Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

went to a pub near St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear a woman from the Donegal gaeltacht, her photograph in an Abbey Theatre programme once, recite poems she never wrote down, her bedsit in Tufnell Park a legend of cats.
    She’d upbraided George Bernard Shaw when he was considering her for a major part and subsequently descended to menial work.
    The death of one of her dogs in a street accident occasioned a nervous breakdown.
    Iarla heard her tell an audience of Irish boys in cloaks, green-and-red half boots, Irish girls in Queen Nefertiti or Queen Nitocris shift dresses, that her poems were millions of years old.
    Old as Queen Scota maybe.
    A line from one of her poems about walking holding someone’s hand in Ireland decided him to return to Kerry.
    In early spring, by the stream, he saw again the hart’s tongue fern and the lords and ladies fern and the buttercup leaves and the celandine leaves and later the hemlock and the ramsons—the wild garlic—and the alexanders and the eyebright and the goosegrass and the chickweed.
    There is a red rim to the chickweed flower and he often saw that red in the whites of his eyes. It wasn’t that he cried. But he was always near tears.
    Near a ráth —an earthen ring fort—he found the small feathers of a singing thrush, which told him that a merlin had plucked its prey here, and he thought of the punitive, sometimes Augean places he’d lived in London, Thin Lizzy’s album Shades of a Blue Orphanage borne to each of them.
    Brecan managed the local Spar supermarket now, which had advertisements for Ardfert Retreat Centre.
    He married a Galway girl, his mother wearing a toque of lopped coins with a cobweb veil hanging from it for the wedding, pancake make-up on her face and angel-hair eyelashes like Joan Collins’ in Esther and the King .
    After a few years in Kerry, working around the bungalow, walking to the Góilín on days when the sky looked as if it was going to kick a ball at you, time of the cuckoo’s sostenuto, Iarla went to New York.
    ‘Slán go fóill [goodbye for the moment],’ said his lover friend of early adolescence, ‘I hope New York does you justice.’
    In Tralee before getting the bus for the onward journey he saw the Christian Brother catechism examiner of childhood hanging around the lavatory in Bill Booley’s Lane.
    ‘I went to Carthage where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.’
    His friend would quote St Augustine to describe a sojourn in North Africa. ‘All naked boys had to wear the horn of a gazelle when they reached puberty.’
    In a steam room in New York a young black soldier with a silver-dollar crew cut said: ‘Balls are the nature of man. When they’re big, man’s nature is big. Yours are big as an infant’s head.’
    He worked in Irish bars in New York, mostly one on the East River whose owner was from Cois Fharraige (beside the south Connemara Atlantic).
    ‘At sixteen I lived on the Holloway Road with just Gaelic.
    ‘Up at six. On the road for an hour.
    ‘We had to get it ready for the chippies. They did the slabbing and we put the plaster on it.
    ‘One hour getting back.
    ‘Then to the pubs.
    ‘Madison and Fifth Avenue was a two-way system when I arrived, with gold traffic signals with small statues of Mercury, messenger of the gods, on them.
    ‘We knew nothing about sex in Connemara.
    ‘The priest called the shots.
    ‘On South Boston men’s beach, in a sauna, the peanut whistle going outside, we found out.’
    Iarla had had a young lover friend in Dublin who was an electrician from Athlone where groups of boys hang out on the Shannon Bridge near the redstone, green-panelled Dillon Shoes building.
    There were fathers in the Athlone area, that boy had told Iarla, who let their friends make love to their teenage sons and watched while they were doing it.
    With a Sagittarius stone—turquoise—this boy had gone to live in Berlin.
    After a year in New York, Iarla went to Toronto, Canada, country of Leonard Cohen whom he heard singing ‘Kevin Barry’ in a 1960s Weltanschauung version at a concert in Dublin.
    ‘Just a lad of eighteen summers . . .’
    He lived in a house with shiplap siding in a run-down district.
    There were stories about gay people thrown at night into Toronto harbour.
    Occasionally he saw the Italian word froci —queers—written on the walls.
    He sent his Dublin friend a postcard of Vuillard’s Toulouse-Lautrec —mushroom hat, poppy shirt, baggy lemon trousers.
    ‘Are