From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  Some stories a man could glory in. Some stories were told for kudos more than laughs. Like the one his mother used to tell him about the time she was fired from the kitchen of the house of the people who’d owned the land below him, spread along the gentle slope down to the lake, the guts of a thousand acres all in all, and even a mile of foreshore annexed, though such land by right was commonage, and never could be owned by just one man. She hadn’t addressed him by his proper title, which was Lord, a title given him by succession on the death of some childless uncle in England, in Sussex or Essex or Wessex or some place like that. Call me Lord, he said, or so the story went, one day when she was bringing him his tea. I won’t, sir, she replied. I have only one Lord, and He’s watching from Heaven, and I’ll never use His name in vain, nor ever will I give it to another. Get out then, old Manford said, get out of here and don’t come back. And that was the forties. People still were expected to bow and scrape even then, and the country supposedly free. That man of the Manfords employed dozens of men, and paid each one of them late on a Saturday, the way no man would be tempted to slacken off before his full week’s labour was given, and even when there was nothing to be done on the land or in the house they were made wait, and women who wanted to go to the shop to buy for the dinner next day were made wait, and the whole parish stood still and waited for the pleasure of his lordship, for the opening of his lordship’s purse. His mother had left her job that day and walked the steep road home, back to her people in Glencrue. And the Manfords’ house was now a shell, four storeys still but without roof or floor, and the steeple of their private church was lying where it fell, graved in moss and the shit of birds.

  There were nights the boy stayed out. Dixie couldn’t sleep those nights. He’d sit up in bed and turn the radio on low, or sometimes he’d read his books, and sometimes the words would swim on the page, and he’d steady himself and he’d slow his breathing down and he’d imagine the panic that rose inside him to be rising water against a lock gate, and he’d picture the wheel of the lock gate being turned, and he’d imagine the flow through the lock, the downward easing, the levelling. That was a trick he’d taught himself. Smart cunts charged fortunes for that kind of shite. Some nights the boy would arrive in ragged and cut from drink in the small hours, and he’d stomp around the kitchen making toast or what-have-you, and the sound of him home was a blessed sound, and he’d say, Well, Pop, if he chanced going down for a look at him, and once or twice he’d caught himself standing at the foot of the stairs in his pyjamas and slippers and dressing-gown, just standing there, looking in through the half-open door to the kitchen, looking at his grandson sitting at the table eating toast, the way a man might look at a child in a cradle, a soft man given to womanly emotions, and he’d catch himself admiring him, the strong jaw of him, the fine thick head of hair, the good-sized hands, and he’d catch himself thanking God for him, for delivering him home from the cold night.

  He never could convert his love to words. He longed to hold the boy the way he used to, to fold him into himself, to hold him hard against him, saying, My boy, my boy. The foolishness that swept through him, more every day; it was like a rogue current below a flat, still surface, a deadly undertow that could drag you down to perdition. The day his daughter landed in with her news he’d surprised himself. Thank God your mother isn’t here to see this day, he’d said, and watched his daughter’s blue eyes fill with tears, and straight across the room he went to her, and he hadn’t known until he was nearly across to where she was standing in the bay of the window would he hit her or hold her, or stand with his hands hanging beside her, looking at her face lit weakly by the sun, a single tear standing proud of the line of her cheekbone, and he put his hand to her face and drew away the tear, and she caught his hand and held it hard to her cheek, and she kissed it and said, Oh, Dad, what an awful world it is. From that day to this he’d asked no question of her, and dribs and drabs of things came out, and he added his own guesses to her sparse telling, and they’d rubbed along grand, and anything that needed to be known was known, and anything else could lie where it was left, inside in the city or across in England, or down beside the devil in his Hell.

  He crested the hill and reached the cairn stones as the western sky reddened and the cold sun touched the line of the horizon. The sun was set already at his starting point. He looked back at the estate, the houses in a figure of eight around two greens, sitting in the shadow of the hill, hidden there. He looked along the Ashdown Road towards the village and the town and the city beyond, at the arrogant peaks of the Galtee Mountains in the far distance. He felt a burning in his lungs and in the muscles of his legs, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth, sharp, metallic almost. He spat and knocked his stick against the topmost cairn stone, once, twice, three times, out of some sense of obligation towards habit, towards his own familiar doings, and a fierce superstition, an aberrant fear that had grained itself into his soul with the years. And he set off down the frosted sunlit side towards the road that would take him back around the hill and home.

