Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

grandmother.
    He once brought a bunch of field roses from the edge of Caney Woods to his grandmother.
    He boxed with Garra Beasley, sheep-coloured hair in a turf cut, at St Francis’ Boxing Club, where Andy Lee learned to box, near Four Star Pizza, near Lidl’s German supermarket with its sign of blue, yellow and Indian red.
    Garra Beasley had no pubic hair until he was fourteen, then a handsel of blonde hair.
    He moved from Moyross to live in a trailer in Southill, near Limerick jail.
    Delvcaem would meet him then to stand on a table against the wall at Colbert Station, put there for the purpose, to watch soccer matches in adjoining Jackman Park.
    Garra now always wore a baseball hat with the colours of the French flag; blue, white with red peak.
    Delvcaem got four valentines one year.
    Two the next.
    Only one the year after that.
    He went out with a girl called Becfola who in summer was always in a flamingo miniskirt with double-serrated hem, flamingo calf boots, tank top that, in the way of All Saints, displayed a bellybutton.
    The Missus, Delvcaem called her.
    She was from Garryowen, by St John’s Cathedral, where a boy neighbour had recently been repeatedly hit in the face with a hurley in the small hours, by a boy neighbour of Delvcaem’s, and lost the sight of both eyes.
    ‘We’ll break windows, we’ll break doors,’ the song ‘Boys of Garryown’ went.
    She asked him to guess what colour underwear she wore.
    He guessed rightly. Pink, of course.
    She asked him did he wear underwear with tongs legs like her grandfather?
    He said no. He wore boxers with the signs of the zodiac on them.
    He’d put a dab of aftershave on both ears before seeing her.
    Had a nought-and-scissors haircut then—nought at the sides, scissors on top.
    Took her to Donkey Ford’s Chipper in John’s Street, and Freda’s Takeaway in Killeely.
    Took her to McDonald’s near St Francis’ Boxing Club where he bought her a McFlurry ice cream.
    When the loosestrife was shedding its petals onto the Shannon she told him she didn’t want to go out with him anymore but stole six cans of Bulmers Cider from the house in doing this.
    Garra Beasley got married at sixteen in the Church of the Holy Family in Southill.
    They played Dion DiMucci’s ‘A Teenager in Love’ at the reception in the Shamrock Hotel, Bunratty, with cake from Ivan’s.
    Dion DiMucci was given an old Gibson guitar when he was ten and learning Hank Williams’ songs.
    Garra Beasley and his wife honeymooned in Amsterdam where they found they had to be twenty-one to get into sex shops.
    Delvcaem’s grandmother in Kilkenny sent him fifty euros and died.
    He forgot to set his watch forward, one year, and arrived at Corpus Christi Church in Moyross one hour early for Mass.
    When asked what he was doing for that hour, he said he was praying.
    Aelred, his cousin, in Margate, Kent, with a tattoo bulldog with the words ‘Proud to be British,’ was killed in a quad accident at Studland beach near Bournemouth and someone sent a wreath of red roses in quad shape to the service at Long Melford Church, Suffolk.
    Bobby Dazzler, he’d called Delvcaem on a visit to Limerick.
    Spent his time with Mush, a Buffer—settled—Traveller friend after his dating Becfola.
    ‘Cous’ (cousin), Mush called him.
    Mush—two curls like a cat’s whiskers on his forehead, his hair dyed canary yellow, parted in the middle, flapper-style—had the habit of regaling compère Cilla Black of Blind Date , his chest bare, taking a few steps towards the television and shaking his fist at her.
    Traveller boys, with diamonds or boxes hairstyles—step top, diamond-or box-pattern at the sides—would sit around afterwards drinking WKD (blue, yellow, green or red vodka), Stonehouse beer, Bavaria Crown lager, listening to music presented by DJ Tiësto, DJ Pulse, DJ Rankin, or Lisa Lashes of Tidy Trax Girls’ fame, familiar to Aelred as regular DJ at Slinky’s in Bournemouth.
    Occasionally in the small hours Traveller boys would doff their shirts and bare-knuckle box for bets of two hundred euros.
    Mush’s car was torched and he moved to the cormorant coast of Galway.
    Delvcaem also had a friend, Heapy, hair on the road between chestnut and nasturtium, a kick-boxer who had a tattoo ‘KICK’ on his buttock from a tattoo shop in Fermoy, County Cork, where Daubenton’s bats hang upside down in cracks under the bridge all day, making wide circles very close to the water at dusk as they grab insects off