Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

not come those days with his Clydesdale. I was the only swimmer.
    I was going to California after Christmas. I thought of Cummian’s face and how it reminded me of that of a boy I knew at national school, with kindled saffron hair which travelled down, smote part of his neck, who wore tallow corded jackets. His hand used to reach to touch me sometimes. At Shallowhorseman’s once I saw his poignant nudity, his back turned towards me. He went to England.
    It also reminded me of a boy I knew later who smelled like a Roman urinal but whereas the smell of a Roman urinal would have been tinged with olive oil his was with acne ointment. One day after school I went with him to his little attic room and he sat without a shirt, his chest cupped. There was a sketch on the wall by a woman artist who’d died young. He often used to walk with his sister who wore a white dress with a shirred front and a gala ribbon to an aboriginal Gothic cottage in the woods.
    He went to England in mid-adolescence.
    He was in the FCA and would sit in the olive-green uniform of the Irish Army, his chest already manly, framed, beside a bed of peach crocuses on the slope outside the army barracks which used to be the Railway Hotel, a Gothic building of red and white brick, a script on top, hieroglyphics, the emblems of birds.
    It snowed after Christmas. The trees around the river were ashen with their weight of snow. There were platters of ice on the water.
    As I cycled back from swimming Cummian was standing with two Traveller youths in the snow. There was a druidic ebony greyhound in historic stance beside them. Their faces looked moonstone pale.
    I knew immediately I’d said something wrong on my visit to Cummian’s house. It didn’t matter what I’d said, it was often that way in Ireland, having been away, feeling damaged, things often came out the way they weren’t meant. Hands in the pockets of a monkey jacket, hurt, Cummian’s eyes were the blue that squared school exercise books when I was a child.
    There was a Canadian redwing in the woods behind my flat who’d come because of the cold weather in North America. Never again I thought, as I was driven to Shannon, the attic room of beech or walnut, a boy half-naked, military smell—musk—off him, a montage on the wall. Choose your decade and change the postcards. Somebody or something dug into one here.
    I have put bodies together again here I thought, put the blond or strawberry terracotta bricks together.
    In San Diego next day I boarded a scarlet tram and a few days later I’d found a beach, the ice plant falling by the side, plovers flying over, where I swam and watched the Pacific go from gentian to aquamarine to lapis lazuli until one day, when the Santa Anas were blowing, a young man and a young woman came and swam naked way out in the combers, then came in, dried, and went away.
    The Red Bridge, a railway bridge, always porous, became lethally porous, uncrossable by foot. Cut off was an epoch, gatherings for swims.
    People would trek over clattery boards who knew it was safe because so many people went there.
    In the fall of 1967 trains would go over in the evening, aureoles of light, against an Indian red sun. You’d hear the corncrake.
    A little man who worked in the railway would stand in the sorrel and watch the boys undress.
    Shortly before he died of cancer he approached me, in a gaberdine coat, when I was sitting in the hotel, back on a visit. He spoke in little stories.
    Of Doctor Aveline who wore pinstriped suits, a handkerchief of French-flag red in his breast pocket, and always seemed tipsy, wobbling a little.
    Of Carmelcita Aspell whose hair went white in her twenties, who wore tangerine lipstick and would stand in pub porches, waiting to be picked up by young men.
    Of Miss Husatine, a Protestant lady who went out with my father once, who didn’t drink but loved chocolate liqueur sweets.
    Of the bag of marzipan sweets my father always carried and scrummaged by the rugby pitch; squares of lime with lurid pink lines; yellow balls brushed with pink, dusted with sugar, with pink hearts; orbs of cocktail colours; sweets just flamingo.
    And he spoke of the winter swim. ‘It was an article of faith,’ he said.

Caravans

    The September river was a forget-me-not blue and the bushes on the other side were gold brocade. The old man who stood beside me as I got out of the river had glasses tied by a black strap around his head. He lived in a cream ochre ledgetop