Dark Lies the Island

by Kevin Barry

  Maybe tonite …

  Gretchen from Flagstaff had a green light beside her name on the screen – Gretchen was live – and Gretchen typed:

  It is what is in your heart that must be answered it is your call to make we are here for you, S.

  Alison from Teignmouth had a green light beside her name on the screen – Alison was live – and Alison typed:

  U hav been v strong for days why now Sara. This is what I must be asking right now. Is the med changed/weakened by ur head doc?

  Kandy The Lez from Bremen had a green light beside her name – Kandy The Lez was live – and Kandy The Lez typed:

  You cut tonite you photo n show me you hot fucken bitch I love you Sara K xox

  The time-running-out bubble erupted on her screen – sixty seconds remaining – and she thought about it but did not insert another coin. She let the seconds come down

  5, 4, 3, 2, 1

  and each beat brought her deeper inside. She was upstairs in the lobby annexe. The shadows breathed. She picked up her stuff and came down the stairs three at a time and out through the lobby at blizzard pace. She crossed the car park to Apache Pizza and gorged on a four-cheese twelve-inch for its lovely seeping saturates. She was eating enough for half a rugby team and thin as a stick. Her brain was moving so fast she was losing weight. She left Apache Pizza and got in the car and gunned it for the holiday home, where she was staying, alone, on her ‘year out’.

  ‘What in Jesus’ name are you going to do out there, Sara?’ her father had said. ‘It’s going into winter, girl.’

  ‘Just some art stuff,’ she said.

  Don’t cut, his eyes said.

  ‘Just give me the keys and the alarm code,’ she said. ‘Please?’

  She had completed her Leaving Certificate in June. The results came in the second week of August. She had enough points for Medicine. She had enough points for Veterinary. She had enough points to build a rocket and fly it to the moon. She hadn’t slept right in months. Her skin was flawless but for the scarring on the insides of the wrists, but for the scarring on the insides of the thighs, but for the scarred remains of the smiley she had carved one night on the inside of the left ankle.

  ‘We all have delicate complexions,’ her mother had said.

  We! As though a clan, or tribe, or family. The town as she pelted through had the feel of the season’s quick changing, a summer killed off, a winter to come. If she floored it, she would be in time for a 1940s British stiff-upper-lip movie of the kind they showed on UK Memories channel in the early evening. Stories about war widows and valour and the last embers of hope. Ladies who had been left even more elegant and poised by the ravages of war, ladies who had been left ‘ve-hy much ah-lone, aksherly’.

  She said it aloud as she drove:

  ‘Ve-hy much ah-lone.’

  As though with marbles in her mouth:

  ‘Ve-hy … mach … hah-lone.’

  Her brain was moving so fast it was out the other side of town already and looking back. She saw herself drive. She felt like she was filmed every minute of the day. The car was a low-slung, old-school Saab in a deep wine colour. Her father was a radical architect who had reinterrogated the concept of walls. She got back to the house he had designed for family summers. It was all glass and angles and odd little nooks situated to give the eeriest, the most austere possible views across the dour bog landscape.

  ‘Wounded’, her father would call the bog, all wet-eyed as he gazed out soulfully and swirled in his hand like a gigantic glass of Masi.

  The house had a bog stream run through it – there was the low constant murmuring of its brown tarry waters. She lay on the six-inch-thick glass panelling over the stream as it ran the length of the open-plan space. It wasn’t a room; it was a space. Sometimes tiny eels swam through, sperm-like. Her father had driven out with her, that first weekend, and he conspicuously left every blade in the house in its place. He was phoning nightly from Granada and acting so blithe. The Sabatier kitchen knives were right there on their block. She got up and went around the room and flicked all of the lamps on.

