Beatlebone

by Kevin Barry

  on rum parade.

  I’m sorry, John?

  Nothing, Cornelius. My mind is tipping out my mouth.

  That would often be the way. Rum I never drank.

  Cornelius rocks the boat free of its berth and aims it over the stones. He mutters blackly beneath his breath and swears vengeance against the waves and world. He pushes the boat out to the water. He works at the ropes and works at the motor—

  Bastarin’ fucken thing!

  The seabirds hover watchfully with their mad eyes, all wing-span and homicide. He doesn’t know the names for birds. Which is neither here nor there. He kneels down by the water to find his face come closer—

  fuck me.

  The shock of the age that’s gone in. He looks older than Father fucking Time. Anxiety and fear and weight-of-love—these are the lines of his face.

  Cornelius works the boat.

  The motor catches and the rope unspools.

  John climbs in and he almost falls but rights himself again—he’s awkward as a duck.

  The boat puts out to the water.

  ———

  Tell me again, John.

  Okay.

  You’re going out to this little island to scream?

  I may well Scream.

  You mean you’re going to be roaring out of you?

  It’s certainly on the cards, Cornelius.

  Like the crowd on Achill.

  Oh?

  But what’s it all about, John?

  Primal scream therapy was devised by Dr. Arthur Janov.

  I never heard of him.

  He lives in California. He has a clinic there. I spent three months with Dr. Janov. He taught me how to Scream.

  What’s it you’ll be screaming about?

  It’s a technique for getting at buried pain and childhood trauma.

  Why would you want to do that?

  Because it weights you down.

  And you want to be lighter on your feet?

  Exactly so.

  How light do you want to be?

  How’d you mean?

  What if you took off into the fucken sky?

  You’re stuck in your ways, Cornelius. You don’t want to have your little world opened up.

  My world’s about as far a ways open as I can fucken handle. What kind of pain have you buried?

  Same kind we all have.

  On account of being a child?

  Well…

  We were all children, John.

  I lost my father. He went away.

  We all lost our fucken fathers.

  I lost my mother. She went and died.

  We all have the dead fucken mothers.

  So tell me how you get by, Cornelius!

  It’s simple, John. I listen to what’s around me.

  Okay…

  And then?

  Yeah?

  I react.

  You listen. And you react.

  Because everything you need in the world is there to be heard.

  You have my interest, Cornelius.

  You can see very little in this world, John. But you can hear fucken everything.

  ———

  He lies down on the boards of the boat as it edges out and moves. He fixes the suitcase for a pillow. He falls back into the grey-blue sky and the day augments itself by patches of cloud and patches of blue as the boat moves out across the bay.

  Abroad in the fucking world.

  Beg your pardon, John?

  He closes his eyes and listens hard—the world is full of hollows—and he is sixteen again and coming down Bold Street—or maybe he’s seventeen—and he wants to fuck everything that moves but he’s in a fat phase and bevvied and he’s headed for the last train at Central station and he bounces off every shop window—a staggering John—and he stumbles and falls into a doorway—Cripps department store—and the sky above the rooftops shows the woozy stars and he heaves and pukes and laughs like a dog as he wipes the sick away and weeps.

  He opens his eyes.

  The sky rolls out and moves.

  He is left to his own private woes and the weaving of his miseries—he’s an expert. Cornelius discreetly averts as John looks out and away, across the islands and the bay, and the boat dips and rises, and the engine judders, and the knuckle of the holy mountain jabs at the sky and the tiny islands are thrown about in all directions. He picks up a piece of dark wood like a baton and turns it—the way it feels snug and murderous in his hand.

  The priest, Cornelius says.

  For killing the fishies.

  Or anything else might come at you.

  Everywhere he looks there is another island but not his. All are familiar but none just right—

  Well? says Cornelius.

  No.

  —because maybe the rocks are thrown about wrong or the way a hill runs at the sky is off. They pass another island and he sees a fast blur against the grey of the rocks and the movement is a quickness, a shiver, a silvering of the blood: the hare. They move farther out and the wind comes harder and in whippety slaps and he tunes into the slow boom and drift. The boat draws a curve around the tip of an island and comes on an open stretch of water. Across the colours of the bay they move and the way that his mood has lifted—now he’s beaming and in tremendous good heart, it must have been the hare. He is coming close in.

  This feels right.

  But in the near distance another boat moves on the water, and draws closer, and there are dark figures in a blur, crouching.

  I can see lenses.

  Down, John.

  He lies flat to the boards of the boat.

  Fuckers. Stay down, John.

  Cornelius works slowly to turn the boat—it drifts again.

  Stay down.

  He lies hardly breathing on the boards of the boat.

  There’s only one thing for it.

  Yeah?

  We’ll have to go and see our friends on Achill.

  ———

  Paranoia drifts in white smoke across the sky.

  The boat moves.

  And here’s Cornelius—

  his back to the May sun,

  his face dark in shade,

  his voice hoarse with soft cajole.

