Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

a kind of perfume himself. ‘You know,’ he said—his accent was very posh—‘there’s going to be a war. You would be better off in Ireland.’ Bert considered the information. ‘I’m here on a course.’ Between that remark and a London hotel there was an island of nothing. Masculine things for Bert had always been brothers pissing, the spray and the smell of their piss, smelly Protestants in the cricket changing rooms. That night Bert—how he became one he did not know—was a body. His youth was in the hands of an Englishman from Devon. The creaminess of his skin and the red curls of his hair had attained a new state for one night, that of an angel at the side of the Gothic steeple at home. There was beauty in Bert’s chest. His penis was in the fist of another young man.
    Marriage, children, a drapery business in Ireland virtually eliminated it all but they could not quite eliminate the choice colours of sin, red of handkerchiefs in men’s pockets in a smoky hotel lounge, red of claret wine, red of blood on sheets where love-making was too violent. In the morning there was a single thread of a red hair on a pillow autographed in pink.
    When my father opened his drapery business he ran it by himself for a while but on his marriage he felt the need for an assistant and Patsy was the first person who presented himself for the job. It was Patsy’s black hair, his child’s lips, his Roman sky-blue eyes that struck a resonance in my father. Patsy came on in autumn day. My father was reminded of a night in London. His partnership with Patsy was a marital one. When I came along it was me over my brothers Patsy chose. He was passing on a night in London. The young man in London? He’d worn a scarlet tie. My father specialized in ties. Patsy wore blue and emerald ones to town dos. He was photographed for the Connaught Tribune in a broad, blue, black-speckled one. His shy smile hung over the tie. Long years ago my mother knew there was something missing from her marriage to my father—all the earnest hot-water jars in the world could not obliterate this knowledge. She was snidely suspicious of Patsy—she too had blackberry hair—and when Patsy’s denouement came along it was she who expelled him from the shop, afraid for the part of her husband he had taken, afraid for the parcel of her child’s emotions he would abduct now that adolescence was near. But the damage, the violation had been done. Patsy had twined my neck in a scarlet tie one sunny autumn afternoon in the shop, tied it decorously and smudged a patient, fat, wet kiss on my lips.

Miles

    1
    ‘Miles from here.’ A phrase caught Miles’s car as he took the red bus to the North Wall. Someone was shouting at someone else, one loud passenger at an apparently half-deaf passenger, the man raising himself a little to shout. The last of Dublin’s bright lights swam by. What took their place was the bleak area of dockland. Miles took his small case from the bus. He had a lonely and unusual journey to make.
    Miles was seventeen. His hair was manically spliced on his head, a brown tuft of it. He was tall, lean; Miles was a model. He wore his body comfortably. He moved ahead to the boat, carrying his case: foisting his case in an onward movement.
    Miles had grown up in the Liberties in Dublin. His mother had deserted him when he was very young. She was a red-haired legend tonight, a legend with a head of champion chestnut hair.
    She had gone from Ireland and insinuated herself into England, leaving her illegitimate son with her married sister. The only thing known of her was that she turned up at the pilgrimage to Walsingham, Norfolk, each year. Miles, now that he was a spare-featured seventeen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old with a rather lunar face, was going looking for her. That lunar face was even paler now under the glare of lights from the boat.
    The life Miles lived now was one of bright lights, of outlandish clothes, of acrobatic models wearing those clothes under the glare of acrobatic lights; more than anything it was a life of nightclubs, the later in the night the better, seats at lurid feasts of mosaic ice cream and of cocktails. Dublin for Miles was a kind of Pompeii now: on an edge. He was doing well, he was living a good life in a city smouldering with poverty. Ironically he’d come from want. But his good looks had brought him to magazines and to the omnipotent television screen. He was taking leave of all that for a few days for a