Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Kissane—shaven head, face a medley of bruises, scars and bur-marigold coloured freckles, followed and held him before the ambulance arrived.
    ‘I’m dying,’ were Delvcaem’s last words.
    Gobby wore a viridian soccer jacket with orange zipper, words ‘The Shamrock Luck.’
    Christina Aguilera had just married Jordan with a reception held over three days among cherry-blossom trees in a Californian vineyard and two months previously Sean Preston Federline had been born to Britney Spears and dancer Kevin Federline.
    Delvcaem, changing hair; sometimes black, sometimes honey-blonde.
    Tattoos that came on and off.
    Baseball cap sideways, armlet tattoo on left arm.
    Which boy was it?
    Who was it?
    The question mark of a forelock surviving all the hair dyes.
    I rifle through the faces at Parteen swimming hole on a Saturday the previous July.
    A boy with guinea-gold Titus cut by a Shannon canal with tattoo tapestry on his body like Justin Timberlake, eyes the blue of a campus of bluebells.
    The salmon were so plentiful here once they used to jump into boats.
    People used to row up to Sunday Mass here, once, because Parteen Church kept summer time in winter and Mass was therefore an hour later in winter.
    The boy surrounded by Moyross boys with faces like the underparts of the mistle thrush from intensity of freckles.
    Fiend dog on his chest, Celtic cross on his back.
    His body told a story the way the Ruthwell Cross in Scotland tells the story of the ‘Dream of the Rood’—the dream of the tree hewn down at the wood’s edge so that Christ could be crucified on it.
    Classicizing tulip-white shorts.
    Incipient posture to his body, like the feet of the whooper swan—lemon-and-ebony bill—who flourishes in the Shannon Callows (water meadows) a little to the north.
    As if he was afraid of something.
    But in spite of this, true to the alternative meaning of eala , the Irish word for swan—noble person.
    Because it was a good summer the death’s head hawkmoth—skull shape (eye sockets and jaws) on thorax—was sighted on a hawthorn bush.
    One of the boys touched it and it issued a high-pitched squeak like a mobile phone announcing a text message has just arrived.
    The word used for penis at this swimming hole is ‘langur.’
    Same word as the long-tailed Asian monkey.
    After the Moyross boys had gone there were pages with photographs of ladies with blow-dry hair dos administering shiny, black dildos to their rears, all over the bank.
    As a child in Moyross Delvcaem would collect ladybirds in Cara—friend—matchboxes.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire, your children will burn.

    At St Nessan’s Community College he was later told that these words referred to the firing of hop fields in Kent after harvest.
    He was also told in St Nessan’s Community College about the Irish hop pickers swept away and drowned at Hartlake Bridge in Kent in 1853, a few years after the Great Famine.
    He’d visited the Famine graveyard near Mitchelstown, County Cork, once with his parents when they were travelling to visit his grandmother who lived at Green’s Bridge, Kilkenny town.
    In St Nessan’s Community College was a framed photograph of Tom Crean, Antarctic explorer from Annascaul, County Kerry, and companion of Robert Falcon Scott, in a sledge that had a flag on it with a harp in the centre.
    Delvcaem was informed that Christmas Day was celebrated on 21 June in the Antarctic, and that Tom Crean had seal soup under a Christmas tree made of ski sticks, decorated with penguin feathers.
    Delvcaem gave up fruit pastilles and cinder toffees—toffees that looked like ashes—for Lent.
    For his Confirmation in Corpus Christi Church, Moyross, he got a white-gold neck chain from Argos.
    He had a buff Airedale called Bisto who wore a scarlet dog collar with a pattern of white dog bones. Bisto’s favourite food was Jonnie Onion Rings and Drifter bars.
    In the summers he and his friends used to camp by Plassey Castle.
    He’d go with his mother on Saturdays to admire the black-bordered blue speculum—wing colouring—of the mallard at Westfields’ Bird Sanctuary, the mallard’s glossy green head, purple-brown breast, and also the features of the red-breasted merganser.
    He got his first detention sheet at St Nessan’s Conununity College because he failed to bring an apple in a box to school for a science experiment.
    Skinny-dipping with the Kilkenny boys in the Nore at Caney Woods when he visited his