Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

ones on the ground and take their genitals in their mouths.
    Young boys like the three puppies—mutts he called them—Tyrian purple and an icense rising inside his vertically blue and white striped hoodie jacket, which Figroll saved from being drowned in the Grand Canal.
    ‘Do you want to buy one?’
    Some of the genitals are too small, the older boys complain.
    Genitals like beetroot leaf, like sweet pea, like the catkins of the hazel tree.
    Female catkins of the alder tree are hard and cone-like in autumn and maybe the small boys’ penises are like that in the mouths of the older boys.
    Their grandfathers used to go bird-nesting—seek the buff eggs of the golden plover, the brown eggs of the lapwing, the whitish ones of the kestrel—pocaire gaoithe, windfucker—and perhaps the small boys’ genitals were like these eggs in the mouth.
    Figroll’s grandfather Bomber Sheehan was in Artane Industrial School for joyriding at thirteen and he told Figroll about Dirty Hairy Sixpence who used to visit the school and get the boys to retrieve sixpences from down his trousers as if they were the Cleeve’s toffees or Sweet Afton cigarettes thrown towards Artane boys in Croke Park.
    ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence
    A bag full of rye
    Four and twenty naughty boys ,
    Bak’d in a pye . . .’
    A small boy who looks like a garden gnome in tracksuit, puts his hands down his tracksuit bottoms, showing a Jacob’s Coconut Cream-white belly.
    Big Lips, silken blond turf with tramlines he gets in the barber’s own home on Sundays, eyes the blue of a Bible picture Nile, after his breakfast of Weetabix Chocolate Chip Minis, rides Sweet Feet, his Lucozade-coloured mare to school, tethers it to the railings, then rides it home to a lunch of a potato, a scone, a Mr Kipling Chocolate Whirl.
    In the evening by the Square Pond he makes sure Sweet Feet eats white cabbage and chopped carrots as a Victorian mother would make her children eat their porridge.
    ‘The kids think they’re Tony Montana in Scarface .
    ‘In this country, you got to make the money first. Then when you make the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.’
    Angel Lips has blonde hair in Tyrolese pigtails, heavy doll eye make-up, green nail varnish, white plimsolls with billiard-green laces.
    ‘You look like the fellow who robs gaffs in Home Alone . I love black babies. I’d love to have one. Black boys have big willies. I love Akon. He’s blacker than Soulja Boy.’
    Risha, aged seventeen, margarine or jaundice colour running through her hair, zebra stripe boots, has her three-year-old son Lenzo’s name in pillar tattoo on her wrist.
    Lace, aged nineteen, Beaujolais Nouveau-coloured hair, has her six-year-old son Ezy’s name in pillar tattoo on her neck.
    The government is farming out the population.
    She and Ezy are going to live on Holly Estate in Tralee.
    ‘I give him the peanut butter with jelly in it.’
    Bo, aged fifteen, features that look as if they’d been fastened together by safety pins, navy leggings with a pattern of rocking horses, is pregnant by Horsey and is going to live in Limerick. Mayross she calls Moyross for beautification.
    ‘What do you work at?’
    ‘Bits and pieces.’
    ‘Bits and bobs. Are you on the buildings?’
    ‘Are you on the scratcher?’ Figroll cuts in, boxers with a pattern of Santa Claus hats showing above his trackie bottoms.
    ‘Do you want that?’ Boo asks. She offers me the butt of a cigarette.
    Kissy, banana-blonde hair, who wears a yellow, red, blue, green rosary around her neck, found Cleo in Palmerston Woods. A Shetland pony with a ginger mane which made him look like a Billy boy. Sores all over her body from being whipped. Suffering from bog burn—hairs falling off from the mud. Took him to Figroll who has had horses all his life.
    ‘Sold fifteen horses this week. In the fields and upland. Turned over fifteen grand.’
    Figroll bought a Clydesdale from his father. Bred near the M1, North London. ‘A Clydesdale out of England.’ Sold it back to him.
    ‘Have you ever been to the Appleby Fair?’ I ask Figroll.
    ‘I heard people get raped at Appleby. Boys and girls. On the hill where they camp.
    If all the money was in England and there were no euros in Ireland, I wouldn’t go to England.’
    If you go into Palmerston Woods bring a stick in case a badger attacks you. If he attacks break the stick because he’ll think that’s a bone breaking. The badger will attack