for one night, that of an angel at the side of the Gothic steeple at home. There was beauty in Bert’s chest. His penis was in the fist of another young man.
Marriage, children, a drapery business in Ireland virtually eliminated it all but they could not quite eliminate the choice colours of sin, red of handkerchiefs in men’s pockets in a smoky hotel lounge, red of claret wine, red of blood on sheets where love-making was too violent. In the morning there was a single thread of a red hair on a pillow autographed in pink.
When my father opened his drapery business he ran it by himself for a while but on his marriage he felt the need for an assistant and Patsy was the first person who presented himself for the job. It was Patsy’s black hair, his child’s lips, his Roman sky-blue eyes that struck a resonance in my father. Patsy came on in autumn day. My father was reminded of a night in London. His partnership with Patsy was a marital one. When I came along it was me over my brothers Patsy chose. He was passing on a night in London. The young man in London? He’d worn a scarlet tie. My father specialized in ties. Patsy wore blue and emerald ones to town dos. He was photographed for the Connaught Tribune in a broad, blue, black-speckled one. His shy smile hung over the tie. Long years ago my mother knew there was something missing from her marriage to my father—all the earnest hot-water jars in the world could not obliterate this knowledge. She was snidely suspicious of Patsy—she too had blackberry hair—and when Patsy’s denouement came along it was she who expelled him from the shop, afraid for the part of her husband he had taken, afraid for the parcel of her child’s emotions he would abduct now that adolescence was near. But the damage, the violation had been done. Patsy had twined my neck in a scarlet tie one sunny autumn afternoon in the shop, tied it decorously and smudged a patient, fat, wet kiss on my lips.
1
‘Miles from here.’ A phrase caught Miles’s car as he took the red bus to the North Wall. Someone was shouting at someone else, one loud passenger at an apparently half-deaf passenger, the man raising himself a little to shout. The last of Dublin’s bright lights swam by. What took their place was the bleak area of dockland. Miles took his small case from the bus. He had a lonely and unusual journey to make.
Miles was seventeen. His hair was manically spliced on his head, a brown tuft of it. He was tall, lean; Miles was a model. He wore his body comfortably. He moved ahead to the boat, carrying his case: foisting his case in an onward movement.
Miles had grown up in the Liberties in Dublin. His mother had deserted him when he was very young. She was a red-haired legend tonight, a legend with a head of champion chestnut hair.
She had gone from Ireland and insinuated herself into England, leaving her illegitimate son with her married sister. The only thing known of her was that she turned up at the pilgrimage to Walsingham, Norfolk, each year. Miles, now that he was a spare-featured seventeen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old with a rather lunar face, was going looking for her. That lunar face was even paler now under the glare of lights from the boat.
The life Miles lived now was one of bright lights, of outlandish clothes, of acrobatic models wearing those clothes under the glare of acrobatic lights; more than anything it was a life of nightclubs, the later in the night the better, seats at lurid feasts of mosaic ice cream and of cocktails. Dublin for Miles was a kind of Pompeii now: on an edge. He was doing well, he was living a good life in a city smouldering with poverty. Ironically he’d come from want. But his good looks had brought him to magazines and to the omnipotent television screen. He was taking leave of all that for a few days for a pilgrimage of his own. There were few signs of garishness on him. The clothes he slipped out of Ireland in were black and grey. Only the articulate outline of his face and the erupting lava tuft of his hair would let you know he worked in the world of modelling.
The night-boat pulled him towards England and the world of his mother.
2
She’d come to Walsingham each year, Ellie, and this year there was a difference about her coming. She was dying. She came with her daughter Áine and with her son Lally. She walked, propped between them, on the pilgrimage, the procession of foot from slipper chapel to town of Walsingham. Áine was a teacher. Lally was a pop star.
3
Miles was in fact late for the procession. He arrived in the town when the crowds were jumbled together. He looked around. He looked through the crowd for his mother.
4
Afterwards you could almost say that Lally recognized him, rather than he recognized Lally. Lally was discomfited by lack of recognition here. Miles recognized him immediately. ‘How are you? You’re Lally.’ A primrose and white religious banner made one or two demonstrative movements behind Miles.
‘Yeah. And who are you?’
Who am I? Who am I? The question coming from Lally’s lips, funnelled mesmerically into Miles’s mind on that street in Walsingham.
5
Miles was an orphan, always an orphan, always made to feel like an orphan. He was, through childhood and adolescence, rejected by his cousins with whom he lived, both male and female, rejected for his beauty. Nancy-Boy they called him. Sop. Sissy. Pansy. Queer, Gay-Boy, Bum-Boy. The ultimate name—Snowdrop. His enemy cousins took to that name most, considering it particularly salacious and inventive. Miles was none of these things. He looked unusually pretty for a boy. The names for him and the brand of ostracization gave him a clue as to his direction in life though. He found an easy entrance into the world of modelling. He was hoisted gracefully into that world you could say. At seventeen Miles had his face right bang on the front of magazine covers. He’d become an aura, a national consciousness arrangement in his own right. This success allowed him to have a flat of his own and, supreme revenge, wear suits the colour of the undersides of mushrooms down the Liberties. Miles sometimes had the blank air of a drifting, unpiloted boat in these suits in the Liberties. There must be more to life than bright suits his mind was saying; there must be more things beyond this city where boys in pink suits wandered under slender cathedral steeples. There must be more to life than a geography that got its kicks from mixing ancient grey buildings with doses of alarmingly dressed and vacant-eyed young people. His mother, the idea of her, was something beyond this city and Miles broke with everything he was familiar with, everything that bolstered him, to go looking for her, to stretch his life: to endanger himself. He knew his equilibrium was frail, that his defences were thin, that he might inflict a terrible wound on himself by going, that he might remember what he’d been trying to forget all his life, what it was like as a little child to have your mother leave you, to have a red-haired woman disappear out the door, throwing a solitary backward glance at you, in a house not far from the slender cathedral steeple, and never coming back again.
6
Who am I? Ellie Tierney had asked herself as she walked on the procession. Who am I, she wondered, now that she was on the verge of dying, having cancer of the bone marrow. An immigrant. A mother of two children. A widow. A grocery store owner. A dweller of West London. A Catholic.
She’d come young to this country; from County Clare. Just before the War. Lived the first year in Ilford. Had shoals of local children pursue her and her brothers and sisters with stones because they were Irish. She’d been a maid in a vast hotel. Met Peader Tierney, a bus driver for London Transport, had a proposal from him at a Galwaymen’s ball in a West London hotel and married him. Had two children by him. Was independent of him in that she opened a grocery store of her own. He’d died in the early 1970s, long before he could see his son become famous.
7
Who
