Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  I lay awake for a while thinking about how everything had changed. He would later ask me about that time and about my memories of her, which grew dimmer as the years went on. I remember her well enough, I would say, to disguise that image I had of the bed in which she sat daily, surrounded by the paper into which she coughed. My one regret, he would say, is that she died before you got a chance to know her. The fact that this phrase, my one regret, became the prefix to many different statements, all of which he seemed to regret, did not pass me by. But I came to see that all of his regrets were centred round the one, the one he wept about as he stood in the bedroom and asked who he was, the one he felt as he deserted those fish and ran towards Maisie when that strange cry came out of him like a seagull's. I didn't know adults, I didn't know they could not state the obvious and only cry when alone. What I did know was that everything had changed and that my soul would change into a cold hard crystal because it had changed. I felt a sadness oozing out of me that I must dispel since I knew I must be free of it or live underneath its moisture for ever. It hovered above me like a departing soul and went out the window and I knew then that if she had gone anywhere it was into that sea from which we had plucked so many fish.

  And I could see her as time went on gathering crusts of things the way objects do that are exposed to the tide. Things that have nothing to do with them: weed, shellfish and the dull green colour of copper when it rusts. Then again I would think the opposite: that she would become hard and smooth like a pebble or a piece of glass that loses its edges with the movement of the water, acquire the water's pale green colour, become something between water and stone. And I heard pebbles thrown against the window, as if to interrupt my thinking. I shook myself, walked out of bed in my communion suit and saw Mouse down below, throwing stones at the window.

  C'est la vie, he said. He still had the empty bottle of milk in his hand. What does that mean? I asked him. Something deep, he said. Come on down, Dony, I'm in trouble. Why? I asked. Spent the money for the milk, he said, and I'm afraid to go home without it. As I climbed down he heard the money jingling in my pockets. By the sound of it, he said, you've got some spondulicks. I have, I told him and when I reached the ground I emptied my pockets. I knew by now that he knew, but he would wait for me to mention it. Of uncertain parentage, he knew the etiquette of these things. So the money clinked, the coinage of the thing itself. There were four half-crowns and assorted sixpences. Where'd you get them, he wondered. People give you them when your ma dies, I said. He looked at me in the light coming from the upstairs window. His brown eyes like cocker spaniel's, pale creamy face that made the lips too red and a lick of dark hair over the forehead. Mine were brown too, the hair was dark, but the skin was olive, like a foreigner's.

  We walked across the sparse grass that led to the broken wall that led to the promenade. I'm sorry for your trouble, he said. But we must be thankful for small mercies. I didn't know mine. I didn't reply to this. I knew he spoke the way older kids spoke, for the sound of it mostly, and he mostly got the words wrong. We climbed over the broken wall and began running towards the lights of the amusements in the distance. But I stopped. I'd noticed something just beyond the line of the tide. Two poles sticking out of the water and a couple of shapes flapping between them.

  He left his fish, I said and began to want to cry again.

  What fish? Mouse asked.

  Those ones. I pointed.

  Ah come on Dony, and he dragged at me again.

  No. They're important.

  And I clambered down towards them, into the water in my good suit, the shoes making a sucking noise each time I stepped. He stood at the edge, still jingling the coins.

  What do you want them for? he asked.

  For posterity, I said. It was a word I thought would have shut him up, since we both would have to pretend to understand it.

  Ah yes, he said. The noise of the coins stopped. I grabbed both rods and dragged them out of the water. There were three plaice we hadn't yet unhooked. Their surprised eyes bulged and they shivered with their last pieces of life.

  Got to go now, I said, dragging them behind me, towards the house.

  I'm going to get it, Mouse said.

  How much was the milk? I asked. I surprised myself, assuming control.

  Sixpence, he said.

  Here, I said, and held out my hand. He looked at me silently, his lips red in the moonlight, then he held out his. I took the coins and left him sixpence.

  Don't go, Dony, he said. It was changing the rules somehow.

  Have to, I said, and gave him another sixpence.

  I walked back to the house and left him standing there by the water. Everything had changed, all right. When I got to the door, he was still there, looking up at me.

  My father answered, dressed in his funeral suit.

