Lark's Eggs (35 page)

And passing Classy Bawn on the way home in the dark, where the Queen's cousin was murdered, he might add a royal refrain to his story.

Charles Stuart's brother became very pious and was made a
cardinal
; as Cardinal York he collected rare books, held musical evenings and had a young male lover; he lost his fortune in the Napoleonic Wars and fled to Venice where George
IV
, who used come and look at Beau Brummell arrange his cravat, gave him a pension.

But the stories didn't end there, they continued—about how Traveller soldiers used cross the Arabian Sea to India and come home wearing cobra-skin boots; how foxhounds were sent out from
West Limerick to South Africa during the Boer War for jackal hunting and Traveller soldiers had the task of building kennels for them by the White Umfolozi River; how the Black and Tans used force girls to have sex with them and then put pig rings on their backsides; how Seán Ó Conaill from Cahirdaniel used come to
weddings
in their area and tell stories and afterwards they'd play the squeezebox and the fiddle; about how in a bad summer when the herons had left for the Ballyhoura Mountains a petrel from the Eastern Atlantic was found in a flowering furze bush on Gort Pier; about how an arsonist, in a part of Scotland where the
black-throated
divers scream, set fire to a hut full of sleeping spalpeens from Ireland, burning them all alive; about young fishermen in a storm off Barra holding one another's collars, like the Highlanders led by Bonnie Prince Charlie across the River Isk and thus being saved, the royal face, the royal features distilled again for some faces, like lost causes, don't go away—until they reached
Limerick
city—where children call on the caravan sites like the hunger cry of the young cuckoo and where sulkies drive on the pavements in the monochrome estates—and were on the estuary road.

‘I have the job of shaving the pubic hair of wrestlers from Limerick,' confides Bryan Gammell, an adult tow-headed man with an almost rhomboid face in an azure Sunday cardigan with a Greek key pattern, under the voice of Eileen Reid singing ‘I Gave My Wedding Dress Away', ‘They fly from Shannon Airport to pose for
pornographic
magazines in London. They all have girlfriends though.'

In his caravan on The Long Pavement, near a rubbish site where fires constantly blaze, is a photograph of himself with some of those boys by the Shannon in Parteen, he in a sleeveless vest, shorts.

One nude man, with a candified face, crouches, a towel touching his pubic hair, raising a beer can to his mouth as though giving a reveille with a trumpet. One in a zephyr loincloth, his bald pate gleaming like a skull at an Ancient's feast. One holding what looks like a facecloth in front of his genitals. Another fellow covering his genitals with the
Evening Herald
.

He moved out of his caravan for a while, staying in a bedsitter—gas oven that flamed like Mount Vesuvius, liver spots of damp on the ceiling—in Mulgar Street where there was a mortuary for the
dead people from the asylum which they closed down, but he quickly returned to it.

‘Remember everyone gave Job an earring of gold at the feast in his house,' says Manus Culligan. In the summer the Traveller boys who swim in Kildimo Lake have rings on their nipples, rings on their navels they got in Kiel, tattoos of grids and tubes they got in
Marburg
. Limerick is just a furlough for them now. When October comes, like swallows that have had a fourth brood, they migrate.

A young man in a moss and lemon check jacket, danton collar, sang ‘The Fields of Shanagolden'.

Before he sang it he said that Michael McCarthy wrote that song and that he was dead now.

Oonagh's brother Pecker, in a laced shirt, black down like cyphers over his lips, smelling of Old Spice aftershave, told the story of how Blaiman, the son of the High King of Ireland, was hunting when a hare was killed on the snow and he asked was there a woman in the world as beautiful as those colours, hare's blood on snow, and a witch said there was, the daughter of the King of the Kingdom of the White Strand, but before he could marry her he had to kill the Three Giants. The sun was blinding him in the fight that went on for weeks and a robin put leaves on his eyes. He was hungry and a hound ran after a red-crested duck and got an egg and an otter put the egg in his mouth. And he married the daughter of the King of the Kingdom of the White Strand and they all drank buttermilk at the wedding.

A girl with gorse gold in her blonde hair, in an argent First Holy Communion dress, with a bonnet of petals, recited the poem that Patrick Pearse wrote in Kilmainham Jail the night before he was executed:

‘Just because you live in a caravan doesn't mean you're a Traveller,' Scolog Cahan hits out, ‘Do you think you're a Traveller because you live in a caravan? You mulligan.'

