Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

And there he was, by the launderette window. Smoking a fag, if you don’t mind. Even though I was on the other side of the street, I couldn’t mistake him, he was not one you’d easily mistake. Steel-wire for hair, a small tight mushroom-shaped cloud of it, and he was wizened beyond his years, owlish, with the bones of the face arranged in a hasty symmetry that didn’t quite take, and a torso too short for his long legs, heron’s legs, and he was pigeon-chested, poetical, sad-faced.

I walked on, and I felt the cold rise into myself from the deep stone centre of the town. I quickened my pace. I was too scared to look back. I knew that he’d seen me too, and I knew that he would flee, that he would have no choice but to flee. He was one of my oldest and most argued with friends. He had been dead for six years.

I didn’t stop until I reached the river. The banks of the river were peopled with the foul and forgotten of the town, skin-poppers and jaw-chewers, hanging onto their ratty dogs for dear life, eating sausage rolls out of the Centra, wearing thin nylon clothes against the seep of the evil-smelling air. The river light was jaunty, blue-green, it softened and prettified as best as it could. I sat on a bench and sucked down some long, deep breaths. If I had been able to speak, the words would have been devil words, spat with a sibilant hiss, all consonants and hate. Drab office workers in Dunnes suits chomped baguettes. People scurried, with their heads down. People muttered; people moaned. I tried to train my thoughts into logical arrangements but they tossed and broke free. I heard the oompah and swirls of circus music, my thoughts swung through the air like tiny acrobats, flung each other into the big tent’s canvas maw, missed the catch, fell to the net.

I was in poor shape, but slowly the water started to work on me, calmed me, allowed me to corral the acrobats and put names to them. A car wreck, in winter, in the middle of the night, that had done for him, and there is no coming back from the likes of that, or so you would think. The road had led to Oranmore.

I tried my feet, and one went hesitantly in front of the other, and they sent me in the direction of Bus Áras. I decided there was nothing for it but to take a bus to the hills and to hide out for a while there, with the gentle people. I walked, a troubled man, in the chalkstripe suit and the cheeky bowler, and this is where it got good. A barrier had been placed across the river’s walkway and there was a sign tacked up. It read:

NO PEDESTRIAN ACCESS BEYOND THIS POINT

Fine, okay, so I crossed the road, but the throughway on Eden Quay was blocked too, with the same sign repeated, and I thought, waterworks, gasworks, cables, men in day-glo jackets, I’ll cut up and around, but there was no access from Abbey Street, or from Store Street, everywhere the same sign had been erected: Bus Áras was a no-go zone. I saw a man in the uniform of the State, and he had sympathetic eyes, so I approached and questioned him.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘There are no buses from here today. There are no buses in or out.’

I stood before him, horrified, and not because of the transport situation, which at the best of times wasn’t great, but because this man in the uniform was undeniably Harry Carolan, a.k.a. Harry Cakes, the bread-and-fancies man of my childhood. The van would be around every day at half three, set your watch by it, loaves of white and loaves of brown, fresh baked, and ring doughnuts and jammy doughnuts and sticky buns too. The creased kind folds of his face, the happy downturned mouth, eyes that in a more innocent era we’d have described as ‘dancing’. Éclairs! Fresh-cream swiss rolls! All the soda bread you could eat, until 1983, when Harry Cakes had dropped down dead in his shoes.

I went through the town like a flurry of dirty snow. This is a good one, I said to myself, oh this is a prize-taker. Now the faces of the streets seemed no different. It was the same bleary democracy as before. Some of us mad, some in love, some very tired, and all of us, it seemed, resigned to our humdrum affairs. People rearranged their shopping bags so as to balance the weight. Motorists tamped down their dull fury as best as they could. A busking trumpeter played ‘Spanish Harlem’. I took on a sudden notion. I thought: might a bowl of soup not in some fundamental way sort me out?

There was a café nearby, on Denmark Street. I would not call it a stylish operation. It was a tight cramped space, with a small scattering of tables, greasy ketchup holders, wipeable plastic table cloths in a check pattern, Larry Gogan doing the just-a-minute quiz on a crackling radio, and I took a seat, composed myself, and considered the menu. It was written in a language I had no knowledge of. The slanted graphics of the lettering were a puzzle to me, the numerals were alien, I couldn’t even tell if I was holding the thing the right way up. No matter, I thought, sure all I’m after is a drop of soup, and I clicked my fingers to summon the waiter.

You’d swear I’d asked him to take out his eyes and put them on a plate for me. The face on him, and he slugging across the floor, a big bruiser from the country.

‘What’s the soup, captain?’ I asked.

‘Carrot and coriander,’ he said, flatly, as though the vocal chords were held with pliers. He seemed to grudge me the very words, and he did so in a midwestern accent and as always, this drew me in.

I considered the man. A flatiron face, hot with angry energies, mean thin mouth, aggravation in the oyster-grey eyes, and a challenging set to the jaw, anticipating conflict, which I had no intention of providing. I looked at him, wordlessly — you’ll understand that by now I was somewhat adrift, as regards the emotions — and the café was on pause around us, and he grew impatient.

‘Do you want the soup or what?’ he said, almost hissed it, and it was at this point he clarified for me, I made out the childhood face in back of the adult’s.

‘It’s Thomas, isn’t it? Thomas Cremins?’

Sealight came into the oyster-grey, he gleamed with recognition, and it put the tiniest amount of happiness in his face — even this was enough to put some innocence back, too, and thus youth. He clarified still further: detail came back for me. He’d been one of those gaunt kids, bootlace thin and more than averagely miserable, a slime of dried snot on the sleeve of his school jumper. I remembered him on the bus home each day, waiting for someone braver to make the first move at hooliganism. A sheep, a follower, no doubt dull-minded, but somehow I remembered kindness in him, too. He said:

‘Fitz?’

We talked, awkwardly but warmly, and with each sentence my own accent became more midwestern, and his circumstances came back to me. I remembered the small house, on a greystone terrace, near the barracks. Sometimes, after school, I would have been in there for biscuits and video games, and I remembered his sister, too, older and blousy, occasional fodder of forlorn fantasies, and of course there was his younger brother, younger than me but… ah.

Alan Cremins had been killed, hadn’t he? Of course, it all came back. It had been one of these epochal childhood deaths some of us have the great excitement to encounter. He was caught in an April thunderstorm, fishing at Plassey, and he took shelter in a tower there and was struck by lightning. I remember the shine of fear on us all, for weeks after. Hadn’t we all been fishing at Plassey, at some point or other, and hadn’t we all seen the weather that day, it could have been each and any of us. It was about this same time I noticed girls. I liked big healthy girls with well-scrubbed faces. We had any amount of them in the midwest.

Should I mention it?

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Oh God, Thomas, I remember the time with Alan. When he, you know …’