Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

boy on the Golden Mile. His name was Marshall. Marshall Gold. A coincidence. He had apple-blossom waves of hair. Parma violets in his lapel.
    ‘ “How does it feel to be handsome?” I said. “Is it alright?”
    ‘ “You’ ve a nice body,” he said. “It’s your face that’s the problem. I’m in the travel business,” he said. “I take trips to Jamaica. Will you travel with me?”
    ‘Went out with him for a few years. Watched Alf Ramsey and Stan Matthews play at Bloomfield Road with him.
    ‘Walked with him by the lights of the Festival of Britain in London.
    ‘The rock-and-roll cafés were springing up nineteen to a dozen in Blackpool.
    ‘I cut my wrists. I was in love and all that. But the dead dwell in a land of no return.
    ‘Where there’s life there’s hope. Now I’m satisfied with my life. Just as it is. I’m getting older bit by bit, day by day, and I don’t notice. Lord have mercy.’
    Crimthann knew of Salome’s dance, but now there were male Salomes.
    Boys in London pubs who dropped quilted workman’s trousers to reveal Calvin Klein, Armani, Lonsdale, aussieBum underwear, and then dropped their underwear. Boys naked but for jungle-army fatigue caps held at their crotch. Apricot-coloured boiler-suit acts.
    But the most popular were soccer and rugger acts. The difference was that the Will Carling or Daragh O’Shea lookalike rugger boys held balls for their acts.
    A rugger stripper might be marigold hirsute; a soccer stripper a beetroot-coloured adolescent boy’s penis.
    At one of these shows the boy beside him, with shot-gold brindled hair, shot-gold goat’s beard, told him the story of the Jacobean-featured David Scarboro who once played Mark Fowler, a confused teenager in EastEnders on television.
    He felt trapped, typecast, and left the programme.
    Even if he tried for ordinary jobs he was seen as Mark Fowler.
    He became clinically depressed and was admitted to a mental hospital.
    On his return home telephoto tenses were focussed on his bedroom by England’s paparazzi.
    The paparazzi claimed he was known in his village as Dracula because he was white as a sheet and emerged from his home only at night.
    He became overwhelmed by this persecution and his body was found at the bottom of Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
For he once was a true love of mine.
Did ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?
Sober and grave grows merry in time
There ye’ll meet wi’ a handsome young man
Ance he was a true love o’ mine.

    Crimthann would trek Hampstead Heath late afternoons. The houses on the margin of the Heath lighted up. Wine doors, diamond-glass windows, floriated lace curtains, lozenge shapes in the transoms, Japanese red maple trees in the cobbled front yards, rock-rose bushes.
    Other people’s homes.
    The crested grebe with their black-and-grey summer headdresses live on Hampstead Heath. Flocks of seven or eight pass over the Heath, diving into Highgate ponds, making sounds like a hawk swooping for prey. Frequently, crested grebe are drowned by fishermen’s nets in the ponds, as are cygnets.
    The coots build their nests in the lifebuoys on the ponds with stalk, leaves of bulrushes, flag, reed, mace reed.
    Like the crested grebe they cover their eggs with weeds.
    The continental fighting coot comes in winter to the Heath, passing over Beachy Head on the way, and when the ponds are frozen fight other birds on the ice, with their feet as well as their beaks.
    ‘We sailed by Beachy, by Fairlight and Dover.’
    In a dingle on the Heath a man with a walrus moustache, chinless face, tattoo of a woman in bondage gear on his belly, who said he was from Chingford, Essex, enticed Crimthann to use poppers.
    He tried to force Crimthann to have sex with him.
    ‘You’ve done the Paddy on me,’ he shouted after Crimthann as Crimthann walked away.
    In the all-night café at Victoria Station, fake rose in a Panda orangeade tin, Crimthann had tea in a mug with Princess Diana on it in a poppy dress, with a boy with filamented hair, mushroom ears and explosions of green eyes, who said he was a boxer.
    ‘I’ve lived in Liverpool, Ringsend and Galway. I was a heavyweight. Now I’m a middleweight.’
    Crimthann remembered a story from community college, where they were continually reminded that in Iraq soccer players who played badly were tortured; how in early May 1916, Countess