by Kevin Barry
———
They move out across the bay. The weather turns. With each moment the bay becomes rougher. There are sentimental forces at work. Also there is deathhauntedness—it is written across the sky. Cornelius steers with a blithe hand to the tiller. His eyes are vague and cheerful. The sky is moving above us now and ever so darkly. John is losing track of himself again. Which may be the purpose. Trouble is a cloak that I choose to wear. The boat moves; the past is about. Old England has him again, as it always will—he’s a Second War kid. He screamed to life in the tinpot metropolis and a thousand nazi bombs came down to mark the occasion. There was sexy Adolf in his dancing boots. There were death planes on the English skies. Now the gulls wheel in sudden calm above Clew Bay and the bay pacifies but just for a beat and there is a sharp, hard slap of water and everything giddies and turns again and he thinks: what’s the worst that can happen us out here? Plenty the fucking worst.
Cornelius?
Yes, John?
What I’m thinking now is fuck it, you know, the first island we come to?
I’m thinking the same way.
With these words it sails into view. It is not his island but another. The boat tilts deftly for it. The boat scalps froth from the water. The small island sits waiting in the wind and wild rain; it sits infinitely in grey patience. This island has at once a maudlin or a mawkish air. He has not put his foot to its stones and he’s come over solemn and searching again—
After a while, Cornelius, do you get to wondering?
About, John?
What’s it we’re here for?
You mean in the middle of Clew Bay on as miserable a fucken Sunday as you’d meet?
Or more generally.
Ah Jesus, John. Are you having feelings again?
I know.
These large sad warmish feelings, John? The best thing you can do is ignore the fucken things.
I wish that I could. I wish I could think of nothing but the happy things. The kid and love and home and all the rest of it. I wish I could think about the fucking money. But then I get thrown back in again. I’m into the past and the murky things. I am not in control, Cornelius, of the way my fucking brain turns. You know where I’m at sometimes? Just by way of hysterical fucking example? I’m in nineteen twenty fucking dot. I’m in the Bluecoat orphanage. How fucking cruel and how fucking lonely? To lie awake at night in the middle of the city. No brothers here, no sisters. A kid awake in the city and lonely. It’s the winter and deep in. This gimpy fucking kid in the corner bed. This snotfaced raggedy limpy kid. The best part of you’s dripped down your dad’s leg, hasn’t it, Freddie?
Ah, John.
And I will not wipe these tears away. My old man? He was like me without the spark plug in. I could have been a fucking disaster as easy. It’s like aunt always said—I’m just the idiot that got lucky.
Can you not go easy on yourself the one time, John?
No I fucking cannot.
———
The island is as drab as its first glance suggested. They push through the misery of its weather across the stones of a shingle beach. The wind is that stiff it raises the eyebrows. Weather that outrages. The stones slide and click eerily beneath their feet as they go. The click and fall of the old Chinamen’s dominoes, on Berry Street, in the Liverpool afternoons—it’s the same note and bone sound precisely. Throwing the bones they called it in the Liverpool pubs.
Cornelius as he ploughs into the weather is happiness itself, is native to the murk, rain and shifting wind.
Above us, John, are you watching?
His words come cupped in a pocket of the wind. The remnants of a cottage sit on a rise above the shoreline. It is huddled sourly among the rocks there. They climb to it. The half-crumbled walls stand about like bewildered soldiers. He steps inside the roofless hollow; Cornelius steps in after. They lean back against the walls of the place. The walls and the men hold each other up. Throwing the bones—doesn’t it mean also to read the future? They are out of the wind here at least. They consider each other coolly.
What was your plan, John?
Fuck off, Cornelius.
———
The way the sky is squared off by the half-fallen walls. Nothing between them and the heavens now. Snipes of wind get through the gaps with fast enquiries but they’re away again as quick. The wind about the bay and the rain make arbitrary music. I wanted to be stood out in the world and here I fucking well am. Here I am on this commanded journey. The sky moves and it is dark and light at once. Size of the place? You’d hardly have kept a family here. Though people were smaller, a world of full-growns five foot two, the kids like elves. The stones that are blackened still must be the last of the fireplace. He lights a fag. So the fireplace was just there, and maybe the huddled sleepers there—a family—and were their limbs entwined, for warmth and love, against the wind and island night?
No, John. This place would have had no more than a poor farmer in it. And only for a few weeks at a time, for the sheep, in summer.
I see.
Hauling the maggot out of his stomach and drinking green envy and spitting into the fireplace.
You paint it beautifully.
