by Kevin Barry
That feeling mightn’t be your own at all.
It is a sadness that’s ripe and livid on the air. He tries to hum it but he cannot—the notes will not hold or take shape.
Do you see now the way you can fall into a dream with this place easy enough if you’d like to, John?
———
I am working on a way to the island, John. We are not beaten yet. In fact an O’Grady is never beat. An O’Grady could be down on the flat of his back stuck like a pig and the guts spewing out of him like a red fucken river and he’s still not beat. All I need is your patience, sweet John. Just stay hid till the place clears. Give it a day or give it two and the Clew will be clear as light. Patience is the virtue required. This is the best place for you. It’s not like I can leave you with normal kinds of people. These are your own kinds of people. Just relax yourself and I’ll be back again shortly. I will get you to the island, John.
———
A vat of goat curry simmers on the hob. It’s got horn and pheromone and dark magic in. Frank stirs, Frank tastes; Frank looks a bit puzzled. Frank also is the lieutenant in charge of chickpeas.
This lot will feed the regiment, John says.
Frank has a First War face. He smiles weakly and takes up the pot of chickpeas and sets it on the drainer. He twists the end of an ashy rope of hair between a thumb and forefinger. John can see that the boy is in the room and not—his mind is all fucked with and swayed.
You’ve been taken apart tonight, have you, Frank?
It did get a bit thorny.
And how you doing now?
Frank sniffs at the air for a clue; he takes out a lighter and he burns the same tip of hair.
It could go either way, John.
Battle’s never won, is it, Frank?
You’ve got one thing reckoned, he says, another comes up.
It’s like laying lino, John says. Does it get violent in the room up there?
It goes ’round the edges of.
Frank tests a chickpea in his gob—he looks dumbfounded.
What exactly are you doing out here, Frank?
The boy smiles. He has milk-bottle shoulders and a North-of-England mug, that First War face.
Where’s it you’re from, kid?
I’m from Leeds.
A Tommy in a trench—take aim on the alleyman.
I’m sorry for your troubles, John says.
And he can see the sweet dull suburb—dad’s an headmaster, isn’t he?—and the sweet beaming mam; she wears a floral print; it’s the better end of Leeds, this.
I want to change, Frank says.
I’m all for it, change. Every day of your fucking life you’ve got to change. You can’t stand still, not ever. You change or you fucking die. But it’s you that’s got to make the change, Frank. Nobody can tell you how and nobody can show you how.
The boy narrows his eyes.
Now if I was you, Frank? I’d grab young Sue and your satchels and I’d take to the road and bloody smartish.
What gives you the right to say?
Nothing. But I look at you, Frank, and you’re twenty years old or whatever you are and I think it’s a shame you’ve got your head all mangled up by this old hog who’s set himself up as some kind of fucking guru out here, some kind…
No leaders here.
Oh look around you, Frank. Open your dim fucking eyes.
But the boy just shakes his head in sadness and covers the chickpeas with a tea towel.
Grub soon, he says, and leaves the room.
High in a corner of the room a spider rides a breezeblown web and there isn’t even a window open.
A hurdy-gurdy plays somewhere from a hi-fi and from elsewhere there is a dull sobbing.
Not good not good not good.
———
By night he’ll creep in on tiptoes to watch the child sleeping. There is something in the way that he breathes that stops all the time inside. A trace of slime above his lips—a snail’s slime, a silver—and John wipes it clean with an edge of his T-shirt softly as he can so’s not to wake him. The city outside quiet as it ever can be. The black breathing of the park. And the way the past is dropping away. He stays as quiet as he can, he hardly takes a breath—at last the past is dropping away—and the kid unglues an eye—so silently—and has a peep and he takes him up to love and they stand together in the blue of the night above the streets and park, and the city for half a moment is quiet as it ever can be, and they are blue in love and doomed in all the usual ways.
———
Joe Director pads softly across the lobby in his flowing garb. He positively fucking wafts across the lobby. He has a little Moroccan teapot held daintily in the one paw and a small cine camera in the other. He’ll want to watch himself with that fucking camera. He sighs even as he walks, and there is something that changes on the air as he comes across. He has an odd weight on the air, as a ghost has weight.
John-kid, he says. A toppener?
We will sit over our nettle tea together. There is no want out the Amethyst Hotel for nettle fucking tea. We will sit and primly sip our tea in this spell of midnight pleasantness. Joe Director stretches and yawns; he lifts his fat little feet and he kicks them out into the air for a bit and he lets them drop again, wearily.
You’re tired, Joe?
Wall-fallin’, he says.
John can feel his stomach contract. There is something in the tone or note. There is something in the waddling Northern vowels. There is something off. We will sit parked in the lobby like a pair of very deranged guests. Joe places the camera significantly on the floor between them and slowly now he tells a version of himself. He tells of all the mad sisters and all the feral brothers, all packed together like ferrets in a sack, and this was in a nothing house, and this was on a nothing street, and this was under the coalsmoke and Lancashire sky and
—nettle tea, a careful sip; on he drones—
the rancid squats in London town—someplace horrid, wasn’t it Ealing?—and the camp in Spain, and the dogs and the junk and the lizard women, and the babies with stars for eyes
—I beg your pardon, Joe?—
and a black-sand beach for a winter—all the junk—and a lost-time in Morocco—medina whispers—and if any of it is true or not, John does not care, all he wants is to hear the telling, having an interest, as he does, in such arrogant freaks.
