Lark's Eggs (36 page)

Scolog's friends, who wear fallal track suits, are going to the College of High Technology in Pallaskenry now or studying
lifesaving
in Cork, spending their spare hours in Game Boy parlours; an iron curtain builds between him and them and a glass wall between him and me. With a Mohawk haircut, a cable of hair on top of his otherwise naked head, in a Laois white football jersey, he struggles through a passage of Russian literature in my caravan, carefully
pronouncing
the words.

Afterwards he summarizes it.

‘God loves writing stories about prisoners.'

Naois in a sanguine Harp Lager T-shirt, who recently sang Skid Row's ‘I Remember You' at a concert in Ballysteen, looking on, presses a button on a tape of the Prague Opera singing Handel's
Zadok the Priest
and tells a joke over it.

‘Did you hear the story of the boy whose mother sent him to look for a bucket and a cocker spaniel? He went to the hardware shop and asked for a fuck it. He went to the pet shop and said “My cock is itchy.” At the bus stop he said to a lady “Hold my fuck it. My cock is itchy.”'

Scolog brings Arab horses to a fair in a town where boys with spartan haircuts collect golf balls as gannets do. In Clare they say young married men bring farmers' sons to the beaches and pay them for sex and he and Naois have taken the ferry across the estuary to investigate this rumour.

Scolog has a tattoo in the shape of a heron on his neck. ‘You can just walk in in Limerick and get a tattoo. In Tralee you get a tattoo by appointment.'

Sometimes he flags down a bingo bus to the nightclubs in
Limerick
. He sees a lot of a girl from Shannon town who has
purple-henna
hair tied at the back with a black fillet, liquorice eye-make-up, wears a roll-neck jersey with a midriff and hoop earrings.

Maybe he'll join the army in Edward Street in Limerick. Some
of the soldiers get an extra ninety pounds a week playing soccer in Markets Field.

He recounts a story from the
Sunday World
of a man in his
twenties
who has been sent to jail in Belfast for having sex with a teenage boy, giving it new material, embellishing it with images from my album, making a jigsaw painting with bits of Damiano Mazza's
The Rape of Ganymede
, Gerrit van Honthorst's Saint Sebastian, Jacques-Louis David's
Leonidas at Thermopylae
, and the way one story becomes another he retells the Children of Lir in the version given to them by the
historian
, the eagle which emerges from a naked boy's body in Damiano Mazza's
The Rape of Ganymede
, becoming a swan.

Lir, the King of Clare, bet in the election for High King of
Ireland
by Dearg, the son of Daghda the Druid, was summoned by Dearg to Lough Derg and told in compensation he could marry Dearg's foster daughter. Lir had his children sleep in a bed beside him and in the morning he'd get up and lie with them. As swans they returned from Inis Glóra off Belmullet in Mayo to Clare and found Lir's castle overgrown with nettles. Kemoc linked the children of Lir with a whitesmith's chain and their feathers fell off and they became old people and died.

When he finished Scolog picks up a letter which has an address in Donnybrook.

‘Who's Danny Burke?' he asks in a betrayed voice.

‘But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.'

In the Lebanon Scolog's father had seen the ruins of Chalcis where Salome was queen who'd danced before Herod Antipas and asked for John the Baptist's head as a reward. In my album Scolog looks at Salome from
The Feast of Herod
by Fra Filippo Lippi, the
friarartist
who seduced an Augustinian nun Lucrezia Buti and had a son by her. Salome with crimped auburn hair, auric brows, pout lips, like a Traveller girl, in a cloth of gold dress with bat, fluted oversleeves, lace yoke, stares insolently at us as though she is looking at a camera. ‘You need a bit of talent every now and then,' Scolog declares.

In the West Limerick countryside there is a small Methodist church. From the community around that church Methodists went to America and introduced the Methodist faith.

In Venice Paolo Veronese spent fifteen years painting a small church and in this travail ‘grew wise'.

Before I leave to live on the coast when the barnacle geese are there and the estuary is pilgrimage-blue Scolog looks at Veronese postcard reproductions in my album; boys with the chestnut, bronze and carrot hair of Irish Traveller boys, auburn underchin growth, curls and twists of hair, Roman noses, orb chins; a patriarch with a vermilion hat forked out in two directions leaning over the Christ child in the temple; an alabaster Christ being laid out in the tomb by a ferociously strong young man in an emerald vest with lopped edge sleeves like an Ancient Irish hero, his copper hair swept back like flying horses's tails; a harlequin dwarf in apricot tussling with a black boy who has white, gold slashed sleeves; the cherry lips of male puberty, a dog nosing a pattern of pink pansies on Prussian blue; pomegranate stockings.

