King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  Smart girls pretty girls thin girls have futures.

  She had not loved him. She had only wanted his presence to prove how little she needed it.

  She imagines what will happen if she calls him. His shock. The stunned stammer that he lapses into when in the past she has surprised him. The shock will turn into guilt, into concern, into responsibility. Now she can hear his voice enfolding her like a winter quilt; it’s our responsibility now, let me take care of you, let me look after you, let me be a father to your child, a good father, a caring father, a loving father, let’s be a family together, all together, locked away from harm in the protective circle of my arms, from anything and everything that would harm you or the baby.

  Lord! No!

  She lies on her bed, stares at the ceiling, listening for the perhaps real, perhaps imaginary synchronicity of heartbeats.

  If not Saul, then who? She lists the men she cares about most in the world. Jaypee? As strange to her as an amputated limb would be. Elliot? Too unworldly; like seducing an angel. Mr. Antrobus? She would terrify him; a wedge of assertive female sexuality thrusting into his carefully ordered world of Greek temples and Ionian sunsets.

  If not these, then who?

  The answer surprises her.

  She lifts up the bedside telephone, punches digits.

  “Hi. It’s me. Yes. Listen, can I come and see you?”

  Because it was the last summer day anyone expected ever to see (global climatic change due to underarm antiperspirant and soft toilet tissue were going to shift the climate to approximately that of the Mosquito Coast), Mr. Antrobus had dared to bless it with the bare skin of his legs and arms. Enye was already too hot, iced coffee notwithstanding, draped on her sun lounger, at the constantly-pushing-up-the-shades-that-are-sliding -down-my-nose-on-account-of-the-sweat-and-the-oil phase when Mr. Antrobus came wading through the rampant hollyhocks with his deck chair under his arm like a refugee from the Hope and Glory days. Net curtains twitched at neighbouring windows; prurient thoughts about what an old man, Proclivities notwithstanding, was doing with a girl like her in a swimsuit like that. She peered over her shades at the watching windows, slowly ran her tongue with unspeakable lewdness around her lips.

  It had been a heady, hallucinatory summer, an illusion of heat haze and dazzle. Enye was no longer certain how much of her life was diurnal and tangible, how much nocturnal and illusory. Advertising copywriter by day; romancer of Saul Martland by the long summer evenings; by the short summer nights, street samurai, Knight of the Chromium Lotus, battling on the edge of reality. Oh come on… The bizarre parameters of her life had crept over her with such stealth that she had not before thought to question them. City Terrorised As Drug-Crazed Swords-woman Stalks Streets By Night. In the heat of the last day anyone expected ever to see of summer, it strained her disbelief further man she was willing to suspend it.

  As ever, Mr. Antrobus looked stuck with his crossword. Normally she would have helped him; she had the gift of instantaneously solving anagrams in her head, which Mr. Antrobus did not always appreciate; he enjoyed stuckness as a spiritual grace, in the manner of Buddhist monks. Today she had a question she wanted to ask him that he could not answer, for it was a trick question, meant for herself, a question she could only truly answer herself.

  She put down her copy of a magic-realist novel that had earned its author a death sentence for blasphemy.

  “Mr. Antrobus. Do you think the world has gone mad?”

  He answered immediately, as if it was a question he had been waiting all his life to be asked.

  “The world has always seemed mad as people get older. Mad, and getting madder. Whether it actually is or not I don’t know. It looks mad, but then it has always looked mad; any sanity it has ever seemed to have it had only because we were at the time equally mad. Why do you ask?”

  “It just seems to me that people are acting as if they no longer understand the rules on which their lives, their society, their world is built; as if there are no longer any rules, no longer any foundations. Or, as if the rules have been twisted by an outside agency so that evil is strong and therefore good and good weak, and therefore evil. As if the world has been possessed, lost its soul.”

  “Now that is a different question altogether. Has the world lost its soul, is that what you are asking me? Has the world been possessed by a dark spirit? Is there a Satan? Is God dead, or merely gone away? My answer would be to say that if it seems that way it is because the world has lost its present. We don’t enjoy the present moment anymore—we don’t savour the pleasure of being. The present is just a tiresome intervention between where we were and where we want to be, a thing that comes between us and our desirable futures. What impatient creatures we have become, always wanting to be where we are not yet, to become what we are not yet. We are not content to be present where we are. Becoming is everything, being is nothing. We have forgotten the Sacrament of the Present.

  “I first learned of the Sacrament of the Present from an old Greek Orthodox monk in the monastery near the town where I was stationed on Kos. I used to go up to the monastery a lot; we had bicycles. The people of the town gave us their bicycles as a token of thanks for their liberation. Such grand and generous people, the Greeks; now they are folk who know what it is to live in the present. They said the olive trees around the monastery were the oldest on the island, older than the monastery itself, they said, older than the coming of Christianity to the island. Certainly, the shade, the peace, was deeper under those olive trees than anywhere else I have ever known. Why did I go up there? I don’t know. Perhaps I felt the need to be absolved of something. Perhaps I needed to know from God whether the love from which I suffered was right or wrong. Can you understand that? The monks came to recognise me; they let me walk in the cloisters and spend time in the chapel—the eyes of those Greek icons, like the eyes of God Himself. Beautiful, beautiful eyes. I used to sit for hours in the dark and the cool of the chapel, gazing on the frescoes.