Boy with coin face, delft-blue eyes, desert-sunset henna hair, pennon neck, champagne shoulders, in an oyster-grey bomber jacket with Rampage Club written on it and a coal-heaver's cap, who swears pledges on his knees in front of the Padre Pio picture in his caravan and who will identify the cuckoo's spit—larvae of the golden-tailed moth and the tiger moth—for you.

He pauses over a postcard reproduction in my album of a monochrome
Male Nude
by Pietro Pedroni; a young man, his back turned, right knee resting on upholstery, he holds a rod slant-wise—a possible instrument of punishment—his hair wet, vinous, after some athletic feat or some sexual act; a lonely silver light on his whole body, everywhere is evidence of submission, to an athletic
discipline
, to the artist who is viewing him.

I held my father's hand one Sunday afternoon as we approached the rugby changing room, the walls mottled, a lone rugby player taking a cold shower, his back turned to us, the ivory sheen of winter on his buttocks with their shoelace split, my father's hand tightening on mine.

‘I knew them all. Trixie Leech, the tailor. Poteen Fallon, the
publican.
Scourge Fallon, the baker,' catalogued my father in St Patrick's mental hospital in Dublin, a few years before he died, against a jigsaw reproduction of Rembrant's
The Return of the Prodigal Son
, which had been one of the loose reproductions which had gone with a set of art books he'd given me when I was a boy—son with little bald patch, kneeling in groove of his father's body, cranberry red cloak on father, an observer with a staff, amber in the carpet.  

Scolog's father Eochaid, who has ribbons of maize and bronze hair and wears an open-work choker-chain with a gold medal on it of St Christopher, patron saint of travellers—has been one of a group of Travellers who served with the Irish Army in Beirut; the Irish soldiers, says Scolog, used go to a casino and watch ‘women with bare diddies ride elephants'; Eochaid tells of how at siesta time men in striped pyjamas used flee the liquid phosphorus attacks, holding children; of the miles and miles of red-dust cemetery with photographs of the dead person over each stone-marked grave; of the cats who'd eat bodies and became so dangerous the Irish soldiers used shoot them; how Palestinians used bring their bedding beside the Irish soldiers at night and recall how when they abandoned Palestine in 1948 the markouk bread was left baking because they thought they'd be back shortly. Eochaid brought back a violet-grey velvet suit which he wears at Travellers' weddings. In their caravan is a wall hanging of
Our Lady of the Ark
, mitre on her head, above the
White Rose of Lebanon
; beside it a postcard reproduction of a heron by Jan Mankes I gave Scolog.  

When I gave it to him he said that in school he'd won third prize for a drawing of a swan and the fellow who drew the duck got second prize.  

Once Eochaid and Senanus, a soldier from the Maigue at Croom, a foxy fellow, went home with some falafel-stand boys to Corniche Mazra's with its street barbers and ate red mullet and drank arak from gilt-edged glasses on the floor with them, under a Damascus-silk
wall-hanging
which showed a stork on a minaret, and afterwards had their bodies oiled with sandalwood and massaged by them.  

The Irish soldiers used swim off the rocks at Raouche, bombed fish restaurants nearby, with areca palms which have white flowers, juniper trees, jasmine bushes, leopard lilies, peacock flowers
and nettles growing beside them.

In the nineteenth century there was a Church of Ireland
Missions
Training College in Ballinasloe and one of their tasks was to try to convert the Travellers who came to the fair and in the Cahan family for generations was a bible, given to them by the Training College, in which there was a picture of a cedar of Lebanon against a deep azure sky on the front.

‘I love to see the larch tree and the oak tree grow,' says Eochaid in Limerick shoes with extra-thick welts and a shirt of hot red, ‘It takes a hundred years to grow a tree. It's terrible to knock it.'

Scolog goes to Dublin for the first time, with his father, when the Huguenot graveyard there is a cornucopia of bluebells and, having got the incentive from my album, looks at Rembrandt's
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
; a campfire, reflected in the fen water, barely indicating the minature refugees. Eochaid tells him that the Gypsies were people who followed Mary and Joseph and Jesus out of Egypt.

‘It's a grand town. By the sea,' Scolog says on his return.

I tell him that Rembrandt used to go up to strangers on the street and ask them to pose for him and he wonders if David and Jonathan were strangers; David, plume in his turban, bidding farewell to Jonathan, who has shoulder-length hair, a scimitar by his side, cross gartered leggings.

