Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  How? she said.

  You brightened up this house once, now you dress like a nurse.

  Because I am a nurse, she said, gesturing me to be quiet with one finger to her lips.

  No, I answered, you're a wife.

  A wife and a nurse, she whispered, letting me inside, closing the door behind her.

  Besides, who's to hear?

  No one, she said. More's the pity.

  She looked at me across the width of my grandfather's picture and she shook her head.

  You're drunk.

  Not yet, I said and walked into the kitchen. I reached up into the top cabinet where the whiskey was and found it empty. Doesn't he drink now? I asked her. You're being cruel, she said. I shook my head, not meaning to be cruel at all. I'm sad, I told her. I had so much to tell him. Tell me then, she said, pulling a bottle out from an entirely different drawer.

  I wanted to tell him, I said, the things I enjoyed with him and why I could never tell him the things I enjoyed. I wanted to tell him how I wondered whether times of enjoyment that are never spoken of can be considered enjoyment at all. I wanted to tell him how in my Babylonian captivity—a phrase which incidentally he would have relished—that was the only question I could think about.

  She poured two glasses on the table and sat down.

  Now you tell me, I said to her, why that is?

  She looked at me and drank. Her lip was seriously perfect over the glass.

  What were the things you enjoyed? she asked.

  Fishing, I said. But that was before your time.

  You never tried to understand him, she said.

  And you did? I asked her.

  Yes, she said. I can honestly say I tried.

  So tell me, then. The word tell in my alcoholic brain seemed worth repeating, endlessly repeating.

  He was the kind of man that finds it difficult to tell things.

  Don't say was, I told her.

  All right, she said and repeated. He is the kind of man who finds it difficult to tell.

  To tell what, I asked her.

  To tell of things of the heart, she said and the phrase seemed to express a kind of loss in her.

  So you noticed it too.

  I was speaking with regard to you, she said. He found those matters difficult to express which created that difficulty in you which made it more difficult for him.

  Oh Rose thou art sick, I quoted.

  On the contrary, she said, I'm very well.

  I was quoting, I said. It was a different Rose.

  I know, she said. The invisible worm.

  I have no doubt, I told her, that it created that difficulty in me but what interests me is where the difficulty came from. I wasn't born with it, or wouldn't like to think I was. His difficulty was all his own.

  If you like to think of it that way, she said. But remember you're drunk now and so you could be wrong.

  Not yet, I said. Not yet drunk, I mean. I poured some more of the whiskey and expected her to tell me to stop. When she didn't, I reached one finger out to touch her lip.

  So am I wrong? I asked.

  Yes, she repeated, but let my finger stay on her lip.

  So what did he tell you? I asked her.

  Much the same as you're telling me, she said.

  I don't believe you, I said and I didn't. Her silence told me I was right.

  The world turned wrong for him, she said. He wanted to make sure that didn't happen to you. He wanted you to be something. Then he was afraid you would reject what he wanted you to be.

  So I did, I said.

  Well, she said. That saddened him.

  And did you love him? I asked, with my finger between the lip and the glass.

  She drew her head back. My finger hung in the air, pointing at nothing in particular. She drank once, closed her lips, then opened them again. Her hair made two sheaves of wheat around her forehead. Her eyes were like the eyes of statues, pitiful and yet emotionless.

  I did what you couldn't bring yourself to do, she said. I cared for him.

  As much as you cared for me?

  She stood up. She brushed her flannel nightdress with her hands.

  There are things I won't let you say, she told me. You have to remember that, if you stay here.

  You going to throw me out?

  No, she said. But if you stay here, there are things you will not say.

  What things? I asked her.

  You know what things.

  Perhaps I don't.

  Then I will tell you when you say them, she said.

  Do you promise? I asked her.

  She turned to leave.

  Rose, I called her.

  She turned back.

  If I promise not to say them will you promise—

  What?

  To tell me what those things are?

  She left without answering. I finished the whiskey and listened to her feet pad through the house. I expected to hear the sound of the wheelchair, as she moved him towards the bed and lifted him inside. Then I wondered how she could have managed, with his weight, which cannot have diminished that much. But there were only her footsteps crossing the floor, a piece of silence, then the soft creaking of the bed as she sank into it. So either he slept in the chair, or she had lifted him from it already. I sat there wondering did he dream, was his sleep any different from his waking. And were his dreams full of the words he couldn't say, full of the sounds he couldn't hear. I must have fallen asleep then because I saw his face bending over me, his mouth opening soundlessly in the attempt to speak. I tried to read his lips, but the beard obscured them.

  I woke abruptly and saw the whiskey dripping from the table, the glass overturned. I got a cloth and swabbed the wet table and felt the absolute silence. I had a sudden longing for the bed of straw in that monastery cellar, the wheezing of Dai's damaged lungs and Antonio whispering from the corner about his imminent demise. I wondered should I have come back, should I stay here, should I have been born at all. It was alcoholic melancholia, I told myself and I rose unsteadily and walked out into the hall. I saw their door was ajar. I walked gently forwards and pushed it open. There was a pale wash of orange from the streetlight angling through the room. He was lying by the window, a blanket tucked neatly around him, the silver of the wheelchair gleaming beneath him. So it spreads out into a bed, I thought. His hair was tufted by the pillow underneath his head, like filigree against the light. There was a chinois screen in the centre of the room. I stepped inside and could see her beyond the screen, lying in the great oak bed. So that was it, I thought. I watched her for a while, the rise and fall of her chest under the blankets, until I got some sense and went to my room.