  You forgot these, I told him and held out the two rods and the dying fish. Sam.

  They laid her out the next morning, in the upstairs living-room, in a dress that seemed to intimate a genteel party of some kind. My father held my hand and we both leaned forwards to kiss her perfect cheek. She looked younger in death, not sick any longer, but somehow distant, as if she was already sleeping beneath the tide that crept over our night-lines. Her brothers lifted the coffin and my father took his place up front. As he was taller than all four of them they had to stretch to keep some semblance of balance. They walked gingerly down the stairs and out to the waiting car. We sat in the seat beside him and I watched through the window as the cortege drew off and every neighbour we passed removed his hat. Outside the church there was a crowd and each hat again came off. I saw Mouse, his school cap in his hand and his aunt's shock of yellow hair under a black bonnet. Again I felt numbed and oddly privileged. The wind blew from the Head, my uncles strained to accommodate my father's height and only when we were seated inside, next to my tall, dark-suited father and the priest walked through, coughing in his coloured robes, did it strike me how fully gone she was.

  Now that the sun has whatever meridian it needs to recreate that vulgar glory behind her head, the priest can make his entrance. The Guardia Civil straighten their three-cornered hats and the soldiers begin their laconic march forwards. The coloured figure walks behind them, purple since it will be Easter soon, and behind him two peasant soldiers dressed in white, one carrying the cruets, the other the makeshift altar. The Virgin flaps once more in the breeze, Mussolini flaps in turn and the tight-lipped Spaniard stays silent, as if he is today the stoic arbiter of the proceedings. The mackerel-ribbed magenta halo behind her holds its glory for one last beat and the wind is rising, whipping clouds of dust round the drab procession. The guards behind us fall to their knees and we stay standing. And maybe that was part of what brought me, tales of disinterred nuns waltzing in the arms of anarchists in Barcelona. I can see myself as Judas, he who betrays because he dimly perceives that was all that was expected of him. His stance in the living-room, preparing me for Mass, each Mass in memory of her, I suppose, his rigid expectation that I too would follow her precepts and the equally rigid certainty that I wouldn't. She had vanished, effected a trick more complete than any town-hall magician, he had moved his bed from his office back into the big brass bed where I used to lie with her and the string of pearls she had hung from the metal bars, her wedding and engagement rings now sat in the drawer, beside the gun and the shoulder-holster, mementoes of a marriage and a conflict of which he rarely spoke. Perhaps I missed her most for that, for the hints and stories she would give me of that past of theirs, bullets whacking past the chimney while the Irregulars and Free-Staters fought it out on the hills above.

  And I realise that betrayal seeds itself, like a weed through a garden. His memory of his War of Independence was like the inviolate rose, ravished by the Civil War that followed. And fifteen years later, I joined a remnant of the splinters of that conflict, a wayward bunch of Republicans who, having exhausted the litany of betrayal at home, sought new possibilities abroad.

>   Come father, I should have whispered, talk to me, tell me why you so disapprove, show me the drama of your past, not your stiff present. You will kill him, Rose told me. Rose, who came to teach us piano and stayed. Maybe, I said, but I knew she was eluding me too. Whatever unspoken promise had been mooted on the piano keys had by now been forgotten, as if it had never existed. He has proposed to me, she said, her head leaning on the door jamb, the piano gleaming like a black seal behind her. He told me he would, I said to her. Her eyes wanted to know but I didn't continue. Hands gripping the green baize card-table, the veins already bulging blue with the signs of age, eyes all avoidance. I am marrying, he told me, because it will be the best thing for all of us. How? father, I asked him. Don't gall me, he said, you know how. But no, I told him, I honestly didn't. She has brought some peace to this place, he said, she's from a good family. What else? I asked him. The truth is, he said and he looked suddenly tired, I've let you run wild. No, I told him, I've done that entirely on my own. Talk some sense to me, please, he asked. I've done the best I could, under the circumstances. And I thought if the circumstances were different, she might, we might, get along a bit better. So it'll be on her shoulders, I said. No, he said, it'll be on all our shoulders. This place hasn't been a home for fourteen years. And have you informed the lady? I asked him and his hands shook, as if at an insult. Miss de Vrai, he said, is aware of my intentions. Thank God for that, I told him. I need your support, he said. Just tell me I'm right.

