Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

knee-length jackets with velvet-lined pockets, Roman-short jackets, banner-striped shirts, cowboy Slim Jim ties, crêpe-soled beetle-crusher shoes. Some had slicked-back Romeo hair, some Silver-Dollar crewcuts. We were told about one of the bachelors, that he’d been a barber in County Longford, his business motto being ‘Very little waiting,’ that he’d recently migrated to one of the north-eastern counties but he was missed in Longford. He had a flint quiff, flint cheekbones, an uncompromising chin like Steve Reeves. John Glenn sang ‘Boys of the County Armagh’ on the loudspeaker.
    A man with the marcel waves of another era, who had been studying the bachelors, declaimed:
    ‘I worked hard all my life. Training greyhounds. Can’t sleep at night thinking about how hard I worked. Met a girl once. She liked going to dances and all that kind of thing. I liked greyhounds and greyhound races. So we stopped seeing one another. But it was a wonderful thing making love.’
    On the way back my aunt sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ as she used to as a girl at ginger-ale parties in a room in my grandparents’ house with a picture of a Victorian girl with the word ‘Solitaria’ underneath it.
Oh! Who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

    The fields of County Limerick were covered with yellow agrimony which was said to cure skin rashes and external wounds and yarrow which was said to cure the innards it looked like. Traveller boys called at the door selling dulse that they’d picked on the coast and dried themselves, popular with young guards because it was good for the physique.
    Before I left my aunt and uncle gave me a large biscuit which was a walnut on a biscuit base buried under marshmallow sealed with twisted and peaked chocolate, and I clutched the canary’s leg in a cage.
    At Limerick bus station, where I wore a sleeveless jersey with a Shetland homespun pattern and mid-calf socks, a woman in a Basque beret said to me:
    ‘Margaret Mitchell was a very small woman but she wrote a very big book.’
    The Irish Sea was Persian blue.
    My father and I had a swim and afterwards a man with a malacca cane, in a linen Mark Twain suit and a Manila straw hat, who had been watching us, told us the history of the Forty Foot.
    Two boys listened intently to the lesson, one with a sluttish Jean Harlow face, the other with a Neptune belly and ant legs.
    The Forty Foot was called after the Forty Foot Regiment stationed in the Martello tower built during the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty Men. Forty Feet.
    At the beginning of the century Oliver St John Gogarty used to frequently swim between the Forty Foot and Bullock Harbour in Dalkey where monks had lived in the Middle Ages.
    Oliver St John Gogarty had fox-blond hair then with an impertinent crescendo wave, eyebrows in askance, shoulders poised for riposte, Galwegian lips.
    He was Arthur Griffith’s white boy.
    Arthur Griffith had founded the non-violent Sinn Féin movement in 1905 in order to set up an Irish republic. He had a brush moustache, wore wire glasses, a stand-up collar, neckcloth.
    One day, in his tailored swimming costume, he decided to swim to Bullock Harbour with Oliver St John Gogarty. He expired a few yards out at sea.
    A few years after that visit to the Forty Foot, when my father bought me a set of art books, there was a reproduction of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in one of them in which Titian depicted the death of self.
    The Flute Player Marsyas is flayed alive, upside down, to the accompaniment of violin music, watched by a little Maltese dog and by King Midas, with ass’s ears, who is Titian himself who’d recently given the prize of gold chain to and publicly in Venice embraced Veronese, lavish with red lake like himself, as his successor. Titian—his arms still muscular in the painting, his honeyed and diamanté chest strung with a salmon-vermilion cloak—painted it with his fingers.
    I thought of the story of Arthur Griffith when I got the books, that it must have been the death of some part of Arthur Griffith’s self that day.
    Gogarty, who’d rescued a suicide in the Liffey by knocking him out, brought the leader to shore.
    In the evening my father and I stopped at a fish and chip shop near the Forty Foot. On a cyclamen, jay blue and lemon jukebox the Everley Brothers sang ‘Lonely Street.’ A boy, in a blue shirt with white, sovereign polka dots, stood eating chips. On his wrist was a tattoo; the name of a place—army barracks or