Eochaid grew up on a Travellers' site in Wimbledon. ‘My mother listened to Jim Reeves all day. She bought a bicycle between my sister and me. Both the Romanies and the Travellers had sulkies there but the Romanies had horses and carts—Totters we called them. Some of them had a pony farm and a donkey sanctuary in Vauxhall. There were zebras there too. There were many Romanies in Reading and in Camberley which is on the A30, out past Heathrow, the road to Staines and Ashford. There were many
Romanies
in Chertsey in Surrey. The Robinsons were there. Fairground people. I went there once and one of them asked my business. “I've come to buy a Ruby Austin 1934,” I said. We returned to West
Limerick
. There was money in kerbing and paving and tarmacking. My father went back for a visit to Bridge North in Shropshire where he was born. An airforce town. He asked a question and they passed him on the street.'

 When the woodcocks are roding in the woods and boys with the creamed whiteness of undrunk milk left out for cats in
farmhouses
are swimming in the Leap a youth with hair
en brosse
,
Manchurian-black
disc moustache and beard, in a jumpsuit with a slashed neckline, tells me, on the greensward by Gort Pier after I've swum, that the central affair of his life had been with a boy he'd seduced when he'd been babysitting and who would wait for him after national school. Then after secondary school. They'd make love in the woods by the Round Weir. The boy has a girlfriend now but there is still love between them.

‘It all started with the Greeks,' he says.

‘Sometimes when there's a storm we've got to get out of the
caravan
and sleep in the car for the night, hugging one another,' says Eochaid.

When the Cahans first returned to Ireland they used go to Tramore for the summer with its accordion set of coloured lights by the sea, where young people pulled up on dirt motorbikes on the sand dunes, and stay until the last Sunday of summer when the amusements were half price.

Now when the wild garlic is blossoming in Glin they go out to the coast with their caravan for the summer, past Glin Pier where the sea ends and the estuary becomes tidal—rock beach on one side of Glin Pier, mud flats on the other; spending a few days on Carrig Island by Carrig Castle, to which there is a bridge; then moving on to the open Atlantic, when the hedges are cascades of comfrey, where they swim their horse every day.

My parents honeymooned here at the end of the War. S

eaweed baths; there were changing booths on the beach then; a sudden foray towards the water, away from the years of
palingenesis
: a caterpillar of lights on the Clare side of the estuary at night.

They honeymooned in early September when the Atlantic is ultramarine and then lapis lazuli with waves which have antennae, then a deep lonely blue.

Then they returned to the teal-blue shop.

Before my father had married my mother he had a Protestant girlfriend, Miss Husaline. She never married, wore flying-squirrel furs, black georgette dresses, lived in a house with a clover green door
and offered visitors tea from Aynsley cups—magenta cups with gold rims. She walked her King Charles spaniel along the street alone.

‘I don't want to die yet. I want to go to the Isle of Man. I want to swim.'

Miss Husaline came into the church with her King Charles spaniel on a leash, carrying a bunch of red carnations, and stood beside my father's coffin.

Scolog returns with stories of the sea; of the leader of a
missionary
group in American-college red who preached on the beach, small bibles in their hands, who said his whole life had been beaches, he'd proposed to his wife in Helen's Bay outside Belfast; of the parson who took a roll of film to the chemist to be developed after lying on the beach and found there were three photographs of naked women on it—three women had taken his camera and photographed one another naked when he was in swimming; of the thin boy in a baseball cap and the fat girl in hot pants who regularly climbed down to a cave to make love and afterwards wrote pornography in the sand; of children from Belfast who woke at night screaming in their caravans.

In Beirut, during night watch, often under the green, white, red and black Palestinian oriflamme, as young Arabs played flutes made from the arbutus which grew all around the Lebanon as it did in County Kerry, the Irish Traveller soldiers used tell stories of their ancestry; how they were rivet-makers in pre-Christian Ireland;
white-smiths
in early Christian Ireland; how king after king legislated against Irish Tinkers in the Middle Ages but to no avail; how the first Gypsies in Scotland danced for James
IV
in Holyrood House in
Edinburgh
, who paid them, and they told him they were pilgrims; how William Shakespeare travelled with Tinkers and collected stories from them … ‘drink with any Tinker in his own language'; how when Charles
II
expressed his astonishment to a learned cleric that he
associated
with John Bunyan, a mender of kettles and pans, the cleric replied that he wished he had the Tinker's ability to reach the heart; how Poor Law legislation in the early nineteenth century drove them back to Ireland; how many Travellers crossed to the United States during the Famine and most of them drifted south with the mule trade during the Civil War but they kept the Gammon; how their
parents
had sold ballad sheets purchased from Bob Cuthbertson, a publisher in Listowel, County Kerry, and how the favourite ballad was ‘The Croppy Boy', ‘I alone am left my name and race'; how Travellers' caravans in scenic areas were wrecked by hired gangs.

