Sunrise with Sea Monster (7 page)

It is a yellowing scrap, torn from a book. I read.

Because I could not stop for death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The carriage held but just ourselves—

And immortality.

He waits for more but the page is torn and at the rough edges the words are indecipherable. What does it mean? he asks. I
tell him it is a poetic meditation on the theme of death, quite at odds with the shabby ceremonials outside. But beautiful,
no? Beautiful indeed, I tell him, but useless. Frederick had a use for it, he says. He said his soul was in the words. And
if you read it when they shoot me, mine will be in them too.

I look at his dark eyes by the barred window and my own feel wet. Because he accepts it so readily, I can only believe it
will happen. So I promise him I'll read it if they come to shoot him, if they haven't shot me first. He rewards me with a
smile.

The gun was to blame. It hinted at a past of his I'd never seen, at possibilities I dared not think of. The piano lost its
frisson
for me, though the lessons kept on, like the memory of movement in a limb that has been severed. I took the gun walking with
Mouse along the tracks round the Head, laying bullets from the chamber on the metal struts and waiting till a train came by
to explode them. I took to shooting salmon in the river by the harbour, in mid-air as they leapt up the weir, flashes of silver
which would explode when hit in a stripe of red. The nightlines had become a memory as well by then and this mode of fishing
would have to suffice. I sat on the peak of the Head one afternoon with the town below me and the sprawl of the city beyond.
I put one bullet in the chamber, spun it then stuck the barrel in my ear and listened to the sound of the trigger as I pulled.
A greasy click, slow, like the operation of a giant wheel as the chamber moved and then I knew either an explosion of sound
and the final silence or a further click. I heard the hammer hit home and then a silence did descend, the clouds moved in
quiet glory over Djouce mountain, the sun came through in a many-fingered burst and I relished my escape. It was a version
of death, a peace beyond anything life could throw at me. I tried again with Mouse, in the old mill behind the sewage plant.
Here, I told him, a game of chance, and showed him how I put the single bullet in the chamber, spun it with the palm of one
hand and shoved the barrel in my ear. Stop it Dony, he said. Why? I asked him. Give me one reason why. I waited for a reason
and when he had none squeezed the trigger. He hit the gun from my hand as I did so and it exploded, sending the bullet into
the watertower of the sewage plant behind. We watched a stream of amber-coloured liquid squirt from the tower. There's your
reason, he said.

It was an escape though, of another kind. The liquid fell, silently, in a long arc and formed a puddle at our feet. Mouse
was shouting at me, his mouth opening and closing, though no sound came out. Then he hit me in the face and I could hear again.
Could have been you, he said, you fucking nut. That stream of piss, I said. Yeah, he said, and turned away, it could have
been you.

I kept it with me, though, tucked into the pocket of a gabardine coat I developed the habit of wearing. I took the train to
Dublin, to a meeting of the Republican Congress in Rathmines Town Hall. I heard grizzled old veterans of his war rail against
the Free State, talk about the betrayal of just about everything, including the Republic and the working class. "I knew your
father" became a kind of refrain to me, expressed with a hint of regret and disapproval and a large dollop of suspicion about
my presence there. He had put his name to several publications on the danger of the growing tide of anarchy, De Valera's betrayal
of the principles of the Treaty and the rising communist menace. I watched him speak in the Royal Dublin Society on the virtues
of the corporate state. I stood in the background while they drove a flock of goats through the august premises, twenty through
each door, and I could see from the back his expression as a large horned monster leapt the podium. Cries of Blueshirt! and
Fascist! and scum of all description echoed round the hall as the meeting broke up in chaos and my last glimpse was of him,
tall, statuesque, his bearded mouth still moving soundlessly amidst the mayhem.