My own father used these places, John. He would cross over in the springtime and the summer. We would not see him for weeks on end. Which was a relief to all fucken parties. He was not right in himself ever nor right in the world. There were times he was so bad he couldn’t lift a cup of tea to his face. Do you want tea, my mother would say, or more likely she would ask me to say. The father would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head, and he’d say, I no more want tea, Cor, and he would look away and settle down lowly to himself. Like a wounded animal settling to its lair. There was no easy relief for him. The way that he groans—I can hear it still, John, I can hear the same groans exactly rise up from myself some mornings. It’s then I fucken worry. Did you know that the groans get passed down to us? My father would bring sheep out to the islands in the summer. I wonder if he was easier in himself when he was on his own. I’d doubt it. He was an intelligent man but it would lead him—the same mind—into dark and difficult places. He would travel inside himself. He would go utterly quiet. You’d know that he was gone deep and to someplace bad because all the colour would leave his face. As if someone turned the bar off on an electric fire—as quick as that. He would go very pale and I would say nothing and my mother would say nothing and I would go outside but I wouldn’t even kick a ball against the gable. It might take an hour or two for it to pass, sometimes a week. He would move lightly through the yard then and you would know it had passed because he would say right so, Cor, and he might even rub my head. The colour would not yet be back in his face. Wherever it was that he had been. But he would move with a bit of a skip to him to reassure me and to make out he was the finest again.
And now it’s Cornelius weeping.
Fathers and sons, isn’t it?
Oh fuck off, John! You have me fucken ragged.
———
They wait out the weather against the walls of the memorious ruin. He looks through the fallen window and onto the bay. A white Spanish horse races across the low waves. This is news he should keep to himself. He squints his eyes halfways shut to make it a trick of the light—the horse stops and turns and raises onto its hind legs and snorts pale fire. It takes off again into the mist and distance. John falls into a huddle and grips himself hard and shuts his eyes to break the spell.
What’s the latest, John?
As a matter of fact, Cornelius, I think I’ve come loose of my fucking bean completely.
No wonder. The wind is after shifting east. There’s none of us right when the wind shifts east.
But I’m having vision-type fucking things, Cornelius!
It would surprise me if you weren’t.
———
The weather continues as roughly.
He has a fag and listens hard.
He travels.
&
nbsp; I’m away again, he says.
Where’ve you landed, John?
On fucking Mount Street. I’m thinking of the late fifties. It’s a night in the winter and there’s a vicious wind come up the town. At this time I’m at the art college. My head’s all over the road. It’s early in the nighttime and I’m stood outside the art college. I’m stood at the corner of Mount Street and Pilgrim Street. I’m talking to some goon about his new band he’s got up and he’s asking about band names and what do you think of this, John, and what do you think of that, John, and I’ve no idea what it is he’s gone and called his fucking band, The Flying Testicles, what-fucking-ever, and I’m going yeah, alright, that’s good is that, and it’s then his face starts to give.
Give?
I don’t know how to describe this, Cornelius. But the years are peeling off and time is shifting.
I know the way.
He becomes a different person. He comes from some other time. He is away out of this cold winter, he says, and this miserable air and he tells me about Spanish places and the port of Càdiz and the orange trees in fucking Màlaga, all this, and he’ll miss his girl so much—her long brown hair—and he’ll miss his dotey Irish mam—and I cannot get away quick enough I’m that spooked. I walk off and wave and he goes, so long then, John, and I’m away up Rice Street, I’m away for Ye Cracke—it’s early in the night and empty—and I sit in the war room on my own, a pint of bitter, in the snug, and I have a fag, try to settle, and the city is moving outside me, all around me, like it’s come loose, and I don’t know where the fuck I am nor when and you know what I’m saying to myself?
What?
I’m saying—
Cling the fuck on, John.
———
Cornelius?
Yes, John?
Do you think about your old man still?
It wouldn’t be a happy dream for me, John. Did I not say? He topped himself for a finish.
Oh. I’m sorry.
He was nearly as well off out of it. And what good would it do to think of him in that place he went to?
No good. You must not ever think of that place. You must not ever think of that dark and glamorous place.
———
How did it happen, Cornelius?
Well. In the same way that an old dog gets to a certain age and a level of disregard for itself and it just takes off some night into the bushes. My father heard what was coming for him. And we didn’t find him after, in the way you wouldn’t find an old dog—you just wouldn’t—because my father, I have no doubt, put himself in the sea. It was all his life nearby and it would have been an idea always of a way out. He would not have been the type to string himself from the rafter of a barn. He was considerate. There was no show in the man.
———
Evening moves across the bay. With it there comes a calmness that could be taken almost for reason. The wind drops to near enough nothing. They leave the sour ruin gladly and make for the boat again. It puts out to the dark water.
We’re getting closer, John. Despite ourselves.
The boat moves across the bay. The tiny islands rest and idle in the evening light. His heart comes down to a slow, dull, even thumping. In no time at all the cliffs of Dorinish Island can be made out in a clear aspect, rising.
Oh there, he says.
They come at last to his island.
There’s a tube of toothpaste in the suitcase, John. There’s a brush to go with it. There is a small bottle of whiskey for emergency situations. There are tins of beans and matches and there are kindling sticks dried well. There will be rain in spats but this place will dry you as quick as it’ll wet you. There’s bread. There is a package of cooked ham cut thick in slices. Ate the fucken ham whatever you do. If you come across on the rocks a large greenish egg not much smaller than the size of your own head and speckled, I want you to walk a long, slow curve around it—it’ll be a tern’s egg and the fucken mother will have your eyes out if you go near it and it would be an awful thing for a man to lose an eye to a maddened bird on his own small island in Clew Bay. Do you hear me, John?
