by Kevin Barry
My afternoon routine was to have coffee at the FACT cinema near the top of Bold Street and then shop at Matta’s Middle Eastern deli about halfways along. I walked daily the roll of the street, and very often I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, because for all its vibrancy there is an air of otherness or of past times about the street, too. I was not yet aware that Bold Street is the site of more reported paranormal activity than anywhere else in Britain.
———
A time slip occurs on the street. It is usually documented as happening in the vicinity of the old Lyceum post office, by the side entrance to Central station and opposite Waterstones bookstore. A typical report, from 2002, carried in the Liverpool Daily Post, came from a former policeman who went shopping on the street with his wife one Saturday afternoon. They emerged from Central station. He met a friend and stopped to talk for a moment. His wife went ahead to Waterstones. When he went to follow, he saw the name “Cripps” above the bookstore, and he jumped back at the honking of a motor horn from an old-fashioned van with the name “Cardin’s” on its side. Everywhere on the street the women wore full skirts and had permed hair; the men wore mackintoshes and hats. He crossed the street and the window of the store contained not books but old-fashioned women’s shoes, umbrellas, handbags. He felt panicked and he asked a lady beside him, who wore contemporary dress, if this store didn’t sell books. Equally bemused, she said that she thought it did, too, and she turned away. He entered the store and there was his wife among the stacked paperbacks, and he looked outside and the street had returned to the moment again.
There have been more than a hundred similiar reports over the years. Almost all of them relate to the area around the Lyceum post office on Bold Street. All the reports suggest that the time slip that occurs leads into the 1950s.
———
I was removed from Dorinish Island in a state of distress. The fish-farmer brought me back to Murrisk Pier and to the same pub that Sid Rawle had been taken to and in much the same condition. Though I had lasted a day and a half as opposed to a year and a half. I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and five glasses of red wine. Weak as a kitten, I felt in no condition to cycle back to Westport, and so I phoned a friend there and asked her to drive out and collect me. When she arrived and saw the state that I was in, she actually shuddered.
How do I look? I said.
Shook, she said.
Very shook, she said.
What the fuck happened you? she said.
I don’t know if I can go into it, I said.
———
By the next morning, however, I felt greatly restored, and I decided to light out for Achill again. I had the sense—perhaps hysterically—that the fibres of the story were starting to knit together. I cycled from Westport to Newport, skirting once more the edges of Clew Bay. Here and there between the trees a view opened up across the water to the knuckle of Croagh Patrick and each time it appeared I raised a knuckle of my own in ritual salute. I hummed little songs as I pedalled along. I stopped for a while in Newport. Anytime I’ve been through the town I’ve entered it in sadness and left in something close to happiness—its trapped feeling or reverb, plainly, is a benevolent one.
There was a café tucked away in a corner of the square. I went and sat there for a while. I made some notes about what might be seen from the attic floor of the hotel in the square. A pair of old farmers came into the café and made their order at the counter. They took a table and talked quietly together; they seemed so easy in their skins. They made light work of enormous sandwiches stuffed with ham and coleslaw and lettuce and there were pots of tea and cream cakes to follow. Then one of them looked over at me and rather sternly said—
Wouldn’t you enjoy your life?
I left the café and aimed the bike due west for Achill Sound. As I cycled along I heard a train that had not passed this way for years, the rhythm of its heavy clanking along the ruts and ribs of the earth, and I imagined all the faces at the windows, in a blur as they went by, and their tiny sadnesses, and all of them were lost again to the years since they’d passed.
The mountains to the north were hardfounded against grey light.
A thin rain descended on the day in slow drifts and sang.
I came at last on a view of Achill Sound—I got off the bike and stood for a while in the drizzle and watched the whitecaps break and each wave as it gave out was the ghost-trace of some lost feeling and a shiver in the blood.
The water moved beneath and slapped against the stakes of the bridge as I cycled across. The streets of the village at Achill Sound were empty as if the world had been about for a while but had moved on again. I took the road by the water and I climbed the mountain by the road and after something less than an hour the road crested and I looked down on the bay at Keel and it was filled darkly as though with blood.
It was the middle of the afternoon when I came to the beach at Keel. I walked it for a long while. I sat on the rocks and was mesmerised by the water. My breath slowed to almost nothing. I saw the women as they crept out of the air in their cloaks of black and waded, and moved out, and screamed their grief to the sky and sea. The shapes of their heavy thighs showed under the wet black of their clothes in the saltwater and the wrack. They screamed and turned finally to face me in their stepped generations and each of them wore my own face—
Lah-de-dah
Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.
———
He believed that the force of a cataclysmic event could smash past a creative block. If such an event placed one in mortal danger and was accompanied by a tremendous crack-up, so much the better.
In the summer of 1980, after heavy weather had sent all of her crew to their bunks with nausea, he was left to sail single-handedly a yacht called the Megan Jaye from Rhode Island to Bermuda. He attributed his even and settled stomach to his macrobiotic diet.
