King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  “Tarpaulins.”

  “Those, and they’re unwinding their hoses. It’s the Fire Brigade; they’ve come to save us. They’re shouting for us to jump. I don’t know, it looks an awfully long way down. The people down there are like ants, not people at all. They’re looking at us. There’s no one looking at the Tans. Look at the Tans, they’re cutting the hoses, the firemen’s hoses! We’re going to have to jump now. But it’s a long, long way down, hold on to me. Mummy don’t let me slip.”

  She screamed.

  “The roof’s fallen in. The roof’s fallen in. Mummy … Daddy, I can’t see them. There’s fire everywhere … Mummy … Daddy … where are you? I can’t see them, I can see a beam’s fallen on them … I can see Daddy’s face and hands, they’re burning …”

  “It’s all right Jessica. It’s all right. Look out the window. Don’t look back at the room. Look out the window. Tell me, what do you see?”

  “The people, they’re shouting for me to jump, but I can’t jump, it’s too high. I can’t jump. I want Mummy, but she’s not there, she’s burning. There’s no one to help me now. I’m going to burn, too. No one to help me, except the Watchman and the Dreamspinner. I wish they were here to make everything all right, like the old woman said they would. She said they would watch over me and make sure no harm came to me.”

  I paused Jessica in her trance. From here, each step would have to be carefully chosen. We might literally be walking on the edge of a precipice. I had never dreamed that such terrors could lie within her unremembering.

  “Tell me about these people, Jessica—the Watchman and the Dreamspinner, and the old woman. Who are they?”

  Her expression changed from terror to beatific nostalgia.

  “The Watchman and the Dreamspinner look after me when I’m asleep. The Watchman has magic glasses that can see to the end of the earth and he can see all the things that might harm me while they’re still a long way off, and the Dreamspinner puts his hand in his sack where he keeps all the things that dreams are made of and he strings them together, like beads on a thread, and hangs them around my bed. The old woman told me about them—the man who sends the dreams and the man who watches over me when I sleep. I used to think I could see them, standing there in the shadows at the foot of my bed—two old men, one tall and thin, the other short and round, taking care of me.”

  “Thank you, Jessica. Please, go back to the night of the fire.”

  Amazing, how her expression reverted once again to the terror of a four-year-old trapped in the most appalling nightmare imaginable.

  “I wanted them to come. I wanted them to help me, like the old woman said they would. She said they would take care of me, but where are they? Why don’t they come? Why won’t they help me?

  “Fire … fire … Flames, everywhere. They’re leaping up around me, they’re reaching for me. Wherever I go, there are flames. There’s nothing left, just flames. I can feel my face burning. My nightie—the one with the flowers on it—there’s smoke coming from it. A flame touches the hem of my nightie. It’s burning, I’m burning. I try to beat the flames out, but they burn my hands. I’m burning, burning!”

  My heart was hammering. I could barely find the words to bid her continue.

  “And then: the hand! It’s a hand. It’s sprinkling something on the flames—on my nightie, on me, something like dust. And the flames go out! Wherever the dust falls, the flames go out. It’s them. They’ve come! At last! The old woman said they would look after me and not let me come to harm. One of them is picking me up—the tall one, the Watchman. He’s not quite how I thought he would be, but people are like that—they’re never just as you think they will be. The other one is the Dreamspinner. He goes in front sprinkling dream dust from his sack of dreams, and where the dream dust falls, the flames die down. They carry me out, set me down. There’re people all around me. When I look, I can’t see them. They’re gone. I wonder where they went.”

  I sighed heavily. The emotional intensity had been overwhelming. There were moments in Jessica’s testimony when I felt I had been there in person.

  “That’ll do for today, Jessica. Thank you, that was most illuminating. You can come back now.” I counted her up through the levels of hypnotic suggestibility to full consciousness. She shook her head.

  “I’ve got a fuc … fierce headache. Did you get anything?”

  I rummaged in my desk drawer for aspirin and requested a pot of Miss Fanshawe’s excellent tea.

  “Quite a lot. Do you remember any of it?”