It was a day when the river was a smuggled indigo and the great, farthingale willow-herb was jutting out of the pier and the wintergreen was blossoming in the grass and three
Traveller
boys, two of them with their shirts off, were swimming a mare.

Connla, who had tangerine-henna hair, tadpole-brown eyes, a choker chain and a smaller chain with a starfish on it.

Felim who had turtle and hazel hair.

Small Taedy who had a platinum crest, dark sides, face and neck stabbed with hair.

‘Get on her back. Get on her back,' Felim shouted at me when I was in the water.

I got on her back and she immediately threw me, giving me a good kick.

Connla thought I was drowning and jumped in after me. Three months later, a few weeks after I left to live on the coast, in a T-shirt with the words Live Intrusions on it he'd purchased on his American journey earlier that year, Connla was killed in an accident with his van on the way into Limerick.

Connla was brought up in an aluminium caravan on a
Travellers
' site off the Holloway Road in London.

In their caravan, beside a picture of Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, was a photograph of his grandparents taken in a Weymouth
photographer's 
studio against a clock which had the face of Elizabeth 1 on it; his grandmother in a blouse with a sweetheart neckline, another blouse under that, Tara brooch on her bosom, with cuff
ribbons
, fur-rimmed ankle boots, her pigtails with bushends; his
grandfather
, who had seen the bonfires burn for the Silver Jubilee of George v on the Dorset Downs, in a suit with a long jacket with padded chest, black Mussolini shirt, aviator-hairstyle having used St John's wort for hairdressing, hands clasping his chest.

Connla's grandfather used drive to Ireland to buy holy statues in bulk in Monster House, Kilkenny and sell them to English Catholics. In Connla's caravan was one of his statues—St Rita of Cascia with a red spot on her forehead.

Uncle Derry, with eyes the blue of the blue in a willow-pattern plate, who had a brindle greyhound in West Limerick and would wear shamrock in September in West Limerick, would sometimes stay on the site in his caravan. He told Connla and his brothers what George 1, who had Punchinello daubs on his cheeks, used do with his Turkish servants Mohamed and Mustapha.

Uncle Derry had served with Major-General Sean McKeown's troops in the Congo, had been involved in the siege of Jadotville, used ride a grey Syrian stallion by the River Congo with its water hyacinths. Members of the army Cumann Luasclas used fend off bats in their sleeping quarters with hurleys. Beside the pale blue
Congolese
flag with a yellow star in his caravan was a photograph of a great grandfather who'd served with the Young Jocks in the Boer War; in a Sam Browne belt with a frog, leggings, centre-parted pompadour, frisé moustache. He'd come back from the Boer War and found his wife was having an affair with another man, shot him dead with a blunderbuss from which emerged the leg of an ancient pot and was not charged as he'd claimed he'd found the man raping his wife.

Connla made his First Holy Communion in the Church of Our Lady of Assumption and St Gregory, in a dove-grey suit with black velveteen cuffs, white shirt, white tie, hair cut in a glib—a fringe.

Each year after they saw the Gerry Cottle Circus on Crown Meadow in Bromley Connla's family, the Dorans, used make a
pilgrimage
to Croagh Patrick in County Mayo for July 27. Patterns they called pilgrimages.

 On the way they stopped at the graves of three Traveller children killed in Walsall when squad cars forcibly evicted Travellers from a site, towing caravans away, and who had been buried in Bilston.

Afterwards they'd have bacon and bubble in Wendy's Café in Walsall. They'd cross Ireland, stopping in Westport, where Connla's mother said they always had good cakes, to buy French Fancies, iced cups, pink apple slices, walnut slices, cream slices, custard slices.

