King of Morning, Queen of Day (20 page)

She watched it continue on its journey with the feeling of guilty helplessness you get when, through your own reluctance to act, you see an altogether different and more wonderful life sailing away from you. A hundred yards up the road, the tram jolted to an abrupt stop, as if someone had pulled the communication cord. Which was exactly what someone had done. A figure appeared in the entrance—the young man in the army greatcoat.

“My God, that’ll cost you five pounds!” Jessica shouted.

“Worth every penny,” he shouted in reply. “Tomorrow, in Herbert Park, by the pond, at ten o’clock?”

And she said, yes, I will, yes. Then the tram resumed its interrupted meander through Victorian suburbia and she was running down Belgrave Road with her copy of
The Scarlet Woman and the Many-headed Beast: The True Teaching of Revelation
in her hand.

W
ALLS. CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING
. Amnesias.

There are ways over walls, through clouds, lights that will illumine the deepest amnesias, known to the skilled practitioner of the hypnotic arts. Not so much ways over or ways through, but ways rather of moving from one side to the other without having to traverse the intervening space.

I did not know what might lie beyond the wall of forgetting, so I carefully prepared Jessica with a string of post-hypnotic commands to pull her out of the trance and erase any memories of the session should the experience prove too intense.

Then together we abolished the distance between remembering and unknowing.

“There are vans parked against the river wall. The vans have canvas sides. Green canvas, I think. Men are jumping out of them. They have things like bandages wrapped around their shins. The bandages are green, like the canvas. We are watching from the window, but when we see the men Daddy makes us get down on the floor and hide under the table. Why does he do that? Are the men bad men? They’re shouting, the men; they have funny accents. Then we hear the shots. One of them comes through the window. Funny, it’s not the sound of the shot that makes me jump, it’s the crash of all the glass falling in. It makes quite a hole in the ceiling, too. It travels upward, you see.

“We hear them running about in the street, and there is the smell of paraffin everywhere. Mummy says, ‘Oh, dear God, what’s to become of us?’ and starts to cry quietly. We hear the voices again. They sound ugly, pleased with themselves. I think they have voices like dogs. Then … whoomph! Fire! Fire! At either end of the quay, they’ve set fire to the houses! They’ve set fire to the houses! We all go downstairs to get out. We open the front door and there’s a man in a black and brown uniform standing there. He’s got a rifle. He says, ‘Oh, no, not you, Paddy. You’re not going anywhere, old son,’ and he raises his rifle. We slam the door, run back up the stairs. There’s the sound of shots. I can see the back of the door go into long, white splinters. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re shooting at anyone who tries to run for it. They want us all to burn.

“The fire’s racing along the roofs. There’s melting lead dripping down into the gutters. Number three’s already gone, number four’s alight, number five’s just caught, and numbers six and seven are smouldering. There are shots and cries and screams and the sound of people running. The room is filling with smoke. I can’t see; I can’t breathe! Can’t breathe! It’s getting so hot. Where’s the Fire Brigade? Why don’t they come? What’s keeping them? Tans or no Tans, we’ve got to get out. We try for the front door, but the fire’s got there first. The hall is full of smoke and flames. We can’t get out. We can’t get out—we’re trapped!

“We’re at the window. It’s the only way out. There are people down in the street—our own people, not the Tans. They are getting back into their canvas-covered vans. The people are shouting, ‘Don’t jump. Don’t jump, hold on, here comes the Fire Brigade.’ They’ve come! They’ll rescue us. The firemen have silver helmets. The helmets look gold in the light of the flames. They’re getting sheet things. What do you call them?”

“Tarpaulins.”

“Those, and they’re unwinding their hoses. It’s the Fire Brigade; they’ve come to save us. They’re shouting for us to jump. I don’t know, it looks an awfully long way down. The people down there are like ants, not people at all. They’re looking at us. There’s no one looking at the Tans. Look at the Tans, they’re cutting the hoses, the firemen’s hoses! We’re going to have to jump now. But it’s a long, long way down, hold on to me. Mummy don’t let me slip.”

She screamed.

“The roof’s fallen in. The roof’s fallen in. Mummy … Daddy, I can’t see them. There’s fire everywhere … Mummy … Daddy … where are you? I can’t see them, I can see a beam’s fallen on them … I can see Daddy’s face and hands, they’re burning …”

“It’s all right Jessica. It’s all right. Look out the window. Don’t look back at the room. Look out the window. Tell me, what do you see?”