  I stood there and said nothing. There was an obscenity at the heart of it I couldn't quite fathom. She is half your age, I wanted to say. Don't ask me to make your mind up for you, and I remembered what he said when he put me to bed the night she died. We'll make do, he said, won't we? There was the same question there, the need for reassurance. We didn't make do, I thought. But I repeated it anyway, wondering would he remember. We'll make do.

  That night I played the piano while he tinkered with the fishing gear. She was due at seven. She would come in, I knew, with the knowledge that he had told me. Outside the sun was falling over the Irish Sea. The tide would soon be fully out and he would roll his trousers up to his calfs and paddle out, with spade and two rods and a tangle of lines. Some ritual was taking place, he wanted to be alone where I could see him, remembering that place we inhabited together years ago now while I sat with her and somehow managed the knowledge of what he had told me. I tried to get the Ravel perfect while I heard the door below me close and heard the gate creak and soon saw him on the beach below, walking towards the line of retreated sea, looking for the casts the rags had left. He soon became a thin silhouette against the rage of colour in the evening sky behind. Then I heard the gate creak again and knew it was her. I heard the footsteps towards the door and saw the silhouetted figure digging furiously in the sand outside. Then the sound of the door opening and the footsteps up the stairs. I played, hitting wrong notes with my left and wondered would my rendition of "Pavane for a Dead Infanta" somehow tell her that I knew.

  Introibe adaltare, the priest begins and I think it odd that they have the universal language while we aspire to the universal politics. The Welshman to my left chews a match and the two German youths stand bolt upright, as rigid in their opposition to the ceremony that is forced upon them as they would be in the observance. The wind has blown a fine layer of sand on to their faces, barely distinguishable from the pale down of their cheeks. They throw a glance sideways towards me, and I'm reminded again that they regard me with something like suspicion. Over the first weeks we lay on the hay on the stone floor under the vaulted ceiling of what must have been a wine-cellar and they talked about politics with a numb duty, as if only to remember what brought them here. In the beginning I answered dutifully but then, unable to stand their heroics any longer or even just possibly out of respect for a more mundane level of truth, I told them I came here because of all courses of action I could have taken it was the only one I knew with certainty that my father would have disapproved of. The words hung in the air, a dumb reality they knew, maybe, but would never admit.

  So, though I stand with them now, I am suspect. I know in my heart the intimate rituals the priest circumscribes in the sandy air with his thin white hands. I welcome them secretly as a hint of home. I stand out of some obscure sense of fellowship but it is neither exhaustion nor the angular pebbles on the soles of my feet that make me want to kneel. I would slip downwards with relief, would welcome their contempt, would put myself outside once more another sphere of approval. And if I let my heart quicken the way it wants to, tears maybe would stream down my own sandy cheeks. I can remember those walks on Sunday down the promenade, both of us in our best suits, to the church on Sydney Parade. Those neighbours who passed us would nod, their faces set in what came to seem a permanent mask of condolence. The sea would change, from white-capped to still, steely grey, I would grow, my suit would change, my height would gain on his but the walk was sacrosanct and the hush of the church interior was always the same. I will go to the altar of God, to God the joy of my youth. There was a shocking relief in the silence there, in the knowledge that we could abide together amidst this ritual, and as with the nightlines, not have to blunder towards speech. So I came to think of God as a great mass of quiet, a silence that was happy with itself, a closed mouth. Till the time came when I would interrupt that quiet.

  I remember Mouse, his face perplexed and saddened among the surging crowds who tried to block us from the boat on Eden Quay.

