Sunrise with Sea Monster Read Online Free Page B

sometimes, mucous green at others.
     A bandstand, quite proud of itself, smack in the middle. The shape of this bandstand, with its top like a Chinaman's hat,
     was echoed intermittently down the length of the prom by gazebos, follies, small shelters, call them what you will, perched
     somewhere between utilitarian and purely decorative functions.
    Why he chose that house I will never know, it was too small for one of his Protestant Ascendancy background, too large for
     one of hers. He would have been by then a veteran of the War of Independence, a fact I would have been inordinately proud
     of, if he allowed me, if he allowed himself a hint of the same. My mother was from Dorset Street and the pictures he kept
     of her show a rolling Edwardian glamour not too far removed from the music-hall. They must have been miles apart, aeons, centuries,
     light-years, if I can judge from the pictures, my own uncertain memories and the uncles that I met, in cinemas, at race meetings,
     the dogs, places he would rarely have gone. All of them small, with a swagger dictated by the rolling belly, conversation
     scattered from the left-hand corner of the mouth, between drags of a cigarette, a short rasping cough and a quick guffaw.
     They met during the Black and Tan War. She was nineteen, spending her summer in her uncle's farm in Mor­nington on the mouth
     of the Boyne. The uncle kept a safe house; he was billeted on it in the way of those days, came in the dead of night, wet,
     his Mauser tucked in his greatcoat and slept in a chicken-coop. She blundered in to collect the eggs next morning and found
     him in the arms of Morpheus among the flying feathers. She cooked him breakfast and that, I suppose, was that. I like to think
     of her in a cardigan, the rough hem of her dress dangling over a pair of Wellington boots, a young impressionable girl with
     a tomboy's face, a pair of eggs in her hand, entranced with this figure half covered in hay and chickenshit. He took to visiting
     her, during the long winter that built up to the truce, in that redbricked slum in Dorset Street. The erratic nature of his
     visits, the romantic allure of the gunman fastening round her heart I suppose.
    The differences in their nature were left dormant, to emerge. A Trinity student, he became a convert, in more ways than one.
     To the Republican creed of those days, and then, before his marriage, to Catholicism. They married during the Truce and honeymooned
     during the Treaty debates, and a certain greyness must have entered his soul as he watched the rhetoric of betrayal lead inexorably
     towards civil war. Perhaps it was exhaustion that led him to take the Free State side, and perhaps again it was the pull of
     his background.
    He bought the house before the marriage, I learnt later from the title deeds. She was to die within five years of coming,
     so it was destined to be her only one. And again I can imagine her first view of it, from the train that would have brought
     her from Dublin, the harbour and the boatworks behind it swinging past, then the row of houses and the balconies revealing
     themselves from a sideways perspective that gradually became flat, like a painted postcard. Dishevelled, mid-Victorian, comfortable
     somehow like the skirts of aunts or a game of bowls on a Sunday afternoon. The peeling white paint of the wooden balconies,
     the sea beating behind, the brown length of the harbour wall and the shell of the Turkish baths on the ocean side. Did she
     know she was to die in it, I often wondered, that the regular thump of the waves on the promenade would accompany her last
     heartbeat? When she opened the front door for the first time and sunlight disturbed the dust the last owners had left, and
     saw the fleur-de-lis on the linoleum floor did she make a mental note to replace it? If so she never got round to it, for
     its prosaic ugliness dominated my childhood. The pair of small white high heels with the pearls where the laces should