Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

no-man’s-land, the unclaimed territory of the Irish Sea. This was the territory along with the terrain of the black river as it neared the sea which infiltrated Miles’s night-dreams as an adolescent, restive night-dreams, his body shaking frequently in response to the image of the Irish Sea at night, possibly knowing it had to enter that image so it could feel whole, Miles knowing, even in sleep, that the missing mechanisms of his being were out there and recoiling, in a few spasmodic movements, from the journey he knew he’d have to make someday. He was on that journey now. But he’d already left the focus of it, Walsingham. What had come in place of Walsingham was flat land, an unending succession of flat land which seemed to induce a mutual, binding memory to the inmates of the car. A memory which hypnotized everybody.
    But the memory that was special to Miles was the memory of Dublin. This memory had a new intensity, a new aurora in the presence of Lally; the past was changed in the presence of Lally and newly negotiated. Miles had found, close to Lally, new fundamentals in his past; the past seemed levitated, random, creative now. Miles knew now that all the pain in his life had been going towards this moment. This was the reward. It was as if Miles, the fourteen, fifteen-year-old, had smashed out of his body and, like Superman, stormed the sky over a city. The city was a specific one. Dublin. And remembering a particular corner near his aunt’s home where there was always the sculpture of some drunkard’s piddle on the wall Miles was less euphoric. The world was made up of mean things after all, mornings after the night before. That’s what Miles’s young life was made up of, mornings after the night before. Maybe that’s what his mother’s life had been like too. Now that he was moving further and further away from the possibility of actually finding her he could conjure an image of her he hadn’t dared conjure before. He could conjure an encounter with her which, in the presence of an artist, Lally, was a hair’s breadth away from being real.
    15
    Rose Keating had set out that morning from her room in Shepherd’s Bush. She was a maid in a Kensington hotel where most of the staff were Irish. Her hair, which was almost the colour of golden nasturtiums, was tied in a ponytail at the back. Her pale face looked earnest. She made this journey every year. She made it in a kind of reparation. She always felt early on this journey that her womb had been taken out, that there was a missing segment of her, an essential ion in her consciousness was lost. She’d almost forgotten, living in loneliness and semi-destitution, who she was and why she was here. All she knew, instinctively, all the time was that she’d had to move on. There had been a child she’d had once and she’d abandoned him because she didn’t want to drag him down her road too. She felt, when she’d left Dublin, totally corrupt, totally spoilt. She’d wanted to cleanse herself and just ended up a maid, a dormant being, a piece of social trash.
    There was a time when it was as if any man would do her but the more good-looking the better: at night a chorus of silent young men gathered balletically under lampposts in the Liberties. Then there was a play, movements, interchange. Which would she choose? She looked as though she’d been guided like a robot towards some of them. All this under lamplight. Her face slightly thrown back and frequently expressionless. There was something wrong with her, people said, she had a disease, ‘down there,’ and some matrons even pointed to the place. Rose loved the theatre of it. There was something mardi gras about picking up young men. My gondoliers, she called them mentally. Because sometimes she didn’t in fact see young men from the Liberties under lampposts but Venetian gondoliers; the Liberties was often studded with Venetian gondoliers and jealous women, behind black masks, looked from windows. Rose had a mad appetite, its origins and its name inscrutable, for men. There was no point of reference for it so it became a language, fascinating in itself. Those with open minds wanted to study that language to see what new things they could learn from it. No one in Ireland was as sexually insatiable as Rose. This might have been fine if she’d been a prostitute but she didn’t even get money for it very often; she just wanted to put coloured balloons all over a panoramic, decayed, Georgian