Sunrise with Sea Monster Read Online Free Page A

I asked him. Stay in that house where everything is intimated, nothing ever said. Wait for that
     wedding which neither of them will mention. Wish them off to some drab hole like Brighton and wait for them to return again.
     You know I can't live here . . .
    What if you're wrong? he asked.
    But I couldn't accept that possibility so came out with the grander reasons, the rotten core of the bourgeoisie, the need
     to obviate one's class in the broader struggle, how any action at all is better than paralysis, but I could tell he wasn't
     listening, I could tell that stuff meant nothing to him. I watched his profile against the glass with all the eucalyptus of
     Killiney hill going past and knew he wasn't made for those kinds of abstraction. His eyes were silver with the light behind
     him and his cheek seemed wet.
    It's her, isn't it, he said.
    What's her? I asked.
    You can't stand the thought of him and her.
    I turned away but it didn't matter, he knew he had struck home.
    They called out the banns in the windswept church on the hill where he had married once before. I hadn't been there but Mouse
     told me of them and I told him he should have come up with some reasons for objection. What ones? he asked. On the grounds,
     I told him, of the ridiculous. She kept the brochures for her wedding trousseau half hidden in her music case. I thought of
     searching in his desk for the ring, hidden I imagined among the yellowing journals where he kept the newspaper cuttings of
     his contributions to the Treaty debates, but decided against it. The silence in the house said everything. A silence different
     from before, a congealed pall of the unspoken. I would pass him on the stairs, her on the promenade and one day decided it
     was simpler to leave.
    I want my absence, I told Mouse, to be a more effective damnation than my presence could ever have been. With me there, they
     can cough and shuffle, imagine my presence is a barrier to speech. With me gone, they will be left with the reality of it.
    And what's that? Mouse asked.
    Ridiculous, I said.
    When we came to Westland Row and made it to the quays the crowds were all around us. I looked at the sad bunch coming out
     of Liberty Hall under the ITGWU banner. He had belonged to the same union once, walked out of the same hall, his Trinity scarf
     like a beacon among the mufflers, before he chose more staid political realities. I made my way towards them and was about
     to say goodbye but the crowds surged forwards, spitting blood and rosaries. Mouse was swept beyond me, part of them now without
     wanting to be. He pushed forwards and got the bag into my hands and tried to say something but the crowds pulled him beyond
     me. And I walked under the drab banner and felt the spittle or maybe it was the spray on my face, for the wind was up and
     the boat was pitching, and as we walked up the swaying gangplank I turned and saw him in his black gabardine coat, pressed
     between a mass of women on their knees, rosaries raised in their fingers and he tried to wave his hand but couldn't so he
     smiled, as if only now conscious of the joke at the heart of it all.
    Lord I love the beauty of Thy house, the priest says, and the place where Thy glory dwells. As the boat drew towards the Kish
     lighthouse I could see the house one last time, the roofs perched above the thin fawn pencil of Bray harbour, barely visible
     in the mist. A line of three-storeyed late Georgian dwellings at right angles to the sea. With a balcony running the length
     of them, adding a touch of rococo, white-painted, peeling, sagging under the weight of hard winters. Ours second from the
     end, protected somewhat from the waves that buffeted them, worst when the tide was high and the wind from the east. A small
     ledge running the length of them too to prevent flooding. The view was of a promenade, a long stretch of green and concrete
     leading to Bray Head with a railing to frame the ocean running its length, painted blue