Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

The goth was pinned to the ground. Crowds broke onto the street in a panic — the station was cordoned. He picked up on the talk as he went with the crowd along the High Street. A guitar case the goth kid had carried was isolated for bomb disposal.

Manus.

That he was a match for the profile in the giddiness went unnoticed. He walked the length of the High Street again. He went along the canal, west, until he found a quiet spot beneath a bridge there. He hung the case over the rail but he could not let go of it. A wino sprawled on the far side of the canal called to him in an Irish accent:

‘They’re a hoor to learn, the guitars.’

He went back the pathway and he found an unseen moment among the Sunday crowd and he sneaked the case behind a bookstall on the Lock.

He was only ten minutes late for their meeting and she looked as good in daylight. Camden was giving him a headache, he said, would they not get on a bus? She laughed, and she was taken with him, he could see that. They went to Hampstead to the repertory cinema there. They waited in the coffee shop for Wings of Desire to be screened. Other young people in black waited also.

‘Ah yeah,’ he said. ‘Wim Wenders.’

‘Vim,’ she said.

‘Hah?’

‘You say it Vim Venders.’

‘Right so.’

They watched angels over Berlin and he was transfixed. Afterwards, they walked, and he asked were there squats in Berlin? She said yes, there were many.

HE SAW HER every day as she moved through Stratford station. She came towards him on the concourse and the illusion held for just a moment. But as she came closer again her features would erase and re-form into someone else’s — a stranger’s. Still, he would search for her among the crush, each morning and evening, though she lived in another country, and he was not even romantic by nature.

His work involved threading fibre optic cables through office buildings. He tried not to stare too hard at the office girls, for she was among them, too — there were many who were slender and dark in that way. His heart was broken by them as he passed through the photocopier rooms. Most days he was rational, but he worried about the depth of his obsession, and he wondered, distantly, if it might turn to something darker.

Leytonstone had the air of just the kind of place a dark turn might occur. He shared a house off the High Road there with three peaceful alcoholics. He would drink with them for as long as he was able to at night and then pass out to dream the jagged, scratchy dreams that left him gaunt in the mornings. To be gaunt at twenty-five was a sombre accomplishment. He was putting money away but had no purpose in mind for it — he would not go back to Ireland. The weekends were the hardest.

He walked the evil local park on Saturday afternoon. The dads coddled their pitbulls and kicked balls at shaven-headed children. The light was giving up by four. He kept his eyes down as he passed the haggard masturbators who patrolled the territory of the public toilets. It was his usual bad luck that when the bell-ringer appeared to signal the park’s closing, he did so directly behind him on the pathway, and he marched there, solemnly tolling, a harbinger, and each time he looked over his shoulder, on every third or fourth peel, the ringer was staring directly into him: a soul-reader in a parks jacket. He let himself be steered out of the park on the tip of the bell’s ringing and he walked the High Road, where people at bus stops ate kebab meat and chips and the traffic looked as if it might do away with itself at any minute. January, and he turned down the long street of pre-war terrace houses on which he made his home. ‘Humps for Half a Mile’ a road sign read, warning of the traffic-calming measures that were in place, but the words had a metaphorical resonance. The house that he lived in was not a house in which he might casually talk of metaphors. It was not yet five o’clock but already his housemates had for some hours been going at the Excelsior lager. They were Connemara men, with the look of bunched and tragic navvies, though all three of them worked in IT. The Excelsior lager was 9.8 per cent to volume and would take the paint off the walls if left to its own devices. He settled into his usual armchair and received the usual vague smiles in greeting. They were watching gazelles in the forest wild — some dappled idyll in equatorial light — but kept flicking back and forth to the BBC for the final scores in the football.

‘Fucken Lampard’s on fire.’

‘He fucken is the cunt.’

This was not a house in which to talk about the heart. This was a house in which to drink super-strength lager and cut yourself shaving. The bathroom in the mornings was out of Scarface . He was not a fastidious man — he was twenty-five — but the blood on the white tiles and the tiny scraps of scrunched-up bloody toilet paper, these were hard to stomach. His stomach was not the greatest anyway. He had not been eating well for the best part of the year since she had left him. Occasionally, a communal stew or casserole was attempted in the house, but most often it was forgotten about, causing smoke damage and small fires — the brigade had been out more than once to number 126.

He could not keep the Excelsior down and always instead drank Heineken. The housemates shook their heads at this and accused him of gayness. But they were not lads overly bothered by sex in any of its varieties. The Excelsior ruled out attempts at courting and copulation. It pretty much ruled out walking, too, and when more weed was required from the Jamaican in the flats, he was, as always, the one sent to fetch it. Soiled fivers were found in the pits of denims and slapped into his hand; an ounce was agreed on for the house to share. He drained what was left of his Heineken and he stood up and into his jacket and he watched the last few moments of the programme about gazelles.

‘I thought they were going to be seen ridin’ one another?’

‘Hardly at this hour. Sure there’s the watershed.’

The Jamaican’s name was Rainbow and his lips were blue from the crack pipe as he answered the door. The flat was kept as a shebeen and got out roughly as a kind of shanty-town bar. The curtains were tightly drawn and there were green fairy lights strung and there were bales of straw for decor and a lady somewhere in her thirties sat at a table licking the papers to seal a spliff. He followed Rainbow through the bar area to the kitchen and bought from him the ounce. Rainbow was not in the best of moods and called him a ‘bloodclat’ for no reason. Rainbow was unpredictable. To ease passage and smooth things out — he was a born diplomat — he bought a can of Red Stripe lager, also, and he went and sat with it at the table, by the lady, and they exchanged a smile, and she admitted handsomely that she was Rainbow’s sister.

‘A pleasure,’ he said.

Rainbow played a ragga step-out on the sound system and could be heard back there to gurgle and hiss and his sister called to him to keep it down, would you, boy, and she too was called a bloodclat. Rainbow, in a huff, then left the flat, screaming vengeance from his blue lips.

He was alone with the sister. She was not a shy girl by any means and she turned her doleful eyes to him and here, sure enough, and now — yes — this was where the heart might be spoken of.

‘Each morning,’ she said, ‘he’d wake me up with his dick in my back. That was lovely.’ He was a skinhead, she said, and it was the first time ever she had been with one of those. Definitely it was love, she said, there was no question about that. She exhaled a heavy greenish smoke that lingered and he felt a tingle from her look.

‘But then he start coming home later,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, and I’m, like, what the fuck? And was days he didn’t come home at all. And nights. I said you got another an’ she stashed someplace?’