From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  People remember their lessons, though. That something can’t come of nothing. Especially the very minute they hear a bad thing said about their neighbour. Yerra no, I don’t know, they’ll invariably say first, to make a show of loyalty. Sure, that couldn’t be true. But then later they’ll think about that thing they heard about the person and think, But why is it being said at all? Where has it come from? There has to be something at the bottom of it. Without even knowing it they’ll think of what they were taught in school and what nature itself has bred into all men’s minds: all things must come of other things; nothing can come from nothing. And once a thing enters a person’s mind, it’s always there, like woodworm in the leg of a chair, like cells of cancer, like rats in the cavities of the earth; it can’t ever be fully eradicated. Even things long forgotten remain in the dark infinity of the mind; there’s no unlearning. What’s said can’t be unsaid. And no law in this universe is immutable.

  I bore false witness against that man, that neighbour of mine, and he came to me in my office in Augustine Stritch’s converted townhouse and he told me he’d take the money after all: he wanted just to up his sticks and leave, to educate his children overseas; that way they’d speak another language, or know something of the wider world. That’s a pity now, I said, you’re just a week or so too late, the offer’s off the table, the project plans have all been dropped. But maybe they’ll be resurrected now, he said, now that I’m willing to help? And I told him I would see, and to go on about his work as normal, to hold off on any decisions relating to that certain project, that the terms would be different now, and I saw his eyes were threatened by tears as he nodded, his hands were shaking and he seemed to have shrunk; his face was drawn and his shirt and jacket billowed out around him as he walked. Come back to me a week from tomorrow, I said, and when he did I told him an account had been set up, and here were the keys and the codes, and as soon as he signed off on his decision and my clients were furnished with evidence of this, one hundred thousand pounds would be credited to that account. And he didn’t even argue: he hadn’t the heart.

  Still I can’t say it. I can’t say what I was. I’ll say what I looked to be to other people. An accountant. Then a lobbyist. I was given that title only years later, though. There was no official word for what I did until recently enough, though it’s an ancient art. I arranged things for people. I read people well, and always knew the right words. I calculated people well and always knew the right amounts. Augustine Stritch gave me my start, and I took to numbers, their definiteness, their unyielding natures: even when you chop a number down to a half or a tenth or a millionth or a billionth part of its former self it still exists, it’s still whole and pristine and incorruptible. When everything else is gone, when the universe has collapsed back in on itself and time itself has stopped, there’ll still be numbers, frozen in the singularity, waiting for existence to push itself into being again, so they can put order on the great expansion, and tell it when it’s reached its terminal mass, its ineluctable point of return to its beginning.

  I was asked to present ideas, to persuade people to make certain decisions. That became the thing I was. Lobby is a strange verb. It keeps its shape and strangeness in conjugation, but it almost stops being a word. It becomes a soft sound with no meaning, no plosive part to give it an edge on utterance that it can tie itself to and make itself understood. I lobby, you lobby, he lobbies, I lobbied. I looked it up in a dictionary one time, to know its official meaning. To petition. I often had to repeat it in conversation. You what? A lobbyist. Oh, right, ya. The hiss in its tail as it became a noun would harden it and the syllables would meld sufficiently that the interlocutor would recognize the word and, after a few seconds of panicked thought of halls and porches and vestibules, they’d nearly always blush a little or cough nervously and excuse themselves with polite mumbles. I didn’t even know it was what I was until a journalist called me it one time. The word often puts me in mind of a hand or a fist being drawn back and flung forward repeatedly to lend physical force to a position, to better deliver an argument, to ask for something with a hint of a threat. It puts others automatically in mind of lies.

  Anyway, there was nothing, it seemed, that I couldn’t get done. No plans I couldn’t have brought to fruition, no White Papers I couldn’t have transformed to law, no land I couldn’t see bought or sold or parcelled or changed from green to red on council maps: whole towns rose up from the soil with the energy of my whispered words, my unbreakable promises, the grip of my enveloping hand. This was a new kind of a thing in people’s minds, but discredited nearly before its birth, like the child of a prostitute. I was among the first, anyway, if not the first, to be given the title. I wasn’t the first one, though. Wasn’t Jesus Christ Himself petitioned as He starved and thirsted in the desert? The envelope He was offered contained the world.

