by Kevin Barry
‘Aodhan!’
The grin turned to me, and it was so enormous it dazzled his features to an indistinctness, I saw just that exclamation mark
!
from the Do-It-Rite! – but when he focused, the grin died, at once, right there.
‘Jonathan?’
I went to him, and I smiled, and I took gently his elbow in my hand.
‘Can we talk, Aodhan?’
‘Sure, man, I mean …’
Now it is a rare enough occurrence in contemporary life that the occasion presents itself for truly felt speech. We are trapped – all of us – behind this glaring wash of irony. But in the quietest aisle of the Do-It-Rite! that Saturday – drylining accessories – as Aodhan McAdam and I squatted discreetly on our haunches, I spoke honestly, and powerfully, and from the heart.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I know about the blow jobs. That’s perfectly natural. I was getting blow jobs myself when I was seventeen. I wasn’t broadcasting the fact, and I could spell, but I was …’
He tried to rise from his haunches, he tried to get away, but I had this strange animal strength (your eyebrows ascend, Dr Murtagh), and I kept his bony elbow clamped in my claw, and I lasered my eyes into his, and he was scared enough, I could see that.
I said:
‘Ellie Prendergast, or should I say Ellie P, is the most beautiful girl in this city. She is an absolute fucking angel. If you hurt her, I will kill you. I’m telling you this now so you can give yourself a chance.’
I slapped him once across the face. It was a manic shot with plenty of sting to it. I told him of youth’s fleeting nature. I told him he didn’t realise how quickly all this would pass. I told him how it had been for me. I spoke of the darknesses that can so quickly seep between the cracks of a life. I told him of the images I had witnessed and voices I had heard. He began to cry in fear. I told him how my Wifey had been plagued by evil faeries in the night – oh it was all coming out! – and how my Ellie was to me a deity to be worshipped, and I would protect her with my life.
‘I have Type 1 diabetes!’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t deal with this shit!’
Oh but I laid it on with a motherfucking trowel. I brought him to the pits of despair and showed him around. My threats were veiled and made stranger by the serenity of my smile. I said I expected him on the porch at eight o’clock, in his track pants and his Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt. But before that he would have a job to do. We rose from our haunches and I caught the scruff of his neck and I led him along the aisles to the paint racks – Saturday-men watched, staff in yellow cover-alls watched, but no one approached us – and I showed him the white paint, how much of it there was and how cheap it was, and I explained I’d be pulling a spot check on the rain shelter at seven o’clock, sharp.
I let go of him then. I sucked up the last of my calm, and I said:
‘Listen, Aodhan, we’re doing a shopping run this afternoon … Can I fetch anything in particular? You two go for that barbecue salmon in the vac-packs, don’t you?’
I left him ashen-faced and limp. I prowled the aisles some more and now these hot little barks of triumph came up as I walked. The Saturday-men avoided my eyes, and they scurried from my path, and I barked a little louder. As I’m here, I thought, why not pick up a couple of things?
So I bought an extendable ladder and a claw hammer.
The automatic doors registered my presence at once and I was let outside to the sun-kissed afternoon. I propped and extended the ladder against the front of the store and I climbed with the claw hammer hanging coolly in my grip. It took no more than a half-dozen wrenches to loose the exclamation mark
!
from the Do-It-Rite and carefully I placed it under my arm – it was light as air – and I descended. I walked across the car park. I placed it carefully on the tarmac in front of the Volvo – my intention was to drive over it and smash it to pieces – but then I thought, no, that would be too quick. So I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark
!
until it began to crack here and there, and tiny shatter lines appeared, and these joined up, piece by piece, until the entire surface of the
!
had become a beautiful mosaic in the blue of the sign, like the trace of tiny backroads on an old map – marking out lost fields, lost kingdoms, a lost world – and I was serene as a bird riding the swells of morning air over those fields.
The squad car appeared.
