by Kevin Barry
JOE She’s fucked around on him, John?
JOHN Oh I don’t fucking know, do I? And I mean who cares? I mean everybody’s fucked everybody else by now, haven’t they? I mean it’s 1978!
JOE Was he jealous of her?
JOHN I don’t fucking know. He’d went away, hadn’t he?
JOE He’d went where?
JOHN He’d went to sea. Where else do they bloody go? Merchant fucking seaman.
His voice is tired and hollow.
The candle spits and gutters.
JOE Did you hate her for fucking about? Or hate him for taking off?
JOHN Oh who cares anymore? It’s dead history! And what can people do about them-fucking-selves? In the end? I mean it’s the fucking blood and it’s fucking fate and it’s all laid down in advance.
JOE There’s Irish.
JOHN And there’s no fucking escape.
JOE There’s very Irish. How’d they mark you, John?
JOHN They made me choose between them.
Joe Director watches carefully the moment—he weighs it in his graven palm.
JOE Why are you here, John?
John rises and goes to the window and looks out…
JOE What are you hiding from, John?
…to the oblivious sea that holds in its palm the island of Achill and the sky with…
JOE What are you scared of, John?
…its first fade in the east. He turns and looks at them coldly now.
JOHN I can see how you operate out here, Joe. You just take these daft fucking kids and play with their fuck juices, don’t you? You put your daft thoughts in their daft fucking heads and in their daft fucking bits and it’s all too easy, isn’t it, Joe?
JOE And what’s it you’ve been up to for twenty years?
JOHN You’re just a fucking user. It’s all too easy, Joe. Too easy to make it a little kingdom out here and you’re the fucking despot and you’re king of the heap with your cocaine and your daft fucking clobber and I couldn’t care less what you’ve been up to in the Amethyst fucking Hotel…
JOE This is a paranoid thought pattern, John.
JOHN …coz I’m here to tell you what you fucking are, pal, and what you are is a pig. You’re going to die and rot and no one’ll give a fucking toss anyhow. Maybe these two fucking halfwits have some hope. Maybe they’re young enough…
He starts to walk from the room.
JOE John-kid?
JOHN I need to sleep.
SUE It’s not too late, John.
JOHN I want to know as soon as Cornelius gets back.
FRANK Did you know that Mars is about, John?
———
He goes to the room marked nine. He closes the door after. He sits on the bare mattress. The world takes its shapes outside but greyly. He can hear their voices down the hallway still.
By the breath of the sea the morning comes closer. He becomes certain that he is in danger. It will be too late to move once the brightness comes through.
He lies on the bed and tries to swat the fear away but cannot and he listens and after a while the voices come nearer but fade again.
A quietness settles—is it the sound of their waiting?
He lies in the stew of his fear and sour thoughts.
He lies almost without breathing—are there voices again?
He waits until a true silence holds about the old hotel and he rises from the bed and goes to the door and opens it by the inch and the inch again—there are no voices—and he moves along the hallway, so quietly, and he hardly takes a breath as he moves—no voices, no footsteps—and he comes down the stair and through the lobby and he walks out of the Amethyst and into the world.
Part Five
BLACK ATLANTIS
He sits in the cave. He listens for their voices but all he can hear is the slow release of the sea—a dissolve, or hissing. His mind is on the blink. His heart pumps the fear. His lips make words madly. Words that are set to run backwards. Words that run off in all directions. He has a set of nerves on like a sack of fucking snakes. He names himself backwards—Nhoj. A Bedouin in a tent? Under the starry cold desert sky. He sits in the cave. He listens very hard but there are no voices. He is way off the beam now. He is a fucking halfwit for even thinking he could walk out in the world still.
Outside, the sea moves. There is a foul hypnosis to it. There is a terrible queasiness to it. Vast creatures moan in the sea’s great room. He listens so hard that his tongue lolls. There is a new, odd, unlovely music on his brain—
He can hear squalling accordions and the manic trembles of timpani.
He can hear the white noise of a migraine feedback.
He can hear madhouse screeches and sawblade whines.
Well I’m in some kind of hell out here, aren’t I?
He tries to slow each breath as it passes through. He is scared but lit by a strange excitement, also. He feels that he is close to the edge of something new.
That gull’s cry sounds just like a lost child mewling.
———
He hides all day in the cave. He has put down some difficult days in his time and here’s another for the fucking annals. It is the movement of the water that works after a long while to calm him. There is an aching sound deep down in the rocks. He hears it as something close to a human sound.
He listens for their voices. The night creeps into the cave like a quiet animal—there are no voices.
Half-dark the May night cloaks the island again and the sea—he is so very far from home and love.
A fish jumps to break the surface of the water and his heart pops loose of its box and the fish is gone again but he is alive on the silver of its skin.
There is an opening-up inside. His mind turns again on its rusty old motors. Despite it fucking all. He feels that giddiness and he feels that grandeur.