Then they'd go out past Rockfleet Castle in Clew Bay where Grace O'Malley had lived, who'd captained her own ship on her journey to meet Elizabeth 1 to entreat for her imprisoned son, past Land's End and the Isles of Scilly, through the straits of Dover, into the Thames estuary where boys used swim then, borne up by pigs' udders; she was received in Greenwich Castle from which Elizabeth had expelled the friars, with its view of the Isle of Dogs, by
Elizabeth
—who wore cabochon earrings and a poisoned diamond ring—in a cloak of myrtle green, a crimson mantle on her head, in bare feet; Elizabeth held her hand high but Grace was the taller of the women and the Queen had to reach up; a cambric and lace handkerchief was handed to Grace and she flung it in the fire after use and when upbraided for this declared they had higher standards of cleanliness in the West of Ireland; when Elizabeth offered to make Grace a countess, Grace said that was impossible because she was already a queen.

Connla's mother, who had flaxen and nasturtium hair, always wore a scarf with a
pattern
of kingfishers for the
pilgrimage
and cast-off kid pumps.

From Croagh Patrick they'd drive to visit a cousin from the
Sperrin Mountains in the Northlands who was in the Magilligan Prison for republican involvement and afterwards the boys would have a swim on Benowen beach beside the prison.

After Connla's mother had to start getting treatment in St Luke's, Woodside Avenue, Muswell Hill, the Dorans came to live in West Limerick.

Early in the year he was killed Connla made an American pattern.

In the Famine days a group of Travellers from West Limerick were brought in a ship by a doctor to Québec from where those who survived dispersed to the United States. They used to make a
pattern
of thanksgiving—a pilgrimage—every year in the United States or Canada. The last pattern was to the Passion Play in
Hollywood
Bowl in 1949.

Over the decades people with names like Cash, Cade, Colleran, used make pilgrimages to places like the St Katharine Drexel Shrine, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, in Bensalem,
Pennsylvania
; the Motherhouse Mission bell used to ring out to say goodbye to sisters leaving in carriages to cross the United States to serve black Americans and Native Americans and sisters would gather near the mission bell and wave snowflake-white handkerchiefs.

The Jesuit Martyrs' Shrine of Sainte Marie of the Hurons in Midland Ontario. The Jesuits were tortured to death in the 1640s after, having had to burn down their own mission station, their trek, with Huron Indians they'd converted, to Christian Island in
Georgian
Bay.

The Shrine of St Thérèse, Queen and Patroness of Alaska, a log church, overlooking Lynn Canal, on Crow Island—where a causeway was cut four hundred feet through wild tides from the coast where the great black-beaked gull feeds on dead calf whales. In Alaska Eskimo sleighs were decorated with the figure of St Thérèse of Lisieux.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Peace at Niagra Falls. In 1678 the Franciscan Father Louis Hennepin was the first European to sketch the Falls at Niagra. In gratitude for the beauty of this place Father Hennepin nailed a cross to a tree overlooking the Falls and offered mass to a congregation of Seneca Indians. The site was terminal for the railroad which aided the escape of slaves from the Southern
States. During the American Civil War, when General Grant issued an order expelling all Jews from Tennessee, Pope Pius
IX
dedicated Father Hennepin's site to Our Lady of Peace. It was consecrated during the Civil War by Archbishop Lynch who travelled by steamer from Toronto.

In New York Connla saw photographs of the pilgrims; women in Breton hats, astrakhan hats, dresses with pagoda shoulders, standing beside priests in priests' homburg hats and black Ford Model T cars at St Philomena's Shrine at Cherokee Village Arkansas, Shrine of the Sacré Coeur in Montreal, Shrine of St John Neumann in
Philadelphia
, Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Milwaukee Wisconsin,
Dickeyville
Grotto Wisconsin, Shrine of St Jude Thaddeus in Chicago, Church of the Seven Dolors in Minnesota.

Connla had driven south from New York in a Barracuda,
stopping
at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate
Conception
in Washington, down through Georgia with its flag with the Cherokee Rose blowing, through Alabama with its flag with
goldenrod
, stopping at truck stops where he heard Erskine Hawkins sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas' and Bob Willis and his Texas Cowboys, across to California where he visited the San Carlos Borromeo
Mission
in Carmel Valley. In Southern California he saw the blue heron and in Northern California the black albatross. Then he drove to St George Byzantine Church on the Northwest Pacific coast.

Before I left for the coast he gave me a postcard of an ikon of Our Lady of Tenderness he'd bought there and he told me a story about how his great grandfather had travelled from Weymouth once to see Joseph O'Mara, who'd been educated in The Crescent,
Limerick
, and had sung in St Michael's Church Choir, in
Lohengrin
by Wagner—in a Prussian helmet with a spike and a demon-red cloak—sitting in the gods.