Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

Her features flashed a hard look as she revealed the skinhead’s treachery.

‘Turn out he was sticking his dick in more than one back,’ she said. ‘Turn out he couldn’t keep it away from backs.’

As he sat and listened, as they smoked the weed together and sipped at their tins of Red Stripe, he found himself growing angry. It was the way that she kept talking about dicks.

‘I’m not one of your girls,’ he said at last.

‘You what?’

‘You’re talking to me like I’m one of the girls,’ he said. ‘It’s dick this, dick that, and dick the other. You’re talking to me as if I don’t have one myself. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even here. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even a possibility.’

‘You’re not,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘You’re depress’,’ she said.

He walked with the weed back to the terrace house. The Excelsior lager was busily washing down the gullies of the Connemara men a feed of chips and saveloys from the homicidal takeaway on the corner — someone had managed to walk. He had at this hour presumed the burp odour of low-grade meat products on the air, but even so it was a trial, and he sat among it feeling dickless and wild. The only way not to smell the saveloys was to eat one and quickly he succumbed.

‘I’m after a run-in with a Jamaican bird,’ he said. ‘She had some arse on her now.’

The Connemara men ignored him. They watched a quiz show as they ate. There was heavy breathing in the room between mouthfuls, much too heavy for the ages of these men. Soon the heavy fug of the marijuana was laid atop the meat odour and also there was the sour tang of the Excelsior that was warming at the bottom of tins.

‘She’d want to phone a friend here?’

‘She would and all.’

‘Tits on it?’

‘Diddy wank.’

The babyish interest that was taken in the show was too much for him. He went to the bathroom out back for a wash and a think. He attempted to arouse himself with thoughts of Rainbow’s sister but it would not take. Depress’ is right, he said. He’d show the bitch depress’ if he got a chance. No he wouldn’t.

‘Anyone for the Ducks?’ he asked on returning to the room.

But there were no other takers for the local and he walked there alone. The dank streets of east London, in low January, and he trod a purposeful beat, with the shoulders held erectly, for show. The atmosphere at the Ducks as he entered its bar-room was rancorous.

‘If you want me to stand up out of my seat,’ growled an old Irish, ‘then I’ll do it, and I’ll knock seven types of fucken shite out of you while I’m at it.’

The Irish wanted to watch the dog racing from Walthamstow on the satellite buy-in.

‘You was born ignorant,’ said an old West Indian. ‘It’s your poor wife I feel pain for. She deserve better. A good-lookin’ lady. And she get hersel’ a pig for a man.’

The West Indian wanted to watch the cricket from Barbados.

The breakdown across the bar-room of the Ducks was about evens. The clacking of dominoes from the West Indian tables; the slow slurping of mystic Guinness from the Irish. The barman, a baleful English, argued for compromise, for the dogs to be let on a while, then a switch.

‘Don’t surprise me,’ the West Indian said, ‘that you come back up the pig-man. He who come in here, with his red face …’

The West Indian stood then — he was most elegantly waistcoated, he was dapper.

‘… he who come in here, in his unpleasant jacket.’

‘Leave a man’s clothes out of it,’ the Irish said.

This would go on for the night, he knew, and so he moved through to the lounge, where the slot machine garbled and the pool balls conversed in great agitation. He bought a pint bottle of Magners — ‘the taste of summer’— and he poured half of it to a glass filled with ice. The lounge began to fill up. The night was climbing up itself. One bottle gave onto the next; the first three were distinct, come the fourth they began to blur. The lounge was full of lively young creatures laden with trinkets and jaunty with menace. There was a bus organised for a nightclub in Essex. Eyes rolled up in their heads. The whites of eyes were everywhere conspicuous.

It was not so long until he was seeing double. Twice the shaven heads and twice the pool balls, and every image mirrored in the mirrors behind the bar was doubled again and he had to shut one eye tightly for the crowd to halve in number. It was in such a condition that he saw her come across the lounge. The illusion held for the usual dream of a moment but then persisted. She broke through the field of his myopia and kept on coming. And then she was leaning down to him, there in his chair, in the lounge of the fucking Ducks, in fucking Leytonstone, and she was saying:

‘Daniel?’

He wasn’t sure about trying out some words. He opened the shut eye and the world threatened to double up again but to his relief it held.

‘Ah Jesus,’ he said, and he tried to make it sound as casual as possible.

She laughed and leaned closer again — he could smell her — and she kissed his cheek.

‘I knew you were east somewhere,’ she said, ‘but Jesus!’

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

The shock of it sobered him. She pulled up a stool beside. She crossed her legs.

‘My uncle died,’ she said. ‘He was Leyton?’

‘Only down the road,’ he said, and he ran a hand through his hair.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just walked it with my cousins. How’re you, Daniel?’

‘It’s like I’m trippin’,’ he said. ‘On fucken mushrooms or something?’

‘You’re not still at that caper?’ she said.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Since.’

‘How’ve you been, Daniel?’

‘Making steady progress, all told,’ he said.

‘Still a bit of a rocket, I’d say … Jesus, this is unreal!’

‘It’s bizarre,’ he agreed.

She looked around, uncertainly:

‘Who’re you with?’

‘I’m on my own.’

‘Ah, Daniel, on a Saturday night?’

It was three whole months they had been together. Then she took the heart out of him and ate it.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘And here we are,’ she said.

‘Daniel and Alicia,’ he said. ‘Long time since those names been seen in consort.’

‘Consort!’ she said. ‘There you go with your words.’

‘Well this is it,’ he said.

‘You’re skinny,’ she said. ‘Are you looking after yourself?’

‘Ah I am.’

‘Where are you living?’

‘Place called Matcham Road. Grand, just around the corner. Sharing a house there. It’s grand.’

‘Who’re you sharing with?’

‘Lads from Connemara,’ he said.

‘Uh-oh,’ she said.

‘Ah they’re grand. They like their Excelsior.’

‘Their what?’

‘It’s a hard lager. Super-strength. Come out of the can it’s the colour of honey.’

‘And you’re working?’

‘IT.’

‘Good money?’

‘Grand.’

‘Are you okay, Daniel?’

‘Why do you keep asking me am I fucken okay?’

‘What, I’m sorry, it’s just …’

‘Just what, Lish?’

‘You look sad.’

‘Would you not be,’ he said, ‘when I’m seeing you every day?’

He hadn’t sobered.

‘When I see you come walking the street towards me and below in Stratford station and I see you in all the offices?’

‘Daniel?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve seen you in the park,’ he said. ‘And I can’t come home because I’ll see you there for sure and I know you don’t want me.’

‘Ah Daniel.’

‘And I don’t want to put you out,’ he said.