  “Not a thing. Must have been someplace hot, though. I’m sweating like a pig. Oops, sorry. Is this the hell where people who tell lies and swear go?”

  When Miss Fanshawe’s Orange Pekoe and two aspirin had done their work and Jessica was safely steered back into the Dublin traffic, I looked again at the session notes. Threatened in the extreme, her life in imminent danger, Jessica had called upon infant memories of mystic guardian figures and somehow, flesh and blood saviours, seemingly imbued with miraculous gifts, had come to her rescue.

  And I reeled under an almost physical blow of déjà vu. It was as if a cloud of unknowing had covered my own understanding and suddenly dispersed in the heat of the sun. Connections were made between fragments of knowledge that had lain disused and forgotten, like museum pieces removed from public display: in a divine flash, I understood. By no means fully—not even one-tenth part, one hundredth part—but I began to understand. I saw.

  7

  UPON WHAT SUBJECTS DID Tiresias discourse during his and Gonzaga’s pedestrian journey from Rostrevor Village to Newry town and thence, south by west, to Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, fabled in story and song?

  The putative third and missing book of Aristotle; the art and science of goat husbandry; the doctrine of baptismal regeneration; the names and natures of ghosts; the nutritional and moral superiority of the vegetarian diet; the causes and consequences of the Wall Street Crash and its effect upon global commerce; the process of fermentation by which milk is converted to yogurt and its role in the lives of the great nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes; their Methuselan life spans; its role in the Imperial endeavours of Genghis Khan; the recent successes of Benito Mussolini in Italy and the potential threat of Adolf Hitler in the Weimar Republic; the virtue or otherwise of nutmeg in rice pudding; the genitive and subjunctive forms of the Irish language, with particular reference to the word guirin which, in its diverse inflections, means a dead crow; an excess of flatus; the act of persistently opening the bottom half of a half door, a slow puncture in a bicycle tyre; a bilious policeman; a carbuncle on the third toe; the quality of moonlight on Kiltrasna Strand on the last weekend in June; the act of floating out to sea on an inflated pig bladder; the licentiousness of student teachers; the disappointment of finding a glass of brandy empty before expected; a hare’s “twill”; a kind of Michaelmas pudding made from potatoes, pig’s blood, and mashed eels; an unpleasant situation which every effort to improve only succeeds in making worse; a scatological priest.

  For what reason did Tiresias interrupt said discourse at approximately twenty past nine in the morning at a point some two miles and three furlongs outside Newry town on the road to the village of Bessbrook?

  It had come to his attention that his travelling companion was not attending to his monologues with customary concentration. Indeed, Gonzaga was standing on a bank by the side of the road looking over the hedge in a generally southward inclination. Also, Gonzaga’s nostrils were somewhat flared and he seemed to be engaged in the general act of sniffing the air.

  What was Tiresias’s reaction to these actions?

  He realised that Gonzaga was in a state of considerable perturbation, which caused him (Tiresias) to question the root of Gonzaga’s disquiet.

  What was Gonzaga’s reply?

  (In flawless iambic pentameter) That there seemed to be some untoward disturbance in the mythlines far to the south of them; that it seemed to him as if some titanic force were twisti
ng and snapping the mythlines and reforging them into new disturbing alignments. This was particularly alarming, occurring in an area they had already pacified of phagus activity and sealed off.

  Describe Tiresias’s subsequent action.

  The removal of his spectacles from his next-to-heart pocket; the placing of them over his eyes; the consequent sighting, after the customary moment’s orientation, of a great dark mass, akin to a thunderstorm, on the horizon, shot through with purple lightning and encircled by severed mythlines whipping many tens of miles into the atmosphere and shedding phaguses.

  What word best describes Tiresias’s reaction to the revelation of his spectacles?

  Consternation.

  What, therefore, was their immediate and firm resolution of action with regard to this disturbing turn of events?

  To abandon their current task in Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, to head south straightaway without hindrance with the purpose of investigating the gyruses they had surveyed and constructed for the express purpose of containing and controlling such an upheaval of Mygmus energy.

  What was Tiresias’s final comment upon the matter before setting off in the generally southward trend?

