The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  You two have to go, I whispered. Let me follow on later.

  Why? she asked.

  I think you know why, I said.

  And she said nothing, so I assumed she did.

  And when the taxi came to take them off it was night again, and raining, one of those tropical summer downpours. I used that silver heat blanket as a kind of covering tent when I carried their bags out to the car. Sarah lifted Jenny to my face to give me a goodbye kiss and she asked for it seemed the hundredth time why I couldn’t come. Because he has to settle things up, her mother told her, he has to pack the rest of our belongings.

  The rain was coursing through the porch roof in continuous drips and she raised her face to it to say goodbye to all of her non-existent friends. And to one in particular that she assumed was crying.

  She doesn’t want us to go, she told her mother, and Sarah replied that the friend had me to keep company with.

  What do you mean, Jenny asked, isn’t he coming soon?

  Yes, but not now.

  Why not now? she asked again, and Sarah had to lift her, almost drag her to the car, saying, because he’s tainted, that’s why, because he’s haunted.

  It was an odd word, I thought, watching the car vanish into that silvery downpour. It was they who were like ghosts, slipping quietly into another world. I was stuck here, in the real world, with the rain falling and the sun coming up tomorrow in that house through which the water coursed now, like a miniature river. The imagination was my element and I would live in it now, until they were safe and well out of this slippery morass. But I stood there for a long time under the dripping porch and watched the laurel and linden trees create their own umbrella’d waterfalls. The road outside turned into a small river and whatever cars made their way down it threw up solid walls of spray. Then even the cars stopped and there was just the continuing rain.

  After an hour or so I walked inside, where the water was covering the carpet. I could have closed every door but I didn’t, I couldn’t be bothered, because part of me welcomed this biblical flood. I turned on the television that had been hidden all this time, tucked beside the fridge, and sat on a wooden chair and propped my feet against the kitchen table. The news flickered away there, mutely, and from what I could gather the riots had flared up spontaneously, savagely, and were on the cusp of general anarchy when the rains took over. A revolution cannot compete with a downpour. On the news station anyway, as the handheld footage of youths in hoods and balaclavas being beaten by black truncheons gradually gave way to flooded vistas, the river spilling its banks, poplar trees looming like pencils out of mirrored fields, cars turning sideways as the floods engulfed them.

  They were well out of it, I thought again and began to wonder about the dimensions an aeroplane occupies, how it collapses space and time and makes nonsense of the weather. They would be sitting now, one head resting on the other’s shoulder, in a turbulent tube at thirty thousand feet. How real could that be? I wondered, yet real it absolutely was, as real as the mice struggling through the water beneath me, their underground tunnels flooded, their homes a watery grave. Were they mice, even? They could have been voles, if voles ever made their homes beneath the floorboards. And I must have sloshed across the kitchen floor to grab the one remaining whisky bottle, because it sat beside me on the table now, together with a glass, no ice. And I wondered how those chimney turrets were doing in the downpour; would the Tyrolean roof survive? it seemed designed to withstand storms of snow, not rain. And after a while the footage of the floods exhausted even the television screen, because it reduced itself to a small white dot, and then a half-grey, flickering haze.

  I walked into the bedroom and found it had fared better than the kitchen and the hallway. The French windows were closed and all I could see through them was the haze caused by the never-ending rain. And I fell asleep to the sound of it and it must have been comforting enough, because the sleep was comparatively dreamless.

  I spent four or five days in that house. It would have been impossible to leave, even if I’d wanted to. When the electricity failed, I played the Casals CDs on Jenny’s coloured little boombox. So I had a cello to go with the sound of falling water. And when the dampened batteries on that gave out, I imagined the sound. I imagined a cello I could crawl into; it sat in the hallway like an enormous, malignant cat. The S-shaped curve beneath the strings allowed me in and I curled up there, on the sofa, and the strings vibrated with the magnificent sound, but there was too much vibrato, too much emotion in the playing. There was a coloured canvas shoe to distract me from it, and the instep of the foot beneath it and the whisper of released clothing and the breath of the refrigerated tray with the stiff body on it and the frozen eyelashes and the birthmark on the underside of the knee, like an unde, a dove, that flew away across the biblical flood.

