Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

you until a bone in the ankle breaks.
    Figroll was camping by Blessington Lakes once. There was an American pit bull on a leash there. A badger attacked Figroll. He threw a stick at it.
    A miniature Jack Russell will shake a rat and break its neck if he catches it. But the badger will kill a Jack Russell.
    Smelly John from Edmonton, a tomato-coloured laceration under his right eye, has half a black Border collie called Loo, blind in one eye, and a Santa Claus Pomeranian called Judge, who can combat badgers.
    Twelve badgers live in Palmerston Woods and have built tunnels of escape there. I feel like them.
    ‘You’d be better off in jail,’ says Smelly John from Edmonton looking towards Wheatfield Prison where he spent time for staging American pit bull fights, ‘Three square meals a day. Television. Snooker. Training courses. They treat you well if you belong to an illegal organisation. Catholic or Protestant. There are Orangemen in the South. There are Orangemen all over the South.
    ‘There was a fellow there with the Orange lily and 1690 on his leg.’
    ‘How’s your love life?’
    In winter twilight, a cilium of very yellow reed canary grass by the canal, Figroll suddenly pulls down his trackie bottoms.
    ‘Is there a bruise on me arse?’
    Donkey Lips, a jack rabbit in a scarlet Éire-Ireland T-shirt 2011, lights up the intense orifice with the light of his mobile phone, buttocks like the pronunciations on the heron’s neck.
    Dirck van Baburen couldn’t have done better.
    On a May evening when purple lilac is mixed with the hawthorn blossom, Figroll suddenly demonstrates his penis as if it was a machine.
    His hair Easter chick yellow and barley, but an arc of a penis above eclipsed water-rat coloured pubes.
    ‘Doesn’t Figroll have a very big prick?’ asks Tooler admiringly, eyes blue as Croagh Patrick, protean, early adolescent features, changed since autumn when his hair looked like a wren’s nest stomped on his head, and he wore a wild bear colour anorak.
    A baby bear escaped from Dublin zoo sixteen years ago and came to the Square Pond.
    Figroll looks like one of the sons of Laocoön in the sculptural group which influenced Michelangelo, constrictor sea serpent from the Greek camp on the Island of Tenedos wound about date cluster genitals.
    Laocoön was a priest of Troy who broke his vow of celibacy by begetting Antiphates and Thymbraeus and was punished for both.
    Wooden horse built by Epeius, the master carpenter, so the Greeks could gain access to Troy.
    Smithfield—cattle, hay market since 1664. Horses sold here since late 1800s. Everything sold here—ferrets, rats.
    I’d seen the turnover in horses, the sudden rejection of paramour horses, the sallying to Smithfield Square which had been lined with farmyards until recently, to buy a new horse or exchange a horse with fifty euro in the difference.
    ‘He doesn’t sleep with his Mum and Dad. He’s got a girlfriend. He fancies me. But he fancies you the same.’
    Three Romany girls near me at Smithfield Market early March.
    One in poinsettia red mini dress.
    One with miniature melon picture hat as hair ornament.
    One in denim hot pants with bib, and reflector yellow high heels.
    One of the girl’s fathers comes from England to sell rope harnesses here but his mother has settled in Kilmacthomas in County Waterford.
    The girl’s bodies have creosote oil on them used for railway sleepers, used for the wooden engine of the Bouncy Castle Rodeo Bull, the young, city centre based manager I’m talking to, horse at side, cartoon cowboy on it, which he brought to Appleby Fair, which he brought to the Horse Fair in the town I’m from, when the left arm of a youth—a koala bear, a brindled boxer dog, a tortoise shell butterfly in a black, white fur trimmed hoodie jacket—is slashed with a machete nearby.
    ‘Sliced like an orange by a sword,’ Tooler, whom I meet shortly afterwards, describes it.
    Shots are fired from a makeshift gun, causing mayhem—lost purses, stolen horses—and a horse stampede, which looks like one of Michael Cimino’s panoramas of the Wyoming Johnson War of the 1890s.
    ‘Doesn’t he have big balls?’
    Tooler’s older brother Fluffy, eyes the blue of a cornflower that has run away from home, in a jacket with a Native American horse at the back of it, pulls back the tail of a chestnut New Forest pony bought at Smithfield and walked home along the Grand Canal that Sunday when blows were rained with tyre