Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘Oh hush, baby, hush! Oh look it, look it … is this your mammy now … is this mammykins?’

The mother fell drunkenly on her child, and Ernestine took the father’s forearm.

‘Oh thank God!’ she said. ‘She was so upset! We were going for security! She thought she had ye lost altogether.’

‘Oh thank you so much,’ said the father.

‘Oh Allie, honey, shush!’ cried the mother.

‘Is that her name, is it Allie, isn’t she some beauty?’

‘Allie, we were only over there! Sweetheart, what is it?’

‘Ah she couldn’t see ye and the poor thing get herself all fussed.’

‘Ah poor baby Allie.’

In a chorus of cooings the matter was smoothed over, and Ernestine and Kit were gratefully thanked for coming to the aid of a small child in distress. The family was left intact, with Allie still weeping, and the ladies moved on with fond smiles and waves. They turned at once for the car park. They made it only just in time. As the Toyota moved, the father dashed into the sightline of the rearview mirror — the angel had spoken — but he was too late, and if he got the reg it was no matter. The plates were false, having been fixed that morning in the garage attached to the bungalow.

They sped twenty and thirty and forty kilometres beyond the speed limit through Sligo and into Leitrim and then Cavan. It was a useful tactic then to drive into Northern Ireland, a separate jurisdiction — the ladies planned for failure as much as success, failure being the commonplace — and it was not until they had crossed the bridge that marks the border, where Blacklion gives way to Belcoo, that they permitted themselves speech again.

‘I’ll tell you this much,’ Ernestine said. ‘I would not like to see a read of my blood pressure right now.’

‘It’d be crazy,’ Kit scolded.

They drove on, and at length they settled to the miserable fact that the day was done for.

‘As we’re on the road,’ Kit said, ‘we could hit the Asda in Enniskillen and pick up some wine.’

The cheaper wines from north of the border would provide a small consolation when they returned, just the two of them, to the floral-patterned walls of the bungalow. It lay blamelessly behind a windbreak of pines — the trees created about the home an aura of great silence. Birds did not nest in those trees ever.

Quickly, the Toyota was on the outskirts of Enniskillen, and traffic was heavy. Another festival — this time by the Erne — drew crowds to its merries, and the air was thick with barbecue smoke that travelled over the water. The afternoon ascended to its peak; the heat was terrific. They saw a shaven-headed, shirtless man and his long, dark-haired partner as they walked towards the carnival, with a small child between them, a little boy.

‘Are you watching,’ Ernestine said, ‘the creature with the head?’

‘Would have the look of a soldier,’ Kit said. ‘A squaddie.’

The Toyota stalled at traffic lights and the family passed directly in front. The ladies regarded each other dolefully.

‘A fine environment for a child,’ Ernestine said. ‘To be growing up in a house where the father has a pierced nipple.’

‘The look of drink off him as well.’

‘Oh it’s sweating out of his every pore, Kit!’

In truth, they weren’t shy themselves with the New Zealand Cabernet Sauvignon, four pounds sterling the screwtop bottle. They went through it by the crate, with the radio set to Lyric FM, the classical station, and it played late, always, into the bungalow’s night, with Ernestine leafing through her power-tool catalogues, and Kit with her small-hours glaze on, and her occasional trilling.

They went sulkily about the aisles of Asda. They filled a trolley with the wine. They bought frozen mince in five-kilo packages. They bought kitchen towel in the fattest available rolls — they went through such an amount of it. Tiredness caught up and it carried age’s taste. The migraine glare of the aisle lights was a trial, and so too was the drone and chill of the refrigeration, and so too the futile cheeps of the piped music. The day was marked by and was heavy with failure, and it was as if their luck might never change but as they neared, by fate, the customer services desk, it did. An announcement was made: a toddler had been found, and its parents should approach at once — the child was panicked.

Boldly, the chance was taken.

‘Oh my darling Allie!’

Ernestine at a dash reached the desk, and she flung herself on the child, and Kit was at her back, and she kept watch; she knew they had perhaps a minute, maximum, no matter how vast the Asda.

‘Oh thank you so much!’ Kit cried. ‘Oh thank you.’

‘Ah she’s upset, she got a wee shock, a wee shock is all …’ Ernestine soothed as the toddler continued to scream.

The customer services lady was delighted to have reunited the odd family — ‘Allie, is that her name?’ she said. ‘Pretty.’ Delighted to be rid of the screaming child, she waved them along.

Held in a firm lock by Kit’s steel-wire arms, it was a monstrously burbling infant they carried at pace across the car park — their trolley abandoned to the air-conditioned aisle. Quickly they were away, and Ernestine through the busy town gunned the Toyota.

Belcoo.

Blacklion.

Dromahair.

And now they began their descent to the midland plain, and the toddler wailed itself to a state of purple exhaustion, and it was laid on the back seat.

Kit after a time turned and eyed it coldly.

‘This is no angel,’ she said.

Ernestine consulted the rearview and tightened her lips in agreement.

‘Is it not kind of … wall-eyed, Kit?’

‘It is. And a jaundicey class of a look to it, I’d say. Once the purple clears.’

On a straight stretch, Ernestine turned to give the child a more considered appraisal.

‘I wouldn’t think we’ll be depriving the world of an Einstein,’ she said.

‘No indeed.’

‘Bad blood, Kit.’

‘Sure what kind of parents? Can you imagine, Ernie? What kind of parents would lose a child in an Asda?’

‘Drunks and drug addicts and prostitutes,’ Ernestine said.

‘With tattoos on their backsides,’ Kit said.

‘It smells, Kit.’

‘Oh, a smell that would knock you, Ernestine.’

‘Look at the Babygro!’

‘It’s busting out of it.’

‘Fattish alright. Being fed on white bread mulched down with milk and cane sugar.’

‘Asda-bought the Babygro.’

‘Oh, classy.’

‘Could it be …’

‘What, Kit?’

‘Could it be an itinerant we have on our hands?’

‘Oh Jesus Christ, a tinker child!’

‘Ernestine, what I’d say to you now …’

‘I know, darling.’

‘Do you?’

‘You’re right, darling.’

‘I am! The likes of this … thing isn’t worth the effort nor the risk.’

The decision was made. The Toyota pulled into a lay-by. The toddler was lifted by Kit from the back seat. It was taken across a ditch and left beneath hawthorn bushes — a kindness to give it shade from the sun that was hot still. The Toyota with relief departed the lay-by, and headed for home, the bungalow, the windbreak pines planted in the soft give of an earth that hid so efficiently.

Near the lay-by as the evening aged the toddler sat silently beneath the hawthorn; it was stunned. It blinked against the midges that came up from the lake to feast on it but it had no strength left to cry. With interest, the toddler was watched by a pair of hooded crows, who stalked about importantly — like fascist birds, like jackboot gestapo — who waited on its final weakening, and for its sore eyes to sleepily close.