I took the train home, wondering did he know I had been there. I found him standing in the kitchen, a glass of whiskey in
his hand. You were there, he said, I saw you near the back. It was a public gathering, I said. What happened, he asked, to
the right to disagree? I don't want to argue, I said. Do, he said, tell me what they would have replied if they hadn't taken
recourse to a herd ofgoats. Don't worry about it, I said. You kept your dignity intact. What does that mean? he asked. It
means, I said, you expounded your Fascist drivel with all the decorum of a gentleman. Where did you learn those words? he
asked, those aren't your words. I'll make them mine, I said. They're teaching you to hate me, he said. And who is they? I
asked. Those latter-day Republicans, he said, those corner-boys and counter-jumpers, the ones who've made a career out of
hating. I don't hate you, I said, to myself as much as to him. Then I wondered had I told a lie, or at best a half-truth.
He must have wondered too, for he finished his whiskey and walked towards the kitchen door.

A key rattles in the metal lock and the barred door opens. A triangle of light comes in and they come in with it in their
triangular hats. The Spaniard turns his face to the shadows but it is me they point at. I stand and approach the tilted gun-muzzle
and the fear that has run through everyone shifts in me like a dulled ulcer.

I walk between them down the long corridor with its peeling parabola of white. They gesture the way with their hands, quite
without suspicion or hate, as if both seem pointless now that it is all over. We pass a plaster-cast statue of Christ in the
wall. Both the hands are broken and the guard nearest me turns to me and grins. He mutters in a dialect I can't fathom and
I smile back to show I understand. We come to a door which they both reach to open, then one steps back to let the other do
so and they usher me inside. We pass through a room without windows, with a plain wooden desk and a water bucket with a dull
liquid inside it. One sits by the desk, the other stands by the bucket and gestures me towards the door beyond.

I open the door and see an oak table and a silver cigarette case, a carafe of water and diamond-cut glasses. There is a man
sitting at the table, German, his uniform bearing the insignia of the Abwehr, with a sheaf of papers in his hand. His skin
is fair, as unused to the sun as mine is. After a space of seconds he says, please close the door.

I obey. The room has churchlike windows with a fan revolving in the ceiling.

Gore, he says, Donal Gore.

I nod, then when he stays silent, I say, that's me.

The question is, I suppose, what is one of your nationality doing here?

Waiting, I say.

Or should I rephrase it, he says. How did one of your nationality get here?

There is another bucket near the wall, dark water inside, a rag floating in it, stained with crimson.

I volunteered, I say.

Why?

Do I have to give an account of myself?

He looks up, for the first time. Green eyes and sandy hair, a freckled sunburnt face and a mouth that seems amused at nothing
in particular.

No, he says, in precise Oxford tones, but it would be simpler if you did.

Why? I ask him.

You've seen what happens in the square outside. If you cooperate, it could be to your advantage.

And if I don't?

He shrugs, then lights a cigarette and reads from the sheaf of papers.

You were born into a middle-class Irish family, your mother died when you were six, your father was a minister in the Free
State government.

He inhales, looking at a paper in front of him.

Your first encounter with politics was with the Republican Congress in Dublin. He exhales, and raises two pale eyebrows.

So, he says. You tell me. What brought you here?

He was eating bacon from the breakfast Maisie had prepared for him when I said I was going and the strings of bacon stuck
between his teeth and he had to pause between his sentences to pick out the bacon with a sharpened match so his words were
even less frequent than normal. You are leaving, he said, because you hate me, not because of any nebulous political ideas.
And though it might have been true, I said it wasn't. And you think you hate me because of her, but in fact you hate me because
I am simply me, your father. Please, he said, as I moved to leave, get your hatreds in perspective otherwise you'll never—and
he stopped there, as if he couldn't finish. Never what? I asked. But he said nothing else, so I went.

The cigarette is nearing its end. The German lets the ash fall from his lip to the surface of the oak table in front of him.

Representations, he says, have been made on your behalf. You would be most unwise to ignore them.

By whom? I ask.

I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. So what brought you here?

My father, I say.

Your father brought you here? He smiles.

No. He's tried to arrange—Ah. Your father has made the representations? Perhaps. As I told you, I neither know nor care. My
function is simply to get some answers to some simple questions.

For instance?

If I must repeat myself, what brought you here?

