Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘What you been up to, Sar?’

She hated the abbreviation, its cuddle.

‘Art stuff,’ she said.

‘You mean masturbation and smoking dope?’

A tiny smile threatened the corners of her mouth but — fuckoff! — she held firm against it.

‘That sounds a little busy for me.’

A labour to his breathing gave lie to the jauntiness.

‘Did you talk to your mother at all?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘Please?’

‘She doesn’t mean to be the way she is, Sara.’

‘You’re defending her?’

‘You know I’d be the last to. But Jesus, Sara. Just talk to her.’

A Spanish evening, behind him, and he wanted to be back there, among it — he wanted to be away.

‘Go back to it,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Whatever it is you’re doing there.’

‘Sara?’

‘I have a cake about done,’ she said. ‘A kind of meringue thing? Got to run.’

‘Sara, how long is this going to go on? I mean, I know what you’re going through, and I know it’s been a hard, hard time.’

‘You do not know.’

‘I fucking know! And when it’s blood, Sara, I can’t just give up and not even try …’

‘And blood has given me what exactly?’

She hung up. She turned the phone off. She went around the room and flicked all of the lamps off. She searched the dark for calm. She slid open the glass doors and stepped outside again to chill and night.

Clutch — a pair of hands took hold of her neck. She was held to the spot; a manacle grip. She felt the great restriction of breath. She tried to scream but no sound came from her mouth. It was as though in a nightmare but she was not sleeping no she was not sleeping. Hands everywhere, hands all over. Then, suddenly, a looseness, and she was freed — she dashed inside. She slid shut the glass door. She fell to the floor. She looked up to the window and the faces crowded in from all angles. The dark tunnels of their opened mouths. Then at once the faces disappeared.

She turned the phone on.

A new text message from Granada:

Give it expression .

Fuck off. She saw him thoughtfully sipping a Fino by the darkwood barrels as he texted, and thinking, I’m just so not like other dads?

The Sabatier block was a low steady throbbing in the dark of the open space. She cut for the red vibrancy, for feeling. See the royal red army march in jagged lines down the pale hillside.

She went around the room and turned all of the lamps on. She searched for the laptop. The dial-up was so slow she had to put the laptop out of her sight so as not to burst into flames of fury.

Her father had said:

‘You’re not mad, Sara. You’re just addicted to the fucking internet.’

Which did not explain the clutching at her throat or the gleam of menace from cut-steel door handles or the faces at the windows or the medication; it did not explain all of the medication.

Her mother had new tits since Christmas.

She pushed back the couch and she found the laptop underneath and she brought it to the cable by the retro phone desk — a fucking cable! — and she plugged it and hit connect:

Gremlin voices gurgled from the medieval depths of dial-up.

Every inch of her skin burned with itch. She went to find some music. She had forgotten to bring the iPod dock to the house and there was only the ‘sound system’, as he called it, which made her smile, and there were only CDs.

Discs!

She flicked through:

Synchronicity by The Police.

Jesus.

Astral Weeks by Van Morrison.

Who looked like an especially sweaty oompah-loompah.

Revolver by The Beatles.

She played ‘For No One’ back-to-back eight times. She would not play it again because she had feelings about the dark significance of the number nine. She knew she should prefer the John tracks, but. She knew that John bought an island in Clew Bay, in the 1960s, but there were three hundred and sixty-five islands down there, and she could not say which one. Dorinish Island — her father claimed to know it, by sight, he said you could see it from a high vantage beside the house. John sailed a psychedelic caravan across the bay on a raft once but he never ended up living on Dorinish, with Yoko, as planned.

She went to dial-up.

The forum took eleven minutes to load.

She headbutted the couch.

‘Dorinish’ — the word lolled on her tongue, and repeated; it sounded like an artisanal cheese or a seaweed therapy facility.

There was just one green light on 4-Real forum for live — Gretchen from Flagstaff.

Sara typed:

I think I’m going to do it tonite?

And the green of the light for live on Gretchen at once died.

She ripped the cable from the laptop. She slid open the glass doors. She flung the laptop out into the dark. It must have landed somewhere but it did so without a sound. As though it had been caught?

She went to the bathroom and split open her pills to wash the powders away, the pinks and greens, the mica-gleam of the powders, and then the dull mulch as they clotted in the tapwater, and the clots swirled a moment, and disappeared. She opened her mouth and looked inside and saw the healthful pink of her gums and the arch of her jawbone.

The sound of a text message drew her back to the space and the stream murmured, ominously; the message was from her mother:

Weather here great, how weather there? Any goss? Art going well?

Her mother was in the Tarn Valley, in France. She had married a former broker from Dublin who had bought a failing vineyard there. Her mother’s voice she could no longer bear to hear — it was high and trilling, it was from the valley of the squeaks. Texts were by now the limit of their interaction; this was understood. Her mother had cheekbones, new tits, an indulgent smile.

Sara texted:

Weather here glorious! Busy busy. Love lots! S xxx .

It was better to enter the contract of vapidity than to try to reason out the madness of that smile, or try to see past the cheekbones, the perfect teeth, the rampant-teenage-bunny tits.

Not to mention the little pink dresses.

Next came a shrapnel attack on the plate glass surrounds — a sudden assault of rain from the bay. She went around the room and turned off all the lamps. Her mind was moving so quick she felt the rain in her face before she slid open the doors and stepped outside.

A cloud mass travelled low over the bay, and now the quartermoon was obscured, and the rain came hard and slantwise, and there was a wind up to give an eeriness and she beamed ecstatically as the rain came through. It was generous and capable and soaked her to the bone in seconds flat.

She went back inside and stepped out of her clothes and shivered and she thought that maybe tonight she would cut on the inside of her thigh, top left, just there. The Sabatier block brooded in night’s shadow like a waiting bishop. She was moved to approach it.

Because this is not going to improve, Sara. This is blood-deep and malevolent. This is for always.

Thus the Dark Angel did whisper; thus did its soft words creep.

As she crossed the floor, she stumbled on the TV remote, and hit the mute on/off: the sound boomed again on UK Memories. It was advertising a new box set of Beatles remasters. It was playing ‘For No One’. The ninth time of listening, and she stood frozen in her step until the song had finished — a Message, unquestionably. But she picked up the remote and killed the TV.

And then the rain eased and played a slower beat on the plate glass in brush strokes. She went around the room and flicked all the lamps on. She went to the Sabatier block. She carefully withdrew the nine knives of the set. She carried two in one hand, three in the other and two wedged under each arm. She went towards the dark. She bent and slid open the plate glass doors with her mouth.