Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

That evening, after work, as I took my walk along the prom, with the cold sea oblivious, I saw them: the rugby boys. They hang out by a particular strip of green down there, sitting around the rain shelter, or tossing a ball about, and chortling all the time, chortling, with their big shiteater grins and testosterone. They all have the floppy hair, the polo shirts in soft pastels, the Canterbury track pants, the mid-Atlantic twangs. Aodhan McAdam was among them, and he saw me, and grinned, and he made a pair of pistols with his fingers and fired them at me.

Ka-pow , he mouthed.

Ha-ha , I grinned back.

He was no doubt giving the rest of the scrum a full account about what went on beneath the duvet. Of course he was! And later he was back for more. Bell rings about ten: orthodontic beam on porch. In fact, he appeared to have pretty much moved into the house. Every night now he was among us.

‘Babes!’ she squealed, and she raced down the hallway, and leapt onto him, and right there — right in front of me! — he cupped her butt-cheek.

Now often, between box-set episodes, Saoirse and I hang in the kitchen — it’s maybe our fave space, and it’s tricked out with as much cutesy, old-timey shit as a soul could reasonably stomach. The Aga. The stoneware pots from Puglia. The St Brigid’s Cross made out of actual, west of Ireland reeds for an ethnic-type touch. We snack hard and we just, like, sway with the kitchen vibe? But now Ellie and Aodhan were invading. Eighteen times a night they were out of the back room and attacking the fridge. Saoirse just smiled, fondly, as they ploughed into the hummus, the olives, the flatbreads, the cold cuts, the blue cheese, the Ben ’n’ Jerry’s, the lavender-dusted chocolate from Fallon & Byrne. I watched the motherfucker from the island counter — the way he wolfed the stuff down was unreal.

‘Do they feed you at your own place at all, Aodhan?’ I said, wryly.

He chortled, and he took out a six pack of Petit Filous yoghurts, and he made for the couch-and-duvet in my back room. He mock-punched me in the gut as he passed by.

‘This ol’ boy’s runnin’ on heavy fuel,’ he said, and he mussed my hair, or what’s left of it.

Later, in the den, I turned to Saoirse:

‘He’s treating me like a bitch,’ I said.

She was freezeframing bits of The Wire that featured the gay killer Omar because she had a thing for him. She had lately been waking in the night and crying out his name.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ she said.

‘I know they’re fucking,’ I said. ‘I can just … smell it?’

‘You need to talk to Doctor Murtagh about this,’ she said.

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning cognitive fucking thewapy,’ she said. ‘Meaning medication time. Meaning this is looking like a bweakdown-type thing again?’

All over the house, I felt like I could hear him … chomping? You know sometimes, in a plane, when your ears are weird, and they flip out the food trays, and you chew, and you can hear the jaw motions of your own mastication in a loud, amped, massively unpleasant way? It was like I was hearing that all over the house –

Aodhan!

Chomping!

Also, he was using the downstairs loo, under the stairs, and of course he pissed like a prize stallion. Saoirse thought it was all marvellous, and she talked increasingly about how hot she thought he was, as hot almost as Omar. We’re talking a lunk but angelically pretty — like a beefy choirboy that could mangle a bear? Fucking hideous.

Then summer thickened and there was a heatwave. We garden, and we have a terrific deck — done out with all this Tunisian shit we bought off the lepers in Zarzis — overlooking the back lawn. During the heatwave, Aodhan and Ellie took over the deck space. I watched from the kitchen — I was deveining some king prawns while Saoirse expertly pestled a coriander-seed-and-lime-zest marinade. Ellie lay face down on the lounger, in a string bikini, and he sat on the lounger’s edge, and with his big sausagey fingers he untied the top of the bikini, and pushed the straps gently back. Then he shook the lotion bottle, rubbed a squirt of it onto his palms, and began to massage it in, super-slow, like some fucking porno set-up. Through the open window I heard her throaty little moans, and I saw the way she turned to him, adoringly, and he bent down and whispered to her, and she squealed.

‘Next thing,’ I said to Saoirse, ‘they’re actually going to have it off in front of us.’

‘What is she, a nun?’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said.

I flung the prawns into the Belfast sink and I stormed out of the house. I bought cigarettes for the first time in six months and lit one right there on the forecourt of the Topaz. I smoked, and I took off along the prom. I passed the rugby boys’ rain shelter, and it was deserted, and I saw that there was an amount of graffiti scrawled around the back wall of the shelter. I went to have a closer look.

Nicknames, stuff about schools-rugby rivals, so-and-so loves such-and-such, or so-and-so loves??? but then, prominently, this:

ELLIE P THE BLO-JOB QUEEN

B-L-O! And P! That they had used my surname’s initial for emphasis, the P of my dead father’s Prendergast! I went and power-walked the length of the pier and back three times. A glorious summer evening, and busy on the pier, with friends and neighbours all about — but I just ignored them all; I pelted up and down, with my arms swinging, and I ground my teeth, and I cried a little (a lot), and I smoked the pack.

I could see the neighbours thinking:

Is he not great again?

Later, in the den:

Aodhan had gone home, and I could hear the thunk, shlank, whumpf of her music from upstairs, and Saoirse had gone into her keeping-an-eye-on-me mode; she was all concerned and hand-holdy now.

‘I think we can pwesume, hon,’ she said, ‘that he didn’t, like, white it himself?’

‘A gentleman!’ I said. ‘But even so he’s been mouthing off, hasn’t he? And it doesn’t bother you at all that she’s …’

I couldn’t finish it.

‘She’s seventeen, Jonathan.’

‘I say we front her.’

‘This is nuts. And say what? That she shouldn’t be giving blow jobs?’

‘Please, Saoirse …’

‘I was giving blow jobs at seventeen.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘As you well know.’

‘But I wasn’t mouthing off about it, was I? I was keeping it to myself!’

‘Just leave it, Jonathan …’

Again that night I hardly slept. I developed this incessant buzzing sound in my head. It sounded like I had a broken strip light in there. More images came at me, and you can picture exactly what they were:

Ellie, descending.

And big Aodhan McAdam —! — grinning.

The next morning I went to her room. Fuck it, I was going to be strong. There was going to be a conversation about Respect. For herself, for her home, for her parents. For duvets. I knocked, crisply, twice, and I pushed in the door, and I could feel that my forehead was taut with self-righteousness (or whatever), and I found her in a sobbing mess on the bed.

Suicidal!

Ellie’s tears nuke my innards.

‘Oh, babycakes!’ I wailed ‘What is it!’

I threw myself on the bed. So much for the Respect conversation. Aodhan, it turned out, had taken his oral gratification and skedaddled. It was so over.

She was inconsolable. We had the worst Saturday morning of all time in our house. Which is saying a great deal. She was between rage and tears and when she is upset she behaves appallingly, my angel. It started right off, at breakfast:

A sunny Saturday, heaven-sent, in peejays — it should have been perfection. Saoirse was sitting at the island counter, trembling, as she ate pinhead porridge with acai fruit and counted off the hours till she could start glugging back the ice-cold Pinot Grigio. I was scraping an anti-death spread the colour of Van Gogh’s sunflowers onto a piece of nine-grain artisanal toast. Ellie was vexing between flushes of crimson rage and sobbing fits and making a sound like a lung-diseased porpoise.