Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

He picked up the neatly placed beer mats from each of The North Star’s five zinc-topped tables, though they hadn’t been used, and he replaced them with fresh, which he dealt out with Vegas flourish. Stepped in behind the bar again, with a clearing of the throat, hmm-hmm, and it was the satisfaction of small rituals that emanated from him, though by now it was a weakish glow.

‘What way are they above?’

‘Well, Mr Kelliher.’

‘That’s good at least. Did you tell them Hourigan was gone to the wall?’

‘I did.’

‘They’d have sport from that?’

‘They would, Mr Kelliher.’

‘A very bleak situation.’

‘I thought he had his head above water.’

‘Indeed no.’

‘Hard to have sympathy, all the same?’

‘Same fella wouldn’t piss on you, Brendan.’

‘The beard does nothing for him,’ said Thomas.

The classical music succumbed to a news bulletin and there was talk of violent death, atrocities in Africa, oil shortages, a widow in Castleisland with lucky numbers for the Lottery, and we listened, keenly enough, for The North Star was at a remove from the world, certainly, but by no means cut off from it.

‘A sad, peculiar life, gentlemen?’

‘To put it very mildly, Mr Kelliher.’

The stout was about its work. It was the third drink of the day, and the drinking would slow now to session pace — the dread of the morning had lifted, we had passed the hour of remorse, and we marched to the mellow afternoon. Even Thomas was starting to look fairly chipper. A strange rumbling then, like dogs going at each other in the distance, but it was internal, miserably, and I wasn’t sure if it was my own stomach or the cousin’s. Serious drinking, the drinking of a lifetime’s devotion, is hard physical labour.

‘You persevere despite it all, Mr Kelliher?’

‘You never weaken, Brendan. Weaken and all is lost.’

It was due that the crossword of the Irish Times would put in an appearance, and the three of us would make light work of it, normally. Thomas would be an amazement to you. Sit there like a stone all the morning and then start throwing out words like ‘inimical’ and ‘hauteur’. But the crossword was left aside, for there was to be a disturbance this day in The North Star. The door opened up, and glamour stepped in.

Glamour carried itself with great elegance and ease. It was jewelled at the fingers and jewelled at the throat. It wore fine woolens and high leather boots and a green velvet cape, the texture such an excitement against machine-tanned skin. Glamour took onto a high stool beside us, and delicately arranged itself.

‘Howye, lads,’ she said. ‘What reds have ye on?’

The North Star was by no means inoculated against the charms of glamour, especially when it spoke with this whispery hoarseness, and Mr Kelliher was a flushed boy as he pressed into action.

‘Madam,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can only offer a meagre selection. But let’s see now, let’s see.’

He took down one each of the varieties of red wine he kept in the house, the little 33cl, glass-and-a-bit bottles, which myself and Thomas sometimes resorted to late in the evening, if the sheer volume of stout was threatening to overwhelm matters. The evenings we hit the firewater are as well left unremarked.

‘Really,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘I should put you in the hands of these gentlemen. They’d be the experts.’

I nodded, shyly, and reached down to see if my voice would function, and it had a quiver and a quake but it emerged anyway.

‘The merlot isn’t a bad old drop, as it goes,’ I said. ‘A Chilean.’

‘Oh?’ she said, and she took the bottle to examine it. She granted a familiar smile to me, and she crossed her long legs beneath the woolen folds. The electric rustling of nylons was heard, it went off like a crack of lightning in the premises, and a light sweat broke out on my forehead.

‘The pinot noir is bog standard, to be honest with you. It’d be fairly… flat, really. Of the three, I’d nearly go for the cabarnet. It’s not going to stand up and talk to you, it’s very much the usual, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s kinda…’

‘Full and ripe?’ she said, with the mouth twisted slightly.

‘You could say.’

‘A very nice breakfast wine,’ said Thomas, you’d never know when he was going to come out with a quick one. She granted to him a slyer smile.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said, and she took the bottle and unscrewed the top, the movement of her long fingers was quick and dizzying.

Now jealousy was no stranger in the town. It was my own foul weather, a cold mist that surrounded me. But it’s a familiar old song, that one, you’d hear it in every public bar of the town, you’d hear it in all the low bars of Nicholas Street, and in the suede-smelling hush of the hotel’s lounge bar, you’d hear it in all the honky tonks of the Castle Walk. The radio announced that a complex frontal trough was moving in off the Atlantic. Good luck to it.

‘The sort of day,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know would you want a coat on you or what. Seasons changing.’

‘They haven’t much choice,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Where are you from yourself?’

She named a western town, a place so far away that we hadn’t a picture at all of the fallings of life in that town, though we’d suspect them to be harsh.

‘And what brings you here?’ said Mr Kelliher.

‘A minor secondary road,’ she said, and winked him one, and he lit up like Christmas.

She enquired about rental accommodation in the town, and I could sense stirrings the other side of me on a high stool. We related to her what possibilities there were.

‘Are you talking a night or a week or what?’

‘You wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m the way I don’t know how a notion might turn in me. Did you ever get that way? Did you ever wake up and think, what about a turn on the heel? What about a sudden swerve?’

She seemed carefully made up, at first glance, but a more considered examination, there in the convivial afternoon of The North Star, revealed the flaws and slips. The mascara had run a little at the eyes, and the lip gloss was a rush job, and this gave her a fraught quality. It hinted at drama that was by no means unwelcome, for the days were slow in The North Star, and the nights were only trotting after them.

‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’

‘I would, Brendan.’

‘Cuz?’

‘Go on sure.’

‘And yourself, miss?’

‘Very kind,’ she said.

Mr Kelliher smirked in the way that he has.

‘Very poor qualities of observation I would have to say, Brendan.’

‘Oh?’

‘This isn’t a miss we have,’ and he wriggled fingers in the air, and I caught it, belatedly, on the third finger of her left hand, the sparkler. She looked at it herself and mock-proudly held it for display.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m separated.’

A class of dizziness palpable from the high stool the other side of me.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ whispered Mr Kelliher, decorous again after his cheeky intrusion.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s the way things work out sometimes.’

We nodded, the three men, sombre as owls. We nodded as though the cruel variables of love were hardly news to us. We nodded as though we’d each known heartbreak and the ache of a lost love, as though we’d each walked the Castle Walk, at four in the morning, in cold rain, with the collars turned up against a lonely wind. Oh what we wouldn’t have given for broken hearts.

‘A marriage is an old record,’ she said. ‘It’ll go around and around grand for years and then it gets so scratched it’s unlistenable.’