  I imagined the dove flying high above the city, the city sinking into the river until the river became a lake, and the lake and the sky above became one. And all that was left were those cello suites, a blur of blue, a blur of grey and a thin indeterminate line in between. And the rains must have stopped then, because I was in the kitchen, eating the peas from a once-frozen bag, when I heard a sound behind me. The sound of feet, wading through the stilled pond beneath the porch.

  This is a mess, she said.

  I turned, and saw that it was Gertrude, dressed in a light rain mac and a pair of wellington boots. She was perfectly reflected in the water beneath her.

  I would say so, I replied.

  You live in a pond. No one can live in a pond.

  Doesn’t the whole city now? Live in a pond of sorts?

  Most of us have ways of coping. Sandbags, rescue services, water pumps. But you, Jonathan, have become . . . how do you say . . . a spermatozoa . . .

  In the amniotic fluid of something or other.

  Doesn’t matter, Jo-na-than. You are not a newt or a water creature. You are a detective, of sorts.

  I was, indeed I was.

  You want your life back?

  I looked at her and smiled, and shrugged. She looked absurd, in that rain mac and those wellington boots. She needed another context. Not this watery one.

  I had a thought, she said. You stopped on that bridge to talk to her.

  Is the bridge still there?

  Of course the bridge is still there. Whole city is still there. It will recover.

  That’s good.

  But my point is, Jonathan, anyone else could have done the same.

  She took her hand out of her pocket, and I saw the pearls. The black ones. She stood by the submerged kitchen lintel and held them out so they were reflected in the kitchen floor.

  You could pass her on, she said.

  To whom? I asked.

  To another. This attachment. Could replicate itself. Is – how you say it? – a pathology anyway . . . that you must be rid of . . .

  And how would I achieve that?

  If you know someone who deserves it. You effect some introduction. In the old-fashioned way.

  51

  There were damp sandbags in every doorway, there were municipal workers with unnaturally wide brushes pushing small tsunamis of brown water in front of them. There were whirlpools around every drain, but the traffic was flowing once more. I had dried the battery on my phone and called Frank, and told him he was indeed right, we should sit down and have a proper talk. So we met in a café and talked, me in my dampened suit, he in a kind of camouflage outfit, with military boots and a black ski mask tucked into the shoulder-band. He had changed, I mentioned, briefly, by way of a greeting. Everyone has changed, he said. You have seen the news? I had, I told him, and assumed he wasn’t talking about the water. No, he said, and adjusted the cuffs on his well-pressed khaki shirt and I saw that he was still wearing cufflinks. So we should talk, he said, and we began.

  We talked about everything but the matter in question, about the riots, the rains, until eventually, when the coffee was cold, he asked me, in the way of men who are used
to dealing with the world, to come to the point.

  I have to stop blaming her, I told him. Much of the fault was mine. When fissures like this erupt between couples, both parties have issues to deal with and must take their share of the blame. Do I detect a whiff of the therapeutic couch? he asked me, smiling. There’s no couch involved, I told him, and it’s not like that, not like the cliché at all, it’s more a conversation with oneself, but sadly, the kind of conversation one cannot have with oneself, only through another. So the other is the conduit, he said. Yes, I agreed, to the kinds of realisations one should make on one’s own, but rarely can. Are we talking forgiveness here? he asked. Yes, we are, I said, but I also know how little there is to forgive. The difficulty, I told him, is forgiving oneself.

  But.

  But, he said. There would have to be a but.

  Yes. But. I would ask you for a favour. I need a gift returned.

  To a woman? he asked.

  Yes, to a woman.

  So I can allow myself the satisfaction of being right, he said. There was a girl.

  There was a girl.

  And you would like me to deal with her.

  Yes.

  As a – what is the Latin? Quid pro pro.

  Something like that.

  Tell her what? That your marriage goes on? You can’t see her again?

  All of that.

  Give her a shoulder to cry on? Because . . .

  Because you’re that kind of man.

  That women like to spill their hearts out to.

  Sometimes more than their hearts.

  We can’t help who we are.

  No. And give her this.