The storm grew more ferocious as the night passed and it looked like the end for a while—the Atlantic was grabbing from all sides—and he was panicked and tearful and screamed for God to come take him because he didn’t fucking care no more anyhow, and then he lost his mind for a long stretch of sea, and he grew frantic and giddy as the seas raved and the skies opened, and he sang his old songs—he belted them out from his lungs as charms—and he Screamed, and after a long hard night fraught with death-fear and the odd hilarity of disasters he made it at last to calm waters and a placid morning—Bermuda—and he believed that it was this event or passage that cleared his mind and allowed him, after four barren years, to create new material and work again.
———
At the small hotel in Keel, I managed to arrange a room and get through the accompanying small talk without mentioning anything about the unsettling vision on the beach. I was watchful of my tone, however—never in itself a good sign—and I worried that I may have been acting overly cheerful or hearty. The young lady at reception was pleasant and told me about some nearby walking and cycling routes. I said I’d see what the old legs had left to give, and I tried to keep the exclamation marks out of my speech. She said I was in room number nine and smiled quietly as she handed over the key. She asked me did I care to dine at the hotel that evening and I said well, certainly, yes, a reservation for one, please, and now I worried that my diction was becoming too formal, in a kind of weirdly over-comma’d Victorian way. Basically, I was all over the shop, and I was anxious again to the pit of my gut: I decided this meant that the story was starting to come together.
———
I established myself in the room marked nine without significant incident. I smoked a little weed for calm, exhaling out the window so as not to activate the smoke detector. Now what we have here, I said to myself, is such an old, old question: how do you bring up the fact of ghosts in reasonable company? Especially in the reasonable company of one’s readers? I was looking out to the hills and the backs of the village buildings as I pondered this—I realised I was actually looking out at the b
ack of the local police station and quickly put my pipe away—and I was feeling much more settled and together in myself, and thinking a little about the story but in a necessarily vague way, just letting it sit at the back of my mind, just there on the ledge of the subconscious where all stories must for a long while sit and season—or so at least I convince myself; no pressure, don’t rush it, and so forth—and it occured to me that the 1970s is by now essentially an historical fiction. True memory of the era—as in sense memory, as in the precise tang on the air of a new morning back then, or the throb and rumble of a great city rising from its fumes in the early morning back then, or the way a lover’s dark hair might splay just so on the sheets, and she stretches—has by now succumbed to time and distance, and what’s left to us is mediated, and it can only be built up again in gimcrack reconstructions, with scenic facade, but if we can get the voices right, the fiction might hold for a while at least.
———
The Liverpool accent, or at least the city accent as it can be heard within, say, a two- or three-mile radius of Lime Street station, is closely related to an Irish accent. There is a type of Liverpool accent that bleeds in particular into the accent of the northside of Dublin. But of course this is an old and storied migration, and one that is stitched into the lore of countless thousands of families: the cities are cousinly.
James and Jane Lennon left County Down in 1848 and emigrated to Liverpool. Among their children was John or Jack Lennon, variously described as a freight clerk or a book-keeper, and also known to be something of a bar-room crooner. Jack married first a Liverpudlian, Margaret Crowley, who died during the birth of their second child. He then married Mary “Polly” Maguire, from Dublin, and they had fifteen children, seven of whom survived. Among these was Alfred, or Freddie, who was John Lennon’s father.
Following the death of her husband—the liver—Polly could no longer afford to look after all the children, and Freddie was deposited in the Bluecoat orphanage in 1921. Later, he is variously described as a ship’s steward or a merchant seaman, and he was also known to be something of a bar-room crooner.
John became obsessed for a while with these Irish roots. He wrote anti-English songs. He named his second child Sean. He consulted the usual books of heraldry and sources of lineage—slow winter nights at the Dakota—including MacLysaght’s Irish Families: Their Names, Arms and Origins, in which he learned that the O’Lennons were most typically from the Counties Down, Sligo or Galway, and were not known to have distinguished themselves in military affairs. Late in his life, he spoke of renewing the planning permission for Dorinish Island and building a magical house out there.
Part Seven
SLIP INSIDE THIS HOUSE
Cornelius?
Yes, John?
There’s a lot of fucking water.
It’s Clew Bay, John.
I mean in the fucking boat.
Oh?
It’s up to me ankles.
Okay.
What does this mean, Cornelius?
It means there’s a hole in the boat, John.
Alright then.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Do you see behind you? There’s a basin.
You mean I’m fucking bailing now?
It could be a notion.
Cornelius?
John?
I want you to look at my fucking ankles.
Yeah…They’re soaking alright.
Is fucking right they are!
Do you want me to stop the fucken sea?
Just fucking answer me…Are we going to make it to the island?
Touch and go, I’d say. Different question for you.
Yes?
Does it matter, at the end of the day, which island I let you down on?
How’d you mean?
There are hundreds of the fucken things. They are all small, wet, miserable holes of places. They’re only fit for hares and rats and filthy birds. Why should one of them be any better or worse than the next?
Listen to me, Cornelius, please. If I was to say to you the words ritual excursion…
Ho ho.
Ho ho fucking what?
You mean like an aboriginal buck?
In fact that’s pretty much exactly what I mean.
The aboriginal is an odd buck.
