Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  What's the tongue for? I asked, squirming away.

  That leads to the next bit, he said.

  There's even more bits? I asked.

  Bit after bit after bit, he said, one leading to the other till the gentleman gets his bit.

  His bit, I said.

  Yeah, but that comes much later.

  I looked up and saw their figures vanishing under the bridge.

  Come on, I said. Let's see what bit they get to.

  I followed him up the broken stone steps with a heavy heart. We climbed the footbridge and saw their figures vanish behind the railway station, then emerge by the tracks, standing under the dripping eaves. The thought of his lips on hers made me feel sadder than I had ever felt. Then the train came in and enveloped them in steam. We saw him standing stiffly, bowing slightly as he handed her the case. The thought came again, of his lips on hers, but nothing in his body suggested it. I felt sorry for him suddenly, realising he'd never get to the first bit, even. Then the other sorrow came back to me at the thought that he might. The sorrow rattled between us, like the doors of the train as it shuddered into movement. Then it drew off slowly and he turned to watch it go and Mouse dragged me down beneath the rail to hide. The train trundled beneath us, enveloping us in a cloud of smoke.

  No go, whispered Mouse.

  He had gone when the smoke cleared and the wisps of it vanished from the tracks like the sadness.

  Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus, the priest intones and the wind whips the surplice of the kneeling altar-boys and I can see two pistols stuck behind two leather belts. That walk of theirs became a regular occurrence, whenever he was home early enough to meet her, and when the rains came he would carry an umbrella. His courtship, if that's what it was, would progress to holding her arm when the winds were high and the waves crashed over the railings. I watched every gesture, sometimes from my bedroom window, sometimes from the beach below. Mouse would design appropriate futures for them both. The day would come, he would tell me, when some cataclysm would prevent the train from arriving and they would wait at the station till the light went. He would walk her back, all hope of the journey to Dublin vanished, back along the promenade to the front door. And then? I asked him. Then, Mouse said, Maisie, acting on some instinct for such disasters, would have a tea ready. A tea for three. You, her and him, Mouse said. I tried to imagine the scene, with a catch in my throat. You would eat boiled eggs on the table by the kitchen range and she would stay the night. Where? I asked, with an unerring eye for such details. It doesn't matter where, he told me. On the contrary, I said, it matters a lot. On the couch by the piano, I said, preferring to keep her near my element. A lady can't sleep on a couch. On the contrary, I told him, echoing his diction, a lady can, on that couch. It pulls out into a settee. And then? he asked. Then, I said, we would have breakfast the next morning. More boiled eggs, he said. Fried ones, I told him. Fried ones with bacon. Then, he said, the sun would be up and they'd walk down to the station again. But nothing would be as it seems. Why not? I asked. During the night, he told me, everything would have changed. He walks down the promenade with no need to protect her from the wind but yet with his arm around her. Why would it have changed? I asked him. And he must have sensed my disturbance, for he didn't reply.

  The train would never come, I told him. The tide would go out and never come back. They would wait hours by the station and come back that night and I'd pull out the couch for her and she'd sleep on the settee once more. She'll teach me the next morning and every morning after till I can play like Chopin. Who was he? asked Mouse. A Pole, I told him, with long fingers who had a way with the ladies. And where's your father? Out, I said. Always out, trying to find where the sea has gone.

  You're lying, said Mouse. How'm I lying? I asked him. You'll be the one out there, trying to find where the sea is gone. No, I said, you're the one who's lying. How? he asked. You know, I said, that the train always comes.

  Though their walk remained as chaste as ever, as the hot days came down on us Mouse and I invented an erotic history for them. We would swim in the afternoons, then lie naked on the rocks before the Head, see their tiny figures on the promenade below. We would twine bodies, as he told me they one day would, our pricks hard against each other's legs. We'd kiss and go through the inventory of gestures men went through with women. It was fine to imagine Mouse as her and him as me and I'd scour the roof of his mouth with my tongue to keep the sadness at bay. I could imagine an erotic thread interlacing the four of us like a necklace, stretching the length of the hot promenade. I wanted him outside of it, yet somehow part of it, an arbiter of the affections and pleasures I knew were properly mine.

