by Sarah Hall
‘He gave her one down the fish dock.’
‘Oh Tony,’ she said.
‘By the mighty Ontario,’ he said.
‘Folks,’ I said, ‘listen, I mean really . . .’
‘County Mayo-style,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean, soldier?’
‘Tony,’ she said, disappointedly.
‘And as for my betrothed? I said, well! I said, this pilates has given you a whole new lease of life, Martina. You’ve come in glowing and you’re up to four sessions a week.’
‘What’s this is next along the line, Andy?’
‘Alan,’ I said, and submitted to my fate. The way they moved was sure as a tide.
‘It’s an Absolut vodka,’ I said.
‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘One minute we’re rock-chewing Spanish peasants humping the donkey in a humid night wind, the next we’re on the porch of the dacha, it’s a summer’s evening, placid . . .’
‘A light breeze licking the trees,’ she said.
‘Pine-scented secrets,’ he said. ‘Cruel handsome souls with cheekbones like knives. Burly intrigue . . .’
‘Burl Ives,’ she said.
‘. . . and some rather fetching Cassock-type headgear. A tubercular old sort about to hack his last . . .’
I poured and set the vodkas over ice – they slammed them back neat.
‘Of course Martina’s not been right since the change,’ he said.
‘Her manners are learned,’ said the mother. ‘There was always something forced about her manners. As if she’d learned them by heart. From a library book.’
‘Pilates!’ he cried. ‘If it wasn’t for the kiddies, it’d be a clean break.’
‘The kiddies were a disaster,’ she said. ‘At your age? I don’t know what you were thinking, Anthony.’
‘Prolonging the noble line,’ he said. ‘1889? Oh . . . Is that a Drambuie, Adam?’
*
The alcohol appeared really to have no great effect – it just kept them at a spinning clip.
‘He never talked about Mayo much, Daddy,’ she said.
‘You could hardly blame the man,’ he said.
‘Though he told a horrid tale. About the day his father decided the wife was a whore. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and screamed the foullest abuse up at her. She flung a loaf of bread down and hit him on the head. Your daddy, as a kiddie, is watching the whole thing from under a table. The poor infant! And next his daddy flings the bread back up again and roars . . .’
She half stood on the bar stool and reddened as she called the line.
‘“Feed your fucking bastards with it!”’
‘Is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?’ said Tony.
‘Folks,’ I said. ‘In truth, I’m not feeling the best this evening, I think it’s a virusy thing and I may lock up a little earlier . . .’
‘Mine’s a Drambuie, Al,’ she said.
‘Times two,’ he said.
I set the glasses and poured.
‘He talked about that loaf of bread for sixty years,’ she said.
‘Martina and I? That first weekend? We never left the bed. Of course this was the eighties and we were extremely tanned and fit. Tenerife, matinees and evenings? That’ll keep you in your skinny jeans.’
‘Always it would come up,’ she said. ‘The morning it all went bananas. Back in Mayo. Back in the . . . Was it a cottage, Tony?’
‘It was a cabin.’
‘From what I could gather that was the last he ever saw of his father. The morning of the loaf of bread flung.’
*
It was by now fully night outside; the road was deserted.
‘Daddy did a turn,’ she said. ‘In his day. As a lady?’
‘Oh?’
‘Coeur d’Alene,’ she said. ‘We were hired for the Empire Builder. Lounge-car floorshow. That was us. And Daddy? In 1957? Oh he was at his peak, my lovers! This was before the tragedy, of course. He went as Dame Delilah. He was got up buxom. He was got up blonde. Tony was still on the bottle. Tony was still in the cot but it seeps in, does talent.’
‘I was four,’ he said, and a tiny tear came. ‘Riding the High Line!’
‘I’ll admit Daddy’s nerves were not right,’ she said. ‘What he’d been through, the trauma? He had . . . He had what I used to call his things. Which were something like Anthony’s spells, actually. Come to think of. But Daddy? Well! For example, he couldn’t see a shoe on a bed. If he saw a shoe on a bed, he wouldn’t be right for weeks.’
‘A shoe on a bed? This is new to me,’ he said.
‘You were four,’ she said.
‘Now I’m going to have a thing,’ he said, ‘about shoes on beds.’
She smiled, and she rose up suddenly, at the shoulders, and her eyes brightened ever more madly, and she gasped her last. Then she keeled over dead onto my bar counter. There was no question about it. The way her head snapped onto the counter top. She just went. There was no question of a passing out; there was no question of the one too many. This was death on the premises. A single hard snap of bone on wood. He looked at her. He looked at me. He looked at her again, so coldly –
‘Oh you haven’t,’ he said.
*
The one road along the peninsula is a bad one, and we are at least a half hour from Castletown of a winter’s night. Which is an ignoble length of time for a woman dead on a bar stool. Together we carried her to the lounge seating and laid her down crookedly there. Her knees wouldn’t straighten. I went upstairs to get a sheet. I didn’t know what I was thinking or doing. I was panicked. I fetched a brown paper bag to breathe in. I took the sheet off the bed; it was like wrestling an octopus. But it covered her, at least, and I spoke stupidly then, intemperately –
‘I suppose the shock would tend to sober you.’
‘Oh no,’ Tony said. ‘I’m still hilariously drunk.’
He looked up at the optics.
‘Where were we, Al?’
Next along the line was a Bailey’s, and I poured a pair of them over ice, and I sat with him on the lounge chairs as we sipped.
‘They must have been happy in Toronto,’ he said. ‘Or at least had some sort of fuck glow.’
From the gap in the mountain the ambulance was seen at last to spin its lights and call and as quickly again its men were in the door and about us. Tony went in the back of the ambulance with his mother. The last that I saw, his head was bobbing in the moving light as he yapped and cried and gesticulated.
I went upstairs with the rest of the bottle of Bailey’s poured into a pint glass filled with ice. I Googled toxicology reports and I Googled liability. I Googled the Empire Builder and I could hear it as it moved across the mountains and the plains –
Winona.
Wolf Point.
Coeur d’Alene.
I had to get out for a bit. I walked down the cold road to the beach and it was just me and the dead jellyfish and my eyes stung with cold and all the silvers of the sea came and entered me there on the white sand like the surface of the moon pocked and cratered and the jellyfish lay dead and translucent all around me and I just lay where I had fallen into this night of void and stars and I thought oh Jesus, oh God, it’s so fucking cold now.
METAPHYSICAL
Ali Smith
It’s a cup and saucer, nothing but a cup on a saucer. But it’s a very nice cup and saucer, proper porcelain, pure and white, Royal Limoges France on the base, good quality, the cup more like a little bowl, it feels good in the hand, the saucer quite deep. The light catches the rims of both saucer and cup, it catches the handle on the cup, a lit capital D, and there’s light inside the cup in lightbulb circles, lines of light which move with him when he moves his head.
He’s a man who, in the middle of the night in his hospital bed, pulls off the oxygen mask and lets it drop, pulls the tube that’s attached to whatever’s hanging off the side of the bed out of his midriff, swings his legs out the other side from the tube and the hanging things and stands
up. He tests his legs to see if they’ll hold him. They will.
He feels his way by holding on to the ends of the other beds till he’s at the door of the ward, which is behind him now, dark and full of the distress and noise of the other sleeping people. It’s quiet in the corridor, darkened too. There’s nobody. Night shift. He knows not to go to the lift that the visitors and other outsiders use. He goes to the goods lift instead. The down button lights when he presses it. The lift door opens a box of light off the dimness of the corridor.
It’s a pretty big lift, nothing in it but him. The doors close. He presses Basement. The lift hums. He takes a deep breath in. He breathes it out again.
In the basement he goes through a set of doors heavy to open. He crosses tarmac up a ramp, like a ramp for cars. It takes him out into the night air, he feels it on his face and feet, his feet are bare. He puts his hands in his pyjama pockets to keep them up round his stomach. There might be women. He doesn’t want to be impolite or careless.
But there’s no one on the street.
There’s a white van, like a work van, with one back door half open.
He climbs inside and sits down on the bit of metal curved over the wheel.
A man comes to the back of the van. You right, then? the man says.
The man knows him. But he doesn’t know the man, does he? The man slams the doors shut and it all goes dark in the back. A stranger knows him. He fills with pride. Well, it’ll be work, probably. Probably a lot of people know him. They’ll know each other from work somewhere.
He sways about in the back. He hopes the man won’t need him to do any work. When the van stops and the man opens the back, he tells him.
I’ve no slippers. I’ve only my feet.
But the van man’s dragging a ladder out of the back, off to do something, someone needing someone to do something, there always is.
There’s a house there. You can’t just go into someone’s home uninvited. There’s a side path to its back garden. There’s grass under his feet. There’s one of those new outhouses at the back of the house, a hut down the garden.
Well, try the door.
It opens.
He goes in. It’s warmer in it. It’s new, the hut, the air smells of newness in it, new wood, clean in the cut. He feels for a light switch by the door in the place he’d have put the light switch if it were him doing the work. There it is.
It’s a clean white room he’s in. Lovely, and a chair, a comfortable-looking one, and on the side up there a kettle, above it a cupboard. He opens its door. Clean wood. There’s a jar of coffee, there’s tea, sugar, tea things, the kinds of things they keep in a hut to make themselves at home, but it’s right nice, they must be decent people. Is there water in the kettle? There’s a sink. All you need, and look there, someone’s made a table out of a plank and breeze-blocks. That’s a good idea. You don’t need much.
He settles down in the chair.
When he opens his eyes the light’s up outside, it’s near morning. He goes out and along the side of the house, leaning as he goes with one hand on the pebbledash. The van’s gone. There’s an ambulance waiting. Is it waiting for him?
It’s a different man. He doesn’t know the man but the man knows him. The man helps him up the steps though he doesn’t need any help. The man asks him did he have a good night.
I did, he says.
He sits down in the ambulance. The man gives him a wave and shuts the doors. There’s no one else in the back. They’ve sent it out specially for him. He didn’t need that.
I don’t need this, he says out loud to the metal doors, the stretcher, the machine for hearts, the boxes and packets of medical stuff and the like.
