Hogan Larks' Eggs

New and Selected Stories
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-1-84351-227-1
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 344 Seiten

Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century. Larks' Eggs affirms that stature. Here, with twenty-two classic stories taken from earlier collections and twelve fresh narratives, Hogan displays anew his lyricism, compassion and sheer prismatic brilliance. His subject is exile and self-image, explored through isolates and eccentrics, brittle lives trapped by poverty, personal histories and restless identities, giving a voice to those on the margins - travellers, the misplaced, the dispossessed. Larks' Eggs' compelling tales of diaspora are both global and local, telling of subsumed identity and allurement, of past merging with present through landscape and mindscape. Desmond Hogan's fragmented personas are repositories for childhood memory and a collective unconscious that is distinctly Irish and history-burdened, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern. 'Here's to the storytellers. They made sense of these lonely and driven lives of ours.' The Lilliput Press is proud to reintroduce one of Ireland's most evocative prose writers. Desmond Hogan takes his place alongside Joyce, Plunkett, Trevor, O'Faolain, Kiely and McGahern.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hogan, Desmond

Leseproben

Blow-Ball

What was it for, why was it they came? Perhaps because it was just there, the house. Perhaps because she might have been there, the lady, and she was in a way their object of pursuit.

The house was Georgian and summer languished around it. The fields beyond had a greenish feel, laid with hay cut just as it was turning colour. Men, separate, unobtrusive, were working in the fields and here and there were sprays of poppies. On the pond in front of the house was an accumulative growth of water lilies; still, strange to the children.

They were drawn to it in a group. Bubbles, whose hair was as bog cotton with the sun in it. A ragged ribbon fell on her forehead. Hanging over them, keeping her apart from the others at times was her class background. But she was vital because summers were blanks; something had to be made out of them. This required imagination, a special talent almost. Bubbles above all had it. Pee-Wee was gentle then; he drooped at the shoulders, an unawareness about him. There was a department in his mind where the word was fantasmagoria. He was undertaking a study of ghosts. Dony reached him through his oddities, because of them he was Pee-Wee’s best friend. Dony was thirteen, the oldest.

There were others, their younger brothers and sisters whom they brought with them. Other children who trailed along but never really committed themselves. Also Bubble’s English cousin who had buck teeth and told Bubble’s mother sometimes that she had been with the boys. But none of them mattered. Bubbles, Pee-Wee and Dony were the instigators.

They had it to themselves, the house. It looked so contained. In a way it was just like going to the pictures. Pictures which showed sleek skies and coral swimming pools which made phosphorus trails of smoke when someone dived into them, the sort of pictures they went to see. At the pictures love was something important. The house made love important too. It had a mythology of sex, of violence, of the supernatural evolved from the generations of landowners who once lived in it. There was a book written about it, written by a young lady of the house, Lady Loughbown. That was the name of the house, Loughbown. The children knew how the lady looked. There was a photograph of her in the book, a photograph of a ghost-like figure in a tapering Edwardian dress. They liked to think that she was buried in the grave in the garden. But most people said it was her dachshunds that were buried there. Pee-Wee wished to see her ghost. Bubbles and Dony wanted to get through to her too.

The book itself had black covers and they usually brought it with them. They took a delight in the suggestiveness of some of the phrases, phrases like ‘We were very attached to one another.’

To one side of the house the framework of a greenhouse had broken down into a bed of nettles, among the trees nearby were sleeping crab apples. The visits to the house were always somehow ineffectual, there wasn’t much to do. They’d stand by the pond, they’d stroll about, looking at things. Sometimes they brought food and had picnics. Bubbles could never bring anything more than milk and brown bread and butter. She always frowned when she produced them, did nothing more. On one of these occasions it began raining. They sheltered under a rug in the garden, eating bananas, the rain beating down ceaselessly. It meant laughter and pulling. The smell of girls’ knickers. Total madness.

Often as the others searched about Bubbles and Dony would sit by the pond and talk. They’d talk about the future. Dony intended to be a priest, and go to Africa. Bubbles had an extravagant wish. She was going to be an actress.

Bubbles was a peculiar girl. Unconsciously she imitated adults in her way of talking, in her way of walking, in her smile. After seeing a film she managed a hint of the star in her demeanour.

Sitting by the pond like that she’d brush Dony’s hair in the way she liked to have it. She always carried a brush and a comb in a funny, worn bag. There was no explanation for it.

