Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

Outside.

She let the knives fall by her feet. The night about was breathing, unwebbed, darkscreened. She picked the first knife up, a serrated-edge breadknife, and she swung a few practice turns of an overarm arching movement, and then she threw the knife far out into the night. The way the ball of her arm twisted so efficiently in the shoulder socket — the satisfaction of that. She threw all of the knives — one by one — and each was taken by the dark and she could not see but could feel the way each was taken noiselessly by the boggy ground.

She went back inside and wrapped herself in the first thing she could find — his hipster duffelcoat, in a retro mustard shade, from the rack; waft of fathermusk.

And she stepped outside again, to be among it, and she walked in bare feet to the high vantage. She looked down on the dark of Clew Bay and the tiny islands that lay in the murk. The cloudbank shifted, a fraction, as though cued by a smiling choreographer, and light fell from the quartermoon and picked out a single island — a low, oblong shape — and it was lit for a moment’s slow reveal. She took a step that was a step outside, yet again, as though from a chrysalis, or trap. Darkly below the moving sheets of water were reliable, never-changing, mesmeric. The hill shapes picked out against the night; the islands, and the Atlantic beyond. She sat on the wet ground. She closed her eyes and knitted her hands around her knees. She huddled closer to herself, and went deeper. She closed her eyes and allowed the world without to fade, for a small while anyway, and for a half a minute, and then a whole one — and then more — there was something just a little like sleep.

i

SILVIJA TURNED TO me from the studio couch and said:

‘Patrick, I am going to teach you everything you need to know about the female genitalia.’

I was at this moment twenty-one years old and coming to terms with the cold hard fact of my genius.

‘But I’ve got a terrible trembling sensation in my hands,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure now is the ideal time for genitals.’

‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘You are not going to be using your hands.’

She sat on the couch, in her underwear, with a scarred Macbook perched on her strong, thin, walnut-cracker thighs. She smoked as only a Slav can smoke — devouring her smoke. She had a flicky fringe and superstar cheekbones. Technically, she was lesbian, but there appeared to be movement on the matter.

‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Take your clothes off and get out of bed.’

Even in early summer, the studio was cold as the steppe, and I would put extra layers on to sleep. Silvija was born in the teeth of the wind of an actual steppe and she did not feel the cold. She put aside the laptop, and she stood and eyed me derisively as I approached. With a thumb and forefinger she massaged a nipple. She had small tits but enormous nipples.

‘If you do okay, I will kiss you,’ she said. ‘But only once.’

She turned out to be as good as her word on this, and the kiss was not the least of her gifts to me.

ii

By her own reckoning, Silvija was at this time the most brilliant fashion photographer in all of Berlin. This didn’t mean that she got paid. The magazines she worked for tended to fold after an issue or two. And Vogue wasn’t going to come calling anytime soon. Asked to photograph, say, a vampy spike-heeled ankle boot, Silvija would commit to print only the leather of its sole, and that blurrily, as some meth-thinned model, wearing latex knickers and a sneer, aimed a high kick at the camera, down some malevolent alleyway with gemstones of broken glass — Berlin diamonds — scattered to sparkle all around.

‘But you don’t really see the boot, Silvija?’

‘I do not photograph the motherfucking boot, Patrick. I photograph the motherfucking life!’

Money was always tight, and we supplemented the magazine work by shoplifting, breaking and entering, and hiring out to the younger designers as they compiled their portfolios. The designers were routinely troublesome — I remember the schizophrenic Croat with his pioneering cutting technique, the polyamorous Frenchman who weighed about as much as a bag of feathers and was reinventing the frock coat, and the epileptic Tasmanian allegedly wanted in Australia for setting fire to a model during Melbourne Fashion Week.

We descended the eerie stairwell from the studio. We emerged onto Arkonaplatz in the morning. The nicotine burn of her kiss was on my lips still. The sun had come strongly through; already the tables were full outside the cafés. We stopped for tiny smoking thimbles of black coffee at Niko’s, and I felt some prose coming on. Silvija shook her head in amusement at my lovelorn state.

‘There will be no honeymoon, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You did fine. And there will be further business between us. There will be instruction. But do you know how much it means to me?’

She snapped her fingers to indicate the sheer nothingness of what had that morning occurred, and I nodded glumly in understanding.

‘Got it?’

‘Yes.’

Silvija snapped her fingers like this a lot. She allowed weight to nothing. All of life, she implied, was without meaning or lasting import, and in this way, I believe, she was teaching me how I should operate (and how I should think) if I truly intended to be an artist. We left the muddy remains of our coffees, stubbed our Marlboro Lights, and set out for a towerblock in the district of Wedding, there to photograph for the deranged Tasmanian model-burner a double-jointed Turkish neurotic capering with a string of anal beads.

And a Rottweiler.

iii

The Berlin designers had until this time mostly lived and worked in Prenzlauer Berg. By 2005, however, the bohemian bourgeoisie from five continents were arriving for the quarter’s cut-price lofts and superb childcare facilities, and gentrification was fast spreading through the old tenements and squares.

‘Motherfucking breeders,’ Silvija called the new arrivals.

The fashion crowd generally was in arch dismay at the intrusion, and had started to venture north from P’berg into the riskier neighbourhoods of Wedding. This was where most of the serious shoots happened that summer. We stopped at a corner shop on the way for some bottles of pils. I uncapped mine with the opener chained to the counter, Silvija hers with her teeth. We drank pils more or less constantly and ate very rarely. We crossed Bremenstrasse, dodging the ironically bearded cyclists on their high-nellies, and breathed in the petrol views. I lugged all the gear; Silvija strode . Inclined as always to be artistically late, we lay for a while on the scraggy hilltop in Mauerpark. We slipped in an earpiece each from my headphones and listened religiously to the Nina Simone version of ‘Lilac Wine’. We looked out across the city.

‘I give it six months,’ Silvija said, and spat dramatically.

I was only a few months off the plane from Cork but Silvija had ten years of Berlin under her belt, and she allowed me to share the old-hand snootiness that those years granted; I had learned to affect the same languid woe as all the other old hands. A constant of hip cities is that much of the conversation centres around the fact the city is not as hip as once it was. In Mauerpark that morning, Silvija talked seriously for the first time of leaving Berlin behind, and I felt a terrible spike of nausea.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Not for a while yet.’

We flung our empty bottles and made for the shoot. She hoicked another of her awful thick green phlegmy spits and I tried not to notice. She was so lean, with a ferocious mouth, and XXX-rated eyelashes. I’d found her through a small ad — a share offered on a studio apartment. The sense memory of the morning’s events was still with me. First the mouth, and after a long time my hands had stopped trembling enough to be brought into play. She talked me through the operation. It was delicate stuff. My hands felt so heavy, but then she laid hers on mine to guide, and lifted the weight — everything was suddenly lighter.