Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Protestant service in St Matthias’s church in 1976. As I left home she pressed a white, skeletal piece of paper into my hands. The address of a hospital where Patsy Fogarthy was now incarcerated. The message was this: ‘Visit him. We are now Christian (we go to Protestant services) and if not forgiven he can have some alms.’ It was now one could go back that made people accept him a little. He’d sung so well once. He smiled so cheerily. And sure wasn’t there the time he gave purple Michaelmas daisies to the dying and octogenarian and well-nigh crippled Mrs Connaughton (she whose husband left her and went to America in 1927).
    I did not bring Patsy Fogarthy purple Michaelmas daisies. In the house I was staying in in Battersea there were marigolds. Brought there regularly by myself. Patsy was nearby in a Catholic hospital in Wandsworth. Old clay was dug up. Had my mother recently been speaking to a relative of his? A casual conversation on the street with a country woman. Anyway this was the task I was given. There was an amber, welcoming light in Battersea. Young deer talked to children in Battersea Park. I crept around Soho like an escaped prisoner. I knew there was something connecting then and now, yes, a piece of paper, connecting the far-off, starched days of childhood to an adulthood which was confused, desperate but determined to make a niche away from family and all friends that had ensued from a middle-class Irish upbringing. I tiptoed up bare wooden stairs at night, scared of waking those who’d given me lodging. I tried to write to my mother and then I remembered the guilty conscience on her face.
    Gas works burgeoned into the honey-coloured sky, oblivious of the landscape inside me, the dirty avenue cascading on the Forty Steps.
    ‘Why do you think they built it?’
    ‘To hide something.’
    ‘Why did they want to hide something?’
    ‘Because people don’t want to know about some things.’
    ‘What things?’
    Patsy had shrugged, a fawn coat draped on his shoulders that day.
    ‘Patsy, I’ll never hide anything.’
    There’d been many things I’d hidden. A girlfriend’s abortion. An image of a little boy inside myself, a blue and white striped T-shirt on him. The mortal end of a relationship with a girl. Desire for my own sex. Loneliness. I’d tried to hide the loneliness, but Dublin, city of my youth, had exposed loneliness like neon at evening. I’d hidden a whole part of my childhood, the 1950s, but hitting London took them out of the bag. Irish pubs in London, their Jukeboxes, united the 1950s with the 1970s with a kiss of a song. ‘Patsy Fagan.’ Murky waters wheezed under a mirror in a pub lavatory. A young man in an Italian-style duffle coat, standing erect, eddied into a little boy being tugged along by a small fat man.
    ‘Patsy, what is beauty?’
    ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
    ‘But what is it?’
    He looked at me. ‘Pretending we’re father and son now.’
    I brought Patsy Fogarthy white carnations. It was a sunny afternoon early in November. I’d followed instructions on a piece of paper. Walking into the demesne of the hospital I perceived light playing in a bush. He was not surprised to see me. He was a small, fat, bald man in pyjamas. His face and his baldness were a carnage of reds and purples. Little wriggles of grey hair stood out. He wore maroon and red striped pyjamas. He gorged me with a look. ‘You’re—’ I did not want him to say my name. He took my hand. There was death in the intimacy. He was in a hospital for the mad. He made a fuss of being grateful for the flowers. ‘How’s Georgina?’ He called my mother by her first name. ‘And Bert?’ My father was not yet dead. It was as if he was charging them with something. Patsy Fogarthy, our small-town Oscar Wilde, reclined in pyjamas on a chair against the shimmering citadels of Wandsworth. A white nun infrequently scurried in to see to some man in the corridor. ‘You made a fine young man.’ ‘It was the band I missed most.’ ‘Them were the days.’ In the middle of snippets of conversation—he sounded not unlike an Irish bank clerk, aged though and more graven-voiced—I imagined the tableau of love. Patsy with a young boy. ‘It was a great old band. Sure you’ve been years out of the place now. What age are ye?’ ‘Twenty-six.’ ‘Do you have a girlfriend? The English girls will be out to grab you now!’ A plane noisily slid over Wandsworth. We simultaneously