Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the surface with their larger-than-usual hind feet.
    Heapy joined the FCA—Local Defence Force—in Roscommon town.
    The Shannon, the Shiven and the Suck were the rivers up there, glistening white with river-crowfoot blossom in summer.
    Heapy would spend his time, when he wasn’t training, standing around Goff Street with other young soldiers or in a pub whose sign said in Irish it was for the rakes— réicí .
    Heapy told Delvcaem how Lieutenant Kevin Gleeson’s Irish UN peacekeeping patrol was ambushed in Niemba, November 1960, by screaming tribesmen using poisoned arrows.
    Lieutenant Gleeson, said Jambo, raising his left hand in a peaceful sign.
    They sent an arrow through it.
    Eight Irish soldiers were killed.
    One died later from wounds.
    There were two survivors.
    A patrol under Commandant Hogan, Irish Battalion second-in-command, came across one of the two survivors, Private Thomas Kenny, with two arrows in him.
    He saluted and said he was Private Kenny, Thomas.
    Driven by Gobby Kissane, Delvcaem started going to north Kerry.
    Gobby would do doughnuts (handbrake turns) on the sand.
    Gobby always wore a woollen cap with ‘Prague’ on it for these trips to the Atlantic.
    Casinos where men of fifty, who have children up to twenty-five, merge with boys from Limerick in camouflage baseball caps or with Traveller couples on honeymoon—youth with a tattoo of a panther with wide-open rose mouth, horseshoe penetrated by a dagger, girl with mascara blue as the kingfisher’s wing and fillet orange as the kingfisher’s breast.
    ‘Have you got euro? Have you got euro?’ fellow Moyross boys importuned.
    A boy in the casino who looked like a heron in jeans said of Midleton, County Cork, where he was from, that it had the highest suicide rate in Ireland.
    A boy in the casino, with a laugh like a kookaburra, in a hoodie jacket, told Delvcaem his parents were alcoholics and he’d take the twenty euros they gave him for food and gamble it in the casinos, buying hashish or marijuana—weed—if he won.
    The bouncer had two crucifixes upside down around his neck, the smaller hanging from a crown of thorns, a miniature rifle.
    ‘I was deported from England in 1974 for fighting for my country,’ he said under Britney Spears’ ‘From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.’
    Summers then when seven-spot ladybirds came out like stars, ragwort grew up high as human beings, and the seagulls were your first cousins.
    Bearded skewbald horses became attached to you and nearly followed the bus with Bus Éireann’s logo—orange setter with legs gathered in—back to Limerick.
    Snail shells of mahogany and sunflower colouring, smashed by a stone, indicated this was the anvil stone of a song thrush so he could eat the snails within.
    The mistle thrush sang on a ‘No Trespassers’ sign and at Clancy’s Strand, by meadows where nasturtiums that had run away from home lived, they threw greyhounds into the Atlantic, who could no longer run at Shelbourne Park, Dublin.
    A scarecrow wore a T-shirt, ‘Irish by birth, Munster by the grace of God.’
    Delvcaem took a digital photograph on his mobile phone of a topaz-and-ebony she-goat, jet-black kid, two nougat-coloured kids, monarchial consort.
    Hashish through horse tranquillizers to ecstasy, LSD, speed, cocaine, were used on Castle Green.
    Delvcaem asked a toy boy with the features of a bottlenose dolphin in pursuit of mackerel why he had broken someone’s nose.
    The boy replied: ‘Because I’m suffering from ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder].’
    Strobe lights at the disco were like the garnet red of the burnet moth hovering over ragwort.
    Delvcaem brought a girl, who looked like poultry stuffed into jeans, behind Buckley’s Garage and made love to her.
    Afterwards his body smelled like the urine the fox sprays to denote its territory trail.
    Two stories he heard about the mink.
    One, they’d been bought from Canada in the 1950s and escaped from primitive mink farms.
    Two, they’d been brought from Sweden, Poland, Romania and Russia several years back and had been released by animal activists.
    They were shooting mink in Galway because they raided farmyard fowl.
    Old and unwanted greyhounds were flung into the Atlantic at Clancy’s Strand.
    Was Delvcaem victim of a ghetto kangaroo court or a tribal fight?
    ‘If a Shankey sees a Cullivan and the Cullivan is just standing there the Shankey will go up and give him a clout.’
    ‘Don’t go over to where the