Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

a product you’d be mustard.’
    They went to a nightclub in Tralee together where the boys danced with the boys and the girls danced with the girls and a boy and a girl had oral sex on the floor.
    When Bricin is distressed he can make his jaws look like the Aristotle’s lantern—the spherical jaws of a sea urchin.
    Alternatively, he diverts to his father’s Essex Polari—a mixture of pig Latin, Romany, criminal argot.
    Dosh, he calls money.
    In the casinos, some boys sell themselves for sex for twenty euros.
    My father, donor of Michelangelos and Bellinis—from the books he gave me I learnt that Leonardo wrote in mirror writing (reversed writing)—referred to my girlfriends as Mary Annes.
    Also known as Mary Annes were the London telegraph boys of the 1880s in their light-blue uniforms and sideways caps, whom speculation said satisfied the desires of the heir presumptive with spiv’s moustache and frogged Hussar’s tunic, who, on his early death, was mourned each day by his mother, with fresh flowers laid on his deathbed.
    One of those London Mary Annes was found to have connections with the Golden Lane Boy Brothel near the Liffey in Dublin, frequented by Dublin Fusiliers and Grenadier Guards, which the Home Rulers used as propaganda against the British rulers.
    Sometimes Bricin comes into my place from the casinos like a ruffled young barn owl with its kitten head and protuberant eyes.
    A man in a denim cowboy hat in the casino told him: ‘I put ads in the paper and get couples. I only go with couples.’
    His mouth is smeared with the Mississippi mud pie he’s been eating.
    Dalta —foster-child; Bricin in my life.
    Late August he visits Essex with his father.
    ‘I love this country,’ his father declares when the Tube reaches Epping.
    ‘In my childhood a mug cost a penny and very big ones too.’
    They feast on jumbo sausages, curry, chips and gravy, and Memory
    Lane Madeira cake in Colchester.
    This is a conversation Bricin hears on a bus in Colchester:
    ‘And the cat got into the fridge.’
    ‘How did the cat get into the fridge?’
    ‘Don’t ask me. And it was so smelly.’
    In a supermarket he witnesses a youth, accosted by store detectives, pulling down his trousers in front of the delicatessen, showing his Ginch Gonch underwear.
    ‘I haven’t got anything!’
    His family knows the Roman roads of Essex, the ploughman’s spikenard, same fragrance as the ointment Mary anointed the feet of Jesus with.
    ‘Goodbye Bud,’ his uncle, who wears a silver lurex shirt and who has a bull terrier called Daniela, says to him when he’s leaving.
    He has returned from Essex wearing a black-and-white baseball cap with rabbit ears and a belt with a monkey motif buckle—three monkey cameos.
    There are male strippers in Galway, Bricin has heard. For hen parties; some of them appear in nothing but Stetsons from Euro-Saver shops.
    Perhaps he’ll go there, wear Union Jack kit, bill himself as the Essex stripper or British kit stripper.
    In September he turns up in the shelter in the evenings while I’m swimming, as a black-headed gull—chocolate-brown head—drawn to sportsfields, does.
    Body like a wounded gull.
    Joins hands, prays for his dead Irish grandfather.
    ‘If he was alive he’d give me fifty euros.’
    Often he lights candles in church for his grandfather before coming to meet me.
    Here he may spend a votive ten minutes.
    His mother got a portrait tattoo of his grandfather in Limerick on her right arm.
    His grandfather used to wear a hat with a scarlet cockade and pheasant feather on the brim.
    I have to ban Bricin from my place. Coming too often, danger.
    He bangs on my window for admittance, like the busty Caroline of Brunswick, in spite of her affair with Italian courtier Bartolomeo Pergami, banging on the doors of Westminster Abbey during the coronation of her husband George IV, the doors barred against her.
    The Polish boy who fixes my bicycle is from Katowice, Henryk Górecki’s town, composer of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs , a tape lost in my flight.
    The bicycle man with handlebar moustache frequently passes me in a Toyota truck and honks at me.
    I arrived on the first of November, a Friday—Samhain—to have my bicycle chain fixed.
    He was in jail for not paying his taxes, an old lady, who reprimanded me for wearing shorts in November, told me.
    I called at the buff bungalow of a boy, who wore a lemon baseball cap with the words ‘The Doctor,’ who’d pledged to help me if I