  We should have headed here in the first place, John. There are no two ways about it. The Amethyst Hotel would be the very best place for you to wait out the assault.

  The fucking where?

  The Amethyst, John. On Achill.

  Amethyst again? What the fuck is the Amethyst?

  Sweet Joe’s place.

  Who the fuck is Sweet fucking Joe?

  Now on Achill Island generally, John, you’ll find the people are mean-spirited and small-minded and very aggressive. Tough nuggety foreheads on them. Hard lines to their faces. Tight little mouths. But of course this is no surprise in the wide earthly world…

  He spits.

  …because they’ve been jawing rocks at the side of the fucken road since the Lord Jesus was a bare-arsed child. We’ll have nothing whatsoever to do with the Achill people, John. That’s a promise to you and faithful. But the people where we’re headed are not Achill by the blood. No indeed. They are your own kind.

  The boards of the boat groan and sing.

  The cliffs of Achill rise up ahead.

  Paranoia races its squadron gulls.

  Who exactly are these people, Cornelius?

  The people, he says, who have taken over the Amethyst Hotel.

  Something odd, something familiar—Amethyst?

  ———

  Cornelius works the boat between the rocks. The motor cuts; the boat is tied off. He is helped from the boat by a great knuckly paw. Which makes him feel lady-like and fey and just shy the parasol. They come from the water and climb. They walk an old track hemmed in by singing hedges in the breeze. The feeling near and near-abouts is medieval. The growth everywhere is very fucking alive—it makes a sore pulsing in his throat. On Achill there is the throb of big summer coming and everything br
eathes. In the Maytime we are untethered and time is not fixed. Or so he believes. The world is in a high, sexy mood. Tiny fists of dread are bunched beneath his skin. He is on Achill Island again—a bad-trip place—and the light is harsh and he is cold with fear.

  I’ve been here before, he says.

  We’ve all been here before, John.

  I’m not talking philosophic. I mean this fucking place. I’ve been here before.

  They climb a bit and then some more. They come in quick time to the Amethyst Hotel. It’s a strange hacienda in the Maytime sun. There are armies of insects on the island’s air. And there are voices—listen?

  The voices are high, wired, freaky.

  I think I’ve been to the Amethyst fucking Hotel and all.

  He steps through the pools of a lost dream now—it’s been nine years since.

  They pass through an old garden once formal but gone to seed and wild again and there is the feeling of things unseen travelling behind the hedges.

  Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, is the gentleman that runs the Amethyst nowadays and I’d have to say he’s an outstanding individual.

  John is worried.

  Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, would mind a mouse for you on Piccadilly Circus.

  I thought we’d said no hotels?

  Amethyst is not open to the public anymore, John. As such. It is for Joe and his friends’ use only at this moment in time.

  His friends?

  The voices come up again. They are loud and desperate. He can hear unwellness and rage. He knows these voices at once and right off for what they are.

  They’ll know to expect us, John. We spoke last night. They know we might be stuck. These are your own style of people precisely.

  It’s true there are some old familiars on the air—

  He can smell the fucking and the freebase.

  He can smell the mania.

  He can smell the freaks.

  ———

  When he sees high the red letters raised

  A M E T H Y S T

  on the white gable wall, it comes back to him for sure: he has definitely been here before. It’s the nine years since. Some actors had it back then. They kept a very nice white wine. They had some quite good pot. They made us a picnic here. It was just a sweet nothing day. It was early in our life together.

  The picnic was brought to the hills. The hills were scratchy with heather and nettles about the ankles and they sat for a while on a Scotch blanket and looked down on the slow-moving green-into-blue of the bay and ate tiny triangle sandwiches of cheese and pickle and drank the cold white wine—

  didn’t we?

  —until the rain came in a sudden attack from a very irksome old god and they scurried away again as the sky changed colour quick as love can change and there was rain in their faces and everything was giddy as hell and they were collapsing with love.

  There’s another we’ll never have back, he says to himself, being the sentimental Scouse.

  ———

  Inside. The air of the strange hotel is humid and trapped. There are voices upstairs. They are going at it fucking hard. There are footsteps now and a figure at the top of the stair—a dark shade there.

  Dips his head for a view—

  Sweet Joe, Cornelius says.

  The beast grins down the stair beneath a cloud or an aura of bushy auburn hair. He has tiny yellowish pisshole-in-the-snow-type eyes. But otherwise this is a most graceful fatman on the move. The way that he bounces on the balls of his feet as he turns the stair.

  Fucking hell, John says.

  The way that he has the look of an enormous forest hog—a creature only rumoured, never seen. He wears a flowy Victorian shirt that billows poetically and some kind of breeches—fucking breeches?—and his skin has a high, healthful, vivacious glow. He is terribly fucking alive. He whispers these decorous words—

  How absolutely proper it feels to have you here, John.

  His voice?

  North-of-England.

  ———

  Are you a little cold, John?

  His voice—the North-of-England, the wheeze, the husk and Burnley of it.

