Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  I have fallen out of time, I thought, where distances have lost all depth and this walk could continue for ever. I looked to my left and could see the Kish lighthouse prodding smugly forward from the silver line and looked back and saw the promenade with its painted townscape behind, further than I'd ever seen it. I thought, this must be the place then, that magical place you will always take with you no matter how far and in what direction you walk. The moon was right above me on its meridian, if a moon can have one, and washed my form in light but left me shadowless. So I jammed each rod deep in the pristine sand, pulled the catgut tight and skewered a worm to each hook. I said a prayer for fish then, the kinds of fish he would have been proud of, and began my walk back. I turned after a time, half expecting the nightlines to be right behind, as if that spot would follow me no matter how far I walked from it, but saw them standing, thirty yards or so away, silhouetted darker against the sand, the worms squirming gently in the moonlight. I knew their place was the right one then, the place where both worlds meet and made my way back to the promenade and was surprised to find it not so far away after all.

  I slept a quiet, dreamless sleep, the kind you remember from childhood in a blanket, it seemed, of peaceful blue. I woke to the sunlight flooding my window, not knowing what time it was, then heard the bells ringing for the first Mass. It was Sunday, I remembered, so I dressed and went downstairs and prepared the kind of breakfast we used to eat together. I made too much for one, absentmindedly, as if the appetites of Rose and him still prevailed in the kitchen. I was hungry, though, so I ate it all. The wedge of sunlight came through the window, illuminating the spot where his wheelchair sat, and served to remind me of the halo it once gave to the fringes of his beard. Then I wondered how the tides were and walked outside.

  The sun was hidden by the empty bath-house at the end of the terrace. It spread a veil of soft rose light across the empty sands, over which the tide had come and gone. I walked from the shadows the terrace threw into the wash of pink across the scuffed grass and up the broken wall on to the promenade. I could see my nightline in the distance, the thin black cord sagging under the weight of seven flapping shapes, bending the rods inwards. I took my shoes off, walked in bare feet down the granite steps across the stones to the stretches of hard ribbed sand. I kept my eyes on those dark flapping shapes, half fearful that if I stopped looking they would disappear. I could make out the outlines of a plaice, two pollock, a bream, a dogfish and a salmon bass. Between them was a larger one, elemental, that I couldn't recognise. As I came closer it revealed itself, outsize and majestic, a hooked creature from some lower depths, shuddering occasionally in the morning breeze, quite silver-scaled, eyes bulging and distended, tulip-mouthed, on its forehead a curved and perfect horn. As it flapped, its gills shuddered with the last gasps of air. I bent down to touch it, wondering what it was and heard a thin pale cry come from it, as it died in the unfamiliar light. I tried to place it, this outlandish shape silhouetted against the morning sun over the sea, when I saw something else emerge from the water behind it, from beyond the tulip mouth, from the line of lazily washing tide.

  The trousers on this figure were rolled up around the calves, the bony, ancient feet splashing the water, the head bent down as if looking for periwinkles. Then he looked up and at me and walked forwards, the beard and the grey hair fringed by the sun behind him.

  There were drops glistening like dew on his tweed suit, but the suit itself didn't seem wet. His forehead had the sheen of a film of sea water and his beard was peppered with the same beads of dew. He was carrying his shoes in his hand, like me, and looked younger and older at the same time. He stood on the other side of the line offish. He looked at the fish, then at me, then at the fish again.

