Lark's Eggs (30 page)

Winter swimmers, you brave the cold, you know you've got to go on, you make a statement. A Tinker's batty horse, brown and white, neighs in startlement at the winter swim. A man rides a horse on Gort Hill, disappearing onto the highway.
Tinkers'
limbs, limbs that have to know the cold to be cleansed.

‘The Tinkers fight with one another and kill one another. If
someone
does something wrong they beat the tar out of them. But they don't fight with anyone else. You never see a Tinker letting his trousers down,' a woman whispered in Connemara, sitting on a wicker pheasant chair. The flowering currant was in blossom outside the window.

A Traveller boy in a combat jacket with lead-coloured leaves on it stood outside his Roma Special, among washing machines, wire, pots, kettles, cassettes, tin buckets.

Some day later there were lightening streaks of white splinters across the road where the Travellers had been.

In early summer the bog cotton blew like patriarchs' beards, above a hide, the stems slanted, and distantly there were scattered beds of bog cotton on the varyingly floored landscape under the apparition-blue of the mountains.

I was skipping on Clifden Head when a little boy came along. The thrift was in the rocks. ‘Nice and fit.' He wanted to go swimming. But he had no trunks. ‘Go in the nude,' I said. ‘Ah, skinny-dipping. Are you going again?' I was drying. ‘No, I'll go elsewhere and paddle.'

‘I used pass him in the rain outside his caravan,' the woman in Connemara told a story before she went to mass, about a Tinker man who died young, standing in an accordion-pleated skirt, ‘sitting by a fire against the wall. “Why don't you go inside?” I'd ask him. “Sure I have two jackets,” he'd say. “I have another one inside. I can put on that one if this one gets wet.”'

‘Are you a buffer or a Traveller?' a Tinker boy asked me. On their journeys there are five-minute prayers at a place where you were born, where your grandmother died.

There was a Traveller's discarded jersey in a bush. Buffer—settled—Travellers stood in front of a cottage with the strawberry tree—the white bell flower—outside.

A Traveller in a suit of Mosque blue came to the door one day to try to buy unwanted furniture, carpets. ‘He had a suit blue as the tablecloth,' went the story after him. Part of his face was reflected in the mirror. It was as if a face was being put together, bit by bit.

A Traveller youth in a cap and slip-on boots which had a
triangle
of slatted elastic material held his bicycle in a rubbish dump against a rainbow. The poppy colours of the montbretia spread through the countryside in the hot summer. There were sea mallows between the roads and the sands.

You felt you were nuzzling for recovery against landscape.

The sides of the sea road towards fall were thronged with hemp agrimony. The seaweed was bursting, a rich harvest full of iodine. As I was leaving Galway the last fuschia flowers were like red bows on twigs the way yellow ribbons were sometimes tied around trees in the Southern States.

‘Now therefore, I pray thee, take heed to thyself until the morning, and abide in a secret place, and hide thyself.'

You felt like a broken city, the one sung about in a song played on jukeboxes throughout Ireland. ‘What's lost is lost and gone
forever
.' In May 1972 you heard a lone British soldier on duty sing ‘Scarlet Ribbons' on a deserted sun-drenched street in that city.

 Old man's beard grew among the winter blackthorns in West Limerick. Tall rushes with feathery tops lined the road to Limerick. Traveller women used fashion flowers from these rush tops.

The bracket fungus in the woods behind my flat was gathered on logs like coins on a crown, stories.

On the street of this town the Teddyboy's face came back, brigand's moustache, funnel sidelocks, carmine shirts, the spit an emblem on the pavement. He had briar-rose white skin.

‘They'd come in September and stay until Confirmation time,' a woman in a magenta blouse with puff sleeves whispered about the Travelling people. When I was a boy Travellers would draw in for the winter around our town.

A pool was created in the river behind the house in which I was staying and I swam there each morning, the river, just after a rocky waterfall, halted by a cement barrier. On this side of the town bridge the river is fresh water. On the other it is tidal. Swans often sat on the cement barrier when only a meagre current went over it.

