Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘I’d say ’tis.’

‘’Twas taken in illegal.’

‘I’d say ’twas.’

‘I was only gone into the doctor’s with my daughter. She has spina bifida. I have the handicapped sticker alright but it’s lost. I had to carry her home in my arms.’

‘Three hundred even.’

‘The van isn’t worth that.’

‘Not my problem, son.’

‘I don’t have three hundred.’

‘Not my problem. Your problem.’

‘If the wind changes that face will stick on you.’

‘If you’re going to be abusive you can leave the way you came.’

‘I want to speak to the manager.’

‘Hello good evening and welcome. Three hundred and you’re on the road.’

‘Ye’re licensed by the council, ye are? Council know this the way ye’re treating fathers of spina bifada children?’

‘Much have you on you?’

So it was that when he was hauling into the juvenile detention unit he didn’t even have the price of a bottle of Coke for Tee-J. The better news was that there was three-quarters of a tank of petrol and the DVDs were still under the boards. Imagine, he thought, if you did have a child with spina bifida? He was sobbing uncontrollably by the time he parked the Hitachi in the visitors’ car park.

Wiped the tears away as he crossed the car park and the summer sky was white and massive and it made him feel headachey, out of sorts, clairvoyant.

Patrick Mullaney could tell you this much for nothing: there wasn’t anything good coming.

Tee-J was waiting in the reception area with some class of a supervisor, a glorified swing-key except the swing-keys wore baby blue polo shirts in this place and smiled all the time. There were rapist young fellas playing pitch ’n’ putt in these places.

Tee-J wouldn’t even make eye contact with his one remaining brother.

Tee-J turned to the polo shirt as Patrick approached and he said:

‘You can tell this cunt to go sling his huke.’

‘Ah Teedge …’

Tee-J had outpaced the guard till the guard hit the ditch and he wound up sitting on the bonnet of the Isuzu Trooper in Strandhill and looking out over the sea smoking a fag like he was off a film. Of course the guards knew full well who it was they’d been chasing — Mullaneys in this neck of the country were in no need of identikit mock-ups. Patrick had had a bad feeling about Tee-J around that time. The daft child had a black-moon look about the eyes and Patrick reckoned if the Teedge wasn’t held safe behind bars, he was going to be toes up on a slab with the hair parted wrong. So he turned his own brother in and that felt so like it was off a film he almost heard the music strike up on the soundtrack.

The polo shirt was all in a flutter — loving it — as he tried to bring the brothers together. Patrick wondered if they weren’t all half-steamers working in these places.

‘Teedge, it was for your own good, like!’

‘Thomas John your brother is absolutely right!’

Tee-J had the lip out and was on the dramatic side.

‘I ain’t got no brud no more,’ he said.

‘Teedge get out into the fuckin’ van, would ya?’

He hadn’t much choice, Tee-J, except if he was going to walk the dual carriageway, and by and by he slugged along out to the car park beside Patrick, with the polo shirt waving at them, all emotional, from the doorway. Tee-J didn’t talk for a good ten minutes in the van but Mullaneys wouldn’t by their nature be able to keep the silent treatment going for long.

‘Fuckin’ badger.’

‘Tell me about it, Teedge.’

True that Patrick was near enough to fully grey at thirty-six — that ran in Mullaneys as well — and in the six months of his brother’s detention it was greyer he was after getting. He wouldn’t have been a bad-looking lad, he felt himself, if it wasn’t for the weak chin. The chin gave him an unreliable look he was told once by a priest. Thanks very much, he said to the priest.

‘What way was it inside, Teedge?’

A sullen shrug from Tee-J.

‘Heard they had a head doctor at you and all?’

A raising of the eyebrows from Tee-J.

‘What’d he say?’

‘That I’m mad as a box of frogs. You can drop me off in Boyle.’

‘Fuck off, Teedge. You money?’

‘Do I look as if I have money?’

‘Doggie Mannion’s we’ve to hit so.’

‘Ah fuckin’ hell Patcho!’

Tee-J got a good sulk on then. Tee-J was being all seventeen as he sat there in the passenger seat of the Hitachi. Herds of fuckwads roamed the earth, was Tee-J’s opinion. He reached for the dash-mounted MP3 system and he played a bit of Slayer to blank them out. Patrick drummed his fingertips on the wheel to the white-noise squall. He gave the Hitachi a nice bit of pep and Tee-J smiled despite himself. He was a kid still really. He had no patience whatsoever and after half a song’s worth of Slayer, he was belting away at the search function and putting on Carcass. The MP3 system was worth more than the van, not that it was paid for.

‘Gettin’ the nosebleed again,’ said Tee-J. ‘You watchin’?’

He raised a palm to feel for the bleed and it had come sure enough. He looked at the smear on his palm and licked it. Patrick was as always disgusted by this.

‘You wouldn’t get it in a fuckin’ kennel,’ he said.

Tee-J reached for a Kleenex and wadded it and tamped it to his nostrils and he programmed the MP3 by genre, death metal on random play, and something good and fuzzy by Decimator kicked in.

‘Doctor said I got wet-brain thinkin’,’ said Tee-J. ‘Said I’d be as well staying clear of the juice.’

They listened to songs about war and leather and blood-encrusted animal pelts. Tee-J had a face on him like a kebab whatever shite he’d been eating at the unit. Patrick had read up about nutrition for adolescents in a leaflet he found in the waiting room of the clinic when he was in about the chest pains. The doctor said the chest pains were caused by stress and petrol-station coffee and signed him up to a yoga class in Rooskey. He only went the once but it was good now all the same. The woman instructor gave them all rubber yoga mats and said when things were getting bad, you found a quiet space, you closed your eyes, and you said, I’m on my mat now and that’s that.

‘Do we have to go to Doggie’s, Patch?’

‘We have to fuckin’ ate, Teedge. But I know, like. I know.’

Doggie ‘The Dog’ Mannion lived in a holiday home scheme over the far side of the lake. A wee duplex he had bought for himself there. He was out on its patio when the boys arrived in the Hitachi. In a yellow dressing gown and a pair of swimming togs.

‘Easy as we go, Patch,’ said Tee-J.

There wasn’t much fazed the Mullaney brothers, all told, but a visit to Doggie did. The Dog was a large, half-bald, buttery kind of man with terrible nerves. He had the eyeliner on in thick black smudges over a deep-tan foundation like a hoor would wear. He was drinking from a child’s beaker; he raised this now to salute the brothers as they crossed the communal lawn of the scheme. He put a hand inside his togs and tugged at himself briefly and the exertion caused his broad face to colour. He leaned over the patio’s rail to address his visitors.

‘When you get a bit of heat at all like the heat we’re after getting today,’ he said, ‘the man below do be swimmin’ in his own melt.’

A laugh was let off that sounded like a chainsaw revving. The Dog had been receiving from the Mullaneys for two years and he paid an insulting tax but he was the only operator in the vicinity who was reliable in terms of cash-flow. He led them through to the living room. Bottles of Rachmaninov vodka from Aldi were everywhere and apple-juice cartons from the same place — Apfelsaft, they called it there. Patrick lay down the box of DVDs and found that his heart was beating much too fast.