by Kevin Barry
Pray at home, he told the wailing widowers, the grievously sick, the unnaturally morose.
There were money and supply difficulties with the brothers named Sox. There were talk-to-the-fucken-dog situations erupting. Maurice and Charlie made a connection with a soldier at Collins Barracks. The soldiers were in and out of the Lebanon on peace-keeping missions and flew home unsearched. Maurice and Charlie were soon taking delivery of nine-ounce bars of soft, sandy Lebanese hashish.
You didn’t even put your lighter to it, Moss.
The way it just crumbled into the skins, Charlie? Gorgeous.
The Lebanese blond on Barrack Street was the finest to be had in town. Trouble stirred accordingly. Hateful dogs were produced; crow bars; knives. Charlie Redmond was arranged in the boot of a car and driven to a field beyond Kanturk.
That was the night that put hairs on me chest, he said, as they ate boiled eggs together at the Bughouse.
Money accrued; ambition was fed. Dope brought girls and money. There was languor by day and violence in the night.
*
Dilly was allowed to visit. She sat in her motley array and dreadlocks, and she twisted the tips of the locks, and looked up.
But in the same fucking room? she said.
Her little posh accent was heart-breaking.
As fate and fortune would arrange it, Dill.
Me and your old man, Dilly? It’s a written-in-the-stars-type number.
We’re thinking of running away with each altogether, Maurice said.
We could open a bar in Tenerife, Moss. We might be very happy down there. Hang out our sign. Dancing tonight.
She looked from one to the other and back again. She gathered into a bundle of herself, drew up her legs – Dilly had a complicated arrangement with furniture always, and she took a while to settle. She wore her weather on the tip of her nose. Happiness brought a moment’s dim blushing there; the tip whitened visibly if she were scared, and she was scared right now.
This place? Maurice said, as he saw her despair. It’s not as bad as they make out, Dilly.
Give us another week, Charlie said, we’ll be running the joint.
And I mean we’re rattlin’ with happy pills.
Serious tack they’re serving, girl. There’s matinee and evening performances up and down that corridor.
But the same room? she said.
An arrayal of the stars, Maurice said. How’s your mother, girl?
Ah, she’s you know.
I do, yeah.
Dilly played with the tips of her braided locks, twisted one and turned it, chewed on it a moment, tucked her legs beneath herself again. She considered the men, in their twin beds, in their baby-blue gowns, with their slack, tranquillised mouths and desperate eyes, and she could not but smile, the tip of her nose softly reddening.
In my opinion? Charlie said. Bob Marley should have gone and lopped the big toe off himself altogether.
He’d still be alive today, Maurice said. He’d be bouncin’ around the place.
You see it was on account of the Rastafarian beliefs, Dilly, that he wouldn’t have the toe lopped off. And the infection spread and that’s all she wrote.
I have a mild case of dreadlocks, Dilly said. I don’t have Rastafarian beliefs. And actually I’m not that into Bob. Though I suppose I kind of like ‘Duppy Conqueror’.
Too cool for school, Maurice said. Who else you listening to?
I don’t know . . . Lee Scratch Perry?
Never heard of him, Charlie said. Or hang about? He’s not a butcher’s apprentice from Mayfield, is he?
That’s him, yeah.
How you getting on with the old God business lately, Dill?
Not something I think about much, Da.
You had a bit of a spell for a while, though, didn’t you?
Very briefly. I got past it.
Wait till they get you in the likes of this place, Maurice said. Can find your mind turning in spiritual-type directions at all hours.
See that payphone out in the corridor? Charlie said. You put fifty cent in that, you get three minutes with the Big Man. It’s a special rate for the supernaturally afflicted.
You been onto him, Charlie?
I’m onto him morning and night, girl. Have you any change?
What’s he been saying to you?
Says he’s missing an angel.
Fuck off, Charlie.
They settled into it together. They arranged the laptop on a chair between the two beds and she sat back on the edge of Maurice’s and they watched Rumble Fish again.
In my humble and honest? Maurice said. We could be looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s finest hour.
You mean like Sofia’s da? Dilly said.
The men traded a painful glance.
She don’t even know these actors, Charlie said. But, actually, looking at it again . . . Is it me or was I something like a Matt Dillon-type in my younger days?
You were the bulb off him, Charlie. But come here. Have you seen Mickey Rourke lately?
Think I saw him on the number eight going up MacCurtain Street. Top-right-hand seat, overhead the driver.
He’s after leaving himself go something shockin’.
He is, yeah. They nearly had to turf him off the number eight.
*
Maurice walked her out the corridor and he laid his arm about her thin shoulder.
I want no more of this Spain talk, he said.
Da? I’m nearly eighteen.
I’d miss you, though.
Two tears in a bucket, Dilly said. Motherfuck it.
Dilly? I just want you to stay close for a while, you know? And come here . . . You know that I love you, don’t you?
Ah, Da. Please? I mean, seriously?
I know, yeah. Okay.
