Beatlebone

by Kevin Barry

  Where it all comes down.

  Where he breaks the fucking line.

  He wants to break the line and he wants to sing his black fucking heart out and speak at last his own true mind.

  World be wary, world be brave: John’s about.

  He walks, and he is so brave now, and he no longer listens for the voices—if the Amethyst throwbacks come at him he will rip their fucking eyes out and piss in the sockets.

  He walks—

  Clew Bay is laid out before him in the morning sun.

  Clew Bay is where paranoia comes true.

  ———

  He has a natter with the gulls. He explains the benefits of capitalism. He has a little sing. He finds that he has a throb on, of all things, and he’d fuck anything now, he’d fuck a clump of seaweed. He feels brave and guided; he feels clairvoyant and strong. He stops up—he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.

  Now he has a spring in his monkey step.

  The sun bleeds gold from the water.

  ———

  He kicks off his dead sneakers. Fuck you, pal, and fuck you, too. Now his feet are cut by the stones as he walks, and he bleeds, and it isn’t too much of a stretch from here to a bleeding Jesus, is it?

  All he needs the cross for his back.

  All he needs the tears in the garden.

  The tiny islands are beaded through the fields of Clew Bay. His is down there, somewhere: a fortress in the sea. All he needs is a boat to bring him to his island.

  With every step he turns up another version of himself.

  He walks on.

  The past seeps again—the past is hidden on the dark side of every moment, just there—and it takes him to Achill when they came before; it’s nine years since.

  ———

  They walked for a while on the beach. They scrambled over the rocks. The last of the summer day was down the rockpools in its colours. There were tiny carnivals down there. They sat for a while but it was chilly; they wouldn’t sit for long. He took her hand and showed his palm and he ran the tip of her finger along the lines of his palm.

  Go on, he said. What’s it you see there?

  They went across the rocks and heard a screeching. He took it for a squall of birds. But he saw the figures on the tideline then.

  They stayed hidden among the rocks. They looked on down the beach. There were shades on the tideline. There were some women there. He counted—there were nine of them, but they were bunched together and moving as one, and they were dressed in black and as though from a faraway time.

  The fuck? he said.

  The women went among the waves, and they watched—rapt—as the women’s screams bled out the sky, and the women kept walking until they were hip-high, until they were chest-high, until the waves broke on their pale white throats—there were nine of them in a line, their heads leant back—

  Jesus fuck, he said.

  —and their black clothes floated on the water, and their Screams came up to a high pitch, and died.

  The women shook out their limbs against the sky.

  They began to hiss and caw at each other.

  They began to beat at each other.

  Fucking hell, he said.

  She put a finger to her lips—he wanted to pull away but she would not let him go.

  Ghosts, she said.

  ———

  He walks the length of the day. He walks on his blistering Jesus-type feet. He makes it onto a fucking road at last. Again the light is fading. He doesn’t know east from west, south from north, land from sky, day from night. But he knows the van’s growl as it turns a curve and comes at him fast and headlong and now it brakes hard.

  Here’s Cornelius—

  the sorrowful little wave of the hand,

  the humorous, the woeful eyes,

  the sad rolling-down of the window.

  This is madness, John, he says.

  This is buck fucken madness, John, he says.

  There is no call for this under the sun nor fucken stars, John, he says.

  ———

  A word rolls slowly in his mouth—

  Dumb-foun-ded.

  Transmitted from who-knows-where, and John just sits there, and the van moves, and Cornelius talks sensibly as he steers—

  People go strange out here, John. You wouldn’t be the first and you won’t be the last. This place has a bad fucken air about it.

  Those people wanted to hurt me, Cornelius.

  Nonsense, John. Those are lovely, warm, decent-hearted people. It was all in your mind.

  The deep-boom beat and the lapping of the water; the van’s spluttering motor; his wretched heart.

  You’re saying that I’m fucking paranoid?