FJORD OF KILLARY
SO I BOUGHT an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbour wall, with Mweelrea mountain across the water, and disgracefully grey skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings. The night in question, the rain was particularly violent – it came down like handfuls of nails flung hard and fast by a seriously riled sky god. I was at this point eight months in the place and about convinced it would be the death of me.
‘It’s end-of-the-fucking-world stuff out there,’ I said.
The chorus of locals in the hotel’s lounge bar as always ignored me. I was a fretful blow-in, by their mark, and simply not cut out for tough, gnarly, west of Ireland living. They were listening, instead, to John Murphy, our alcoholic funeral director.
‘I’ll bury anythin’ that fuckin’ moves,’ he said.
‘Bastards, suicides, tinkers,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t give a fuckin’ monkey’s,’ he said.
Mweelrea is the most depressing mountain you’ve ever seen, by the way, and its gaunt, looming shape filled almost every view from the Water’s Edge Hotel, the lounge bar’s included. The locals drank mostly Bushmills whiskey and Guinness stout, and they drank them to great excess. I wiped their slops from the counter with a bar cloth I had come to hate with a passion that verged on the insane. I said, ‘But seriously, that’s one motherfucker of a high tide, no?’
Barely the toss of a glance I received. The talk had shifted to roads, mileage, general directions. They made a geography of the country by the naming of pubs:
‘Do you know Madigan’s in Maynooth?’
‘I do, of course.’
‘You’d take a left there.’
‘I have you now.’
The hotel had twenty-three bedrooms and listed westward. Set a can of peas on the floor of just about any bedroom and it would roll slowly in the direction of the gibbering Atlantic. The estate agent had gussied up the history of the place in the brochure – a traditional coaching inn, original beams, visited by Thackeray, heritage bleeding out the wazoo, etc. – and I had leapt at it. I was the last of the hopeless romantics.
The talk had moved on, briefly, from roads and directions.
‘If he’s still around when her bandages come off,’ Bill Knott, the surveyor, said, ‘he’s a braver man than me.’
‘Nice woman,’ John Murphy agreed. ‘As long as you don’t put your hand in the cage.’
Behind the bar: the Guinness tap, the Smithwick’s tap, the lager taps, the line of optics, the neatly stacked rows of glasses, and a high stool that sat by a wee slit of window that had a view across the water towards Mweelrea. The iodine tang of kelp hung in the air always, and put me in mind of embalming fluid. Bill Knott looked vaguely from his Bushmills towards the water.
‘Highish alright,’ he said. ‘But now what’d we be talkin’ about for Belmullet, would you say? Off a slow road?’
The primary interest of these people’s lives, it often seemed, was how far one place was from another, and how long it might take to complete the journey, given the state of the roads. Bill had been in haulage as a young man and considered himself expert.
‘I don’t know, Bill,’ I said.
‘Would we say an hour twenty if you weren’t tailbacked out of Newport?’
‘I said I really don’t fucking well know, Bill.’
‘There are those’ll say you’d do it in the hour.’ He sipped,
delicately. ‘But you’d want to be grease fuckin’ lightnin’ coming up from Westport direction, wouldn’t you?’
‘We could be swimming it yet, Bill.’
I had made – despite it all – a mild success of myself in life. But on turning forty, the previous year, I had sensed exhaustion rising up in me, like rot. I found that to be alone with the work all day was increasingly difficult. And the city had become a jag on my nerves – there was too much young flesh around. The brochure about the hotel appeared in my life like a revelation. I clutched it in my hands for days on end. I grew feverish with the notion of a westward flight. I lay in bed with the brochure, as the throb of the city sounded a kind of raspy, taunting note, and I moaned as I read:
Original beams.
Traditional coaching inn.
Thackeray.
Estd 1648.
The hotel had the promise of an ideal solution. I could distract myself (from myself) with its day-to-day running, its endless small errands, and perhaps, late at night, or very early in the morning, I could continue, at some less intense level, with the poetry.
All my friends, every last one of them, said, ‘The Shining’.