An elegant, a dark gothical seabird appears and moves its slow-beat-steady wings across and just inches above the water.
First streaks of nightgreen run the sky.
Nobody can find him out here. He is safe here for a while at least. He digs his monkey toes into the sand and feels the tiny grains as they roll the crevices of the skin and slowed by his clamminess they cake. There have been other animals in this cave before. There have been other animals among these rocks before. He can feel them here still. In the sand deeply buried their chalk-white and brittle bones—
Elkbone.
Wolfbone.
Sealbone.
The words bring a dark turn. How might it be never to leave this place? To open a vein into the fine white sand. His lips sting hard with salt as though he’s had a feed of chips. The rocks pitch their aching—maybe he will never escape this place—and the way the oil and vinegar soak the brown paper of the bag to translucence.
Blow a ring of the breath on each chip to cool it off—
Hoff!
The hunger pang tells him that he is alive and not for leaving.
The slivers of an odd tune come right inside—it sounds like it comes from the future, or else it comes from deep in the past.
The slivers fade as quick but what you do is you just wait—
Slowtime; cavetime; the silver of the sea-night.
———
Sometimes when his nerves are in rags it does some good to recite the numbers of the Liverpool buses—
The sixteen for Princes Park.
The forty-two for Mount Vernon and Edge Hill.
The seventeen—Kirkdale; the nine—Dingle.
Buses for Crosby, Walton, Anfield Road, and the rainsome air and the steam of a caff—an egg and chip, a mug of tea you’d walk your boots across—and the yellow of the yellow of the egg yolks—so queasy and vibrant—and the long flirtations over frothy coffees—it’s from a good convent you get the better quim, the cheeky skirt, the turned-up noses and try-me eyes—and as he dreams his heart begins to slow again, and ease.
Cavetime.
He opens his eyes. He watches over the water. He listens carefully
in the gaps between the wind. There is never a silence on the island that is true. There is always something that is out there, and moving.
———
He stands in the dark vault of the cave.
The night sea gleams; it moves its lights in a black glister.
The water drags the shingle and the sound is slow and luxurious—
an old king in silverbeard fans a palmful of gold coins to a tabletop covered with white cloth
—and the rocks ache and he sighs in agreement with them. It has never been easy nor was it meant to be.
The fine sand of the cave’s floor comes up to a brilliant white in the moon’s glow. His skin is so white in the glow. He has been ever such a whiteman always—ever the honky, ever the goy.
There is a hard splash as the water splits, and the great sleek head shows, and the dapper spindles of the moustache, and the long fat body works its muscles onto the rocks.
It sidles up to the cave’s entry—hello?—and pokes a sober look inside.
The sad doleful eyes; the night caller; the seal.
There is a moment of sweet calm as their eyes lock on each other’s.
Alright? he says.
Alright, John, the seal says.
———
And I’ll tell you another thing.
Go on?
All this…
He swings his head to indicate the world beyond—he’s got a fat stern head on like a bouncer.
Fucked, he says.
You don’t mean…
I do, John. It won’t last.
You mean everything?
The works, he says.
But it sounds as wehrks.
The wind, the waves, the water, he says.
But it sounded as wawteh.
It’s all in extra time, he says. It’s all of it fucked, son.
Mostly what John cannot get his head around is the Scouse accent.
So where’s it you’re from originally?
You’d know Formby way, John?
Would I? Half my bloody life out there as a kid.
Bunkin’ off, was it?
Now you have me.
———
In a cold sun—wintertime—with their coats laid down in a hollow of the dunes, a salt-lipped girlie, and the way that he kissed her and got a throb on, and he kissed her and put his hand between her legs—clamp. The sudden military clenching of her thighs.
John?
It’s fine.
Don’t.
I won’t then.
The magic words—she opened her legs—and it happened for a while but not for long, and there was the train home—through grim Bootle—and the searching for words—the Albert Dock—and the shifting in seats—Central station—can I see you the Wednesday then?—maybe, I don’t know—and the blue suburbs—maybe, I don’t think so, John—and aunt and home, the home that was his only home.
———
You can’t go back, John.
But I just been.
He eyes the seal hard. He wants some fucking answers here. He has come all this way.
Let me see if I can explain things, John. What you do is you open your eyes in the morning, okay? First thing? And it’s a particular world that appears…Am I right?
Yeah?
And what it’s got is…
is the fall of black hair on the white of her skin
…the look of a world that’s always been. As if it will never change, as if it will never break up, as if it will never disappear…
John cuts in—
I’ve a feeling I’m not about to hear anything good here.
The seal laughs but ruefully.
Reality, John, tends not to hang around. A lonely bloody suburb in 1955—it’s gone—and the rattle of the train for Central under your bony arse—it’s gone—and the smell of the sweat and the red raw of the acne and a tumble in the Formby dunes—it’s gone—and her with a kisser on that tastes of salt and Bovril…
He hadn’t remembered the Bovril tang—a strange seal this.
