Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

‘Oh please, Ell?’ I said. ‘It’s only been, like …’

‘Eleven weeks!’ she cried. ‘Eleven weeks of my fucking life I gave that dickwad!’

‘Look, baby, I know it doesn’t seem like it now? But you’ll get over this and it might work out for the best and …’

And maybe the blow-job rep will start to fade, I didn’t say.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

She held a box of muesli in her hand.

‘It’s a box of muesli,’ I said.

‘No it is not,’ she said.

Admittedly, it was an own-brand line from a mid-range supermarket — a rare anomaly.

‘Ah, Ellie, it’s fine, look, it’s actually quite tasty …’

She turned the box upside down and emptied the muesli onto the limestone flags that had cost peasants their dignity to hump over from County Clare.

‘This is not actual ceweal,’ she said. ‘This is, like, twibute ceweal?’

She began with her bare feet to slowly crush the muesli into the flagstones. Deliberately grinding up and down, with a steady rhythm to her step, like a French yokel mashing grapes, or a chick on a Stairmaster set to a high gradient.

‘I want him back,’ she said.

‘Ah, look, Ellie, I mean …’

‘I want Aodhan back.’

She came across the flags and caught me by the peejay lapels.

‘And I want him back today!’

I fell to my knees and hugged her waist.

‘But this is madness!’ I cried.

Generally speaking, in the run of a life, when you find yourself using the expression –

‘But this is madness!’

— you can take it that things are not going to quickly improve. It was half ten in the morning but Saoirse didn’t give a toss any more and she went to the fridge and took the cork from a half-drunk bottle of Pinot Grigio. With her teeth.

So! The next development!

I was sent to have a heart-to-heart with Aodhan McAdam. He had, of course, switched his phone off — they are by seventeen experts in avoidance tactics. And Ellie could not and would not lower her dignity by going to find him herself. And Saoirse hadn’t left the house in eleven months, except for Vida Pura™ blood transfusions, Dakota hot-stone treatments, and Beach Body Bootcamp (abandoned). So it was down to me. I was to find out his mood, his motives, his intentions. Essentially, I was to win him back. Saoirse was as intent on getting him back as Ellie. He was male youth, after all, and she liked having that stuff around the house.

It turned out that McAdam worked a Saturday job. Oh right, I thought, so he’s going with the humble shit — a Saturday job! He worked at this DIY warehouse on the Naas Road. I got in the Volvo and rolled. I played a motivational CD. N’gutha Ba’al, the Zambian self-confidence guru, told me in his rich, honeyed timbre that I had a warrior’s inner glow and the spirit of a cheetah. I cried a little (a lot) at this. I felt husky and brave and stout-hearted but the feeling was fleet as the light on the bay. Traffic was scant but scary. Cars edged out at the intersections in abrupt, skittery movements. Trucks loomed, and the sound of their exhausts was horrifyingly amplified. Pedestrians were straight out of a bad dream. Everybody’s hair looked odd. I drove through the south side of the city, tightened my grip on the wheel and tried to remember to breathe in the belly. The Volvo was grinding like an assassin as I pulled into the Do-It-Rite! car park. I tried to play the thing like I was an ordinary Joe, a Saturday-man just out on an errand, but I knew at once I wanted to climb up the store’s signage and rip down that exclamation mark

!

from Do-It-Rite!

I stormed — stormed! — towards the entrance but that didn’t work out, as the automatic doors did not register my presence as a human being. So I had to take a little step back and approach the doors again — but still they would not part — and I reversed three steps, four, and approached yet again, but still they would not part, and in my shame I raised my eyes to the heavens, and I saw that the letters of the Do-It-Rite! signage were so flimsily attached, with just brackets and screws, and this too was an outrage — the shoddiness of the fix. Then a Saturday-man approached and the doors glided open and I entered the store in the slipstream of his normalcy.

I hunted the aisles for Aodhan McAdam. They were shooting day-for-night in the vast warehouse space, it was luridly strip-lit, and I prowled by the paint racks, the guttering supplies, the mops and hinges, the masonry nails, the rat traps and the laminate flooring kits, and some cronky half-smothered yelps of rage escaped my throat as I walked, and every Saturday-man I passed did a double-take on me. The place was the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches patchworked together, and the staff wore yellow dungaree cover-alls, so that they could be picked out for DIY advice, and eventually I saw up top of a set of cover-alls the blond, floppy hair, the megawatt grin and the powerful jaw muscles, those hideous chompers.

‘Aodhan!’

The grin turned to me, and it was so enormous it dazzled his features to an indistinctness, I saw just that exclamation mark

!

from the Do-It-Rite! — but when he focused, the grin died, at once, right there.

‘Jonathan?’

I went to him, and I smiled, and I took gently his elbow in my hand.

‘Can we talk, Aodhan?’

‘Sure, man, I mean …’

Now it is a rare enough occurrence in contemporary life that the occasion presents itself for truly felt speech. We are trapped — all of us — behind this glaring wash of irony. But in the quietest aisle of the Do-It-Rite! that Saturday — drylining accessories — as Aodhan McAdam and I squatted discreetly on our haunches, I spoke honestly, and powerfully, and from the heart.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I know about the blow jobs. That’s perfectly natural. I was getting blow jobs myself when I was seventeen. I wasn’t broadcasting the fact, and I could spell , but I was …’

He tried to rise from his haunches, he tried to get away, but I had this strange animal strength (your eyebrows ascend, Dr Murtagh), and I kept his bony elbow clamped in my claw, and I lasered my eyes into his, and he was scared enough, I could see that.

I said:

‘Ellie Prendergast, or should I say Ellie P , is the most beautiful girl in this city. She is an absolute fucking angel. If you hurt her, I will kill you. I’m telling you this now so you can give yourself a chance.’

I slapped him once across the face. It was a manic shot with plenty of sting to it. I told him of youth’s fleeting nature. I told him he didn’t realise how quickly all this would pass. I told him how it had been for me. I spoke of the darknesses that can so quickly seep between the cracks of a life. I told him of the images I had witnessed and voices I had heard. He began to cry in fear. I told him how my Wifey had been plagued by evil faeries in the night — oh it was all coming out! — and how my Ellie was to me a deity to be worshipped, and I would protect her with my life.

‘I have Type 1 diabetes!’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t deal with this shit!’

Oh but I laid it on with a motherfucking trowel. I brought him to the pits of despair and showed him around. My threats were veiled and made stranger by the serenity of my smile. I said I expected him on the porch at eight o’clock, in his track pants and his Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt. But before that he would have a job to do. We rose from our haunches and I caught the scruff of his neck and I led him along the aisles to the paint racks — Saturday-men watched, staff in yellow cover-alls watched, but no one approached us — and I showed him the white paint, how much of it there was and how cheap it was, and I explained I’d be pulling a spot check on the rain shelter at seven o’clock, sharp.