  There was nothing to say. I'd fished him from the sea somehow, dragged him from one element to the other with an invisible line. He stood there blinking in the unfamiliar light, looking from the fish to his feet, up at me again. He was nothing like he had been, I could sense that immediately. He took one step towards me, then stopped, the hooks touching his waistcoat, his eyes inchoate, his mouth serene. He was lost and yet found. I reached forwards, touched his real sleeve and felt the salt water there as I led him round the line. He looked at me apologetically as if he was late, many years late, then pulled the rods from the sand, gathered up the armfuls offish and began to walk to the shore. They could have been the fish he had left there all those years ago, when he gave that strange cry and ran towards Maisie and the doctor on the promenade. His feet left prints in the sand, just as they had done in life. The dead must have weight then, I thought, and followed the prints, several steps behind him. He climbed the granite walkway and stood on the promenade among the first early morning strollers, awkwardly, like a bird that was unused to land. I took his elbow, which was as light and brittle as a feather, and walked him towards the house. The rods dragged and the lines dripped water on the concrete beneath our feet. I led him from the stares of the passers-by to the railings and the sparse sea grass towards the terraces. He saw the door and stopped as if the sight of it was painful to him, then started again as I moved him forward, opened it and ushered him inside. We stood together in the darkened hallway as we had so many times before.

  I felt guilty as always but a strange thrill ran through my fingers which was unfamiliar. Through the accident of fishing, I had brought him back, I knew, from whatever place he had inhabited. He stood now in the dark of the house staring at the light outside and all the harshness seemed gone from him, the silent fury. He was lost and malleable, and somehow more human than when he had lived. We have so much to say to each other, I thought, and wondered would we say any of it, then took the fish from his hands, closed the door with my foot and led him into the kitchen. The plates were on the table, with the breakfasts I had eaten, thoughtlessly as it turned out, since here he was and he could well be hungry.

  Are you . . . I asked, and didn't think to finish the question, but he must have divined it anyway since he nodded, vigorously. I took the fish from his arms and looked at the unfamiliar one. It seemed the most appetising of the lot, part skate, part sea-horse, so I cut it, gutted it and placed strips in the pan. It gradually began to sizzle, the flesh white, succulent and transparent, and a magical smell of burnt honey flooded the room. The scales on the horn fell off and the flesh began to brown, so I sliced it free of the rest, skewered it on a fork and handed it to him to eat. The flesh crumbled in his lips and he smiled, welcoming the taste, and handed the fork back to me. I ate it in turn and knew why he had smiled as the unfamiliar filled my mouth, flesh that was hardly flesh, fish that was no known fish, taste that was somewhere beyond the bounds of sensation. It was there, crumbled and was gone, leaving the aftertaste of honey.

  He spoke then, as if the taste had released something. His voice was quiet, with none of the fury it had held in life. If the dust that wheeled in the sunlight that came through the window had made a sound, it would have sounded like his voice.

  He told me he had been walking, and that he always seemed to have been walking since he had last seen me. I had left him by that sea and it had surpassed all of my efforts to move him. The boy's hands achieved nothing, the water down his naked spine, the muttered words and prayers; nothing had moved him till he saw that expanse of dark blue. So he did what he had known he would always do, since I had left for that war I had wanted to partake in: he walked. And he headed for what seemed most natural, the ridges of sand under the fine woollen socks she had knitted for him, then the water creeping round his socks and meeting his ankles. He had looked up and down the strand, seen figures in the darkness, one of them which no doubt was me, but he wanted to know me most of all the way he'd known me long ago, when we both would stand ankle deep in the water all those years past, before my mother had died. I had no memory of her, he told me, which always troubled him, since an indigent figure, lying in a bed perpetually, should not be counted as a memory proper; and he had kept walking and those thin lo
ins of his which had been dead all those years came to life again, life of a kind, of a new kind, and he had known then what he had to do. Which was to bury himself in that ocean, since speech between us had always been difficult, but there was another kind of speech which he now wanted. If he were to die, he told me, he would rather die in that element which had given voice to all we never said. It was our language, he knew that and suspected I had always known that, and the accidents that had muddied our efforts to be in that language were just that: accidents. The accident of her absence was the first, which led to a silence that was hard to break. So as he walked and the dark blue moved from his loins to his chest to the beard under his chin, he began to fill that silence and say all the things he had never said to me. And there were so many of those things it seemed the sea was hardly big enough to hold them, so when his feet left the hard ridges of the sand and were treading on water alone another kind of walking began. It was a simpler kind, walking through no known landscape, carrying on that conversation with me about the things we never talked about in life, for this was death, he was certain of that, this walk along no known surface with only the ocean of all that had happened above.