  The next day brought sunlight, a great solid wedge of it coursing through the window. I got up late and could feel that tenderness round my temples, that moral unease brought on by too much whiskey. I made my way downstairs and wondered what I'd said last night. The kitchen was empty and the ochre walls were bright with the sunlight. I walked through the hall and heard the rustling of papers from the living-room. She was sitting by the window, thumbing through a pile of bills or letters. He sat across from her like a great immobile child, his head down and his mouth slightly open. She didn't look up when I came in so I decided to apologise.

  I'm sorry, I said, if there's something I should be sorry about.

  What kind of an apology is that?

  None, I suppose. But I don't remember.

  She lit a cigarette and looked up from her papers. The smoke did what smoke does to her face. Then she held out a letter.

  Came for you in the post today, she said.

  The stamp was from Spain. I saw the General's face again, with the three-cornered hat.

  You've got friends over there? she asked.

  I shook my head. I pulled back the envelope which came away too easily, as if it had been opened already.

  You must think me rude, she said. I never asked you about it.

  She dropped her paper
s and stood up.

  Come into the kitchen, she said, have some breakfast and tell me.

  We walked inside, leaving father alone there.

  Did someone open this? I asked her.

  Jesus, Donal, give me more credit.

  Maybe they censor the post?

  You're in some kind of trouble?

  I said nothing. I opened the letter and saw a scrawl of mathematical symbols. She cracked two eggs on to the range and asked me again about Spain. So I told her, the truth this time. About the journey to Madrid, the afternoon at the ambulance wheel and the incarceration. She laughed.

  Don't laugh, I said to her.

  I'm sorry, she answered, laughing more. But you must admit it's funny. After all that drama, the only action you get is an hour behind the wheel of an ambulance. Do you drive well?

  I shook my head and began to laugh with her. No, I told her, it was truly heroic. I turned a corner and whacked into a fire hydrant. I could hear the gunfire.

  You could hear it?

  From about two miles away. Then a mortar bomb hit the house up ahead of me. I reversed back into a street full of loyalists.

  Then prison?

  She was smiling now, trying to hold in the giggles.

  Safest place to be. Till you had to go and fuck it up.

  I thought I saved you from a firing squad.

  Actually you did, I told her. But only the sound of it.

  How do you mean?

  I shook my head. I thought of Antonio, probably two weeks dead now.

  Leave it, Rose, I said. I looked at the letter again. I remembered Hans and his talk of the Heidelberg principle. Or was it Heisenberg?

  She came towards me smiling, holding a plate.

  Here she said, soldier. Eat.

  The hair was falling over her face. She sat down beside me, the smile a nostalgic, far-off one, watching me as I ate. The sun came through the window, lit one half of her face. It suddenly struck me that she seemed happy. She had in some indefinable way become a woman, since I went away.

  What are you thinking of, Rose? I asked her.

  I'm thinking you're going to have to pay your way.

  With what?

  Don't the war-wounded get pensions?

  In this war, maybe. Not in that one.

  Maybe I can employ you then, to take him for walks. A penny a mile.

  No, I told her, I'll walk him for free.

  As she settled a blanket round his shoulders I saw a tangle of wire glinting in the open cellar door. I walked down two steps and saw lying between the coal-scuttles two iron rods, the skeins of catgut and the row of fish-hooks, a shovel beside them. I grabbed them all in a bundle and walked back up to where she had him perched in the open doorway. I'm taking him fishing, I told her. Fishing? she asked. Nightlines, I told her. Before your time.

  The tide was out and the sun glinted as it had years ago, off the scallops of the rocks. I turned when I reached the promenade and saw her standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, watching us, her yellow hair bright in the sunlight.

  She seems happy, I told him, as I wheeled him past the urinal, its great wings of concrete trying to imitate a pagoda. Did you do it, or was it me? Could it possibly have been you that opened her like a flower and let her breathe? That abstract, girlish air had been replaced by something different, something hard to define. If it was me, I told him I would leave, but if it was him I promised to stay. I could quietly delight in her happiness, his silence, as long as things stayed that way.

  There was a ship out on the sea, unnaturally high on the surface of the horizon, some kind of battleship, metal grey against the hot sky. I've become a hero of sorts, father, I said. A counterfeit hero. A hero of confusion or out of confusion. Should I go to public meetings and invent achievements, my suffering under duress, my prescience even, to have been a kind of harbinger to the Emergency we labour under? Will you not be proud?

