Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

Alice in the kitchen sat by Mary Pearson, and took her by the arm, and they listened, with glazed smiles, as Obran rattled on and on at one of his endless, self-aggrandising yarns. Mary kissed Alice’s button nose and laid her long, elegant fingers across Alice’s nervous knees. The manner of this, the languid ease of it, edged just a shade beyond chumminess. Mary Pearson had deep sexual talent and was becoming ever more comfortable in its realm. She was a slender, fine-boned twenty, plain-featured but attractive, with that particular charge of attractiveness that comes in freckles and neat chin and dirty eyes, and she applied it through the touch of her fingertips and Alice moved on again, bashful now. The kitchen stank of Wednesday’s bolognese and drying sweat.

Mary listened to Obran ramble on — bollocks talk — and she watched Alice join another small huddle, and she watched the stunned, wordless lads from Connemara who had eaten too much ecstasy, and she smiled for Jack and Kay. She watched over them all with the fondness that is usually reserved for watching over small children. She was born to middle age, and a lascivious one: all solace was in the senses. She’d slept already with three of the boys and two of the girls at the party. She’d been notching them off in History and Politics, and she was working her way through the hockey union too. Her father owned half Ballinasloe. She had not talked to him since the horse fair, when he’d accused her of sleeping with an itinerant. She bored of Obran — anyway she’d already been — and she crossed the kitchen towards Jack and Kay, she was convinced she could talk them into it yet. Ollie stumbled as she passed and almost knocked her over.

‘Ollie! For fucksake. Watch where you’re going.’

‘Lady Muck,’ said Ollie, bowing. ‘My sincere apologies, like.’

Ollie moved on through the hallway. He paused to steady himself with a hand on the hall table. The table had flyers for pizza, taxis and Jesus. That snot-nosed bitch, the look she always gave him. He peeped into the main room and it was writhing now — there had been a fresh intake from a party in Salthill broken up by guards. He decided that he had no interest at all in the main room. His business was done for the evening and anyway he felt short-breathed and tense and his vision was definitely blurred, especially out of the left eye. He went upstairs instead. He wore his puffa jacket, as he did at all times. He stuck his beany, bristled head into a small boxroom, saw that it was empty, and gratefully threw himself down on its lonesome single bed. Ollie had overdone it, again. Ollie had been overdoing it, in one or another, since he was big enough for shoes. His eyes were frightened and atrocious, pissholes in the snow, and they gave him a comically tormented look, always, even if he was in good form. He was local. He sold amphetamine cut with paracetamol to students, and he signed on at three post offices, one in the city and two in the county. He drove a Corolla that was rotten with rust, it had neither tax nor insurance. He smoked too much cannabis. He drank like it was going out of style. He no longer had parents, he had six brothers who between them had six wives, nineteen children and twenty-eight dogs. His brothers would slag him about the seventh bride but Ollie had no interest in women, nor in men for that matter — he had interest in money, cannabis, cars, amphetamines and long-neck bottles of Corona lager. He had a kind of antic court jauntiness, almost medieval-seeming. There was no violence in him. There was vast bitterness in him. He made up stories out of the wet salty air, about people and for people, to frighten them and to entertain. He was currently putting it about that Mary Pearson had HIV. He was subject to magical thinking about the significance of the number nine. He put together a fat cone that used up five Rizlas and two entire Rothmans. He sucked down the lovely resins and immediately took on the notion that there were guards outside the house. They could have followed the crowd that came in from Salthill. Of course they could have. It wasn’t just likely it was probable. He took another drag and felt his crown tighten and he decided it was certain, he didn’t have a minute to spare. He went to the window and looked down to the parked cars, and to the shadows, and the rain blown across the town. There were plainclothes out there, of course there were, and they were waiting for him to make his move. Well, they hadn’t bested him yet and they wouldn’t tonight. It was Ollie’s belief that he was tailed by plainclothes five or six days out of the week and he wasn’t entirely mistaken in this. The window was an attic window — a cheap Velux job set into the slate roof — and he saw that if he took off the puffa it would be easy enough to wriggle outside; he was slim-hipped as a ferret, and he could move along the rooftops of the terrace that the house was set on. Puffa out the window, and he climbed after it, with the cone wedged efficiently in the corner of his mouth, a dull burn. From the rooftop you could see to the cathedral, its wet concrete looming through the foul weather, and distant, the blur of the taxi-lights in rain, and all around the sodium gloom of the lamps. Ollie zipped into the puffa again and patted himself down to check for wallet, keys, lighter, fags, dope. He pressed back against the dripping slates and worked out his escape. He counted the chimneys along the length of the terrace — nine. He would need to climb to the other side, over the crease of the rooftop, and from there he could shin down a drainpipe into a yard, and then make his way down back towards the docks. So long as there were no dogs he’d be fine. He set to.

‘Who’d leave a window open on a night like this? It’s a fucking icebox in here.’

‘Actually the breeze is kind of nice now, leave it open a while. Whose room is it anyway?’

‘Probably Alan’s. It certainly smells like a wankpit.’

‘Does, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, if it’s Alan we’re talking about, there’ll be no shortage of action,’ and he made the jerk-off motion with his hand.

‘Please, Jack. Not an image I want to stick. He’s not here, is he?’

‘Think he’s home still. There are cows to be milked in Leitrim. There’s no such thing as Christmas for cows, you know. Come here.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘What?’

‘What what? Do you honestly believe I might be feeling romantic?’

‘You’re making too much out of this.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘I thought the plan was we weren’t going to talk about it. Tuesday it’s done with and we can forget about it.’

‘It was crazy taking a pill.’

‘What difference does it make, Kay? You’re getting it looked after on Tuesday.’

‘Looked after! This is starting to sound like something from the 1950s.’

‘I know, yeah. She takes the lonesome boat. I am in the moody, guilt-ridden role. It’s a play-of-the-week starring Cyril Cusack and Joan McKenna. Can you hear the uillean pipes?’

‘Siobhan McKenna. Anyway nothing’s decided.’

‘Don’t. Everything is decided. We’ve been all around the houses with this, it’s set for Tuesday. We do it and it’s done.’

‘I’m the one up on the table!’

‘Woosums! So fine, okay. Tell you what. Let’s have it then. We’ll buy a semi-d and sign up for Fianna Fail.’

‘You’re an arse. Why don’t you go and rub off Mary Pearson some more?’

‘Maybe I shall, maybe I shall,’ and he made the cross-eyed look, and he did the Twilight Zone music, and she laughed.

‘What are we going to do, Jack?’

‘Another half?’

‘Unbelievable! Really, I mean you’re outdoing yourself tonight.’

‘I know. I’m a maggot. And you adore me, so deal with it. And come here, look? Please.’