fragmentarily, without anyone recognizing my motive. My story, my something out of nothing, replicated itself like a monster virus, mutating to strengthen itself, rearranging its component parts and properties to better survive each retelling and gain in size and virulence: it leaped the border into Kerry; it travelled back the road into Limerick City; it forded the estuary to Clare.

  You can make something out of nothing, Father. I always knew this, even when the Christian Brothers were wearing out leathers hammering the first and second laws of nature into us. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. Matter can’t be created or destroyed. Only changed from one form to another. Bullshit. You can make a thing out of nothing, as true as God. I’m vindicated now by science too, you know, too late. They can create vacuums now that they examine with microscopes where the world we can’t see is magnified a trillion times and they’ve found particles that appear all of a shot out of nowhere and disappear again. Out of nothing, into nothing. I used to read about all that stuff, until recently. The workings of nature, the makings of the world. They brought me some kind of a stand to prop my books up but it doesn’t work great and so all I can do now is think. And sure, what harm? What harm is right.