  “I think his name was Brother Anastasis, which means ‘resurrection’ in Greek. He was the only member of the community who spoke more than three words of English. I think he saw my spiritual welfare and guidance as his personal ministry. They had a wonderful spirituality in that place—silence and singing, stillness and dancing. A kind of languid grace that only comes from the deep deep practice of the presence of God.

  “Presence, he said, was everything. Even then, in 1944, he said that man had forgotten the Sacrament of the Present. Too much, too high, too far, too loud. Not enough silence and stillness; too busy becoming to truly be. Not enough presence. I asked him what he meant by the Sacrament of the Present. He took me out into the olive groves that were as old as Christianity itself, made me look at those gnarled, ancient trees, and told me his answer. Those words he spoke to me I know I will never forget: A tree, by being a tree, is, and so worships God.”

  The last sun of the last summer beat down like molten copper into the garden. When it set that night it took part of Mr. Antrobus down with it beyond the edge of the world. For the rest of that summer, endless days of grey overcast and damp drizzle, he became oppressed by premonitions of death and judgment, as if the door to God had stood ajar before him all his life and he had not recognised it. As Enye herself remembers that last bright day, before the darkness and disease of the winter and the war against the Adversary took firm hold of her life.

  Mothers know, you know.

  It amuses her to see that the process of subdivision goes on. Her mother’s home—the long, low bungalow behind its high wall and green wooden gates—had been built in the garden of Enye’s maternal grandmother’s house. Now her mother has a tiny mock-Georgian house with a French hatchback parked outside it built in her garden. She wonders, can the process go on ad infinitum?

  She has read that smell is the most powerful stimulator of memory. She strips scale-leaves from the cypress hedges, rubs them in her palms, inhales. Sea gulls crying. The mournful voice of the ferries
down in the harbour, slipping away to sea. Sunsets. Sunrises. Starry, starry nights. Frost on the flagstones. The surprise of waking to find the garden white with snow, the peculiar earth-sweat smell of sunburned ground returning its heat to the sky in the cool cool cool of the summer evenings. Trees. Herbaceous borders. The loom of her maternal grandmother’s Victorian pile over her childhood. Cigarette smoke and steaming kitchens, forever associated with the theme tune of “The Magic Roundabout.” Smells. Memories. The old house. The windows need repainting; there is a cracked panel in the glass door. The brass letter basket is new, but she knows she will have to press and press and press to get the doorbell to ring.

  And the dogs will come leaping and barking and wagging their tails: Shane and Paddy’s successors.

  She is looking old. Small; desperately small, and vulnerable, pushing away the barking, wagging dogs. Gone the universal competence with which Enye and her brother had endowed her, perhaps it never was, and this old, terrible fallibility has always been her true complexion. She can imagine how Ewan would have thought it a sickness.

  “Come in, oh come in, come in.”

  The house smells different, like an old woman’s house. The smell puzzles Enye until she recognises that her own personal perfume, the smell of her life and presence, has leached out of the walls and the rooms and furnishings and dissolved away. There is no part of her here now, not even her smell. Tea is prepared, homemade cakes and biscuits set on polite plates while Enye pats the dogs’ heads and asks them their names and if they have been good boys, as people will ask dogs, and shakes their proffered paws and tells them what good boys they are, as people will tell dogs.

  “So, tell me, how is advertising, then?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “I quit. Personality clash with my Creative Director. Constructive dismissal. It would have happened sooner or later. Just happened to be sooner.”

  “And so, what are you doing with yourself now?”

  “Would you believe, I’m working for a bicycle courier company? I’ve got one of their cards here. Here you are, see? Keeps body and soul together, and me pretty fit.”

  “You thought yet about what you want to go on to do?”

  “No. I don’t know. Hell, Mum… dammit… no, I said I wouldn’t do this, sorry… I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  The dogs lie on their sides in front of the fire and thump their tails against the carpet.

  “When’s it due?”

  Mothers know, you know.

  “Goddamn. July. Thereabouts. I haven’t been to see the doctor yet. I don’t know for sure…”

  “What you’re going to do with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whether you want to keep it or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the father?”

  “Saul,” She smiles, the entropy of the heart. “Saul. You’d like him. He’s a solicitor, very desirable. He doesn’t know. I’m not seeing him anymore.”

  “Would you think of marrying him?”

  “Saul?” She laughs, a deep, cleansing, painful laugh. “Oh, he’d love that. He would. He’s a born husband and father. He’d be a much better father than I would a mother. No, I’m not going to marry him. I’m not going to tell him. He would have me in a mental institution in five years, or up for manslaughter, pleading diminished responsibility. The girls at work, would you believe, passed the hat for me, in case I wanted to get rid of it and couldn’t afford to.”

  “And will you?”

  “I think so. I’m about seventy, eighty percent certain. I’ll give it until I’m ninety, ninety-five, before I make a commitment.”

