by Kevin Barry
He stood in the street, smoking. He hadn’t smoked in years. It was, it seemed, still in him, still something he could do. So he took the first cigarette he was offered, in the belief that it would be suspicious if he didn’t. Ah sure they all smoke over there, I left mine in Sullivan’s, thanks, thanks very much, I’ll go get a pack in a minute. And days later he was still smoking, and buying the things, which were expensive to the point of absurdity. He stared at the change in his hand. He thought maybe he’d given a smaller note than he’d thought. Absurd. But the next time, it was the same, and he stared at the change in his hand and laughed at it. It was the money was absurd, not the smoking. The smoking was civilised. The money was a joke. His tail told him so. The State, he decided, was using cigarettes to devalue the currency, and he told people so, and they laughed and he smirked and everyone felt terrible clever. He bought boxes of twenty for a while, wondering at himself, and he sweated in the street in the evenings, smoking, as it was often warm, but he was unsure which way the sweat was coming – from the climate outside or the climate within (and he loved this little metaphor, as he loved these days all metaphors, and the grand metaphor, the Great Metaphor, which he thinly sliced and imparted to all, a host and sacrament (you see!) and celebration of all that was due to him having reached the age he had so unintentionally reached, with nothing to show for it but a tail) which was a fevered tussle (the climate within, that is) between terror and embarrassment and the urge to talk and to not stop talking, not for a minute, to devalue the tail through the furious display of the tail. The over-wagging of the tail. Look at the tail. Look at it! It does not exist! For this was the key he had found in his pocket, or rather in Sullivan’s pocket. The key to returning with his tail between his legs. To laugh at the Devil. To say the Devil’s name. To declare him with a smile, and to counter him with intelligence, with contradiction, with laughter. Show the tail to the tail detectives. He met them all head-on, his knowing look met their knowing looks. Old buddies. Old friends. Old lovers. Jokers and clowns and earnest little fuckers. All of them eyeing him like he was something that they’d seen before, and it was always languid, with the chin up – Back, is it? And he fucking held their gaze. Back it is, back alright, broke and broken. With my tail between my legs. And there was always, sure enough, a pause. But he held them, he held them all, and they all fell eventually, they all dropped those chins, and the smile went full on, and Michael would laugh with them and slap their shoulder and he’d buy them a pint. Money, he decided, covered most holes. And Sullivan too. Look at me, Sully, chased out of it, back to Mammy, the eyes fallen out of my head. Will I take you out to dinner? And it was as easy as that. Say it. Just say it. And contradict it. And he piled the money onto a credit card from a bank he had never been able to pronounce the name of, and he knew that somewhere a few thousand miles away a little counter was clocking up, and he didn’t like that metaphor, but what can you do? Life is what’s important. He spoke and he recounted and he told them all about it. I was there for two years, then there for six months, then I was everywhere for a while, then I moved in with Dieter, no that was after the stint at the radio station, and my time in the theatre company, and no, Dieter is in his forties, well, his fifties then, what does it matter, you people need to drop the ageism, and no, no, I don’t think my accent has changed at all, what are you talking about, I’m the same as the day I left. He switched after a while to roll-ups, they were cheaper, a little. And he switched then to pouches he bought on the streets, Mary or Henry, which tasted either like steel wire or laundry, but it was cheaper, and he was rattling through the money like a runaway train, and Sullivan smiled at him, half smiled, and wanted to see a picture of Dieter, and Michael couldn’t find one. And apart from Sullivan – Sullivan and his big eyes and his hugs and his kindnesses and the long hours of listening as Michael stroked the tail – the people he was talking to were acquaintances who felt no entitlement to pin him down on any of it. He told someone he’d spent a night in jail in Bucharest. And he spoke, regretfully, as if of a terrible time, a terrible mistake, of the amount of drugs he took over a six-month period in Copenhagen, though he’d never been to Copenhagen, and he told everyone this, and asked them to keep it to themselves, and he would cheer them up at the end of it, listen to me would you, wounded creature, back home with my tail . . . ah here, I’ll get you another. And he sometimes stroked that tail obscenely. He’d seen