But I was thinking, the west of Ireland … the murmurous ocean … the rocky hills hard-founded in a greenish light … the cleansing air … the stoats peeping shyly from little gaps in the drystone walls …
Yes. It would all do to make a new man of me. Of course, I hadn’t counted on having to listen to my summer staff, a pack of energetic young Belarusians, fucking each other at all angles of the clock.
And the ocean turned out to gibber rather than murmur.
Gibber gibber – whoosh. Gibber gibber – whoosh.
Down the far end of the bar, Mick Harty, distributor of bull semen for the vicinity, was molesting his enormously fat wife, Vivien.
‘We’re after a meal at the place run by the Dutch faggots,’ he said. ‘Oysters for a starter … They have me gone fuckin’ bananas!’
Vivien slapped and roared at him as he stroked her massive haunches. She reddened and chortled as he twisted her around and pulled her vast rear side into his crotch area. Nobody apart from me paid a blind bit of attention to the spectacle. And even as she suffered a pretend butt-rape from her cackling husband, she turned to me and informed me, precisely, what they had paid for the meal at the Dutch couple’s restaurant.
‘Two starters, two mains, we shared a dessert, two bottles of wine, two cappuccinos,’ she said, as Mick grinded slowly behind her, hoarsely yodelling an Alicia Keys love ballad. ‘Hundred thirty-six euro, even – not cheap, Caoimhin.’
‘Cappuccino is a breakfast drink,’ I said. ‘You’re not supposed to drink it after a meal.’
I was not well liked out in Killary. I was considered ‘superior’. Of course I was fucking superior. I ate at least five portions of fruit and veg daily. I had Omega 3 from oily fish coming out my ears. I limited myself to twenty-one units of alcohol a week. I hadn’t written two consecutive lines of a poem in eight months. I was becoming versed, instead, in the strange, illicit practices of the hill country.
‘Fuckers are washin’ diesel up there again,’ John Murphy said. ‘The Hourigans? Of course, they’d a father a diesel-washer before ’em, didn’t they? Cunts to a man.’
‘Cunts,’ Bill Knott confirmed.
Outside, the rain continued to hammer away at our dismal little world, and the sky had shucked the last of its evening grey to take on an intense purplish tone that was ominous, close-in, biblical.
‘Sky is weirdin’ up like I don’t know fucking what,’ I said.
John Murphy grabbed my elbow as I passed along the bar – he was aggressive, always, once the third pint was downed – and he said, ‘I s’pose you know that possessed fuckin’ she-devil above in the house will put me in the ground?’
‘John,’ I said, ‘I really don’t want to hear about it.’
‘I mean literally, Caoimhin! She’ll fuckin’ do for me!’
‘John, your marriage is your own private business.’
‘She’s fuckin’ poisoning me! I swear to bleedin’ fuckin’ Jesus! I can taste it off the tea, Caoimh!’
‘Would you go again, John?’ I indicated his emptied stout glass.
‘Oh, please,’ he said.
They were all nutjobs. This is what it came down to. This is the thing you learn about habitual country drinkers.
‘Mick’s a man of sixty,’ Vivien Harty said, awed at the persistence of her husband’s desire, ‘and he’d still get up on a cracked fuckin’ plate.’
Just then a cacophony erupted:
From the hillsides, everywhere, came the aggravated howls of dogs. These were amped to an unnatural degree. The talk in the lounge bar stalled for a moment in response but, as abruptly, it resumed.
‘The tiramisu?’ Mick Harty said. ‘You wouldn’t know whether to eat it or smear it all over yourself.’
Nadia, one of my Belarusians, came through from the supper room and sullenly collected some glasses.
‘The arse on that,’ John Murphy said.
‘Please, John,’ I said.
‘Two apples in a hankie,’ he said.
I believed all nine of my staff to be in varying degrees of sexual contact with one another. I housed them in the dreary, viewless rooms at the back of the hotel, where I myself lived during what I will laughably describe as high season (the innocence), and my sleepless nights were filled with the sound of their rotating passions.
‘Thank you, Nadia,’ I said.
She scowled at me as she placed the glasses in the dishwasher. I was never allowed to forget that I was paying minimum wage.
