There Are Little Kingdoms

by Kevin Barry

  Dealing with men was like dealing with infants. If they weren’t puppy-dog, they were crude and arrogant, and which was worse? She wasn’t ever taking ecstasy again. It brought all this emotional crap up. And it… just… wasn’t… neat. She put her head against the banisters and closed her eyes. Eoin, in her opinion, had already stalled in life. When they first went out, he’d seemed to have everything opening up for him. He was rangy, good-looking, quickwitted, he was fit and active, he didn’t drink much or smoke much or do drugs much, he was sociable and presentable. But slowly, in the two years of their relationship, his terrible secret had slipped out: he was a settler. He would settle for the small solicitors firm in Galway. He would settle for a quiet, unperturbed life. He would settle for a house on Taylor’s Hill and a new Saab on a biannual basis, and he would involve himself delicately in the probate of small farmers and shopkeepers, and he would father unassuming and well-spoken children. But not with Helen Coyle he wouldn’t.

  James, who was, inevitably, Eoin’s best friend, had a wider reach to his ambition. He was a broad-beamed, meat-faced man—at just twenty-two, there was none of the boy left—and he moved across the ground with a sure-footedness born of privilege. He had subtly courted Helen Coyle for the two years she had been involved with his friend—in the end, not all that subtly—because he had recognised early that in back of the pleasantness and openness there was an overwhelming want for progress. He saw that they would propel each other forward, through all the years and the bunfights, that neither would allow the other to slacken, not for a moment. James was handsome but in the way that a bulldog is handsome and in the cause of advancement he would have the grip and clench of a bulldog’s jaws. That was good enough for Helen Coyle—she’d made her decision.

  Slowly, with a sense of building unease, the night gave away on itself. The slow fog of the mood drugs lifted and left nothing at all behind. Still there was some low music and people lay on the cushions and couches, and Alice, button-nosed, slept on her arms at the kitchen table. There was a tiny snoring sound if you crept up and listened to her quietly, and she dreamt of faraway places and pleasant young men in a warm light.

  The nineteen year old from Roscommon had been rebuffed at every turn and he prepared for a cold wet walk out the long curve of the bay to Salthill. He would not spend on a taxi if there wasn’t cause to. They would already be unwrapping bundles of newspapers outside the churches and the gulls, raucous with winter, would circle down from the low sky in search of last night’s chips.

  Helen went to her room upstairs and she quickly, neatly undressed and she stood for a moment with her left hand laid on her flawless belly—the satisfaction of that—and her pert nose twitched, she believed that she could smell smoke. She put on her dressing gown and followed the smell, it came from down the hallway, from the boxroom. She pushed in the door and saw Jack asleep on the narrow bed and the filthy old carpet smouldering on the floor. It was clear at a glance what had happened. His cigarette had fallen but there had been a piece of luck, he had the window open and rain had come in and put out the few flames that had started. It was almost at the finish of its damp smouldering by now. She went to find Coll, who shared the house, and yeah, a bucket of water, just to be sure. Fucking Jack! He could have put the whole place up, these old houses were always going up. Every year the Advertiser had another dreary tragedy, with names and ages and places of origin, from Carlow, originally, from Roscommon, originally.

  Coll was back in the living room, flicking through his records. She whispered it to him. Fucksake! he said. Fucking typical of these people! There’s another deposit gone! He ran upstairs and saw that it was as she said—he didn’t and never would trust women’s accounts of things—and he went to fetch the water. When she had bent down to whisper to him, he turned just in time to see the swell of a breast beneath the dressing gown and the image now occupied his mind to a far greater degree than the non-event of a failed fire.

  Martina turned to Mary Pearson, on a couch pushed back to the living-room wall, and she said:

  ‘Dave Costelloe? Yeah, but… kind of low-sized, isn’t he?’

  ‘I know. It’s the kind of way that if he was three inches taller he’d be a different man.’

  ‘Yeah but I do know what you mean, he’s kind of dirty?’