When Dony changed to long pants that summer it was Bubbles he wanted to see him in them. She seemed to understand. It was just she who mattered. Her family wasn’t important. It didn’t matter that her uncle had been in court for interfering with young children. It wasn’t even important when everybody knew that her older sister had shamefully had twins. Her sister went to England afterwards. Dony was at the station when she was leaving. There were two trains, one going to the sea and the other to Dublin. Dony was going to the sea with his mother, to a day of candyfloss, of grey ebbtide, of cold. The girl was going to Dublin. She was a bulky girl, in a pink cotton dress, lying against the wall. She looked mute, a little hurt. Bubbles was there to say goodbye to her and she eyed Dony. Dony sensed disdain and rejection on his mother’s brow when she glanced their way.

But she couldn’t have suspected his friendship with Bubbles. She couldn’t have suspected that he’d be with the girl the following morning, that he was with her almost every day of the summer. They were fugitive hearts, all of them.

But nothing happened to them and they were impatient. Their refrain became: ‘I wish something would happen.’

They were baffled when suddenly, unexpectedly, summer was almost over. Their sensibilities changed, the pang of schooldays so near again. More children joined their group, others followed them to the house, spying on what they were doing.

One morning at Loughbown Bubbles decided to do something climactic. She fell on the terrace with a little yelp. She let the others help her up. Her eyes were round and deceiving.

‘I’ve seen a lady,’ she said. ‘She was all white.’

‘It was her,’ Pee-Wee started.

They wanted to know more about the lady but Bubbles was vague. All she could remember for them was that the lady had seemed to have beckoned to her.

They believed because they wanted to believe. It would have been a breach of trust if they hadn’t. But Dony said bluntly to her: ‘You’re lying.’ Bubbles looked at him, her eyes begging. It was as if he’d said something irrevocable. ‘I’m not,’ she cried.

She turned, letting out a little sob, and ran down the steps to the stone seat beside the pond. She was apparently transfixed there, her hands hiding her face. Pee-Wee went and put an arm around her, the others standing back ineffectually. One of the younger ones was crying now too; she said she’d seen the devil at a window.

The group was split. They drifted home separately, no need to hurry. It was already long past their lunchtimes. They’d be scolded at home, interrogated for the truth. But their parents wouldn’t understand the truth anyway.

It was warm as Dony ambled home, bits of fluff blowing across the lane as it they’d been released from somewhere. He turned as he heard a cry from behind. It was Bubbles who couldn’t get over the gate. He went back and helped her across. Her hand felt so tiny as he tugged it; it was white and complete. They walked home together, a little quiet with one another. Bubbles was wearing a pinafore, her head inclined from him, something on her mind.

‘I didn’t see a lady,’ she admitted. ‘I’m a liar.’ Her voice was just a suggestion, soft. ‘I wanted to make you notice me,’ she added. Dony wasn’t sure what she meant, what she was hinting at.

She spoke about the colour of his eyes, the colour of her eyes, other things, her words slurred. She lowered her eyes and smiled shyly when she said: ‘You’re the nicest boy in town.’

Coming near her house she pressed his hand suddenly and left him.

The next week they were back at school and they had few opportunities of seeing one another. They depended on a chance to meet. Often they encountered each other in the library, the two boys and Bubbles. They were usually bundled in mackintoshes and they’d speak behind a bookshelf. The librarian’s eyes would glance at them sporadically. These moments were memorable, mellifluous; the light strained from the rain outside, winter evenings mostly wet.

Once Dony found himself sitting in front of Bubbles at the pictures. It was a picture in which Ingrid Bergman was having a love affair with Humphrey Bogart in Paris. Ingrid Bergman’s pale, clear, Nordic face was touched by a Paris lightness. Bogart brought her for a drive to Normandy, a chiffon scarf about her neck, tied out in two wings, fluttering in ecstasy.

Sometimes Dony caught Bubbles’ eyes and it might have been that they were sitting together. They really enjoyed the film for that. But already things separated Dony from the previous summer. Awful nightmares, a new recourse in sex; carnal dreams. Pee-Wee was smoking. He’d merged with a group of boys and hadn’t much time for Dony.

Somehow he failed to meet with Bubbles for a long time after that and in the spring her family emigrated to England. She called him into a yard one evening beforehand to tell him. She’d changed, she wore earrings, very tiny, very minute ones; her hair was in a bun. It was during Holy Week. There was an array of old tractors in the yard, a broken-down threshing machine. The fields about were rimmed by flood water; something inexorable about it. It made Holy Week more real. One strange remark Dony remembered from that conversation: ‘Wasn’t Jesus very good to die for us?’ Bubbles had said.

She suggested they go to the house, to Loughbown, before she went. But this would have been ambiguous now and it was never achieved.

If it had been at any other time that Bubbles went they might...