  So this was the way the dead talked, I thought, watching him standing there, swaying slightly in the kitchen, the water beginning to dry in patches on his suit, eyes slightly distant and confused but with a smile I'd never seen before underneath his beard. They whisper, they create a silence that fills the whole room with another kind of speech, and if a noise was made by those particles of dust wheeling gently in the sunlight, this would be it. The sound of dust rubbing elbows, rubbed by sunlight. I reached for another strip of that unique fish from the sizzling pan and held it out to him. He took it and ate and began again. But began is the wrong word, since from the silence with no speech, there was simply silence and speech.

  Rose, he told me, Rose had known the folly of it the moment I had left. He had married her for me, she had married him for me, but these follies take their own momentum. I must have known that, he said, from the follies of my own: they create their own accidental excitement and only later does one realise, it was not about that at all. But by then the folly is erect and fully built, filling the garden all on its own. The church on the windy hill where he had married my mother was not ready for a second visitation, but the dress I had refused to see, the preparations for the wedding breakfast I didn't attend, the ring he had bought her all had created such a frisson that it seemed to be about that after all. Only when they came back to the cold living room did they both realise the profound futility, how the reason for their union had been driven away by the fact of it and how that reason had been me. They had looked at the empty piano and after an age of the same silence he had asked her to play and when she shook her head, the blonde tresses, for she had done them in ringlets for the occasion, moving from one side to the other, he had known the precise and absolute folly of it. But one lives, and I of all people must have known that, one makes the best of it and in their case they did until they heard the news of where I had gone. Walking—he seemed to have been walking for ever—by the promenade, looking down on the same sea that I had drawn him out of, he was hit by the folly one last time and felt his ribcage burst. He grabbed the railings and remembered leaving me by the hooks fifteen years before when he had seen the doctor running. He grabbed the railings, but the railings hadn't held him and he fell backwards. And she had found him there like a beetle, all four limbs in the air, all of them useless. She had carried him back with the help of Vance the chemist who was passing and then learnt a kind of love, he supposed, as she wheeled him from room to room of the house that was all emptiness. For there was a fondness there, he told me, that could have blossomed into a union but the fact of the wheelchair had saved them from all that. She would read the newspapers to him daily then, never knowing whether he heard or not, and he had come to welcome his trapped state, the inertia that had become his lot; he took comfort in the patterns of sun across the linoleum floor and the dust that circled round in it, since the news she read to him was barbaric, unthinkable, so much so that silence was blessed. Then one day I was suddenly there again.

  He stopped and stared at the same patterns of sun on the same floor. I reached for the pan to take another strip offish and was surprised at how much flesh the fish contained. I ate a strip, tasted the same honey and handed one to him.

  The fish would never diminish, he told me, it would provide its meat until everything was said. We were there in a continual present, until there were no mysteries left. Then he could go back to that greater mystery. He was never one for talking, he told me, ironic really since that was part of the trouble: the words that would have cleared the muddle never sprang to his lips. He had always hoped silence would do the trick, an unspoken understanding, and if all else failed there was always fishing. He could see the thing he was then, in his tweed suit, his son beside him at the living-room table, Maisie serving us both, how inadequate it must have been, and realise how much of it was accidental. We are born out of accidence, he told me, and out of accidence we imagine is created the necessary, the indomitable self, which, if we only knew it, could change in a minute with our intervention. But we fill our years, he told me, with the business of that self, with the way it walks down the promenade, takes the black car to work, the way it sits at the green baize table, fills the world with what it thinks is purpose, till the range of possibilities has narrowed to the ones just that self wants. And death, he told me, is the realisation of all those lost possibilities in the life we have left. You see each of them as you walk, you see how if any one of them had been grasped, things could have been different.