  He made out through the blinded front window two figures at the kitchen table as he put his hand on the front gate to open it. His heart lifted at the thought that the boy was home early: he’d be inside drinking tea and eating a bit of supper made for him by his mother; he’d be in better form and a bit sheepish over earlier; he’d be willing to hear about the crack in the pub and the story of the cutting-down-to-size of Hughie Fitz. And his heart sank back at the realization that it wasn’t Lampy at the table, it was his daughter’s friend from the hospital, the brown-skinned, dark-haired lad, who called once in a wonder, and sat in near silence looking at his daughter, and she sat looking back at him, and he couldn’t watch them at it, it was unbearable, and so he went out to his shed or up the hill or down the road to Ciss’s whenever he came. He’d suffered terrible, Florence said, and he was here on licence, and he was a locum, and Pop didn’t know what that was and nor did he ask. Every foreigner had a story, a lament, and they had all to be taken with a pinch of salt or, even better, not at all. He wondered how it would go at Ciss’s if Florence married a foreign Johnny, after all the jokes he’d heard cracked there and all the jokes he’d cracked himself and all the talk along the years about keeping them out, about there not being jobs enough for the Irish, about there not being space enough for all the madding hordes. Fuck them, he thought. It’d nearly be a pleasure telling them. The loudest mouths of all were the ones who’d never done a hand’s turn their whole lives. He slowed himself to ease the creaking of the gate, and he kept to the grass to the right of the garden path the way he wouldn’t be spotted passing back to his shed. He’d plug the Dimplex in and settle himself in the old armchair and he’d smoke a fag or two and read the pile of papers from the week. Leave them at it, looking into one another’s eyes.

  From her seat at the kitchen table Florence saw her father at the gate. She hoped he’d go straight to his shed. Farouk was talking today, more than he had ever done, and she felt he was about to say something, about his wife or his daughter or his faraway home, about what had happened to him, about his heart, his poor heart. She knew his story, as everyone at the hospital did, from the first day he worked there as a locum: Freda Wiley from HR had spread the contents of his file and his life around the wards and the corridors before she went on her break that morning. Florence had only to allocate his parking space and print his permit and his identification badge, and he’d sat across from her in her tiny office as she’d threaded a lanyard through the badge, and she’d looked at him and seen that he was smiling at her and so she smiled back, and she’d told him to call in to her any time at all if he needed anything, or had any problems with his parking or his email or his post or anything else, and she knew from his file that he was forty-four, but he looked younger; he had a boyish gait, a kind of a loose-limbed way of moving, though his hair at the sides was shot with streaks of grey, and his eyes were dark and shrouded.

  She wonders at herself
sometimes. Why she wants so badly for this man to speak to her. Why it matters that he tells her all his truths, when she holds her own so tightly to herself. He talks and she listens and she studies his eyes. She understands only a little of what he says sometimes. He tamps reality down, he says. The universe could be contained on a pinhead. Elementary particles have no interior structure, did you know that? And she shakes her head, no, she didn’t know that. And he laughs, a low, gentle laugh that could break easily to a sob but never does. She gets the feeling he hasn’t cried for a long while, years maybe, that he’s armoured himself against the truth of things with theories and explanations and ways of persuading himself that nothing ever happened. He’s allowed himself to lose his mind. It’s easy then to tamp reality down and down to nothing, he says. If an elementary particle has no interior structure or any outer shell, then what is it but nothingness, and so we are made from nothing, and so is the universe, and all of this – he casts his hand at the ceiling, at her, back at himself – is nothing. A dream, maybe. But we are not the dreaming, we’re the dreamed. And he laughs again and she doesn’t know what to say. Do you know what some boys called me on the street yesterday? Shit-face. Go home, shit-face, they said. Go home to fuck. Go home to fuck, they said. Can you imagine saying that? Can you imagine what happens in their minds? And all I could think to do was laugh. What else is there to do? And she feels then she should be soothing him, somehow, shushing him, stroking his face and hair and urging him in a low whisper to sleep; she imagines herself lying beside him, pressed against him, and she’s surprised at herself, at the sudden stab she feels, of longing, of terrible want.

  He’d come to her office one day, a week into his second locum stint at the hospital, before he started his rounds in the wards, and he’d asked her in a faltering voice, in clipped uneven words, so low she could barely hear him, if she’d like to come with him for a drive that weekend, to the sea. And she’d been so shocked she’d paused too long before answering, and he was turning away towards the door before she said, Yes, yes, that’d be lovely, and he’d smiled at her and said, Good. I drive to the sea when I can, he said. And sometimes it feels so lonely there.

  And he’d collected her in an old Mercedes, and the radio kept coming on of its own accord, at full volume, startling them, and they laughed each time it happened, and their laughter and the spasmodic radio filled the hour it took them to get to Lahinch, and it was twenty years since she’d walked that beach, and the last man she’d walked it with had been handsome too, and full of mystery, and he’d pulled her down onto the sand and kissed her hard. Farouk would never do that, she knew. But at the tideline they’d stood side by side looking out at the churning sea, and he’d reached for her hand and held it, and she’d felt through his palm the pulse of his pounding heart.

