Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

A July evening, after a tar-melter of a day, and Broad Street was quiet and muffled with summer, the entire town was dozy with summer, and even as the summer peaked so it began to fade. Dogs didn’t know what had hit them. They walked around the place with their tongues hanging out and their eyes rolling and they lapped forlornly at the drains. The old were anxious, too: they twitched the curtains to look to the hills, and flapped themselves with copies of the RTE Guide to make a parlour breeze. Later, after dark, the bars would be giddy with lager drinkers, but it was early yet, and Broad Street was bare and peaceful in the blue evening.

The youth of Broad Street and its surrounds had convened in a breeze-block arcade tacked onto Moloney’s Garage. This had been one of Moloney’s sharper moves. He’d taken an old shed that he’d used for a store room, it was maybe forty foot long and half as wide, and he’d installed there a pool table, three video games, a wall-mounted jukebox and a pinball machine. To add a note of local pride, he’d painted the walls in the county colours. It wasn’t much of an arcade, with just the clack and nervous roll of the pool balls, and the insipid bleats of Donkey Kong and Defender. There was high anxious talk about girls and handjobs and who had cigarettes, and there was talk about cars and motorbikes. It wasn’t much at all but it was the only show in town and this evening, a dozen habituees had gathered there, all boys, from pre-pubescents through to late teens, and there was desperation to make this a different kind of night, a night to sustain them through the long winter. But so far it was the same old routine, with Donkey Kong and Defender, and winner-stays-on at the pool table, and James was always the winner, and he always stayed on. The pinball machine lit up and crackled to salute a good score. Its theme was the criminal scene of Atlantic City, and the illustration showed a black detective, with a heavy moustache, patrolling in a red sports car, and whenever the day’s hi-score was achieved, the detective’s eyes lit up and he spoke out, in a deep-voiced, downtown drawl.

He said: ‘Atlantic City. Feel The Force!’

This was James’s cue to leave the pool table and approach the pinball machine. At nineteen, he was the oldest of the habituees, and certainly the biggest. Not fat so much as massive, the width of a small van across the shoulders, and he moved noiselessly, as though on castors, and the flesh swung and rolled with him, there was no little grace to it, and he considered the breathless, blushing youngster who’d achieved a new hi-score on Atlantic City, and he considered the score, and he said:

‘Handy. Handy alright.’

With a long-suffering sigh he reached deep into the pocket of his jeans and took out the necessary coin and inserted it in the slot. The silver balls slapped free and he pulled the spring-release to send the first of them on its way, and it bounced and pinged and rebounded around the nooks and contours of the game, around the boardwalks and the neon boulevards, and wordlessly, the habituees of the arcade swivelled their attention from the pool to the pinball, for the magic had shifted to a new discipline, and cigarette smoke hung blue in the air, and it twisted as they turned. It was a matter of pride to James that he wouldn’t let even one of the silver balls drop between the flippers to the dead-ball zone, and he worked the flippers with quick rhythmic slaps from his fingers and palms — an expert — and his score rolled onwards and upwards. The habituees were hypnotised by the ratcheting numbers, and James knew precisely when he’d made the day’s hi-score and he drawled it deep, in time with the black detective:

‘Atlantic City. Feel The Force!’

Then, with the silver ball still pinging and rebounding, and the score climbing still higher, his routine was to become Stevie Wonder. He closed his eyes and clamped on a delirious smile and rocked his head wildly from side to side, and he sang:

‘Happy Birthday… Happy Birthday to ya… Happpy Biiiiirthday…’

And the arcade rumbled with the usual low laughter, and as James sang the blind star’s signature tune and rocked his head on his huge shoulders, beaming blindly to the ceiling, he let the flippers miss the first of the silver balls, and he released the second and let that drop too, and then the third, and all the while he maintained the delirium of a blind ecstatic. Then he returned to the pool table, took up his cue, and said:

‘Right so. Where am I here?’

‘You’re on the reds, Jamesie.’

Beyond the open doors of the arcade, Broad Street revelled in the unexpected langour of evening heat. Broad Street didn’t know itself. The evening was moving to its close, quicker now as the summer aged, but there was heat in it still. There was scant traffic. The hills above the town darkened with the shadows of approaching night. Moloney sat in his kiosk, on the forecourt of the garage, by the pumps, and he cursed the championship reports in the weekly paper. The lying bastards hadn’t seen the same match he’d seen. They were making excuses for the county side. He hadn’t seen a county side as weak in years. There were fellas with weight on them. It was a disgrace. There were fellas on the county side who’d spent the winter drinking. Where, Moloney asked the walls of his kiosk, oh where was the dedication? There were no answers, and certainly none outside on Broad Street.

James chalked his cue. He performed this action with priestly nuance, a sense of ritual. He allowed a particular amount of chalk onto the tip’s head, blew off the excess dust, and then, with an air of dainty finesse, surprising in a young man the width of a van, he chalked the curved sides of the tip too. A small fat pink tongue emerged from between his lips as he performed the task. It was a sign of concentration, for it was a knacky business to get it right. He wanted no moisture whatsoever in the vicinity of the cue’s tip. Not on a night so clammy as this, when the arcade was fuggy with the sweat and vapours of teenagers in summer.

‘So listen, Carmody,’ he said. ‘Are you looking at me with a straight face on you and telling me she’s not ridin’?’

‘All I’m saying is I don’t think our friend has been next nor near. Our friend hasn’t been within a million miles.’

James closed his eyes, briefly, and nodded his head, slowly. This was sombre acknowledgement of information received. His manner, as he leaned in over the pool table, was proper and studious. The great mass of his belly he arranged carefully, and he peeked beneath his chin to ensure that it was not interfering with play and thus causing a foul — if it was, he’d be the first to call it — and he formed a careful bridge for the cue between thumb and forefinger of the left hand, and he sized up a long red for the bottom left corner.

‘I’m not saying for a minute she’d be an auld slut,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is she’d be gamey. All I’m sayin’ is if you could get her going at all then she’d really go for you. Do you know what I mean, Carm? She’d be like…’

His gaze drifted out to Broad Street, as he sought the precise image.

‘She’d be like a little motorbike.’

The low murmur of laughter rippled again around the table’s edges. Another kid was having a go at Atlantic City, there was an amount of interest in Defender, somewhat less in Donkey Kong, but there was no contesting the focus of attention. Outside, at a little past nine, the evening had gone into tawn, was in its dream-time, with the sky velvet, with the air still warm, with the shadows taking on the precise tone of the sky’s glow. As he prepared to let the cue slide, James tapped the faded baize three times with the middle finger of his bridge hand, a sportsman’s tic, and with his right arm working from the elbow as a smooth piston, he made the shot. He sent the white down the table onto the red and its kiss sent the red slowly for the bottom left, and the left-hand side he had applied to the cue ball, an indescribable delicacy, caused it to drag and spin back towards the centre of the table, where it would be ideally in place for the next red he had in mind. The object red still rolled, slowly, and then it dropped into the bottom left pocket, and the cue ball’s positioning was perfect, and his opponent, Carmody, tapped the butt of his cue three times on the concrete floor in stony-faced regard. And the usual hymn, the usual evensong, was sung: