Lark's Eggs (33 page)

‘Tell us the story of Mary, Queen of Scots,' Kevin and Will, the two Traveller boys would often say in my
caravan
. I would tell them the story again, how when Mary Stuart came from France to claim her Scottish kingdom she sent a naked swimmer to shore from each of her two ships, how people tried to make a match for her with many kings and princes but how she fell in love with the young tall bisexual Lord Henry Darnley and married him, how he was strangled on the streets of Edinburgh wearing nothing but his nightgown, how on her flight from Scotland she survived on porridge, how when captive in the English Midlands she would give alms to the poor when she went to bathe in a holy well, how when she returned to the Midlands from another place of captivity she told the beggars she was as poor as they were now, how when the thistles grew in the early summer around the castle where she had been beheaded they were called Queen Mary's tears.

‘You've lived here three years,' Will said one day, when the bottom of the sky was smoked white with dapples of cerulean in it like the pattern in the breast panel of a medieval costume, ‘and you've never gone with a boy. We know a big fellow—he's about seventeen or eighteen—who sucks langers. We'll bring him here for you.'

Will had parted glinting copper hair. Kevin had shorn sides with the crest dyed sunflower-yellow. Will wore an open-work choker
with a gold medal on it. He had a body with ambition. Kevin had a string of diamanté jewels around his neck. Outside the caravan they'd hitched a chocolate and ice-cream horse with gold threads in its mane.

Some evenings later they led a boy dressed entirely in black across the fields.

‘This is Conal,' Kevin said, ‘but he has another name too, Clement.'

Conal had Spanish ebony hair like a lot of people in this area of Ireland. A year after Mary Stuart's beheading Philip
II
of Sapin had sent the Spanish Armada to Ireland and the ships had foundered off the coast of Kerry, many of the survivors settling in Kerry or making their way here to West Limerick.

Conal had the physical fullness and the block features of many boys in this area. His shoulders crouched the way the shoulders of boys crouched in First Holy Communion photographs.

With two names he was like a country with two languages. On one of his fingers he wore a virgin signet ring.

‘Say the poem by Tommy Hardy about the ruined maid,' ordered Kevin. Both Will and Kevin behaved like matchmakers. They had me stand and recite the poem, making the appropriate music-hall,
effeminate
gestures. ‘You should be in a concert,' said Kevin.

Thomas Hardy's poems were the favourite recitations.

‘Take off your shirt and show your muscles,' commanded Will.

‘Tell the story of Mary, Queen of Scots,' Kevin requested.

After I'd done what had been demanded of me I asked if each person in the caravan would tell a story.

First it was Will's turn and he told how he had his grandfather's false teeth.

Then Kevin told of a boat on the river with three men in it and how a hole came and one of the men stuffed it with his coat.

Will had another. The rats got into their caravan called Freedom and had baby rats and the caravan had to be burned to the ground. ‘A rat would climb a caravan,' he said, ‘a rat would climb a hostel.'

‘Our father was in the army,' Kevin recounted, ‘and he was forced to join the
IRA
. They told him he'd be kneecapped if he didn't join. He got out after a year.'

 ‘Our cousins in Rathkeale swim in their clothes,' said Will.

‘My father ties a rope around me and drops me in,' told Kevin.

With the bad summer there'd been few people at the river and I'd seen no swimmers. Flocks of teal skimmed it. The curlew had lived there and a crane and a mallard and the long-tailed silver bird. There'd been the glamorous blue of the watch on the other side.

Sometimes instead of swimming here I'd cycled to a banished beach on the Shannon estuary. ‘No public person goes there,' the old lady, with hair of cultured pearl, in the nearby store had informed me. She told how the people who'd owned it had taken the sand from it, not wanting it there, but the sand came back of its own accord. You would never meet anyone there. The sea tides came in as they did to the river.

The landscape reminded me of the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, the way it was suddenly surrounded by water—water suddenly impinged on castles in curvaceous ruin.

A few evenings before as I was swimming there wild geese had flown over crying against the shades of peacock's tail in the sky, heading across the estuary.

On my way back I stopped at the old lady's shop. Some boys were sitting on a bench, drinking soft drinks. But her two grandsons who had carrot and apricot complexions were away at school now.

The mullet were jumping in the river when I swam on another stop. A heron bade my presence by skimming the water.

Now it was Conal's turn to tell a story.

‘Des, St Colmkille would sleep on a pillar as a pillow in Donegal. Then he went over to the Island of Iona in Scotland and a crane followed him. St Colmkille said to a monk, “Look out for a crane because he's going to be very tired when he gets here and look after him.”The crane arrived and the monk fed him and looked after him for three days. Then he went back to Donegal satisfied. St Colmkille saw a poor old woman pick nettles in a churchyard for her dinner. And he said from this day on I'll eat only nettles. And from that day on St Colmkille ate only nettles. St Colmkille was dying on a Sunday because he said Sunday is a day of rest and the white horse that carried the milk from the dairy to the monastery came up and laid his head on his chest. St Colmkille looked towards Donegal and
he blessed it. He blessed the corn. And then he died, aged
eighty-seven
. And the white horse cried like a human being.'

We walked a little in the night, Conal and I, by the hawthorn bushes and the apple and pear trees, which gave only berried fruit now, in the field where my caravan was. The berries of the hawthorn had been cardinal red in the day's sunshine. By the estuary now were the raven berries of the blackthorn and the bog bilberry and the red berries of the guelder rose. The estuary was the blue of a blue
butterfly
these days.

‘Did anyone ever catch you swimming naked in the river?' he asked.

I told him I swam more in the estuary now where no one could see you. With no one to talk to out there, a glissade of landscape by the ruined castle, I recalled people I'd met in my life.

That afternoon I'd thought of Evert, the little boy with
punctured
upper lip who sat beside me on the night bus from
Johannesburg
to Capetown one September, the South African spring, how his cousin, a soldier, with argent gold hair, had been standing at one of the bus stops, how the Christ-thorn had been in blossom in the Ceres mountains as we neared Capetown. Afterwards I sent him a postcard with the amaranth-purple Algerian Coffee Stores in Soho on it.

Streets change. A car started honking at a film-maker on that street who was walking to his favourite café. ‘Hurry up, slow coach.'

He turned. ‘I'm dying, you know.'

In a bar in Dublin once an Irish writer, wearing a cravat like the quiddity of a rugby-playing boy in the 1940s, had recited Paul
Verlaine's
poem about Soho to me.

When I'd arrived to live in London from Ireland a boy in a café in Soho with eyes the grey-green of orchard lichen had looked into my eyes. No one had ever looked at me like that in Ireland.

In my mind by the Shannon estuary today I sent a postcard to Evert. He'd be about eighteen now, with columnar locks maybe, in a jersey of harebell blue, slacks of royal blue, like a Limerick schoolboy, sitting at a café table in a park in Capetown under the yesterday,
today and tomorrow trees in blue, white and mauve blossom.

In the night Conal said to me: ‘I have a Saudi Arabian
girlfriend
.' And he took a crumpled letter from his pocket as if in
evidence
of sexual orthodoxy.

Pearse and Jonathan, two boys nearer Conal's age, had arrived.

Pearse wore a Foreign Legion beret and a Gypsy sleeper. In his face was the face of a girl I'd known who had boscage blonde curls like the blossom in some lost Arthur Rackham poster.

The blue of his eyes was the wheeling blue of the
Mediterranean
near Pisa where I walked with that girl once and saw an imaginary little boy. It was the forlorn blue of the sea asters among the rocks by the beach on the Shannon estuary, the urgent blue of the last scabious in the Shannonside fields.

That little boy had never been born but maybe he'd been the people I'd met, bits of people, children who'd leaned their head towards you on a bus in the night.

Pearse was born in the year of the Falklands War. Someone had told me a story about an English soldier who'd gone to battle in the Falklands with Sandy Denny's songs on his headphones. He'd been killed.

I often thought of her song ‘Traveller by Trade' here.

Pearse sometimes stood on the town bridge saying ‘This is Elvis singing' and singing Elvis Presley songs or ‘Dirty Old Town'.

Jonathan wore a bull's earring and combats—army fatigue trousers. He had a cub muscular body like that of a boy I'd known at school who smelt of walnuts and brine from acne ointment.

His hair was crinkled 1930s style and his eyes had a gaping expression like a walrus in a state of surprise.

Pearse asked for some of my aftershave in a phial. He was going
to a wedding. ‘I'm going to wear Clarks shoes and a poplin shirt. All the boys will be there with cuff jewels. My little sister is going to be the peach girl.'

I asked Pearse and Jonathan to tell a story. Pearse told how a bullock was lost for days and found up a tree. Jonathan's was about how he borrowed a friend's billy goat and the goat ran away to a remote Shannonside ruin and the only way he could catch it was by borrowing a she-goat so the billy goat went towards her.

Sometimes they went to an old hall and sat in old-fashioned style, boys on one side, girls on the other, but danced to music like ‘Sex on the Beach' or ‘I Was Up at the
RDO
Glay'. But there were some boys who desired other boys—boys with earrings like the rung on the pier by the river where I swam to which ships used be tied at full tide—and turned up their collars.

But there was sometimes the answer of violence to desire—boys went home with bruised faces. The bruises on the face were a code for days.

Desire was as unanswered as it had been for a boy I knew when I was growing up who dressed entirely in black, had hair of India ink—an ancestor, maybe a survivor from the Spanish Armada—who had killed himself with rat poison.

The blue of that boy's eyes was found again in the autumn Roman skies, in the Michaelmas daisies old ladies ferried along Roman streets, in the eyes of young pilgrims of desire in the squares at night who were so at peace with their company that there was no need for desire.

‘Do you have any more cakes?' Jonathan suddenly demanded. The last bun had been thrown across the caravan. As I lit the stove to make more tea Jonathan began blowing out my matches one by one without making any movement of his lips.

‘I'll have no matches to make coffee for my breakfast,' I said.

There was no personality in the whites of his eyes. The
atmosphere
had changed so suddenly there was no connection with what had gone before, Jonathan requesting me to recite Lord Byron's ‘So we'll go no more A-Rowing' and listening to it with the mellifluous expression of a young laird.

‘Please leave me some matches for my breakfast.'

 In my mind I saw the frieze of Lord Henry Darnley's
Elizabethan
auburn pubic hair as he was strangled on the streets of
Edinburgh
, the tartan shawl of an old woman who heard him crying for mercy in the name of a noble, young laminated Christ.

‘Stop blowing out the man's matches,' Jonathan told Conal. But he continued to do it. Then suddenly he pushed Conal on to my writing desk, completely smashing it. Everyone left then.

By the river where I would swim was a disused warehouse. At the beginning of the century the paraffin for all the lighthouses on the Shannon estuary was stored in it. The Lights House it was called. One morning I came along to swim and there was a crowd of men. They were turning it into a factory. You could no longer swim there. A video camera lit up and filmed you at night if you approached the pier. I left for the Atlantic coast.

Will and Kevin's father, the Traveller man, drove me, my goods in a little trailer behind his car. We stopped briefly by the warehouse. Teasel grew at the bottom of the lane which led from the road to the pier.