  “Oh, Enye…”

  “Shit, Mum, everything is a mess. Everything is just falling apart and running through my fingers and I can’t stop it.” She crosses to the window, looks out through the blinds at the neo-Georgian house where the garden she had played in as a child once grew. She runs a thumb along her mother’s record collection, selects a Mozart symphony, sets it spinning on the turntable.

  “Ewan says you’re sick. The way he puts it, you were at death’s door.”

  “Ewan exaggerates. Ewan will say anything to get his own way. I’m all right.”

  “You look different.”

  “Older.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Ten years.”

  “I couldn’t wait to get out of the house as soon as I got that university scholarship.”

  “You look well.”

  “That’s pregnancy. Every woman’s supposed to look radiant. Tell me that when I’m a walrus.”

  “You’ll look good then. Oh, Enye.”

  A pause, a space for Mozart to have his say.

  “Mum, do you think it would be all right for me to stay here a day or so?”

  She is given her old room back. All the posters, the books, the tapes and toys and things are in place. She cannot sleep. Who can sleep in the shrine to his memory?

  They go to the big mall down by the ferry port. They pick things out for each other they know they will detest. They make shop-assistants’ lives hell. They shop, they coffee and Danish, but it is only when they are back home again and Enye’s mother says that tonight she really ought to put up the tree does Enye realize that Christmas has stolen up on her unawares. Her mother asks Ewan if he wants to help; he scowls across the dinner table at the two women. He has used every available excuse to take himself out of the house since Enye has come back. He, the one who so much wanted this reunification.

  “I worried about him when he was small,” her mother says. “His imaginary friends, always happiest with his own company, not fitting in at school.”

  “You never worried about me and I was the one who invented entire imaginary countries populated by rubber monsters.”

  “The doctors never said that you displayed symptoms of incipient schizophrenia.”

  “What?” Enye says, but her mother will not speak again on the subject. Enye senses that she may have already spoken too much.

  They plant the tree in its bucket of sand and earth and set it in its immutable position by the living room door. The tiny, individual Christ lights are taken from their box, tested, repaired where necessary, and spiralled around the branches. Enye’s mother goes up on the kitchen step stool to drape the fat, furry tinsel garlands.

  “Why did you lie to us about our father?”

  She does not falter on her step stool as she drapes the fat, furry garlands over and under and over. She has had ten years to prepare for this question.

  “Because I didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  “But I was hurt.”

  “All I had was a choice of evils.”

  “It wasn’t as if it was one lie, it was lie after lie, years of lies, a lifetime of lies. I still don’t know if you’ve ever told me one true thing about my father.”

  “You think you are God that no one may lie to you? You never lied to me?”

  Without the least flavour of malice, or rancour.

  “It hurt me that you thought I would never be mature enough to handle it.”

  “I knew you would come back when you were mature enough.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  “I have lied to you, I admit that; but Enye, just let me hold this one thing, keep it mine and not burden another with it. Just let me take it down with me into the earth and let it be dissolved away and forgotten.”

  “Why? For God’s sake? Can it be so terrible, can it be any worse than what I have imagined all these years?”

  “It can.”

  She dreams of her father that night, for the first time in many, many years. For the first time in many, many years, she can remember his face. He is walking toward her from a very great distance across a great flat plane. His hands are held out, but they, like this face, like everything about him, are indecipherable. Concealed intent. Hidden spirit. As soon as he draws close enough for her to be able to reach and
touch, he dissolves and reappears, an eye-blink of dust in the great distance, far, far across the great flat plane, approaching step by step.

  The breakfast radio news has reports of people breaking up the wall between the two Germanies with hammers and kitchen cutlery, and of unspeakable barbarism from a land whose kings had once impaled their enemies on long wooden spikes. Two spoonfuls of yoghurt on the muesli, tea from a china pot.

  “I reached ninety-eight percent this morning.”

  Her mother continues pouring the tea.

  “I’ll be going today. I’ll take the evening sailing.”

  “There are places here will do it.”

  “Back-street chop-shops, I want it done properly, and legally. I owe it that much. The girls have given me an address. It would seem I am not the first cycle courier to have needed an abortion. My God, I cannot believe I am talking like this…”

  By correctly identifying the voice of a well-known country-and-western singer, Mrs. Marion Doyle of St. Brendan’s Avenue, Coolock, has won herself a Radio One KRTP-FM sunstrip for her car.

  Her mother comes with her as far as the ticket barrier. She presses an envelope into her daughter’s hand. “If your mind’s made up, your mind’s made up.” Then she turns and walks away and in a dozen steps is lost among the press of passengers surging into the boarding tunnel. In the brown envelope are one hundred bills of small denominations.

  “God. Mum! Mum!”

  The surge and press of passengers and suitcases and baby buggies and luggage trolleys sweeps Enye before it into the great white ship.

  She wakes in the night, in her coffin-narrow berth. The other passengers with whom she shares the cabin sleep on, a topography of breathings. It is 2:33 on the little portable alarm clock. What? Not a change in the steady vibration of the engines, or the hum of the air-conditioning, not the dull thud of a mid-Channel floating something banging the hull, nor the change of attitude as the great white ship crosses a sea current. Not a presence of anything. No, an absence.