  Now that, John, is the man precisely.

  The van moves; the road is taken.

  What have you been doing, John?

  I’ve been working, Cornelius.

  How so?

  By empathising with the common man and his everyday tragedies and his common fucking despair.

  Where was this?

  In a cave.

  Now, Cornelius says, and he flaps a paw gracefully—it’s as though the world entirely is at its ease.

  Anyway there are developments, John.

  Oh?

  You see the way it is out here is that things can move slow enough for a long while. It’s all slow, slow, slow. And then? Quick! Out of nowhere, John? Quick. All of a sudden things moving at a savage fucken pelt and the wind behind them.

  He wants her so badly, he wants her touch so badly; he is so many miles from love and home.

  I was worried about you, John. I won’t tell a word of a lie. You could have gone over on an ankle. You could have gone over a fucken cliff. You could have been found at the bottom of it stone dead or halfways there. You could have been left a vegetable, John.

  Cornelius?

  But the time you were lost did us a power of good. Westport town is clear as day. Mulranny is clear. Newport is clear. The newspaper men have decided you were no more than an apparition. Clew Bay has been left entirely open to us. We have played this game sweet. Everything is just right for the excursion.

  I think it’s best now if you just get me to a fucking airport.

  Nonsense, John. We are heading for the island.

  Part Six

  ELEVEN ELEVEN ELEVEN—DAKOTA

  At eleven minutes and eleven seconds past eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11th, 2011

  —11.11.11 on 11.11.11—

  I stood on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, by the entrance to the Dakota Building, with all the other hunched pilgrims, and it felt like the moment to begin.

  It was impossible not to view the scene in a religious aspect: our bowed heads, the air of cathedral hush that pertained even within the city’s yellow-mouthed honk and scurry, the gaudy memorial trinkets for sale across the street in the park. Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg: miracles, in other words, only go so far, and to feel any true connection or reverb at a site like the Dakota must be so rare as to be miraculous.

  The city that morning had the feeling of late summer still. The colours had not caught fire yet in the fields across the park and the trees were almost fully in leaf. Shadows sat heavily to weight an intense, blue-skied clarity, and I drifted in a paranoid sea of numerological speculation. To search for hidden patterns in the arrangement of numbers—in ones, or in elevens, or in nines—is symptomatic of at least a mild disintegration, and I was not unaware of the fact.

  I was operating at the usual deep thrum of anxiety and fretfulness. I was worried about both the feeds for my material and how I might subsequently arrange it. But the fact I was worried at least signalled that the work had begun.

  I took out a pad and
began to make a sketch of the scene. The building itself is a Gotham folly, with dark stones, sombre turrets and an air of bespooked Victoriana, and as I drew I tried to imagine within it occult dreams, and the view across the trees, say on the night of a spring gale, in the soak of an insomniac sweat, as the trees shake out their fearful limbs, and the green shimmers of the treetop faeries move like gasses through the dark. The fact that I am myself tuned to occult frequencies—and frankly I have come to a point in my life where this is no longer deniable—felt like half the battle, but still I had a nagging worry at the edges of my thought, and it was this:

  If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be, I needed to get to the island.

  ———

  Clew Bay is a flooded valley—its many tiny islands are merely a scattered range of drumlin hills submerged at their bases by some unimaginably violent deluge. (Geology: slow, slow, slow, and then quick.) There are certainly not, as the happy legend suggests, three hundred and sixty-five islands; perhaps there are half that number. The knuckle of Croagh Patrick, the pilgrim mountain, rises on the southside of the bay; to the north lies the Nephin range of County Mayo, which has an ominous air; if ever mountains can be said to brood, the Nephin mountains brood. On a lit, clear morning, Clew Bay is an infinitely beautiful place—especially if it is seen from a height above Mulranny, with a springtime light coming slantwise to pick out and give definition to the islands’ shapes—but more often than not the Atlantic clouds swarm in from the west, moving like an invading force, or a slow disease, and the view is uncertain and shifts; the islands appear to come and go in the mist. Among the islands are Freaghillanluggagh and Gobfadda and Mauherillan. There is a Kid Island, a Rabbit Island, a Calf Island. Dorinish is in fact a pair of islands—Dorinish Beg and Dorinish More—linked by a rocky causeway. The local pronounciation would be closer to “Dur-nish” than “Dor-in-ish.” In the 1970s and 1980s this place was known colloquially as Beatle Island.