  He walked with me from the house towards Bray station, past the sea to our left and the large Victorian piles to our right. He reminded me of the hawker he'd seen in Greystones, scattering broken glass out of a sack to gather the crowds. We'd bet our souls on whether he would bleed when he lay on them. You won Mouse, I told him. Nobody wins a bet like that, he said. We turned up from the sea by the Northern Hotel past the Legio Maria pebbledash front with the Virgin holding the ball of the known world, towards the train. What'll he do without you, Mouse said. He had come to be more Christian than I. He'll have her, I told him. And more to the point, what will you do without me. He sniffed in the cold air and brushed his black hair from his perfect forehead. I'm going for prelims next month, he said. He would pretend to me his application to a seminary was to provide him with a cheap degree, but I knew the reality. He had found God with a vengeance. And then, I asked him, lying, as he wanted me to. Maybe teaching. The train came and I said, you don't have to come any farther. Why not? he asked. There'll be a demonstration at the boat, I told him. You shouldn't be seen with the likes of me. But he shut me up with a glance of contempt and opened the carriage door.

  Rose had declined to come that day and my father had stood by the living-room window, with his face turned to the sea once more. You're too young, he said, to take a step like this. Was I ever too young? I asked him. Why do you think you're so different? he asked me. I don't, I said. You don't choose conflict, he said, war and hate and all that, it chooses you. So it chose you once, I said. That was different, he said. What I can't take any more, I said, is the hypocrisy, the prevarication—Don't give me politics, he said, I know all that. Just tell me what it is. You know what it is, I told him. I don't, he said, I honestly don't. Then look at me and tell me that, I asked him. But I turned and left before he had a chance to.

  You've got him wrong, Mouse said as the train soughed past Killiney. Maybe, I said, but doing something is better than nothing. What do you mean? Mouse asked. The heroic act, I told him, is as apt a metaphor as any for this condition we call life. The contemplation of it sweet, the execution tortuous and the end product vacuous. You'll have to translate for me, said Mouse. If I stayed what would I do? I asked him. Stay in that house where everything is intimated, nothing ever said. Wait for that wedding which neither of them will mention. Wish them off to some drab hole like Brighton and wait for them to return again. You know I can't live here . . .

  What if you're wrong? he asked.

  But I couldn't accept that pos
sibility so came out with the grander reasons, the rotten core of the bourgeoisie, the need to obviate one's class in the broader struggle, how any action at all is better than paralysis, but I could tell he wasn't listening, I could tell that stuff meant nothing to him. I watched his profile against the glass with all the eucalyptus of Killiney hill going past and knew he wasn't made for those kinds of abstraction. His eyes were silver with the light behind him and his cheek seemed wet.

  It's her, isn't it, he said.

  What's her? I asked.

  You can't stand the thought of him and her.

  I turned away but it didn't matter, he knew he had struck home.

  They called out the banns in the windswept church on the hill where he had married once before. I hadn't been there but Mouse told me of them and I told him he should have come up with some reasons for objection. What ones? he asked. On the grounds, I told him, of the ridiculous. She kept the brochures for her wedding trousseau half hidden in her music case. I thought of searching in his desk for the ring, hidden I imagined among the yellowing journals where he kept the newspaper cuttings of his contributions to the Treaty debates, but decided against it. The silence in the house said everything. A silence different from before, a congealed pall of the unspoken. I would pass him on the stairs, her on the promenade and one day decided it was simpler to leave.

  I want my absence, I told Mouse, to be a more effective damnation than my presence could ever have been. With me there, they can cough and shuffle, imagine my presence is a barrier to speech. With me gone, they will be left with the reality of it.

  And what's that? Mouse asked.

  Ridiculous, I said.

  When we came to Westland Row and made it to the quays the crowds were all around us. I looked at the sad bunch coming out of Liberty Hall under the ITGWU banner. He had belonged to the same union once, walked out of the same hall, his Trinity scarf like a beacon among the mufflers, before he chose more staid political realities. I made my way towards them and was about to say goodbye but the crowds surged forwards, spitting blood and rosaries. Mouse was swept beyond me, part of them now without wanting to be. He pushed forwards and got the bag into my hands and tried to say something but the crowds pulled him beyond me. And I walked under the drab banner and felt the spittle or maybe it was the spray on my face, for the wind was up and the boat was pitching, and as we walked up the swaying gangplank I turned and saw him in his black gabardine coat, pressed between a mass of women on their knees, rosaries raised in their fingers and he tried to wave his hand but couldn't so he smiled, as if only now conscious of the joke at the heart of it all.