Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

informs me, looking at the Grand Canal. ‘You could lie on the bed and watch the television.’
    At fourteen or fifteen they go to the Phoenix Park at night, join the Rumanian, the Polish, the Chinese boys among ilex trees, among chestnut trees and Scotch pines, among blackberry and hawthorn bushes, raise a flickering lighter. Those trackie bottoms come down. Their buttocks manifest. White ammunition.
    Fifty euros each time.
    Money for horses. Money for drugs.
    The rabbits nibbling and the stags rutting.
    ‘It’s been going on for hundreds of years. Got stage fright at first,’ says Ryaner, aged fourteen, hair the colour of New England in autumn, skin white as a squall of gulls. In an Afghan hat face like a cuckoo that comes out of a cuckoo clock.
    Sometimes the guards shine magnetic cling headlights at them and they scatter into a grove of evergreen oaks.
    ‘They go to the Phoenix Park not just for money. They want that experience.’
    I’m talking to a man in a hat, T-shirt with a tropical scene—sea, sunset, palm trees—the Grand Canal.
    ‘Where are you from?’
    ‘You know, where the horse hair is held.’
    ‘Peace and love.’
    Young desperado Scythians. Scythians one of the earliest people to master the art of riding. Every Scythian had at least one personal mount. They owned large herds of Mongolian ponies. Some of these sacrificed with wife, children, servants on the owner’s death. Mathias, the thirteenth apostle, was saved from being eaten by them by the Apostle Andrew who’d crossed the Black Sea by express boat.
    Some of the boys smoke finely rolled joints—like the cigarette sweets Rosaleen Keane in my town sold when I was a child—as they rode horses.
    Palomino is a colour they say. There’s a dead palomino in the fields. An abandoned piebald—all ribs.
    When the horses are confiscated they’re just ordinary kids, asking you to buy them smokes, asking you to buy them wine, asking you to buy them score bags—heroin, pulling up an Iron Maiden T-shirt which has a face with skeleton’s teeth, one of the teeth a miniature skull, to show you bullet wounds in their arms they got for not paying for drugs.
    When the horses are gone the girls lead the boys along the canal as if they were horses.
    Girls with elaborate bouffants like cross dressers—toffee-coloured, Danny La Rue blonde, wing quiffs brushed in flamingo.
    In the case of one of the boys, Eak, who has a Sicilian lemon blond turf-cut, eyes the blue of a pet parrot someone has abandoned to an Irish wilderness, a horse had previously been the girlfriend. A chestnut and white foal with chestnut measles on the white patch who would try to nuzzle his pubes the colour of carrot cake.
    ‘Ride a cock horse to Coventry Cross
    To see a fine lady on a white horse . . .’
    Lady Godiva rode naked through Coventry once and Peeping Tom was struck blind for looking at her when all menfolk were supposed to be indoors.
    Kil, youth with butter-bath body, eyes the blue of Homer’s seas, in boxers patterned with Hell flames, rides a grey Australian pony—‘a filly with a willy,’ he calls her—into the Square Pond
    ‘You could put that six pack in the fridge,’ Figroll comments.
    Three or four year old newts returned to the Square Pond in early autumn. Crabs, lobsters here. Pike. ‘Pike will bite your toes.’
    Otters by the Scheme Bridge.
    Otters are born blind, I tell Kil.
    ‘No way.’
    ‘Kil rode his bird in the canal once,’ Figroll announces.
    ‘I’m fishing for little, small roach,’ Denone, half Traveller, half Costa Rican, his mother’s mother from North West Guanacaste region—Spanish, Indian, Blacks brought to raise bananas.
    A bit like a Dundee cake himself—knobs of hair, nuts of freckles.
    Denone caught an otter while fishing for pike. Snapped the line. Otters have strong teeth.
    Pike here—freshwater shark, perch, roach, hybrids—roach and bream mate. Tench only feed in summer. Go underwater in winter.
    Denone lived for a while at Pegham Copse near Colchester where his father Pittir got a job welding gates and boxed with Three Finger Jack White at Dummers Clump in Hampshire where that Ferguson who went to Buckingham is from.
    Denone learns to box at Matthew’s Boxing Club in Ballyfermot and on his wall he has an advertisement for Brutal Nutrition, bare breasted, putty-breasted ladies intermingled with boxers and the caption: ‘The bad part was yesterday.’
    They have a game—tea bags.
    Older ones pin the younger