  She slid the glass doors and stepped outside and she looked back into the lit space – a magazine shot. Minus people. She turned and looked out beyond the expanse of the bog, where the ground fell away, so quickly, and there were low reefs of dune, and then a descent to superlative, untenanted coast. Each year it lost about a metre to the Atlantic – it was coming towards the house, the water. This was Clew Bay, in County Mayo, and hundreds of tiny islands were strewn down there. They were inky blobs of mood against grey water. It was a world of quiet dimly lit by the first stars and a quartermoon. The house behind her was silent as a lung.

  She went back inside and crawled onto the low grey couch and sounded an animal’s groan. She felt like she was sucking up all the poisons the planet had to offer. The house had been tested for radon, and there were trace elements, it was reported, and she breathed deeply, with a cupped hand in her crotch, and she tried to suck it up but radon deaths were slow. A sick tiny flutter from her crotch like the heartbeat of a gerbil. She found the remote and hit up UK Memories and sure enough there was a 1940s stiff-upper-lip playing:

  ‘Chin up, wren, t’will soon be over!’

  Vehy-mach-hah-lone. She closed her eyes for the swoon of the matinee strings. She felt the heaviness of the sorrow that hovered above – she saw it as a kind of airship. The pizza cheese re-formed and coagulated in her gut. She waited for the faces to form once more in the plate glass of the windows.

  She killed the sound on UK Memories. She went around the room and flicked all of the lamps off. She went again and sat by the vague burbling of the stream. She let full dark take over the glass – that it might banish what was out there. But each night sent its visitors. The open maw of a mouth she might see or the slash of a sudden, quick turn that could only be the angle of a nose, like a Frenchman’s cruel hard nose – the night put its faces to the glass. The murmuring of the stream came to work as the voices of those gathered outside.

  She believed and at once did not believe.

  ‘Please?’ she whispered.

  The word was enough to break the spell. She got up and went about the room and she flicked on all of the mismatched lamps – the kitsch 80s lamps, and the vintage 50s lamps, and her father’s treasure, a superb thin angular 70s Belgian classic that had the look of a spider, reaching, and cost about the same as a retro Saab. Three of them made like ever. In some humourless loft in Antwerp. She slid the glass doors and stepped boldly outside and into the chill of the fresh dark.

  ‘Nothin’ and nobody,’ she said.

  ‘Veh-hy … much … hah-lone,’ she said.

  She convinced herself that it was so. It was chill outside but a sweet chill. The stars worked to hang a melody on the dark sky. The bogside was picked out along its expanse in an abstract confusion of shapes; the rocky outcrops and the reefed banks and the lone tree – a wind-twisted whitethorn – that was visible from the house.

  ‘It’s on holiday,’ her father said once. ‘Get away from all the other trees.’

  The black breathing of the sea was beyond; the sea was a palpable beast, and as though it was waiting. She sniffed hard for its sexual note – brine, ozone, salt.

  She turned back inside and slid the glass doors shut and every surface in the room gleamed in the lamplight with menace. The space was planed to a riot of sharp angles. The Sabatier block sat glowering on the brushed granite worktop. She shook her head rapidly from side to side, like a dog after rain. Her phone rang.

  The ringtone was demented, so loud and fast, cacophonous, and she knew that it must be going on past seven o’clock – or eight o’clock, his time – in Granada. He’d have a couple of drinks down and some jamón and Manchego for nibbles. He’d be feeling languid and deep and thinking, okay, I’ll just check in, I’ll play it casual.

  She had switched off voice message – it would not go to voice. So how long to let him suffer? Twenty rings? Or forty?<
br />
  She answered somewhere in between.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  The busy sound of a Spanish bar behind him, its air of ease and banter, a lightness of tone, happily analytical, the spat consonants and sibilant hiss; Andalucía.

  ‘What you been up to, Sar?’

  She hated the abbreviation, its cuddle.

  ‘Art stuff,’ she said.

  ‘You mean masturbation and smoking dope?’

  A tiny smile threatened the corners of her mouth but – fuckoff! – she held firm against it.

  ‘That sounds a little busy for me.’

  A labour to his breathing gave lie to the jauntiness.

