Sunrise with Sea Monster by Neil Jordan Read Free Book Online

about it, I asked him, since like any kid I longed to know about the gun and the blood it
     had spilt. No, he said, you wouldn't understand. Go down and finish your lesson.
    So I went down and played again. I was aware he was listening and took care to finish every phrase, to anticipate mistakes,
     to keep the pedal down so the notes would carry upstairs. I had progressed to Schubert by then and tried to fill the house
     with it. When I had finished, there was silence, from upstairs and from Rose beside me. I turned to look at her, expecting
     some comment but her head was tilted back, her eyes looking up to the ceiling and her hair hanging free like a curtain behind
     her. She said nothing for a while.
    What do you think would make him happy? she asked me eventually.
    You, I was about to say, but didn't.
    A job, I said.
    To his surprise, though, he was given a job. Whether it was a sudden softening in the harsh deity De Valera had become or
     the fact that the new administration needed some semblance of continuity, he was appointed to the post of under-secretary
     to the Department of External Affairs. Whatever the cause, he was absent from the house now consistently, returning long after
     nightfall.
    So his defeat had one happy outcome. I got to walk Rose down the promenade to the train. The sky was an expanse of silver
     over the mottled sea. I was taking his place, I felt, in loco parent is, and tried to fulfil my role with all the gestures at my disposal. I carried her music case, a touch I was proud of. I held
     her elbow as we crossed the pools of brine on the grass, making our way up to the level-crossing. Won't be long now, I said,
     in my best adult manner as she leaned her head against the station wall, waiting for her train. His election poster curled
     round every pillar in the station as the train drew off, flapping in the wind the carriage left behind it, the way those three
     huge visages do now. It had the same distant authority, the same melancholy, the same sense of loss.
    Over the next weeks the posters decayed, became sodden with rain, torn at the corners, wedding themselves eventually to the
     brick and metal surfaces they sat on. He grew into the landscape, became part of it, of the gazebos, the lampposts, the stone-pillared
     shelters, of the promenade I walked down towards the train with Rose.
    That became my job and I its diligent servant. Touching her elbow, passing the bandstand, to which the weather had welded
     the remnants of his face. Rose? I would ask her. Yes, Donal, she would answer in a way that became an obligatory litany for
     our conversations. What kind of house did you grow up in in Sligo? A cottage, she would tell me, beside a golf course that
     backed on to the sea. And Rose? I would say again. Yes, Donal, she would answer. Are your sisters anything like you? Two of
     them are, she would tell me and two of them aren't. And the ones that aren't, Rose, I would ask. What do they look like? Sheila,
     she would tell me, looked good till she married the farmer but now she's bigger than a haycart. And Joan was born to be a
     spinster, so she's thin. Were you born to be a spinster, Rose? I would ask her, knowing she would bless herself and give her
     special smile. And Rose? I would ask. Yes Donal, she would answer. Tell me their names again. Sheila, Joan, Fergus, Johnnie,
     Angela, Mary and Pat. That's seven, Rose I would say. Eight, she'd tell me, including me.
    Because every detail of her background fascinated me, more than the lessons, maybe even more than her head of hair. The cottage
     I could picture, the golf course where they picked balls from the rough and sold them back to golfers at twelve a penny, the
     beach she described to me with the sand-dunes and the curling breakers, but I could never see the legions of sisters and brothers
     inside the cottage, only her. A cottage with a tin roof which the rains played on like a kettle-drum and her inside, sitting
     at a piano among the