  They drove together often after that. Even when he was assigned elsewhere, to Limerick or Ballinasloe or Ennis, he’d text her, short messages, unpunctuated, WILL U COME FOR DRIVE SUN 3PM, and she’d reply YES, and he’d always be a few minutes early and Pop would humph and grunt out through the blinds, and ask why he wasn’t coming in, and she’d say, Maybe he doesn’t feel very welcome, Dad, and he’d pretend offence and say, Lord Almighty, what has a man to do? Roll out a red fuckin carpet for every cunt? And she’d say Farouk was from a culture with a welcome imperative, where even your enemy was afforded your hospitality in your house, and he’d say, Welcome imperative my bollix, that’s all very well until they’re flying planes into skyscrapers and chopping every cunt’s head off for saying the wrong prayers. And she’d say, DAD! and she’d shake her head, but she knew what he really meant, what his fear really was, because she knew the truth of her father well, the warm and wounded heart of him.

  She went about each day the same way. Waking early and listening to the singing birds. Listing in her head the things to be done. Deciding on her outfit and her shoes, her bracelet and earrings. Whether she needed to stop on the way to the hospital for petrol or on the way home for messages. What she’d cook for Dad and Laurence for their tea. What she’d have for her lunch; whether the rain would hold off so she could go for her walk at lunchtime, across Sarsfield Bridge and down along the quays and past the courthouse and back around to Thomond Bridge and up again full circle to the hospital’s back gate; whether Freda Wiley would go walking with her, chattering non-stop about this one or that, what was said and what was said back, and who had turned around and done or said what to whom and she would hmm and nod and laugh and pretend disgust at the appropriate times and Freda loved to talk, she hardly drew breath in the effort to fit in as much as she could to the time of their walk, and so no gap would be allowed, no lull, no silent space that might allow into Florence’s mind a trickle of blood from Javier’s nose, and from the side of his mouth, and from the cut above his eyebrow, and his bulbous blackened eyes, and his slack buckled body heaped in the corner and the men standing over him looking, one of them saying, Fuck, fuck anyway, is he dead? and the man with his arm around her throat whispering into her ear all the things he was going to do to her, and the hardness of him sticking in her back, and his laughing as she struggled to be free, and the paramedics kneeling, glancing, shaking their heads, and the papers saying it was a tragic accident, a burglary that had got out of hand, and the Guards taking her statement, and looking in her eyes, and seeing she was lying, she was lying, there was more to it than this, but telling her that she was free to go, to go back to her father’s house, and to stay there, and to have her baby, and to stay in her father’s house, and to do her secretarial course, and to get a safe job in a safe place and to keep her mouth closed, and her heart, and to hope each time she closes her eyes that when she opens them again it will all have been a dream.

  Mrs Coyne is happy. The handsome young therapist is telling her again the same thing he told her on her last visit. To sit up in bed first, and then to swing her legs out, and to sit on the edge of the bed and to start with her toes. Wiggle them, wiggle them. Then to lift her heels and press the balls of her feet downwards. To count slowly to ten, or until she feels heat flowing into her calves. Then to dig her heels into the floor and exert pressure downwards to stretch the muscles in the fronts of her legs. Count slowly to ten again. And on you go with this, up along your body to your arms and neck until your blood is warmed and flowing and your muscles are all ready for the day. Don’t stand up until you’re sure you won’t fall down. She wonders if he’s forgotten or if he presumes she’ll have forgotten. She doesn’t care either way. There’s a beautiful smell off of him. He’s kneeling on the floor in front of her and she’s on a hard chair with the foot he’s working on raised and rested on a low padded stool and the consulting room is empty but for them and the door to the corridor is closed. She leans herself forward as far as she can, gripping the armrests tight to hold herself, to stop herself falling forward on top of him. Can you imagine? He’d get some hop. A woman sixty years his senior landing on top of him. She’s nearly close enough to smell his hair. He has lovely hair, thick and fair, tousled a bit like he hadn’t time to comb it. Probably he hadn’t. They’re very understaffed in all these places. You’d need to go private now for a therapist with nicely combed hair. She’s just about to breathe in the scent of him when he looks up at her and smiles. He has blue eyes, shining with kindness, and a wide mouth full of straight white teeth. He has a funny kind of a foreign accent. Not Australian, quite. Nor not American at all. Definitely not English, though it is quite refined. He has a name you couldn’t put with a country too easily. She closes her eyes and searches for it, and it’s right there in the front of her mind, dancing away from her each time she gets close. David. David. That’s his first name. A name she always liked. Dear one, it means. Vorster. That’s the surname. Vorster. And he’s from South Africa, she suddenly remembers. And the sound of that country always puts her in mind of supermarket checkouts, and fruit, and pickets, and she can’t fully remember why that should be. Something years ago, something that was in the news
.