Dark Lies the Island

by Kevin Barry

  The camp was sheltered by a great outcrop of shale. High and wind-blown were the voices of perhaps a dozen shaven-headed children (their voices travelled) and as many again were the skinny dogs. The grown travellers skulked in the rearground, and were watchful; they came nearer. The children and dogs surrounded Doctor Sot as he climbed from the Megane. The ground was hard-packed underfoot, brittle and flinty; the frost wouldn’t think to lift up here for months at a time. The children were pin-eyed and unpleasantly lively. The dogs might have been alien dogs, so skinny and yellow-skinned and long-headed they were, like bad-dream dogs, and they pawed him madly.

  ‘Ah down off me now please! For the love of God!’

  He might have landed in far Namibia such was the foreignness of things. There was something that resembled a teepee. Inside it was a generator, juddering. Sinister crows were present in numbers. There were rough shelters made with lengths of tarpaulin and these were strewn around a copse of trees by the outcrop’s base. There was a horse trailer with a smoking chimney. The distressed van of rainbow colours was parked beside it. There was a pair of old rusted caravans. The young chap who had earlier driven the van came through the barking children and the laughing dogs.

  ‘S’about?’ he said.

  ‘Doctor Carl O’Connor!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘North Western Health Board!’

  ‘Oh yeah? I’m Joxie.’

  ‘Outreach!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘Welcome to Slieve Bo … Joxie?’

  The young man swept back his mass of braided hair and arranged it away from his face. He was sharp-featured, sallow, bemused.

  ‘I’m here about the nutrition,’ said Doctor Sot. ‘I’m here about the sex diseases.’

  ‘You jus’ piss yerself?’ said Joxie.

  More adults came forward. They swatted the children and kicked the dogs. A forest of braided hair sprang up around Doctor Sot but the beautiful young woman was not to be seen. He shielded his crotch with his satchel. Indeed there had been a tiny seepage.

  ‘Aim of the Outreach programme,’ he explained, ‘is to bring the, ah … the services … to …’

  He should have boned up on the stuff in the leaflets. He should have learned some of the lingo. But the travellers smiled at him regardless. They were not unwelcoming. Their accents were mostly English, the burr of them specifically south-western.

  ‘Devon, so happens,’ said Joxie.

  He poured for Doctor Sot a cup of green tea. They were now in back of the horse trailer by a wood-burning stove. The young man’s full title, it emerged, was Joxie The Rant.

  ‘Rant, Joxie? Why so?’

  ‘’Coz I get a rant on,’ he said. ‘A ranter, yeah?’

  ‘Do him a rant, Jox!’

  ‘Bit early, is it no?’

  The adults of the camp were greatly taken with Doctor Sot. There were six of them packed into the trailer around him. He was a break from the boredom – the boredom that was bred into them by suburbs and drab English towns. Doctor Sot found it difficult to tell them apart, even to sex them, but he knew well enough that the beauty was not here. There was muffled hilarity to the brief silences that yawned out between them. To fill these, he spoke of the importance of five portions daily of fresh fruit and veg.

  ‘Your broccoli is a powerful man,’ he said. ‘Handful of florets? There’s a portion, there’s one of your five.’

  He spoke of oily fish, such as mackerel, for the sake of its Omega 3.

  ‘Ground control to Omega 3,’ said Joxie.

  The travellers smoked their roll-ups and drank green tea. As this was not an official Outreach session, as it was more of a break-the-ice visit, Doctor Sot saw no reason why he shouldn’t offer to strengthen their tea. He opened the satchel and with a wink produced a full naggin.

  ‘Nip of this lad?’ he whispered. ‘Greatly medicinal.’

  ‘They do know yer out an’ about, yeah?’ said Joxie.

  The evening began to flow. By the time a second naggin had gone around, the travellers had in their civility produced tins of own-brand supermarket lager and flagons of unlabelled cider. They questioned Doctor Sot as to what pills he might have in his satchel. He laughed them away.

  ‘It’s the six, just, is it?’ he tried. ‘Just the six of you, for grown-ups?’

  ‘Well there’s Mag an’ all, ain’t there?’ said Joxie. ‘Mag’s in her bender.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She got one of her spells on, don’t she?’ said Joxie.

