Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  Then one day I woke to find him sitting in his chair in the hallway, staring at a letter on the floor. I saw the stamp of the Reich and wondered had he somehow divined the full extent of my betrayals, before I realised his chair had moved. During the night, from the study through the open door into the hall. I wondered could he do in his sleep what he couldn't do waking, and imagined the thin hands pushing the wheels, motored by some dream. Then Rose came from his room, pushed him to the kitchen and I realised with a dull ache that none of us would be touched with the miraculous.

  I opened the letter, fed him breakfast while I checked the scrawl of numbers against the Heisenberg. Scarlett, I could decipher. Rhett would welcome a shopping trip. Await your list.

  I was emptying the wicker pots in Bullock harbour when I saw three figures dressed in greatcoats bumping on bicycles down the pier towards me. I saw the same broad shoulders on the first one and in the noonday sun his scale seemed diminished. Scarlett, he said, how's she cutting. Donal's the name, I told him. Always Scarlett to me, he said. And while we're at it, meet Oliver. He gestured to the smallest of the three, who glared at me with protruding eyes through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. No hand was extended, so I didn't extend mine. And this is Festy.

  The third was long as the first was broad with hair halfheartedly slicked back, a greased lock of which dangled in front of his eyes.

  And what'll I call you? I asked the broad one. Red, he said. A bit like yourself but with less of a stare.

  You're a fisherman? asked the small one, Oliver, rubbing his left eye under the disc of his glasses with one finger.

  For the time being, I said.

  Would you grace us with a spin? he asked. Since the ocean, as far as I know, doesn't have ears.

  I headed out for the Kish with the three of them and we bobbed in the wash of the Liverpool Ferry which was passing. You've heard from your friend, Red asked me, when the noise of the engine had died. Yes, I told him, he's planning a trip here. Even before he's got the shopping-list? he asked, as if there was an etiquette for such things. What exactly was on the shopping-list? I asked him. Funds, said Oliver, wiping the spray from his glasses. Funds for what? I asked. Silence came over all three of them for a moment, and they exchanged glances. Can we trust him? the tall one asked Red, and I heard the deep Cavan accent for the first time. Perhaps, said Red, we have no alternative.

  Let me ask you a question, then, said Festy. If you were to strike at the heart of the enemy, where would you hit?

  I'd have to first find out which enemy, I said.

  Would you stop your codding, you know the one I mean. England, the Crown, the whole damn caboodle.

  Ah, old England is it? Well. I gave myself some time, and the appearance of what I hoped was reflection. The heart, I said and ventured. Houses of Parliament?

  He shook his head with a twinkle in his eyes. Think again, he said.

  Buckingham Palace?

  He grinned now, with obvious relish.

  Again.

  I give up, I said, knowing it would increase his glee and it did.

  Give up? Really?

  Yes, I said, really.

  Where, he asked, would you find the Royal Family, the War Cabinet, and the old dog Churchill himself all under the same roof?

  Westminster Abbey on Poppy Day, I ventured.

  Wrong again.

  He lit a cigarette for dramatic effect, then finally came out with it. In a conspiratorial whisper, as if a passing herring-gull might have overheard.

  Madame Tussaud's.

  I drew breath, perhaps for the wrong reasons. He gripped my elbow, brought his lips closer to my ear.

  Hit them where it hurts most. Their symbols.

  Ah, I said. I tried to imagine his enemies melting into a ball of wax.

  What a stroke, he said. George, Victoria, Anne, that old crone Elizabeth.

  Milton, I said, Shakespeare . . .

  Guy Fawkes, he said, with a certain lack of logic.

  I nodded sagely and looked at the bobbing waters. I thought, thank God it's harmless.

  We would need considerable funds, the tall one said.

  Explosives, said the small one.

  Weapons, said Red.

  Must I describe the operation in detail? I asked.

  What do you think yourself, asked Festy, his Cavan consonants thickening.

  I thought even the Prussian Hans would have seen the humour in it. But I didn't say that.

  Never show your hand is what I think, I said instead.

  You think that's wiser?

  Keep the cards close to the chest . . .

  Maybe you're right. Or before we know it the Huns'll hit it themselves.

  Better safe than sorry, I told him.

