Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the signal-red jersey with butterfly-cream sleeves of Arsenal.
    Flahri, Afro hair—Irish mother, cuckoo Libyan father, father who ran away—with a miniature ArmaLite rifle on a chain around his neck, which he says was a gift, sang Phil Colclough’s ‘Song for Ireland.’
    Daire, one of Crimthann’s friends, on holiday from Germany, in a tank top that showed his tattoo—a leprechaun in tank top with the words ‘Irish Power’ beneath him—told a soccer story.
    A donkey who was mistreated ran away and met a dog, a cat and a cockerel on the road in a similar predicament and they went together to Bayern—home of Bayern Leverkusen.
    ‘They talk about the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four,’ Crimthann says as a lighted tanker passes from the Shannon estuary to the Atlantic, ‘but there are other Irish incarcerations in England that are not known or heard of, people who had to leave, who feel they had to leave, who couldn’t face home, who ended up in their own prisons in England, unwanted, outcast, barely tolerated, neglectful of themselves, holding on only to a few items—pictures on the wall of Gary Breen or Princess Di.
    ‘There are so many prisons in England and the prisons are Irish people who live in loneliness and isolation and abandonment and even self-torture—knowing they can never go back, that there’s been some crime, some unforgivable sin . . .’

Pictures

    My father and I were looking at Veronese’s Saints Philip and James the Less in the National Gallery in Dublin one summer’s day when the curator approached us in a gameplumage tweed jacket and started explaining it to us.
    The curator was from a part of the Shannon estuary where learned-looking goats ran wild and where bogland printed itself on sand. He’d been an officer in the Royal Field Artillary during the First World War, had twice been wounded at the Battle of the Somme in which men who gathered by the Lazy Wall in the Square in our town had fought.
    The curator was renowned for his clothes.
    Women would go to a church in Dublin to see him walking to Holy Communion in glen tweed suits, houndstooth cheviot jackets, rosewood flannel trousers, enlarge check trousers, Edelweiss jerseys, Boivin, batiste, taffeta shirts, black and tan shoes, button Oxford shoes.
    A seated St Philip in a pearl-grey robe, sandals with diamond open-work, clutched a book as if he was afraid the contents might vanish, another book at his feet. St James the Less in a prawn pink robe, a melon cloak tucked into his belt, had a pepper-and-salt beard, carried a cross, and was talking to an angel with spun gold hair descending upon them both, perhaps asking the angel to help them save the contents of the books.
    My father told the curator how I’d won first prize in a national art competition that spring.
    I’d won it for a painting inspired by an episode of ‘Lives of the Caesars’ on radio that showed Julius Caesar, during a night battle off Alexandria, fireballs in the air, having jumped off a rowboat, swimming to the Caesarean ship, documents in his raised left hand, burgundy cloak clenched in his teeth to keep this trophy from the Egyptians.
    I’d been presented the prize in a Dublin hotel by a minister’s wife with a pitchfork beehive, a tawny fur on her shoulders that looked like bob-cat fur.
    The hotel, I later learned, was one where young rugby players from the country spent weekends because the chambermaids had a loose reputation and they had hopes of sleeping with them.
    My mother, usually silent, on the train back west, in a wisteria-blue turban hat with two flared wings at the back she’d had on for the day, spoke of the weeks after my birth when it snowed heavily and she used to walk me, past the gaunt workhouse, to the Ash Tree. A beloved sister died and the Christmas cakes were wrapped up and not eaten until the Galway Races at the end of July when they were found to have retained their freshness.
    After we left the gallery my father and I took the bus, past swan-neck lamp posts, to the sea.
    In a little shop my father bought American hardgums for himself and jelly crocodiles for me.
    We walked past houses covered in Australian vine, with pineapple broom hedges, to the sea at the Forty Foot.
    In winter, when I was off school, sometimes I accompanied my father on his half day to Galway. We’d have tea and fancies in Lydon’s Tea House with its lozenge floor mosaic at the door and afterwards go to Salthill where we’d watch a whole