Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

‘God, John, a semi-flush? I don’t know. I… don’t think so. No, John, no. I’m afraid not. Apologies. Nothing I can do to help you out there. Have you thought of Mangan, or Troy?’

‘True, I suppose, I could nearly ah… I could nearly… I could knock in, I suppose?’

‘You could, John. Especially given they’d be five miles nearer to you. Given they’d be neighbours.’

‘I ah…’

‘And tell me, by the way, while we’re at it,’ and Jim Flaherty takes a dainty step back, a little dancing step back, and he blocks off the door with an arm to the jamb, an arm with the reach of a mid-sized crane. ‘Tell me, John. Where you parked?’

‘Oh, I ah… I left it down by L_______ Road. Actually.’

‘I see. You decided to park twelve hundred yards away. At a spot that is hidden from the open view. I see.’

‘Listen, anyway, folks, I’ll knock away out of it. I’ll see ye.’

‘I’ll tell you now, John, we can do it easy or we can do it hard. Which way would you want it to be?’

‘Easy.’

‘Good man. So how long have you been sleeping with my wife?’

‘Jimmy!’ she cries. ‘This is crazy talk!’

‘Noreen, love, would you ever go upstairs and lock yourself into the bathroom and put the key out under the door for me? I’ll deal with you in due course. John, you might take a seat by the fireplace, please.’

Noreen trots for the stairs. John Martin sits down on a straight-backed chair. Jim Flaherty takes a length of rope from beneath the sink. He comes across the floor, smiling softly in a pair of well-pressed denims.

‘I was wondering all along who it was,’ he says, ‘but you know I never once thought it’d be a Clare man! Then again, you’re nearly always surprised at what looks up at you out of the trap.’

He winds the rope gently but firmly around John Martin’s thin waist, around and around, and he knots it quickly and precisely. He takes a clean, ironed tea towel from a drawer and presents it to the bound farmer.

‘I want you to use this as a gag, John,’ he says. ‘It’ll stop you swallowing your tongue.’

‘And what, am… what am… precisely?’

‘What I’m going to do, John, is I’m going to dislocate your shoulder. It’ll give you something to remember the day by.’

Sometimes, in the slow drag of winter, terrible sounds will pierce the calm of the midlands air, and we look up, and our brows gather in knit nervous folds, but we persuade ourselves that it is otherwise, that these are not the cries of humankind. But we know! In our hearts, we know.

John Martin comes back across the bottom fields, walks with a drop-shouldered jerk, and he’s had thumps in the mouth as well, and they took teeth with them. Oh the terrible spittle of revenge that formed on the grey lips of big weeping Jim Flaherty! But he must leave it go. The woman from the O.C.B. is due ten minutes since. He gets back to the 4x4. De Valera is gone apeshit on the K-9 Serenity.

‘I swear to God to you, John, I didn’t! Not at all. Not even close.’

‘How many times, Mary?’

Half eleven in the morning, the Sunday after the Saturday, and she stood there, and she lied to him! He was sat in the kitchen trying to eat a sausage sandwich. And there is no bite to eat he likes better in the week than the sausage sandwich of a Sunday morning. And he couldn’t eat it.

‘No, honest to Jesus,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t the same. It was just… different. All I wanted was to be back at our usual auld thing. Never again!’

He tried to believe her. He gripped himself inside and squeezed hard, and he felt a little better. He took a bite out of the sausage sandwich, chewed it, remorsefully, and shook another lash of brown sauce into it. He was man and boy a martyr to the brown sauce. His head wouldn’t let him be.

‘I’ll ask you again,’ he said. ‘Did you come, Mary?’

He does not believe that his wife is a malicious woman. He is no fool and he knows that there are women who have malicious streaks. His mother, now, was a malicious woman, you could even say an evil woman. He would never forget the night he went into her room after she’d unbeknownst to him been with O’Donnell and the way she was lying on her stomach and the way she turned around to him and the way she kind of… writhed , is the only word, like a serpent, and the look that was on her face. Pure hate. But Mary, no, he didn’t think she had that streak in her.

He had to believe her, somehow. There were walls in the house painted more often than Mary came, and he wanted to be sure it was her, not him.

He didn’t know how he finished that sausage sandwich but by Jesus he finished it. Then he went out to the chickens. He walked through the yard. A Sunday, and he gave an impression of slitheriness, like a stoat.

Driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder is no picnic, not when the white sear of the pain waters your eyes and blurs your vision. But it is nothing at all compared to driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder while a manic-depressive spaniel, in manic phase, answerable only to the tides of the moon, makes repeated assaults upon the area of your crotch. Blood streaming down his face, raging against it all, tears streaming from the sheer physical agony, spitting teeth — it is in this state that John Martin pulls into the yard of Meadowsweet Farm. He is awaited there by his wife, and by the woman from the O.C.B.

Mary comes running.

‘Oh Jesus!’ she cries. ‘Oh Christ! Oh Dev! Are you okay?’

‘Hello there!’ calls John Martin, and staggers from the jeep, and falls to his knees. ‘I’m afraid I got caught up in the town. I’d a bit of am… a bit of an auld am… whatchacallit.’

The woman from the O.C.B., a tall, thin matron in a green wax jacket, takes a couple of nervous steps back.

‘Bastard!’ cries Mary Martin, and she runs screaming to the house, with the small howling dog in her arms.

The worst of it was that he had crushed two Valium into hot milk and then poured it into his crying child to conk her out. It was Madge’s idea, and they were her tablets, but what kind of a father would do that? And for what turned out to be a five-minute special. And Madge lay there, for the rest of the night, yapping nonsense out of her, smoking her fags.

‘That young miss will sleep now sweet as a dream for you, John, you have nothing to worry about there. These are the English Valium, you see, these are the Valium we used get all along. Until they starts making them below in Clonmel. Clonmel! They’re not the same at all and I’m not the only one that’s saying it. Honest to God, John, you might as well be eating Smarties. But I have an arrangement about the English Valiums with the man in the chemist, the man of the McCaffertys. Have you ever noticed, John, the way every single last one of the McCaffertys has the big teeth?’

He had never put down a night like it.

He came from a town himself, it wasn’t as if he had background in poultry management. It was not a pleasant setup, not by any stretch, not when a smother of them would go on you, all the disease. There was a young fella in town wore one of the long coats with the badges and he was forever buttonholing John Martin with rants about cruelty. What about the quality of life, he’d say, getting himself all worked up. What about my quality of life, said John Martin. Do you think I’m outside in a palace?

The poultry shed was bad now. It was bad. But he had mixed feelings about the poultry shed. He had mixed feelings because it was the one place his daughter was calm, it was the one place she never cried out or skittered. She would pull at him to take her there and he’d go. She’d sit there on a pail in her red coat and it was like she was in a chapel.