by Kevin Barry
I did, yeah…years back.
I knew some of those people, John.
You did?
Oh yes, I did.
You by any chance know which island is mine, Joe?
I’d possibly know it by its air, John. I’m to understand from those people it has a very particular air.
Cornelius?
Yes, John?
When are we going to get to my fucking island exactly?
But Cornelius just smiles and shows a palm for patience and sips his brandied tea.
Joe Director gets the kettle on.
I’ll brew up fresh, he says.
The sitars waft. A hurdy-gurdy, too. A clavichord? What’s he mean, fucking particular? John wants to be a million miles from this place and he wants to be sat just where he is.
Outside—
low snaps of wind come from the sea to whip at the hedges and the pines.
In the Amethyst—
the dim jangle and spit of sitars,
the vaulted grunts and spasm breath of the fucking, renewed,
the brown burn of freebase, bitterly.
Tell me more about the rants, John says.
———
The life in New York runs along very tidy lines. He doesn’t leave the apartment much. He doesn’t need to—it’s the size of fucking Birkenhead. He plays with the baby. He’s that good the baby and sleeps like a turtle—he is that sweet in the shell. John looks out the windows. John barks at the cars. John eats sushi from cartons and watches the late movies in bed. Black-and-whites, he does all the movie voices—shut the fuck up, John! He gets eel juice on the sheets. He makes lots of plans. The days sail by and not ungaily. He sits on his backside. He sits in the great fortress high above the plain where the savage injuns roam. He’s the Freaky Sheriff and he has a very beady eye. He bakes lots of fucking bread. The yeast and warmth of the kitchen on a cold winter day with the city under its heaps of dirty snow outside—he’s cosy as a bastard in the womb. He is that happy he gurns and sings. And the days pass by and the nights and he cannot sleep if the wind is high and he looks out to the park and along the treetops the greens of the treetop fairies fly—hello? Words that come from out of the blue—arboreal. Which is lovely. He listens to the birds at dusk and all their newsy chatter. Like biddies at a bus stop. He gets nervous when the days get longer. He watches his weight. He doesn’t drink booze and he doesn’t do dope. He eats brown rice and baked fish and steamed veggies. He is decidedly on the leanish side—he turns side-on to the bedroom full-length for a profile check. He makes lots of plans. He smokes fags. He looks at the rain above the city and the lights caught and blurred inside the murk of the rain as the night comes down and it’s an eerie docklight—he is home again. He develops certain arcane theories. He doesn’t leave the apartment much. He makes certain occult connections. He gets worried about the number nine. He starts to have a thing about the elevator. He listens to strange music. He obsesses about the number fucking nine. He stays up all night. He reads about Stockhausen. He reads about Howard Hughes. He reads about what’s-his-face, fucking Rimbaud. He watches bits of telly. He does all the telly voices. He is Greta Garbo. He is Captain America. He has mad energy sometimes and sometimes he has fucking zero. He is the Peanut Farmer Carter, he is Mao Tse-tung. Strange thoughts come unbidden—the world is full of hollows and the world is full of graves. Sometimes he plays the guitar but not often. He does all the telly voices—he is a cowboy, he is a spaceman, he is a pimp. He sends out for books on the occult. He talks on the phone to California, to Liverpool. He hums and coos and burps the baby—the baby spews. He sends tidy sums to radical causes. He is bone dry in terms of actual fucking songs is the sorry fucking truth of it all. He reads some Aleister Crowley—he’s a right fucking laugh. He has zero fucking songs is the point of it all. He finds a channel that shows Monty Python at five in the morning. Baby spew the sour milk smell the bloody motherhood. He orders in. Bring us your raw fish and your pizza pie. One night he catches himself having a right good weep in front of a Pete-and-Dudley. He sits and looks across the sky and across the park and towers and it means nothing to him at all. He has no fucking songs. He is that happy he wants to Scream.
———
Violent confrontation, John.
This is Joe Director.
