Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘Ya wanna see my bender?’ she said.

‘I’d love to, Mag,’ said Doctor Sot.

‘Knows my name ’n’ all,’ she said.

The bender was on the one side a length of tarp stretched over a run of willow branches staked in the ground. The other side was walled by the shale outcrop and on this Mag had sketched drawings of great wingéd creatures and a series of mathematical equations.

‘Soon’s I get ’em right,’ she said, ‘I paints over an’ I start again.’

‘You’re bringing forward knowledge each time, Mag,’ he consoled.

The bender was warmed by a tiny pot-belly stove, its flue extended through a hole in the tarp. The bender was lit barely by a battery lamp and it had pallets for flooring.

‘Ya wan’ yer pallets down,’ she said. ‘With yer pallets down, the damp it don’t get up.’

‘The way to go, Mag, unquestionably. We don’t want the damp getting up.’

‘Thing is,’ she said. ‘Soon’s ya get yer pallets down, get yer rats run under, dontcha? So what I’ve done?’

She stuck her head out the bender’s slit and tugged at Doctor Sot’s arm so that he did the same.

‘Chicken wire,’ she said. ‘I’ve closed off space between pallets, haven’t I? Means no rat run.’

‘There’s peace of mind in that, Mag.’

They had cake. She showed him in detail her equations. Mag, he learned, was involved in divining the true nature of time and memory. She believed that each of these ungraspable entities ran in arcs, and that the arcs bent away from each other. She had concluded this after long study of her staked willow branches. The diverging nature of these arcs was the source of all our ills. She might be onto something there, thought Doctor Sot. He wasn’t sure where she was getting the figures for her equations from. Perhaps they were being carried to Slieve Bo in the talons of the great wingéd creatures.

‘Do you take medication at all, Mag?’

‘Poisons? Hardly,’ she said.

‘Nip of this, Mag?’

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Don’t agree with me.’

They sat beside each other with their backs to the shale. She drew up a blanket over her striped legs and offered him some of it. He took a piece and raised it to his face to smell it. It was the smell of a child’s blanket: stale rusk and hot milk.

‘Do you sleep, Mag?’

‘In daylight more so,’ she said.

But after a time her eyes did close. Doctor Sot slid a hand from beneath the blanket and lightly, very lightly, he laid it against her face. He felt the tiny fires that burned there beneath her skin. Her lashes were unspeakably lovely as they lay closed over her light sleep. If Doctor Sot could draw into his palm these tiny fires and place them with his own, he happily would.

Down in the valley the blackbirds were singing against the winter dark. The White Lady’s River ran calmly beneath the hump-back bridge and past the may tree whose blossom would in late spring protect us. The town slept, but in the back kitchen of the terrace house he knew that Sally was on her pink sofa yet. Dear Sal — her gown, her grin, her mad thyroidal eyes. She rose from the sofa and went calmly on a tour of the house. She flowed through the house. For fear that he would get back early, she would lay cloths now over all the mirrors in the house.

I WAS LIVING in a caravan a few miles outside Gort. It was set up on breeze blocks in the yard of an old farmhouse. There were big nervous dogs outside, chained. Their breathing caught hard with the cold of the winter and the way the wind shuddered along their flanks was wretched to behold. I lay there in the night, as the dogs howled misery at the darkness, and I doted over a picture of my daughter, May-Anne, as she had been back in the summertime. I hadn’t seen her in eight months and I missed her so badly. I was keeping myself well hidden. Things had gone wrong in Cork and then they went wronger again. I had been involved with bringing some of the brown crack in that was said to be causing people to have strokes and was said to have caused the end altogether of a prostitute lad on Douglas Street. Everybody was looking for me. There was no option for a finish only to hop on a bus and then it was all black skies and bogger towns and Gort, finally, and Evan the Head waited for me there, in the ever-falling rain, and he had his bent smile on.

‘Here’s another one I got to weasel you out of,’ he said. ‘And me without the arse o’ me fuckin’ kecks, ’ay?’

He jerked a thumb at a scabby Fiesta that wore no plates and we climbed into it and we took off through the rain, January, and we drove past wet fields and stone walls and he asked me no questions at all. He said it was often the way that a fella needed a place and he would be glad to help me out. He said that I was his friend after all and he softened the word in his mouth — friend — in a way that I found troubling. It was the softness that named the price of the word. He said things could as easily be the other way around and maybe someday I would be there to help him out. We turned down a crooked boreen that ran between fields left to reeds and there were no people anywhere to be seen. We came to the farmhouse and the smile on the Head’s face twisted even more so.

I never promised you a rose garden, he said.

You would have hardly thought it held anyone at all but for the yellow screams of children escaping the torn curtains and the filthy windows. Evan said he had rent allowance got for the house on account of his children. He had bred six off Suze and a couple off her sister, Elsie. These were open-minded people I was dealing with. At least with regard to that end of things. We went inside and the kids appeared everywhere, they were shaven-headed against the threat of nits, and they were pelting about like maniacs, grinding their teeth and hammering at the walls, and the women appeared — girlish, Elsie and Suze, as thin as girls — and they smirked at me in a particular way over the smoke of their roll-ups: it is through no fault of my own that I am considered a very handsome man.

‘Coffee and buns, no?’ said Evan the Head, and the girls laughed.

The house was in desperate shape. There were giant mushroomy damp patches coming through the old wallpaper and a huge fireplace in the main room was burning smashed-up chairs and bits of four-be-two. The Head wasn’t lying when he said I’d be as well off outside in the caravan. He brought me to it and I was relieved to get out to the yard, mainly because of the kids, who had a real viciousness to them.

Now of course the caravan was no mansion either. The door’s lock was busted and the door was tied shut with a piece of chain left over from the dogs and fixed with a padlock. The dogs were big and of hard breeds but they were nervous, fearful, and they backed away into the corners of the yard as we passed through. Evan unlooped the chain and opened the door and with a flourish bid me enter.

‘Can you smell the sex off it?’ he said, climbing in behind.

‘Go ’way?’

‘Bought it off a brasser used to work the horse fairs,’ he said. ‘If the walls could talk in this old wagon, ’ay?’

It had a knackery look to it sure enough. It was an old sixteen-footer aluminium job with a flowery carpet rotten away to fuck and flouncy pillows with the flounce gone out of them and it reeked of the fields and winter. There was a wee gas fire with imitation logs. Evan knelt and got it going with his lighter.

‘Get you good an’ cosy,’ he said. ‘You any money, boy-child?’

‘I’ve about three euro odd, Ev.’

‘Captain of industry,’ he said.

The gas fire took and the fumes rose from it so hard they watered my eyes. I asked was it safe and he said it’d be fine, it’d be balmy, it’d be like I was on my holidays, and if I got bored I could always pop inside the house and see if young Elsie fancied a lodger.