Free Sunrise with Sea Monster by Neil Jordan

be.
    I volunteered, I tell him, I took the course of action most likely to wound my father. I became the person he was most likely
     to fear, despise, to loathe. I wanted to quench forever the last embers of speech between us. I joined the Republican movement
     he had abandoned, espoused whatever politics would fill him with terror. I walked into Liberty Hall by the Liffey in Dublin
     on an April morning and stood in a queue with a line of other lost souls and when my time came I wrote my name down. So what
     brought me here was a series of accidents, beginning with the accident of birth, a childhood spent on the promenade in Bray,
     a holiday town not a stone's throw from Dublin, a slender talent for music at an early age, the discovery of certain sentimental
     harmonies in the company of a woman who was to become my stepmother. And, while we are at it, nightlines.
    Nightlines? he queries, a smile playing on his thin lips.
    Nightlines, I say, a practice common in the South of Ireland. Two metal rods with a line of hooks strung between them, to
     be jammed in the sand at low tide, the hooks skewered with rag or lugworms, take your pick, then left to simmer as the ocean
     passes over them until morning.
    And in the morning? he asks. His smile has broadened.
    In the morning the tide, following a logic known only to itself, makes an orderly retreat, leaving a ray, a plaice, a pollock
     or, if you're lucky, a salmon bass swinging from the hooks. This practice to be indulged in at arbitrary intervals with a
     familiar who may relish the sense of relative peace it brings, the main pleasure, I might add, being in the silence brought
     about by the absence of the need for speech.
    Is that all? he asks.
    No, I say. Lest I misrepresent the pleasures of this ritual, it should be stressed that the actual catch is ancillary to the
     process. The evening walk with the hooks swinging between both participants is without doubt the high point. The morning's
     catch is an afterthought, a by-product, often-times a let-down.
    I think I understand, he says.
    No, I say, you don't. Neither for that matter do I. But if representations have been made on my behalf by my father, I will
     regretfully have to decline them.
    What precisely do you mean by that?
    It means, I say, I won't accept his patronage. Or yours. Whatever sordid arrangement he came to with your superiors is nothing
     to do with me. Now, if you'll excuse me.
    I stand. He stands too. He says certainly, then floors me with a straight right from the shoulder, western style. I feel a
     mouthful of knuckles, an exploding lip and find my head crashing off the bucket on the floor. It wobbles, then falls, spilling
     stale blood and water over my chest.
    He walks round the oak table and stretches down a hand. I take it.
    You must excuse me also, he says. It is after all the least that is expected of me.
    He pulls me upwards. He smiles, pats my cheek, then turns me towards the door.
    Let's talk again tomorrow, he says.
    There is a cry I recognise as they walk me back down the peeling corridor. I hold my sleeve to my lips to stem whatever blood
     is coming from them. They turn the key in the barred door then and push me back inside the room. Every figure there is hunched
     by the windows, dark against the streaming light. I hear the cry again like the strangled gull my father had inadvertently
     imitated when he ran from the fishing lines. I walk across the straw-covered floor and peer above their shoulders. I see Antonio
     standing by the wall, head tilted backwards at a strange angle, staring at the sky. Three Moroccans raise their rifles nonchalantly
     and fire at random while his figure jerks, an odd dance to the rhythm of their bullets. He spins several times, face to the
     wall, then face to us and falls.
    There's silence in the room. The Welshman coughs then, a spasm, born out of years on some coalface. The boy from Turin mutters
     a prayer. The Germans withdraw from the window and sit back