“The people, they’re shouting for me to jump, but I can’t jump, it’s too high. I can’t jump. I want Mummy, but she’s not there, she’s burning. There’s no one to help me now. I’m going to burn, too. No one to help me, except the Watchman and the Dreamspinner. I wish they were here to make everything all right, like the old woman said they would. She said they would watch over me and make sure no harm came to me.”

I paused Jessica in her trance. From here, each step would have to be carefully chosen. We might literally be walking on the edge of a precipice. I had never dreamed that such terrors could lie within her unremembering.

“Tell me about these people, Jessica—the Watchman and the Dreamspinner, and the old woman. Who are they?”

Her expression changed from terror to beatific nostalgia.

“The Watchman and the Dreamspinner look after me when I’m asleep. The Watchman has magic glasses that can see to the end of the earth and he can see all the things that might harm me while they’re still a long way off, and the Dreamspinner puts his hand in his sack where he keeps all the things that dreams are made of and he strings them together, like beads on a thread, and hangs them around my bed. The old woman told me about them—the man who sends the dreams and the man who watches over me when I sleep. I used to think I could see them, standing there in the shadows at the foot of my bed—two old men, one tall and thin, the other short and round, taking care of me.”

“Thank you, Jessica. Please, go back to the night of the fire.”

Amazing, how her expression reverted once again to the terror of a four-year-old trapped in the most appalling nightmare imaginable.

“I wanted them to come. I wanted them to help me, like the old woman said they would. She said they would take care of me, but where are they? Why don’t they come? Why won’t they help me?

“Fire … fire … Flames, everywhere. They’re leaping up around me, they’re reaching for me. Wherever I go, there are flames. There’s nothing left, just flames. I can feel my face burning. My nightie—the one with the flowers on it—there’s smoke coming from it. A flame touches the hem of my nightie. It’s burning, I’m burning. I try to beat the flames out, but they burn my hands. I’m burning, burning!”

My heart was hammering. I could barely find the words to bid her continue.

“And then: the hand! It’s a hand. It’s sprinkling something on the flames—on my nightie, on me, something like dust. And the flames go out! Wherever the dust falls, the flames go out. It’s them. They’ve come! At last! The old woman said they would look after me and not let me come to harm. One of them is picking me up—the tall one, the Watchman. He’s not quite how I thought he would be, but people are like that—they’re never just as you think they will be. The other one is the Dreamspinner. He goes in front sprinkling dream dust from his sack of dreams, and where the dream dust falls, the flames die down. They carry me out, set me down. There’re people all around me. When I look, I can’t see them. They’re gone. I wonder where they went.”

I sighed heavily. The emotional intensity had been overwhelming. There were moments in Jessica’s testimony when I felt I had been there in person.

“That’ll do for today, Jessica. Thank you, that was most illuminating. You can come back now.” I counted her up through the levels of hypnotic suggestibility to full consciousness. She shook her head.

“I’ve got a fuc … fierce headache. Did you get anything?”

I rummaged in my desk drawer for aspirin and requested a pot of Miss Fanshawe’s excellent tea.

“Quite a lot. Do you remember any of it?”

“Not a thing. Must have been someplace hot, though. I’m sweating like a pig. Oops, sorry. Is this the hell where people who tell lies and swear go?”

When Miss Fanshawe’s Orange Pekoe and two aspirin had done their work and Jessica was safely steered back into the Dublin traffic, I looked again at the session notes. Threatened in the extreme, her life in imminent danger, Jessica had called upon infant memories of mystic guardian figures and somehow, flesh and blood saviours, seemingly imbued with miraculous gifts, had come to her rescue.

And I reeled under an almost physical blow
of déjà vu.
It was as if a cloud of unknowing had covered my own understanding and suddenly dispersed in the heat of the sun. Connections were made between fragments of knowledge that had lain disused and forgotten, like museum pieces removed from public display: in a divine flash, I understood. By no means fully—not even one-tenth part, one hundredth part—but I began to understand. I
saw.

U
PON WHAT SUBJECTS DID
Tiresias discourse during his and Gonzaga’s pedestrian journey from Rostrevor Village to Newry town and thence, south by west, to Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, fabled in story and song?

