Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

parents are Buffers in Greenmount. My cousins are Rathkealers.’
    In the front garden of his Greenmount home is a nymph with outsized breasts on a petalled stone mound, two cherubs who look as if they’d done military service with the task of holding up the urn.
    Many of the Buffer—settled—Traveller boys in Greenmount now play soccer whereas they once played hurling and Gaelic football. Their soccer team recently won against the guards’ team. There used to be a notorious remand home in Greenmount near St Finbarr’s Cathedral.
    But the worst fate was to be sent to one in Daingean, County Offaly, in the midlands.
    Some of Crimthann’s group ventured to work in the meat factory in Charleville, in north-west Cork, where there were fights with slash hooks and pickaxe handles on Saturday nights. A few went to work in Pat Grace’s Famous Fried Chicken in Dublin—Pat Grace had managed the Limerick soccer team for a while. Others went to Germany where they invested their earnings twice a month in the Deutsche Bundesbank.
    But when Steven Gerrard made his debut playing against Ukraine, Crimthann went to England.
    David Beckham and Posh Spice being married, on the wall of a room in Dollis Hill, in angel-white Confederate tails and oyster satin antebellum dress, by the Protestant Bishop of Cork, in Luttrellstown Castle, County Dublin, which the Bishop blessed so the marriage could take place in it; David Beckham and Posh Spice in identical mulberry change of gear, cutting the cake, which looked, taking its theme from the castle grounds, as if it was adorned with marzipan honeysuckle and marzipan holly.
    For the first few weeks Crimthann worked laying pipes for McNicholls in Thornton Heath. Originally two brothers from Bahoula, County Mayo—one brother with green trucks, the other brother with brown trucks.
    He took a ride on a black Shetland pony on Weymouth Strand, sprouted with Union Jack sunscreens; sat under a London pub mirror decorated with eagles, phoenixes, sheaves of wheat in warm gold and cold silver, for a striptease to an Eminem song by a boy in an American football helmet, fishnet football Jersey, jocks; swam in Blackpool in October where a member of the Manchester United Youth Team had once famously walked out of a guesthouse in hi-waist swimming togs to avoid paying his bill to a Jayne Mansfield lookalike landlady and changed into bumfreezer jacket and tie with small knot and square ends, on the Golden Mile.
    Union Jack bunting on the Golden Mile; women with dicky-bow earrings or fake-pearl ties linking arms with Morecambe-and-Wise husbands; illuminations of the tower, of a ferris wheel, of the dodgems reflected in the Irish Sea.
    Crimthann’s grandfather, who had a greyhound called Dinny and a shihtzu called Sheila, had once taken a cattle boat from Cobh and seen a flea circus in Blackpool and Dick Turpin’s ride to York reenacted in a circus.
    Wall’s ice cream; Brylcreem; Durex—‘Better for Both’; Movietone News; fish and chips on Friday nights; black shirts with white buttons.
    Thick cotton soccer jerseys with stiff collars and billowing shorts—but Duncan Edwards, the Greek kouros , defied them by rolling the elastic on his waist to show his thighs.
    Duncan Edwards’ face in an Oxford frame—Cinestar quiff, laconic smile—a Greenmount family legend; Munich . . .
    Crimthann’s grandfather told him how, just after the Second World War, Moscow Dynamos, in blue, presented their opponents, Chelsea, in red then, not the gentian blue of now, with bunches of red carnations before a game at Stamford Bridge.
    Ten years later, the Roman Catholic Church banned attendance at a match in Dalymount Park, Dublin, between Ireland and Yugoslavia, because Yugoslavia was a communist country, but 33,000 people turned up.
    ‘My grandfather in the Seychelles cussed me for being light-skinned,’ an elderly black woman in a coat fastened with loops and bone toggles, in the Royal Take Away on the South Pier, said to him.
    ‘He was a communist. Nearly threw myself under a bus when he died. My dad went to America then. My mother left for England with me and my sister. We lived in Sunderland on the Wear, between the Tyne and the Tees, at first.
    ‘It was just after the war. When the lights went on again, all over the world.
    ‘My mother died. Then we moved to Blackpool. My sister was always telling me what to do. And I said, it’s like locking the gate on an ass that’s galloping in the fields.
    ‘Met a