Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

in New York, he wasn’t sure of.
    Between waking and sleeping in a Brooklyn hospital, after listening to a broadcast of Jessye Norman singing in Central Park to commemorate Princess Diana, Iarla dreams of Dr Oliver St John Gogarty, a story from his adolescence, a fellow Irish exile in New York.
    Dr Gogarty survived.
    He turned up at tea parties in Lady Cunards in New York during the Second World War.
    The former Maud Burke of California, relative of Robert Emmet, sung about by Count John McCormack of Athlone.
    Alone in New York: Gogarty a bohemian, an autumn leaf.
    He is an autumnal person.
    And always there’s the sea, the radiance of the sea at the Forty Foot, which he made his own and where he used to swim with tempestuous regularity in his youth. And there’s the bitter cold of the Liffey, the Liffey into which he jumped one winter and swam to save his life, the bitter cold of the Irish emotions that had tried to murder him.
    They’d burned his library in north Connemara where the panelling had been made of the wood of shipwrecks . . .Condillac, Helvétius . . .
    With the crow’s feet of his temples, the raised, almost halter-like enclosure of hair around his temples, he drops in for an hour or so at a tea party in New York—Worcester tea service and Derby Botanical dessert service—and then he walks off, a winter swimmer remembering Dublin, the way light hit the warm-gold lettering of a pub mirror, the way radiance hit a certain joker’s pub anecdote.
    And somewhere in him, in these late-autumn days, is a naked young swimmer’s buttocks, bruised together like the face of a young Byronesque-featured wit at a Catholic public school that had the acrid smell of shoe polish.
    Yes, in these days of Fall, he remembers his brother-poet Catullus: ‘What human form is there which I have not had? A woman, man, youth, boy . . .’
    And though it’s Fall there’s the urge for a swim, Coney Island maybe, the peanut whistle sounding, past the monuments to Garibaldi and to the Unknown Soldier, the Stars and Stripes fluttering over a few gentlemen swimmers who still wear the old-fashioned, black, bib top, swimming suits so that we are presented with epochs that eddy together—like the autumn and Atlantic-caressed flag.

Wooden Horse

    ‘Took me into the gaff. Shot me in both arms. Three weeks in Tallaght hospital. Three weeks at home recovering.’
    Fifteen-year-old youth, whose body looks like a suburb of Baghdad. Sunflower-yellow hair, head shaped like one of the horses’ heads in the production of Equus I saw, a play about a teenager who is sexually attracted to horses.
    Eyes, an emerald that has been wronged, green as the horse trampled Scheme greensward.
    Septic scar on his chin.
    One of the eyes of the man who shot Horsey swollen so that part of his face looked like a rancid onion.
    ‘What happened to him?’
    ‘He’s dead.’
    Horsey has a horse and saddle ring given to him by Joker Jewin.
    Joker Jewin was born between Epsom and Croydon. Worked on the roads at Grove Park Kent with forty-six Irishmen. He was the only Englishman.
    Became interested in the Republican movement.
    Tattoo on his back of crossed Republican rifles, which he got in Croydon. Horse and saddle tattoo on his right arm.
    Two bottles smashed in his face in a hotel in Croydon by an Orangeman. ‘A nice scar for life.’ Thus the name Joker as Joker in Batman who has a scar.
    Rides around Tallaght in a daffodil-coloured Philip Jowett dray drawn by a monkey-coloured pony with a white square on its forehead.
    Knows how to make gin-traps for rabbits and mesh traps with perch swing for crows and magpies who steal chickens’ eggs or eat the young of other birds.
    They have made me feel like a crow or a magpie who’s been eating the blue eggs of the song thrush.
    ‘Lie down with the dogs, wake up with fleas,’ says Figroll, in a primrose-coloured hoodie jacket, ‘Lie down with the pigeons and you’ll wake up tumbling.’
    Horsey deals drugs, often owes money.
    Figroll has lonely, lonely lapis lazuli eyes. Blue of the classroom orb of planet Earth when I was a child. In his hoodie cuirass has a head like a popping peanut.
    A field mouse who has run in from the fields, a grey squirrel clasping an acorn in the Phoenix Park. The grey squirrels have reached the Grand Canal from the Phoenix Park but they who eliminated the red squirrels are in turn being coerced by escaped chipmunks.
    ‘There’s a bed and a television there,’ Figroll