  ‘Oh, filthy! There is absolute filth in those eyes.’

  ‘Yeah, there is but… Jesus. Can you believe the time?’

  ‘Sunday’s a write-off. Come here, do you want to go and get some breakfast? I’m pretty sure Anton’s is open.’

  It was eight o’clock, in Galway, on a Sunday morning. The wind had eased, to some extent. It would be a cold day with intermittent rain. Ollie drove the Corolla down the docks, his beany head swivelling left and right. He had people to see at the Harbour Bar, which kept market hours, and he had only the one wiper working. In rain, it felt as though the Corolla was gone half-blind. His shin was reefed open from the drainpipe but the wound had dried up some and, all told, it was unlikely to kill him. He passed by the house and wondered if there was anything still going on there. If things worked out at the Harbour Bar, he could knock back up and do some more business. But just as he drove past, the last of the stragglers emerged to the grey old streets and another wet morning of the reconstruction.

  Breakfast Wine

  They say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of The North Star, Pearse Street.

  ‘The next thing an ESB bill will come lording in the door to me,’ he said. ‘That could tip me over the edge altogether. Or wait until you see, the fucker for the insurance will arrive in. Roaring.’

  He took the rag to the counter and worked the rag in small tight circles, worked it with the turn of the knot and the run of the grain, he was a man of precise small flourishes, Mr Kelliher, and these flourishes were a taunt to the world. Even in desperate times, they said, proper order shall be maintained. The Kelliher mouth, like generations of Kelliher mouths before it, was bitter, dry and clamped, and the small grey eyes were deranged with injustice.

  ‘I’ve no cover,’ he said. ‘My arse is hanging out to an extraordinary degree. I’m open to the fates. It’s myself and the four winds. You’ll see me yet, boys, with a suitcase, at the side of the road, and the long face on. The workhouse! That’s what they’ll have to get going again for the likes of me.’

  The clock considered twelve and passed it by with a soft shudder, as though it had been a close call. It seemed to be a fine enough day, out there beyond the blinds. Birds in the trees and flowers in the park and the first bit of warmth of the year. The torpid movement of late morning in the town, and the sunlight harsh in its vitality, as if it was only here to show the place up.

  ‘Nail me to a cross and crucify me,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘and at least that way I’d go quick.’

  The North Star was an intimate place, a place of dark wood and polished optics, with the radio tuned to the classical station for calm (it played lowly, very lowly) and the blinds let slants of light in and you’d see distant to the morbid hills, if you strained yourself. Myself and Thomas were sat there on the high stools. We were fine specimens of bile and fear and broken sleep. There was slow hungry slurping, and I finished what was before me.

  ‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’

  ‘I would of course, Brendan.’

  ‘Cuz?’

  ‘I will so,’ said Thomas.

  Mr Kelliher never drank himself—not anymore—but he drank milky tea by the gallon, and a whistling kettle was kept in perpetual operation in the small private space adjoining the bar. Its whistle was a lonesome gull, or the wheeze of a lung, and it was part of the music of the house. Mr Kelliher attended to the stout. Each fresh glass he filled two sevenths shy of the brim, with the glass delicately inclined towards the pourer’s breast, so as the st
out would not injure itself with a sheer fall, and he set them then, and there was the rush and mingle of brown and cream notes, and the blackness rising, a magic show you would never tire of.

  ‘Small industry in this country is being wiped out,’ said Mr Kelliher.

  ‘Who are you telling?’ I said.

  ‘It’s the likes of us who toil and scrape, Brendan. We’re the ones getting a clatter off the blunt end of a spade. Ignorance! That’s all you come up against around this place.’

  ‘Shocking,’ I agreed.

  He removed our used glasses—averting his eyes from them, so decorous—and placed them in the neat dishwasher, where they would expect company. He filled to the top the fresh ones and with a curt nod put them before us and a note was slid across and we moved our lips wordlessly in thanks.

  ‘There are fellas in Leinster House would shame a brothel,’ he said.

