There Are Little Kingdoms

by Kevin Barry

  He picked up a golf magazine, then another, then noticed a magazine near the bottom of the pile that did not seem to be in any way, shape or form about golf. It was in fact a pornographic title and as he flicked through it, sipping at the gin, he discovered its theme. It was about women who dressed up by wearing animal tails. There was mail order, even, where you could send off for a horse’s tail attached to a belt. Now maybe he was an innocent man for fifty, but this was news to him and there in the grim room, at two in the morning, it became an intense agitation. He got up off the couch and began to pace.

  ‘Is this what it’s all about now?’ he shouted. ‘Is that what’s supposed to be going on around the place? Somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter? Hah? Going around a kitchen in a horse’s tail? Stood over a pan of sausages? Hah?’

  He caught sight of the old quarehawk reflected in the window, pacing and ranting, and that shut him up lively. He turned off the light and lay down on the couch. He drew the malodorous anorak over his head. An unquiet sleep came. There were images full of dark portent, images of mountains and still water. It was an enormous relief when he woke to grey light in the window. He went immediately downstairs—though it was just gone five in the morning—and he got busy sorting out the grease traps. He looked out onto the street and it was familiar but odd, as if streets were running into the wrong streets, as if the hills were wrong, and the sky at a crooked slant, it was the amalgam place of a dream out there. A tremor arrived with the rise of the morning.

  This student has been coming around Wednesdays for three or four weeks now. He is doing a project about low-income families. Richie think it’s a disgrace, this fella is just a snoop, but his mother and father put up with it because they’re bored, is what it is, because they’re on the wagon, and they’ll talk to just about anybody to escape the monotony. The student has all these daft bloody questions. Tonight it’s about God and Mass and all that.

  ‘Do you go to Mass yourself, Mrs Tobin?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘Not that I believe that much in Jesus and stuff but it’s just lovely sometimes, you know, if there’s a choir and the way things are said.’

  ‘The ritual, you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s the ritual of the thing you admire?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And what about yourself, Mr Tobin?’ he says. ‘Do you have beliefs?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. I mean if you’re asking me do I believe in miracles and walking on water and bread and fishes, I couldn’t look you in the face and say oh I do, yeah. But if you’re asking me when we’re dead do we just lie around and rot in the ground like cabbage, well, I don’t know that I believe that either.’

  ‘And what about you, Richard?’

  ‘Oh don’t be asking him,’ says the Da. ‘Richie’s a fucking pagan.’

  He put a mop to the floor of the chipper. There was some relief in laying the suds down, squeezing the mop out in the wringer of the bucket, taking the suds up again. The day had arrived into Clonmel like a morbid neighbour, dour and overcast, the sky was low and dense, it was close in. As he swung the mop back and forth across the linoleum, things started to come apart altogether. He would begin to get a clear image, then somebody would drop a rock into the middle of the pool. Tremors queued up.

  ‘Ah stop it for fuck sake,’ he said.

  But it’s the Ummera Wood, he’s fifteen years old and pustular, a hank of hair and hormones, and Denis is a year or two older. They’re bush drinking—naggins of vodka. They sneak up on her quiet and she freaks out and screams, then laughs with relief ‘cause she knows them—Denis and Richie. The three of them sit around drinking, and she’s slagging them off because they’re younger than she is. They drink the vodka. Denis gets quiet and moon-faced for a while, then he strikes up, he says Linda would you snog Richie, would yuh? Fuck off, she says, he’s only a baby! Snog me so, he says. Nah, she says, you’re too fucking ugly! And he has her by the hair then and she’s down on the ground. What are yuh crying for, he says, we’re only having a mess? And he’s on top trying to screw her and Richie kneels down and puts his in her face and he says b-bite me and I’ll fucking b-b-bate yuh.

  He peeled spuds. He made batter for the burgers. He rolled out the potato cakes. He filleted the fish. He wondered where Denis had got to, and then he saw him: he was on his back underneath a Subaru Legacy at a garage outside a small town on a trunk road to Cork. He was covered in oil and diesel, there was junk everywhere, tarpaulin piles, dead Fiestas, tyres and wrenches, scrap iron, and Denis found that life was very hard sometimes because you cannot take a spanner to it.