  The weekends between the lessons were filled with her absence. He would take the fishing lines out from beneath the stairs while I practised the scales she had given me till I would hear the front gate open and the scraping of the metal rods off the concrete outside. I would see him through the window, untangling the hooks from the catgut and know they would remain knotted till I made my way outside to join him. The tide is good, he would say and hand me one rod which I would walk backwards with as the skein unravelled. Then we'd walk across the scutched grass to the broken parapet that led to the promenade with the hooks swinging between us. You were practising, he'd say, leaving a hint of her in the warm air. Yes, I would answer and want to talk about her but feel the weight of his reserve. So I'd look at the thin line of the sea instead and wonder would we come out the next morning to find her entangled in the lines, like a mermaid, mine for the whole weekend.

  Then the day came when they walked the promenade and every lamppost was emblazoned with a poster advertising his face. I had long come to understand the probable significance of the handgun he kept in the spare room, among my mother's things. He had been born a Protestant but converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. Betrayal, then, began with him. He had betrayed the interests of his Ascendancy class by joining the Republican movement. When the War of Independence gave way to the Civil War, he felt betrayed by that Republican movement in turn. He joined the Treaty side, was given a post in the first Cosgrave administration and there his slow drift back to the politics of his class began. One of the few of Protestant background in the Free State government, his presence would have given some comfort to the disaffected of his own class. So he presided, in part, over the incarceration and decimation of his former comrades. I had heard him mutter darkly about De Valera as the embodiment of satanic guile, as the murderer of one Michael Collins. He had seen the same De Valera spend years in the outer wilderness of nonparticipation in the electoral process, and then march back with his followers into the Dail, one hand on the book, reciting the oath of allegiance, the other on the guns inside their coat pockets. He went for election again in 1932, in West Wicklow, his military past and his Ascendancy present presumably a bulwark against the rising tide of Republicanism. So for the following summer, the Wicklow landscape became synonymous with my father's face. Plastered on to stone walls, nailed on to trees, flapping outside churches, the rains sweeping down from the Sugarloaf gave his image the texture of whatever surface it covered. I saw him speak from the bandstand through a megaphone, in halting tones more suited to the proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society than to the group of windswept weekenders that congregated on the promenade in front of him. He campaigned with a decorum that must have been unique to his constituents, in all weathers, outside churches, pubs, football pitches, and one morning the gaunt, iconic figure of De Valera himself harangued the Mass-goers from one side of the church railings, my father from the other. I glimpsed it with Mouse as we filed inside and knew even then how unequal a contest it was. When we came out, all that remained of the encounter was a road filled with pamphlets and the posters of my father's face flapping against the church railings. Do you think he won? I asked Mouse, not quite versed in electoral procedures. I think they were just the heats, he said, the big game is later.

  Though he lost, needless
to say, along with his party. Rose came to teach us on the day the results came in and was unusually subdued. I played for a while and she hardly listened. Then she placed her hand over mine on the keyboard and asked me where he was. In his study, I told her, looking at the freckles of her muscular hand on mine. Go up and talk to him, she said. About what? I asked her. Whatever, she said, just go and talk to him.

  So I left the piano and walked upstairs. I knocked on his door and when there was no answer, pushed it open slightly. The floor was strewn with newspapers, he was sitting at the green card-table by the window, smoking a cigarette. Is there anything up? I asked him. No, he said, nothing's up. What are you doing then? I asked him. I was listening, he said. He pushed his glasses off his forehead and looked at me. I had so rarely seen his eyes without the opaque glass in front of them that I was surprised by their startling blue. We might be in trouble, he said to me. Because you lost? I asked him. Yes, he said. Won't Dev give you a job? I asked him; and he smiled at my naivety. Dev, he said, wouldn't give me the time of day. Didn't you know him once? I asked. More than that, he said. He was my chief. So what happened then? I asked him. We fought, he said, but that's all over now. Tell me about it, I asked him, since like any kid I longed to know about the gun and the blood it had spilt. No, he said, you wouldn't understand. Go down and finish your lesson.

