by Neil Jordan
“The sealogged pack almost pulled me backwards once more, then I bent my head forwards, kissing the water, and began to walk towards the only place I could, the shore. There were bodies around me, some threshing, some dead, and the dead ones took the bullets as well as any sandbag and I pushed one with me, in front of me and felt it jerk as it took each bullet, saw the water spout or maybe the blood from the corpse, but it was my floating sandbag, my own dead anonymous protective angel, and I knelt as the sea grew shallower and finally abandoned it and ran. I ran towards a mound of dune which was spitting with awakened sand, behind which twenty other shapes were cowering, and I cowered there with them.”
~
I remember that terrible silence on the green when I awoke, flat out on the grass with my hair spread around me like the Lady of Shalott. She stood above me with the niblick in her hand, the metal club of which she seemed to want to bury in my skull.
“Mother,” I asked, “what is it?”
She seemed unwilling to reply, and the silence spoke instead for her, that terrible silence through which I could hear a skylark singing and her breath heaving.
“Your father,” she said eventually, “can never know.”
“Can never know of what?” I asked her.
“Of your condition,” she said. “Who was it?” she asked, again after an age of that silence and the skylark singing. “Him,” she answered for me, “your half-brother, oh my Lord, oh my Lord.”
Then even the skylark’s song faltered and she filled the silence by saying, “Get up, you bitch.” I tried to rise and reached my hand out to her for help, but she stayed still, immobile with that terrible quiet, so I grasped the putter and used it as a stick to rise. I walked away from her, three-legged like a cripple, and after another of those moments she followed behind.
~
“There were dead bodies like colonies of sleeping seals everywhere along the shoreline, and a whole carpet of bodies in the sea itself, some of them moving, most of them not. The sea rose and fell beneath them,” says Gregory, “causing the carpet to rise and fall with it, less like a carpet, more like a blanket covering of seaweed, and it was coloured khaki, something like the colour of seaweed, and the sea underneath the khaki was red. Further out towards the flaring battleships the moving sea of bodies diminished to what seemed like infinity, and I remember thinking, there are not enough bodies in the world to cover that distance. And I realised the shapes in the distance were the carcasses offish that were brought to the surface by each boom. The shells flew above us with a sound that was like a woman’s skirt being torn, and crashed on the fort beyond, a huge cloud of dust and shrapnel billowing in the air. And then as the cloud diminished, the thousands of tinyflashes sparked again, and the sand spat and danced and any one of us whose head had risen above the dunes out of curiosity or bloody-mindedness got bloodied and went down. And I remember thinking, it is still early morning, can’t be later than half past seven.”
~
The silence that I walked in now was deep and interminable, broken only by sounds that served as a dramatic emphasis to it, the sound of her feet crushing the grass behind me, her niblick dragging behind her feet, her voice, which continued on the same train of thought like a broken soliloquy, saying, actress, of course, what a perfect profession, actress and whore, but he can never know, you see that don’t you, he must never even suspect so go, please, inhabit a fleapit in Montgomery Street, some musichall in Brighton but go quietly and quickly, leave a gap of silence to explain your absence and write then, write after nine months or however long it takes, you’re no daughter of mine but I won’t deprive him of the angel he imagines, just don’t ever disabuse of him of how he needs to think of you . . .
~
“My hearing must have gone,” says Gregory, “because from then on I remember it all in silence. A huge old collier pushed through the burning boats and the bobbing bodies towards a pier of barges they had strung together, stretching from the pink sand round the shore out into the bloody water. And the gangways fell and the men poured down them and we were given a respite, because the sand above my head stopped dancing and the water spumed towards the barges like some god was pissing down on them, all the fire of course was concentrated there, took less than seconds to reach them. And the bodies on the barges fell left into the sea, the bodies on the gangplanks fell backwards, making a carpet of corpses for the ones who came behind to clamber over. I knew then I was a coward, because whatever they were doing I could never have done, and in the end even they couldn’t do it, since they gave up the attempt. The collier began to hiss steam and draw back like a huge and useless dragon, dragging the gangplanks with it, spilling out the corpses in a bloodied half-circle as it turned. But I was seeing it the way they didn’t see it, flat, from behind, plain horrible, and if I had been them I realised I would have done the same, an hour before had just done the same, pushed the only way there was through the falling bodies, forwards, since there was no going back. But I was a coward, we were all heroic cowards, moving like lemmings in the only direction allowed us, towards the waves of fire.”
