Sunrise with Sea Monster (11 page)

Now tell me what was it really like, Mouse whispered as we staggered out after closing time.

So, I said, you saw through the hyperbole.

I've got the God's-eye view, he said, fingering his collar.

It was drab, I told him, drabber than you can ever imagine.

You're wrong, he told me, I can imagine drabness all too well.

Of course, I realised. You've got a prison of your own.

One that'll last longer than yours.

We had reached the barred windows of Hatch House.

They won't take pot-shots at you if you shimmy down a drainpipe.

My problem is in shimmying up.

He stared at a drainpipe that led to a window on the third floor.

You can leave, Mouse. Come home with me.

Where would I go?

Your aunt still speaks well of you.

Like fuck, he said.

He walked towards the pipe and tested it. Then began to climb.

Call me, he said, please.

I will, I said.

Why don't I believe you?

I don't know.

I do. Because my present state is too depressing. But tell me you'll call and I can imagine it's true.

I'll call, I shouted, then he put one finger to his lips and almost fell from the drainpipe.

Remember me to your father anyway. Then he slid open the window and was gone.

The train left me on the promenade with the moon illuminating the high swelling of the sea. I was light-headed. I had forgotten
to ask about a key and found a handful of stones which I flung at the windows. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, I shouted drunkenly, let
down your hair. She opened an upstairs window and her hair hung in the moonlight like a skein of rope. Did I wake him? I asked
her. She shook her head and had half a smile on her face. A pity, I shouted and she frowned so I shouted again. Don't you
want him to wake? She closed the window and I watched the procession of lights down the floors as she made it to the hallway.
Then the light showed through the amber glass on the door panels and the door opened.

She was wearing a virginal flannel nightgown, like a nurse's.

What's happened to you? I asked her, you've lost all your colour.

How? she said.

You brightened up this house once, now you dress like a nurse.

Because I am a nurse, she said, gesturing me to be quiet with one finger to her lips.

No, I answered, you're a wife.

A wife and a nurse, she whispered, letting me inside, closing the door behind her.

Besides, who's to hear?

No one, she said. More's the pity.

She looked at me across the width of my grandfather's picture and she shook her head.

You're drunk.

Not yet, I said and walked into the kitchen. I reached up into the top cabinet where the whiskey was and found it empty. Doesn't
he drink now? I asked her. You're being cruel, she said. I shook my head, not meaning to be cruel at all. I'm sad, I told
her. I had so much to tell him. Tell me then, she said, pulling a bottle out from an entirely different drawer.

I wanted to tell him, I said, the things I enjoyed with him and why I could never tell him the things I enjoyed. I wanted
to tell him how I wondered whether times of enjoyment that are never spoken of can be considered enjoyment at all. I wanted
to tell him how in my Babylonian captivity—a phrase which incidentally he would have relished—that was the only question I
could think about.

She poured two glasses on the table and sat down.

Now you tell me, I said to her, why that is?

She looked at me and drank. Her lip was seriously perfect over the glass.

What were the things you enjoyed? she asked.

Fishing, I said. But that was before your time.

You never tried to understand him, she said.

And you did? I asked her.

Yes, she said. I can honestly say I tried.

So tell me, then. The word tell in my alcoholic brain seemed worth repeating, endlessly repeating.

He was the kind of man that finds it difficult to tell things.

Don't say was, I told her.

All right, she said and repeated. He is the kind of man who finds it difficult to tell.

To tell what, I asked her.

To tell of things of the heart, she said and the phrase seemed to express a kind of loss in her.

So you noticed it too.

I was speaking with regard to you, she said. He found those matters difficult to express which created that difficulty in
you which made it more difficult for him.

Oh Rose thou art sick, I quoted.

On the contrary, she said, I'm very well.

I was quoting, I said. It was a different Rose.

I know, she said. The invisible worm.

I have no doubt, I told her, that it created that difficulty in me but what interests me is where the difficulty came from.
I wasn't born with it, or wouldn't like to think I was. His difficulty was all his own.

If you like to think of it that way, she said. But remember you're drunk now and so you could be wrong.

Not yet, I said. Not yet drunk, I mean. I poured some more of the whiskey and expected her to tell me to stop. When she didn't,
I reached one finger out to touch her lip.

So am I wrong? I asked.

Yes, she repeated, but let my finger stay on her lip.

So what did he tell you? I asked her.

Much the same as you're telling me, she said.

I don't believe you, I said and I didn't. Her silence told me I was right.

The world turned wrong for him, she said. He wanted to make sure that didn't happen to you. He wanted you to be something.
Then he was afraid you would reject what he wanted you to be.

So I did, I said.

Well, she said. That saddened him.

And did you love him? I asked, with my finger between the lip and the glass.

She drew her head back. My finger hung in the air, pointing at nothing in particular. She drank once, closed her lips, then
opened them again. Her hair made two sheaves of wheat around her forehead. Her eyes were like the eyes of statues, pitiful
and yet emotionless.

I did what you couldn't bring yourself to do, she said. I cared for him.

As much as you cared for me?

She stood up. She brushed her flannel nightdress with her hands.

There are things I won't let you say, she told me. You have to remember that, if you stay here.

You going to throw me out?

No, she said. But if you stay here, there are things you will not say.

What things? I asked her.

You know what things.

Perhaps I don't.

Then I will tell you when you say them, she said.

Do you promise? I asked her.

She turned to leave.

Rose, I called her.

She turned back.

If I promise not to say them will you promise—

What?

To tell me what those things are?