  So I went down and played again. I was aware he was listening and took care to finish every phrase, to anticipate mistakes, to keep the pedal down so the notes would carry upstairs. I had progressed to Schubert by then and tried to fill the house with it. When I had finished, there was silence, from upstairs and from Rose beside me. I turned to look at her, expecting some comment but her head was tilted back, her eyes looking up to the ceiling and her hair hanging free like a curtain behind her. She said nothing for a while.

  What do you think would make him happy? she asked me eventually.

  You, I was about to say, but didn't.

  A job, I said.

  To his surprise, though, he was given a job. Whether it was a sudden softening in the harsh deity De Valera had become or the fact that the new administration needed some semblance of continuity, he was appointed to the post of under-secretary to the Department of External Affairs. Whatever the cause, he was absent from the house now consistently, returning long after nightfall.

  So his defeat had one happy outcome. I got to walk Rose down the promenade to the train. The sky was an expanse of silver over the mottled sea. I was taking his place, I felt, in loco parent is, and tried to fulfil my role with all the gestures at my disposal. I carried her music case, a touch I was proud of. I held her elbow as we crossed the pools of brine on the grass, making our way up to the level-crossing. Won't be long now, I said, in my best adult manner as she leaned her head against the station wall, waiting for her train. His election poster curled round every pillar in the station as the train drew off, flapping in the wind the carriage left behind it, the way those three huge visages do now. It had the same distant authority, the same melancholy, the same sense of loss.

  Over the next weeks the posters decayed, became sodden with rain, torn at the corners, wedding themselves eventually to the brick and metal surfaces they sat on. He grew into the landscape, became part of it, of the gazebos, the lampposts, the stone-pillared shelters, of the promenade I walked down towards the train with Rose.

  That became my job and I its diligent servant. Touching her elbow, passing the bandstand, to which the weather had welded the remnants of his face. Rose? I would ask her. Yes, Donal, she would answer in a way that became an obligatory litany for our conversations. What kind of house did you grow up in in Sligo? A cottage, she would tell me, beside a golf course that backed on to the sea. And Rose? I would say again. Yes, Donal, she would answer. Are your sisters anything like you? Two of them are, she would tell me and two of them aren't. And the ones that aren't, Rose, I would ask. What do they look like? Sheila, she would tell me, looked good till she married the farmer but now she's bigger than a haycart. And Joan was born to be a spinster, so she's thin. Were you born to be a spinster, Rose? I would ask her, knowing she would bless herself and give her special smile. And Rose? I would ask. Yes Donal, she would answer. Tell me their names again. Sheila, Joan, Fergus, Johnnie, Angela, Mary and Pat. That's seven, Rose I would say. Eight, she'd tell me, including me.

  Because every detail of her background fascinated me, more than the lessons, maybe even more than her head of hair. The cottage I could picture, the golf course where they picked balls from the rough and sold them back to golfers at twelve a penny, the beach she described to me with the sand-dunes and the curling breakers, but I could never see the legions of sisters and brothers inside the cottage, only her. A cottage with a tin roof which the rains played on like a kettle-drum and her inside, sitting at a piano among the bric-a-brac. Though I later learnt there was no piano, she had learnt on the upright in the priest's house, then graduated to playing organ at Mass on Sundays, won a scholarship to Dublin and stayed at a hostel run by nuns in Leeson Street. But what matter, we should be able to choose the pasts of those around us: I would have had her in bare feet, an only child, walking that beach and golf course endlessly, a lover of twilights, aware of a grander destiny than was implied by her simple surroundings. We would reach the station then and she'd lean on the green pillar as the five-thirty came in from Greystones, she'd pat me on the cheek, tell me to practise and be gone in an expanse of railway carriages.