  On the way back, while a porbeagle played around the bow, I told them Rhett had requested a meeting, and was awaiting details of the time and place. All four of us agreed to leave their operational plans in the realm of the unknown until that meeting had taken place. In cold print, I continued, the symbolic value of your plan would be obvious only to the most perceptive of minds. Better to explain it in person. The small one nodded, then the tall one nodded too and Red smiled. And there seemed more to his smile than met the eye. So what's the best place? I asked. Depends how he travels, said Red. By land, sea or air. By sea is the best, the submarine off the West Clare coast, Spanish Point strand, half a mile offshore on a good moonlit night. Put that to him, and tell him we've got just the vessel to pick him up. Which vessel is that? I asked. The one we're standing in, he said. And the tide was up, so he swung himself in one leap on to the granite surface off Bullock pier, now level with the boat.

  We'll be in touch, he said, rolling his trouser-leg inside his woollen sock. Then all three of them mounted and cycled off into the grey afternoon.

  Spanish Point, said Soames three days later, staring at the rain that spattered on the cobbled courtyard outside. I used to summer there, in the Eagle Guesthouse, nuns walking on the windswept beach below.

  What have nuns got to do with it? I asked.

  They have a summer home there. Spanish Point, he said again, as if the name awoke sentimental echoes for him. I suppose it has historic resonances.

  The Armada? I asked.

  The sea was red, they say, with the blood of Spanish sailors. He twirled my coded letter in his fingers.

  Madame Tussaud's, he mused. They can't be serious.

  Maybe they're not, I said. Maybe they have quite different intentions.

  Or maybe, he said, they see some symbolic virtue in it. Explosives, landed at Spanish Point. Used to blow up the waxen image of Sir Francis Drake.

  So what will you do? I asked him.

  Send it, he said. And symbolic or not, when they move we'll move.

  But before either moved, my father did.

  I l l

  THE DAY HE moved again there were low clouds hanging on the skyline like a membrane, ready to burst. To believe the weather affected our moods would have been fallacious, but I remember each moment with the skies that accompanied it, so the presence of rain, the heat in the house, the winds moving the rigging in the harbour behind us all come to have a spurious significance. A relationship, like a chord that accompanies each note of whatever melody we made, so the skies on this day stick with me, the grey-blue sack hanging over the sea, the occasional curtains of soft rain moving towards us. I woke early and checked them through the front window as usual. I left Rose sleeping and went in to check him, sleeping on the bed I had made of his chair, the woollen rug tucked around his chin. I put one hand on his and when his eyes opened, raised him gently to a sitting position, then moved him slowly out into the hallway. I set him by the window in the kitchen, with the view of rough sky beyond the chimneys he seemed to like so much and laid out the things for his breakfast. I let the eggs brown around the edges and the strips of bacon crinkle the way he favoured them, made the tea then wheeled him to the table. And I was bringing the fork towards his mouth when
I heard the sound of nails scraping off a wooden surface and realised his hand was moving.

  It was moving towards the sugar-bowl, like a stiff crab, the veins standing out against the mottled skin. I looked at his eyes and saw them staring back at me with that sad intensity, his mouth pursed with the effort. I held my breath and watched the hand cross the acres of board to reach the bowl and grip it. I tried to speak, tried to encourage him but no sound came out. Then I saw the hand shake with a heroic inner fury and the bowl was overturned, the sugar spread in a neat arc beneath it. The eyes seemed to well up with tears then. Don't worry, father, I managed to say, you tried, and reached out a hand to his face, but he almost imperceptibly jerked it away. I could see the mouth then pursing with a further effort and followed the line of it, down his twitching shoulder to his wrist to his hand, gripped crablike as before but now with one finger extended, tracing a line in the spilt sugar. One unsteady stroke downwards then two more to reach the centre of the first. It was a K, traced with all the awkwardness of a child at kindergarten. Then another downwards stroke and another with a stroke to meet it at the base. I L. He then repeated the L, began to form another letter but I already knew what it would say. Kill me.

