Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘For her stomach,’ he said.

I am not lying when I tell you there was a time Evan the Head was thought to be a bit of a charmer. He was from Swansea originally and sometimes in his cups he would talk about it like it was a kind of paradise and his accent would come through stronger. I had known him five years and I would have to say he was a mysterious character. I had met him first in a pub on Barrack Street in Cork called the Three Ones. It wasn’t a pub that had the best of names for itself. It was a rough crowd that drank there and there was an amount of dealing that went on and an amount of feuds on account of the dealing. There had been shootings the odd time. I was nervous there always but Evan was calm and smiling at the barside and one night I went back to the flat he had in Togher and I bought three sheets of acid off him at a good price — White Lightnings, ferocious visuals — and he showed me passports for himself that were held under three different names. I was young enough to be impressed by that though I have seen quarer sights since, believe me. Evan used to talk about orgies all the time. He would go on and on about organising a good proper orgy — ’ay? — and he told me once about an orgy in a graveyard in Swansea that himself and an old girlfriend had set up and that’s when he started taking down Aleister Crowley books about the occult and telling me he suspected I might be a white witch.

Magick, said Evan, should be always written with the extra ‘k’.

I emptied out my bag in the caravan — it held just a few pairs of boxer shorts and T-shirts and trackie pants. I had little enough by way of possessions since Fiona Condon had turfed me out, the lighting bitch. I had not arranged to collect my stuff. I would not give her the satisfaction, her and her barring order, and I was dressing myself out of Penney’s. She hadn’t let me near my daughter; I hadn’t seen May-Anne since that day in early summer I had taken her out to the beach at Garrettstown. Evan watched me as I unpacked my few bits and I felt by his quietness that he was sorrowful for me. At least I hoped that was what the quietness was.

‘Have you any food, Ev?’ I said.

‘You not eaten?’

I told him I’d made it from Cork on the strength of a banana and a Snickers bar.

‘Poor starving little wraith,’ he said.

He said I could come in later. He said there would be a pot of curried veg on the go. And that was the way our routine began. I would come in, the evenings, and I would be fed, and I would watch TV for a while and help with burning the four-be-twos before going and dry-humping Elsie on a mattress in a back room that smelled of kid piss and dried blood.

Elsie the third night told me that she loved me.

Now Elsie to this day I do not believe had original badness in her. It was just that she could be easily led and her sister had badness in her sure enough and as for Evan, well.

I said, the third night:

‘But Elsie you’re fleadhin’ Ev and all, yeah?’

‘What’s fleadhin’?’ she said.

‘Fuckin’,’ I said. ‘It’s a Cork word for fuckin’.’

‘Business o’ yours how?’ she said.

Elsie and Suze were from Leeds — Leeds-Irish — and they had people in south Galway. Their father had been put away for knocking their mother unconscious with the welt of a slap hammer and they turned up on the doorstep of the Galway cousins and they were turned away again lively. Their eyes were too dark and their mouths were too beautiful. They were the kind of girls — women — who look kind of dramatic and unsafe. They were at a loose end arsing around Galway then, fucking Australians out of youth hostels and robbing them, and they met Evan the Head in the Harbour Bar, was the story, when there still was a Harbour Bar, before the Galway docks was all cunts in pink shirts drinking wine. Evan was loaded at that time having brought in a trawler full of grade-two resin from Morocco — he came into Doolin with it, bold as brass, stoned as a coot in the yellow of his oilskins — and that was ten years back and if one of the sisters wasn’t up the spout off him since, the other was.

‘Evan an’ me is over,’ said Elsie, ‘but I’m not sayin’ he isn’t a wonderful father.’

At that moment there was the loud cracking sound of wood snapping — shhlaaack! — which meant that Evan the Head had lain a length of four-be-two along the bottom steps of the stairs and taken a lep at it from the banister. He was a limber man and he enjoyed breaking up the firewood in this way.

See him perched up on the banister, with the weird grin on, and he eyeing just the spot where he wanted to crack the wood — then the wee lep.

In Cork I had seen Suze sure enough, lumbering under children and dope smoke on the couch of the Togher flat, but I had never seen Elsie though I had heard her, once, in a far room, crying.

‘Does Suze love him still do you think?’

‘No,’ said Elsie, ‘but he has the spell on her, don’t he? I can beat the spell.’

So it was — so simple — that we became a kind of family that January in the old farmhouse outside Gort. But of course I could not say I was ever entirely comfortable with the situation. I kept going out to the caravan at night, to be alone for those cold hours, for my own space and to think of May-Anne, to look at her photograph, and to listen to the dogs, the strange comfort of them. Elsie thought this was snobbish of me. She wanted me to stay with her on the mattress. And Evan the Head said he agreed with her, and Suze agreed, and that was the start of the trouble.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to tell you about Elsie and what she looked like when she came. She wouldn’t allow me to put it inside because there’d been complications with the last child she’d had bred off her for Evan and she didn’t want another kid happening. I said fine to that. I have never been comfortable with being a father. I love May-Anne — my dotey pet, I always call her — but it makes me frightened just to think of her walking around in the world with the people that are out there. See some of the fuckers you’d have muttering at the walls down around the bus station in Parnell Place, Cork. You’d want a daughter breathing the same air as those animals?

‘Get in there!’ Ev cried from the hallway into the back room where Elsie and I lay on the mattress. ‘Get in!’

When she came Elsie had a tic beneath her left eye — at the top of her cheek there was a fluttering as if a tiny bird was caught beneath her skin. The dry-humping made me feel like a teenager again but not in a good way. We lay there — a particular night — with Elsie’s tic going, with me all handsome and useless, and Evan leapt on the four-be-twos off the banister, and the eight mad kids bounced off the ceilings and bit each other and screamed, and the wind howled outside, and the wretched dogs cried a great howling in answer to the wind, and then Suze was at the door, and she said:

‘Why don’t we make this interestin’?’

Yes it started like that — the trouble — it started as a soft kind of coaxing. Sly comments from Suze and sly comments from Evan the Head. And I got worried when the winter stretched on, the weeks threw down their great length, the weeks were made of sleet and wind, and it became February — a hard month — and the sly comments came even from Elsie then. She was easily led and bored enough for badness. I started to feel a bit trapped in this place and I thought about moving on but I had nowhere to go and no money to get there. Given the way things had turned out in Cork, I would be shot or arrested if I went back, no question. I missed May-Anne so badly but I thought the best I could do for her was to keep myself safe until the troubled times had passed over.