Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

From an exotic assortment of spirits, Freddie considered something green and conceivably… Venezuelan? He held the bottle against the window and moonlight made lurid the unreal green of its liquor. Well, one took one’s chances.

‘I must say,’ he said, with a relaxed grin. ‘I’m very much looking forward to the guided badger walks.’

‘Nothing is decided on badgers,’ she held up a warning finger.

‘But it’ll be a unique attraction,’ he argued. ‘Badger sightings are terribly rare. And I happen to know just the spot. I’ll tell you now, Angel — I can all but guarantee badgers. Of course, these will be nocturnal events, obviously, but that just adds to the fun of it. Night-time expeditions! A cloak of darkness!’

Freddie Bliss was about to go with the Venezuelan when he spotted half a bottle of decent-looking Spanish brandy at the back of the press. This was a definite result. He waved the dusty treasure at his daughter and set free a suave smile.

‘Come, my darling,’ he said. ‘The night is young.’

Angelica narrowed her eyes. She retained — despite it all — a good posture. She wore light fabrics in bright colours. She had a fondness for ethnic trousers, loosely worn, and these did not flatter. She had some handsomeness still but it was turning into something else. She had moved from city to city, and from town to town, propelled by a talent for hopeless optimism.

‘I’m warning you, Dad,’ she said. ‘What I’ve told you about Joe is in the strictest confidence. He’d be livid if he thought every old sod knew his difficulties.’

‘Where do you find these blokes, Angel? Pubs?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Seedy night-spots?’

‘Shut up! What do think I am? Some kind of tart?’

‘Well where did you meet him?’

‘We met on the Internet.’

‘I see,’ said Freddie Bliss, assuming some kind of motorway junction.

The warmth in the air was still and oily feeling. Soon the lake would turn stagnant and rank. The yellow flowers of the gorse would dry out and become a nose-tickling dust. That was the first sign of the year turning.

‘I’ve been wondering…’ she said.

She picked up the mallet again and swung it thoughtfully to test its heft.

‘I’ve been wondering if maybe we should… knock through some more? We’ve started so we’ll finish, kind of a thing.’

‘More, sweet? I’d be worried about draughts.’

Three internal walls had already come down. All was rubble and wreck. For weeks, Angelica had stomped around in brown padded boots like builders wear, in a facemask, wielding the mallet, with her cheeks a flushed red against the whiteness of plaster and dust. A space the size of a football pitch had been cleared out downstairs. She now spent much of the evenings crawling around with a chalk, marking down where the new divisions would go.

‘You mean,’ said Freddie, ‘that now we put up new walls?’

‘Perhaps just screens,’ she said.

‘Like Japanese?’

‘Precisely, Dad. Lacquered.’

‘Lovely.’

‘I’m thinking fin de siecle. I want an opulent feel. Decadent!’

‘Like a knocking shop?’ said Freddie Bliss.

‘More opium den,’ she said.

The curriculum vitae of Angelica Bliss:

She went first to art school in Leeds, where she discovered no aptitude for creativity, but fell happily pregnant by her free-drawing instructor, Kim, who was kind enough to drive her to Halifax for the abortion, and with a Yorkshireman’s swarthy panache offered to go halves on the cost. Then she took up archaeology at Liverpool, and talked excitedly for two years of Picts, Celts, and Roman walls, and she was neck-deep in mud on digs in North Wales, and the dig supervisor, Frank, vowed to leave his wife of thirty years for her, and there was a dreadful scene in a lay-by outside Wrexham: midnight, winter, early eighties. She had enough of learning then, thank you very much, and with a loan from her parents opened a candle store in Stoke-on-Trent. From there, she progressed to a transcendence workshop in Inverness, then a market stall in Camden Town, then a lost weekend in Murcia that lasted five years, then a period of intense political activism on behalf of the Turks in Dortmund, then a marriage of one year to a financial services executive in Kent, then a squat strewn with needle-thin junkies in Coventry, and finally a dull job at a call centre in Manchester. She had long since gone through her inheritance: all that was left was the house. She now stood in the middle of the house, late on a summer’s night, with the mallet hammer in her hands.

‘What we also need to think about,’ she said, ‘is the breakfast menu. Traditional? Kippers?’

She swung the mallet. She took out a doorframe. There had as yet been little discussion about marketing. Angelica believed that once the camera crew had been, and once the programme aired, their name would be out there, and it would spread, and the business would make itself. She held the firm belief, always, that if your name was Bliss, then the stars were helpfully arrayed. Significantly, this had not proved the case for previous generations.

‘Actually,’ she said, throwing the hammer aside. ‘We really need to start getting some ideas down. They’ll be here for seven. Sharp!’

‘I’ve had a shave,’ said Freddie Bliss. ‘And I’ve given quite a bit of thought to what I’d like to say.’

‘What you mean, like to say?’

‘To camera.’

‘This isn’t about you! This is a renovation show.’

‘Fly on the wall, you said?’

‘Oh you know the type of thing, Dad. We’re battling against the odds. We’re setting up a new business. This is a story about life changes and DIY. The last-minute madness of the renovation. The drama of the first paying guests.’

‘You mean there’s a booking?’

‘Oh shut up! We’ll go out on the eight o’clock slot. The eating-your-supper slot. All we’ve got to worry about is keeping up with the business as it arrives.’

The scullery ceiling caved in. Angelica shrugged heroically.

‘I rather thought,’ said Freddie Bliss, ‘that I’d talk about… courage.’

‘Oh dear Christ!’

‘I’ve never had any. Now you certainly do, Angel. You’re a tremendously brave girl.’

‘You’re background colour! You can say hello and look whiskery and that’s it!’

‘I’m worried about the lights. Will there be lots? Will there be… kliegs? If there are going to be kliegs, I’d better have a word.’

They repaired to what was left of the dining room. It was a house of scurrying and of rising damp. Angelica remained confident they would be open for business in three weeks. Freddie couldn’t see it, unless they were to put the guests on beds of straw. But he was no longer a man to fret. He was, in the calmness of his age, a great believer in doing things right: after dinner, you have some more drinks.

He placed the bottle on the table with a triumphant flourish and then sniffed at the air, sighed, and went to open the windows. Torpid and clammy, it was June, and the gorse on the low hills was an invitation to midges. The smoke from the candlelight would keep most of them at bay. He lit more, to be on the safe side. Angelica poured the coffee. Freddie added generous slugs of the cognac. It was a brand from the northern bit, something unpronouncable with lots of Xs and Ks, and it had a badly drawn bull for a graphic.

‘This should do the business, Angel,’ he said, as though predicting a safe landing in hazardous conditions. ‘Carajillos, isn’t it? Civilised.’

‘If we must,’ said Angelica.

‘No gun to your head, dear. You mustn’t always scold so.’

‘I’m not scolding.’

‘It’s your tone. It’s a scolding tone.’