Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

The shovelers call from the reedbeds but they could stand up on tippy-toes and sing Merle Haggard and Foley wouldn’t pay the blindest bit of attention. He’s thinking about the time he had the fucker down and a knee on his throat and he could have closed that windpipe lively but no, what possessed him but he let the bastard go.

He has been told he should try accentuate the positives. And certainly, it hasn’t been Crapsville all the way. He has had small blessings. He has never, for example, had to journey through the regions of romance. That would have been on the rich side. Of course there are sugary men who will croon that love, at length, shines on each and all of us — woo-oooh! woo-oooh! — but no, thanks be to God, love never came next nor near Foley. Not that till he was twenty-six or twenty-seven, and six foot ten in the full of his growth, the big ape, not that he didn’t maintain a glimmer of hope: maybe, oh just maybe… This was a young man listening to enough country and western music to believe just about anything. But he never tried to foretell the detail of it. He never tried to picture it actually come true. Was she really going to float down from the starry sky and put in an appearance on O’Connell Street some Saturday? Walk up to the big tank called Foley and tap him on the shoulder? Settle down and raise enormous children? It wasn’t going to happen, and it never did, and it was sweet relief to give up on even the notion.

He walks on. There has been an unpromising start to the new season — two draws and a loss — and black squalls cross his brow when he thinks of the remarks that have been made. Do not say the wrong thing about Manchester United in the vicinity of Foley. Then the storm clouds will gather. Then you’d want to leave a wide berth. He wears the number seven jersey that says ‘Cantona’ on the back. It’s the biggest size the mail-order people can do but still a tight fit. See him of an evening, sat on the corner stool, there in the shadows, with the dry-roasted nuts, and the pint glass like a thimble in his hand. It would go through you, if you were unfortunate enough to be in any way soft-natured.

He follows the creek, goes past the factory, and the creek begins to quicken once it rounds the bend that leaves Mungret behind. Ahead of him on the pathway there’s a distraction. On the last high bank of the creek there are some boys gathered and as he approaches them he grows wary because he can see the shimmer of their gold in the afternoon sun. They wear streaks in their hair and dress shirts in bright colours. They have alert brows and startled eyes. There are six of them, no, seven, there’s eight of them, count, nine? Travellers.

‘Story, boss?’

‘What’s the story, big man?’

‘Some size of a creature we’ve on our hands here, boys. Look it!’

They stand in a half-circle to block the pathway but they keep switching position, they keep dancing around the place, it’s as though they’re on coals, and their voices have hoarse urgency.

‘Where you headed, sir?’

‘Are you headed for the hills, I’d say?’

‘Come here I wancha? Where do they keep you, do they keep you in a home?’

‘What brings you out this way, sir? And what size are you at all, hah? If you don’t mind me asking, like. You must be seven foot tall?’

‘Tell me this and tell me no more. What size is the man below? The women must think it’s Leopardstown.’

‘Now listen,’ says Foley. ‘That’s the kind of talk I won’t abide.’

‘It has a tongue!’

‘Ah come here now and go easy. Where do you live, fella? Are you inside in the city? Are the Health Board looking after you?’

They move in closer, and the talk changes to a confiding tone.

‘Listen. You’d do us a turn, hey? You see what it is, we’re short a few yo-yo for a game of pitch ‘n’ putt below in Mungret.’

‘Pitch ‘n’ putt my eye,’ says Foley. ‘You fellas are no more playing pitch ‘n’ putt.’

‘You’re calling us liars?’

A leader emerges. He spreads his arms like he’s nailed to a cross and he looks to the sky in great noble suffering and he bellows from deep:

‘Hold on, boys!’

It should have been obvious who the leader was. His shirt is of the richest purple and his hair is the most vivaciously streaked. His gold shimmers in the sun and he slaps a stick off the ground.

‘Hold on, boys. What we’re dealing with here is no old fool. You’re right, sir. We are having nothing at all to do with the pitch ‘n’ putt. Truth be known, there is a tragedy we’re dealing with. Martin here — the runt — Martin’s mother is laid out below in Pallasgreen. Misfortunate Kathleen! God rest her and preserve her and all belongin’ to her. And the situation we’re after been landed in, through no fault of our own, we’re short the few euro to wake her right. So help us out there, boss, will yuh? Martin is in a bad way.’

‘I’m bad, sir,’ says Martin. ‘I am bad now. And I guarantee you there’ll be prayers said.’

‘Shush now,’ says the leader, and again he slaps the stick off the ground, but Foley just smiles.

‘Out of my way, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘I’m going to walk on through.’

The leader slaps the stick again and exhales powerfully through his nose.

‘We’re not getting through to you, hey? Put your hand in the pocket there and help us out, like.’

They dance around him again, they swap and jostle with each other, they have terrible static in them, but Foley doesn’t move, and Foley doesn’t speak. The leader comes a step closer.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

Foley smiles.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re off on a bad footing. Can we not be civilised? Can we not calm ourselves? Look. I’ll tell you what. Will you shake my hand?’

The leader smiles. Negotiations have been smoothed. He opens his face to Foley. He is a reasonable person.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Of course I’ll shake.’

Foley closes his hand softly around the boy’s hand then and a cold quiver passes between them. It’s the feeling in the hazel switch when it divines water, and it’s the feeling that comes at night when a tendon in the calf muscle has a twitched memory of a falling step, and it’s there too, somehow, in the great confluence of starlings, when they spiral and twist like smoke in the evening sky. Foley holds the boy’s hand and the feeling sustains for a single necessary moment.

‘You were born the fourth son in a lay-by outside Tarbert,’ he says, ‘and you’ll die a wet afternoon in the coming May. The way I’m seeing it, a white van will go off the road at a T-junction. A Hitachi, if I’m seeing it right. And I can tell you this much, Bud — it ain’t gonna be pretty.’

‘What you sayin’ to me? What you sayin’ to me you fat fuckin’ freak?’

The leader shucks his hand free and takes a step back, and the others step back too. Foley, arrogant now, draws a swipe through the air, as though he’s swatting flies, and he walks on through. For a while the traveller boys follow and they taunt him from a distance but he knows they will not make the decision.

The creek dwindles to its outflow, and the estuary has an egginess, a pungency. The lethargy of swamp gives way to the slow momentum of the Shannon. From across the water, the hills of Clare look on unimpressed. You would be a long time impressing the hills of Clare. A path branches off from the creek and from here you can follow the river back into town and it’s a weary Foley that turns onto the branching. Sweat pours from his armpits and stains the number seven shirt that says ‘Cantona’ on the back. Oystercatchers work the rocks, most efficiently, and the lapwings are up and gregarious, but Foley doesn’t want to know. He limits his thoughts to each step as it falls. His heavy head lifts up now and then to find the town come closer, and still closer.