  (And love is very hard to do.)

  Richie locked up the chipper for a while and he walked through the town to clear his head of all the crap that was building. He would stay in Clonmel for a time at least, nobody seemed to know him here—they say God looks after drunks and children. He walked to the town’s far edge and there in the small garden of a house on a new-build estate, he saw a boy and a girl holding hands and crying and he went to them. He said, what’s the matter? The dog is dead, she told him, and he asked the dog’s name and she said the dog was called Honey, we had to bury Honey. He said I know a song about Honey and he sang the old Bobby Goldsboro number. A mother appeared at the front door, arms folded, thin smile, and he made a move back towards the centre of the town.

  It was coming to life just then. Trim old ladies busied along towards the shops. Men were going into the ESB to talk about bills and easi-payment plans. He hummed to it all as he walked and then he thought that maybe if you tried hard enough you could transmit the thing itself out into the world and each time he passed somebody new he said lightly under his breath just the single word ‘love’, he said it to the postman and he said it to the guard, he said it to the old ladies and to the cats on the walls. The sun was making a good effort to come through the low banks of cloud; traffic streamed down for the new roundabout. Five sad slow notes played on a recorder. It was turning into June.

  Animal Needs

  Meadowsweet Farm is perhaps not the place you have prepared for. There is no waft of harvest to perfume the air. There is no contented lowing from the fields. These are not happy acres. Meadowsweet Farm is put together out of breeze blocks, barbed wire and galvanised tin. The land is flat and featureless. There are sawn-off barrels filled with rancid rainwater. A snapped cable cracks like a whip and lifts sparks from a dismal concrete yard—the electrics are haywire. The septic tank is backed up. The poultry shed is the secret torture facility of a Third World regime, long rumoured by shivering peasants in the mountain night. Desperation reigns, and we hear it as a croaky bayou howl. There is a general sensation of slurry.

  John Martin stalks the ground, with a five-litre tub of white paint spattering a trail behind him. He pulls up short and considers a gate and decides to give it a quick undercoat, and does so. He nods to himself, acknowledgement of a job at least begun. There was an offer on the five-litre tubs, and hasty streaks of white are showing up all over Meadowsweet Farm this morning. He is painting gates and fences and breeze-block walls, barrels, sheds, pallets—if it stands still, he paints it. This is a brilliant white that will glow eerily after dark. It’s as though he’s preparing for an airlift evacuation. He fetches his tool box from the 4x4 and storms the poultry shed. He takes out a screwdriver and has another go at the fuseboard and suffers a mild shock. It leaves a silvery tingle all down his right arm, and to shake this feeling he rotates the arm several times through the air: a rock star guitarist, with an audience of fowl. He goes outside again and puts three lengths of ply across a muddy pathway. He paints another bit of wall. He fetches the hard-wire sweeping brush and goes through the yards, grimly janitorial. You’d swear that royalty was coming and in a sense, it is: the woman from the Organic Certification Board is on her way. He gets a cloth and a basin of water and goes out to the road, where the Meadowsweet Farm signage has lately been erected—cheerful yellows and reds, a cock crowing against a blue Iowan sky—and he wi
pes it down. He drags some fertiliser bags out of a ditch and piles them for a bonfire. He goes up to the house and into the kitchen and he eyeballs his wife and he says:

  ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’

  This is no rosy-cheeked farmer. This is a gaunt and sallow man, long-armed, with livid, electric hair.

  ‘Fuck off,’ says Mary.

  He stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, with his feet planted for strength, and his neck warily hunched. He is watchful and tense, five foot eleven of peeled nerves.

  ‘All I’m saying is get it out in the open. Can’t we talk about it now, while she’s at playschool? How many times, Mary? I swear I won’t hold it against you.’

  She looks up from the computer. She scrunches her eyes tightly shut and then opens them again hopefully, as if by mercy he might have disappeared. It all reduces down to this thin sour broth: you open your eyes and there’s a nutjob on the floor in front of you.