*
These last days at the Bughouse. They lay in the twin beds beside each other, and, late one morning, a moment opened that allowed the words to be spoken –
You know I think the girl could be mine, Maurice? I mean there is a possibility.
I know there is, Charlie. I know that.
Chapter Thirteen
CYNTHIA AND DILLY – THE QUIET STORY
In Cork and on Beara, from April 2013 to August 2015
She walked with her mother through the April city. The birds were on fucking springs. Remorse was the lightness of her step, the relief that she was beyond the Bughouse walls.
That’s one that’ll stick to your bones, Cynthia said. I’m sorry you had to go through it. How are they looking?
Insane.
It’ll do that for you, the Mental.
They’re watching Rumble Fish . . .
Jesus Christ.
. . . and doing all the lines.
They don’t get over themselves, do they?
No.
And the long fella lands himself in there how exactly?
An arrayal of the stars they’re calling it.
Ah, they would do, yeah.
Fate and magic, et cetera.
If one of them doesn’t strangle the other, Cynthia said, we can call it a result. They do fill a room, though, don’t they?
They do, yes.
Is your father kind of wandery still?
How’d you mean?
I mean are his thoughts, you know . . . heading in strange directions?
It’s Maurice. When are his thoughts fucking not? They’re both kind of . . . I don’t know. Tranked-looking? Pale.
Yeah, well, they’re in the fucking Mental, aren’t they? We’ll go and eat a bun, will we?
They went to the Crawford. They ate carrot cake with fresh cream and drank Americanos. The fathomless ease of the faces all around them, and the nerveless chatter – no, we are not like other families. Dilly looked at her mother in a certain way; Cynthia lowered her cup, because there was a challenge in the look.
Did you ever see them violent?
Ah, Jesus, Dilly, please.
Did you?
Where’s
this coming from?
I don’t know.
Why would you ask me something like that? No, I did not.
I don’t believe you.
Believe what you fucking like.
Her mother’s face made an attempt at a blank, unreadable glaze, but quickly the slyness of a grin tipped up the corners of her mouth.
Okay, she said.
Okay what?
Once I saw Maurice thump the head off some young fella on Washington Street.
When was this?
Oh, God, I don’t know. It was, like . . . ’93? ’94? I remember it was outside the Pot Black Pool Hall.
The what?
Before your time.
And this was over drugs?
No . . . I believe something might have been said about his shoes.
His shoes?
As I recall.
And, like . . . very violent?
I suppose. It was kind of, you know . . . Bit sickening.
You watched it?
Well, I was fucking there. What could I do? It was horrible. Scary. And I remember his heart was just like thumping out of his chest for about an hour after it. And it was . . . oh, I don’t know.
What?
It was a bit kind of horny as well. If I’m being honest with you.
Ah, Jesus Christ, Ma.
You asked me.
They went to the English Market. Everybody looked breezy and glad of themselves. Cynthia bought olives, monkfish and sourdough bread, some coffee beans and bulbs of fennel. The fennel was to settle her stomach. Her stomach lately was ripped and hysterical.
We’d want to leg it out the road before that fish starts talking to us, Dilly, she said.
They drove out the back road to Beara. The countryside was trying to shuck the last of the winter from its shoulders. Cynthia chewed on a piece of raw fennel and her aniseed breath scented the car. Is she still beautiful, Dilly wondered, with a wounded, sidelong glance. Certainly she had a skin tone that would make you puke it was so clear. She didn’t look forty-one. She had nice, sad eyes. She had a mouth that was really fucking vivacious when she laughed, but she did not laugh much. Mostly she looked as if she were in a condition of vague disbelief about the world. As in what the hell are you going to throw at me next?
We’ve all been through a very great deal, Dilly said.
This is apropos of?
Apropos of my fucking hole.
*
There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates – it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying. He would not be allowed back into the house again. The long war was at last over. The internecine strife of Maurice and Cynthia. More than twenty years she had given it. The sleeplessness and pain of the long absences, the hot lurches of emotion, the sudden reversals of fortune, the endless pleadings, the slow relentings, the golden times of morphiate heaven, the atrocities on both sides, the shock tactics, and the giddy joy of their lavish sexual reunions – it was all done with now. The summer came in slowly and gently and lit the peninsula. The gannets plunged to attack the new mackerel shoals. The clifftops were a riot of sea pinks, bird’s-foot trefoil, ox-eye daisies. The Skelligs sat dreaming far off in the June haze. Cynthia expected a measure of peace, at last, but the truth was that she felt like the insides of a fucking dog.
*
Late in the night there were voices from the beach. She came up from the shallows of a thin, morbid sleep, and the thugs of her dreams were led away. Youth, or at least that season’s faithful guild of it, came to play nightly on the beach. They drank and laughed and fucked each other on the back sands. By night the old shoreline was narcotic.
Cynthia put the bones of her feet to the floor and darkly muttered and went to the window. The new house, as she still thought of it, five years on – glass and steel and a view of the bay, built when they had been hog-fat, briefly, on the profits of Ard na Croí. It was from this place they were to see the gales come in. Here they were to drink little. They were to think not about the possibilities of heroin. Oh, Maurice, what did we do to each other?