It’s the only way to strip it all down and see what lies beneath. We’ve got to peel our skins back.
You reckon?
I do. And it’s never easy. It causes a lot of pain. We’ve got to open up the clam shell. It’s shut so very tight. I mean let’s look at you, John. On the surface? Deviant genius.
Thank you very much.
But deep inside? I’d very much like to know. And I think you would, too, John.
From upstairs a dead velvety hush is loaded with the weight of their listening.
Sometimes it’s difficult, John. I won’t deny it. It can be very bloody difficult. We go in hard and we go to very tricky places. It can be deeply fucking unpleasant. But the rants can soften us, too, and sometimes we move very gently through the process. We can deal with tenderness. We can deal with love.
John fetches another splash of brandy for his mug of nettle tea. The bottle has an odd label in Spanish that shows a black lizard. Okay. The taste of fields in his mouth; the burn of the sexy brandy. Not unlovely.
The rants are unpredictable, John. Especially ’round here.
Joe Director: his grin soft with rue.
Cornelius: his face lit with happy wattage, an idea.
Mightn’t it be the best place for you, John?
I beg your pardon?
I’ll head for the mainland. I’ll see who’s around. I’ll come back by the van and road bridge. I can see at least if the fuckers have cleared.
You’re saying leave me here?
They wouldn’t think to spot you at the Amethyst Hotel, John.
Outside the hills have collapsed into each other and the iron sea moves and he makes for another nip of the firewater.
Cornelius?
Yes, John?
When are we going to get to my fucking island?
Are you telling me you want to be sat there with eighteen thousand fucken cameras on you and the News of the fucken World? A few hours, John. I’ll be back with the van and we’ll be away.
Joe Director aims for a basement stair—
There’s more where that brandy’s come from.
He pauses, a bright notion—
Would you like to burn off some cocaine, John?
And from upstairs a sky-opening Scream.
Did I not tell you? They are your own kind precisely, John.
———
Frank and Sue?
He’s a stunned-looking beanpole with matted blond hair in fag-ash ropes—a honky Rastafari. There is something canine or wolfish. As though born to the dog star. She’s tiny and elf-eyed with busy, travelling tits. Attractive, a-gleam, but distant—an undiscovered star. North-of-England, the pair of them, but they are posher than Joe. There are pockets of coke burn on the air—bitter-grey and teasing—but the Amethyst Hotel more generally has the stale eggy waft of a fuckery. He sits down on the stairs with these kids and they have an earnest chinwag there.
You’re on way to your island then?
That I am.
How big’s it?
It’s nineteen acres.
That’s a spread is that.
Nineteen acres of rocks and bloody rabbit holes.
Not to mention the banshee fucking wind—he lights a fag. He has a sip of nettle tea. He has sworn off the lizard brandy and he has refused the base cocaine. He feels strong, wise, avuncular and glad.
This is it then?
How’d you mean?
Just the three of you here?
There are others that come and go.
I bet there are.
You sound a bit worried, John.
This was Frank.
Why should I be worried?
Sounds like you got the fear in.
>
Why should I have the fear?
I’m playing with you.
You’re playing with me?
Sue darts a lizard tongue to lick at her tidy, full lips; Sue beams hard the elf lamps—
Why’s it you’ve come here? she says.
I guess I’m running away, too.
From what? Frank says.
From who? Sue says.
From myself, he says. I’m gonna be the first in human history that manages to outrun his own fucking shadow.
They look at each other—he’s dark, she’s distant; their grins are way the fuck off.
What’s it you pair are running from?
I was always going to come here, she says.
And me, Frank says.
It draws you in, she says.
It’s got an air, he says.
Little runaways, John says.
You sound different, she says.
Different how?
Different older.
Well I’m thirty bloody seven, aren’t I?
Posh kids gone west for dope and fucking and screeching—he knows their kind long since.
How’s it you’ve found this Joe?
Their eyes go down at mention of Director.
