Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the Horse Fair, like Elizabeth I sailing down the River Effra to visit Sir Walter Raleigh at Raleigh Hall, who mentioned Banks’ horse Marocca in his History of the World.
    Redser Lardon’s mother used to walk an armada of cocker spaniels, Chinese pug dogs, Welsh corgis around town. She usually wore an olive and beige scarf at her neck. They lived in a Regency town house with moss coloured door, lead lights over door, foot scraper by door.
    He suffered from Down syndrome.
    When I used to be hitchhiking outside town, close to the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, he’d stop and talk. Always wore a belted great coat. Strawey cockscomb. Would shuffle and snort with laughter. Sometimes carried Eagle and Beano comics and would engage you in conversation about Dan Dare or Walter the Softy. Inference was that I was a bit of a Walter the Softy.
    ‘What goes around, comes around,’ he’d say.
    When his mother died he drowned himself in the Grand Canal.
    ‘I liked you too,’ Figroll says—he’s in a squirrel-coloured hoodie jacket, ‘but I think there’s something weird about you.
    ‘What makes you wet the bed? Are you a steamer? Will you steam with me? I’m fast on bald men. I went with Baldy Paddy Beatley.’
    Baldy Paddy Beatley let four dogs go wild in the fields.
    A lurcher (greyhound/deerhound), face of a patterdale.
    Whippy—cross Labrador, Staffordshire terrier, with carrion skin.
    Greyhound/Irish deerhound/Saluki (Arab hunting dog), bit of Bedlington.
    A dog he called a lurcher but with its fur looked like soaked breadcrumbs.
    ‘If they attack you you put your finger up their arse,’ Tooler had advised me.
    ‘He was bareback.’
    Naked, Baldy Paddy Beatley had crow-coloured hairs all over his body, his body looked like a potato field covered with crows.
    ‘Baldy Paddy Beatley used to box. His favourite punch was backhand. I was a whippet he said. I’m not eighteen anymore. I’ve no fucking teeth.
    He said he boxed with two Knackers from Mullingar who went on to the Olympic Games. The Knackers in Mullingar stand fifty feet apart from one another and throw things at one another he said.’
    Figroll flings an empty Perlenbacher bottle at me.
    ‘Baldy Paddy Beatley has his woolly hat pulled over his eyes. Like a real paedo. Why don’t you pull your hat over your eyes?’
    ‘It’s either in you or it isn’t. It’s a tradition. The horses are more like dogs. Come to the door in this weather.’ The snowmen in the Scheme look more like crazy banshees than snowmen. ‘They come home. The scatter-brained ones won’t.’
    Sometimes when I wake up at night or can’t sleep it’s as if a horse comes to the door. A horse that’s been put down. A youth’s face like one of the ghosts of horses on the walls of Trois Frères. An asymmetrical henna-coloured horse like one of the horses on the walls of Lascaux. The prehistoric white horse carved on top of the Berkshire Downs at Uffington. The horse presented as gift by King Oswin that Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne—whose bones were brought back to Gal-way by his successor Colman—immediately gave to a poor man.
    Near Lindisfarne in Northumberland there’s a poppy field.
    An autobiography-writing horse like the disabled Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.
    ‘Boys you see think a horse is like a steam engine or a thrashing machine, and can go as long and as fast as they please; they never think that a pony can get tired, or have feelings.’
    William Banks’ gelding Marocco who was possibly burned by the Inquisition with his master in Rome or Lisbon.
    The kissing and counting mare Samuel Pepys saw at Bartholomew Fair on a September day on which he was later invited by a wench to her room in Shoe Lane.
    The horse on which the actor Edmund Keane, as a boy, dressed as a monkey, used to do somersaults on at Bartholomew Fair and fell off, damaging both legs.
    Begun in the early Middle Ages Bartholomew Fair in West Smith-field in London—Ruffians Hall—where men fought with sword and buckler for twelve pence, was suppressed by the Victorians on the grounds of debauchery.
    ‘. . . it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth snuffling and snarling, and now and then a hurt . . . Hide, and be hidden; ride and be ridden, says the vapour of experience . . .’
    When Ben Jonson’s work failed elsewhere he turned to the expensive, private theatres where only young boys acted.
    A wooden horse comes to my door—a youth in a hoodie jacket with hair over his mouth