Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

the Pound came.’
    Surrounded by boys, some like the wolf of Gubbio with a stud in its ear, some with a caduceus—staff of Mercury—by a torched Go-Kart, I am made to feel like Gypo Nolan in John Ford’s film, who is taunted by a prostitute during the War of Independence because he doesn’t have the fare to the USA, accepts a British award leading to the arrest of his friend Frankie McPhillip, revealing Frankie’s whereabouts, seeks expiation in Dublin’s churches, tried in secret by his former comrades, shot.
    It was no use denying I’d rung up the Joe Duffy show. I had to accept it though it wasn’t true, and go through a period of vilification.
    ‘Paedo. Faggot. Rat. You egg. You fuel. You did the monkey.
    What’s the colour of your eyes? I’ll buy you a pair of socks.’
    Figroll gets a replacement horse, a skewbald from the Leitrim mountains with white fur like a goose’s feathers.
    ‘A psycho horse.’
    ‘He’s a spirit. Mad as a brush. Mad as a fork. Mad as a spoon.’
    I feel like that horse, on the ground by the Square Pond, head tethered by many ropes held by the youths, beaten on the face with a fleecey butter-green poplar bough by Figroll until the blood runs from his face and mouth, thought to have expired, rising, standing, anticipating further blows.
    Banger, a Chihuahua of a boy, hair as black as the black of a chess board, eyebrows like black sickle moons, cherry cordial lips, cheekbones scalloped like a holy water font, runs excitedly in the middle of this entertainment as a moorhen hobbles in the fields.
    Banger has two bracelets of miniature ikons, one large, one smaller, dominant ikon in large one that of a Christ who looks like Tony Montana in Scarface .
    ‘Where did you get the bracelet?’
    ‘In Lourdes.’
    ‘When were you in Lourdes?’
    ‘I wasn’t. My nanny was. Where’s yours?’
    Figroll has two similar bracelets. One a Gypsy woman had given him in town. ‘She only gives them to special people.’ One the Leitrim owner of the skewbald had given him for luck.
    In identical magenta tracksuits, two girls smoke cigarettes on the gate, but with the look of Martha and Abby Brewster, the two spinster aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace , before they poison one of their gentlemen victims with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, cyanide.
    Suddenly one of them screams.
    ‘He did a shit.’
    Horsey emerges from behind the hawthorn bushes, carrying a stick with excrement at the end, and goes in the direction of the girls. Excrement gets on the white jackets he’s carrying. He looks to the Grand Canal for a solution.
    The Pound strike again, confiscating the Leitrim skewbald, and that is the finish for me. ‘You were a spy from the SPCA.’
    Fluffy in a hoodie jacket patterned with skulls tries to tether my bicycle to an elder tree. Figroll simultaneously tries to wrest the bicycle from me.
    ‘I was fond of you,’ I plead.
    I want to say you and the other boys came into my life in a wooden horse.
    I wanted to say I’d known a wooden horse since childhood. The Horse Fair in my town was a wooden horse in which people who were different came.
    Thomas Omer started building the Grand Canal in 1757. One of his houses is by the twelfth lock with Deadly Nightshade on the other side of the canal. The twelfth lock was built too narrow on the Dublin side. It had to be widened. The mares and foals among the ragwort by the twelfth lock know not to eat it because of its poisonous juices.
    The Grand Canal was built with gunpowder, picks, shovels, candles.
    Horses used to draw barges by the canal. That’s why the boys claimed in Tallaght Council Offices they had a right to own horses.
    ‘Have you ever heard the expression “Keep on the straight and the narrow”?’ Kil asked me one day, in Bermudas patterned with Brazil nuts, ‘It comes from the Grand Canal. The long barges were pulled by a horse on a straight and narrow path. The path had to be straight and narrow to keep the tension of the barge.’
    Getting across the Bog of Allen took five years.
    They got to Daingean—Philipstown after Queen Mary’s Spanish husband (‘My marriage is my own affair.’)—where there was another reformatory school. I knew someone who was turned barefoot out of it.
    Then the canal extended to Shannon Harbour. An extension beyond the Shannon to the town I’m from.
    There was a Guinness depot there. Coffee Bradley, a Somme veteran, came down the Grand Canal in a Guinness barge, as King of