  ‘Spells?’ Sot asked.

  There was no reply, and Sot fretted. He drank to brace himself. And he drank more quickly. And quickly it was as if Doctor Sot had become part of the camp – the travellers largely forgot about him. They were in and out of the horse trailer, attending to children and dogs. They smoked their roll-ups with a resin crumbled in. They sipped at their lager and cider. They didn’t say no to another nip of the Jameson – Doctor Sot fetched extra from Elizabeth – but their conversation was no longer centred on the visitor. They talked drowsily about making some dinner. They talked about how they were going to get the van sorted. They talked, at some length, of the significance of the number ‘23’.

  ‘Why have the children no hair?’ asked Doctor Sot.

  ‘Nits,’ said Joxie.

  Joxie tugged up the sleeves of his army shirt to show Doctor Sot the abscesses that had formed around old needle holes. Doctor Sot said that he’d be as well to come down to the practice and there they could have a closer look, there would be no charge for it. He said if anyone else needed to come down, that could also be arranged. Joxie decided to rant. One of the hanks of hair battered some tom-tom drums, and Joxie launched into a half-sung, half-shouted diatribe. It was all Greek to Doctor Sot, though he recognised that there were repeated references to ‘Jah Rastafari’, the number ‘23’, and, more aggressively, to ‘George Bush’.

  Evening came among them. Doctor Sot sat back in the trailer and, woozily, he faded into and from the moment. A hand placed before him a saucer of curried vegetables.

  ‘A wonderful idea,’ he said.

  He ate the food. It put sense in him. Mag had not appeared, and so he picked up his satchel. The dogs and children and adults were all around him in the dark as he clambered into the Megane.

  ‘It’s, ah … it’s been an education,’ said Joxie.

  They all laughed, Doctor Sot as hard as the rest of them, and indeed until he wept. His eyes were full of tears as he started up Elizabeth. He immediately drove her into a ravine. He sobered at once, with the impact, and the travellers helped him from the car. It was the end of the eleven-year-old Megane – its remains fumed slowly in the dark, the smoke of its last breaths rose in a dense tangling. Gingerly, Sot fetched out the rest of the naggins and the chocolate cake that he had bought earlier for Sal but had forgotten to give her. He sat on the hard-packed soil of the camp, with a handkerchief held to his bleeding head.

  ‘Poor Liz,’ he sighed. ‘Poor Sal.’

  There was some of the relief that accompanies an old parent’s death.

  ‘Hell we gonna do with you?’ said Joxie.

  ‘Perhaps you’d run me down the mountain, Joxie,’ Sot said. ‘Your van?’

  ‘No lights,’ Joxie said.

  It would be next morning before he could be brought down safely. He would need to stay the night. The travellers found their way around the camp’s darkness by the glow of their mobile phones. Each was a pin-prick of light against the mountain black. He used his own phone to call Sal.

  ‘Darling?’ he said. ‘There’s some bad news. I’m afraid it’s Elizabeth …’

  Sal was not at all worried that he was caught out on Slieve Bo. She was well used to his capers and disappearances. Often, Doctor Sot was gone for days at a time. Many was the ditch of the north-west he had woken up in. Once he woke beneath an upturned rowing boat on the shore of Lough Gill – one leg of his trousers had been entirely wet, the other entirely dry. He had never quite pieced that one together. Tonight’s accommodation wasn’t bad at
all. He was shown into one of the rusted caravans. The travellers turned out to be early-to-bed types: the boredom. By nine, there were no lights at all but those dim cold ones hung in the sky above. Bald children and alien dogs stretched around the caravan with him and they all slept sweetly. Doctor Sot could not settle, but sat. He drew on a naggin and looked out to the camp. The chocolate cake, uneaten, was on his lap in its white box. His eyes adjusted to the dim, eerie glow of the starlight as it made shapes inside the caravan – the prone figures of the kids and the dogs, breathing. Sot stood then and he approached bravely a mirror mounted on the door of a cupboard. He crept up on it, carefully, and found that it was clear – no malevolence – and he backed away. He crept up on it again and still it was clear – no malevolence – he backed away. He crept up a third time and a figure appeared in the mirror but there was no malevolence – it was his young woman, outside. She looked in at him. She made not a move, but smiled. He climbed down from the caravan and went to her. The serenity in her smile, it was confirmed at once, was that of a psychotic.