~
She hit me once before the clubhouse and I fell into a mound of sand which she had told me was a bunker. I got to my feet, spittle and sand mixed in my mouth with the taste of vomit, and I said, “Mother.”
“Please don’t call me mother,” she said, “I have no daughter.”
And when we reached the house the silence was even vaster, though there was a wind now, rattling the shutters, a big wind which seemed as if it would continue for days. I went to my room where the wind augmented the silence, and after what seemed hours Mary Dagge came up with a glass of milk and a sandwich on a tray.
“What a thing,” she said, “what a terrible thing, Nina. Now you have to eat, drink this milk, eat the sandwich, and when they’re all asleep, I’ll take you, I know a woman, a tinker woman who can do something.”
“Do what?” I asked her.
“What’s necessary,” she said. “Don’t think you’re the first, this happens in the townland, there are ways and means of dealing with it and it won’t be pretty, but there it is.”
30
WE BEGAN TO dig,” says Gregory, “since there was nothing more worthwhile to do. Ships wheeled in meandering circles behind us, tows full of shapes that seemed to be kneeling, sheltering from the fire until you realised, no, they were dead, jammed against each other, half-upright on their knees as if in some kind of prayer where they’d fallen. We knelt too, digging with the cloven-shaped spades from our packs, and made what I’d always dreamed of making on the dunes back home, a trench. We dug down until we could stand upright, we packed hard the walls of sand and reinforced them with driftwood sleepers, we dug sideways till we hit the hard rock where the cliff raked underneath the sand, we dug forwards, tunnelling underneath towards the Turkish side. We packed the sand we dug in sandbags and piled them on the top to take whatever they were firing at us. We dug like moles, burrowing into the sand to take whatever comfort it could give, and when we could dig no more we slept in the sandy bed we had dug for ourselves.”
~
I must have been asleep. Mary Dagge woke me, saying come quietly now, quietly. And she led me through the darkened house, as silent as it has become these days, down the stairs, through the hall, into the scullery, out the kitchen door, and there she had Garibaldi tethered to the trap, the bridle tied to the boot-cleaner. “Get up there Nina,” and her accent had broadened, she was about country business I sensed, talking the way she rarely talked with us, and I got up. She held the horse hard by the reins and whipped it smartly and the old creature jumped with the shock, used to softness as I was. Where did all these hard knocks come from, her ears seemed to ask, pricking backwards on her flat griddled skull. Over the gravel with the wind blowing, so if they heard anything above, it was not the hooped wheels crunching off the gravel, it was the storm blowing. Why was there a storm? It seemed appropriate, too appropriate to my mood, ri
diculously apt—I remember thinking the whole process like a cautionary tale, the summer leaves flying off the branches far too early, swirling around Garibaldi’s pricked-back ears. Then the moon made an appearance as if it had to, as if it was required for this tale, a warning to all maidens young and fair.
“Where are we going?” I asked Mary Dagge, and she answered, “Mabel Hatch.”
“You said a tinker woman,” I remember saying, “Mabel Hatch’s no tinker.”
“Some call her Mabel Cash,” she told me, “one of the rare occurrences of travelling women that strike roots. Of the Clare Cashes,” she said, “her father was Roustabout Cash, had women from here to Lisdoonvarna, knew how to deal with every ailment that affects them, and don’t worry your head now, Nina, Mabel will see you right.”