You go at it hard around here, don’t you?
She looks at the boy—he smiles, nods: they turn to kiss quickly and hard. And now she turns back to John and it is regretful, her smile, as though to say you will never know this taste.
Sue flicks the elf lamps; then—
We get the rants on, John.
———
There is no true dark in the Maytime on Achill—it might be an isle of Norway. He moves about the small dead hotel. There is a haze of blue light in the evening windows still. Frank and Sue weep loudly in a room upstairs; Joe Director is in the kitchen tending with homicidal cheer to a goat curry. John has entered the swim of family life at the Amethyst Hotel. That sweet clamminess. Cornelius has returned to the mainland to fight back the press dogs. There are statements daubed on the walls at the Amethyst Hotel—statements about the id, statements about tide of Capricorn. The carpets squelch underfoot and give off the stale aniseed waft of seawater. He is so many fucking miles from love and home. There are fiendish midges on the air and they swarm to attack his blood. Get it at the neck, get it at the font. He slaps the tiny Nazi fuckers away. Evidence of life, at least. He smokes, sighs. He stands in the doorway porch of the Amethyst Hotel, slapping lazily at the bugs, and he looks out to the half-lit night. Joe Director comes along to link arms, companionably. Joe Director has odd charisma. There is a blush of heat rising beneath the collar of his antique shirt.
Did you know that Mars is about, John?
Well that’s all I fucking need, isn’t it?
It is a dull fire in the eastern sky and now the past in a dark sliver returns: it was here they saw the women dressed in black walk into the sea.
———
Scared but even so he goes for a turn in the half-a-night’s air. Now it is Sue that comes to follow and watch. She is tiny as a faerie that could walk the leaves and not bend a stem but weirdly big up top with those giddy tits and she wears a Victorian brocade number for a blouse and she has her sexy smile on—hasn’t she?—and she sits in the garden and tunes into the far-out stations.
Alright, Sue, love?
A smile, an elf’s—she picks at the flowers. The half-a-night smells of salt and flowers. He watches the sheep for a bit. They drift this way and that across the crooked track that comes up the hills to the Amethyst, and loose sand moves in strange drifts and sings—a grainsong—and he’s emotional—just a bit—and he walks the haunted hotel garden—he wants to get away from the freaky elf-eyes, from the North-of-England girl Sue—and now he is entirely unseen—or so he believes—and he looks down and trips out for a while on the slow-moving waves—birdsong, breath-of-sea—and he watches the salty Dummkopf sheep as they come and go, the way they move like slow daft thoughts, and his go to his old dad again. A flitter in the head and he is back in that place again. The way that he sneaks up sometimes unawares, the way he just appears—
Alright, Freddie? Alright, kid?
And always it’s as a kid, he sees him as a kid in the faraway twenties—Little Freddie, of the Bluecoat orphanage, a gimp, he comes hop-a-long—and he sits on a rusted iron bench by the briars and the beads of the berries of the haunted island garden—treesong, breeze in the leaves, his blues, a midnight yearn—but what he feels beneath the pads of his feet are the stones of the city of Liverpool—as was, Mariners Parade, Fazakerley Street, Hackins Hey—and he watches the city and the world take all its strange forms and shapes through his father’s eyes, and how it must have been for him, and how great the miracle, the zillion-to-one shot that his eyes should fall and catch on a slender girl, his blue-veined love, his Julia.
Dead love stories are what make us.
———
Well.
He’s all stirred up. Just fucking leave it, John, he says.
By night the old garden is sweet as incense and hollow as a church. There is a great heaviness here. Tang on the air of the summer-come-soon, and with it the years are coming back—windy beaches, freckled youth, the thin reddish-brown limbs of a north-western summer; the summer of his lost anonymous England; Tropic of Lancashire. He speaks now in his old true voice. Feeling lurches; feeling shrieks. He cannot think about his father easily. It causes too much commotion. He’ll have a fag and a brandy instead—tamp all that stuff down. That way you can keep the past locked in. He goes inside again. Sue comes along to follow and watch.