  His arm fell to his side, as if exhausted by the effort. It touched the sugar-bowl as it fell, sent it spinning like a top, the sound of its rocking gradually diminishing into silence. And when the silence came it was absolute. His hand hung by the chrome wheel, his shoulders slumped forwards, his head bent at an odd angle, eyes staring sideways at the message he had written. Do you mean it? I asked him, but there was not a whisper of movement in reply, as if he had said all he could, or would. Then it was my turn to cry. The tears came quite independent of me, they streamed down my face unbidden and splashed on to his inert hand. Odd, since I was feeling nothing. I knew what I should feel: grief, guilt, an unutterable sadness at the thought that he could see, feel, perceive from his solitary cage. I thought of these things, should have felt them, thought I should have felt them, but the only hint of feeling was in the film of salt water that covered my cheeks. I am sorry, I said to him, I should have realised, should have felt more but can't. Please tell me why that is? He stayed slumped there, his breath gradually quietening, as distant and unapproachable as he was when I was ten. I heard the sound of Rose's feet coming down the stairs and ran my hand over the mess of sugar on the table, obscuring the letters.

  She came in and touched her hand to my cheek and felt the wetness. Who made the mess? She asked. He did, I told her. How? she asked, and she must have sensed something for her hand went to my other cheek and began to wipe it. He moved, I told her. He moved? she said. He can't move. Well he did, I said. She put her hands round my shoulders. Don't, I told her. Why not, darling? she asked. Because he moved, I told her, he moved and he knows. My God, she said. Yes, I said, my God. He sees things. He hears things. He feels things. Don't you, father?

  He sat beneath us, head still inclined at the same angle, eyes staring at the spot on the table where the letters had been. I don't believe you, she said. You don't? I asked her and I stood and grabbed her hair and kissed her. Her lips struggled against mine and I saw his head give a tiny jerk, away from us to avert his eyes. Did you see that? I asked her. No, she said and I grabbed her again and brought her mouth forcibly to mine and twisted her round so she could face him, see the head jerk once more, a small spasm run through his body this time. You saw that? I asked her. Stop it, Donal, she said, and now she was crying. I'll stop, I told her. But you saw it. Yes, she said, and now it was her turn to cry. Doesn't bear thinking of, does it, I said, to no one in particular this time. No, she agreed. It doesn't. What do we do? What do we ever do? I asked her. Take him for a walk.

  I wheeled him out into the same low clouds, the rain still holding off but a fine mist blowing down from the Head. The mist, deceptive in its wetness, soon brought a fine dew to his beard. So you hear me, I said to him, you've heard everything I've told you. The back of his head kept the same rigid aspect towards me, moving only with the movement of the wheels. And you know, you old goat, you know everything probably and if you don't know you can guess. And I can only apologise. I'm sorry that it happened in precisely that way, that it happened when it did, between us and you but the one thing I can't be sorry for is that it happened at all. Do you get my drift, father? The wheels swished along the wet cement in reply. The dew glistened from his grey hair and that was all. I walked him past the empty gazebos, waiting for some sign from him, but got nothing. We came to the end of the railings, where the sand bled on to the cement of the prom and I turned his chair left and pushed him towards the sea. I halted just at the lapping tide and left him facing the water, sat down on the wet sand and looked at his profile. It was rigid, like an immobile hawk, the blue eyes fixed on the horizon. Come on, father, I said and at the word father, the eyes flickered towards me. Father, I said, and the eyes flickered again. Look at me, I said, and the head turned slowly to face me, the eyes fixing on mine. The fury seemed gone from them, the wide, staring fixation, they were moist and melancholic like the mist all around us. Can you hear me? I said, Donal, your only son. I've done you wrong, I said and the eyelids blinked, rapidly. Does that mean yes, I asked, and they blinked again. Or was it a no? I said, and they continued blinking. This is frustrating, I told him, I'll have to choose silence like you. The eyes blinked once more and I gave up talking. I sat there, laid my head against his inert arm and looked out on the sea.

  And the silence brought a kind of peace. I could feel the occasional twitch of his arm and felt glad he was alive. I saw the line of the horizon gradually merge with the cloud and saw the rain coming towards us. I sat until the last possible moment, savouring the illusion of a union, then walked him back along the promenade as the rain sheeted down. We were both wet through when we reached the house.