~
“I awoke,” says Gregory, “to a fine drizzle curtaining my face, turning the sand underneath me into wet clay. It was night and whatever fires had been burning on the ravaged boats had been long extinguished. There was a distant glow from the Queen Elizabeth, a strange movement from the sea, as if a beaded curtain was shifting with each wash of the tide, and the beads were bodies, of course, still uncollected. They would bloat over the next few days, the tide would retreat and leave them beached and sizzling in the hot sun, the tide would advance again and collect them, moisten their dried khakis and the dried skin beneath them until they shrivelled eventually, into something as insignificant as dried fish.”
~
In Mabel Hatch’s house—a long way from her barn, who would have thought it—she had a steaming bowl, towels dipped in mustard and a bicycle pump which she dipped in a jar and pulled, it made a sucking sound I remember. She loosened my skirts and put hot towels round my tummy, a poultice she called it. She gave me a cup to drink, it tasted salt, tart salt, and I lay back my head on the straw feeling drowsy.
“That’s it,” said Mary Dagge, “sleep if you feel like it,” but it didn’t feel like sleep, like a dream had while half awake. And I felt something cold between my legs, it was the pump, I tried to rise but Mary Dagge stroked my forehead, saying “Hush, Nina, hush,” and I heard the sound of the sucking pump but it was blowing now, vomiting something over me in me, and I cried and she said hush, and I twisted from them both but my legs were wet.
“Does my mother know you’re doing this?” I cried, and they both said, “wisha no love,” in that country way, and the way they said it I knew she did.
“Take me home,” I said to Mary Dagge.
“Yes love,” she said, “it’s finished and we’ll see tomorrow did it work.”
“Did what work?” I asked, but I didn’t need the answer. I knew.
31
I LAY THERE in the soft rain wondering which of them was George; it seemed impossible he’d made it, but then my comprehension was limited to the trenches we had dug and the score or so bodies that slept around me. For all I knew there could have been aerophagii roaming the beachhead, monsters chewing on the flesh of dead platoons. Mine was shattered and lost, I recognised none of the faces around me. I thought of the pearl that George had found in the river, extracted from the oyster-shell with his teeth, and hoped Nina had kept it, since it might be the only remembrance the three of us would have of him. He seemed more dear than life to me then, and looking out at that carpet of waterlogged bodies, a symbol of what was best in life, of what had been extinguished. I had survived and wasn’t sure I wanted to, I lived like the tiny spider crabs that scurried round my boots, the bloated worms the soft drizzle was bringing to the surface in the dampening sand. There would be flesh for them to feed on, spilt intestines to swim in, dead arseholes to penetrate, those corpses over the weeks would live with maggots, worms, ticks, lice, with those huge bulbous bluebottles that seemed specific to those beaches. But whatever was George in each of them was dead. I remembered the boy that was pilloried at school, I remembered the crushed dockleaves Nina wrapped his battered hands in, I remembered his face behind the dried tomato plants reading Touchstone: sir, I am a true labourer, I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness.”
~
Mary Dagge sang softly on the way back, to the greying horse, not to me. She sang a lullaby about the windy castle at Dromore, about how those inside were safe as houses, or as castles I suppose the phrase should be. And the winds were dropping now as if they’d played whatever their part was, and the moon sat on a long vista of cloud the way the moon does after bad weather, you wonder how you can see it, sitting on the circles of cloud and not behind it, but there it was. She helped me up the stairs, kind again in that country way. She said, “Where’s your brother now, child, on the way to the Dardanelles?” And I tried to picture them both on a large metal ship like the ones that used to strike the bar by the Lady’s Finger, but on a different sea, under the same moon maybe.
The house didn’t seem to want me in it, I could feel that, the opposite to the way it is now, it won’t let me go, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in it any longer. I don’t know why when I recount this I become the girl I was then, the breathy girl in a river of events, all the distance vanished, grief maybe, loss, so strong I can’t separate myself. She said, “Sleep, child,” like a spell and opened the door to my room, the room too that didn’t seem to want me in it, and I could see through the window the sun was whitening the moonclouds over the curling river, over Mozambique. I took off my clothes, wet below, and felt my body didn’t want me in it either, I felt my nightgown didn’t want me in it, and so I got between the sheets naked, as Mary Dagge would have said in that country way, as the day I was born.
