Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

over the bed of a dying, bald uncle, a gay uncle who had a festive chamber pot under his deathbed, a chamber pot with crocks of gold running around it. Before AIDS was invented, that uncle seemed to be dying of something like AIDS. Or maybe merely an overdose of failure, an overdose of incohesion. His version of Ireland didn’t merge with England.
    The harvest fields of Clare didn’t get him by here: England scoured him. England debilitated him. England killed his spirit and then killed him. But not before he carried on a kind of maudlin homosexuality. The white hands of a corpse Lally saw, a rosary entwined in them, had been lain on his genitalia when he was a child, a St Stephen’s Day Christmas tree behind the merry lecher, other people gone to bed.
    Ireland kicked up such stories like sand in your feet on a beach: Ireland was so full of sadness. Ireland fed itself into Lally’s songs now. They came out, these stories, renewed, revitalized, pop songs for a generation who swayed and sometimes jived to them and couldn’t be unnerved by them.
    Star of the Sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me. Lally’s blue-shirted wrist wrestled with a bottle of Coke now. He was on to Coke. And he being the pop star, everyone watched the movement of his wrist, everybody’s attention had gone to his wrist in alarm, people realizing that they’d been neglecting Lally for a while and that his wrist was telling them so.
    And despite resenting him a little maybe they were glad for the coherence he gave to something of their lives. Even to death.
    ‘Beach at Brighton, Baby-death.’ Áine was looking at her brother in stillness now, not in anger or resentment.
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    As stars came out they walked on the beach. Lally tried to identify the stars in the sky. The Walsingham Way? Next week he’d be in California. By the Pacific. Watching the sky of stars over the Pacific. But he’d take something from here. Pointers to his mother’s life and death. Ellie too saw her life and death in the stars tonight. A constellation of stars like a constellation of wheat fields in County Clare. ‘A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.’ Áine saw London classrooms in the sky, children of many races, rivers of children’s faces. Miles, away from the group, dissociated from it, didn’t look at the stars but poked the sea with a stick.
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    ‘Goodbye to yis all now.’ Drunk, unpilgrim-like, Rose tottered out of a pub near the Chinese restaurant in Walsingham, looking behind at a constellation of lights in the window of that pub that might have distinguished it as a brothel if it had been in a city. The lovers stood at the door, goodbyes in their eyes. They were bent on returning, getting stociously drunk and staying the night in Walsingham. A bus would take Rose home. Her hair down on her shoulders she was a manifestation of Irishness in her dowdy coat. Her back stooped a little: she was an aged pilgrim. The successive pilgrimages were gradations, demarcations of age. But there was a wicked youthfulness about the way she stepped on the bus and turned around, shouting back to the men who hadn’t yet gone back into the pub. ‘Up Mayo.’ Bandy knees afar twitched in response to her salutation: two Mayo bachelors looked suddenly spectral, looked like a vision in a wash of white light from a turning car. Then they were gone, gone into the album.
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    In the middle of summer in Wells-next-the-Sea there would be boys with faces pugnaciously browned by sun, boys whose crotches would be held in by aerial blue jeans, battalions of these boys unleashed on the place and their eyes, the explosive look in their eyes, turning the nights into a turmoil. Boats would be lined up on the beach. Lanes would meander down to the beach as they did now. The jukeboxes would be more active. England would come here to be loved, ladies from Birmingham, factory boys, boys with backsides tight and fecund as plums. This is where England would take a few weeks off, the boring country of England becoming carnal, becoming daring, becoming poetic. Caution and pairs of cheap nylon stockings would be thrown to the nervy summer breezes. The grey would go for a few weeks, making room for a blue that visited the place from the deep Mediterranean.
    Ellie would be dead in July. Her funeral would be in West London on a very hot day. Áine would cry more than anybody. Lally would be silent, a pop star in black and white, no tie, white fin de siècle shirt