Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

Then, late one night, Evan the Head came into the yard — I heard him hiss at the dogs — and without so much as a knock he was in the door of the caravan and he sat on the foot of my fold-out bed. He lit a candle and I saw him by its soft light. He had his twisted smile on. First words he said to me:

‘Suze is the better comer.’

‘Go ’way?’

‘Know what a geyser is?’

‘I do, yeah.’

‘That’s Suze if she’s in the form. You see she’s got one eye a dark brown and one a dark, really dark green?’

‘Yeah, kinda …’

‘Yeah kinda noticed that, ’ay? Did you, boy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah well that’s a good sign,’ he said, ‘for a comer.’

I did not reply because I did not like the way he was smoking his roll-up. The hard little sucks on it and his eyes so deep-set.

‘She’s inside,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘I said she’s waitin’ on you, boy. Are you goin’ to keep her waitin’?’

‘Ah please, Ev.’

‘You don’t want to get that lady riled. Suze? Not a good plan, boy-child. I said you don’t get that fucking lady riled.’

‘Evan, look, I’ve the thing with her sister, haven’t I?’

He stood then — he loomed in the candlelight — and the words that came were half spat, half whispered:

‘You’ll get in that fucking house and you’ll fuck my wife and you’ll fuck her sister or you’ll get the fuckin’ life taken out of you, d’ya hear me, boy?’

‘Evan get out of the caravan, please!’

He leapt up on the bed then and he danced about and he laughed so hard. And he kind of poked at my head with his feet, kind of playful, as if he was going to stamp me, but he let it go, he stood down, and he left without another word. Then I heard him turn the padlock on the chain outside.

They kept me locked in the caravan for days and nights I quickly lost the count of. The windows were rusted shut and could not be squeezed back and I was so weak because they brought me no food and no water. I was in a bad state very quickly. The dogs outside I believe sensed that I was weakening, that I was dying, and they called to me. We were held on the same length of chain. In the daytime the girls came and whispered through the door to me — awful, filthy stuff that I would not repeat, for hours they whispered — and I knew that Elsie hadn’t the better of the spell anymore. Evan came by night and he crawled over the roof of the caravan and he made little tapping noises. I roared and cried myself hoarse but there was no one to hear me out there and after a few days I was slipping in and out of a desperate weird sleep — full of sour, scary dreams, like bad whiskey dreams — and I felt the cold of the fields come into my bones and once in the afternoon dusk I woke from a fever to find Evan the Head outside a window of the caravan and in each of his arms he held a child to look in at me, and I knew it was the first time ever that I had seen those children calm. I have never had religion or spiritual feelings but lying there in the caravan in the farmyard outside Gort I knew for sure there was no God but there was surely a devil.

But if I gritted my teeth against the fear and kept my eyes clamped tightly shut, the sweats would seem to ease off for a while and I would see clearly my day on the beach with May-Anne, at Garrettstown, in the summer. It was a windy, blustery day, but the sea and the sand made us high, we were soaring, and we ran about like mad things on the beach. Afterwards, before the bus back to town, I bought her a 99 at a seaside shop. The shop had all sorts of beach tat for sale and she asked me about the pork-pie hats that said ‘kiss-me-quick’.

‘What’s kiss-me-quick?’

‘It’s just a seaside thing,’ I said. ‘An old saying. From England I think.’

‘Kiss-me-quick kiss-me-quick kiss-me-quick,’ she said it in a duck’s voice from a cartoon and I pecked her on the cheek, really quickly, peck peck peck, and I nuzzled the nape of her neck — she squealed.

I don’t know how many days I had been locked in the caravan when I crawled the length of it one morning and under the sink found two tins of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup from years ago, probably — from the days of the brasser I would say. I opened them and I drank them cold and if I did not come to life exactly it felt as if my thoughts came for a short while in a clearer, more realistic way. Then I went to the closet to throw up.

I hated to use the chemical toilet in there because of the smell but I had no choice — my gut heaved and emptied itself. I wrapped myself around the tiny plastic loo, tears streaming. I saw then that the spillage over the years had worked away at the floorboards beneath. They were rotten to the extent that some had been replaced with a piece of ply.

I waited until the night. Elsie and Suze had come out just once in the afternoon to whisper their filth at me, and Evan had on the roof for a while made his tap-tappings and I believed he was working at some kind of spell — something from an Aleister Crowley book, maybe; magick — and when he went away I waited, waited, until all in the farmhouse was darkness and quiet, and there was just the feeling of the dogs outside.

I unhooked the chemical loo and lifted it clear and the ply beneath came loose so easily it was unreal, it was like wet cardboard in my hands. The hole I quickly made was no more than two, two and a half foot wide but that was enough to squeeze through, and I scraped past an axle, and I was crawling along the wet ground of the yard then beneath the caravan. All of the dogs huddled close to the ground and peered at me, oh and their eyes — so yellow — were livid, but they made not a sound, they were quiet as the air was cold.

I wriggled out from beneath the caravan and sat with my back to it to ease the beating of my heart. No lights came on in the farmhouse and the dogs in perfect silence watched me as I found the strength to walk to the Fiesta and climbed into it. I lifted off the panel for the wires to come loose and I knew well enough which wires to rub together.

I was no more than halfways down the crooked boreen when the lights came on in the farmhouse and there were roars and screams and the sound of doors and footsteps and with my eyes pinned ahead I steered along till the boreen gave onto road and I missed the verge and the tyre ripped on rocks but I kept going hard into the night. The way the ripped rubber of the tyre slapped along the back road had a rhythm to it — three beats, again and again and again — and I heard it as kiss-me-quick, kiss-me-quick, and I drove it until the screaming of the voices — oh May-Anne — and all that was behind me had faded — my sweetheart, my dotey — to nothing, just nothing at all, and I was at a high vantage suddenly and beneath me, on a plain, were the lights of Gort.

THE NEXT THING was he had to get the van out of the clampers. He walked out there past the industrial estate and the traffic was all eyes: he felt as if they were all watching him — who’s the latchiko on the hoof?

And of course up top of the situation with the van was the situation with Enya’s father. The father had put word out that the next time he saw Patrick Mullaney he was going to take the head clean out of his shoulders. Patrick had not known that Enya was only fifteen and a half years of age. It wasn’t as if she was small — there was no shortage of the girl. And it was only the one date they’d had. He took her to an Apache Pizza on the by-pass road and they shared a Meat Supreme. She wouldn’t get in the back of the van so he drove her to a Topaz station and they had sex in the handicapped toilet there. To delay climax, he had focused on the toilet cleaning schedule pinned to the wall. It claimed with biro signatures that some buck called Felim had cleaned the toilet at hourly intervals all day until 6 p.m. and a girl called Marnia had done the job at 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m. She did in my hole, Patrick thought, looking at the filth of the stall around him. Enya moaned softly meantime and she had been no stranger to such moans was Patrick Mullaney’s belief.