On this side it is a spate river and the current, always strong at the side, after rain, is powerful, I did not gauge its power and one morning I was swept away by it, over the barrier, as if by a human force. I had no control. There was no use fighting. I was carried down the waterfall on the other side of the barrier to another tier of the river, drawn in a torrent. I saw pegwood in red berry on the bank. I got to the side, crawled out. In Ancient Ireland they used eat bowls of rowan berries in the autumn.

One morning I tried the tidal part of the river at the pier called Gort. In Irish
gort
means field, field of corn. It is very close to the word for hunger, famine—
gorta
. The flour ships from Newcastle and Liverpool used come here. People would carry hay, seaweed to the pier. A slate-blue warehouse shelters you from view.

When I was a boy they used hold a rope across the river at the Red Bridge, someone on either side, swimmers clutching it and then the swimmers would be pulled up and down.

I remembered a man drying the hair of a boy in the fall of 1967.

I had a friend who used swim naked when he found he had the place to himself. One day someone hid his clothes in the bushes and a group of girls came along. He hid behind a bush until they went.

 He was writing what he called a pornographic novel for a while. As we passed some Travellers' caravans one autumn day he told me a story. A boy, a relation, a soldier in Germany, came from England, slept in the bed with him. At night they'd make love. The evenings during his visit were demure. They'd have cocoa as if nothing had happened. My friend had a modestly winged Beatle cut, wore vaguely American, plum or aubergine shirts with stripes of indigo blue or purple blue.

A Traveller in a stove-pipe hat called to the door one afternoon and offered five pounds for a copper tank that was lying behind the house, his hand ritualistically outstretched, the fiver in it. I said I couldn't give it to him. It was my landlady's. The copper tank
disappeared
in the middle of the night.

An English Gypsy boy with hair in smithereens on his face, his cheeks the sunset peach of a carousel horse's cheeks, in a frisbee,
carnelian
hearing aid in his left ear, on a bicycle, stopped me one day when I was cycling and asked me the way to Rathkeale. I was going there myself and pointed him on.

In Rathkeale rich Travellers have built an enclave of pueblo-type and hacienda-type houses. They were mostly shut up, the doors and the windows grilled, the inhabitants in Germany, the men tarmacadaming roads. A boy with a long scarf the lemon-yellow of the Vatican passed those houses on a piebald horse.

I moved down the river to swim in the mornings, nearer the house where I lived, and swam among the bushes, putting stones on the ground where there was broken glass. There'd been a factory opposite the pool.

When I was a boy it was an attitude, swim in rain, ice, snow, brave these things, topaz of sun often in the wet winter grass, topaz in the auburn hair of a boy swimmer.

A group of young people used swim through the winter. Even when the grass was covered with frost and the blades capped with pomegranate or topaz gold. They'd pose for photographs in hail or snow. I was not among them but later I had no problem swimming in winter, in suddenly, after some months of not swimming, taking off a Napoleon coat in winter and swimming in winter in the Forty Foot in Dublin or on a beach in Donegal.

There was something benign about these young people. Mostly boys. But sometimes a few girls.

One day in Dublin I met one of the boys just after his mother died. It was winter. We didn't say much. But we got on the  bus to the Forty Foot and had a swim together. He went to the United States shortly after that.

Some English Gypsies were camped outside town and one day a boy on a Shetland pony, with copper crenellated mid-sixties hair and ocean-ultramarine irises, asked me, ‘Did you ever ride a muir?'

‘Look at the horse's gou,' he said referring to a second Shetland pony a boy with skirmished hair was holding, ‘Would you like to feak her?'

It's like a bandage being removed I thought, plaster taken off, layer and layer, from a terrible wound—a war wound.

Christmas 1974, just before going back to Ireland from London, I slept in a bed with an English boy under a bedspread with diamond patterns, some of them nasturtium coloured. He had liquid ebony hair, a fringe beard. He wore his bewhiskered Afghan coat, spears of hair out of it. In bed his body was lily-pale—he had cherry-coloured nipples. On our farewell he gave me a book and I put the Irish Christmas stamp with a Madonna and Child against a mackerel-blue sky in it.