  ‘Why are you doing this? Haven’t you enough to be doing outside? Do this much for me, John, okay? Turn around. And fuck off.’

  Wounded, his mouth a grey slit, John Martin goes again into the weather, and a filthy breeze has worked itself up, and he retreats to the shelter of the chicken shed. Poultry management is no joke at the best of times. You would be amazed what can go wrong. At present, it is the heating. He has not been able to regulate the heat for five days, and the shed is like Zaire. Unaccustomed to the luxury of such warmth, the chickens have been unpleasantly lively but this seems to be subsiding now to a kind of rattled exhaustion. They screech and gasp in a terrible, grating way.

  ‘Will ye ever shut up?’ he says, and he wipes sweat from his brow. ‘Please!’

  This is Meadowsweet Farm in its fourth year. Previously, it was known only as Dolan’s, her father’s place, until he had a massive stroke, which was much deserved. All that was left of the Dolans then was Mary. They hadn’t exactly been ringing the bells above in Sligo, so they thought, why not? People said from the start there was going to be a problem with the chickens. They were an expensive, high-faluting breed. People laughed at the idea of artichokes, too, and muttered knowingly the second September, the time of the artichoke famine. Orders have been slow enough coming in on the computer at Meadowsweet Farm. This is a scatter of acres outside the town of B_____. There are both organic and traditional operations in the area. There are crisis levels of debt. There is alcoholism and garrulousness and depressive ideation. There is the great disease of familiarity. These are long, bruised days on the midland plain. People wake in the night and shout out names they have never known. There is an amount of lead insult among the young. The river is technically dead since 2002. There is addiction to prescription medications and catalogue shopping. Boys with pesticide eyes pull handbrake turns at four in the morning and scream the names of dark angels. Everybody is fucking everybody else.

  An engine subsides in the yard outside. John Martin shakes himself alive and thinks no, Jesus, she can’t be here already. He scurries to the yard but it is not the woman from the O.C.B. It is the grey Suzuki van. It’s Frank Howe!

  Howe steps out of the van, displays his palms in a gesture of openness and shucks the cuffs of his jacket.

  ‘What about you, Big Man?’ he says.

  Howe is from the north and has crude animal intelligence. He can smell weakness and need. He steps across the greasy, puddled yard, and he kicks the fire-snapping cable from his path. John Martin raises a trembling hand to stop him.

  ‘Frank,’ he says. ‘I’m going to ask you to clear out of here now. And I’m not going to ask you twice.’

  He takes a wrench from the ground and holds it in threat above his head. He assumes an attack stance.

  ‘Easy, killer,’ says Howe. ‘Is that one of mine?’

  Frank Howe sells combination socket wrench sets at the markets. He also sells copies of Rolexes, pirate DVDs, illicit growth promoters and directions for dog fights. He stands calmly smiling in the Siberian wind. He chews on a scabbed knuckle. His black leather sports coat has its collar turned up. His peanut-shaped head is shaved to bristles. He has put the hours in on the sunbed. He can be no more than five foot two inches tall.

  ‘It’s too soon,’ says John Martin. ‘Oh it’s too fresh, Frank! Fuck off out of here now lively.’

  ‘She inside?’

  ‘I’m warning you!’

  ‘You’ll warn nobody, John. We’re as well to get that clear for a start. Put the wrench down and come in and talk to me like a good man.’

  Mon, a gude mon. Howe strides like a six-footer into the poultry shed. He drags out a pail and sits on it. He sets his face sternly, and hovers his fingers in the air: a kestrel waiting to swoop, or a concert pianist poised to begin.

  ‘I am a man,’ he says, slowly, emphasising each word.

  Aaah… ohmmm… a… mon.

  ‘And she,’ says Howe, ‘is a woman.’

  A wummun.

  John Martin considers cranking shut the slide-door. He considers taking a leap through the air and beating Howe all about the head with the wrench. He could wrap the body in opened sacks and drag it to the prep area and put it through the mincer, piece by piece, mix it with the mix for the meatballs, flavour with coriander and lime, put it out to the farmers’ markets, Thai-style.

  ‘You,’ says Howe, ‘are a man.’