  But he wouldn't, I knew, or wouldn't have been. The sun must have been particularly hot, or the blanket round him, for there was a glimmer of sweat on his brow which gathered into a drop and trickled down his nose to his cheek. I could almost have mistaken it for a tear. Are you too warm, father, is she too eager for your comfort and wraps you in blankets when your astrakhan will do? Or could it be a tear? I wiped his cheek with my hand and turned the wheelchair to face the battleship. Boats on the horizon had always meant a lot to him. Thoughts of the Americas, of the edge of the world, those days before Galileo when the earth was flat. Those monsters at the world's end, fabulous creatures whose pleasure was to whoop as the galleons tumbled through the void. Maybe he has chosen silence, I thought then. The battleship edged slowly past the crown of his waving hair. The world being so unspeakable, he would rather be mute. This condition was a blessing he would have desired.

  I walked on again, and saw another tear gather. I thought paradoxically how pleasurable his silence was. Not because I wouldn't hear him speak, but because it was only his infirmity that allowed me approach him without embarrassment, circumspection, and all of those awkwardnesses that had made us what we were. Do you hear me, father? I thought and felt for a moment from his inert shoulders a resounding yes. But I leaned forward and looked at his eyes and saw them fixed upon the battleship, quite blue, with all the vacancy of cornflowers.

  I pushed him on again to where the railings ended and the promenade moved easily and gently on to the sand. The sand was hard, strewn about with pebbles and the wheels moved easily over it. When we made it to the point from where the tide had retreated, the wheels bumped and splashed over the ridged pools, his head jerked periodically. I apologised uselessly to him but pressed on. We reached the edge of the rippled water then and I faced him towards it, with his eyes fixed on the slowly moving fortress of grey. I took the spade then and dug, in the way he had taught me. I was rewarded with a handful of worms and jammed both rods on either side of his chair, the hooks swinging in front of his face. I skewered a worm on each hook, looking at his eyes each time for a hint of recognition. I felt the urge to talk, but kept it down, remembering the silence he used to maintain with me. When the work was finished and each worm struggled on its hook I stood for a while with my arms on his shoulders, looking out to sea. I remembered the wall of water in my dream and imagined the battleship carried by it, smashed against the shore like a child's toy. I felt the same peace again, the same lack of need for speech. I pushed him back then towards the promenade, wondering had he felt it too.

  I spent the day in the house, with Rose and himself, seeing whatever rhythm they had established between them. She moved him from the front door to the back yard, following the movement of the sun. She worked through papers in his room, told me the details of his finances, which were almost nonexistent. She played the piano in the afternoon. As the tide came in, the battleship passed out of view. I sat upstairs in what once was my room listening to the soft rustle of her Schubert. The music called for me to come down, play with her, share whatever mood it was we had before, but I didn't dare. I felt it was a chord between the three of us, threading through the house. I saw her cycling down for groceries at half-past four, when the tide was on the wane. I went down and played myself then, the same tune she had played, as if to keep him company. When the light was beginning to fade, several hours later I went to my room again and could see, way down the beach, my rods beginning to emerge from the retreating water. I went to Rose, who was in the kitchen, and asked her could I walk him once more. With a little luck, I told her, we might have caught something.

  So I wheeled him down the promenade again, through the evening chill that was descending from the Head. He sat with the same rigid intensity and when I bumped him over the sand his spine hit the seat with the rhythm of a jackhammer. I could see a silver glint in the evening light, jerking between the rods. When we reached them I found seven mackerel hanging from the hooks.

  We cooked them that evening, and the first pebble of our new existence fell into place. I had a functio
n, however humble. I was a gatherer of flesh from the sea outside. I gutted them, Rose prepared them and father sat by the radiator, his eyes on the metal bars, blinking regularly, as if aware of his impending meal. His breath quickened slightly as the fat began to spit. When he heard the chink of the bowl against the cutlery, I could swear I saw his lips move.

  I wheeled him from the radiator to the table.

  He knows something, I said to Rose.

  Like what? she asked.

  He knows food is coming.

  You trying to be funny? She wiped her hands on her apron.

  I could hear him breathing when the fish fried.

  She opened his mouth and began to feed him gently, wiping his beard all the time, fork in one hand and cloth in the other. She ate herself while he chewed, then fed him again.

  I never thought of fish, she said.

  Why not? I asked.

  The Emergency, she said. No meat to be had, so I cook potatoes.

  Do you consider yourself his wife? I asked.

  I've no one else, if that's what you mean.

  That's not what I mean.

  And what if I do? she asked.

  Something in her tone made me bridle.

  What did I do wrong, Rose? I asked.

  Just about everything.

  I touched her neck. She shifted away, slowly.

  Tell me.

  No.

  Go on. Give me a hint.

  I touched her again and she let my hand stay.

  It's all connected, she said. Something broke in him when you left.

  And is that my fault?

  You could have stayed.

  With both of you? You know I couldn't.

  I would have gone, if you'd asked me.

  The thing is, I said, you were his intended . . .

  Perhaps I was. But that's connected too.

  His plate was empty. She poured a mug of tea for him, put a straw in it and placed it in his mouth. The tea slowly vanished from the mug, silently.

  I twirled one of her blonde curls round my finger.

  Did you love him, then?

  You must assume I did, she said.

  She leaned her head back and eased the muscles of her neck against my hand.

  But do you know what's more important? she said.