  ‘Did you talk to your mother at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘She doesn’t mean to be the way she is, Sara.’

  ‘You’re defending her?’

  ‘You know I’d be the last to. But Jesus, Sara. Just talk to her.’

  A Spanish evening, behind him, and he wanted to be back there, among it – he wanted to be away.

  ‘Go back to it,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whatever it is you’re doing there.’

  ‘Sara?’

  ‘I have a cake about done,’ she said. ‘A kind of meringue thing? Got to run.’

  ‘Sara, how long is this going to go on? I mean, I know what you’re going through, and I know it’s been a hard, hard time.’

  ‘You do not know.’

  ‘I fucking know! And when it’s blood, Sara, I can’t just give up and not even try …’

  ‘And blood has given me what exactly?’

  She hung up. She turned the phone off. She went around the room and flicked all of the lamps off. She searched the dark for calm. She slid open the glass doors and stepped outside again to chill and night.

  Clutch – a pair of hands took hold of her neck. She was held to the spot; a manacle grip. She felt the great restriction of breath. She tried to scream but no sound came from her mouth. It was as though in a nightmare but she was not sleeping no she was not sleeping. Hands everywhere, hands all over. Then, suddenly, a looseness, and she was freed – she dashed inside. She slid shut the glass door. She fell to the floor. She looked up to the window and the faces crowded in from all angles. The dark tunnels of their opened mouths. Then at once the faces disappeared.

  She turned the phone on.

  A new text message from Granada:

  Give it expression.

  Fuck off. She saw him thoughtfully sipping a Fino by the darkwood barrels as he texted, and thinking, I’m just so not like other dads?

  The Sabatier block was a low steady throbbing in the dark of the open space. She cut for the red vibrancy, for feeling. See the royal red army march in jagged lines down the pale hillside.

  She went around the room and turned all of the lamps on. She searched for the laptop. The dial-up was so slow she had to put the laptop out of her sight so as not to burst into flames of fury.

  Her father had said:

  ‘You’re not mad, Sara. You’re just addicted to the fucking internet.’

  Which did not explain the clutching at her throat or the gleam of menace from cut-steel door handles or the faces at the windows or the medication; it did not explain all of the medication.

  Her mother had new tits since Christmas.

  She pushed back the couch and she found the laptop underneath and she brought it to the cable by the retro phone desk – a fucking cable! – and she plugged it and hit connect:

  Gremlin voices gurgled from the medieval depths of dial-up.

  Every inch of her skin burned with itch. She went to find some music. She had forgotten to bring the iPod dock to the house and there was only the ‘sound system’, as he called it, which made her smile, and there were only CDs.

  Discs!

  She flicked through:

  Synchronicity by The Police.

  Jesus.

  Astral Weeks by Van Morrison.

  Who looked like an especially sweaty oompah-loompah.

  Revolver by The Beatles.

  She played ‘For No One’ back-to-back eight times. She would not play it again because she had feelings about the dark significance of the number nine. She knew she should prefer the John tracks, but. She knew that John bought an island in Clew Bay, in the 1960s, but there were three hundred and sixty-five islands down there, and she could not say which one. Dorinish Island – her father claimed to know it, by sight, he said you could see it from a high vantage beside the house. John sailed a psychedelic caravan across the bay on a raft once but he never ended up living on Dorinish, with Yoko, as planned.

  She went to dial-up.

  The forum took eleven minutes to load.

  She headbutted the couch.

  ‘Dorinish’ – the word lolled on her tongue, and repeated; it sounded like an artisanal cheese or a seaweed therapy facility.

  There was just one green light on 4-Real forum for live – Gretchen from Flagstaff.

  Sara typed:

  I think I’m going to do it tonite?

  And the green of the light for live on Gretchen at once died.

  She ripped the cable from the laptop. She slid open the glass doors. She flung the laptop out into the dark. It must have landed somewhere but it did so without a sound. As though it had been caught?

