New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  The ballroom’s walls, three feet of concrete, seem to swell from the sound contained within. The door’s pulled back: a surge of music, a riot of light. The cones of those old Bose speakers throb like small black hearts, and overhead the silver mirrorball spins and shimmers. Long John Donegan, gagging for porter and meat, charges the bar like he’s a centaur. Steel shutters go up, and here it is, your cash-free society: transactions conducted by tokens indexed to the barter system (you mind my childer for the night, I’ll lag your tank). Homebrew can be got for very little. Once in a blue moon there’s black-market harder stuff, but who here has the tokens for it?

  Some dance, some prefer to watch. Some pair off and pull their partners close, and if you’ve credit there are rooms to let in the upstairs wing, discretion guaranteed, no nudge or wink. Everyone knows the score: it could all be over in the time it takes to squeeze a trigger or thumb a detonation code, so steal a little sweetness when you can – right now it’s Saturday night and hold that thought. Hold that thought.

  Here is where they set it down, the weight they’ve borne, the penance done, where they array their woes together like tributes at a grotto, or offerings to be burnt. That weight too great to be carried is a cosmic sadness, faith, a lament for all that has been and gone. Vast, ineffable, that big sky sadness that speaks to living things of all things lost, of histories cancelled out, of what a wonderful world, the late great Planet Earth, Groucho Marx and Penny Lane and the Wizard of Oz and poor old Superman, and you won’t be seeing rainbows anymore, it’s over, over for Mary Ellen Cash and Naeem Hammoud and Susannah Codd and Long John Donegan and Evelyn Brown, and over for you and I.

  But not just yet.

  The hour draws near, and they gather at the bandstand, not just to witness but to imprint on their minds the memory of what’s before them and so to later tell others of their witnessing.

  ‘Will he come?’

  ‘He always do.’

  ‘But what if he don’t?’

  House lights dim. Drapes draw back. A beam flickers and takes form.

  And when tonight’s final song is sung and the rite’s complete, when that mirrorball stops spinning and those house lights flicker on, the assembly will drain their drinks and say ‘G’mora’ and goodnight and at last disperse to suit up and boot up and scatter back into a night barely lit by the fading moon, where a day will come with a pitiless sun, or maybe no sun, and the fields might bake and the roads might bubble like soup and quakes rend the hills and split the rocks and the wind howl like trumpets in a crazy woman’s dream, and objects become detached from their names, rivers lose their riverality, earth its earthliness, symbols sunder from the things they signify – no matter what awaits, these people will bear these airs and melodies with them, sustain themselves with songs akin to ghostly echoes of some revival or requiem mass or chain-gang holler or death fugue, the widow’s cry for her lost at sea, the prayers of buried miners, scraps of words and melodies fluttering in their souls like fireflies lost on the river, I’ll never get out of this world alive, I’m so lonesome I could cry.

  And so yes, here he is at last, the vision made incarnate in his fine white suit and his shining white boots and great white hat, a white guitar strapped across his chest. The room is filled with his pick and strum. So hark now: hear this voice so high and wild and lonesome. Hear the angel sing.

  And if you should weep, well, that’s all right, that’s all right. You weep because you’re mended. And if what you see here makes no sense, then ask yourselves, would you really want the mystery undone, to hear it’s a trick of the light, a lantern shadow show, a hologram or hallucination or electro-magnetic anomaly or an apparition or visitation or even to hear it’s a miracle?

  He is among you, faith. That is all that matters. You can look into those two blue eyes that bear the light of one close to death, the contours of a face so gaunt it’s just bones pushing out skin like tentpoles under tarpaulin. You can watch his bony fingers twang the strings and hear the truth of his heart and the raw song in his mouth like the call of a wounded old wolf. You can mend.

  And if only for this hour are you consoled and mended, then this hour only it must be.