  I couldn't speak to Rose. I left him with her in the hallway and called up the boy and together we readied the boats in the driving rain. We chugged out beyond the Kish and let the nets out and drifted. The line of the bay was like a soft brushstroke, barely visible through the falling water. I could have cut the nets and drifted for days, left them both to themselves, to whatever silences would persist now between them. I could have drifted to Belfast, Liverpool, to the Isle of Skye, to some Norwegian outcrop where the language would have given me a different kind of silence. The thought of it was beguiling, seductive even: to leave whatever shards of life were left behind, to let that small smudge that was the Irish coastline vanish gradually into the mist that almost hid it. I was about to do it when I was brought back by a shoal of mackerel.

  The pattern that the spitting rain made on the water's surface was thickened suddenly and I thought the showers had strengthened. But they hadn't; it was an explosion of sprats peppering the water all around us and after them the silver-blue flashes of the mackerel, foaming when they hit the nets like froth on a horse's mouth. The net was full in what seemed an instant, we pulled it in, dumped the slapping silver on the bottom of the boat and dipped it again. It filled as quickly and we pulled and dipped again till the weight brought the water almost to the gunwale. Then we headed for home.

  So I was brought back to him by fish, once more. The rains had stopped when we made it to the harbour and got to shovelling the tons of gasping silver that weighed down the boats. We worked till midnight, packing them in ice, became covered in a sheen of silver scales ourselves and when the moon came out, we gleamed in its light. I made it to the house then, left the boy to arrange to get the catch to Dublin. She was sitting in the kitchen downstairs, the whiskey bottle open beside her, a cigarette smoking from a saucer on the table. She told me I stank of fish.

  I know, I said, and poured a glass for myself. What did he do all day? I asked her.

  The same as usual, she said.

  But he knows.

  How do you know he knows? she asked me.

  So I showed her. I overturned the sugar-bowl and spelt the words he had spelt
in the granules.

  She stared at them for a while, saying nothing. So what do we do? she asked.

  What do you mean, Rose? I asked her softly.

  You're his son. For once in your life you could obey him.

  You're serious?

  No. Not serious. Jaded. Exhausted. I never thought things could be like this.

  You wanted them so, Rose.

  No. I wanted you. It happened.

  I thought I could leave today and never come back. But I couldn't.

  I know you can't. Neither can I.

  She reached her hand over to mine.

  I think I'm going mad, she said, in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner that made me believe she was. I spent all day with him, talking. I told him everything twenty times over. I was hoping for something from him. Some response. But nothing came.

  She smoked and drank a little.

  He's a vegetable, Donal.

  He spoke to me.

  Then he's playing a vegetable.

  You hate him, do you?

  Sometimes.

  I could say nothing more to her. I put the wireless on and we listened to talk of the war. I fiddled with the dials and found some music, a marching tune with heavy brass, made distant by the interference. I walked behind her then and put my arms around her. She held them to her breast with one of her hands and reached the other back to grip my neck. The fish scales gleamed on my arms. Do I still stink? I asked her. Yes, she said and drew me down on her knee and kissed me like a man. I knew then she was stronger than both of us.

  I slept in his room that night. In the hope of discovering some secret life he lived while the house slept, of dreaming a dream he dreamt, of hearing him talk in his sleep, I wasn't sure. He lay still in the moonlight, breathing softly, staring at the ceiling. His breath rose and fell with the rhythm of the waves outside. They moved in counterpoint with each other, meeting intermittently, then departing again. In my sleep I was walking with him again, both of us barefoot over the wet sand. I looked behind me to the nightlines, far away by the thin line of tide, etched against it like dark spindles. We were making our long way back to the promenade; not a word passed between us but the old silence, the comfortable one, the one that didn't ask for speech. I could see a dim plump figure on the promenade, wearing an apron, rubbing her hands in it with a distracted air. I could hear a low rumble behind us. I turned and saw where the nightlines had been a white line of water. The rumble grew louder. There was a man now, running on the promenade towards the house, a figure in black, a black bag swinging neatly in his hand. Father gave a strange strangled cry, like the squawk of a herring-gull, and began running too and I tried to follow him but slipped and heard the rumble grow into a roar, and then the white wave was on me, on us both, dragging metal rods and lines and hooks in its wake. I saw through the whorls of water his face cry out silently as he went down.