  That he feared for the young lady.

  8

  THE CITY HAD SWELTERED under the heat wave for twenty-one days now. Citizens checking their barometers first thing in the morning found the needle sitting stolidly on 1030 millibars and the thermometer heading for the upper eighties. Living memory had never seen the like. “Three weeks and still no relief in sight!” the newspapers bewailed. Lunchtime saw the city’s green spaces populated with typists and shop assistants and legal secretaries and junior clerks rolling down stockings, removing jackets, loosening collars, eating sandwiches with hair oil dripping onto them. A warehouse fire in which the entire national stockpile of powdered ice cream mix was destroyed provoked citywide panic. The wireless reported scenes reminiscent of the Crash of 1929 as customers fought over tuppenny cones. An extreme Protestant sect prepared for the imminent end of the world by buying every last can of pork luncheon meat in the city. Fears of a wave of lawlessness as heat-crazed young hooligans ran amok never materialised, but that did not prevent the Evening Echo from reporting, with some glee, an outbreak of boot-polish-eating among sixteen-year-olds. There were daily reports on the level of the Blessington reservoirs. “To pot with the reservoirs,” a well-known wag was reputed to have said. “The only water I ever drink is with me John Jameson’s, and not much of that.” Reliable sources reported that in the original, the words to pot had been somewhat more emphatically expressed. Assorted weather workers, rainmakers, prophets, and shanachies were consulted on when the drought would end. They promised rain next month next week tomorrow this afternoon but the anomalous lens of dense, hot air remained moored like a vast airship over metropolitan Dublin. It rained in Wicklow, it rained in Arklow, it rained in Naas, and there were reports of a spit or two in Balbriggan, but not a drop, not even a cloud, darkened the city’s streets.

  Twenty-one days. Exactly five days longer than Jessica Caldwell had been going out with Damian Gorman. It was as if Nature herself were bestowing a blessing on the relationship. Strolling in the stately cool of the National Museum’s corridors, pottering about Sandycove Harbour in a hired rowboat with a gramophone in the stern playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” evening promenades along Dun Laoghaire Pier, passing themselves off as gentry from Kingstown Yachting Club; bicycle expeditions to the wilds of Dalkey and Killiney Head with its view over the bay that the tourist brochures likened to the Bay of Naples but which bore no comparison; or into the Wicklow Hills; by charabanc to Glendalough with jaunting car ride and boat trip to the cave known at St. Kevin’s Bed, all in for one-and-sixpence. In the sixteen days since that first tentative Sunday morning rendezvous by the pond in Herbert Park, she had been out with Damian twelve times.

  She would have loved to have been able to tell someone about those sixteen days, but from the first meeting, secrecy had been an unspoken compact between them. She had told her parents she had been out with Em and Rozzie, but she already suspected that they suspected she was seeing a man and questions could not be long forestalled. Under no circumstances could they know that their daughter was seeing a unit commander of the Irish Republican Army.

  She found some outlet for her confessional need in Jocasta. Her younger sister had always possessed this rocklike, near-ecclesiastical trustworthiness. When you told Jocasta it was you had painted the wash-hand basin black or poured molten lead smelted down from the seals of wine bottles down the plughole, you felt the double satisfaction of having confessed and the knowledge that Jocasta would take that confession to her grave rather than squeal. Jessica found herself regularly well after midnight on the end of Jocasta’s bed enjoying the catharsis of feelings teased out like tangled wool. Dates, times, the exact anatomical location of each kiss and its rating on a scale from one brotherly peck on the cheek to ten impending suffocation; hopes, wild romantic dreams, fantasies. Jocasta sat through them all, silent, listening, lit with her own peculiar inner luminosity. At an early age Jocasta had decided to orient her life along a different axis from the rest of the planet. Jessica suspected that her confessions were as incomprehensible to Jocasta as propositions in analytical chemistry. When she crept back to her room, temporarily shriven, she was certain she could hear the click of a bedroom door shutting. She could never catch her in the act, but she knew The Shite was spying. Let her listen, Jessica thought savagely. Little bitch is probably jealous.