The putative third and missing book of Aristotle; the art and science of goat husbandry; the doctrine of baptismal regeneration; the names and natures of ghosts; the nutritional and moral superiority of the vegetarian diet; the causes and consequences of the Wall Street Crash and its effect upon global commerce; the process of fermentation by which milk is converted to yogurt and its role in the lives of the great nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes; their Methuselan life spans; its role in the Imperial endeavours of Genghis Khan; the recent successes of Benito Mussolini in Italy and the potential threat of Adolf Hitler in the Weimar Republic; the virtue or otherwise of nutmeg in rice pudding; the genitive and subjunctive forms of the Irish language, with particular reference to the word
guirin
which, in its diverse inflections, means a dead crow; an excess of flatus; the act of persistently opening the bottom half of a half door, a slow puncture in a bicycle tyre; a bilious policeman; a carbuncle on the third toe; the quality of moonlight on Kiltrasna Strand on the last weekend in June; the act of floating out to sea on an inflated pig bladder; the licentiousness of student teachers; the disappointment of finding a glass of brandy empty before expected; a hare’s “twill”; a kind of Michaelmas pudding made from potatoes, pig’s blood, and mashed eels; an unpleasant situation which every effort to improve only succeeds in making worse; a scatological priest.

For what reason did Tiresias interrupt said discourse at approximately twenty past nine in the morning at a point some two miles and three furlongs outside Newry town on the road to the village of Bessbrook?

It had come to his attention that his travelling companion was not attending to his monologues with customary concentration. Indeed, Gonzaga was standing on a bank by the side of the road looking over the hedge in a generally southward inclination. Also, Gonzaga’s nostrils were somewhat flared and he seemed to be engaged in the general act of sniffing the air.

What was Tiresias’s reaction to these actions?

He realised that Gonzaga was in a state of considerable perturbation, which caused him (Tiresias) to question the root of Gonzaga’s disquiet.

What was Gonzaga’s reply?

(In flawless iambic pentameter) That there seemed to be some untoward disturbance in the mythlines far to the south of them; that it seemed to him as if some titanic force were twisting and snapping the mythlines and reforging them into new disturbing alignments. This was particularly alarming, occurring in an area they had already pacified of phagus activity and sealed off.

Describe Tiresias’s subsequent action.

The removal of his spectacles from his next-to-heart pocket; the placing of them over his eyes; the consequent sighting, after the customary moment’s orientation, of a great dark mass, akin to a thunderstorm, on the horizon, shot through with purple lightning and encircled by severed mythlines whipping many tens of miles into the atmosphere and shedding phaguses.

What word best describes Tiresias’s reaction to the revelation of his spectacles?

Consternation.

What, therefore, was their immediate and firm resolution of action with regard to this disturbing turn of events?

To abandon their current task in Slieve Gullion’s bonny braes, to head south straightaway without hindrance with the purpose of investigating the gyruses they had surveyed and constructed for the express purpose of containing and controlling such an upheaval of Mygmus energy.

What was Tiresias’s final comment upon the matter before setting off in the generally southward trend?

That he feared for the young lady.

T
HE CITY HAD SWELTERED
under the heat wave for twenty-one days now. Citizens checking their barometers first thing in the morning found the needle sitting stolidly on 1030 millibars and the thermometer heading for the upper eighties. Living memory had never seen the like. “Three weeks and still no relief in sight!” the newspapers bewailed. Lunchtime saw the city’s green spaces populated with typists and shop assistants and legal secretaries and junior clerks rolling down stockings, removing jackets, loosening collars, eating sandwiches with hair oil dripping onto them. A warehouse fire in which the entire national stockpile of powdered ice cream mix was destroyed provoked citywide panic. The wireless reported scenes reminiscent of the Crash of 1929 as customers fought over tuppenny cones. An extreme Protestant sect prepared for the imminent end of the world by buying every last can of pork luncheon meat in the city. Fears of a wave of lawlessness as heat-crazed young hooligans ran amok never materialised, but that did not prevent the
Evening Echo
from reporting, with some glee, an outbreak of boot-polish-eating among sixteen-year-olds. There were daily reports on the level of the Blessington reservoirs. “To pot with the reservoirs,” a well-known wag was reputed to have said. “The only water I ever drink is with me John Jameson’s, and not much of that.” Reliable sources reported that in the original, the words
to pot
had been somewhat more emphatically expressed. Assorted weather workers, rainmakers, prophets, and shanachies were consulted on when the drought would end. They promised rain next month next week tomorrow this afternoon but the anomalous lens of dense, hot air remained moored like a vast airship over metropolitan Dublin. It rained in Wicklow, it rained in Arklow, it rained in Naas, and there were reports of a spit or two in Balbriggan, but not a drop, not even a cloud, darkened the city’s streets.