Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

He couldn’t get it out of his mind all the following week. Slugging around the place, trying to look after chickens, and it haunting him. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. Madge was handsome but crazy, and he didn’t need any more distractions. There was already the situation with Noreen. There was also the situation with Kelli Carmody at the sports centre, though that was most definitely over. Kelli was nineteen, for Christ’s sake, and they are unpredictable as snakes at that age. He had changed the hours of his workouts to avoid her, and he fully intended to continue doing so. There is only so much a man’s heart can take. He was still getting over Jenna. He knew whenever he saw her at the till in Lidl that he wasn’t fully over her yet. And Yvonne, too, Yvonne Troy was a heartbreaker. So no, there would be no more messing, there would be no situation with Madge. Even if she did have legs that went up to Armagh.

The woman from the O.C.B. is polite but firm.

‘No way, John. I mean, seriously,’ and she half laughs. ‘You’re not even in the ballpark here. We have to maintain standards, you know?’

‘I realise,’ he says, through gritted teeth, because the pain is if anything increasing, ‘that there needs to be an improvement in the poultry shed.’

The woman from the O.C.B. climbs into her jeep. She sits for a moment with her feet held out the door, and yanks off her Wellingtons, one then the other, and flexes her toes in the stockinged feet, then reaches in for the driving shoes. A slight colour comes into her cheeks from the exertion of this.

‘I realise,’ he says, ‘that I need to regulate the heat and get a decent run marked off. I realise I need to invigorate the feed.’

She wears streaks in her hair and the faintest trace of lipstick and her left eye turns in slightly to regard a haughty nose. She isn’t bad at all.

‘John,’ she says. ‘This isn’t really about the chickens.’

The child is home from school. She is at the upstairs window, utterly blank-faced, looking out at it all. She pulls the heavy curtain shut, tottering with the weight, and the room becomes dark as night. The heels of her trainers light up as she crosses to the bed. She climbs in and pulls the covers over her head to thicken the dark. She flashes her torch, on and off, again and again. It is night-time in a secret world. There are dancing bears on a frosty rooftop as the happy music plays. She walks the twinkling streets. The good witch waves from a high window. The postman cycles across the sky. She turns up the music still louder. A bulldog barks a yard of stars.

An indisputable fact: our towns are sexed. Look around you. It’s easy enough tell one from the other. Foley’s town, for example, is most certainly a woman — just take in the salt of her estuarine air — but she’s not a notably well-mannered or delicate woman. She is in fact a belligerent old bitch. You wouldn’t know what kind of mood you’d find her in. And so he storms out, every afternoon, and slams the door after himself.

He walks the trace of a creek that takes him into countryside. Today the creek is particularly foul, there is either something very rotten in there or something very alive. Foley walks by and sniffs at it but he has no great interest. This is an enormous, distracted, heavy-footed creature we’re dealing with. He’s jawing on his thoughts. He’s remembering the knockdown fights with his father in the street.

These are the dog days of summer. The country feels heavy. There’s a lethal amount of growth and he’s pollen-sick from it, Foley, the last of August pulses in his throat. He can see across the estuary to the malevolent hills of Clare. Do hills brood, as they say? Oh they sure do. Foley’s massive hands are dug into the pockets of his outsized jeans and the hedgerows tremble with birds. Foley’s eyes are watery, emotional, a scratched blue, and they follow the caked dry mud of the pathway. Along the verges there are wild flowers — pipewort, harebell, birdsfoot trefoil, grass of Parnassus, all so melodious sounding it would turn your stomach — and they bloom and shimmer for Foley but he won’t give them the satisfaction.

His father sang ‘Sean South of Garryowen’. His father sang ‘Dropkick Me Jesus’. His father sang ‘The Broad Black Brimmer Of The IRA’. A roof-lifting tenor the old fucker had and unquestionably a way with the ladies.

Dogs somewhere, and the bored drone of motorway traffic, distant, like the sound of a dull dream, also chainsaws.

And he walks the trace of the water, Foley, and he comes within the shadow of the cement factory. The grasses and reeds are dusted grey from the factory’s discharge. This is the type of country that would redden your eye and Foley knows it all too well. He spent seventeen years at the Texaco out here — it was, for a time, an ideal confluence of beast and task.

At the start, it was just two pumps beside a dirty little kiosk for the till. Midwestern rain hammered down on the plastic roof. Electric fire, a kettle, a crossword and Foley might have been in the womb he was so cosy. He near filled the kiosk. He was prince of the forecourt. He knew the customers by name: the boys from the cement plant, the Raheen businessmen, the odd few locals. Foley was pure gab in those days. He’d talk shock absorbers, chest infections, four-four-two. He’d talk controversial incidents in the small parallelogram the Sunday gone. But word came through and there was quickly great change. Statoil bought out Texaco and the kiosk was bulldozed. An air-conditioned, glass-fronted store went up, with automatic doors and cooler units. Foley found himself with colleagues. The next thing they were squeezing him into a uniform and sticking a bright red hat up top. Then they started fucking about with croissants. Then they put in a flower stall and started selling disposable underwater cameras — the better, presumably, to document the coral reefs of the Shannon. Foley went to the supervisor.

‘Come here I want you,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘I want to get one thing clear,’ he said. ‘Just for my own information.’

‘Yes?’

‘Are we a petrol station? Or are we an amusement arcade?’

‘I must say your tone is slightly…’

‘Don’t mind tone. Are we a supermarket?’

‘Now listen…’

‘What the fuck are we?’ cried Foley. ‘Are we Crazy Prices?’

‘There’s no need for your tone, I find it…’

‘I’ll give you tone!’

He lunged for him and that was that. Don’t come around here no more, they told Foley, and it was the end of the seventeen years.

Foley was six foot five on the morning of his fourteenth birthday and half as wide again. This is the original brick shithouse we’re talking about. He was a clown of a child. His father informed him daily he was fit for Fossett’s. There wasn’t a school jumper could be got in the town to fit him. The best his father could do was a chandlers on the Dock Road that stocked a heavy-duty v-neck designed for vast trawlermen sent to face the wrath of the Irish Box. Foley at fourteen wore it to face the Brothers. In cold weather, the rad in the classroom would seize up and to free its workings it needed to be hit a wallop and this became Foley’s job. The teacher would roar down in a hoarse, booze-scratched voice:

‘Foley! Hit that rad an auld slap, boy. You’re good for something anyway, you big eejit.’

And he’d slug across the floor, Foley, and the other boys would do the Jaws music — dah-duh, daaaah-duh, daaaaaaah-duh — and he’d wind up the shoulder, take a swing at the thing with an opened palm and it’d gurgle back to life from the pure shock of force.

Quiet awe would swell in the classroom.