  I wound the bracelet of black pearls round my fingers. They reflected the café we sat in, the stained-glass windows, the curved ceiling, in their dark uneven way.

  It will mean a lot to her?

  Yes, I said. And to me.

  We crossed the bridge then. The river was swollen like a fat worm that had fed too much on a bloated corpse. The humidity had come back wholesale and I was sweating in my already damp suit. He seemed immaculate, though, walking beside me and talked about tides of history that were coming this way, how the neutered, degendered flowers of the west could never thrive in that hard ancient Slavic soil. Were these new opinions, I asked him, or did he always think that way, trying to imagine Sarah listening to such bilge, but no, he told me, much like my therapeutic experience, it was a matter of uncovering a layer of thought he always knew was there. There are times, he told me, where one has to think straight.

  Nail one’s colours to the mast.

  I offered him the cliché for nothing.

  Yes, he said. Otherwise the future won’t be black or white, will be a . . .

  He was searching for a word.

  A rainbow, I offered again.

  No, he said. A mess. A pastel mess.

  We made our way then through the cobbled streets I hadn’t seen for a while, and I was sad to see that most of the cobbles had been lost, ruptured, torn out of their sittings by the floods. They were being piled in untidy pyramids now by municipal workers. But I heard it then, the sound I hadn’t heard for a while, and he must have heard it too, because he asked me, did she play the cello?

  She did, I said, and we could see the tiled arch now, the miraculous sound coming from above or inside it.

  Can you hear that? I asked him.

  Of course, he said. Bach. The second suite, in D minor.

  I was mildly surprised at his erudition.

  We know our music here.

  We walked inside the arch. And he was right. Of course, they knew their music.

  The courtyard was a mess of sandbags and sad grey pools that reflected the grey sky above. But the melody soared above it, which time or tide could never mess with.

  And you want me to give her this?

  The black pearls were in his hand. And I realised, for the first time, that they weren’t black at all. They were a delicate dove-grey.

  Just follow the sound, I told him. Up those steps. And be nice to her.

  What else would I be? he murmured. And I did wonder what else, as he walked up the fan of dark concrete steps and was soon out of sight.

  52

  Am I a charlatan, Jonathan? she asked me at the departure terminal. She was that kind of woman: she liked goodbyes, at bus stops and metro platforms, train stations and airports.

  No, I told her, you’re a croupier and card reader and the best of friends.

  There was a crush of panic around the security gates, with every conceivable form of luggage: bulging plastic sacks, cases wrapped in twine, army-surplus bags. Three-generation families, dark Roma hair, babies in papoose scarves.

  Maybe I should go back, she said. To Monte Carlo. Wear a black necktie and a formal waistcoat and a very short skirt.

  It might be better than here. But, I told her, they have casinos in London.

  London?

  And in Brighton. And in Blackpool. And probably in Weston-super-Mare.

  London, she said. Séance on a Wet Afternoon.

  You liked that one?

  That Richard was in it. Hard to pronounce.

  Attenborough, I said.

  Say hello to London, she said. And to your wife. A pity I never got to meet her. And you must kiss little Phoebe before you go.

  I kissed her first. Her make-up was perfect that evening, all of the lines masked in a film of foundation, the lips etched perfectly with the thin pencil, the eyes shaded with powder blue.

  Then I kissed the Pomeranian, and lost myself in the gypsy crowd.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Neil Jordan was born in 1950 in Sligo. His first book of stories, Night in Tunisia, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and his subsequent critically acclaimed novels include The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster, Shade and Mistaken. The films he has written and directed have won multiple awards, including an Academy Award (The Crying Game), a Golden Bear at Venice (Michael Collins), a Silver Bear at Berlin (The Butcher Boy) and several BAFTAs (Mona Lisa and The End of the Affair). He lives in Dublin.

  neiljordan.com

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Night in Tunisia

  The Past

  The Dream of a Beast

  Sunrise with Sea Monster

  Shade

  Mistaken

  First published in Great Britain 2016

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  © Neil Jordan, 2016

  Neil Jordan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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  ISBN 978 1 4088 6515 6

  eISBN 978 1 4088 6517 0

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  Neil Jordan, The Drowned Detective