Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

you in the land of the living?’
    The reply was an ancient John Hinde colour postcard of the town under the Giant’s Arse mountain.
    Shortly after Iarla got this card his mother died of cancer in Marymount Hospice in Cork, with a Norah Lofts book by her bed.
    In Kerry he found her love letters to his father in a yellow, royal-blue and scarlet Weetabix cereal tin she’d sent away for with coupons she’d collected.
    ‘I looked after old people for a penny a day when I was a girl,’ she’d told Iarla once, ‘put turf and bog gale under their beds.’
    Iarla left Toronto shortly after returning from Kerry and went back to New York, to pubs run by Irishmen with TV-cop moustaches.
    Early one winter, thrush in the mouth turned into pneumonia and he spent a winter in bed.
    He thought about his friend in Berlin and then a card drifted through from him, belatedly condoling him on his mother’s death: Jerg Ratgeb’s Crucifixion ; the tongue of the thief on Christ’s right side hanging out, a woman in shrimp-pink gown thrusting herself at the foot of the Cross and crows pecking around the Cross in oblivion.
    Big Tom and the Mainliners played in New York, attracting an audience of heroin addicts by mistake because mainlining is an American term for injecting into the main vein, and Iarla returned to Ireland for a short sojourn, going via London.
    The Irish streets in London didn’t seem changed; the posters in the windows, the names of singers with what were either the titles of their songs or maxims, after their names.
    Dominic Kirwin: ‘Always.’ Scan O’Farrell: ‘Today.’ Joe Dolan: ‘Come Early.’
    An omnipresent poster: ‘Brendan Shine Live.’
    A black woman stood at a bus stop in embroidered lapis-lazuli garb, in blue headdress, series of filigree pendants in her ears. On the bus was the ubiquitous Irish story:
    ‘Do you know “The Lonely Woods of Upton?” You don’t know it,’ the man was looking at Iarla’s black leather matador jacket, ‘because you’ve never been there.
    ‘My mother and father didn’t care about me. They gave me to an orphanage there in Ireland when I was three. She’s married to another man in Scotland now. He’s dead.
    ‘I have three bairns in Scotland. People don’t know how hard it is. I’ve got to come here and support them. And I drink. I’m nobody’s child. You’re nobody’s child but your own.’
    And then he started singing:
Those men who died for Ireland
In the lonely woods of Upton for Sinn Féin.

    Iarla could see the contrast between the Irish in England, his London years, and New York. He’d that experience in his life, that vicissitude.
    In the Postcard Gallery on Neal Street he bought a card for his Dublin friend who’d returned to his city: Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Dutch Woman and Boy Looking At Rembrandt’s Nightwatchmen , the woman with a mole on her face, shadows filling the eyes and the curious, serious mouth of the boy, her grandson, the woman’s right hand clenched in threads of light.
    A barred feather, which fell in his path in Kerry, told him that a sparrowhawk was close by, seeking prey.
    Glebe, this place was called—earth.
    A ruined castle reminded Iarla that County Kerry was known as the Kingdom.
    In the small park in the town, a man in his Sunday suit played ‘A Nation Once Again’ on bagpipes under a statue of Kerry Antarctic explorer Tom Crean with ski sticks—who’d been seen off on one of his voyages by the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Tzar Nicholas II, who, with his wife Princess Alix of Hesse, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, and his children, was murdered in a blood-stained cellar in Ekaterinburg in 1918—two women with reticules seated on a stone bench watching the performance, the older with pumps with almond-shaped toes, the younger with French pleat at the back of her hair.
    A Denny van drew up during the recital, with four lonely-looking sausages on the van.
    Iarla thought his experience of the west of Ireland was the experience of a missing face, like the face of a boy, chestnut-fringed green eyes, in a V-neck vermilion Jersey, he’d seen at a party in a hotel after a play once, a woman belting out Isabel Leslie’s ‘The Thorn Tree’ that night as she played on a piano with a red silk front.
    ‘But if your heart’s an Irish heart you’ll never fear the thorn tree.’
    The green-headed mallard, who mates with our farmyard geese, stays for summer, but I must go.
    Before flying back to New