  The Fuck Monkeys

  Philip O’Ceallaigh

  I’D BEEN WALKING ALL AFTERNOON in the sun. I reached the house and knelt under the pump and let the cold water pour like a river over my head. I drank until sated then sat there dizzy in the dirt as the cicadas shook their rattle at the cooling evening. Then I got up and walked across the yard to the hammock, strung between two bent pines, and kicked off my boots and pulled the cork on a bottle of rakia. Settling back and drinking, I stared up at the branches, needled green against the blue. I closed my hot eyes. The swollen heavy sun sank into the waves.

  I was woken by the scraping of their claws on the flagstones, and saw them there in the dusky light, as though through smoke, these little creatures that wouldn’t have come up as high as your knee – copulating. I remained absolutely still. If I moved they could take fright, scarper back into the undergrowth, back into the falling night. They were some kind of animal, some kind of monkey, with long tails. Yet they had curiously beautiful, almost human, faces. Their eyes were impossibly big, hers long-lashed, with high arching eyebrows. She reached behind, gripped him, danced him into herself, glancing over her shoulder, making tiny panting noises, something between a sigh and a squeak – she was on all fours then, but there was nothing submissive about her. She danced and sang it, grinding him, grinding her teeth, grinding out the fuck. He was on his knees, spine arched and head thrown back, arms limp pendulums grazing his ankles, the rest of his body strained taut towards where he was hooked.

  They might have been tiny humans, if you forgave the tails.

  He began to twitch, dry branch about to snap, and she disengaged and spun fluidly to face him, and gripped his cock – huge, in proportion to the rest of him – and licked at him with her pointed tongue. She worked on him, devouring him, gathering rhythm as the waves in the background began to fizz and roar.

  She released it from her mouth, and with the final shakes of her little fist he became a fountain of seed, shooting high through the air. She caught the next shots on the face and in her open mouth. He pumped until it dripped from her. Just when it had to be all over, she gave his balls a little tickle and he arched his back and shot the last of it.

  He stood up, tottered a few steps – she was rubbing it on herself and convulsing with what I took for laughter – and toppled over on his side, chest heaving, tail twitching. She leapt to her feet and danced little circles around his body, hopping from one foot to the other, arms in the air. She finished it off with a tap dance, slapping her soles violently on the flagstones right before his face, then back-somersaulted so fast into the darkness and the vines that she left a faint blur hanging in the air after her, like dissipating smoke.

  He lay facing away from me, as though asleep, but I supposed he was listening to the tremor of the waves on the rocks, coming up through the rock of the earth, purified on the cut stone where his skull rested. Slowly, slowly, he raised himself on his little elbow and gazed towards where she had disappeared. His tail twitched, shot through with electricity, like a sleeping cat hit in its dreams by the shadow of a bird passing overhead. He got to his feet and limped away, to disappear among the vines.

  I lay very still. The pounding of the waves was a dull echo in my ears, like far-off thunder.

  Then I moved too, slowly, recalling my body, recovering my nerves and muscles from paralysis.

  The hammock lurched as I reached for the bottle. I raised it to my eyes; it was almost full.

  The yard before my house, lit now only by a candle burning in a lamp hanging on a nail on the gable wall, swayed and settled as I lay back, cradling the bottle. I could not recall having lit the candle. It had still been bright when I had lain down. A bat swooped and flitted and was gone again into the darkness. I took a pull from the bottle, and it burned down into my gut
, into my blood.

  Then, far away, from across the waves of the bay, over the headland, the breeze carried the sound of the church bells. The wind was blowing from the town. I counted them off, and then it was just me again, and the sea.

  *

  I had arrived about a month before the thing with the monkeys occurred.