In the bed on the ward with the mask back on he tells whichever of them’s visiting him, one after the other.
I took the goods lift up again, he says. I wasn’t missed. All night. They didn’t miss me. I don’t believe they even knew me gone. I made myself a cup of tea.
None of them believes him. They humour him but they don’t believe him.
I put the kettle on, he says again. I didn’t think they’d mind. I made it in the cup with a teabag, there were teabags on the side, though there wasn’t any milk. You can’t have everything.
I washed up after myself. I put the things away. They had right nice things. I left it as good as I found it.
*
The smallest of our cats brought in the carcass of a bird that had been dead for quite some time and threw it round the kitchen, the bathroom and the hall. The carcass was full of maggots. I chased the cat out. I put my hand inside a plastic bag and picked up off the top of the broadband box, which is where it finally landed, what was left of the bird.
I took it out to the bins then came back to the house and hoovered up all the maggots I could see. The smell was pretty foul.
I was undressing later in the bathroom for a bath and I was thinking about the plant in the Botanical Gardens which flowers only once every hundred years or so and whose flower is meant to smell of death. Last year or the year before they announced in the media that this plant had flowered; every day on the local TV news they reported the massive queue of people waiting at the gates of the gardens to smell it. There were still two or three maggots, I saw now, there on the bathroom floor. I went for them with a piece of toilet paper; I managed to pick up one. The others disappeared; they must have seen me coming and known to squeeze themselves into the dark of the place where the side of the bath meets the floor.
I looked at the one on the paper in my hand. It was whiter than the bleach in the paper, it was quite small. Did that mean it was young? I knew nothing about maggots. It was ridged, completely white except for the black in it at one of its ends.
Maybe you could charge people to come to smell us, the maggot said.
No it didn’t, maggots can’t—
Yeah, because maggots haven’t got a voice, have they? it said with its black mouth or its anus, whatever the black bit is. Maggots can’t talk. Maggots don’t have language, do they? Even after all that time of us cleaning things up. All the years of us helping with infected wounds etc. All the centuries of us eating dead things away to clean bare bones, all the millennia we’ve cleared up the rot you leave behind. We’re not unhygienic. It’s you hoovering up life, leaving each other for dead for all the centuries and centuries in the ditches and the battlefields, in the seas and the graveyards, in the town squares, hung off the trees and lampposts bombed and shot and cut to pieces. It’s not us who smell, and that’s obvious enough to a maggot brain, but you’re not even bright enough to—
I screwed up the paper in my hand. I threw it into the toilet bowl. I pressed the bigger of the flush buttons, the one that gives the longer flush.
I got down on my knees and had a look at the crack between the laminated side of the bath and the tiles on the floor. The tiles were rough marble and quite uneven, which is presumably how those other few had escaped behind the laminate.
I went through to the front room to get something to poke with. I went on tiptoe because I was naked – as if going on tiptoe would protect me from something like the postman, anyone, coming to the front door (which is glass) and seeing me there with no clothes on.
As I did it, I felt stupid. I felt surveilled and self-conscious.
How had a maggot I had just drowned made me feel these things?
I began to feel cruel too. What right had I to decide about life and death of any sort, even a maggot’s?
I came back through to the bathroom with a sharpened pencil and got down on my knees again. I put my head sideways on the floor but I couldn’t see if anything in there, in the gaps between the floor and the edge of the side of the bath, was moving.
I poked the pencil point in anyway, wherever there was room to.
I got into the bath. That was better.
I ducked my head into the water. I surfaced, shook the water off me and the water still in my ear sang in a high-pitched Brechtian singsong:
making short work of the dirt
hear us in the human skin cells
that you like to call the dust
hear us in our maggot chorus
in a pure white noise of maggots
we don’t stay like this forever
nothing stays like this forever.
I told my imagination to fuck off.
I stuck my finger in my ear to get the water out. I got out of the bath and dried myself. Before I left the bathroom I checked all round, all the corners. There weren’t any more there alive or dead, not that I could see.
I got dressed, went into the kitchen and opened the hoover. I took out the hoover bag and took it outside to the bins.
I put a new hoover bag into the machine and clicked the plastic clasp shut.
Two weeks later, midnight, I was cleaning my teeth to go to bed and there was a bluebottle on the mirror ledge.
I killed it.
The next day, round about lunchtime, there was another bluebottle, metalled and shining, a little winter-dozy, on the rim of the pot we keep the toothbrushes in.
I killed it.
The night after that I put the reading light on in the bedroom to read a bit before going to sleep. A large bluebottle sang past my head. I got out of bed and hit at it with the book.
I killed it.
The next day there were two bluebottles in the kitchen at different ends of the light fitting.
I killed them by spraying them with disinfectant cleaning spray.
The next night I was in the bath. A bluebottle hummed by my ear and landed on the bristles of one of the toothbrushes.
The next night and the next night and the next day and the next.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Beatlebone and City of Bohane and the story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He has won the IMPAC Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, the Author’s Club First Novel Prize, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He also writes plays and films. He lives in County Sligo, Ireland.