Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

was a boy it was an attitude, swim in rain, ice, snow, brave these things, topaz of sun often in the wet winter grass, topaz in the auburn hair of a boy swimmer.
    A group of young people used to swim through the winter. Even when the grass was covered with frost and the blades capped with pomegranate or topaz gold. They’d pose for photographs in hail or snow. I was not among them but later I had no problem swimming in winter, in suddenly, after some months of not swimming, taking off a Napoleon coat in winter and swimming in winter in the Forty Foot in Dublin or on a beach in Donegal.
    There was something benign about these young people. Mostly boys. But sometimes a few girls.
    One day in Dublin I met one of the boys just after his mother died. It was winter. We didn’t say much. But we got on the 8 bus to the Forty Foot and had a swim together. He went to the United States shortly after that.
    Some English Gypsies were camped outside town and one day a boy on a Shetland pony, with copper crenellated mid-sixties hair and ocean-ultramarine irises, asked me, ‘Did you ever ride a muir?’
    ‘Look at the horse’s gou,’ he said referring to a second Shetland pony a boy with skirmished hair was holding, ‘Would you like to feak her?’
    It’s like a bandage being removed I thought, plaster taken off, layer and layer, from a terrible wound—a war wound.
    Christmas 1974, just before going back to Ireland from London, I slept in a bed with an English boy under a bedspread with diamond patterns, some of them nasturtium coloured. He had liquid ebony hair, a fringe beard. He wore his bewhiskered Afghan coat, spears of hair out of it. In bed his body was lily-pale—he had cherry-coloured nipples. On our farewell he gave me a book and I put the Irish Christmas stamp with a Madonna and Child against a mackcrel-blue sky in it.
    All the journeys, hitch-hiking, train journeys overlap I thought, they are still going on, they are still intricating, a journey somewhere. It’s a face you once saw and it brushes past the Mikado orange of Southern Switzerland in autumn, a face on a station platform. It is the face of a naked boy in an Edwardian mirror in a squat in London with reflections of mustard-coloured trees from the street.
    When I returned to England in the autumn of 1977 I went on a daytrip to Oxford shortly before Christmas with some friends and we listened to a miserere in a church and afterwards sat behind a snob-screen in a pub where tomtits were back-painted on a mirror. It was another England. I was sexually haunted. By a girl I’d loved and who’d left me. By a boy I’d just slept with.
    In Slussen in Central Stockholm I once met a boy with long blond centre-parted hair, in a blue denim suit, and he told me about the tree in Central Stockholm they were going to cut down and which they didn’t, people protesting under it. I bought strawberries with him and he brought me in a slow, glamorous train to his home on the Archipelgo, a Second Empire-type home. There were Carl Larsson pictures on the wall. It was my first acquaintance with that artist. He sent me two Carl Larsson images later. Images of happiness.
    Years later I met that boy in London. He was working in the Swedish army and leading soldiers on winter swims or winter dips.
    At the Teddyboy’s funeral there were little boys in almost identical white shirts and black cigarette trousers, like a uniform, girls with bouffant hairdos, shingles at ears, in near-party dresses, in A-line dresses, in platform shoes, in low high heels with T-straps, with double T-straps, carrying bunches of red carnations, carrying tulips. In Ancient Rome, after a victory, coming into Rome, the army would knock down part of the city. At the Teddyboy’s funeral it was as if people were going to knock part of the town.
    The Teddyboy wore a peach jacket in the weeks before he was drowned. He was laid out in a brown habit. My mother said it was that sight which made her forbid me to swim at the Red Bridge with the other young people of town. In the summer when I was sixteen I tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills at dawn one morning. I just slept on the kitchen floor for a while. At the end of the summer a guard drew up on the street opposite our house in a Volkswagen, the solemn orange of Time magazine on the front of the car. He’d come to bring me to swim at the Red Bridge. Years later, retired, he swam in the Atlantic of Portugal in the winter.
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