  We had no women. It was an awful lack in our lives. Mothers, daughters, lovers, wives, we had none of these at all, not a one between us, because women were a premium in the county, and in truth we were hardly prizetakers. It was from this lack of women that we had turned into auld women ourselves. Daily we regaled each other with our ailments and complaints, we talked of changes in the weather, and strangers in the town. Nothing could occur in the town of an insignificance beyond our gossip. If a wall got a lick of paint, it would be remarked in The North Star. Mr Kelliher winced, and stretched a liver-spotted hand up behind himself to investigate a region of the upper back, and his eyes leapt to the ceiling, and he said:

  ‘Would you ever get a class of a cold pain out a lung?’

  ‘Would you not mean a kind of a white heat, Mr Kelliher?’

  ‘Precisely so, Brendan!’

  ‘Searing,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Like a poker!’ said Mr Kelliher.

  ‘Arra,’ I said, and we all three of us nodded in sad resignation.

  The North Star was discreetly situated in the town. You trailed down the steep decline of Russell Hill, passed Bord Gais and Hair Affair, you kept your head down passing the guards, you moved away from the commerce and traffic of the town, you hung an abrupt left into a narrow, vague, nothing-much sort of a street, and this was Pearse Street, its dullness a measure of the low esteem that particular martyr was held in hereabouts. The North Star was the only action on Pearse Street, and sunlight breached this narrow gorge for just one hour a day but now was the hour and Mr Kelliher came out from behind the bar and he shut the blinds fully against it. He was a small man neatly hewn, and sallow, with impressively planed features, like the carved dark aztec of a cliff-face, and he was of indeterminate age, it wouldn’t surprise you if he was forty-three or seventy-four, and there was something of Charlie Chaplin in the swing-along, quick-stepping gait, but you wouldn’t mention it.

  ‘Turned out fairly nice, Mr Kelliher.’

  ‘Pleasant enough looking, Brendan.’

  ‘After the night we put down.’

  ‘Sure the night was filthy altogether.’

  He picked up the neatly placed beer mats from each of The North Star’s five zinc-topped tables, though they hadn’t been used, and he replaced them with fresh, which he dealt out with Vegas flourish. Stepped in behind the bar again, with a clearing of the throat, hmm-hmm, and it was the satisfaction of small rituals that emanated from him, though by now it was a weakish glow.

  ‘What way are they above?’

  ‘Well, Mr Kelliher.’

  ‘That’s good at least. Did you tell them Hourigan was gone to the wall?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘They’d have sport from that?’

  ‘They would, Mr Kelliher.’

  ‘A very bleak situation.’

  ‘I thought he had his head above water.’

  ‘Indeed no.’

  ‘Hard to have sympathy, all the same?’

  ‘Same fella wouldn’t piss on you, Brendan.’

  ‘The beard does nothing for him,’ said Thomas.

  The classical music succumbed to a news bulletin and there was talk of violent death, atrocities in Africa, oil shortages, a widow in Castleisland with lucky numbers for the Lottery, and we listened, keenly enough, for The North Star was at a remove from the world, certainly, but by no means cut off from it.

  ‘A sad, peculiar life, gentlemen?’

  ‘To put it very mildly, Mr Kelliher.’

  The stout was about its work. It was the third drink of the day, and the drinking would slow now to session pace—the dread of the morning had lifted, we had passed the hour of remorse, and we marched to the mellow afternoon. Even Thomas was starting to look fairly chipper. A strange rumbling then, like dogs going at each other in the distance, but it was internal, miserably, and I wasn’t sure if it was my own stomach or the cousin’s. Serious drinking, the drinking of a lifetime’s devotion, is hard physical labour.

  ‘You persevere despite it all, Mr Kelliher?’

  ‘You never weaken, Brendan. Weaken and all is lost.’

