Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

York, where he found the helper, suppressor cells were quickly vanishing from his body, Iarla met a man with a turf cut, in suede shoes with a metallic sheen, above Clancy’s Strand in Limerick.
    ‘You wouldn’t think I’d want to have my hair short,’ he said, ‘I was in the army for so long. I was out in the Lebanon. I saw a man choke his own daughter. She was handicapped and showed her panties. You wouldn’t think I’d miss the Lebanon. But I do.’
    ‘Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best . . .’
    Iarla’s friend told him about his own swim and the winter swim in Dublin; of the chute at Blackrock Baths; of bathing places with graffiti urging assignations; of jetties into the Irish Sea, which people wandered as if seeking revelations; of two villas called Milano and La Scala adjacent to the sea near his home; of going to Song of Norway performed at a theatre with organ-pipe pillars on either side of the stage—the women in dirndls (Alpine costumes); of an attempt at being a seminarist; then the profligacy of men’s swimming places—cormorants flying low over the gnashing and discontented sea at swimming coves, academic-looking seals coursing by you while in England a peer sent to jail for alleged sexual assault on two Boy Scouts in a beach hut and the police raiding men’s houses and examining their photograph albums; of bran-faced young FCA men fresh from army summers at Finner Camp offering themselves for fellation at urinals with the word ‘FIR’ (men) outside, the experience of serving in the Belgian Congo where gonorrhoea being rampant greatly increased the numbers of soldiers in urinals; of the ship that brought him past the swimming places of Dublin Bay, the cerulean mountains that virtually formed letters of the alphabet, the nimbused valleys, to the minarets of North Africa; of how earlier in the century Mr Carson approached the Forty Foot in winter with a lantern, would swim to Bullock Harbour in Dalkey and back, was prosecuted and fined two and sixpence for swimming naked in 1906; of Dr Oliver St John Gogarty who was taken captive during the Civil War in January 1923 by men who entered his house using a woman, later to become a nun in Rathmines, as a decoy, was taken to a house near Salmon Pool on Island Bridge to be shot, twice claimed he had to urinate outside because of nervousness, second time threw himself into the Liffey and swam, was swept along by the current, came to a house where he was given brandy by a garda doctor. In 1924 he presented two swans, which were sent from Lady Leconfield’s lake in Sussex, to the goddess of the Liffey as thanksgiving. The swans wouldn’t get out of the crate so W.B. Yeats, who was presiding over the ceremony, had to give the crate a good kick.
    Cicero—as the pupils of Green’s CBS in Tralee in their blue-grey jerseys know—told the story:
    The young courtier Damocles in the city of Syracuse was heard to envy his lord Dionysius whereupon Dionysius proposed he sit on his throne for one day and the feasting Damocles noticed a sharp sword hanging over him by a thread, the price of power!
    Iarla had Richard Westall’s paintings from the Postcard Gallery, Neal Street, London—a Neronic young man not unlike the neoclassical rugby youths in the showers of O’Dowd Park, Tralee.
    Wasn’t there the story too, passed down from a drama adjudicator who’d drowned himself, of Georges d’Anthe, white horseguards’ uniform, wavy blonde hair—perhaps like the youth in the hotel—the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador of St Petersburg and reputedly his pathic, who fell in love with Alexander Pushkin’s wife, a ‘Raphael hour,’ and slew Pushkin, whose winter coat was missing a button, in a duel?
    In the National Portrait Gallery in London, Iarla had seen the portrait of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, after Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, with chin-frizz beard, whose face Elizabeth I had slapped after he’d turned his back on her.
    In Essex Birhtnoth’s beautiful and ornamented sword was coveted and Birhtnoth slain by the causeway— tóchar .
Then would he wish to see my Sword, and feel
The quickness of the edge, and in his hand
Weigh it . . .

    Perhaps he picked up the HIV virus from a youth from Red Wing, Missouri, with a Joe Dallesandro headband.
    There’d been a priest, a Raphael hour, eyes the blue of the chicory that grew at the béguinage gates at home, he’d made love to in an apartment full of street jewellery