Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘Art of Noise,’ said Billy Stroud.

‘Shut up, Billy!’

‘Of course the next thing the summer’s over and I’ve a start with BT up here and she’s to follow on, October is the plan. We’re ringing from phone boxes again, Tuesdays and Fridays but the second Friday the phone doesn’t ring. Next time I see her she’s forty bloody three.’

Flint station we passed through, and then Connah’s Quay.

‘Built up, this,’ said Tom N. ‘There’s an Aldi, look? And that’s a new school, is it?’

‘Which means you want to be keeping a good two hundred yards back,’ said Big John.

We were horrified. Through a miscarriage of justice, plain as, Tom N had earlier in the year been placed on a sex register. Oh the world is mad! Tom N is a placid, placid man. We were all six of us quiet as the grave on the evening train then. It grew and built, it was horrible, the silence. It was Everett at last that broke it; we were coming in for Helsby. Fair dues to Everett.

‘Not like you, John,’ he said.

Big John nodded.

‘I don’t know where that came from, Tom,’ he said. ‘A bloody stupid thing to say.’

Tom N raised a palm in peace but there was no disguising the hurt that had gone in. I pulled away into myself. The turns the world takes — Tom dragged through the courts, Everett half mad, Mo all scratched up and one-balled, Big John jobless for eighteen months. Billy Stroud was content, I suppose, in Billy’s own way. And there was me, shipwrecked in Liverpool. Funny, for a while, to see ‘Penny Lane’ flagged up on the buses, but it wears off.

And then it was before us in a haze. Terrace rows we passed, out Speke way, with cookouts on the patios. Tiny pockets of glassy laughter we heard through the open windows of the carriage. Families and what-have-you. We had the black hole of the night before us — it wanted filling. My grimmest duty as publications officer was the obits page of the newsletter. Too many had passed on at forty-four, at forty-six.

‘I’m off outings,’ I announced. ‘And I’m off bloody publications as well.’

‘You did volunteer on both counts,’ reminded Big John.

‘It would leave us in an unfortunate position,’ said Tom N.

‘For my money, it’s been a very pleasant outing,’ said Billy Stroud.

‘We’ve supped some quality ale,’ concurred Big John.

‘We’ve had some cracking weather,’ said Tom N.

‘Llandudno is quite nice, really,’ said Mo.

Around his scratch marks an angry bruising had seeped. We all looked at him with tremendous fondness.

‘’Tis nice,’ said Everett Bell. ‘If you don’t run into a she-wolf.’

‘If you haven’t gone ten rounds with Edward bloody Scissorhands,’ said John Mosely.

We came along the shabby grandeurs of the city. The look on Mo’s face then couldn’t be read as anything but happiness.

‘Maur ice ,’ teased Big John, ‘is thinking of the rather interesting day he’s had.’

Mo shook his head.

‘Thinking of days I had years back,’ he said.

It has this effect, Liverpool. You’re not back in the place five minutes and you go sentimental as a famine ship. We piled off at Lime Street. There we go: six big blokes in the evening sun.

‘There’s the Lion Tavern?’ suggested Tom N.

‘There’s always the Lion,’ I agreed.

‘They’ve a couple of Manx ales guesting at Rigby’s,’ said Everett Bell.

‘Let’s hope they’re an improvement on previous Manx efforts,’ said Billy Stroud.

‘There’s the Grapes?’ tried Big John.

‘There’s always the Grapes,’ I agreed.

And alewards we went about the familiar streets. The town was in carnival: Tropic of Lancashire in a July swelter. It would not last. There was rain due in off the Irish Sea, and not for the first time.

TWO LADIES IN their sixties made ground through north County Sligo in a neat Japanese car. The sky above Lough Gill was deep blue and the world was fat on the blood of summer. The speed limit was carefully abided and all the turns were slowed for. There was the carnival air of a fine Saturday in June. A vintage car show had drawn a crowd in 1920s boaters and blazers to Kilmore; the old Fords and Triumphs honked cheerfully in the sun, and the ladies as they passed by smiled and waved. There was a lengthy queue for the ferry ride to the lake isle of Inishfree, there were castles to be visited, and way-marked walks to be hotly trailed. All the shaded tables outside the village pubs were full and tinkled with glasses and laughter, and children played unguarded in the cool of the woods.

‘When it gets a good old lick of weather at all,’ Ernestine said, ‘this is one powerful country.’

‘No place to compare,’ Kit sighed, and the summer growth swished heavily against the Toyota’s side windows on a tight bend after Tully.

Ernestine was big, with the high colour of a carnivore, and her haunches strained a little against the capacity of her cream linen trousers in the confined space of the driver’s seat. Her mottled, fleshy arms were held tensely erect as she steered — she had learned to drive later in life. Kit, slightly the younger, was long-necked, tightly permed, and thin as a cable. She had a darting glance that scanned the country they passed through and by habit she drew her companion’s attention to places and people of interest.

‘Would they be hair extensions?’ she wondered, as they passed a young blonde pushing a pram along the roadside verge.

‘You can bet on it,’ Ernestine said. ‘The way they’re streaked with that silvery-looking, kind of …’

‘Cheap-looking,’ Kit said.

‘Yes.’

‘Gaudy!’

‘A young mother,’ Ernestine said.

‘Got up like a tuppenny whore,’ Kit said.

‘The skirt’s barely down past her modesty, are you watching?’

‘I am watching. And that horrible, horrible stonewash denim!’

‘Where would the whore be headed for, Kit?’

Kit consulted the road map.

‘Leckaun is the next place along,’ she said. ‘Only a stretch up the road from here. Her ladyship is headed into a pub, no doubt.’

‘Drinking cider with fellas with earrings and tattoos,’ Ernestine said. ‘In by a pool table. In a dank old back room. Dank!’

‘You can only imagine,’ said Kit, and she made the sign of the cross. ‘A jukebox and beer barrels and cocaine in the toilets. The misfortunate infant left to its own devices.’

‘Would we nearly stall for a while in Leckaun, Kit?’

Kit pondered this a moment.

‘No,’ she decided, ‘we’ll hit on for the castle. There’ll be a nice crowd there for sure.’

Onwards through the county the Toyota mildly sped, and the ladies had the windows buzzed down a little for breeze: it brought the medieval scent of the old-growth woods. They had been on the road since early morning but there was no tiredness yet — the excitement of the outing countered that.

‘A Cornetto would go down a treat,’ Ernestine said.

‘Ice-cream weather most certainly,’ Kit replied.

They turned to smile at each other. They hoped to have the need to buy ice creams soon enough, and more than two.

Castles were good. The car park was almost entirely full. Ernestine manoeuvred — after a couple of chubby attempts that brought sweat to her forehead — into the last available space. As the engine cut the car filled with the sound of anxious birds and the nearby chatter of the castle visitors. For a moment, the ladies pleasantly listened — they did love a summer-afternoon crowd. The lake waters the castle kept guard of sat as heavily as the blue sky above; each was a suspension of the other.

‘Or would we chance a scone, Kit?’