Yes, Cornelius, I’m listening.
———
He stands on the island and waves as the boat moves slowly back to its own world. He has the belted leather suitcase by his feet. He wears the old man’s suit. The gulls hover above the water to reel down the night. The first lights are beading across the mainland now. He listens intently—oh let there be a sign that this is not the end place. The hollow sound the sea makes speaks of nothing so much as the hushed quiet of the big sleep that’s to come, maybe soon, maybe late. The island is cold and loud with birds—he is too scared to turn and face into it. The boat becomes smaller in the distance; it disappears. He tries to put himself together again. His lips move to make words and he looks out for a long time over the dark water. He is falling again. He wants to be home now and away from this cold place. He wants never to feel this old again. The mainland lights are many and hopeful across the distance of the water.
———
He turns in to face the island at last. It is so very fucking cold out here on the rocks. The stones talk beneath his feet as he moves along the shifting, clicking causeway and the night birds huddle and thrum in the crevices and gaps and make their slow contented hums—it’s in the dim haze of the night that he can see clearly at last. The lights on the mainland are arranged as a song and in quite an eerie notation, actually—he hums it for a bit and all the birds quieten. He is terrified and ecstatic and he goes from the east to the west of himself. Small voices come off the water. The water moves and there is a boat in the dark—again they have come for him. There are men huddled on the boat as her engine cuts and the boat lights up with torches and shows the men, with their fags and flasks, and he does not fucking fear them and he stands tall on a high rock to look out and face them and the boat comes ever the closer and one of the men rises in the torchlight and calls—
Mr. Lennon? Would you like to make a statement?
Abso-fucking-lutely, he says.
———
Have you got your paper and pens handy? Are you ready to press “record”? Then, gentlemen, I shall begin. I am made of rags and bones and tattered skin. I am of the third sex. My spirit animal is the billy goat or perhaps some days it’s the hare. I’m never quite sure, in fact. I come and go in time and fucking space. Hobbies? I quite like to speak on the telephone. I do like a good yap. I talk to Liverpool, I talk to Hy-Brasil, I talk to fucking Mars. I like to put my voice along the high wires. I could quote you some poetry if you’d like? How’re you fixed for some Gerard Manley Hopkins? I caught this morning morning’s fucking minion—the one where he sees a bird and goes all swoony coz he loves fucking nature. Nature? I’ve had my fill of it, gents. Turns out it’s all an illusion. Pull the fucking drapes back and it’ll disappear. It’s painted fucking scenery. It’s a diorama. I am full of venom and bile and honky fucking blood. I’m afraid you’ve got me at quite a busy moment. I’m about to crawl under a rock and have a yap with the maggots. Also I’m having quite a difficult time with these terns. They do go on a bit, don’t they? If you really must take my photograph, young man, make me beautiful and get my good side. It’s this one, actually. This side I look like a young Rita Hayworth. The other side I look like Quasi-fucking-modo. I’ve always envied a gentleman with a hump. No one’s going to ask you why the long face, are they? Now what else can I tell you? The number nine’s for Dingle—you won’t catch me out on the Liverpool buses. I had a small growth on my back the other month, I thought it was me hump getting started. Turned out to be a boil, which was a disappointment. What else can I tell you? I think we should all love and ravish each other but I’m holding out no great hopes. I might grow into this suit yet, I fully accept it’s not a perfect fit. Do go easy on yourselves, gentlemen, you’ll not be going around for long. Do have a go at the fat lying hypocrite bastards that run the fucking place, won’t you? Smell the flowers and so forth
and fuck each other gladly. Any follow-ups, gents? Any further enquiries? A little more Manley Hopkins? Certainly. Blue-bleak embers shall fall, gall themselves and gash gold-vermillion. He was a fucking laugh, wasn’t he? Good night, gentlemen. Safe home the sea road.
Part Eight
THE GREAT LOST BEATLEBONE TAPE
The sound engineer, Charlie Haimes, pushes open the steel door and steps outside to the first of the morning. He sits on the same step of the fire escape that he’s sat on almost every morning of these last humid weeks. It is a little after six and already very warm. The bars of the escape are warm to the touch even. He lights another fag, Charlie Haimes. It’s late July, and the smoke is a hard burn on his lungs.
Inside a fuzzbox oodles and wafts. An effects unit hisses and barfs. A theremin runs slow eerie loops. A shriek sustains on the long pedal. It all sounds to Charlie Haimes like a cat having an incident. But who is Charlie Haimes to say?
The music dies and there are bootsteps and the steel door opens again—John steps out. He has a face on. He rests on the rail and looks out across the city or what can be seen of the city from the fire escape—the workings of a laundry, the back of a Turkish restaurant, a sliver of the early-morning street. He takes his glasses off and rubs his weary eyes.
