Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

of mine died in Dublin that day.

      ‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever,’ a voice had said in a dream shortly after the girl had abused me and Eleanor had gone.

      It was in Cairo, early in the summer, the muezzin’s call to prayer at dawn, gurkies on front of cars on October 6 Bridge, sag pipes played by the Nile as brides in glacial white were photographed with sudden flashes by Coca-Cola stalls like munition heaps.

      In London you start recovering again. You start being well again.

      An old man, a neighbour, face red as a lady tulip, stands outside his door. A trough of sanguine horsechestnuts beside the door, the last green of the year lit up. Sometimes he talks about Mabel Stevenson, a girlfriend he had before the war who used to live in the oatmeal and faded mulberry-coloured houses visible just above the hill; about meetings in Lyons Corner Houses all over London, an idyll on the Cornish Riviera. She joined the Wings and was killed. A last photograph. She’s standing in very high high heels, very straight, to the right of an army big band who are arraigned with their instruments in front of an aerodrome. In memory of her he observes a wartime diet in the evenings: Spam, Cheddar cheese, a slice of half-moon cake.

      As a youth he worked in the Black Cat cigarette company in Camden Town. He did an evening course in photography and got a job in Whitehall during the war, working for the War Ministry. His task just after the war was blowing up photographs of quislings.

      I sit on a deck chair with him on warm afternoons, beside the pineapple broom. He describes how the patch of road near us was once haunted by men taking bets. Now there’s an estate agent’s which is open on Sundays, painted viridian outside with viridian fluorescent lights in the window.

      That autumn, at the opening of an exhibition by a Russian painter, I saw an old friend of mine – the boy who used to take turf home with a donkey and cart before it got wet.

      The landscape of East Galway behind the cottage. Beds of pearl-like rock, riff-raff of cypresses, abandoned baths for cows to drink from, verdigris on thatch, sudden illuminations on the horizon.

      The Russian painter wore a crimson caftan and as if drawn by that a woman in a crimson coat approached him. ‘May I introduce myself?’ He totally ignored her.

      ‘You’ll probably never meet me again,’ a very tanned woman with honey-coloured hair in a pigtail, in a black leather skirt, said in a kind of despair. ‘I’m off to live in Wiltshire.’ She was talking to a man with skimpy, shoulder-length grey hair, in drainpipe trousers, dicky bow with white mice on it, who was staring with infatuation at the painter. A woman with an entire batik trailing from her handbag very purposefully blocked his view.

      I was at the party because I knew Vincent, the waiter with the canary-yellow quiff in otherwise dun hair, who was from Derry. He wore a tuxedo, a sleeper in his left ear. Then suddenly I saw Daniel. He had not changed. Walked out of school twenty years ago and had not changed. He wore a black suit, a shirt of blue and yellow and white. He still had that moulded face, brown eyes with flecks of gold.

      I’d met him once since he’d left. He’d returned to town for a visit two years after first going.

      ‘Reason I left Ireland was because I wanted to fuck. You couldn’t fuck in Ireland.’

      I didn’t approach him. Just looked.

      This melancholic city of exiles, all races, vendors of Colombian star fruit and golden passion fruit, but always, in the wetness, the incipient sense of tribe.

      Met Daniel in Salthill once and we went for a secret, naked swim. He had swabs of sores on his body and a soldier’s pectorals. His body smelt of Vaseline. The day was very grey and there was an alarming number of nuns on the prom.

      ‘I will always have Teampoilín in my mind,’ Daniel said as he swam. Teampoilüín was the ruined church by the river in our town where miscarried or aborted babies were buried, as well as illegitimate babies who died at birth.

      Barry McGuire sang ‘Eve of Destruction’ from an amusement arcade which was painted in twin colours outside – tobacco brown, frog green – and Padre Pio’s face was nailed to a billboard outside the church next door.

      On one of Mr Haythornthwaite’s final trips to our town, when he was sitting in the buffet at Westland Row Station, waiting for the train West, no other customers in the buffet, a woman in a sky-blue coat came in and sat at his table. There were many empty tables. ‘There are some very nice soldiers in Collins Barracks,’ she said eventually.

      I visited him shortly before he died. A room in a row of council houses. It was autumn and there was a carton of Chesterfields on the cupboard – white and red with black lettering – a souvenir from the time he gave up smoking cigarettes.

      In Dublin once, after you’d left Eleanor in Bewleys in Westmoreland Street, you saw a young male prostitute with blond hair, in pale blue denim, being fished out of the Liffey. You felt like giving that boy some speech, some memorial, in this city of Guinness-lubricated and Guinness-agitated speech.

      I got a lift to Ireland that autumn with Vincent and a friend of his, Chris. There were cumulus clouds over an Italian villa of a pub called the Ocean Queen and over raspberry haemorrhages of council houses. Chris spotted a headline in the window of a newsagents which looked like a Royal Legion hut.

      ‘I’m not having an affair,’ says vicar. ‘I’m a pouf.’

      Vincent had been a rent boy before he became a waiter. For a while he worked in a room full of out-of-order washing machines, where old men came to have tea and sherry and be whipped. His mother was a heroin addict who brought him over from Deny when he was very young. For a while he had a foster mother who was an East Kilbride Catholic in Appleby in Westmoreland. When he was seven or eight he confronted his foster mother in Louis XV heels with fancy bars: ‘You’ve lost a son and gained a daughter.’

      Chris had hazel hair, a scimitar of freckles across his face. He wore a watch with teddy bears instead of digits. He switched all the time from a tough Dublin working-class accent to a camp South-East London one. He came over from Dublin when he was thirteen and went to school at Sedgehill. His first sexual experience had been with a girl who’d bestow herself for Cadbury’s cream eggs. Her father was a piper who played on Saturday nights in the Pipers’ Club. He played his favourite tune, ‘Speed the Plough’, in the house as they made love in a shed.

      We stopped at a church in which one of the stained-glass windows depicted a crucifix made of lilies. There was a note beside a candle. ‘For my son Ben who is 21 today.’ The names of the First World War dead were ingrained in the wall outside. ‘Of your charity pray …’

      We passed through a mountainous landscape of boarded-up houses, scattered rocks, dried-up rivers. Suddenly there was a Congregationalist church and beside it a Chinese restaurant, Po Lun.

      Vincent had been born near the statue of Our Lady Queen of Peace in the Creggan. She had blue, upcast, lunatic eyes.

      The boys in tartan kilts used come to Deny on Saturdays in buses to march.

      ‘Are you Irish?’ a soldier boy asked me at a disco the other night. ‘Why?’ says I. ‘Do you want some Irish?’

      Posters for the Wolfe Tones and the Pogues hugged electric poles in Dublin. The trees were yellow.

      ‘Nice day in the shelter,’ a woman sarcastically said.

      Some men were working on the pavement outside Trinity College. ‘Sure, they’ll be pulling it up next week.’ There was another driven bit of sarcasm from a passing woman.

      Two women on a bus talked.

      ‘And I said to him it’s about time he’d be going to the altar.’

      ‘She boils a good egg.’

      ‘Mind you, it goes soft now and then.’

      By the Grand Canal two prostitutes were fighting. ‘She fuckan cut her wrists and you don’t care.’ One was wearing a short crimson dress and carrying a handbag. The other