Sunrise with Sea Monster by Neil Jordan Page B

plants a boot in my shoulders. I attempt to comprehend their talk as the weight crushes my chest into the pebbles. The breath
     squeezes out of me slowly and one of them rises, takes a knife from his belt and cuts off the roasted flesh in strips. He
     turns the spike slowly, shifting the carcass on its axis and chews as he mumbles instructions. The pressure on my back eases
     and the hands above me drag me over to the column. The kid in khaki with his neck bent strangely can't be more than fifteen.
     His lips are blue and the rope that jams his neck to the sandstone column has plenty to spare. They wrap it around mine so
     my cheek touches his then tighten it with a perfunctory jerk. I breathe in long strangled gasps, and each struggle to breathe
     better causes the rope to tighten more. I can see spots in front of my eyes, the figures in the three-cornered hats, like
     blurred puppets in the sun, sitting by the table, bringing pigmeat to their mouths. They mutter as they eat and it seems to
     be about everyday things. Then I close my eyes, feel the blood sink to my bowels and hear a familiar sound: the even purring
     of the Hispano-Suiza. It comes closer, I open my eyes and see a haze of white. I hear the engine sputter into silence, the
     door open and his voice, in screaming Castilian, thick now with a German accent. He calls them sons of the leavings of whores
     and one of them walks towards me, cuts the rope with a knife that smells of pork gristle. My head flops downwards, almost
     on to the blade, and a pair of hands lifts me till my face is even with the patent-leather hat. Then the hands on my neck
     are replaced by ones covered in soft pigskin and he carries me over to the open door of the car.
    You are an idiot, Irish, he says almost wistfully as he eases me inside. His gloves run along my neck where the rope burned
     it. He closes the door, takes the driver's seat and starts the engine, reverses suddenly so the high boot strikes the table,
     sending it cartwheeling in the dust, upending the bearers of the three-cornered hats. He guns it forwards then, and lurches
     off in the direction he came.
    So, he says, you will accept my hospitality whether you like it or not.
    We drove for three days and nights. Through towns covered with the dust of chalk, through a moonlit landscape of small broken
     farms. After a time, the swelling on my neck subsided and it was comfortable to talk. Until then, I listened. There is a price
     to pay for everything, he told me, rarely apparent at the time of the transaction, making its claim at the most unexpected
     moments. He himself had no doubt that his bill would come, but no longer understood the terms. Until then he was content to
     observe the demolition going on around him. He had become convinced from an early age that the greatest triumph of the human
     being was the most useless: the attempt to create meaning from a meaningless world; to create a moral system out of the random
     chaos of human affairs. The Reich's greatest triumph, he told me, was its recognition of chaos, of the arbitrary maelstrom
     that raged beneath the veneer of what we term civilisation. That recognition gave it power, a power it could use to create
     yet another absurdity: an amoral system based now upon an amoral premiss. So of the fact that he would one day pay, he had
     no doubt. His sole amusement lay in conjecture, of what form that payment would take.
    I listened to him talk, watched his scarf blow in the wind, the pale glow of his hands on the wheel. There was a river behind
     him, following the road, then the ruins of a wall, an old broken millwheel, a courtyard with tables, the light of a pens ion burning inside.
    Can I call you by your name, Irish? he asked me softly.
    Yes, I told him. You know it. Donal.
    Donald, he said.
    Donal, I told him. From the Gaelic.
    We sat by a table and drank wine from earthen mugs.
    So you are alive, Irish, he said. We must be thankful for small mercies.
    You are