Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the colour of Biblical dates who turned into a wooden horse.
    Wreathes by the Grand Canal change from white to electric blue, from poly-colours to white and scarlet, scarlet of blood, scarlet of poinsettia wreathes of New Orleans.
    A girl with geyser hair-style, crimson on top, cerulean cord around her hair, kneels by the Grand Canal and weeps for her brother as the sun sets.
    I take her hand.
    ‘It was just a stupid accident.’
    ‘I’ve suffered too,’ I tell her. ‘I know what it’s like.’
    ‘There are no cash machines in graveyards,’ says Mad Mickey Teeling, ‘Spend what you have now.’
    Mad Mickey Teeling wears a cap covered in badges—Martin Doherty killed Ardoyne Belfast, James Larkin, James Connolly, Che Guevara, nine Hunger Strikers (‘one missing,’ he apologizes), the Irish colours and also a 1960 halfpenny on it.
    He has a Central Asian shepherd dog called Eric.
    ‘You get ten years for robbing a shop,’ he complains, ‘but paedophiles only get two. The priest who baptised me and married my parents molested children.’
    The horses were their imagination, the horses were narratives, the horses were anthropoid like Dumbo the flying elephant and his one friend Timothy Mouse, or like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Ginger, Merrylegs.
    ‘Can you remember Black Beauty’s friend’s name?’ Figroll asked me one day.
    He hadn’t read the book but he’d seen the film where Black Beauty narrated his story voice-over.
    ‘Ginger? Merrylegs?’
    Hash dipped in acid, hash with melted down glass dipped in diesel, Kepplers cider, house music.
    Monksfield after ten when the off-licences close, the guards coming looking for them.
    Dumbo was taunted by the other elephants because he had big ears. Mrs Jumbo, his mother, was locked up as a mad woman for defending her child. Dumbo was forced to be a circus clown who has to fall into a vat of pie filling. With the help of his friend Timothy Mouse and some crows Dumbo discovered his ability to fly because of his big ears and he became a circus celebrity.
    There was a circus in the field opposite the Jensen Hotel and Shell garage.
    They wanted Mad Mickey Teeling’s Central Asian shepherd dog when he brought it to the circus grounds.
    ‘He can be a cunt. You’d want to see the hiding I gave him,’ he told them to put them off.
    A man with a belly like a plum pudding with cream on top, asked the boys to distribute circus leaflets with the motorbike globe of death on them, and when their task was done, as the circus lights turned from yellow to red to aquamarine to purple, as the jungle drums beat within the tent, had sex with some of them.
    Figroll smoked three joints one morning, took twenty-four-hour pills, drank a bottle of Huzzar vodka, stole a scarlet, white and yellow Honda CO 21.
    ‘A horse must have jumped on it.’
    Set it on fire in Brennan’s Field.
    ‘I was on a buzz. I pissed on my mobile. You could see the piss on the screen.’
    In Ireland in the nineteenth century it was believed that the song thrush built its nest cup of leaves and twigs, lined with mud, low in trees and bushes so the fairies in their houses in the grass could enjoy their music. But this did not prevent Figroll from telling a song thrush in Brennan’s Field, ‘Shut your fucking mouth.’
    ‘Someone snitched on me. I was crying when I got to the police station. It takes a big man to say sorry and Figroll says sorry.’
    Pinocchio’s nose grew longer when he lied. The moustaches or lip growth on boys in Oberstown Boys Centre where Figroll was sent told you they’d committed a crime. Figroll joined the boys with faces pale as mousetrap cheese, youths you would formerly see at Smithfield Horse Fair; anxious to sell horses, with a half-starved look, knifed cheeks.
    ‘Now farewell to the Faire . . .’
    City of exile, city of loneliness.
    I live in a world without stories. Without friends.
    Diogenes of Greece walked the street with a lighted candle looking for a human being.
    I feel like him.
    Seven doomed horses and a donkey from Mayo sequestering themselves under the trees, at different angles from one another, nosing one another.
    There’s something very human about horses.
    They tried to stop my heart the way they stop horses’ hearts, giving them an injection.
    ‘Love is boat that swim for most,’ says Bo, in a leopard spot top with bare midriff, before she leaves for Moyross, Limerick, holding a baby like a marshmallow hedgehog in a fluffy jacket.
    ‘What