In the dark glass now she caught her glance gauntly – Jesus, I’d really want to do something with my fucking eyes, wouldn’t I? She turned from the image – from the grey haunt of herself – but then she was drawn to it again, and she returned –
The strange thing was that she looked oddly serene, and she knew that this time the separation would hold.
*
This was the summer that Dilly lit out for the territories late at night and drifted about the empty country roads alone. To be at the far end of the peninsula on a summer’s night with a paleness in the sky after midnight even – it was like a sad film about an island of the north. When you know at some level that you’re saying goodbye to it all. The loveliness of these bereft roads by night. The ferns in the ditches that were hardly moving but breathed in the warm night breeze, it seemed, and even spoke.
Cynthia said –
You’re away with the fucking birds, Dilly. You do know that, don’t you?
*
Another year passed. Another summer traipsed up from the south. They sat in the night garden and drank. In truth, it was just a rocky little field above the bay – the garden never took for her mother. There was a lone tree by the ditch, a dwarf tree twisted by the sea wind, its stunted limbs like witch’s fingers. Torches were lit against the summer-night bugs, the midges that went for the neck blood especially. Charlie Redmond was parked down the road in his old Mercedes, watching the house and smoking. Every year it just got fucking crazier. She sat with her mother and they drank a bottle of blush wine and then opened another.
We should go in, Dill.
If we go in, we can’t see what he’s doing.
It’ll be fine. We need to eat something.
He’s not well, Ma. I mean the face on him?
He’s okay. There’s always pasta and pesto?
Like the stations of the fucking cross.
I know but it’d be quick. I was going to cook a chicken. Or like a fish. Make an effort. I was going to bake a whole fish. Some salad. Pasta and pesto is going to depress the fucking Jesus out of us.
He’s down there still.
He’s harmless, Dilly. He just thinks he’s looking after us.
*
October. The month of slant beauty. Knives of melancholy flung in silvers from the sea. The mountains dreamed of the winter soon to come. The morning sounded hoarsely from the caverns of the bay. The birds were insane again. If she kept walking, toe to heel, one foot after the other, one end of the room to the other, the nausea kept to one side. It leered at her with a hissing threat from the one side only. The pain was yellowish and intense and abundantly fucking ominous. Cynthia knew by now that she was very sick.
*
Dilly lay back in the bed. She allowed her hand to trail down and she dreamed about some things for a while. Haunch of shoulder. Slope of thigh. Some nameless love. Some eyeless love. The winter days travelled greyly over the fields of the sea. She flexed her toes and held the stretch and tried to wish the chill from her bones. Someday I will live in the desert, she thought. I could live in a bender there, and maybe just keep a dog or two, and maybe there is someone to make a rendezvous with after dark, some long, horse-faced creature from a myth, with serpent’s tail and rancid smile, a lover ardent as the night. As the cool desert breeze as it moves across our love.
She swung her legs out from beneath the covers. She was nineteen years old and obsessed with Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (the damage), with the mystical lost recordings from Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio, and with a webcam that showed the eerie view from a motorway bridge over an abandoned suburb of Tokyo. She liked the feeling beneath her bare feet of brushed concrete as she descended the stair. It was a horny feeling, like money coming in.
In the kitchen Maurice sat gauntly with his weed vaporiser and the knit bones of
his smile; he was wretched and green, a sick lizard prince. Charlie lay in a foetal huddle on the sofa.
Hey now, she said.
She trailed her fingertips along the back of Maurice’s neck to console. A tension shot through him in a thin, whippety snap, a cabled tension. She knew that he was suffering. Just by looking at him she could tune into the white burn of Maurice in his suffering.
Your mother’s doing great, girl, he said. I was onto the hospital there again.
She’s doing fabulous, Charlie said.
I mean the treatments they got now? When you think about it?
Maurice shook his head in awe.
Unbelievable, he said.
The machines they got in the hospitals now? Charlie said. It’s like the Starship Enterprise out at the Cork Regional.
She’s taking this thing on, Maurice said, and she’s totally going to fucken beat it. You know that, Dilly, don’t you?
*
The months proceeded. There was no remorse. It was summer again, and Dilly knew that it was the last one she would spend on the peninsula. On the June nights she went out to walk so as not to panic. She walked the clifftops in true dark. She sensed older presences as she walked. She knew by a cold stirring that here they had made their fires, and here their cattle had grazed, and here they ate periwinkles and oysters from the shell, and they had this burning salt on their lips, and felt this old rain, and made their cries of love and war, and roamed in hordes; their little kingdoms here were settled, and disassembled; by night, in our valley, the wolves had bayed.
*
She went into the cold seawater. A swarming light moved over the bay. A fishing boat idled far off. She basked on the rocks a while in the last heat of the day. She found her face in the shallows of a rock pool. It was woeful, proletarian, grandiose.
Down the strand there was the pattern of a family at play in the inky haze – young parents, two small kids, their chattering.
The edge of the horizon across the bay darkened.
It would be an evening of warm summer rain.