32
I MUST HAVE slept again,” says Gregory, “because I was awoken by a hand on my shoulder and a pith helmet near my face, muttering something about an advance. He scurried down the trenches we had dug and woke them one by one. It wasn’t daybreak yet but there was enough light in the sky to show the battleships, the Queen Elizabeth like a black cardboard cut-out against the palest dark behind it. Then the guns began to roar and I must have had my hearing back, because the sound seemed all around me, like a giant bell, booming, circular, whirling from one ear to the other. We stared up from the sandbags and over the next twenty or so minutes saw the fort above us disintegrate. It seemed to become its own volcano, spewing clouds of dust and smoke from within its bowels, geysers of red flame shooting upwards as each new shell hit, eventually wrapping itself in a shroud of black through which we could see nothing. Then the firing stopped and the cloud stilled and there were no answering crackles of yellow, as if everyone inside it must be dead. There were feet then, clambering over the top, and I followed them, and was amazed to see, all over the beach, squirming figures like our own emerging from invisible dug-outs. We were everywhere, like ants gone to ground, scurrying into the sunlight. How, I wondered, do these pockets of battered humanity become an army again? But that’s what they were, an infantry of thousands of feet making for the cloud that twenty minutes before had been the castle. We staggered up the rise and into the cloud-fogged piles of ancient masonry. There were bodies fused into the shattered stone, pulverised with the dust, bits of bone and khaki mixed with the shattered brick, but no resistance.
“We made it through the pall of smoke into the village behind, and there it was a different matter, they let us plough down streets then emerged from broken doorways to fire from behind. I fired blindly and jerked that bayonet four times into resistant flesh and became amazed again, this time at how simple savagery was and how long it took the recipients of it to die. Then, I felt a thud in my arm and went over through an open doorway, and lay there staring at a pot bubbling in an empty room, a wood fire beneath it. I got the smell of vegetables and spices and felt a hunger like I’d never felt, realised it was a day since I’d eaten. I heard the sounds of the cleaning out in the street behind me, the dulled cries and the pop of rifles, saw the low embers beneath the bubbling pot and realised somebody had left it, a meal interrupted. I edged myself forw
ards on my good arm and used a blackened piece of wood as a ladle and began to eat, the scalding liquid dribbling down my chin but the taste so good after that I didn’t care. Taajin, I learnt to call it later, a rough broth of vegetables and lamb. And my eyes must have become accustomed to the dark because then I saw her, a girl, huddled, almost part of the shadows, as if she’d been there for ever and would never move again, braided hair and a ring of medallions round her sweating forehead. She stared at me as I continued to eat, and I tried to smile to reassure her that I meant no harm. She smiled back, a flash of white teeth from the shadows.
“I got to my knees and felt in my pockets for a coin, a trinket, anything to pay for what I’d eaten, and I found one, a penny, covered in my own warm blood. I flicked it across the floor to her, and her hand spun out, and she caught it neatly. She bit it with her teeth, hoping, probably, that it was gold.”
~
I dreamed of the pearl, I remember, as large as the moon itself, lying in the round concentric mulch of the oyster’s flesh, I was inside the shell and the pearl was as big as it could possibly have been. The swathes of colour, pink and delicately purple and white, shifted as I shifted my head. The oyster’s flesh was around me like wet seaweed, shifting groggily the way seaweed does when the tide is turning, and I stretched my hand down to touch the pulpy mass and it parted to reveal the face of Isobel Shawcross with pearls in her open eyes.
I saw myself dreaming then, the enormous pearl outside the window sitting placidly in the purpling sky, and I saw my face below, my naked body under the sheets which were turning red, and I realised my body had a certain kind of beauty, although it still didn’t want me in it. I could have left that body, I felt, left that body to its own devices, but as it had that certain kind of beauty I decided it might as well be put to use, as if it was suddenly someone else’s body, not mine. And it went on that way, me dreaming of me dreaming, the pearl outside the window slowly vanishing in the reddening sky.