  The sun has become proper daylight now and the winds have died a bit. The priest turns and raises his fingers and rivers of sweat are running down his forehead. It is possible almost to feel sympathy for him in that board-like purple outfit, in front of this stolid congregation. He is reaching up to his moment I imagine when the pale hands take the small white disc and the mundane miracle happens. The Welshman to my left looks at me sideways, imagining my response. He knows everything, I imagine for a moment, with his small miner's eyes, his rocklike common sense. So what's a Mick doing here? he asks me with monotonous regularity. Passing the time, I tell him. I fancy the heat to disguise the fact that I know he knows I'm not one of them. Something in my face shows it, I suppose, some comfort emanates to me from the altar beyond us on the packing cases, the wine the priest pours from the leather gourd into the cruets and I wonder when he lifts the tiny disc between both thumbs and forefingers will I be able to resist the urge to kneel. My apostasy is almost over.

  She became a friend, I suppose that's the word for it, the gap between our ages wasn't that great; she would have been nineteen, pushing twenty, when I reached fourteen. I was a quick pupil, had a strong mimetic ability, came to copy every movement of her hands and came to see in the end that her facility was limited. The pieces we played became like duets. She tried to disguise the fact that I was gaining on her and I tried to hold myself back. But one day working on the Schumann I must have forgotten myself and played the whole thing, from start to finish, her turning the pages, saying nothing for a full twenty minutes. Then the piece was over and I remembered. I looked at her, a deep blush spreading over her cheeks, and cursed myself silently.

  You know what it is, she said.

  What? I asked her.

  You don't need me any longer, she said.

  Why not? I asked her.

  Because I can't get through that.

  Can you keep it a secret? I asked her.

  Now why would I do that? she asked.

  Because I want you to stay, I was thinking, because he wants you to stay.

  Because you need the money, I said, shooting in the dark.

  She smiled, embarrassed, and I realised that I was right.

  Because I need you to listen, I said. If you didn't teach me, I wouldn't play.

  She said nothing and the smile slowly faded.

  That was a fluke, I said, growing desperate. Then she stood up.

  Please, I said, and I grabbed her hand to stop her. My arm was across her stomach. She placed her other ha
nd over mine and held it, warmly, kneading the fingers. I felt a deep blush flooding my cheeks, but she didn't seem to notice.

  I could hear Maisie moving around upstairs. Rose's fingers kept that ripple over mine and I realised we were talking about the lessons no longer. And slowly the blush on my face receded. She turned, took my head in her hands and kissed me on the cheek.

  Don't worry Donal, she said. I'm going nowhere. Anyways, I can't afford to. I stayed still, feeling her lips close, her breath on my cheek and wondering what I would have done if she had been Mouse.

  You can teach me, she said, hardly moving a muscle. I could hear Maisie's feet coming down the stairs and she drew away.

  Now play it again, she said.

  Hoc est enim corpus meum, the priest says and now raises the small disc of white. The Virgin seems to sweat in the heat and Mussolini stares into some indeterminate future and the Caudillo contemplates his own moustache. And I feel the urge to kneel, if only for my father's sake but the Welshman spits contemptuously to the pebbles in front of him and the Spaniard who tries to crawl into my bed each night cracks a thin, melancholy smile.

  He left us to our own devices, as his face on the posts of the promenade urinal became gradually indistinguishable from the concrete. Rose stayed, I can only surmise because she had to, because of those seven brothers and sisters in that cottage in Sligo, because prospects for young ladies were limited. Some years later I would visit out of curiosity the hostel where she lived in Hatch Street and understand more: the barred windows, the nuns in blue, the list of rules pasted on the inside door. But at the time I imagined she'd stayed because of me. The thought of her complementing my father's life had vanished; he was rarely there, she began to complement mine. I came to understand the precise emotional import of those stockings, drying by the stove that day I first met her. I discovered Erik Satie. The arbitrary melodies puzzled her, but she worked her way through them while I stood behind her, watching the movement of her shoulders under her dress. I could see between her buttons the down of her skin. I reached my finger out to touch that skin, expecting a reprimand, or the music to stop. But none of that happened; she stiffened slightly, then relaxed and played on. This then became our habit, Erik Satie, her working out the discords as I sat beside her and worked my hand up the inside of her leg. Stop it, Donal, she would mutter, but some peasant pleasure-principle took over, her knees would shift to hit the pedals and my hand would stay there till her legs were wet.