We are what we pretend to be, aren’t we, Joe? For a finish?
He does not like this—his smile is thin, grey, cattish.
You’ve been out here for a while have you, Joe?
Been here for years now.
The smile warms; there’s a flip of the wrist.
Feels like nothing, he says. So long as you’re keeping busy.
You know about my island, Joe?
I knew some of the people you had on it for a bit.
The Diggers?
Same as.
I heard there was a fire out there.
I heard as much, John.
He takes out a lighter and wraps a wiry strand of his hair around a fat thumb; he sets fire to the end of the strand.
The high note of its bitter scent flashes on the air.
Joe?
He takes up the camera, and trains it, and sets it with a flick of the thumb to its whirring.
No thanks, John says—he raises a palm against it.
Not even a quick hello, John?
Put the fucking thing down.
———
And might it be out there still—or up there—somewhere, in an old freak’s effects, or on the spidering web, just a few seconds at the end of a reel as the tall man, gaunt with tiredness, holds a palm against the lens and pushes it away firmly, angrily, and the hog-like man chuckles, and it is past midnight at the Amethyst Hotel—are there witches moving on the beach?—and all the stars are out, and Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky.
———
They settle again to their sipping; they settle again to their talk.
I’ve had some luck in my life, John. I’ve had an angel’s share. But for you to show up at our little place here? Well that’s something very special indeed.
There’s an arrogance to him, and the hoggish smile, and the query comes now just as expected—
Do you want to come up the room, John?
He says—
Joe?
Yeah?
Have you any idea how long it’ll be before Cornelius gets back?
———
Sometimes he’ll walk the streets on the biblical afternoons when a great downpour hits the avenues and it rains frogs and cats and dogs and the people all become strange twisted birds in the hot wind from the tunnels and get sucked down the black maws of the subways and the taxi cabs move through the yellow blur and vapours of the streets and the rain washes the colours of the streets and smears them and he comes down from his eyrie and walks the streets for a while and he is that happy in his old raincoat with the fisherman’s hat pulled down over his eyes—the hat a yellow oilskin makes him look like a cartoon duck—and he roams for a while around the seabed of the city and he has a natter with the crustaceans—hello?—and he goes among the pools of the streets and the mad things—the hat he’s had for three bucks off a Chinese dude that keeps a stall in the park—among the crabs and the mad—he talked to a Turkish boy once who had only the one yellow snaggle tooth and a mouth that’d been opened with a hatchet apparently and a T-shirt that read Galatasary—and for a while it feels like his very own town and place and maybe he can work again and breathe again and write again, and not be locked to the fucking past—that he might play again—not locked to the past—that he can write again—not locked to the past and its same old song—
Lah-de-dah
Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.
———
At table—
There’s Frank.
There’s Sue.
There’s Joe Director.
It is two in the morning. It is early in the Maytime. It is a whispery old dining room. There is a vat of goat curry and a giant wooden bowl of spiced chickpeas with mint and parsley and there are bottles of cold Madeiran wine. Into the grain of the wooden table the words
B L A C K
A T L A N T I S
are carved and from a hi-fi the boozy sitars waft—a dozen years he’s been trying to outrun the fucking sitars. Spoon up the curry from the antique delft. It’s tasty as hell.
Kid, says Joe. Tender as such.
Drink the cold sweet wine—it’s a very nice old wine. Let the night drift out a little. Get looser. The delft shows a little Dutch kid. The finger-in-the-dyke kid. What’s-his-face? Outside the pale night is stretched across the sky.
Black Atlantis, Joe?
Joe Director nods sombrely.
It’s outside the window, John.
Joe Director is a forest hog.
Frank is a wolf.
Sue, an elf.
And John?
I have made my own shell—
I am the clam,
the barnacle,
the brittlestar.
———
Do you want to come up the room, John?
No, I don’t.
Do you want to get the rants on, John?
No, I fucking don’t actually because what I realise right now I’m sat here is I don’t need to scream no more and I don’t need to rant neither because I know who I am and what I am and what I am is I’m a full-grown fucking man. I don’t need to do that stuff anymore.
Come on, John…
Look, he says. After a while you’ve gone and opened yourself up plenty. And you can just let it fucking lie. But you lot do whatever you need to do to get yourselves through the night. Don’t let me stop you.
You want to make a circle, John?
I’m good but thanks.
You want to get the rants on, John?
I’ve said no! I don’t want to get the fucking rants on!
Do nothing you don’t want to do, John-kid.
Well that’s just fucking fine then.