Are there…Are there rats on the islands?
Crawling with them. Night and day. Chorus of them. A squealing fucken choir. But your aboriginal, if I’m not wrong, is the buck who’d be listening?
Exactly so.
What’s it he’d be listening for again?
A kind of a song but it’s beneath the skin of the earth.
I’ve heard it.
You’ve heard which?
The what-you-call-it. The song.
When was this?
I was coming home from a disco in Castlebar.
Okay.
I took a wrong turn.
This was late on?
Thirty-five o’clock in the morning. I found myself moving across a small difficult field. Oh-oh, I says. Where this field was exactly you could nail me to the cross and crucify me and I’d still not be able to tell you. But I found that an awful shiver had come into me. It was as if the blood had turned to ice in my veins. The feeling was not of this world but of another.
Cornelius?
Stay with me. I turned around. I was sure there was someone behind me. There was nothing and there was nobody. I thought there’d be eyes in the dark. There were no eyes, John. But the dark seemed to close in around me. As if it was trying to take hold of me. I was moved slowly around on my innocent feet. It was like I was being turned on my feet by a dancing partner.
Was it the devil?
Ah go easy, John, would you? I felt like I was being lifted above the ground.
Was it a floating sensation?
Well. I was…aloft. Is the only way I could say it for you.
Okay.
Aloft!
And what happened next?
All the air got sucked out of the world. There was utter quiet. And I could see everything. Do you know that kind of way? I could see the smallest things and the biggest. I could see across the sea and I could see over the shoulders of the mountains and I could see down a maggot’s ears.
There were maggots?
Next thing there was…Jesus Christ…I don’t know…I could only call it a rip in the sky.
Okay.
I’m not joking you. A rip! And I looked into it. And what did I see?
This I want to hear.
I saw the bottom of the fucken sea. And it was deserted except for all the little floaty plants and the rocks and the one…small…wise-lookin’…crab.
A crab?
Is right.
And wise?
And tuneful, John. Because it fucken sang to me.
Cornelius?
Don’t ask me the words. Stretch me out on the Spanish rack and I could not repeat for you the words. But I could tell you the feeling it gave me handy enough.
Go on then.
Utter peace, John. Cornelius O’Grady wasn’t made of bones and flesh and woes no more. All I was made of was a pure fucken smile and glee.
You were floating still?
Across the night and sky and not a bother on me. Well, I says to myself, this is a good one.
How’d it wind up, Cornelius? For a finish?
I came to, John.
I’d imagine so.
On the flat of my back in the middle of the same field and it pissing out of the heavens on me.
Morning?
And as bleak as you’d meet one. You know you’ve a night of it put down when you wake up in a small wet field.
There seems to be an amount of that around here.
Why would you think that is?
I don’t know.
Because the fields are possessed, John.
You say this matter-of-factly, Cornelius.
Well.
———
Cornelius c
uts the motor—the boat coasts by the sea road. There are voices in the night. There is a car on the stones of a small beach. There are men talking in a pod of smoke and carlight. They are very close but the boat moves unseen and silently by stealth through the water.
Pressmen, Cornelius says.
A voice comes clearly for a moment as they pass—
If she goes on me again it’ll be the last time she goes. Thirty pound that exhaust.
Steepish, Cornelius says.
The world’s about, John says.
———
Home bites at him for a bit. But he will not go back there. The days of England are done for now. What the fuck is England good for? Sausages and beer and pale gawpy faces. He sits in the boat and he fucking well bails. On white porcelain cups in railway cafés the lipstick traces. The boat moves on its slow-boom beat and it dips and scoops and cuts through the water. His gut is all over the shop. His heart aches for old England. The dark sky growls; in the near low mountains there are rumbles.
Mother of fuck, Cornelius says.
I’ve made a misery of your father’s suit, John says, bailing.
It’s not much good to him where he is now.
Do you ever think about where that might be?
I do, actually.
I thought you might.
I would see it as a falling field that runs down to the sea, John. It is not a bad old day there at all. Maybe it’s much the same as now, the Maytime. From the field you can look across the sea or at least across a wide clean pacified bay. It’s calm as glass. You walk in this field but of course by your nature you make no shade. The sun is through the white clouds in the sky but there is not much heat in it. By the edge of the field, by the shadow of the ditch, it feels very cold. You walk but your step doesn’t land. You are at an elevation in the air just a fraction above the thistles and the heads of the flowers. You are no more than a few inches in the air but it puts a lovely ease into the motion. You are stepping through the air. Your eyes are speckled in the way that a young fox’s are, greenishly. There is a particular type of saltiness on the air and it’s of the sex. Your whole body from head to toe is weightless and trembles with delight. The breeze off the bay is a light one but plenty all the same to move you around the place. You travel the field hither and back again. Everything is very funny. The way a sheep looks up at the sky. The way the wren darts from a hole in the stone wall on its happy bouncing rear. The fucken hilarity of it all. The world has no sorrows. The world is nothing but a long comfortable sighing. The field runs down to the sea. The blood still pulses as in the best days of rude fucken youth. Certainly, John, it is in the west of Ireland.
