Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘Easy, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, as he steered the old girl through the dogs.

The camp was sheltered by a great outcrop of shale. High and wind-blown were the voices of perhaps a dozen shaven-headed children (their voices travelled) and as many again were the skinny dogs. The grown travellers skulked in the rearground, and were watchful; they came nearer. The children and dogs surrounded Doctor Sot as he climbed from the Megane. The ground was hard-packed underfoot, brittle and flinty; the frost wouldn’t think to lift up here for months at a time. The children were pin-eyed and unpleasantly lively. The dogs might have been alien dogs, so skinny and yellow-skinned and long-headed they were, like bad-dream dogs, and they pawed him madly.

‘Ah down off me now please! For the love of God!’

He might have landed in far Namibia such was the foreignness of things. There was something that resembled a teepee. Inside it was a generator, juddering. Sinister crows were present in numbers. There were rough shelters made with lengths of tarpaulin and these were strewn around a copse of trees by the outcrop’s base. There was a horse trailer with a smoking chimney. The distressed van of rainbow colours was parked beside it. There was a pair of old rusted caravans. The young chap who had earlier driven the van came through the barking children and the laughing dogs.

‘S’about?’ he said.

‘Doctor Carl O’Connor!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘North Western Health Board!’

‘Oh yeah? I’m Joxie.’

‘Outreach!’ cried Doctor Sot. ‘Welcome to Slieve Bo … Joxie?’

The young man swept back his mass of braided hair and arranged it away from his face. He was sharp-featured, sallow, bemused.

‘I’m here about the nutrition,’ said Doctor Sot. ‘I’m here about the sex diseases.’

‘You jus’ piss yerself?’ said Joxie.

More adults came forward. They swatted the children and kicked the dogs. A forest of braided hair sprang up around Doctor Sot but the beautiful young woman was not to be seen. He shielded his crotch with his satchel. Indeed there had been a tiny seepage.

‘Aim of the Outreach programme,’ he explained, ‘is to bring the, ah … the services … to …’

He should have boned up on the stuff in the leaflets. He should have learned some of the lingo. But the travellers smiled at him regardless. They were not unwelcoming. Their accents were mostly English, the burr of them specifically south-western.

‘Devon, so happens,’ said Joxie.

He poured for Doctor Sot a cup of green tea. They were now in back of the horse trailer by a wood-burning stove. The young man’s full title, it emerged, was Joxie The Rant.

‘Rant, Joxie? Why so?’

‘’Coz I get a rant on,’ he said. ‘A ranter, yeah?’

‘Do him a rant, Jox!’

‘Bit early, is it no?’

The adults of the camp were greatly taken with Doctor Sot. There were six of them packed into the trailer around him. He was a break from the boredom — the boredom that was bred into them by suburbs and drab English towns. Doctor Sot found it difficult to tell them apart, even to sex them, but he knew well enough that the beauty was not here. There was muffled hilarity to the brief silences that yawned out between them. To fill these, he spoke of the importance of five portions daily of fresh fruit and veg.

‘Your broccoli is a powerful man,’ he said. ‘Handful of florets? There’s a portion, there’s one of your five.’

He spoke of oily fish, such as mackerel, for the sake of its Omega 3.

‘Ground control to Omega 3,’ said Joxie.

The travellers smoked their roll-ups and drank green tea. As this was not an official Outreach session, as it was more of a break-the-ice visit, Doctor Sot saw no reason why he shouldn’t offer to strengthen their tea. He opened the satchel and with a wink produced a full naggin.

‘Nip of this lad?’ he whispered. ‘Greatly medicinal.’

‘They do know yer out an’ about, yeah?’ said Joxie.

The evening began to flow. By the time a second naggin had gone around, the travellers had in their civility produced tins of own-brand supermarket lager and flagons of unlabelled cider. They questioned Doctor Sot as to what pills he might have in his satchel. He laughed them away.

‘It’s the six, just, is it?’ he tried. ‘Just the six of you, for grown-ups?’

‘Well there’s Mag an’ all, ain’t there?’ said Joxie. ‘Mag’s in her bender.’

‘Oh?’

‘She got one of her spells on, don’t she?’ said Joxie.

‘Spells?’ Sot asked.