  O Father, bless me, I have sinned. O Father, hear me just. Hear me. I can’t say it. I’ll tell you instead about a man I once knew. A man, a kind of a tramp, I suppose, who stayed in a garret at the top of the building I lived in when I was first indentured to the Brothers Stritch. I don’t know if he even paid rent. All I knew then was that at some point he’d lost something or someone and the loss had shattered him. Where, where, where? he’d say. Just that one word, over and over, a question to himself, to the world, to nobody. I’d meet him in the morning on the stairs or down in the damp hallway and he’d greet me with a whispered where or two, just as another person would say hello or good morning. Sometimes in the evenings he’d have drink taken or whatever calming drugs he was on would have worn off and he might pause as he passed to grip my forearm gently and his febrile eyes would meet mine; his wheres then would be louder, more urgent and imploring. I don’t know, I’d reply, and shrug him off, hardly slowing. I often saw him at the end of town where I worked, standing with his back against the wall beside the Augustinians’ vaulted doorway, an empty cardboard cup in one hand. He’d have his arms out slightly from his sides, one barely shod foot hiked up, his head resting against the concrete, his Adam’s apple bobbing rhythmically as his breath was fashioned into a stream of low wheres by a soft ululation of his tongue and the barest rise and fall of his chin. Where, where, where flowing relentlessly through gapped and gritted teeth, like a never-ending, whispered prayer. As I passed him he’d show no sign of recognizing or even seeing me. His racked face would invariably be cast skyward, his pose fixed in a parody of the Passion, a casual crucifixion. I learned later from the landlord, who I think was related to him in some way but didn’t care to admit it, that he’d lived years before in some roiling place in the centre of London and that he’d been married there. His infant son had toddled through an unlocked door and into the street. He was never found. He had searched and searched for a year and had lost his mind. He picked up a child once on a London street that looked like his son. It took seven or eight policemen to extricate the boy from his arms. The parents pushed for prosecution. He was sectioned, locked away for years, and repatriated on release. Hollowed, emptied, sent sailing home, at Her Majesty’s pleasure and expense. I never put money in his cup. He never met my eye on the street. I thought nothing of him then, but I think of him often now.

  I was married in 1970 at the age of twenty-five in the same church at Ardnamoher where I failed to make my first confession. I never failed again, though I never made an honest confession until today. I reeled the Act of Contrition off my tongue the second time of asking and each time after and most times he’d say, Good lad, go on, good lad, and he’d leave me away with two Hail Marys and a Glory Be. He’d sussed that I was who I was, from important people, from land. If he’d known that the first day he’d never have refused my absolution. I made up sins to tell that priest and all who came after him, and never mentioned the actual articles, the blasphemy or avarice, the vainglory or the lust. The terrible hubris. The other things. He was old, though, he couldn’t keep us all straight in his head, us progeny of labourers and landed men and layabou
ts: the outward signs of a child’s provenance were less distinct by then; everyone had shoes for one thing. I was married on a Friday morning and we had our wedding breakfast in O’Meara’s Hotel in Nenagh and my father made no speech and her father stood to thank the reverend father and to acknowledge the efforts of my parents and to express his satisfaction at the mettle and manners of his new son-in-law. He was practised and perfunctory and he neglected to mention his daughter or his wife. They sat straight and silent, side by side, smiling coldly. I thought to stand and toast her beauty and her gentle nature but I couldn’t. She was no beauty and anyway I hardly knew her. She was from unassailable, unimpeachable stock. She was from land that bordered ours. She was thick-hipped and thin-lipped and healthy. She gave me no trouble. She gave me three daughters and no son. And at the age of forty-five I fell in love.

