And the undersea just as glittering, speckled, chained in miracles somehow, that wonderful half blindness the eyes have underwater, blurred because the sea itself is a huge lens, like you are wearing the sea itself before your face. So it's gone even more like a painting, a furious mad painting, there was a whole book of them in the town hall library, the fellas that painted in France and were laughed at to begin with, like they didn't know how to paint. I won't risk writing one of the names, but I do remember them, hard harsh names, and troubled lives to match, I can say them in my head as I write. But I'd be ashamed to spell them wrong. And myself in that undersea, my whole body loosened, but also sharpened, my lungs rich with air at first and then beggared, and the head lighter, lovelier, and the chiller water deeper, washing my face, asking my face who it was, what shape it was, in infinite detail. Suddenly I am longing to tell Dr Grene about this, I don't know why, I imagine he would be interested in it, it would please him, but I would also fear he would read something into it. He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely. Oh yes, the beach at Strandhill, high tide as it was, is good for a little, then it plunges down, you are suddenly in the big water of the bay there, the big muscle, enormous, like the famous Hudson river, no, not as big as that of course, but I felt I was not so much entering as touching something vast flexing there under God's eye. And could I feel it pull me out, swiftly, deeper? I don't know. I do know I gave my heart to it, I do know I was moved by it, maybe I wept, can you weep underwater, it must be possible? How long was I swimming without coming up? A minute, two, three, like a pearl diver in the south seas, wherever they are, whatever they are? Myself and my bathing suit, and inside the suit a little pocket with two bob in it, which would be my fare back to Sligo on the old green bus, for safety's sake stuck in that pocket, like something you could keep a scapular in, if you were Catholic. And I suppose my youth, my softness, my hardness, my blue eyes, my yellow hair sleeking underwater, and maybe three hundred sharks out there, beginning to be in the neighbourhood of sharks, wonderful, wonderful, I didn't care. Become a sort of shark.
The great pull of the current beginning to take me, like a word lost in a swell of music.
Then in all that happiness, suddenly enveloped, stolen back, taken up, by human arms I knew, expert, almost devious. And this person, sleek and round and strong, raised me up through the wild glitter, and we broke the surface, and there was the roaring world again, and the heaving sea, and the sky whether up or down I didn't know. And the swimmer drew me back to the strand, with the boys and the girls, the buckets, the old cannon pointing out to sea, the houses, the Plaza, the stunned donkeys, the few motorcars, Sligo, Strandhill, my fate, my fate as woeful as my father's, my ridiculous, heartless, funny fate.
It couldn't have been anyone in the world fishing me out except Tom McNulty. It was always going to be him. Anyway, he was a famous swimmer, he already had a medal for saving a life given him by the mayor of Sligo himself, which was what got him into the politics, he always said. The other person he saved was an old crone that the tide plucked from the shoreline, like the joker it is – an old crone, but not as old as I am now. No.
'I know you,' he said, glistening on the sand, his nice square fat face smiling at me, and the world and its aunt gathered about us, and Jack also there now, in his sombre black bathing trunks, and his body that never really looked like flesh, but something stonier, the bones and muscles of a traveller. 'You're the lass from the Cafe Cairo.'
And I laughed, or tried to, the salt water spluttering in my throat.
'Oh mercy,' he said. 'You swallowed the ocean. Yes, you did. Jaysus,' he said, 'where's your blessed towel? Do you have one? You do? And your clothes? Yes, come on. Come on with me.'
So my towel was put around my shoulders and my clothes gathered for me by Jack, gingerly holding them, and the two walked me up across the burning hot road towards the Plaza, we kept to the grassy verge when we could, and across the desert of the carpark and into the ticket office with us, and Tom was laughing, very easy and relieved he probably was, to have rescued me. I can't remember if he got another medal for me, I hope he did, because he probably deserved it, all things considered.
Oh, dear, it is difficult to look back on the joy of those days, but on the other hand, it is something rare I know in a life to know such joy, and such luck.
I knew my luck, knew it as well as a sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself.
It was pride too, my pride in him, with his fame and his confidence.
We'd go up the concrete steps to the pictures between those laurel hedges. We might have been a couple in Hollywood, I might have been Mary Pickford herself, though I suppose in all honesty Tom was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks.
The dark in our little world was the drinking habits of Sligo. Men like Tom and his brother would be so drunk in the small hours things would happen which not only could they not remember, but they wouldn't want to, which was no doubt a great blessing.
I would be standing down on the dancefloor, happy to be on my own, looking up at the stage where Tom's band were ranged, his little dapper father a dab hand on the clarinet, on any instrument you liked. Late in the evening Tom would play 'Remarkable Girl' with his hawk's eye peering down at me. When we were walking on the beach at Rosses Strand one time he teased me by singing 'When Lights are Low in Cairo', because I was the girl that worked in the Cafe Cairo. There was a singer called Cavan O'Connor that he modelled his voice on, he thought Cavan was the greatest singer that ever breathed. But Tom had grown up more or less on Jelly Roll Morton and he was cracked on Bubber Miley, like all the trumpeters were, even more than on Louis Armstrong himself. Tom said Bubber had put the jump into Duke Ellington, no question. These matters for Tom were nearly as important as the politics. But my brain left him there, once he started on that. It didn't seem as interesting at all as the music. Soon he had me sitting in with the band playing piano when the piano player proper was unwell. He was a big lad from the back of Knocknarea with TB. 'Black Bottom Stomp' was his party piece as one might say. Jack was never on stage but he liked to sing in the early part of his cups, when he was cheerful, very cheerful. Then it would be 'Roses of Picardy', 'Long Way to Tipperary', because he had been in the British Merchant Navy when he was only a boy, but I think I wrote this before. Saw every port from Cove to Cairo, but I think I wrote this. Maybe it's worth saying twice.
Jack was always about and then he'd be gone for a while. He used to go out to Africa on contracts. Oh, Tom was very proud of Jack, Jack had done two degrees at Galway at the same time, Geology and Engineering. He was just a brilliant man. I have to confess he was about three times better-looking than his brother, but that is neither here nor there. But he was, he had those smalltown filmstar looks, you'd be in the cinema watching Broadway Melody or some such, and when the lights would go up at the end, yes, you'd be back in bloody Sligo – except for Jack. Jack still had some halo of Hollywood about him.
But Jack kept a few feet between us, what sort of feet I don't know. He was too ironical to be friendly, he'd be jesting and joking the while, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with the wrong sort of look. I don't mean coveting me, but maybe disapproving. Long looks when he thought I couldn't see him. Sizing me up.
Jack kept a Ford car though, to go with the leather collar on his coat. We were always in that car, we saw a thousand Irish landscapes through the front screen, we washed a million tons of rain off it with that little wiper back and forth, back and forth, and gallons of whiskey they drank in it, as we went along. The big thing was to get out onto the strand by Coney island at low tide, and surge along through the shallow inch of water, roaring and at our infinite ease. There were always friends with us, the prettiest of the girls that hung after the band, and other likely lads of Sligo and Galway. The funny thing was, Jack had a girlfriend that he was actually going to marry, Mai her name was, but we never saw her, she lived in Galway with her parents, very well-to-do they were. Her father was an insurance salesman, a very impressive fact to Jack, and they lived in a house in Galway that was Something House, and that was a big fact for a man whose father was the tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. He had met her at the university, she was one of the first girls there, oh, and I'd say one of the first girls at a lot of things, looking down her nose at me being one of them. No, that isn't fair, I don't think I ever met her but the one time.