Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

fulmars spray a foul and oily substance.
    He stands like a young guillemot about to parachute from a cliff nest to the sea.
    In the theatre of another mobile phone the same boy in pale-blue Samsung-mobile-phone Chelsea T-shirt, a silver pendant around his neck, which is a replica of a silver pendant found near the second-century Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England.
    Rihanna’s—Barbados girl of Irish descent—‘Unfaithful’ plays for a few seconds on the same mobile phone.
    ‘There was a mink on the Nun’s Strand! I swear on my mother’s life.’
    Was the mink he saw Canadian or European? European minks had a white mark above the mouth. Both Canadian and European had a white mark below the mouth. Hard to see.
    The mink would wait by the montbretia rushes for prey—rats, mice, shrews, rabbits.
    The pawmarks of the mink on the sand—he wanted necklaces, bracelets like that.
    He’d also have liked bracelets like the otter’s pawmarks on the sand with webbing between five toes.
    Eelgrass, after its crop in September and October, carpets the tide-edge on the black sands—like Haiti—alongside the Nun’s Strand with deposits in November.
    To walk on this your tackles—trainers—get slightly wet but the feeling is luxuriant.
    The white-breasted black brent geese have heard of these deposits in the Canadian High Arctic and can be seen on the black sands, known as Rhenafoyle, alongside the Nun’s Strand, in November, and heard calling to one another.
    It was in November that Delvcaem was murdered.
    Ropes hang from trees in Moyross, north Limerick city, so boys can swing from them.
    Little girls play with pogo sticks.
    A lemon sulky is drawn by a tittuping scarlet caparisoned, stockinged, snowy Irish draught horse, driven by a Traveller boy in Bronx 69 T-shirt, who’s speaking on a mobile phone.
    Another Traveller boy, in Sex Pistols T-shirt, rides a wild Arabian horse.
    There’s a jilted junior bicycle among the bulrushes, a discarded lady’s slingback shoe with high, slender heel.
    On the gateposts of one house are stone herons and in the garden of another a plastic, life-size horse.
    In the garden of Delvcaem’s house, the house of mourning, are scarlet mushrooms with white polka dots.
    Primroses— sabhaircíní —are growing.
    By the door a mother duck in bonnet, blue pinafore, child duck in blue apron carrying yellow roses.
    Delvcaem’s mother answers the door, still in her dressing gown, patterned with daisies among dill-like foliage.
    Sapphire-blue eyes, cinereous mare’s tall.
    It is Delvcaem’s nineteenth birthday.
    The forget-me-not— lus míonla (gentle herb)—is returning to the Shannon banks.
    In north Kerry they light the paschal fire on Cnoc an Óir—the hill of gold, the hill of autumn—to commemorate St Patrick, who outwitted the druids by lighting the paschal flame before the flame of Lá Bealtaine—May Day.
    On Delvcaem’s bedroom wall is a torso shot of Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers—scrolled rose tattoo on left arm—never seen since February 1995 when his Vauxhall Cavalier was found at a service station by the Severn estuary, which has the second highest tide in the world; Justin Timberlake in small-band denim cowboy hat; Shayne Ward with cobweb facial hair; Lee Otway with mouse-nest blond hair, bone necklace, white singlet with stardust; Boy George in Welsh lady’s hat; Christina Aguilera of the Marlene Dietrich mouth in mid-thigh dress of Tyrian purple and fishnet stockings; Britney Spears and troupe of dancers in Catholic girls’ school uniforms; Sugababes in décolleté sequinned black; the Garryowen Pipe and Drum Band in forage caps and white gaiters; Andy Lee of Southill, Limerick city, with his opponent, Alfredo Angulo López, at the 2004 Athens Olympics; grinning teenage Kildare boxing star, David Oliver Joyce, with boxing gloves poised at the camera.
    On a rack are intersport jerseys—rugby, soccer, Gaelic—from Elverys Sports shop, won from a voucher on a Coca-Cola bottle.
    Delvcaem was wearing a zippie jacket with the words ‘El Club que Encajona’ —the club that fits together—black-and-cream shoes with winkle-picker toes, when he was murdered.
    Beaten on the head with an iron bar outside an off-licence, knife through the temple.
    Nedeen, Moss, Macla, Gobby were with him when he was attacked, all on the way home from a martial arts film, Kung Fu Hustle , at the Omniplex.
    Delvcaem ran.
    Attackers pursued him.
    Gobby—Gobby