  She went to the bathroom and split open her pills to wash the powders away, the pinks and greens, the mica-gleam of the powders, and then the dull mulch as they clotted in the tapwater, and the clots swirled a moment, and disappeared. She opened her mouth and looked inside and saw the healthful pink of her gums and the arch of her jawbone.

  The sound of a text message drew her back to the space and the stream murmured, ominously; the message was from her mother:

  Weather here great, how weather there? Any goss? Art going well?

  Her mother was in the Tarn Valley, in France. She had married a former broker from Dublin who had bought a failing vineyard there. Her mother’s voice she could no longer bear to hear – it was high and trilling, it was from the valley of the squeaks. Texts were by now the limit of their interaction; this was understood. Her mother had cheekbones, new tits, an indulgent smile.

  Sara texted:

  Weather here glorious! Busy busy. Love lots! S xxx.

  It was better to enter the contract of vapidity than to try to reason out the madness of that smile, or try to see past the cheekbones, the perfect teeth, the rampant-teenage-bunny tits.

  Not to mention the little pink dresses.

  Next came a shrapnel attack on the plate glass surrounds – a sudden assault of rain from the bay. She went around the room and turned off all the lamps. Her mind was moving so quick she felt the rain in her face before she slid open the doors and stepped outside.

  A cloud mass travelled low over the bay, and now the quartermoon was obscured, and the rain came hard and slantwise, and there was a wind up to give an eeriness and she beamed ecstatically as the rain came through. It was generous and capable and soaked her to the bone in seconds flat.

  She went back inside and stepped out of her clothes and shivered and she thought that maybe tonight she would cut on the inside of her thigh, top left, just there. The Sabatier block brooded in night’s shadow like a waiting bishop. She was moved to approach it.

  Because this is not going to improve, Sara. This is blood-deep and malevolent. This is for always.

  Thus the Dark Angel did whisper; thus did its soft words creep.

  As she crossed the floor, she stumbled on the TV remote, and hit the mute on/off: the sound boomed again on UK Memories. It was advertising a new box set of Beatles remasters. It was playing ‘For No One’. The ninth time of listening, and she stood frozen in her step until the song had finished – a Message, unquestionably. But she picked up the remote and killed the TV.

  And then the rain eased and played a slower beat on the pl
ate glass in brush strokes. She went around the room and flicked all the lamps on. She went to the Sabatier block. She carefully withdrew the nine knives of the set. She carried two in one hand, three in the other and two wedged under each arm. She went towards the dark. She bent and slid open the plate glass doors with her mouth.

  Outside.

  She let the knives fall by her feet. The night about was breathing, unwebbed, darkscreened. She picked the first knife up, a serrated-edge breadknife, and she swung a few practice turns of an overarm arching movement, and then she threw the knife far out into the night. The way the ball of her arm twisted so efficiently in the shoulder socket – the satisfaction of that. She threw all of the knives – one by one – and each was taken by the dark and she could not see but could feel the way each was taken noiselessly by the boggy ground.

  She went back inside and wrapped herself in the first thing she could find – his hipster duffelcoat, in a retro mustard shade, from the rack; waft of fathermusk.

  And she stepped outside again, to be among it, and she walked in bare feet to the high vantage. She looked down on the dark of Clew Bay and the tiny islands that lay in the murk. The cloudbank shifted, a fraction, as though cued by a smiling choreographer, and light fell from the quartermoon and picked out a single island – a low, oblong shape – and it was lit for a moment’s slow reveal. She took a step that was a step outside, yet again, as though from a chrysalis, or trap. Darkly below the moving sheets of water were reliable, never-changing, mesmeric. The hill shapes picked out against the night; the islands, and the Atlantic beyond. She sat on the wet ground. She closed her eyes and knitted her hands around her knees. She huddled closer to herself, and went deeper. She closed her eyes and allowed the world without to fade, for a small while anyway, and for a half a minute, and then a whole one – and then more – there was something just a little like sleep.