Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

want to stay the night with you,’ he says.
    I bring him to the beach and give him my spare swimming briefs, which he jogs in while I swim.
    In a corner of the beach he towels himself naked.
    Gooseberry-velutinous chest—soft, fine hairs; moustachial hairs under his navel; genitals the salmon red of the linnet’s breast.
    The geography of Essex with its many tidal rivers in its early body hair.
    He is the young warrior who, after letting his beloved hawk fly into the Weald, advances towards his doom in battle with the Vikings as the causeway tide goes out.
    Bricin—Bricin Pluckrose is his name.
    His father is from the wastes of Essex near Chelmsford.
    Bricin brings a childhood snapshot of himself in rag hat with butterfly on it—Essex skipper, orange with black rim.
    He brings a photograph of his father standing against a Union Jack in olive-green polo shirt with red-rimmed collar, black braces, black laced-up boots.
    His father used to sell fruit and vegetables in Chelmsford in scarlet work boots with white laces, jeans with rolled-up ends, scarlet braces and shaven head like William Pitt’s niece and social hostess Lady Hester Stanhope, who used to beat her servants in Phoenicia with a mace and employed an ex-general of Napoleon as soothsayer there.
    His father’s sister—his nan—was a skinhead.
    ‘No earring but a bald head. No jail record.’
    She said then: ‘I want to slow down and marry.’
    She married a heavyweight boxer in Brentwood.
    ‘He saved my bacon,’ she said of him.
    The boy who tells these stories has hair the black of the defensive liquid the ten-armed cuttlefish emits, pockmarks like the webbing between the sea otter’s feet, Rudolph Valentino in mayhem good looks, mackerel-blue eyes.
    Eyes that suddenly liquify into anguish at the remembrance of some insult or some uncertainty as to my expectations of him.
    They are different expectations, new expectations.
    Occasionally his eyes rivet dangerously.
    Speech is frequently interrupted; a stammer, a caesura.
    The Queen’s father, George VI, had a stammer, I tell him.
    His grandmother, who witnessed the Canvey Island disaster of February 1953, has a framed message from George VI on her incrusted line-patterned wallpaper.
    ‘Help to make the world a better place and life a worthier thing.’
    ‘She’s with the fairies,’ Bricin borrows an expression from his Irish mother who drinks an eggnog every night and occasionally a Club Dry Gin with it.
    Bricin disappears from my life just as the Essex skipper vanishes from a musk thistle.
She is the fairies’ midwife . . .
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers . . .
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut . . .

    It is St Patrick’s night and the shelter from which I swim is invaded.
    A bin filled with glass from occasional winter drinkers has been emptied out.
    A small English boy with a café-crème baseball cap and a jail-bird stride indicates he carries a flick knife.
    A girl in a T-shirt with the words ‘Oopsy Tipsy! One too Many’ is walking around with jeans down to her knees.
    A flamingo bottom like François Boucher’s toiletting Venus.
    In the Boucher painting putti-bearing chaplets administer to Venus.
    Here the putti wear baseball caps.
    I ask two of these putti—one with a T-shirt with the words: ‘So wotcha say?’—to look after my bicycle while I’m swimming.
    They throw it to the ground, smashing the lamp to smithereens.
    A girl with ‘Will try anything twice’ flaunted on her T-shirt throws grit at me as I change.
    I ask her to stop whereupon the putti who threw my bicycle to the ground approach to beat me up.
    I manage to appease them and I make a getaway from this demonic theatre.
    A boy with Fatty Arbuckle features, hair and freckle colouring of the red squirrel, eyes blue as hedge periwinkles, in tropical shirt and Dr Livingstone shorts reconciles me to Bricin.
    He delivers him to me.
    The following Friday as he eats a forest-berry Bavarian cream cake he tells me that his cousin Uinseann—Gaelic for Vincent—who has Adam Ant braids, eyes like the Japanese sika deer in Killarney National Park, and tennis-star sisters Venus and Serena Williams on his mobile phone, used to make love to him in the shower of his home.
    Bricin is wearing a J. Nistlerooy, Manchester United, black away shirt.
    Uinseann has a girlfriend now who has beet-red dye in her hair, wears Mickey Mouse knickers, and said to Bricin: ‘If you were