———
He drinks a bit and smokes a bit and drifts. The light of the moon comes through in witchy rays. He thinks—
What if we were to run away for real? Say to Buenos Aires to a secret compound behind high gates with Hector on security detail with his machine gun and his ’tache. Or make it a tiny fiefdom in a jungle someplace—a Kurtz. Or make for the desert. Or what about Berlin in an old factory packed with hypodermic flunkies. Or what about Budapest. Or what about fucking Barnsley. Or say he goes upriver, or say he goes underground, or say he’s a shepherd in Patagonia—of course you’ve got your Welsh down there, bloody Taffs, they get everywhere—or say he just clings to a rock out in the middle of the black fucking ocean
Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief
on his own tiny Atlantis
as kids we sang, on the street we sang
on his nineteen rabbity acres—or what about a fucking trout farm in Wales—do a Roger Daltrey on it—and let there be no…
You’re on the move, John?
This is Joe Director.
You what?
You’ve left the room, John. You might pretend to be here but you’re not. It can’t contain John, the Amethyst.
Frank and Sue are quiet, smiling, watchful.
Come on up the circle, John.
Fuck off.
What about we do the rants, John?
You’re a bunch of fucking throwbacks.
Come on, John.
It’s 1978!
We could go up the room, John.
I’m done with all that stuff. I’m done with all that open up and bleed.
We could go to the room right now.
Come on, John, says Sue, and she’s up, an elf, and she has his hand in hers, and her touch is so light.
Come on, John, says Frank, a young wolf, and he’s up, and moving.
The time is now, John, says Joe Director. Let’s go inside.
Part Four
THE RANTS
Pale night.
An upstairs room at the Amethyst Hotel.
Once a room for dancing, its ghosts, unseen, move in silence across the old boards still.
Sea-rasp outside hoarse as love by night whispered.
The room is bare but there are symbols of the occult daubed on the walls.
On the floor in a corner of the room a tapered candle burns on a saucer of Dutch patterned delft—the flame sputters and twists in the breeze that comes through the room and the red wax melts in beads that fall to pool and harden on the faded blue of the delft.
The symbols on the walls are in a red daubing as of blood.
The light of the candle is feeble and yellowish—the pale blue of night dominates against it.
High windows are left open to the night.
Moths in flight are shown though feebly in the throw of candlelight.
Joe, Frank, Sue and John squat upon the boards to make a Ranters’ circle there.
They are an hour in, and they are already past the worst of it—
JOHN I said shut your fucking hatch you little elf-faced fucking witch!
SUE Oh why don’t you shut your fucking beak you lying rat-faced bastard!
FRANK Go harder, Sue.
SUE What you are, John? You really want to know what you are?
JOHN Oh fuck off! I mean what gives you the right? Fuck off!
SUE What you are…
JOHN On the fucking broom you rode in on!
SUE …is a fucking suck machine. You’re just a rich guilty bastard away on a skite. You come out here…
JOHN You can do better than this, Sue.
SUE …and the way you look down at us? In your arrogance? When it’s you that shows up here? With your whingy fucking snout stuck in the air and your whingy fucking beak all twisted oh and…
Hard veins of assault rise in Sue’s neck; their blue pulsing is an alien form in the room; she loudens.
SUE …it
’s give-to-me, give-to-me, give-to-me, that’s what you’re saying, that’s what you’re asking, every fucking cell you got it’s screaming give-to-me, give-to-me, give-to-me—you’re a fucking leech and paranoid come calling and saying it with your eyes—suck-suck-suck—make it all easy and calm and sweet forme…
FRANK Leech come crawling.
SUE …is what you’re saying, fucking leech…
JOE Suck the blood.
SUE …and justify, justify, tell me I’ve done all the right things, won’t you, tell me I’ve let no one down not ever, won’t you, and you can’t even see you’re the most superior fuck that ever stood up and all you are is a fucking…
Sue begins to weep.
SUE …is a fucking…
FRANK IS a whinging fucking hooknose bastard.
Frank Screams.
Sue rises onto her knees and makes the cocksucking gestures—cupped palm, piston wrist—and Screams and lets her eyes roll until all that shows is the whites of her eyes and she roars from her hollows at John—
SUE Give-to-me give-to-me give-to-me! Suck suck suck suck suck! You’re a fucking worm!
JOE Harsh, Sue?
FRANK Harsh to fucking worms.
Joe Director’s hands move to his belly to bed down the chuckles there. He is a proud old hog.
Sue exhales sharply from her nose and falls to the seated position again; Sue deflates and wipes her tears away.
John raises his hands behind his head and knits his fingers there; his smile is dew-bright, amused, morning-fresh.
JOHN You’re gonna have to do better than this, kids. Much better.
Sue smiles and shakes her head—John winks at her—and now she sticks her tongue out and she loads indecency into her eyes. She lets her voice drop an octave—there is throat and smoke in it now.
SUE I know what you fucking want.
JOHN Oh try harder! Please! Coz I’ve had the real nasties thrown at me, you know. And by proper fucking maniacs.
SUE Let’s talk about cunt.
JOHN You’re too fucking obvious.
SUE Fuck me fuck me fuck me. Is that what you want to hear, John? Let’s talk about love.
JOHN Oh behave, child.
FRANK Here we go.
SUE You want to have in, don’t you, John?