  It was due that the crossword of the Irish Times would put in an appearance, and the three of us would make light work of it, normally. Thomas would be an amazement to you. Sit there like a stone all the morning and then start throwing out words like ‘inimical’ and ‘hauteur’. But the crossword was left aside, for there was to be a disturbance this day in The North Star. The door opened up, and glamour stepped in.

  Glamour carried itself with great elegance and ease. It was jewelled at the fingers and jewelled at the throat. It wore fine woolens and high leather boots and a green velvet cape, the texture such an excitement against machine-tanned skin. Glamour took onto a high stool beside us, and delicately arranged itself.

  ‘Howye, lads,’ she said. ‘What reds have ye on?’

  The North Star was by no means inoculated against the charms of glamour, especially when it spoke with this whispery hoarseness, and Mr Kelliher was a flushed boy as he pressed into action.

  ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can only offer a meagre selection. But let’s see now, let’s see.’

  He took down one each of the varieties of red wine he kept in the house, the little 33cl, glass-and-a-bit bottles, which myself and Thomas sometimes resorted to late in the evening, if the sheer volume of stout was threatening to overwhelm matters. The evenings we hit the firewater are as well left unremarked.

  ‘Really,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘I should put you in the hands of these gentlemen. They’d be the experts.’

  I nodded, shyly, and reached down to see if my voice would function, and it had a quiver and a quake but it emerged anyway.

  ‘The merlot isn’t a bad old drop, as it goes,’ I said. ‘A Chilean.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, and she took the bottle to examine it. She granted a familiar smile to me, and she crossed her long legs beneath the woolen folds. The electric rustling of nylons was heard, it went off like a crack of lightning in the premises, and a light sweat broke out on my forehead.

  ‘The pinot noir is bog standard, to be honest with you. It’d be fairly… flat, really. Of the three, I’d nearly go for the cabarnet. It’s not going to stand up and talk to you, it’s very much the usual, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s kinda…’

  ‘Full and ripe?’ she said, with the mouth twisted slightly.

  ‘You could say.’

  ‘A very nice breakfast wine,’ said Thomas, you’d never know when he was going to come out with a quick one. She granted to him a slyer smile.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said, and she took the bottle and unscrewed the top, the movement of her long fingers was quick and dizzying.

  Now jealousy was no stranger in the town. It was my own foul weather, a cold mist that surrounded me. But it’s a familiar old song, that one, you’d hear it in every public bar of the town, you’d hear it in all the low bars of Nicholas Street, and in the suede-smelling hush of the hotel’s lounge bar, you’d hear it in all the honky tonks of the Castle Walk. The radio announced that a complex
frontal trough was moving in off the Atlantic. Good luck to it.

  ‘The sort of day,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know would you want a coat on you or what. Seasons changing.’

  ‘They haven’t much choice,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Where are you from yourself?’

  She named a western town, a place so far away that we hadn’t a picture at all of the fallings of life in that town, though we’d suspect them to be harsh.

  ‘And what brings you here?’ said Mr Kelliher.

  ‘A minor secondary road,’ she said, and winked him one, and he lit up like Christmas.

  She enquired about rental accommodation in the town, and I could sense stirrings the other side of me on a high stool. We related to her what possibilities there were.

  ‘Are you talking a night or a week or what?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m the way I don’t know how a notion might turn in me. Did you ever get that way? Did you ever wake up and think, what about a turn on the heel? What about a sudden swerve?’

  She seemed carefully made up, at first glance, but a more considered examination, there in the convivial afternoon of The North Star, revealed the flaws and slips. The mascara had run a little at the eyes, and the lip gloss was a rush job, and this gave her a fraught quality. It hinted at drama that was by no means unwelcome, for the days were slow in The North Star, and the nights were only trotting after them.

  ‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’

  ‘I would, Brendan.’

  ‘Cuz?’

  ‘Go on sure.’

  ‘And yourself, miss?’

  ‘Very kind,’ she said.

  Mr Kelliher smirked in the way that he has.

  ‘Very poor qualities of observation I would have to say, Brendan.’

  ‘Oh?’