She left without answering. I finished the whiskey and listened to her feet pad through the house. I expected to hear the
sound of the wheelchair, as she moved him towards the bed and lifted him inside. Then I wondered how she could have managed,
with his weight, which cannot have diminished that much. But there were only her footsteps crossing the floor, a piece of
silence, then the soft creaking of the bed as she sank into it. So either he slept in the chair, or she had lifted him from
it already. I sat there wondering did he dream, was his sleep any different from his waking. And were his dreams full of the
words he couldn't say, full of the sounds he couldn't hear. I must have fallen asleep then because I saw his face bending
over me, his mouth opening soundlessly in the attempt to speak. I tried to read his lips, but the beard obscured them.

I woke abruptly and saw the whiskey dripping from the table, the glass overturned. I got a cloth and swabbed the wet table
and felt the absolute silence. I had a sudden longing for the bed of straw in that monastery cellar, the wheezing of Dai's
damaged lungs and Antonio whispering from the corner about his imminent demise. I wondered should I have come back, should
I stay here, should I have been born at all. It was alcoholic melancholia, I told myself and I rose unsteadily and walked
out into the hall. I saw their door was ajar. I walked gently forwards and pushed it open. There was a pale wash of orange
from the streetlight angling through the room. He was lying by the window, a blanket tucked neatly around him, the silver
of the wheelchair gleaming beneath him. So it spreads out into a bed, I thought. His hair was tufted by the pillow underneath
his head, like filigree against the light. There was a chinois screen in the centre of the room. I stepped inside and could
see her beyond the screen, lying in the great oak bed. So that was it, I thought. I watched her for a while, the rise and
fall of her chest under the blankets, until I got some sense and went to my room.

The next day brought sunlight, a great solid wedge of it coursing through the window. I got up late and could feel that tenderness
round my temples, that moral unease brought on by too much whiskey. I made my way downstairs and wondered what I'd said last
night. The kitchen was empty and the ochre walls were bright with the sunlight. I walked through the hall and heard the rustling
of papers from the living-room. She was sitting by the window, thumbing through a pile of bills or letters. He sat across
from her like a great immobile child, his head down and his mouth slightly open. She didn't look up when I came in so I decided
to apologise.

I'm sorry, I said, if there's something I should be sorry about.

What kind of an apology is that?

None, I suppose. But I don't remember.

She lit a cigarette and looked up from her papers. The smoke did what smoke does to her face. Then she held out a letter.

Came for you in the post today, she said.

The stamp was from Spain. I saw the General's face again, with the three-cornered hat.

You've got friends over there? she asked.

I shook my head. I pulled back the envelope which came away too easily, as if it had been opened already.

You must think me rude, she said. I never asked you about it.

She dropped her papers and stood up.

Come into the kitchen, she said, have some breakfast and tell me.

We walked inside, leaving father alone there.

Did someone open this? I asked her.

Jesus, Donal, give me more credit.

Maybe they censor the post?

You're in some kind of trouble?

I said nothing. I opened the letter and saw a scrawl of mathematical symbols. She cracked two eggs on to the range and asked
me again about Spain. So I told her, the truth this time. About the journey to Madrid, the afternoon at the ambulance wheel
and the incarceration. She laughed.

Don't laugh, I said to her.

I'm sorry, she answered, laughing more. But you must admit it's funny. After all that drama, the only action you get is an
hour behind the wheel of an ambulance. Do you drive well?

I shook my head and began to laugh with her. No, I told her, it was truly heroic. I turned a corner and whacked into a fire
hydrant. I could hear the gunfire.

You could hear it?

From about two miles away. Then a mortar bomb hit the house up ahead of me. I reversed back into a street full of loyalists.

Then prison?

She was smiling now, trying to hold in the giggles.

Safest place to be. Till you had to go and fuck it up.

I thought I saved you from a firing squad.

Actually you did, I told her. But only the sound of it.

How do you mean?

I shook my head. I thought of Antonio, probably two weeks dead now.

Leave it, Rose, I said. I looked at the letter again. I remembered Hans and his talk of the Heidelberg principle. Or was it
Heisenberg?

She came towards me smiling, holding a plate.

Here she said, soldier. Eat.

The hair was falling over her face. She sat down beside me, the smile a nostalgic, far-off one, watching me as I ate. The
sun came through the window, lit one half of her face. It suddenly struck me that she seemed happy. She had in some indefinable
way become a woman, since I went away.

What are you thinking of, Rose? I asked her.

I'm thinking you're going to have to pay your way.

With what?

Don't the war-wounded get pensions?

In this war, maybe. Not in that one.

Maybe I can employ you then, to take him for walks. A penny a mile.

No, I told her, I'll walk him for free.

As she settled a blanket round his shoulders I saw a tangle of wire glinting in the open cellar door. I walked down two steps
and saw lying between the coal-scuttles two iron rods, the skeins of catgut and the row of fish-hooks, a shovel beside them.
I grabbed them all in a bundle and walked back up to where she had him perched in the open doorway. I'm taking him fishing,
I told her. Fishing? she asked. Nightlines, I told her. Before your time.

The tide was out and the sun glinted as it had years ago, off the scallops of the rocks. I turned when I reached the promenade
and saw her standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, watching us, her yellow hair bright in the sunlight.

She seems happy, I told him, as I wheeled him past the urinal, its great wings of concrete trying to imitate a pagoda. Did
you do it, or was it me? Could it possibly have been you that opened her like a flower and let her breathe? That abstract,
girlish air had been replaced by something different, something hard to define. If it was me, I told him I would leave, but
if it was him I promised to stay. I could quietly delight in her happiness, his silence, as long as things stayed that way.

There was a ship out on the sea, unnaturally high on the surface of the horizon, some kind of battleship, metal grey against
the hot sky. I've become a hero of sorts, father, I said. A counterfeit hero. A hero of confusion or out of confusion. Should
I go to public meetings and invent achievements, my suffering under duress, my prescience even, to have been a kind of harbinger
to the Emergency we labour under? Will you not be proud?