  I’m fine, thanks.

  They sit in the hotel kitchen over a brew of nettle tea and fags.

  We can get that chill in Maytime yet, the evenings.

  There is something old-timey about his voice, as if transmitted from the days long since; there is a static on the coils of it. His face is alive with tics and nervy flutters as if there are small desperate birds trapped beneath the skin.

  You’d need your cup of tea, he says.

  Common-sensical, also, the tone, like a fucking busman, and there are arcane symbols daubed on the kitchen walls—

  Black Sun,

  Pentacle,

  Evil Eye.

  There are voices upstairs—young, unsettled, roaring.

  Frank and Sue, he says. They’re in the thick of it just now.

  Oh yeah?

  They’ve gone deepish, he says. We’d best not disturb Frank and Sue just now.

  A rueful, confiding grin, and the words again are whispered—

  They’ve been weeks getting to where they are now, Frank and Sue.

  One minute they’re roaring at each other, Cornelius says. The next they’re riding each other like dogs.

  It could go either way yet, Joe says, for Frank and Sue.

  The voices above are pitched high and sorely and break at times to screeches, at other times to screams—John is back in a freakhouse again. It’s been a stretch of time. He sips not unhappily at his nettle tea.

  How’s it you’ve ended up out here, Joe?

  Oh it’s hardly an ending, really, is it?

  A flush creeps up the fatman’s neck.

  You can really listen out here, he says. I mean if it’s a Mesmeric you’re after.

  Now, Cornelius says, and he tips a measure of Spanish brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

  That’ll keep the blood moving, Joe says.

  Common-sensical, which is the true note of a madman, or so Peter Sellers said one time, and he’d have known.

  Joe moves lightly on his feet to look out the window. He considers the Maytime in the island’s gleeful light. He nods and turns.

  It was magic last night, John, he says. You were there and you were not there.

  Okay.

  And you sang quite beautifully, actually.

  I did?

  But what a very strange song it was.

  A song?

  It was odd, Cornelius says, but it was lovely.

  Okay, John says.

  The night will not come back except in slivers and scraps and dark shapes that hover but will not hold.

  On the walls—

  the Hexagram,

  the Ankh,

  the Eye of Providence.

  He is here and he is not here; he throws his palms down to slap his thighs, as though jauntily, but in fact for confirmation of flesh and bone, here on a hardback chair, in the kitchen of the strange hotel, in the month of May—how merry, how merry—in 1978.

  How do you pass the days out here, Joe?

  Exploration, he says. We dig in.

  Oh yeah?

  They’d be hammering each other, Cornelius says.

  It has been there all the while but only now is he aware of Moroccan-type music on a hi-fi but faintly, a sitar, soft padded drums, and Joe smiles and shimmies his fat hips.

  We go in hard at the Amethyst, John.

  He sips his nettle tea and the brandy’s warm kick comes through; he lights a fag for a prop. It’s 1978, he’s a bloody dad again, and he’s away in a fucking freakhouse?

  Where’s it you’re from, Joe? Originally?

  Knowleston way.

  Where?

  But Joe just waddles a grin about his face and moves his fleshy hips to the desert music—languid, his fat rhythm. He looks at John calmly and evenly—

  They call me Joe Director, he says.

  He smiles
, hog-like, and shows the graven palms—

  Daft kids, he says.

  There are no directors out here, he says.

  We are very much a community out here, he says.

  Oh yeah, John says, a community?

  The Community of the Black Atlanteans.

  Of the fucking what?

  Upstairs, by now, the noises are unmistakably sex noises—

  Hot shrieks.

  Chocolate moans.

  Livid whelps.

  Frank and Sue, says Joe. They’re young still and they have the blood for it, John.

  Like dogs on the street, Cornelius says.

  Is it just the three then?

  There are other young friends who come and go, Joe says.

  I bet there are.

  But for now? Yes. A family of three.

  He’s been set down in a freakhouse; he eyes the blithe fiend Cornelius hard. But Cornelius just beams and aims splashes of brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

  We go in deep out here, says Joe, and we go in all the way.

  I have you, John says.

  No stranger to the screaming himself, Cornelius says.

  I understand so. But would this be along the lines of the California technique, John?

  Well…

  To scream is only the start of it, Joe says, ’round here.

  His hog arrogance.

  Oh yeah?

  In fact we’ve gone a long ways past that ’round here.

  Go on?

  Around here, John, we get the rants on.

  The rants?

  Is fucking right. Have you ranted, John?

  I can’t say that I have…as such.

  Joe Director purses his lips in regret; the bloody Lancashire of him.

  The rants bring us all the way inside, John. And that’s where we need to go, isn’t it?

  Best of luck with it, John says. I’m just on the way to me island.

  Upstairs—the sound of a vaulting climax, and Joe lifts shyly an ear-cup for it.

  Youth, he says, and smiles.

  This is it, Cornelius says.

  The vaulting cry lands; now there is a dull sobbing.

  You set some people down on your island for a bit, John?