Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

sign the year Dr Gilmartin, Archbishop of Tuam, had congratulated the County Mayo commissioners responsible for the boycott of Miss Dunbar-Harrison.
    Iarla shared a room with his brother, Brecan, a year older than him.
    Over Iarla’s bed was a colour photograph of Kirk Douglas showing his legs to Tony Curtis in The Vikings .
    With Brecan he’d walk to the grave of Scota—daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt, wife of Miliseus of Spain, killed at the Battle of Slieve Mis.
    From there they could see Banna Strand where Sir Roger Casement landed in a German U-boat, Easter 1916, and was marched by the English to Tralee where the Royal Irish Constabulary man’s wife cooked him a steak.
    Casement left his pocket watch as appreciation before being moved on to his execution in Pentonville Prison.
    The story, told by a Christian Brother catechism examiner, who’d felt Iarla’s neonate ginger-auburn hair inside his swain’s short trousers, was recorded in an exercise book with fleurons on the cover.
    It was Brecan, who had a haircut like Brian Poole of the Tremeloes, who’d returned to his family’s butcher business, who’d first made love to him.
    Brecan slept in the Kerry colours—green and dust-gold.
    There was an amorist in town, originally from Dublin, with a horseshoe beard like Yul Brynner in Solomon and Sheba , who swam in winter and won best actor award at the amateur drama finals in Scar-riff, County Clare.
    The adjudicator at Scarriff later drove his car off Corrib Bridge by Fisheries’ Field in Galway and drowned.
    St Swithin of Winchester requested to be buried in the cathedral yard so his grave would be rained on, and St Swithin’s Day, 15 July, determined the weather, rain or shine, for the next forty days.
    It was on St Swithin’s Day the Dublin man seduced Iarla in a copse behind a flank of mountain ashes after Iarla had swum in a stream.
    Looking at Iarla standing naked in the stream one day, the man said he reminded him of Tom, the dirty little chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies , who came down his friend Ellie’s chimney uninvited and subsequently, like the boys in Henry Scott Tuke’s paintings, had to purify himself—Tom, the dirty little chimney sweep, immediately put on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum .
    Iarla was by his side in a hotel in a neighbouring town after a performance one night.
    On the wall was a colour photograph of the Rose Garden, Bangor, County Down.
    A taciturn-faced boy with Fräulein-blonde facial hair, eyes chestnut-fringed, green rugby player’s chest, in a V-neck vermilion jersey, sat on the floor.
    There was a feeling of expectancy. Was someone going to sing a song?
    And then indeed the boy in the vermilion jersey did sing a song:
I sold my rock
I sold my reel
When my flax was gone
I sold my wheel
To buy my love a sword of steel.

    In the town, the drama group would meet in an Augustan pub called The White Causeway, a sign without that featured an undertaker celebrating with a glass of wine and a picture within of a bottle of wine beside a wine glass, with the words: ‘Salina Helena, Napa Valley Reserve, 1917.’
    The grey seals were born in autumn as white-coated pups on the Góilín—inlet—a coral strand made up of calcerous algae washed in by the winter tides.
    They remained on the strand for three weeks, after which the mothers abandoned them and hunger forced them to sea.
    ‘Most people say you’re turning into a right old poufter. Other people say you’re sound,’ a youth in a whipcord jacket and goffered shirt said to Iarla at a dance one night when Big Tom and the Mainliners were playing.
    When a poster for a parish-hall showing of The Swordsman of Siena —Stewart Granger in full Sienese garb waving a sword, a trembling décolleté Sylva Koscina with droplet earrings and a fearless Christine Kaufmann in a tam by his side—turned up in town, Iarla went to study in Dublin, dancing on Saturday nights in an Aran cardigan with wooden buttons at The Television Club.
    He had his tarot read by a girl who sat beside him on a chaise lounge in South King Street.
    He threw up his studies after a year and a half and went off to England.
    ‘The swan would die of pride if it hadn’t black feet,’ his mother said to him.
    Her Pier Angeli had died of a barbiturates overdose.
    In London he lived on pans of onions, which he fried wearing a sheepskin coat, and drank tea from a mug with Gainsborough’s shepherd girl on it.
    He regularly