  The one thing she did not confess to Jo-Jo was that her flights of fancy were causing her increasing alarm. The new vividness they had taken on since she had begun the sessions with Dr. Rooke had been initially enjoyable; a private reality she could summon and superimpose over the cabbage stench of Mangan’s kitchen and the endless mastication of the Shopper’s Special Luncheoners was a mental balm. But she was losing control of them. They came to her unbidden, in the kitchens, at the tables, on the tram, at dinner with her parents, listening to the wireless. They would descend, a cloud of unknowing, and carry her away. The tram seemed particularly attractive to visions. She regularly missed her stop because she was caught in a daydream that seemed more concrete than any reality. Once she had dreamed of a tiny woman dressed only in strips and scraps of red leather, which Jessica thought rather becoming in a vulgar sort of way, and a blind harper, a man blind from before birth, for blank skin covered the sockets where eyes should have been. Rags and snippets of cloth were tied to his hair, his blond beard, his fingers, the strings of his harp, so that he could feel the world about him in the slightest movement of the air about his body. He played upon the harp, and the small, almost naked woman danced a lewd jig.

  That other, ur-Dublin, was growing closer to the true Dublin every day. So close now that pieces of that alien city were crossing over into familiar streets. After an inconclusive round in her internecine warfare with Fat Lettie, she had retired to the ladies’ jax for a Woodbine and summoned a vision of herself seated on one side of the unbridgeable gulf the Bible teaches is fixed between heaven and hell, while on the other side, pinch-faced demons were basting Fat Lettie in her own lard on a giant iron griddle, a shrieking, naked mass of melting blubber.

  The scream from the kitchens had frozen every forkful of Shopper’s Special between plate and oblivion. Jessica burst from the toilets to find that an entire pan of boiling fat had somehow spilled itself over Fat Lettie. “All over her face and front,” said a shocked Brendan. “Just fell off the stove. She never even touched it. It just fell off the stove.”

  9

  THERE IS (INDEED, THERE must be) a certain amount of the sixpenny-thriller sleuth in every psychologist, and a certain amount of the psychologist in every detective. All those motives, all those hidden drives and desires, piled high, like so many Freudian peaches we cautiously examine in our search for truth, careful lest we pull the wrong one and the whole pile topples.

  It w
as with not inconsiderable relish, therefore, that I donned the mantle of Holmes, Peter Wimsey, Poirot, and other such worthies and set off, metaphorical bloodhounds baying, on the trail of Jessica Caldwell.

  Assuming from my transcripts of the interviews that Jessica had been adopted (I foresee a storm on the horizon when the time comes, as surely it must, when she learns that the people she has called Mother and Father all her remembered life never were her true parents), I made my first call at the Public Records Office in the Four Courts. I was not particularly hopeful of finding the identities of Jessica’s true parents and was not overly disappointed when the clerk returned to inform me that no reference to a Jessica Caldwell could be found. My frustration rather was reserved for those idiots who, in the all-mighty name of Nationalism, wantonly destroy a nation’s past; too much of our racial memory was burned in the occupation of the Four Courts in 1922 by republican forces, and their subsequent siege and bombardment (with fragmentation shells, dear God!) by Free State Troopers. I had at least one concrete reference to lead me on: Jessica’s harrowing account of the burning to death of her parents in their own home by soldiers could only refer to the burning of Cork City by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence, in reprisal for an ambush in which eleven of their men were killed.

  Therefore to the rebel city I went, obtained a room for the night in a rather overgrand (and, to my subsequent regret, overpriced) hotel on Patrick Street and started on my inquiries. They have long memories in Cork. Once I had established the impeccability of my nationalist credentials, the people I met in the hotel bar were only too keen (a zealous light would come into their eyes) to recount the events of that night.

  From Jessica’s descriptions and the local testimonies, I narrowed the possible locations down to Merchant’s Quay on the north side of the Lee, in the shadow of Shandon Steeple. Next morning, fortified on a true detective’s breakfast of bacon, tripe, and a local blood pudding called drisheen, I crossed the river on foot to further my investigations.