Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

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    ‘Indiana Jones,’ he cries, riding away on the New Forest pony, recalling Indiana Jones riding a rhinoceros while chasing a truck in Africa.
    ‘Did you sell any horses in Smithfield?’ I ask Baz, a boy whose hair in autumn was chick feather light dun. Now it’s turtle coloured. It grows on his head like a clump of chives from an old teapot. But his eyes are still the eyes of babyhood.
    ‘No, I sold donkeys.’
    The Jerusalem two-stroke Figroll calls a donkey.
    Baz has a little donkey, Amy, from County Mayo, who looks as if snow has fallen on her and some of it turned to slush.
    ‘You could get Channel Four on those ears,’ extols Figroll.
    In 1600 Cheapside vintner William Banks’ bay gelding Marocco, shoed in silver, known to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Dekker, Rowley, Middleton, climbed to the top of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, to the applause of braying donkeys.
    Donkey Lips’ eyes are a piñata—a children’s party he doesn’t want me to come to. When I ask the colour of his eyes and try to look at them he scrunches up his face like a scrolled baby’s napkin.
    ‘That’s a weird question for these parts. Would you ask the Limerick boys what’s the colour of their eyes?’
    ‘I had to stop Donkey Lips from knifing you for asking the colour of his eyes,’ Figroll warns me later.
    Limerick boys . . .
    When you’ve lived in a place for thirteen years, and you’re suddenly driven out—the riverine haw, the sloes, the rosehips you miss, the riverside and companionable Travellers’ horses.
    The piebald horses had snowdrop white patches. Snowdrops the comfrey that came to the Shannon meadows in May was called.
    The loss of a child is a terrible thing; the loss of children (plural) is even more terrible. The loss of a community of children is devastating.
    In exile though you remember your friends, their faces . . .
    Remembering them, their kindness, remembering the river, gives you fortitude and resolve . . .
    Laocoön and Cassandra, priest and priestess of Troy gave their oracles and were not believed.
    Laocoön tried to set the wooden horse on fire.
    He threw a spear at it.
    A few days after that Sunday at Smithfield someone comes to the Square Pond and shoots Big Lips’ mare Sweet Feet in the head just as she is about to have a foal. Foal comes out anyway and Big Lips starts hand-feeding it.
    It is like the story of Jane Seymour and Edward VI.
    ‘King Henry, King Henry, I know you to be:
    Pray cut my side open and find my baby.’
    Then the Pound, in apparent retaliation for the violence of a Traveller family who got to a Traveller family they were feuding with, in a wooden horse, swoops.
    Eighteen horses and four donkeys driven down fields to field owned by NAMA. National Asset Management Agency.
    Horsey’s stallion Flash hides in the osiers and escapes.
    Five days to claim them. They are kept twenty-eight days. ‘Pound said it all cost thirty-eight grand.’
    Figroll, Horsey, Kil, Fluffy, Tooler, Big Lips, Donkey Lips, Denone, Eak go to the Council Offices in Tallaght to plead, led by Skaf, a youth in his twenties, woollen hat making his eyes look troglodyte, buried. But it’s like chasing the tooth fairy. Figroll’s mother, whose medication for migraine is wearing the calcium on her teeth, rings up. The horses and donkeys are dead.
    Figroll tells me that the horses from the Traveller Site at Fonthill Road—where a Traveller man with hair dyed the red of Danny Kaye had asked me one day: ‘Did you get married yet?’—were brought to Kinnegad, County Westmeath, put down, burned in the cement factory.
    ‘They give horse meat to feed tigers in the zoo, to dog food factories, they give the dead horses to glue factories.’
    Two youths from Ballymun sit on the edge of the almost deserted Smithfield Plaza towards the end of the fair, like herons waiting in unison by the Grand Canal. Horses are confiscated at Smithfield now, that don’t have a horse passport or don’t have a microchip, so there is a samizdat horse fair on the top of Chapelizod Hill.
    ‘I’ll give you a thousand euros now and the rest in Coolock.’
    Someone rings up the Joe Duffy show to say the Scheme boys were cruel to horses and deserved the horses and donkeys being taken. The boys are convinced it was me. Identical voice.
    ‘Didn’t you ring up the Joe Duffy show and say we were cruelty to horses?’ Figroll accuses.
    ‘Two English people went to Coolock and asked to see the horses. Then