The dogs had stopped; the rain continued.
It was by now an hysterical downpour, with great sheets of water streaming down from Mweelrea, and the harbour roared in the fattening light. Visibility was reduced to fourteen feet. This all signalled that the west of Ireland holiday season had begun.
‘He was thrun down,’ John Murphy said, speaking of a man he had lately buried. ‘He went into himself. He didn’t talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a burnt rasher. You’d visit and he’d say nothin’ to you but he’d know you were there all right. The little eyes would follow you around the room.’
‘Age was he when he went, John?’
‘Forty-two.’
‘Youngish?’
‘Arra. He was better off out of it.’
My first weeks out at the Water’s Edge I had kept a surreptitious notebook under the bar. The likes of ‘thrun down’ would get a delighted entry. I would guess at the likely etymology – from ‘thrown down’, as in ‘laid low’? But I had quickly had my fill of these maudlin bastards.
This, by the way, was the Monday of the May bank holiday weekend. Killary was en fête. Local opinion, cheerfully, was that it had been among the wettest bank holidays ever witnessed. The few deluded hillwalkers and cyclists who had shown up had departed early, in wordless outrage, and in the library room of the Water’s Edge there was just a pair of elderly couples still enjoying the open fire. I left the bar and took a pass through the library to smile at them, throw on a few sods of turf, and to make sure they hadn’t died on the premises.
They stared into the flames.
‘That’s some evening?’ I tried, but there was no response.
Both couples held hands and appeared significantly tranquillised. Coming through the lobby again, I looked out through the doors and I saw a pair of minks creep over the harbour wall. They crossed the road, in perfect tandem, and headed for the rising fields beyond the hotel. I went back into the bar. I had an odd nausea developing.
‘They can cut out that particular gland,’ Bill Knott said, ‘but if the wound goes septic after?’
He shook his head hopelessly.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is when the fun and games start.’
Mine was one of four licensed premises in a scattered district of three-hundred-odd souls. This is a brutal scarcity, by Irish ratios, s
o there was enough trade to keep us all tunnelling towards oblivion. The bar was another of the elements that had sold the place to me. It was pleasant, certainly, with an old-fashioned mahogany finish, zinc-topped low tables, and some prints of photo finishes from fabled race meetings at Ballybrit. I always tended bar in the evenings. I’d had a deranged notion that this would establish me as a kind of charming-innkeeper figure. This was despite the fact that not one but two ex-girlfriends (both of them, admittedly, sharp-tongued academics) had described my manner as ‘funereal’.
The bar-side babble continued unchecked:
Bill Knott was now reckoning the distance to Derry if you were to go via Enniskillen. Vivien Harty was telling John Murphy that that wasn’t tuppence worth of a coat his wife had on the Tuesday gone, that he was looking after her all the same, and that no woman deserved it more, given what she’d been through with the botched hysterectomy. Mick Harty talked of the cross-border trade in stallions and looked faintly murderous. ‘Our horses the fuckers are after now,’ he said.
Nadia, meantime, was singing weird Belarusian pop beneath her breath as she got up on the footstool to polish the optics. A seep of vomit rose in my gullet. I was soul sick. I was failing spectacularly at this whole mine-host lark. I quietly leaned on the bar by the till. I looked out the small window. Watery, it was.
‘Seriously, lads, we haven’t seen a tide that high, surely? Have we?’
It was lapping by now at the top of the harbour wall. The estate agent had assured me that the place never flooded. I’d looked the slithery old fuck in the eye and believed him. I had suspected, I had hoped, that the life I found out here would eventually do something for my work. Something would gestate in me. I’d be able to move away from all that obtuse, arrhythmic stuff about the sex heat of cities that had made me mildly famous in provincial English departments. My poetry was known of but was not a difficulty for the Killary locals – there had never been a shortage of poets out there. Every last crooked rock of the place had at some point seated the bony arse of some hypochondriacal epiphany-seeker. Some fucker who’d forever be giving out about his lungs.