Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

flower.
    They’re typical of groups of boys you see in Cork or Limerick, who have no association with female company, and who are obsessed with soccer.
    In January they have neophytes, sixteen-year-old boys, down over their lips like the teeth of the dog’s-tooth violet, with faces like kittiwakes or guillemots and Damien Duff razor shaves, sea-anemone ear studs or maybe white plastic rosaries or pendants with gold knobs of Our Lords head around their necks under a Cristiano Ronaldo T-shirt or T-shirt with a 2Pac epitaph: ‘Only God can judge me!’
    In Greenmount in Cork they have sex games with one another in a shed.
    But more often than not they play shadow games—they mime what each other is doing.
    Or they might retell a legend learned at community college, like how Fionn MacChumhaill was the Hercules of Ireland and another Hercules, Cúchulainn—no one knew whether he was Scottish or Irish, Celtic or Rangers—came to fight with him.
    Fionn MacChumhaill lay in a cradle, pretending he was a baby, bit off the middle finger of Cúchulainn’s right hand—his strength—and then killed him.
    In the shed is a poster of Mayfield’s Roy Keane, of Cúchulainn-stature, in an Etruscan-red jersey, black knee-high stockings with scarlet tops, which have galloons of gold, beside a picture of Princess Diana in cream linen jeans holding a child in Bosnia; David Beck-ham with a topknot; Wayne Rooney just out of De La Salle in Croxteth kicking a ball; Keanu Reeves in a shirt of gold brocade patterned with blue-and-red blossom and green foliage, and codpiece, as Don John in Much Ado About Nothing .
    ‘I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace.’
    In the summer in cobweb-muscle T-shirts they pick potatoes near Bandon, which was settled with Somerset people in Shakespeare’s day.
    On summer evenings, in the hoops—emerald and white of Celtic—they congregate at the mallard sanctuary in the Lee Fields where elderly men lie way out on the Lee as if it was a jacuzzi.
    On Saturdays they watch soccer at Turner’s Cross, originally home of Evergreen United.
    In the 1950s soccer was played at the Mardyke, home of Cork Athletic.
    There were no toilet facilities at the Mardyke in the 1950s and men and boys urinated over the stiles. Soccer was a phallic tradition in Cork.
    Black and Tans, called after a pack of hounds in south Tipperary, once played soccer on the greenswards of Cork in zebra-striped jerseys, jerseys with enlarged vertical stripes of black and white. Some of them did charity work with a boys’ club in Greenmount.
    Others of their number, using trench ladders, during a Gaelic football match in November 1920, stormed Croke Park and shot dead thirteen people, including three boys of ten, eleven, fourteen, and the Grangemockler cornerback Michael Hogan in white-and-gold Tipperary stripe.
    Poinsettia red is the colour of the Cork Gaelic team and in O’Keefe Park in Black-and-Tan days it was customary to start matches with the singing, by a soloist in a bowler hat with a red carnation in his lapel, of ‘My Dark Rosaleen’:
O my Dark Rosaleen
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope
Upon the ocean green . . .

    The Palace Theatre of Varieties opened in King Street, Cork, Easter 1897, with the overture to Semiramide , by Rossini, the Miller Girls in Gainsborough costumes singing ‘By Shannon’s Dancing Waters,’ the good fairy Goldenstar doing a leg-show in front of a backdrop of Pope’s Quay, and it didn’t close before Fred Karno brought his Ladies’ Soccer Team in blue-and-white Kilmarnock stripe.
    ‘My Old man is one of the Boys and I am one of the Girls.’
    Speedwell is one of the first flowers to come to the coast and one of the last to leave. Crimthann’s eyes are speedwell blue. He is relatively small, like Tottenham Spurs’ Robbie Keane. Hair cut Turkish style—slash at the side, slash in the brow.
    The barber in Cork who cut his hair has a statuette in his shop of a clown-client in a barber’s chair seizing the clippers from a bobby barber.
    On a January Sunday evening, the pharos on Loop Head in County Clare signalling, Crimthann sits alone in the shelter.
    His father buys antiques—a painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes, a statuette of Charlie Chaplin in pumps with white laces seated under a lamppost with a dog—and sells them.
    ‘My grandparents are Pavvies in Kilmallock. My