  I stayed sometimes in Limerick in a flat above a shop. I owned the building and the shop was leased to a cobbler and I liked to wake to his tapping hammer and the squeaking ratchet of his vice, to listen to the accents of his customers, the easy lilt of them. There was an open fire in the flat and I was careful to have the flue cleaned regularly so I could make use of it. I liked to write out plans and calculations on sheets of unlined paper, to plot courses and link people and places and events and contingencies together and then to convert my maps to lists of actions, and I’d commit the list of actions to memory and burn the sheet of paper in the fire. And this ritual became a sacred thing. I’d watch the paper blacken and light, and I’d watch the flames consume my plans, baptize them to smoke, and the smoke would be drawn upwards and out into the damp air. I dined some evenings in the restaurant of a hotel on the city’s north side, a good walk along the river and across the bridge from my flat, and one Monday evening in the spring of 1990 I was served by a girl with blonde hair and light blue eyes and her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and tied in a braid, and her nose and lips and cheeks and chin were formed so perfectly they seemed impossible, like she was only a likeness of herself, a false image of perfection rendered by a flattering master. She asked me could she take my order in a soft accent that had the lilt but not the harshness of the city and I couldn’t answer her for a long moment because I’d forgotten what I’d decided to have, I’d forgotten even what the choices were, or what I’d had the last time I’d been there, and I think if I’d had to give her my own name at that moment that I’d have failed. She smiled and asked if I needed a few more minutes and I recovered myself sufficiently to order a sirloin steak, medium rare, and I wondered at myself, at my foolishness, at this imposturous, impossible feeling, this sudden weakness that was after overtaking me. She came back my way to clear a table just vacated and I looked at the back of her neck and the backs of her arms and I thought I would pay any amount of money to be allowed to stand behind her and to touch my lips to the back of her neck, to put my hands on her arms and grip her gently, to press myself against her. She turned and saw me staring and she fumbled and dropped a plate and it smashed across the polished hardwood floor and she said, Fuck, fuck, and I laughed and she looked up at me from her pretty haunch and said, Sorry, I didn’t mean to say fuck in front of a customer, and I told her she could say fuck in front of me any time, and that was the first time I’d ever used that kind of language in the presence of a member of the opposite sex and the sound of it from her and the sound of it from my own mouth thrilled me into the very centre of myself, into my tattered filthy soul.

  I went there every evening that week. Earlier, so the dining room was quieter, and she was always there. I became very aware of myself: I’d always dressed smartly and subtly in dark, well-cut suits and Italian leather shoes but I started to worry at my hair in the bathroom mirror before leaving my flat, combing it and coiffing it and teasing out the grey, and I ran my razor round the inside of my nose, and I flossed my teeth and dabbed myself behind the ears with aftershave, like a woman, like a fool. And every evening she served me and she always seemed happy to see me, and she laughed at my jokes, and the sound of her laugh was soft, gorgeous. And my wife rang me on the Thursday at Stritch’s and asked when I’d be home, and there was a querulous but not a quarrelsome tone to her voice, and she reminded me that Vigil Mass on Saturday was her mother’s cousin’s month’s mind and that we’d be expected to go, and she had a parish committee meeting that night and I shouted suddenly, so loudly I could hear the outer office fall silent, THAT’S YOUR OWN BUSINESS, NOT MINE, and she took it well, God bless her, and she kept her voice even and she said, You don’t normally give the whole week in the city, I just wondered was everything okay, were you under terrible pressure, and I can see now that you are, and I don’t especially need to go to the meeting, and if I do decide to go I’m sure I can trust Olivia to mind the other two, she is fourteen now for pity’s sake, she’s big and bould enough to do it. And I felt a tenderness towards her then I’d never felt before, a gentle wave of something approximating love, and I thanked God for her, for her docile, passive nature, and I heard the waitress from the hotel in my head saying, Fuck, fuck, and I saw her on her haunches with her hand full of shards, and in my mind a shard had pierced her skin and a thin line of blood rivered along her palm and I took her hand in mine and examined her wound and I put her wound to my lips and her blood was warm and sweet and my wife was saying, John, John, are you there or are you gone? and I mumbled an apology, a story about a deal, a client, dinners, early starts, and I hung up on her and listened to the whispers from the juniors and the secretary, and I waited for Augustine to march through the door of my office demanding to know what the blazes I meant by that shouting, but he was old, then, Augustine, half deaf and near his end, and I was left alone to draw a map in black marker on white paper, to convert my lists and loops to plans of action. And I burned that paper later in my fireplace above the cobbler’s shop.

