Sunrise with Sea Monster (3 page)

I remember Mouse, his face perplexed and saddened among the surging crowds who tried to block us from the boat on Eden Quay.

He walked with me from the house towards Bray station, past the sea to our left and the large Victorian piles to our right.
He reminded me of the hawker he'd seen in Greystones, scattering broken glass out of a sack to gather the crowds. We'd bet
our souls on whether he would bleed when he lay on them. You won Mouse, I told him. Nobody wins a bet like that, he said.
We turned up from the sea by the Northern Hotel past the Legio Maria pebbledash front with the Virgin holding the ball of
the known world, towards the train. What'll he do without you, Mouse said. He had come to be more Christian than I. He'll
have her, I told him. And more to the point, what will you do without me. He sniffed in the cold air and brushed his black
hair from his perfect forehead. I'm going for prelims next month, he said. He would pretend to me his application to a seminary
was to provide him with a cheap degree, but I knew the reality. He had found God with a vengeance. And then, I asked him,
lying, as he wanted me to. Maybe teaching. The train came and I said, you don't have to come any farther. Why not? he asked.
There'll be a demonstration at the boat, I told him. You shouldn't be seen with the likes of me. But he shut me up with a
glance of contempt and opened the carriage door.

Rose had declined to come that day and my father had stood by the living-room window, with his face turned to the sea once
more. You're too young, he said, to take a step like this. Was I ever too young? I asked him. Why do you think you're so different?
he asked me. I don't, I said. You don't choose conflict, he said, war and hate and all that, it chooses you. So it chose you
once, I said. That was different, he said. What I can't take any more, I said, is the hypocrisy, the prevarication—Don't give
me politics, he said, I know all that. Just tell me what it is. You know what it is, I told him. I don't, he said, I honestly
don't. Then look at me and tell me that, I asked him. But I turned and left before he had a chance to.

You've got him wrong, Mouse said as the train soughed past Killiney. Maybe, I said, but doing something is better than nothing.
What do you mean? Mouse asked. The heroic act, I told him, is as apt a metaphor as any for this condition we call life. The
contemplation of it sweet, the execution tortuous and the end product vacuous. You'll have to translate for me, said Mouse.
If I stayed what would I do? 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 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 be
would have left neat prints on the dust over the linoleum, since I can't imagine him lifting her in the way that tradition
demanded. But then again maybe he did, maybe there was a strong, reassuring forearm under the small of her back, the folds
and laces of a wedding dress tucked underneath his palm, her lips and chin embedded in his neck, beardless, since the beard
came later.

A foghorn blaring through their first night in that house together. Announcing the mists that would surround it, creep up
to the ground-floor windows from the sea beyond. The mists I can imagine would envelop it like a glove, seep through the cracks
in the window-panes and drop the temperature inside so she could clutch him more ardently in the brass bed she was to die
in.

Confitebor tibi in cithara, Deus, Deus meus.
The words are carried on the wind which raises another cloud of dust and the Virgin shudders with her melancholy smile. I
will praise thee upon the harp, O God, my God. Why art thou sad, o my soul? and why dost thou disquiet me? There was a piano
in the front living-room which I have a dim memory of her playing. Some wet afternoons I would hear the keys tinkle again
and imagine she had come back, picture the keys moving of their own accord. I would creep downstairs, the random arpeggios
creating chords I'd never heard before, then see Maisie through the half-open door, brushing the notes with her dustcloth.
Maisie made a poor substitute for even the hope of her presence, but sometimes at night when the wind whistled through the
sails in the harbour outside my bedroom window I would mistake the sounds for music. I would creep down again, in darkness
this time, and see the keys gleaming in the moonlight, untouched. I would tinker with them, become her ghost myself, pick
out the melodies I most wanted to hear. "Roll out the Barrel," "Roses Are Blooming in Picardy," "The Harp That Once Through
Tara's Halls." The piano became my way to her, till one night a shadow crossed the moonlight over the keys and I felt the
hair stipple on my back. I stayed still, my hands holding the dying notes until the shadow moved to my left and I heard the
cough behind me and realised it was him. Where did you learn to play? he asked. I didn't, I said, afraid to turn. You make
a good hand at it, he said and came towards me and his voice was hoarse. I thought it was her, he said. I lifted my hands
from the keys and listened to the silence, realising it had been years since he mentioned her, and still not by name.

I have hired you a teacher, he said soon after. Miss de Vrai, and I imagined a thin spinster in a tartan dress, clutching
a ruler with which she could rap my knuckles. But what came was Rose. Rose, whom I first saw from the top window, her damp
hair lifted in the wind like a flock of starlings. It was just after a spring tide and it was spring too, for the waves were
crashing with celebrative bursts along the whole length of the promenade. She clutched her gabardine coat around her, held
her music case up to protect her face from the spray and laughed as she struggled with the wind. I understood that laugh,
I'd seen it on kids, indulged in it myself, being a kid but had rarely seen it on adults. A wave hit her, nearly knocked her
sideways and she stopped a moment to regain her breath. I knew she was bound for our house, by the music case. So she gripped
one hand against the railings, her hair wet, the gabardine clinging to her body. She moved to dodge the next wave and walked
straight into another and laughed again. She looked up at the house, and I wondered could she see me in the upstairs window.
She moved to safer terrain then, and walked on. I tried to imagine what the house would look like to her, a line of peeling
facades, buffeted by wind and water, at the farther end of the promenade. I saw her cross the grass verge then, by the broken
wall that was meant to protect the green from floods; she tried to pick her way through the numerous pools then gave up, and
simply walked, the water coming up to her ankles over her laced boots. I wondered whether I should shout to Maisie that she
was here. Then I heard the doorbell ring and heard Maisie running anyway to answer it. I walked out of my room to the top
of the stairs and looked down. Maisie was ushering her in and the wind slammed the door behind her, leaving her in a small
damp patch of her own making. Maisie ran to get towels, gave one to her and dabbed the carpet with the other.