  ———

  I spent much of the winter watching clips from television interviews with John Lennon, mostly from American talk shows in the 1970s, and I replayed the same lines over and over again as I made rough drafts for voice and tried to get a fix on the intonation.

  From our time and perspective, there is already an antique note to his phrasing and tone. There are verbal tics redolent of 1960s cool—many sentences end with a breezy “yunno?”—but these are concurrent with words and formulations—and a kind of pinched melody, actually, almost Larkinesque—that sound like they come from an older England, the England of austere lower-middle-class life in the war years and thereafter. He is suburban. He is a child of the early 1940s, and thus the tentacles of his concern will reach for a time still further back: a shadow-time such as immediately precedes all of our births, the time of the dead love stories, which is such a heavy time. He is quite nasal and often defensive. There is a haughtiness that can be almost princely but his moods are capricious—sometimes he is very charming and funny and light; at other times there is a darkness evident, and an impatience that can bleed almost into bitterness. He can transition from fluffy to spiky very quickly, even within the course of the same sentence. Often during these interviews he was accompanied by Yoko Ono, who very clearly, from this distance, was the tethering fix in his life; lacking her presence, you get the feeling that he might have unspooled altogether.

  ———

  In the spring of 1967, an advert appeared in a London evening newspaper offering an island for sale off the west coast of Ireland. Dorinish was owned by the Westport Harbour Board in County Mayo. It was used mostly for its rocks, which were harvested for ballast by the local fishing fleet. The listed guide price was £1,700 sterling. John Lennon had for a long while dreamed about an island place. He was shown the advert and was taken with the notion.

  The cliffs of Dorinish rise against the Atlantic in a way that naturally provides a buttressing effect against the prevailing winds and gives protection to the island’s grasses, which retain their essential nutrients. The pasture here is perhaps the best to be had anywhere on Clew Bay and so it was that a crowd of thirty or forty interested sheep farmers were in attendance when Alistair Taylor, a trusted member of the Beatles’ retinue, showed up at the auction in Westport.

  It would not be difficult here to sketch a scene of comic incongruity—a beflared record company freak with hashish eyes amid the slurried ranks—and it’s true that the agricultural west of Ireland in 1967 would have been a distance of decades rather than miles from psychedelic London. But in fact Taylor was short-haired, respectable, besuited, a former Liverpool docker who had worked for the late Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, and who had for a long while been trusted by the band—they called him “Mr. Fix-It.”

  In 1964, he had been involved with an attempt to buy Trinity Island, off the Greek coast, for all four Beatles, but the deal fell through. Just a few months before the Dorinish auction, he co-ordinated an attempt to buy the island of Leslo, also off the coast of Greece, and again for the band as a whole—the plan was that the Beatles and their familes would live on Leslo adrift from the everyday world and its dreary, non-psychedelic concerns. A live-work-play structure, modelled on Crystal Palace, was to be built at the centre of Leslo with avenues leading from it to private quarters for each band member. This deal also fell through, but not before the band and their wives and girlfriends visited Leslo on a chartered yacht. John and George spent the greater part of the voyage squatting on the foredeck under the influence of hallucinogens and ukuleles.

  Precise details of the Westport auction have not been unearthed, and we do not know the extent of rival bids, but we know that Alistair Taylor returned to London having efficiently secured Dorinish Island for John Lennon at the knockdown price of £1,550 sterling.