…and all of it, John? It’s all got the same weight as a bloody dream.
So what’s left that’s real?
This, the seal says. Where you’re sat just now.
The clouds drift to hide the moon; the cave darkens. A pool of silence is allowed to open. The silence is a tease. The seal holds it for a long while, then—
What’s it you want to know?
John sits up a little straighter. He feels his mouth dry out. His words come small and shyly—
Do the, ah…
Go on?
Do the dead ones get together out there?
You’re an odd fish, John.
I know that.
Do you mean on the water?
I think I do, yeah.
It’s complicated, the seal says.
Silence—a heavy beat.
Then—
Deathhauntedness, the seal says.
Okay.
That’s our little problem, isn’t it, John?
John’s head swings low—his remorse.
Deathhauntedness, the seal says. The fear that it’s all going to end and the measuring out of the time that’s left or might be and the morbid fear of numbers and dates and the fear of photographs because they hold the moment in such a sad way and the sense of summer and life as a painful place, as if it’s a painful place to be, out here, in life, and the fear of brightness and the fear of light and the fear of losing her, of dying first—who dies first?—and every time you hold her it’s what you think—who dies first?—and the cold cold feeling that comes in the small hours
—am I getting close in yet, John? Am I getting close in yet, old pal?—
and the stewing in the past and the sense of every time being maybe the last time and everything is charged and everything glows and the night terrors that come in a soak of sweat
—you could call all of this more plainly love—
and the sentiment and the fear and the poison and the pain…
Don’t forget the fucking isolation, pal!
I could hardly forget that, John. The sense that life is for everyone else but not for you? And you know the scariest of the lot? The very worst of it all?
Stop.
You think it might be the sweetest feeling, don’t you, John?
You want to take the pain away.
You want to take the numbness away.
You want to let it fade away.
Let it fade, he says.
And he is alone then in the cave.
———
The next fucking development—
He tries to step from the cave but the white sand rises and circles its grains, slowly at first, but then faster and faster again until it’s a great spinning wheel of blurred light and he’s trapped inside.
He tries to Scream but nothing comes.
He cannot hear himself breathe—is he even breathing?
He cannot hear his heart beat—is it even beating?
He tries to Scream but nothing comes.
He is flung back by a great force.
The grains of sand settle again to the cave floor and for a moment a dead silence holds.
Then he hears his name called—
Joh-hhhnn?
———
The voice is taken by the wind again.
He sits in the cave and asks his heart to settle.
As if it has ever yet settled.
He watches over the water. He works to slow his breath. He sits as still as he can. The vaulted eaves of the cave contain all that’s left of him.
These haunted, vaulted eaves.
He begins to gain the control of his thoughts again. He sees that the morning will come up clear. He begins to trace out the lines of something new. He says the words aloud until they come in forms and pattern. He can see the tiny detail and he can see the broader sweep.
He stands and paces between the cave’s walls. He slaps a palm off each of the walls in tur
n, and he counts aloud as he slaps and paces, he counts from one to nine and back again.
It will contain nine songs—the nine.
He can hear the tiny fragments—he can hear the broader sweep.
There is an autumn and a winter and a cold, cold spring pouring through him now—he needs to keep pace with the rush.
It will contain nine fucking songs, and it will fucking cohere, and it will be the greatest fucking thing he will ever fucking do.
Now in the cave he has all of its words and all of its noise and all of its squall.
He sees the broad sweep—he sees the tiny detail. This is the one that will settle every score. This is pure expression of scorched ego and burning soul.
The title comes through with first light. He makes carefully with a finger the letters of the word in the white sand
b e a t l e b o n e
and this is what he knows for sure:
Heard once it will haunt you fucking always.
———
The morning comes higher to make a bone-white sky. It takes away his manic joy and slips the anxiety back in. Because this is how it fucking is and this is how it fucking goes.
He is so tired. He hasn’t slept a wink. He has tried so hard this long while to be at home in the world. Baking the bread. Swinging in a papoose the baby. Cosy-as-the-fucking-womb stuff. Captain fucking Domestic. Doing all the voices. Doing down the days. But his mind will go to other places. He cannot hold the moment. It is the moment itself that contains all riches. Maybe on his own island he will finally learn to hold the moment. He needs to get to his own island. He has been drawn there again for a reason. He is on the wrong fucking island. He needs to make the trip whole now.
He stands and shakes out his limbs.
Alright then, he says.
He tastes the sea and the salt, the sexiness, the early morning air.
He steps from the cave.
———
They’ll call it another crack-up album. Fucking press. Fucking pigs with typewriters. Fucking typing with their fucking toes. Tappety-fucking-tap-tap. With their stubby little piggie fucking toes and their fags in their piggie little gobs and their fat little mugs of honey-brown ale. Feed their fat fucking faces. Fat typing piggie bastards.
Well, okay: crack-up album is just fine with him—
Where it all breaks loose.