  ‘Ya wanna see my bender?’ she said.

  ‘I’d love to, Mag,’ said Doctor Sot.

  ‘Knows my name ’n’ all,’ she said.

  The bender was on the one side a length of tarp stretched over a run of willow branches staked in the ground. The other side was walled by the shale outcrop and on this Mag had sketched drawings of great wingéd creatures and a series of mathematical equations.

  ‘Soon’s I get ’em right,’ she said, ‘I paints over an’ I start again.’

  ‘You’re bringing forward knowledge each time, Mag,’ he consoled.

  The bender was warmed by a tiny pot-belly stove, its flue extended through a hole in the tarp. The bender was lit barely by a battery lamp and it had pallets for flooring.

  ‘Ya wan’ yer pallets down,’ she said. ‘With yer pallets down, the damp it don’t get up.’

  ‘The way to go, Mag, unquestionably. We don’t want the damp getting up.’

  ‘Thing is,’ she said. ‘Soon’s ya get yer pallets down, get yer rats run under, dontcha? So what I’ve done?’

  She stuck her head out the bender’s slit and tugged at Doctor Sot’s arm so that he did the same.

  ‘Chicken wire,’ she said. ‘I’ve closed off space between pallets, haven’t I? Means no rat run.’

  ‘There’s peace of mind in that, Mag.’

  They had cake. She showed him in detail her equations. Mag, he learned, was involved in divining the true nature of time and memory. She believed that each of these ungraspable entities ran in arcs, and that the arcs bent away from each other. She had concluded this after long study of her staked willow branches. The diverging nature of these arcs was the source of all our ills. She might be onto something there, thought Doctor Sot. He wasn’t sure where she was getting the figures for her equations from. Perhaps they were being carried to Slieve Bo in the talons of the great wingéd creatures.

  ‘Do you take medication at all, Mag?’

  ‘Poisons? Hardly,’ she said.

  ‘Nip of this, Mag?’

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Don’t agree with me.’

  They sat beside each other with their backs to the shale. She drew up a blanket over her striped legs and offered him some of it. He took a piece and raised it to his face to smell it. It was the smell of a child’s blanket: stale rusk and hot milk.

  ‘Do you sleep, Mag?’

  ‘In daylight more so,’ she said.

  But after a time her eyes did close. Doctor Sot slid a hand from beneath the blanket and lightly, very lightly, he laid it against her face. He felt the tiny fires that burned there beneath her skin. Her lashes were unspeakably lovely as they lay closed over her light sleep. If Doctor Sot could draw into his palm these tiny fires and place them with his own, he happily would.

  Down in the valley the blackbirds were singing against the winter dark. The White Lady’s River ran calmly beneath the hump-back bridge and past the may tree whose blossom would in late spring protect us. The town slept, but in the back kitchen of the terrace house he knew that Sally was on her pink sofa yet. Dear Sal – her gown, her grin, her mad thyroidal eyes. She rose from the sofa and went calmly on a tour of the house. She flowed through the house. For fear that he would get back early, she would lay cloths now over all the mirrors in the house.

  THE GIRLS AND THE DOGS

  I WAS LIVING in a caravan a few miles outside Gort. It was set up on breeze blocks in the yard of an old farmhouse. There were big nervous dogs outside, chained. Their breathing caught hard with the cold of the winter and the way the wind shuddered along their flanks was wretched to behold. I lay there in the night, as the dogs howled misery at the darkness, and I doted over a picture of my daughter, May-Anne, as she had been back in the summertime. I hadn’t seen her in eight months and I missed her so badly. I was keeping myself well hidden. Things had gone wrong in Cork and then they went wronger again. I had been involved with bringing some of the brown crack in that was said to be causing people to have strokes and was said to have caused the end altogether of a prostitute lad on Douglas Street. Everybody was looking for me. There was no option for a finish only to hop on a bus and then it was all black skies and bogger towns and Gort, finally, and Evan the Head waited for me there, in the ever-falling rain, and he had his bent smile on.

