Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

He leaned forward and sipped from his Magners. She wasn’t getting up from that in a hurry.

‘I’ve to go,’ she said.

‘Ah yeah.’

‘We’re going to a disco in Essex someplace.’

‘Party bus,’ he said. ‘Massive.’

‘Don’t want to really, it’s just my cousins.’

‘Party bus,’ he said, ‘and the uncle still warm in the ground.’

‘Daniel,’ she said, ‘you’re so funny.’

She moved in and she kissed his cheek again and he closed his eyes.

‘I’ll see you around home sometime,’ she said. ‘Be careful!’

‘Right so,’ he said.

He drank his cider. The vision doubled on him again. Let them all off to their party bus. The bell rang for one more and he opened his eyes and stood uncertainly and he walked towards the bar. He didn’t know how many Magners he was after.

The barman sucked his lips as though in warning as Daniel approached.

‘You sure?’

‘Listen,’ Daniel said. ‘Will you tell me something straight up please. Was I just talking to a girl there?’

‘The black-haired piece?’ the barman winced. ‘Ooh. She was a sort. How’s it you know her? She work community Outreach?’

‘Okay,’ said Daniel. ‘Magners.’

‘What about half a lager?’

‘Better plan,’ Daniel said.

He walked home a while later. What had earlier been clear sky had clouded over and now it was unseasonably mild. There was no gainsaying the past. With all else that had happened, he had held her too, and that could not be taken away. He turned in the gate of number 126 to see what way they were getting on inside with the Excelsior.

LATE IN JANUARY, Doctor Sot felt the bad headaches come on again and he drank John Jameson whiskey against them. The naggins slipped pleasingly into a compartment of his leather satchel but they needed frequent replacing and he thought it best not to replace them always from the same off-licence in town. He aimed the car for the 24-hour Tesco on the outskirts of town. A cold morning was coloured iron-grey on the hills above town — brittle and hard the winter had been, and it was such clear, piercing weather that brought on the headaches. The heater in his eleven-year-old Megane juddered bravely against the cold but inadequately and his fingers on the wheel had the look of a corpse’s. Steady nips of the Jameson, he found, kept in check the visions of which these headaches were often the presage.

The Megane had a personality. It was companionable and long-suffering and he had named it Elizabeth for his mother. Car and mother had in common a martyr’s perseverance and a lack of natural advantages.

‘Small devil loose inside my head, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, ‘and it’s like he’s scraping a blade in there, the little bastard.’

As he crossed the hump-back bridge over the White Lady’s River he whistled the usual three-note sequence for luck, a bare melody, and he sucked in his cheeks against the pain. He groped inside the satchel for a naggin. He wedged the naggin between his thin thighs. He unscrewed the top and fate dug a pothole and the pothole caused the Megane to jolt. The jolt splashed whiskey onto the trousers of his Harris tweed.

‘Oh thank you very much,’ said Doctor Sot.

He checked the mirrors before raising the naggin. Clear. And it was just his own eyes in there, which was a relief. Mirrors, typically, were more troublesome for Doctor Sot earlier in the morning. He drained what was left of the whiskey and great vitality raged through him and he tossed the empty naggin in back.

‘Another dead soldier, Liz,’ he said, and with his grey lips he bugled a funeral death march.

The Tesco at eleven this weekday morning was quiet and the quietness for Doctor Sot had an eerie quality. As he walked the deserted aisles, wincing against the bright colours of the products, he felt like the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse. What would you do with yourself? All the fig rolls on earth wouldn’t be a consolation. So taken was he with this grim notion he walked into a display of teabags and sent the boxes flying. He was upset to have knocked them and got down on his hands and knees to remake the stack in a neat triangle. He felt the hot threat of a urine seepage. He summoned his deepest reserves to staunch it — he was wearing, after all, his finest tweeds.

‘Well this is a nice bag of sticks,’ he said.

The seeping was tiny — a mercy — and the boxes of tea were at least in some manner restacked. He proceeded with as much nonchalance as he could muster. From the bakery counter he picked up a chocolate cake for his wife, Sal, who was the happiest woman alive. Also he placed in his basket some mouthwash, a family pack of spearmint gum and eight naggins of the John Jameson. A patient, Tim Lambert, appeared gormlessly around an aisle’s turn with a duck-shaped toilet freshener in his hand.

‘Tricks with you, Doctor O’Connor?’ he enquired.

Doctor Sot put his basket on the floor and went into a boxer’s swaying crouch. He jabbed playfully at the air around the old man’s head.

‘You’re goin’ down and you’re stayin’ down, Lambert!’ he cried.

Tim Lambert laughed, and then he eyed, for the full of his mouth, the contents of the doctor’s basket. Sot picked up the basket and primly moved on, the humour gone from him. The consolation was that Lambert’s lungs wouldn’t see out the winter — he had told no lie. Oh and he knew full well what they all called him behind his back. He knew it because another of his elderly patients, Rita Cryan, was gone in the head and had forgotten that the nickname was slanderous and meant to be secret.

‘That’s not a bad mornin’ at all, Doctor Sot,’ she always croaked when he paid a house call now. He tended with Rita to strap on the blood pressure monitor a little too tightly. There was temptation to open one of the naggins before he got it to the counter but he denied himself and bore the small devil’s caper.

‘You’d want a good class of a pelt on you,’ he said to the girl at the till. ‘Brass monkeys weather.’

But she was an eastern and as she blankly scanned his items he realised that pelt was perhaps a little rich for her vocabulary, not to mind brass monkeys.

‘Pelt like a bear,’ he said. ‘For the cold, I mean? Look it! Here’s Papa Bear in his lovely warm pelt!’

He flapped his arms delightedly against his sides to indicate Papa Bear’s cosiness.

‘Is fifty-three euro eighty-nine cent,’ she said.

In the Megane, he opened a naggin and he took a good nip for its dulling power. He saw a distressed van come coughing and spluttering into the car park. The rainbow colours it was painted in could not disguise the distress. It was driven by a young man with braided hair. Many small children, all shaven-headed, wriggled and crawled along the dashboard and against the windscreen. The man climbed down from the van and slid back the side door. More shaven-headed children poured out and more braided adults. These, Doctor Sot realised, must be the new-age travellers the paper had been on about. They were camped in the hills above town. On Slieve Bo, if he recalled. They were colourful and unclean and wore enormous military boots. There were bits of metal in their faces. They made a motley parade as they went across the car park. The driver remained at the side door of the van and spoke loudly to someone inside. A young woman poked her head out and spoke back to him. He huffed and he gestured and he followed the rest of the travellers across the car park. She remained. She stepped out and leaned against the van and rolled a cigarette from a pouch. Her hair also was in braids and piled high and she wore striped leggings tucked into her boots. Doctor Sot’s breath caught as he watched her. She was remarkably beautiful and vital but there was something else that drew him, too. She felt his stare and returned it. She smiled and waved at him. Sot slugged hard on the naggin and took off.