  So I asked that girl if I could take her out on her next day off, and she said, Where do you want to take me? and she smiled, and I wasn’t sure if she was making fun of me. Aren’t you married? she said, and I said I was, but that we had separated, and anyway, I was only asking out of friendliness, and I wasn’t trying anything on with her, that I just thought it would be nice to see her outside of her workplace, to be able to talk to her properly, that I lived on my own and was lonely sometimes, and that seeing her in the evenings was the best part of my day, and I believed myself, actually, I did, that’s how far gone I was, how daft. And that Saturday she came for a drive in my Jaguar and we walked the long beach in Lahinch and the breeze off the ocean was steady and cool, and she wore my jacket over her pink cardigan, and the jeans she was wearing were tight and they were frayed a little at her ankles and she’d taken off her shoes and was carrying them dangled by their straps and there was a thin gold chain on her left ankle and a tattoo of a silhouetted bird in flight, and the sun was low to the horizon and the sky was red and the ebbing tide was drawing out along the sand and lines of breakers stretched away to the curvature of the earth and there was no one on the beach but us, and I put my arm around her and drew her into me and kissed her, and there was salt on her lips from the breeze, and I drew her down onto the sand, and she kissed me hard back, then soft, and her sweet salty lips barely moved and I wish I could have died there on the sand.

  And we drove the coast road to Galway and checked into a hotel in Spanish Arch and we stayed there for a night and a day and another night and half a day, and I rang my wife and told her I’d been called to Dublin, to help a client through a crisis with his bank, and it was one of our biggest clients and so I couldn’t really refuse, and she sounded weary on the phone and I could see her, lipless and harried, clutching the receiver white-knuckled, standing her ground against panic, against suspicion, against acceptance of the obvious conclusion, against the temptation to cause a scene, to profane, to step outside our hollow temple. And we drove back to Limerick and I dropped her at her shared house and I told her I loved her, and I meant it, and she said she loved me, and I think she
meant that too, just as she said it.

  I was good for a while, a good person, kind. For months and months I did my work and served my clients well, and any representations I made were heartfelt, and I swerved around the tricky cases, the problems insoluble except by dint of lucre. A man who’d been audited and found to be in breach of his fiscal duties and landed with a ruinous liability and fine came to me hat in hand, head hanging, and I told him not unkindly that if he’d come to me in the first place he’d never have been audited, let alone held liable for such a sum. He wished to have his case reviewed, he said, he had a small bit set aside, in case, in case. I explained to him the procedure to apply for lodging an appeal, but he already knew that. I thought you could, you know … lobby on my behalf, he said. And I said, Lobby? As though I’d never heard the word before. I held my office door open for him and I wished him all the best. I went home to my wife and daughters one week night and every weekend. I brought them little gifts. My wife had taken up charismatic prayer, whatever in the hell that is, I still don’t know, and my eldest daughter was studious and big-boned, well able to mind her sisters. I sang along with the radio in the car. I admired the variegations of blueness in the gaps between clouds, I gave mountains and meadows and stretches of bog vivified, unjaundiced regard. I thought about the curves of her, the slender limbs of her, the rise and fall of her chest in sleep, the sounds of her, constantly. I bought her bracelets and necklaces and handbags and shoes and underwear; I gave her money; I brought her to Paris and Venice. I lost my reason over her, I lost myself, forgot myself.