  The old man met me where the ferry docked, on the side of the island facing the mainland. I boarded his skiff. People were milling upon the docks, disembarking, and we were already heading out to sea again, rounding a headland, leaving it behind. I watched bays and inlets and long stretches of cliff go by, and seen this way the island was bigger than I had expected. The limestone ridges of the hillsides were pale jutting bones in the evening light. Scrub and small pines clung where they could on the heights. When the sun, which had been hanging over the island when we had docked, was over the sea, I knew we had reached the far side of the island and were approaching our destination. We rounded a point and entered a small rocky cove. He cut the engine, and we glided silently the last distance. Cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth, he planted his hand on the wooden post of the jetty and leapt with unexpected litheness. He secured the boat, and I rose, stiff from sitting crouched, unsteady as the boat shifted under my weight. He extended an arm strong as a dry old branch and hauled me onto the jetty. I stood there, dizzy at the swaying world, staring out at the dazzling waves. When I turned around I was blind. The world was bleached of detail. All I could discern was the form of the old man, walking away. I took my pack from the boat and followed him.

  We ascended the rough track. I struggled to keep up. Warm breaths of pine and sage and rosemary rose from the baked earth. The land levelled out and a squat house of neatly cut stone came into view. A high narrow stone chimney rose from its roof of rough tiles. Heavy flagstones paved the yard in the front of the house. Woody shrubs had taken root in the cracks between the stones and some of them had grown large. All around were neglected fruit trees and vines, the grapes in dense unripe clusters.

  He turned a key in the cracked wooden door and forced it open with his shoulder. He handed me the key and I followed him inside. He moved through the cool gloom, opening windows and shutters, letting in light, revealing a single large room with a narrow iron-frame bed set against the far wall. From a wooden trunk he extracted a pile of blankets and dumped them on the bed. He indicated a metal tub and a lump of brownish soap. The stove was set with papers and kindling, and he put a match to it, and we watched the flames for a moment. Logs were stacked on the floor. He opened a dresser and showed me old pots and plates. He indicated my provisions: a large jar of cloudy olive oil, a big sack of rice, smaller sacks of cornmeal and beans, a large dusty demijohn of red wine and several bottles of rakia. He wiped a couple of cups with his sleeve, uncorked the wine and poured. He handed me a cup, clanked his own against it and downed it. I drank too, thirstily. He put his cup on the shelf, and I followed him outside.

  The pump stood in the yard in front of the house. He worked the handle. It looked too loose, broken, then it resisted and gushed brown water. When it ran clear he had me work the handle while he threw water over his face.

  He stood upright, shaking water from his hands.

  We gazed down the slope, past the vines that had run wild, through the trees, to where the sun hung low over the expanse of open water. The bay had sunk into shadow but further out the water still caught the light in a wild and brilliant sparkling, a trembling so intense you knew it could not possibly endure for long. And against this, towards the horizon, was a remoter, smaller island, monochrome and two-dimensional, like a paper cut-out. The old man raised his arms from his sides, palms outward, and let them fall, as if asking what more I could want. I felt he was mocking me. I took out my wallet and gave him the money. He counted out the notes, nodded, folded the wad and put it in his back pocket. He took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He offered one, and I accepted. It was the first friendly gesture I had felt from him. Soon I would be alone in this place, with my sacks of rice and cornmeal and beans and my jug of wine, and it would be dark. We smoked for a moment, looking at the sea. This is what people do, I thought. They look upon open spaces, where light falls. Then he turned and pointed, to a place to the right of the house from where we stood, where a hammock hung between two pines, and spoke one word.

  I shook my head, uncomprehending. Then, having barely lifted his hand in farewell, he was descending the path. I continued smoking in the gloom, until he was gone from view.

  I tossed the butt. It hissed briefly where the water from the pump had pooled in the dirt.

  I stood about for a long time then went into the dark house and put a log on the stove to keep it going. And then I remembered the hammock, and the wine. I poured myself a glass. I emptied it and poured another. I brought out the demijohn and arranged a big log as a table beside the hammock and settled in. One by one the stars came out, and I befriended them all, smothering my hunger in wine.

  *

  On the first morning, I ripped the wild growth from between the cracks in the flagstones. In the afternoon I assessed the land, striding about, bareheaded in the sunshine, anticipating the labour to come. Late in the afternoon I went down to the cove. In the clear water among the rocks I could see fish swimming.

