Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

was in trouble with my bicycle.
    He ambushed a girl with tricolour hair—hazel in front, fuschia on top, ebony ponytail—on a madder rose junior bicycle, which featured the bobbed-haired Dora the Explorer in lemon ankle socks, and forcibly took a link from her chain.
    She threatened the Demon Man on him.
    The link didn’t fit.
    I was led to a greensward where boys in a flea market of baseball caps stood around a Samhain bonfire.
    Between the first of November and the first of May the filí —poets—would tell a story for each night.
    A Raleigh racing bicycle, which wobbled like jelly, was produced from a shed.
    I was asked twenty-five euros for it.
    I only had twenty-two euros.
    I was given it for that and I walked the two bicycles the ten miles back against the night traffic and met a man with greyhounds, pink and white electric-fence twine attached to them.
    The hermit crab crawls into the mollusc abandoned by the mussel or the oyster.
    A nosegay of snowdrops— pluíríní sneachta —comes to my door.
    A child is a graph; he measures the year.
    I see him again in a scarlet-and-navy-banded blue-striped Tommy Hilfiger jersey and pointy shoes, eyes the blue of the hyacinths the rubbish-dump-frequenting herring guff decorates its nest with; white polo shirt with vertically blue-striped torso, listening to Rihanna’s ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’ on his mobile phone; I see him crunching a Malteser—small round chocolate with honeycombed centre—sucking a strawberry Fun Gum or biting on a raspberry and pineapple Fruit Salad bar; I see his eyes again, blue as the blue pimpernel flower of Essex.
    There was a honey-haired and honey-browed young drug dealer who ultimately used to reside in the shelter in the evenings.
    His mother’s people were from The Island in Limerick, where swans colonize the turloughs (winter lakes) with a view of council houses beyond.
    On his motorbike, with yellow backpack, he’d travel over rivers like the Oolagh and the Allaghaun, to places like Rooskagh, to sell marijuana and hashish to boys waiting on summer evenings in diamond-pattern shorts.
    The Lueneburg Manuscript of the middle of the fifteenth century tells how in the year 1284, on the twenty-sixth of June, Feast of Saints John and Paul, one hundred and thirty children from Hamelin, Germany, were led from the town by a piper dressed in diverse colours to a place of execution behind the hills. A stained-glass window in Marktkirche, Hamelin, depicted the colours. Jacob Ludwig Carl and William Carl Grimm, known to embellish, retold the story.
    Were the children drowned in the Weser?
    Did they depart on a Children’s Crusade?
    Were they murdered in the forest by the piper?
    Did they anticipate Theresienstadt where children were allowed to paint in diverse colours before being gassed?
    Did they anticipate the children pulled out from the rubble in Dresden, on a night a Vermeer was burned, in Harlequin and Pierrot costumes because the bombing of Dresden took place at Fasching—Shrovetide carnival?
    Divers colours: the paintings of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini, Damiano Mazza—two boys look at them and then, like the two children of Hamelin who didn’t follow the piper, debouch to the garda station to report this montage of pornography.

Old Swords

    Luke Wadding, seventeenth-century Waterford friar in Rome, who sent the sword of the Earl of Tyrone—buried in the Franciscan Convent of San Pietro in Montorio—back to Cromwellian-overrun Ireland, did most of his writing between sunset and midnight, we were told at National School . . .
    On her fern-and ivy-collecting visit to County Kerry in the late summer of 1861, shortly before her husband’s death from shock over his son’s affair with an actress, Queen Victoria was presented with a davenport writing desk, lions and unicorns rampant on it, made by three Killarney carpenters, the surviving brother of the Liberator Daniel O’Connell coming to meet her in the home of the Herberts, who were catapulted into bankruptcy by the expenses Queen Victoria incurred for them.
    The stories come back like the lesser celandine blossoms by the sea in early spring: stories from history, stories from your life . . .
    The parents of Iarla Corduff, whose hair was the pale red-bronze of the grouse when affiliated to heather, eyes the green of the County Clare Burren moth, were married in Baltimore, Maryland, where they were emigrants.
    Iarla’s father worked as a fisherman and his mother