  He winks, appreciatively, at John Martin.

  ‘And Madge,’ he smiles, ‘is a woman.’

  Howe shuts his eyes and takes a small bow.

  ‘End of story,’ he says. ‘I had a go off yours. You had a go off mine. If you like we can put four crosses on St Jarlath’s pitch and nail ourselves to them. Or we can get on with us lives and forget all about it. Be friends still. Look. Come over tonight, John, bring herself. We’ll have a few drinks and relax, for Godsake. Is all I’m saying to you.’

  ‘You’re trying to destroy my family,’ says John Martin.

  The heads of the chickens twist from each to the other, like the crowd at Roland Garros. Howe stands and kicks the pail aside. He shrugs. He pushes past John Martin in the doorway and heads for the van.

  ‘Take your ease, John,’ he says. ‘I’ll give yez a tinkle later on, soon as I’m done in Shinrone.’

  John Martin walks into the fields of the farm. It is all around him, and there is a vague hissing at its edges, as in a sour dream. She is due for twelve and the place is an out-and-out disaster. Meadowsweet Farm is a concern on the brink. The O.C.B. runs a tight ship, and if they cannot get on board, they might as well turn the place over for sites. Be done with it. He notes a rusted gate and fetches a scraper and opens a fresh tub of the white paint and rinses out a brush under the tap in the yard. He sets to. Madge Howe is an attractive lady but mad. The glazed look, the grey tongue. There is going to be hell to pay. What was he thinking?

  He takes rust off the gate. A fine mist of copper-coloured particles lifts into the air and causes him to sneeze. He cannot shake the fear that his daughter has been permanently damaged. She is a spaced out kind of child at the best of times, but she has gone even deeper into herself since. Fear is a black wet ditch on a cold night. It is hard to claw yourself out, your fingers slip in the loam. He puts an undercoat on the gate. He takes a couple of fertiliser bags out of a hedge. He cannot even think about going to have a look at the few cattle. There is a white nervous sky, and magpies are everywhere on patrol, stomping around, like they own the place. He takes one of the phones from his pocket and puts in a call to Noreen.

  ‘Can I come over?’ he says

  ‘Oh John,’ she says. ‘No way. I don’t know how long he’s going to be gone.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he says.

  ‘Shut up!’ she says.

  ‘I want you now, Noreen.’

  ‘I’m warning you!’ she says.

  ‘How long is he gone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we not chance it?’

  ‘No.’


  ‘I’m in love with you, Noreen,’ he breathes it, a whisper, a husk on the breeze.

  ‘Park on the L_______ road,’ she says, ‘and come over across by Tobin’s field.’

  He climbs into the 4x4. It’ll be chancy on time but what are you going to do? The bayou howl, the bayou howl. He backs out of the yard, goes down the drive, turns onto the road. He will need to stop off in town to pick up condoms. He is in the thirty-seventh winter of his life. The other phone goes, the official line. Caller i.d. says ‘mry’.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where you goin’?’

  ‘I’ve to head into town.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve to get rope.’

  ‘Pick up the dog while you’re there’

  ‘You’re not serious, Mary? She’s not!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s in again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arra the fuck, since when?’

  ‘I’d to drop her in this morning. She was bad. You were told this. You were in the back fields. I’m talking to a wall is what I’m talking to. She’s ready since eleven. They rang. They said pick her up.’

  ‘She’s in again?’

  Picking up the dog will not be straightforward. The pregnancy has been a nightmare, she’s even been snapping at the child. When John Martin interfered with her supper one night, pushing it out of the way with his foot, she nearly took his face off. She is a fast-tempered spaniel bitch, high-bred, with taut nerves. He breaches the tearful peripheries of the town. He makes it through to the central square under a tormented sky; he parks. The vet’s clinic is on one of the terraces that traipse from the square. There are feelings strong enough to overwhelm the physical laws. There are feelings that can settle in stone. There is an age-old malaise in the vicinity of this terrace. It has soaked into the grain of the place. The afternoons looking out on sheeting rain… The nights staring into the dark infinities… How would a place be right after it?