  ———

  The writer John McGahern said once that Ireland skipped the twentieth century—it went straight from the nineteenth into the twenty-first. This is almost true. The twentieth century existed in Ireland only for the half hour it took John Lennon’s gypsy caravan to be sailed on a barge across Clew Bay to Dorinish Island, and the caravan is painted all the colours of the sun, and the water breaks and makes up again as the stately barge moves, and the sheets of the water spread out and come to and re-form again, and the water greys, then clears, and then colours again; it wears all the colours of the sun.

  ———

  The sense of an ache or a wound just beneath the skin—almost impalpable but always there—is not uncommon as you move through the sobering ruts of your thirties. Psychedelic experimentation, in my own long experience, will tend to deepen or amplify this sense. Earlier, in the maelstrom rush of your twenties, in the campaign to selfhood and determination—in finding out who you are—the ache can lay buried so deeply and so quietly it might seem not to exist, but it comes back, and it has a definite weight—as though it has lain buried on the dark side of each passing moment, just there—and the urge to Scream, I believe, is by no means an unreasonable response to it.

  Primal scream therapy, which is loosely grounded in Reichian philosophy, was initiated by Dr. Arthur Janov at his clinic in California in the early 1960s. Its ambition was to free the subject from the buried pain of childhood trauma. Its techniques included not just screaming but the making of a careful, guided exploration of the self and of the self’s layered and shifting histories. We are each so many different versions of ourselves, after all, and the body by the passing hour can be heaven or it can be hell.

  Primal scream had become a popular practice by the 1970s and especially in those places where the children of the previous decade had settled and seeded: the far-flung outposts of Aquarius. There were a number of devoted groups in Ireland, and notorious among these was a collective in Burtonport, County Donegal, on the north-western coast, who named themselves the Atlantis Community but who were more usually known, locally, as the Screamers.

  ———

  Fictional and biographical treatment
s of John Lennon have tended either towards hagiography or character assassination, and I felt the wisest practice was not to do any traditional research among the texts. I did listen to the music: the Plastic Ono Band album, repeatedly—his “primal scream” record—and The White Album, as ever, a great deal. The voice of Alistair Taylor, incidentally, can be heard on the latter’s “Revolution 9.”

  Above all, though, my method would be to try and spring a story from its places, from the area of Clew Bay, and Achill Island, and of course from Dorinish itself—if I could figure out how to get there—and to be guided as purely as possible by the feelings that are trapped within these places, and by the feelings trapped within.

  It was on the first of my runs out west that I came across the derelict remains of the Amethyst Hotel.

  ———

  John Lennon made his first trip to Dorinish Island in the late summer of 1967. He was ferried there by a local fisherman. He brought along a cine camera and we can see him turn on his booted heel slowly to pan and sweep up the view as the boat moves out and across the bay, as the boat’s prow bites hard on the water and the slap of the low waves comes infinitely in Atlantic blacks, silvers, lichen-greens. He wears a long Afghan coat, and maybe its flapping is picked up in the camera’s tinny sound recording, and the trace of voices, too—south Liverpool, the west of Ireland—but just barely, at the edges of the film, like voices at the edges of a dream.

  He spent a little under two hours on the island. Snide newspaper reports would suggest that he was under the influence of LSD at the time but the estate agent involved said that in fact he was practically minded, and he made enquiries about a drainage scheme for the island. He was determined that building work should commence quickly. He had drawn a plan for a house on Dorinish—it was a fantastical house, a magic palace, as in a child’s fantasy of a palace.

  ———

  He was not alone in this migratory instinct. It had established itself quickly as a freak tradition to settle in the west of Ireland. They came from the cities to take up derelict old cottages down the ends of rainy boreens. The cottages could be had for almost nothing along the Atlantic seaboard. But it was not long, one imagines, before the idyll of a New West was smeared by the great dreariness that Ireland attempts to stay quiet about.