All the journeys, hitch-hiking, train journeys overlap I thought, they are still going on, they are still intricating, a journey somewhere. It's a face you once saw and it brushes past the Mikado orange of Southern Switzerland in autumn, a face on a station platform. It is the face of a naked boy in an Edwardian mirror in a squat in London with reflections of mustard-coloured trees from the street.

When I returned to England in the autumn of 1977 I went on a daytrip to Oxford shortly before Christmas with some friends and we listened to a miserere in a church and afterwards sat behind a snob-screen in a pub where tomtits were back-painted on a mirror. It was another England. I was sexually haunted. By a girl I'd loved and who'd left me. By a boy I'd just slept with.

In Slussen in Central Stockholm I once met a boy with long blond centre-parted hair, in a blue denim suit, and he told me about the tree in Central Stockholm they were going to cut down and which
they didn't, people protesting under it. I bought strawberries with him and he brought me in a slow, glamorous train to his home on the Archipelgo, a Second Empire-type home. There were Carl Larsson pictures on the wall. It was my first acquaintance with that artist. He sent me two Carl Larsson images later. Images of happiness.

Years later I met that boy in London. He was working in the Swedish army and leading soldiers on winter swims or winter dips.

At the Teddyboy's funeral there were little boys in almost
identical
white shirts and black cigarette trousers, like a uniform, girls with bouffant hairdos, shingles at ears, in near-party dresses, in
Aline
dresses, in platform shoes, in low high heels with T-straps, with double T-straps, carrying bunches of red carnations, carrying tulips. In Ancient Rome, after a victory, coming into Rome, the army would knock down part of the city. At the Teddyboy's funeral it was as if people were going to knock part of the town.

The Teddyboy wore a peach jacket in the weeks before he was drowned. He was laid out in a brown habit. My mother said it was that sight which made her forbid me swim at the Red Bridge with the other young people of town. In the summer when I was sixteen I tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills at dawn one morning. I just slept on the kitchen floor for a while. At the end of the summer a guard drew up on the street opposite our house in a Volkswagen, the solemn orange of
Time
magazine on the front of the car. He'd come to bring me to swim at the Red Bridge. Years later, retired, he swam in the Atlantic of Portugal in the winter.

At the end of the summer of 1967, when I was sixteen, I started swimming on my own volition.

In early February the wild celery and the hemlock and the hart's-tongue fern and the lords and ladies fern and the buttercup leaves and the celandine leaves and the alexanders and the eyebright and fool's watercress came to the riverbank or the river. There was the amber of a robin among the bushes who watched me almost each morning.

Here you are surrounded by the smells of your childhood, I thought, cow dung, country evening air, the smell the grass gives off with the first inkling of spring, cottages with covert smells—the musk of solitary highly articulate objects—and a mandatory photograph
on the piano. My grandmother lived in a house like the one I lived in now. She had a long honed face, cheekbones more bridges, large eyes, Roman nose. She was a tall woman and spoke with the
mottled
flatness of the Midlands.

Here's to the storytellers. They made some sense from these lonely and driven lives of ours.

When I was a child in hospital with jaundice there'd been a
traditional
musician who'd been in a car accident in the bed beside me. There were cavalcades of farts, an overwhelming odour as he painfully tried to excrete into a bedpan behind the curtains but the insistent impression was, in spite of the pain, of the music in his voice, in his many courtesies.

You heard the curlew again. ‘The cuckoo brings a hard week,' they said in Connemara. One year was grafted onto another. ‘March borrows three days from April to skin an old cow,' they'd said a month earlier, meaning that the old cow thinks he's escaped come April. Two swans flew over the Deel and the woods through which golden frogs made pilgrimages among the confectioner's white of the ramson—wild garlic—flower, soldering stories.

On a roadside in County Sligo once I sat and had soup from a pot with legs on it with a Traveller couple. Now I knew what the ingredients were—nettles, dandelion leaves.

With May sunshine I started to go to Gort to swim each day. Traveller youths swam their horses in the spring tide, up and down with ropes, urging them on with long pliable horse goads with plastic gallon drums on the end. One of the Traveller youths had primrose-flecked hair. Another a floss of butter-chestnut hair. Another hair in cavalier style. ‘You've a decent old tube,' said the boy with the primrose-flecked hair.