  ‘Here’s another one I got to weasel you out of,’ he said. ‘And me without the arse o’ me fuckin’ kecks, ’ay?’

  He jerked a thumb at a scabby Fiesta that wore no plates and we climbed into it and we took off through the rain, January, and we drove past wet fields and stone walls and he asked me no questions at all. He said it was often the way that a fella needed a place and he would be glad to help me out. He said that I was his friend after all and he softened the word in his mouth – friend – in a way that I found troubling. It was the softness that named the price of the word. He said things could as easily be the other way around and maybe someday I would be there to help him out. We turned down a crooked boreen that ran between fields left to reeds and there were no people anywhere to be seen. We came to the farmhouse and the smile on the Head’s face twisted even more so.

  I never promised you a rose garden, he said.

  You would have hardly thought it held anyone at all but for the yellow screams of children escaping the torn curtains and the filthy windows. Evan said he had rent allowance got for the house on account of his children. He had bred six off Suze and a couple off her sister, Elsie. These were open-minded people I was dealing with. At least with regard to that end of things. We went inside and the kids appeared everywhere, they were shaven-headed against the threat of nits, and they were pelting about like maniacs, grinding their teeth and hammering at the walls, and the women appeared – girlish, Elsie and Suze, as thin as girls – and they smirked at me in a particular way over the smoke of their roll-ups: it is through no fault of my own that I am considered a very handsome man.

  ‘Coffee and buns, no?’ said Evan the Head, and the girls laughed.

  The house was in desperate shape. There were giant mushroomy damp patches coming through the old wallpaper and a huge fireplace in the main room was burning smashed-up chairs and bits of four-be-two. The Head wasn’t lying when he said I’d be as well off outside in the caravan. He brought me to it and I was relieved to get out to the yard, mainly because of the kids, who had a real viciousness to them.

  Now of course the caravan was no mansion either. The door’s lock was busted and the door was tied shut with a piece of chain left over from the dogs and fixed with a padlock. The dogs were big and of hard breeds but they were nervous, fearful, and they backed away into the corners of the yard as we passed through. Evan unlooped the chain and opened the door and with a flourish bid me enter.

  ‘Can you smell the sex off it?’ he said, climbing in behind.

  ‘Go ’way?’

  ‘Bought it off a brasser used to work the horse fairs,’ he said. ‘If the walls could talk
in this old wagon, ’ay?’

  It had a knackery look to it sure enough. It was an old sixteen-footer aluminium job with a flowery carpet rotten away to fuck and flouncy pillows with the flounce gone out of them and it reeked of the fields and winter. There was a wee gas fire with imitation logs. Evan knelt and got it going with his lighter.

  ‘Get you good an’ cosy,’ he said. ‘You any money, boy-child?’

  ‘I’ve about three euro odd, Ev.’

  ‘Captain of industry,’ he said.

  The gas fire took and the fumes rose from it so hard they watered my eyes. I asked was it safe and he said it’d be fine, it’d be balmy, it’d be like I was on my holidays, and if I got bored I could always pop inside the house and see if young Elsie fancied a lodger.

  ‘For her stomach,’ he said.

  I am not lying when I tell you there was a time Evan the Head was thought to be a bit of a charmer. He was from Swansea originally and sometimes in his cups he would talk about it like it was a kind of paradise and his accent would come through stronger. I had known him five years and I would have to say he was a mysterious character. I had met him first in a pub on Barrack Street in Cork called the Three Ones. It wasn’t a pub that had the best of names for itself. It was a rough crowd that drank there and there was an amount of dealing that went on and an amount of feuds on account of the dealing. There had been shootings the odd time. I was nervous there always but Evan was calm and smiling at the barside and one night I went back to the flat he had in Togher and I bought three sheets of acid off him at a good price – White Lightnings, ferocious visuals – and he showed me passports for himself that were held under three different names. I was young enough to be impressed by that though I have seen quarer sights since, believe me. Evan used to talk about orgies all the time. He would go on and on about organising a good proper orgy – ’ay? – and he told me once about an orgy in a graveyard in Swansea that himself and an old girlfriend had set up and that’s when he started taking down Aleister Crowley books about the occult and telling me he suspected I might be a white witch.