Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

pilgrimage of his own. There were few signs of garishness on him. The clothes he slipped out of Ireland in were black and grey. Only the articulate outline of his face and the erupting lava tuft of his hair would let you know he worked in the world of modelling.
    The night-boat pulled him towards England and the world of his mother.
    2
    She’d come to Walsingham each year, Ellie, and this year there was a difference about her coming. She was dying. She came with her daughter Áine and with her son Lally. She walked, propped between them, on the pilgrimage, the procession of foot from slipper chapel to town of Walsingham. Áine was a teacher. Lally was a pop star.
    3
    Miles was in fact late for the procession. He arrived in the town when the crowds were jumbled together. He looked around. He looked through the crowd for his mother.
    4
    Afterwards you could almost say that Lally recognized him, rather than he recognized Lally. Lally was discomfited by lack of recognition here. Miles recognized him immediately. ‘How are you? You’re Lally.’ A primrose and white religious banner made one or two demonstrative movements behind Miles.
    ‘Yeah. And who are you?’
    Who am I? Who am I? The question coming from Lally’s lips, funnelled mesmerically into Miles’s mind on that street in Walsingham.
    5
    Miles was an orphan, always an orphan, always made to feel like an orphan. He was, through childhood and adolescence, rejected by his cousins with whom he lived, both male and female, rejected for his beauty. Nancy-Boy they called him. Sop. Sissy. Pansy. Queer, Gay-Boy, Bum-Boy. The ultimate name—Snowdrop. His enemy cousins took to that name most, considering it particularly salacious and inventive. Miles was none of these things. He looked unusually pretty for a boy. The names for him and the brand of ostracization gave him a clue as to his direction in life though. He found an easy entrance into the world of modelling. He was hoisted gracefully into that world you could say. At seventeen Miles had his face right bang on the front of magazine covers. He’d become an aura, a national consciousness arrangement in his own right. This success allowed him to have a flat of his own and, supreme revenge, wear suits the colour of the undersides of mushrooms down the Liberties. Miles sometimes had the blank air of a drifting, unpiloted boat in these suits in the Liberties. There must be more to life than bright suits his mind was saying; there must be more things beyond this city where boys in pink suits wandered under slender cathedral steeples. There must be more to life than a geography that got its kicks from mixing ancient grey buildings with doses of alarmingly dressed and vacant-eyed young people. His mother, the idea of her, was something beyond this city and Miles broke with everything he was familiar with, everything that bolstered him, to go looking for her, to stretch his life: to endanger himself. He knew his equilibrium was frail, that his defences were thin, that he might inflict a terrible wound on himself by going, that he might remember what he’d been trying to forget all his life, what it was like as a little child to have your mother leave you, to have a red-haired woman disappear out the door, throwing a solitary backward glance at you, in a house not far from the slender cathedral steeple, and never coming back again.
    6
    Who am I? Ellie Tierney had asked herself as she walked on the procession. Who am I, she wondered, now that she was on the verge of dying, having cancer of the bone marrow. An immigrant. A mother of two children. A widow. A grocery store owner. A dweller of West London. A Catholic.
    She’d come young to this country; from County Clare. Just before the War. Lived the first year in Ilford. Had shoals of local children pursue her and her brothers and sisters with stones because they were Irish. She’d been a maid in a vast hotel. Met Peader Tierney, a bus driver for London Transport, had a proposal from him at a Galwaymen’s ball in a West London hotel and married him. Had two children by him. Was independent of him in that she opened a grocery store of her own. He’d died in the early 1970s, long before he could see his son become famous.
    7
    Who am I? Lally had thought on the procession. The question boggled him now. He was very famous. Frequently on television. A spokesman for a new generation of the Irish in England. A wearer of nightgown-looking shirts. He felt odd, abashed here,