  The following day I set to work. Ripe apricots and figs burst in dark stains on the dry ground where they fell and I ate what I wanted from the branches. I spent the morning clearing the vegetation choking the vines and breaking the hard earth between the rows with a hoe. I pruned back the vines until it was too hot to work. Then I sat in the shade and admired my tidy patch of cultivated land, the dug soil with the tinge of moisture showing darker against the pale baked earth around. Even as I watched it was drying to the same dusty colour. It was rocky land, mostly, all around. Evidence of the struggle to subdue it was all about. Great mounds of rock were stacked on the hillsides and ran along the slopes in long lines. Where the gradient was gentle enough, these deposits of rock narrowed and became the walls of terraces, giving the land a sculpted look. At one time it must have been a garden. It had been won over generations. But the terraces were overgrown now, and collapsing. Working alone, at most I could hope to subdue the flat area around the house.

  In the evening, when the sun had cooled, I went down to my cove. I experimented with baits – bits of sea anemone, cockles, little seasnails – and cast out with the hand reel. No fish bit. All I could reel in were crabs, hanging stupidly in the air, dripping water in molten beads, clamped obstinately to their prey even as they became prey themselves. The fish ignored me, but the crabs kept coming. In the end I kept three; back at the house I boiled them with rice, smashed the claws and extracted the scraps of flesh.

  *

  The good man is a tree that grows beside a stream, tall and straight, and bears fruit at the chosen moment. But time was out of joint even before the fuck monkeys came.

  I had lost track of the days, but always counted off the bells from the church when I could hear them. Soon they were irregular. They would toll two and the next time four. Or toll the same number of times on two consecutive hours – I presume they were hours – and I did not know if the second occasion was a mistake or the rectification of a previous error. Errors in the stone tower of the church? The sun climbed the sky and fell, and did not care for hours. In the middle of the day I was junked out on sun and untroubled, even when I observed the shadows nudging across the yard stop and slowly draw back again, for what might have been an hour. What did I care, if the sun rolled backwards? What did I care about the giant spider spinning between the trees? All you want is one day, beneath the sun, like a butterfly.

  My glass would refill when I was busy meditating on the insects in the grass, and at first I supposed I had lost the capacity to judge the true sequence of events. But this happened many times; I’d drain the strong red wine, enter my house to look for a knife perhaps, or a piece of string, and when I returned, my glass
, which I’d left drained on the stump by the hammock, was brimming so full I’d have to lean down and slurp at it ungracefully.

  I decided to test it, one day. I drained the glass, took a good hard look at it, said, I’m watching you. I gutted some fish. When I went back, it was still empty. Because it only refilled when my mind was elsewhere.

  But as long as the monkeys, or whatever it was, were refilling my glass, giving me more hours not less, I was happy to go along with it all. My work was coming along. I had a stretch of well-tended vines and the grapes were swelling and filling with their syrup, and in the rows between I had the beginning of corn, tomatoes, beans and peppers, and my fishing was improving. Each morning I woke early, splashed water on my face, then worked among my plants. I had made mistakes in the past, on the mainland. The why of things had not been revealed for me. And so I was patient in the new place.

  Then, dozing in my sling, the bottle nearby, I would hear the scratching of their claws on the flagstones, and I would half open my eyes. The monkeys began to come like this regularly, and always when my mind was elsewhere. Sometimes they fucked with tenderness, sometimes anger, but always afterwards he was alone, and it seemed he remembered what it was he went there to forget. He would fall and lie with his skull against the flagstones and his little ribcage – rabbit ribs, fishbones – would stand out with each laboured breath. He’d limp away into the tunnel of darkness between the vines and I’d reach for my bottle and take a slug.

  And I recalled the old man, that first day, pointing at the courtyard, saying one word. I couldn’t be sure, I might have remembered wrong, or misheard, but I know it had three syllables and I remembered the initial letter clearly.