some raw times, some shocking things, and it was good to be back in this quiet little city where no one had any money and no one had a clue. The truth in him shrank. It shrank and it shrank, and he lost it for days on end, obscured by the clutter of these stories, and the stories were so much more comforting, and fuller, and they seemed fairer too, they seemed closer to him, to what he was, to him as a person, and they were not all to his advantage, and he punished himself with some of them, for balance, for justice. He deserved them. And they were beautiful and cruel and complicated, these elaborations. He saw in his listeners’ half smiles their appreciation of the close calls, the humiliations, the sorry state of his tattered progress, which had stuttered but was progress, was something, was a life, was a life in particles, in anecdotes and characters and things that had happened. He was a tour manager for a Ukrainian punk band on a debacle through France and the Low Countries. He had slept with two sisters in Warsaw. He had been beaten half to death on a train through the Carpathians. He hinted at drug money. He’d lived with a couple of rent boys in Hamburg – sweet days those, the sweetest. He’d driven a taxi in Berlin. This last one he dropped as soon as he’d said it. Ah no, I didn’t, my German is terrible. But I had a lover who drove a taxi in Berlin. The stories he told me. I’m sure he made most of them up. Born liar, trouble, I got out of it pretty sharpish. He stayed away from his family, though he thought he saw his sister once, crossing Dawson Street in a rain-shower, and that was like a dream that he suddenly remembered. The furtive Christmas visits, three of them in five years, he didn’t mention them. He claimed not to have been back once, and thought he could get away with that. He claimed a family rupture for convenience, though there was none that he knew of. He claimed the time of anyone who vaguely recognised him, who fell into his orbit. He declared himself broke and bought everyone a pint. He declared his tail between his legs and he made new friends and he slept with some of them and he was proud of his tattoos though everyone had them here, or something like them, and more of them, and everyone had already slept with everyone else here, and certain inconsistencies in his metaphors were showing. Here.
He ran, Michael did. You have told this one before, Michael, darling. I have? You have. Is it not worth hearing again? Maybe, for the variation. He ran. He ran down his minutes. He would step outside for a cigarette so that he could gather himself. And if no one joined him he would step back in again after two drags to hear what they were saying. Nothing. Dieter, did I tell you, the kindest man I ever knew. A beautiful man, a loving caring man. But I couldn’t bear to see him fail, his health, after the operation, I couldn’t bear it, and I know it’s selfish, and I know, I know, he calls me every day, and I miss him, Jesus I miss him, but I can’t, I can’t . . . I’m sorry. And he found tears for Dieter. Remarkable, true tears. Poor Dieter. I’m a bastard and I know it and I don’t deserve a thing.
He delivered the invocation one night to a woman he’d been to college with – apparently. He said it to her under a full moon on Dame Lane with a pint in his hand and a pint in hers, and his roll-up burning a sour taste of scorched bone onto his lip. Tail between me legs, he said. And she regarded him, and exhaled towards the heavens and sighed a little sigh and said, Sure we all have our tails between our legs these days. Whether we’re coming or going. That’s the truth. And if you don’t have your tail between your legs then you’re going nowhere, and you might as well lie down and die. And it turned out that she was off to South Africa the next week. And she did not think she would be back. And he wondered was there anyone listening to him at all.
It was Sulliv
an, nearly a month in, who caught him in the bathroom staring at himself in the mirror, at his tattoos and his collapsed hair, weeping like a child.
What is it?
I can’t remember.
You’re hurt, aren’t you?
I suppose I am.
It’s your heart, am I right?
What else is it, ever?
And there is no Dieter, and there is no television, and there is no Copenhagen, and there is no Berlin taxi driver or Hamburg rent-boys.
No.
So. It’s alright. It really is. Come here. Tell me the story. Tell me the real story.
No.
And he stared at what was written on him, and wept for what was written through him, and he had no idea what he was at all, or what he was at all.
The Second-Best Bar in Cadiz
Andrew Meehan
I left Ireland to escape mince, in search of properly ripe fruit, but in time I have discovered that the diners of coastal Andalusia, despite a stated fondness for seafood, have no interest in foods like sardine ice cream and are impatient with destination dining of any kind.