Okay, Sue?
In the lobby he falls into an old armchair. Damp green the velvet, like mosses, as if the world is creeping up through its stones and into the Amethyst again. He feels like a very senior citizen. Sue eyes him darkly as she comes past—like a strange breeze she moves past—and he knows now that maybe he is scared a little of button-pretty Sue.
So where’d you hook up with this lot then?
One minute I’m at Saint Hilary’s, she says.
Saint fucking Hilary’s?
And the next? I’ve met this bloke on the train.
Blokes on trains? Never a good idea, sweetheart.
Turns out he’s Joe Director.
Love and fate, he says.
Why’s it you’re here really? she says.
I’ve been indignantly asking myself that same fucking question, Sue.
From above there is a mighty hog’s bark—the Amethyst is not good on the nerves—as Joe Director goes hard, hard at the boy Frank, and he can hear Frank’s sputtering, and he can hear his cries.
You think this stuff gets you places, Sue?
You leave it inside it poisons and twists.
That’s what I used to think.
Used to?
He turns an eye in to meet its other—a goon-show for the daft kid—and she halfways smiles.
Where’d he really find you, this Joe?
There is an arrogance to her; it’s a kind of shine—the star-of-youth—and it lights the haunts of her elfin or woodland face.
I’ve told you. I was always going to come here.
She goes up the stair. She looks back at him for a slow, held moment as she turns the stair. She disappears into the strange room up there. And the screeches in the room come down to sobs and groaning as her voice goes among the others, and he can hear new, fast, urgent whispers, as of love.
He sits auntishly in the comfy damp chair.
Next, a great manic slam and entry—
Return of Cornelius.
Never a dull moment, the Amethyst.
———
Not good, John. The pressmen are crawling like demented fucken maggots all over the province of Connaught.
Cornelius, hoarsely whispering—
I mean it’s a full circus wagon of the cunts. They’re camped in Mulranny. They’re camped in Newport town. They’re all over Westport like flies on old meat. The place is ri
ddled with them. There’s not a boat moving on the Clew that don’t have a camera fixed to it. There is no earthly approach to the island at this moment in time. They could even be on the island itself…
Throws up the paws in a hopeless flap—
We just don’t know, John.
Who sits in his armchair, cross-legged, harshly executive, with a brandy on the go, a heavy tumbler full of amber sea—
What the fuck happens now, Cornelius?
We’ll need to keep you here a small while yet. And what harm?
From upstairs—
A screech.
A cry.
A Scream.
He swirls his brandy; he inclines his head towards the door.
To the garden, Cornelius. Please.
———
You’ve fucking landed me in it here, pal.
How so, John?
You’ve set me down in a freakhouse!
Ah go easy.
I want away from here and I mean now!
That could be a problem, John.
They are in conference by an old gate down the hotel’s sideway. The five-bar gate sounds its hollows in the breeze. Hedges converse, it seems, the stars whisper, and the dark sea groans.
Get me the fuck out of here, Cornelius.
Through the hollow bars of the gate the breeze moves slowly to play an off-kilter tune—an arabesque.
Would you not go easy on yourself, John? For once in your fucken life?
A strange music in reverb as the breeze comes through the bars of the gate.
I’ve a bad feeling, Cornelius.
But that could be on account of anything at all just floating around the place. Remember you’re a long way off the road when you get to the far end of Achill Island.
Meaning fucking what?
These are pure open-minded people, John.
Cornelius?
Stop. Calm yourself. And listen…Okay?
The breeze plays through the bars of the gate a night-song and Cornelius stands frozen there, his palm held high—
Listen?
Cornelius…
Do you hear, John?
The strange notes that play and turn on the air.
Maybe, he says.
That’s awful sadness, isn’t it, John?
But from where?
Here. Just now. Listen. And you know the funny thing about it?
What?