Sunrise with Sea Monster (19 page)

The news from Europe passed us by, seemed monstrous, but somehow less intimate than the monstrosities we had accomplished.
Rose came down from Sligo on the day of the fall of Stalingrad and we walked the promenade for an hour, before she collected
her things. She had felt ill for weeks on her return, she told me, had feared she was pregnant, then discovered she wasn't
and instantly regretted it. She was a widow now, she said, and in the country that had a certain status. We were both regretful,
but empty of tears as she emptied her room. The dress I had bought her was packed neatly with the others, the ring was still
on her finger. You could live here, I told her, if it took your fancy, but she shook her head and I understood why. So we
said goodbye once more, by the Bray station this time, and I saw her borne off by the double-gauge of the Great Southern Railway.

IV

T
HEN, ON THE day after De Valera presented his condolences to the German embassy on the death of Hitler, I resurrected my
father.

He had died in that other sea, to the west, and this smaller one outside my window, that I fished when the light was good
seemed to hold his spirit in a more companionable form. Rose was by now a memory, a bittersweet one, that scent of dried flowers
matching the printed flowers on her dress, her upright back by the upright piano, her long blonde hair shifting as she played.
I drank too much most nights, whiskey in the empty study and, when the night was clear and the humour took me, Guinness in
the waterfront bars down near the Head. I would wake with the first light, walk out behind the house to where the Dargle river
spilt into the harbour.

That river was a small insignificant one, almost an afterthought to the layers of sand and silt that clogged its banks, but
in the early morning when it reflected the sky it had a certain muddy poetry to it. I had clear memories of a kingfisher,
scudding across the brown surface with its flash of royal blue, of the mullet that would hang beneath the bridge where the
sewer pipe came out. I would sit beneath the huge metal girders of the railway bridge, watch these mullet and think of how
the fish we had always caught together were of the unprepossessing kind: mullet, plaice, sole, an eel or two, the lazy kind,
addicted to the grosser forms of waste, fun for catching, maybe, but not for eating. I would watch the somnolent arcs these
mullet made, then hear the six-thirty from Cork to Dublin whacking by, shaking the earth I sat on, the huge metal girders,
adding a ghostly ripple to the swatches of water, sending the mullet off in whiplike flashes to the darker corners that fish
go to whenever they go.

My memories of him were dimming. The alcohol of each night didn't help, but I would substitute them with fancies. See him
beneath the water, the fish we caught when we were younger draped round his neck in a tangle of eel, catgut, gill and reddened
mouth for all the world like a wreath. Or smaller ones around his forehead like a halo, woven together like sprigs of myrtle,
his head ascending through them to a bowl of light which halates it in turn. Cleaving through the water upwards, in a dive
reversed, the white cloud and the blue sky reflected in the metal surface of the Dargle water and the angels, if they deigned
to grace my fancy, rising with him, whipping this way and that in the stiff morning breezes. Then at times I would think of
the banks of silt around the river conserving his flesh, that dull sand we all return to and the rust-coloured water holding
whatever water inhabited him, spreading, the colour of old blood, out to those cold white horses that played on the sea beyond
the river's mouth. His soul playing over it like that unseen wind that only showed itself on the water when it rippled, then
shuddered as the train went by, that wind becoming a secondary gust the train sucked into itself then dispersed among those
frothy horses along the shore further down the line.

These were fancies, easy to imagine with the warped clarity that too much whiskey brings. What proved impossible to imagine
was what common sense told me—that he simply was no more. And the fact that the old prosaic reality proved impossible to picture
while any alternative to it was blissfully simple proved something else to me in turn: that these layers of silt, those ovals
of pig-iron above it, the six-thirty roaring to Dublin, Dublin itself and the sea beyond it served simply as an adjunct to
his story. He died in the sea to the west and the sea itself depended on him for its continued existence, since why else would
I have sat beside it, or beside this river, its drab, half-forgotten tributary? And to return to fish—for somehow fish are
central to his tale—only seriously there when caught, dead, gutted and eaten, otherwise as elusive as memory itself, backwards
flips on the surface of the water, shadows running to shadows. Fish were important in more ways than one. As the garland to
our cruellest moments, and to our kindest ones and as a conduit to a whole river, even a sea of memories. The memory of those
piscine armfuls led to other recollections which would ripple on the surface of my quotidian dreaming and drag me down with
them. There was another sea there, but I was underneath it, the brown waters were as cold as dreaming is, and a cod or a ling
or at times a codling would weave towards me and beyond with a memory pinned to it like a
Bord iascaigh Mhaire
tag. The sea was all about death, and death drew into itself all the moments of its attendant lives and my attempt to understand
this sea had taken years now and one memory would draw me towards it, always the same, lapping like a rising tide when you
had forgotten there was such a thing as water, for you had thought the tide had retreated, your bare feet had grown used to
the hard scalloped sand and yet there it was, creeping round your ankles saying, in so many words, remember me. And the memory
was this. The two of us, laying nightlines for the umpteenth time at low tide.