She had come the night before with her music case under her arm out of habit I assumed, since we had long given up all pretext
of lessons. Let me be the first to congratulate you, I said, aware that he could see us from the living-room window, walking
the length of the promenade. The evening sky was immaculate, the sea was serene, only disturbed by the movement of paddle-boats
around the Head. You can't blame me, she said, you can't take that tone. What tone is that Rose? I asked her. I don't expect
you to understand, she said, I don't want to talk about it. So what can we talk about? I asked her. You, she said. You'll
kill him if you go. So, I said, maybe there is a reason to my going after all. How did you get like this? she asked. I don't
know, I said. Maybe the sins of fathers are visited on their sons. He is a good man, she said, better than you've ever given
him credit for. Better than you'll ever know if you go like this. So where should I stay? Rose, I asked her. In the bedroom
next to yours? He asked me, she said, he asked me to consider his affection for me. He finds it difficult to say such things,
I was touched, I said I would and you're going to tell me that's a crime. All I've said is my congratulations, I told her.
Donal, she said and she grabbed me and pushed my shoulderblades against the promenade railings, I'm begging you, don't do
this to him. So it's him it's being done to, I said. All right, she said and took a breath. Don't do it to me, then. I'm not
doing it to you, I said.

She was wearing a peach-coloured dress underneath her gabardine. Her blonde hair was piled on her head in a way that was new
to me. She laid her chin on my shoulder and stared out at the sea. I have a feeling, she said. A premonition. Of what, I asked.
Something dreadful. Something worse than dreadful. If you go. I can't stay, Rose, I said, as softly as I could. You know that.
Let me leave, then, she said. I'll get out of your lives. It'll be as if you never saw me. The thing is Rose, I said, it can
never be that. It can't? she said. Then go and be damned. 'Cause you will be.

I volunteered, I tell him, I took the course of action most likely to wound my father. I became the person he was most likely
to fear, despise, to loathe. I wanted to quench forever the last embers of speech between us. I joined the Republican movement
he had abandoned, espoused whatever politics would fill him with terror. I walked into Liberty Hall by the Liffey in Dublin
on an April morning and stood in a queue with a line of other lost souls and when my time came I wrote my name down. So what
brought me here was a series of accidents, beginning with the accident of birth, a childhood spent on the promenade in Bray,
a holiday town not a stone's throw from Dublin, a slender talent for music at an early age, the discovery of certain sentimental
harmonies in the company of a woman who was to become my stepmother. And, while we are at it, nightlines.

Nightlines? he queries, a smile playing on his thin lips.

Nightlines, I say, a practice common in the South of Ireland. Two metal rods with a line of hooks strung between them, to
be jammed in the sand at low tide, the hooks skewered with rag or lugworms, take your pick, then left to simmer as the ocean
passes over them until morning.

And in the morning? he asks. His smile has broadened.

In the morning the tide, following a logic known only to itself, makes an orderly retreat, leaving a ray, a plaice, a pollock
or, if you're lucky, a salmon bass swinging from the hooks. This practice to be indulged in at arbitrary intervals with a
familiar who may relish the sense of relative peace it brings, the main pleasure, I might add, being in the silence brought
about by the absence of the need for speech.

Is that all? he asks.

No, I say. Lest I misrepresent the pleasures of this ritual, it should be stressed that the actual catch is ancillary to the
process. The evening walk with the hooks swinging between both participants is without doubt the high point. The morning's
catch is an afterthought, a by-product, often-times a let-down.

I think I understand, he says.

No, I say, you don't. Neither for that matter do I. But if representations have been made on my behalf by my father, I will
regretfully have to decline them.

What precisely do you mean by that?

It means, I say, I won't accept his patronage. Or yours. Whatever sordid arrangement he came to with your superiors is nothing
to do with me. Now, if you'll excuse me.

I stand. He stands too. He says certainly, then floors me with a straight right from the shoulder, western style. I feel a
mouthful of knuckles, an exploding lip and find my head crashing off the bucket on the floor. It wobbles, then falls, spilling
stale blood and water over my chest.