I shave my face in the green darkness of the bathroom in Oscar’s – which is not yet a destination restaurant, however much I want it to be – then move to my papery chest. Because I am going out again. I am going to meet Nacho, who will be returning from a pick-up. Most nights we go to his bar, Puntillitas, and drink and do drugs and sometimes, when I can get Viagra, we make love. Most of the time he has somewhere to go or has had too much cocaine, but I will certainly see him sometime before morning, even if we have parted as though that is it.
Nacho is a typical Gaditano (whatever that means, from day to day) and I am not. However, my apartment near the cathedral does have one of the biggest terraces in Cadiz and I work nearby. My life is a postcard and yet I have fostered a dependence on products and especially pills to get me through any kind of normal situation – exercise, sex, breakfast – until now, when it has become impossible to regard any kind of situation as normal, even a drink with my boyfriend. Even cooking, which I chose as a career because it contained the promise of impressive people, regular money, perfect discoveries in foreign locations resulting in awards and enticing invitations. And because being a chef means I am not The Man with the Plastic Fork in the Emperor Inn in Castlebar. I do not hear from Nacho and so drink vodka alone on my terrace.
Nacho keeps leaving the same message. It is 5 a.m. and calmly I make it clear that I am looking forward to seeing him tomorrow. I assume that his bar with the palm-warm manzanilla will still be there tomorrow. Now he is at my door and he has been sampling his own wares – usually coarse, pink, pure MDMA – and is smiling so much that he may dislocate his own jaw. He is a tiny, stout skinhead with a spider’s web creeping from his elbow all over his arm and when he is not high he is lugubrious to the point of being sinister. His bar is near the market but he lives in a house near Puerto de S— that he passes through just two or three times a week. Tonight, he has not been home.
Unreliable time-keeping aside, Nacho is a kind, superstitious man with unquenchable curiosity about the strangest things – geology, gambling – and an unsolvable disinterest in most others. He enters deep trauma at the thought of anything happening to any of his family and fierily worries that one of them may outlive another and is therefore irrevocably concerned about his own drug intake. Amongst other things, he is convinced that he is about to have a heart attack and die before he has finished tiling the fountain at his house in the country.
I’m laughing – this is usually funny – until Nacho upends his fist and thumps his breast, swallowing uselessly, pleading with me, somehow, before pouncing on my vodka. Now he rolls around the mattress like he is trying to wipe something off himself and onto my sheets, groaning, and reaches for the bedside drawer where I keep the Valium, which I sense are beyond him in some way. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid tonight.
‘I’ve changed the sheets,’ I say. ‘Can we do this in the other room?’
‘Fucking fuck,’ he says.
Of course, he is exaggerating, but it is effective, and I am now willing to agree to whatever point he has wanted to make. What I am not expecting is Nacho to lose control completely. This is unpleasant and if I am not mistaken could be a lose–lose situation. I strong-arm him through the sitting room where I manage to prevent him from barfing onto my explosively white carpet and steer him towards the kitchen and, eventually, after some argy-bargy with the fridge, to the terrace, which is drenched in the cooling perfume of honeysuckle. After another frenzy, he begins to soften and calm.
‘I want to get some sleep tonight,’ I say.
‘Fucking fuck,’ he says.
He is not the type to analyse things. We kiss dolorously before he goes off to get more coke. He promises to return and customarily he doesn’t, so I manage some sleep before I have to prepare for work. I take my tea to the terrace and stay there longer than normal (I allow myself ten minutes per morning), listening to the cathedral bells and working on my plans for Oscar’s.
Nacho, heart attack avoided, is where?
I am now in a hurry to get to work and so do what I have to do – there are just the two of us in the kitchen so I will make the bread, gut the fish, skim the stock – before Oscar joins me; though, unexpectedly, I take a detour via the churro stall near the market. I sit stupidly on a tiled bench near some roadworks. I can picture it, if today is like any other day: Nacho half-asleep beside some eighteen-year-old, partially clothed and unable to do anything about it, thinking about the dust and piss on the floor, about me, unaware that I am considering a future without him and may soon be gone from his life completely. This is a good idea but a new one and something I must develop further.