  He had seen me walk down the promenade, he told me, the day I came back, sitting by the green baize table where she would leave him on odd days, my gait and the holdall I had carried like a sailor's, and had willed with every piece of himself to be able to move when I walked into that room, but the more he willed, it seemed, the more the rigour took hold of him. He had heard my knock on the door, Rose's voice and mine, then my feet ascending the stairs and listened, unable to turn as I mentioned his name. He had welcomed every moment of our walks along that promenade, accepted the simple pleasure of listening and realised his condition somehow gave me voice. He had wondered whether if he could have answered would I have spoken so much.

  He had known the inevitability of what would follow from the moment I came back. If he could have said, please don't worry, he would have, but even that was denied him. His only terror was that guilt on my part would lead back into silence. And when that happened and my silence came, a rage would come on him in waves: rage at the old muddle once more, since if he couldn't talk, all he would have wanted was for me to, and the rage gave him movement one morning and he wrote on the sugar but the worry eluded him. And he came to realise that even that too would be misunderstood. So all our efforts to revive him he concurred in; he would have walked if he could if only to say that, clearly and unambiguously so we would have understood. But he came to see then that even Rose was not what it was about. Rose was excluded in turn from this raging need between us, the coming together and away, the speech, the muddle and the further silences. So when that sea presented itself to him with its submarine like a child's toy in a bath and he found at last he could walk, that was the way he had walked. It was our element, after all. And he had walked thus since, in a wash of the past till one day as he walked he saw light above him, playing round him in shafts and realised he could surface again. And coming to the surface, he had seen me there, playing with the lines as if I had never stopped in two decades. And he realised those lost possibilities were not losses, they were always there, intimated by the fabric of what had come to happen: unravel one of them and the infinity of others present themselves. And that was the sum of what was. And he nodded at the pan and said we had come to the end of that fish.

  All the water had dried from his suit and it seemed to be collecting dust as he sat there. A
pale sheen of it covered his cheek and his beard. He turned to the window and scattered wafts of it, like gold dust. I saw the reddish hue in the room and realised the day had gone its course while we spoke and it was approaching evening. You know, he said, the tide should be far enough out now for a nightline. And he turned and walked through to the hallway and I heard the old clattering down below the stairs as he gathered the rods. Are you ready? he asked and I nodded and followed him out to the sparse sea-grass. We climbed the broken wall and walked along the promenade towards the stone steps. The sun was behind us, throwing long shafts over the grass, the concrete walkway and the beach beyond. I heard the five-thirty go by for Dublin and felt the tremor in the earth and followed him down the steps to the sand. I took my shoes off, as did he, when the hard ridges began with the water between them. He dug with the spade while I pulled the worms through the wet, crumbling sand, squirming, as if they knew what faced them. We untangled the line then, jammed the rods down and skewered a worm to each hook. And it was then, with the worms swinging once more in the evening air, that he chose to depart. He walked towards the sea, trousers rolled around his calfs, and I noticed a pale moon against the blue beyond. He walked quietly, as if I had never existed, as if no conversation had ever begun. I sat on the sand and the skewered worms dangled in front of my eyes, his figure way beyond them, just a silhouette now. My eye travelled down the line of worms, to see where he was headed. And it was then I noticed a figure pacing with calm expectancy, way beyond, at the lip of the water. A pair of high-heels, incongruous on the sand, a blue Edwardian dress and a straw hat. What seemed like a bag, clasped with both hands by her stomach. My only memory of her had been sitting in the bed upstairs, coughing. I saw his thin sticklike silhouette walk towards her, neither disappointed nor surprised, take her arm and walk, like a couple on a last stroll on a ravishing summer's evening. I knew that she, of all things, was what he most wanted. I saw them walk then, in the thin evening light across planes of sand, sea and air, mauve, purple and silver, till the light became so thin they could be seen no longer.