In the Lebanon was a people, many of them fair-haired like Irish Travellers, called the Druses, who'd come from Arabia.
Sometimes
they read the bible. Sometimes the Koran. It was said of them that a father sometimes cohabited with his daughter or a father made love to son.

A horse shed is converted into a gym, a poster of Manchester United's Dave Beckham on the wall, and Scolog trains there, pulling up his gammy shirt to show muscles like an outcrop.

‘Keep the shovels flipping. You won't feel the time is slipping,' he sings as he lifts weights.

‘Adonis,' a girl called him in Sinbin nightclub in Limerick, which he got into on a counterfeit pass. In Phoenicia in early spring people mourned the death of Adonis, carrying naked effigies of him in procession and then threw them into the Mediterranean. Women wailed and tore their hair. Next day they rejoiced and said Adonis had come again.

Before he leaves to try to get into Icon, a Limerick nightclub, on another counterfeit pass, Scolog studies
Venus, Adonis and Cupid
by Annibale Carraci in my album; Adonis in wolf skin, a bit of gold brocade slung on his chest but leaving his nipples exposed, leggings that leave his feet bare, his arms rippled with muscles, his gold hair crimped like a girl's and his blue-blood lips pursed as he beholds a naked Venus, who has a checked fillet in her hair, fondling a naked Cupid, Etruscan red drapery beneath Venus by which two Chinese white pigeons peck.

In the
Samhain samhradh
, the second summer, Scolog, in a black shirt with white lotus flowers on it, dries my back after I've swum, yellow blades of the gorse flower on it. ‘You look like an age horse, you look like an age pony, you look like a weasel.'

When I was a child still in feral short pants I went one night—it was a Saturday night, a holiday granted to me—to the flat—near a house in which Russian horse dealers of the days of Catherine the Great had bivouacked, which put a summer cover on its historical
door on hot days—of the boy, with a pencilled quiff, who worked in our shop, was a winter swimmer—he used swim in the river by a willow-bend with young guards and young priests, one of the priests claiming to have become a winter swimmer through bringing invalids to Lourdes and taking the cold baths with them—and who
sometimes
wore a black shirt purchased in the priests' shop near the Pro Cathedral in Marlborough Street Dublin and I slept in the bed with him—he was from a part of Clare where there were aboriginal national schools and goblin palm trees outside penal-looking
bungalows
—and he took off his clothes to put on his pyjamas, his
backside
ruddy like a robin's breast in patches and, like that, just the top of his pyjamas on, he turned to me and quoted the travelling players who had just visited the town, a Cleopatra in a leopard-spot body stocking, about an Antony, like the Roman soldiers in the Stations of the Cross in the church, with laced up persimmon legs, in a kindled saffron cloak: ‘For his bounty, There was no winter in't; an autumn'twas That grew the more by reaping: his delights Were dolphin like.'

With his friend Naois, who has a pellucid ginger turf cut with an asterisk quiff, black moiré eyes, Scolog sometimes goes and drinks Lucozade under a cedar of Lebanon by a ruined house where a poet lived. There is a man in the town who wears a chesterfield coat with velvet lining, who lives in a decrepit cottage the way a robin builds a nest in an old kettle, knows everything about the history of the town and will tell you about the poet with owl features who lived in the house; how he used sit under the cedar of Lebanon with a boy with cuneiform sideburns from Pallaskenry who wrote a book about a murder that was committed in West Limerick when a young lord drowned the girl of lowly birth he'd married in the Shannon and asked to go to his execution in a carriage; how the book made a
fortune
in England and the young man sent it to his parents in America, joined the Christian Brothers, taught poor boys in Cork and soon died; how the people of the house used row at summer's apogee, when dolphins probe far into the estuary, to the Nuns' Strand and explore the caves by boat; how, during the Famine, the poet's brother brought a group of people who used dance at the end of the Ash Avenue on Sunday evenings to Québec on a ship where they
replenished
themselves on St Lawrence eels, as they would eat the conger
eel from Gort Pier at home, before disappearing to the United States; how the poet was converted to the Catholic Church and an atheist came to his house and, under the cedar of Lebanon, tried to persuade him not to but the poet said: ‘I have lived as a Christian and I intend to die one.'