I had travelled to the Curragh to visit Hans in the low collection of Nissen huts that constituted his prison. A plain of
flat green as far as the eye could see dotted with clumps of grazing sheep, a copse of trees barely hiding the military barracks.
He emerged from a group of half-starved Republicans, the grey pallor of his face now echoing the grey of his tattered uniform.
You have betrayed me, Irish, he said.

Yes, I said, betrayal seems to be my destiny. And what does this say of these times where betrayal becomes the only viable
response?

He didn't answer, so I proffered him the brown paper parcel I held which contained a bottle of Irish whiskey and two strings
of fine black pudding. He hesitated, as if the last vestiges of his pride were reviving themselves, then stretched out his
hands and pulled it towards him.

Schnapps, he said, as he ripped open the paper, couldn't you have brought me schnapps? Though he pulled the cork from the
whiskey and began to drink it anyway.

At least you won't be shot here, I told him.

True, he said, you have other more refined means of torture.

What are they? I asked, and he told me how they heard Mass each morning, played hurling and handball each afternoon and studied
Irish at night.

You should join the classes, I told him, you might learn something.

Linguistics, he said, was never my strong point.

Then I remembered his mathematical leanings, and told him how his mentor Heisenberg had been captured during the Rhine advance
and was being held incommunicado outside London.

He will understand the true nature of uncertainty, then, he said. He passed me the bottle and I drank and after a time his
eyes lost their resistance. Maybe I'll stay here, Irish, he said.

You have no alternative, I said, looking at the rolls of barbed wire across the fields behind him.

No, he said, when the whole thing is over and it will be over soon, yes?

Soon, I assured him.

I will learn your language and your violent sports and teach mathematics in a boys' school. Your president is mathematical?
he asked.

He runs the country on Euclidean principles, I told him.

Maybe I could help him then, Hans said, the whiskey making him dewy-eyed. It would be good for once, to be of use. And Irish,
he said, as I made to go. Just so you know. I cannot blame you. In your situation, who knows, I would have done the same.

That evening in the Railway Bar I learnt that his Fiihrer had immolated himself and that De Valera had, with all the logic
of Zeno, presented himself at the diplomatic offices of the Reich to offer his condolences. The conversation in the bar ranged
from the supportive to the censorious. Backing a loser there, said a local landscape gardener, sucking heavily on a cigarette.
Sure what has he been backing since the whole bother began, said a coal merchant whose two sons served in the Irish Guards,
his blackened hands clutching a half-empty pint. If it's not one shower, he muttered cryptically, it's the other.

I drank and listened and felt the same dull ache. Some facts draw all other facts into themselves, create a mystical union
between disparate things, and the thought of De Valera brought me back once more to him, to his study with the green baize
table and his fingers pasting newspaper cut-outs of Civil War atrocities into the ledger he kept for that purpose.

I finished my drink and edged my way outside, hoping to be rid of that memory. But out there the moon was full and illuminated
perfectly the green swath that led to his house, etched each small gazebo on the seafront in a childlike blue. I walked across
the grass, which was wet with May dew, to the promenade. The tide was out and the moonlight touched each ridge on the empty
sand and blurred the distances, so that sand was all there was to the horizon where the thinnest line of silver intimated
the sea. I knew the full moon was the cause of it, made the tides full and the absences fuller and remembered my dream again,
him running barefoot across the strand in advance of the crushing wave while the doctor ran to the house with his black bag
and Maisie rubbed her hands on her smock on the prom with a distracted air.

I wanted to exorcise him then once and for all, put him finally to rest and went to the house, pulled open the door of the
cupboard below the stairs and found the metal rods, rusting now, bent into a circle at the top with the old gut still tied
to them. The lines had discoloured, turned green in places, amber in others and the old blunt hooks still hung from them.
I wrapped them in one hand, took a coal shovel in the other, walked outside down the steps on to the sand and began to walk.
I walked towards the line of silver that was the tide, but never found it. The closer I walked, it seemed, the more it retreated.
I saw a worm cast, dug out rapid spadefuls, chasing the source and pulled out three rags. I walked on, but the tide came no
closer, then dug again. I came up with some lugs this time, walked again until my effort to reach that sea seemed futile.
It was the same thin line on the horizon of quiet silver, taunting me with its absence.

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.