There was no reply, and Sot fretted. He drank to brace himself. And he drank more quickly. And quickly it was as if Doctor Sot had become part of the camp — the travellers largely forgot about him. They were in and out of the horse trailer, attending to children and dogs. They smoked their roll-ups with a resin crumbled in. They sipped at their lager and cider. They didn’t say no to another nip of the Jameson — Doctor Sot fetched extra from Elizabeth — but their conversation was no longer centred on the visitor. They talked drowsily about making some dinner. They talked about how they were going to get the van sorted. They talked, at some length, of the significance of the number ‘23’.

‘Why have the children no hair?’ asked Doctor Sot.

‘Nits,’ said Joxie.

Joxie tugged up the sleeves of his army shirt to show Doctor Sot the abscesses that had formed around old needle holes. Doctor Sot said that he’d be as well to come down to the practice and there they could have a closer look, there would be no charge for it. He said if anyone else needed to come down, that could also be arranged. Joxie decided to rant. One of the hanks of hair battered some tom-tom drums, and Joxie launched into a half-sung, half-shouted diatribe. It was all Greek to Doctor Sot, though he recognised that there were repeated references to ‘Jah Rastafari’, the number ‘23’, and, more aggressively, to ‘George Bush’.

Evening came among them. Doctor Sot sat back in the trailer and, woozily, he faded into and from the moment. A hand placed before him a saucer of curried vegetables.

‘A wonderful idea,’ he said.

He ate the food. It put sense in him. Mag had not appeared, and so he picked up his satchel. The dogs and children and adults were all around him in the dark as he clambered into the Megane.

‘It’s, ah … it’s been an education,’ said Joxie.

They all laughed, Doctor Sot as hard as the rest of them, and indeed until he wept. His eyes were full of tears as he started up Elizabeth. He immediately drove her into a ravine. He sobered at once, with the impact, and the travellers helped him from the car. It was the end of the eleven-year-old Megane — its remains fumed slowly in the dark, the smoke of its last breaths rose in a dense tangling. Gingerly, Sot fetched out the rest of the naggins and the chocolate cake that he had bought earlier for Sal but had forgotten to give her. He sat on the hard-packed soil of the camp, with a handkerchief held to his bleeding head.

‘Poor Liz,’ he sighed. ‘Poor Sal.’

There was some of the relief that accompanies an old parent’s death.

‘Hell we gonna do with you?’ said Joxie.

‘Perhaps you’d run me down the mountain, Joxie,’ Sot said. ‘Your van?’

‘No lights,’ Joxie said.

It would be next morning before he could be brought down safely. He would need to stay the night. The travellers found their way around the camp’s darkness by the glow of their mobile phones. Each was a pin-prick of light against the mountain black. He used his own phone to call Sal.

‘Darling?’ he said. ‘There’s some bad news. I’m afraid it’s Elizabeth …’

Sal was not at all worried that he was caught out on Slieve Bo. She was well used to his capers and disappearances. Often, Doctor Sot was gone for days at a time. Many was the ditch of the north-west he had woken up in. Once he woke beneath an upturned rowing boat on the shore of Lough Gill — one leg of his trousers had been entirely wet, the other entirely dry. He had never quite pieced that one together. Tonight’s accommodation wasn’t bad at all. He was shown into one of the rusted caravans. The travellers turned out to be early-to-bed types: the boredom. By nine, there were no lights at all but those dim cold ones hung in the sky above. Bald children and alien dogs stretched around the caravan with him and they all slept sweetly. Doctor Sot could not settle, but sat. He drew on a naggin and looked out to the camp. The chocolate cake, uneaten, was on his lap in its white box. His eyes adjusted to the dim, eerie glow of the starlight as it made shapes inside the caravan — the prone figures of the kids and the dogs, breathing. Sot stood then and he approached bravely a mirror mounted on the door of a cupboard. He crept up on it, carefully, and found that it was clear — no malevolence — and he backed away. He crept up on it again and still it was clear — no malevolence — he backed away. He crept up a third time and a figure appeared in the mirror but there was no malevolence — it was his young woman, outside. She looked in at him. She made not a move, but smiled. He climbed down from the caravan and went to her. The serenity in her smile, it was confirmed at once, was that of a psychotic.