Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

I let go of him then. I sucked up the last of my calm, and I said:

‘Listen, Aodhan, we’re doing a shopping run this afternoon … Can I fetch anything in particular? You two go for that barbecue salmon in the vac-packs, don’t you?’

I left him ashen-faced and limp. I prowled the aisles some more and now these hot little barks of triumph came up as I walked. The Saturday-men avoided my eyes, and they scurried from my path, and I barked a little louder. As I’m here, I thought, why not pick up a couple of things?

So I bought an extendable ladder and a claw hammer.

The automatic doors registered my presence at once and I was let outside to the sun-kissed afternoon. I propped and extended the ladder against the front of the store and I climbed with the claw hammer hanging coolly in my grip. It took no more than a half-dozen wrenches to loose the exclamation mark

!

from the Do-It-Rite and carefully I placed it under my arm — it was light as air — and I descended. I walked across the car park. I placed it carefully on the tarmac in front of the Volvo — my intention was to drive over it and smash it to pieces — but then I thought, no, that would be too quick. So I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark

!

until it began to crack here and there, and tiny shatter lines appeared, and these joined up, piece by piece, until the entire surface of the

!

had become a beautiful mosaic in the blue of the sign, like the trace of tiny backroads on an old map — marking out lost fields, lost kingdoms, a lost world — and I was serene as a bird riding the swells of morning air over those fields.

The squad car appeared.

SO I BOUGHT an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbour wall, with Mweelrea mountain across the water, and disgracefully grey skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings. The night in question, the rain was particularly violent — it came down like handfuls of nails flung hard and fast by a seriously riled sky god. I was at this point eight months in the place and about convinced it would be the death of me.

‘It’s end-of-the-fucking-world stuff out there,’ I said.

The chorus of locals in the hotel’s lounge bar as always ignored me. I was a fretful blow-in, by their mark, and simply not cut out for tough, gnarly, west of Ireland living. They were listening, instead, to John Murphy, our alcoholic funeral director.

‘I’ll bury anythin’ that fuckin’ moves,’ he said.

‘Bastards, suicides, tinkers,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t give a fuckin’ monkey’s,’ he said.

Mweelrea is the most depressing mountain you’ve ever seen, by the way, and its gaunt, looming shape filled almost every view from the Water’s Edge Hotel, the lounge bar’s included. The locals drank mostly Bushmills whiskey and Guinness stout, and they drank them to great excess. I wiped their slops from the counter with a bar cloth I had come to hate with a passion that verged on the insane. I said, ‘But seriously, that’s one motherfucker of a high tide, no?’

Barely the toss of a glance I received. The talk had shifted to roads, mileage, general directions. They made a geography of the country by the naming of pubs:

‘Do you know Madigan’s in Maynooth?’

‘I do, of course.’

‘You’d take a left there.’

‘I have you now.’

The hotel had twenty-three bedrooms and listed westward. Set a can of peas on the floor of just about any bedroom and it would roll slowly in the direction of the gibbering Atlantic. The estate agent had gussied up the history of the place in the brochure — a traditional coaching inn, original beams, visited by Thackeray, heritage bleeding out the wazoo, etc. — and I had leapt at it. I was the last of the hopeless romantics.

The talk had moved on, briefly, from roads and directions.

‘If he’s still around when her bandages come off,’ Bill Knott, the surveyor, said, ‘he’s a braver man than me.’

‘Nice woman,’ John Murphy agreed. ‘As long as you don’t put your hand in the cage.’

Behind the bar: the Guinness tap, the Smithwick’s tap, the lager taps, the line of optics, the neatly stacked rows of glasses, and a high stool that sat by a wee slit of window that had a view across the water towards Mweelrea. The iodine tang of kelp hung in the air always, and put me in mind of embalming fluid. Bill Knott looked vaguely from his Bushmills towards the water.

‘Highish alright,’ he said. ‘But now what’d we be talkin’ about for Belmullet, would you say? Off a slow road?’

The primary interest of these people’s lives, it often seemed, was how far one place was from another, and how long it might take to complete the journey, given the state of the roads. Bill had been in haulage as a young man and considered himself expert.

‘I don’t know, Bill,’ I said.

‘Would we say an hour twenty if you weren’t tailbacked out of Newport?’

‘I said I really don’t fucking well know, Bill.’

‘There are those’ll say you’d do it in the hour.’ He sipped, delicately. ‘But you’d want to be grease fuckin’ lightnin’ coming up from Westport direction, wouldn’t you?’

‘We could be swimming it yet, Bill.’

I had made — despite it all — a mild success of myself in life. But on turning forty, the previous year, I had sensed exhaustion rising up in me, like rot. I found that to be alone with the work all day was increasingly difficult. And the city had become a jag on my nerves — there was too much young flesh around. The brochure about the hotel appeared in my life like a revelation. I clutched it in my hands for days on end. I grew feverish with the notion of a westward flight. I lay in bed with the brochure, as the throb of the city sounded a kind of raspy, taunting note, and I moaned as I read:

Original beams.

Traditional coaching inn.

Thackeray.

Estd 1648.

The hotel had the promise of an ideal solution. I could distract myself (from myself) with its day-to-day running, its endless small errands, and perhaps, late at night, or very early in the morning, I could continue, at some less intense level, with the poetry.

All my friends, every last one of them, said, ‘ The Shining ’.

But I was thinking, the west of Ireland … the murmurous ocean … the rocky hills hard-founded in a greenish light … the cleansing air … the stoats peeping shyly from little gaps in the drystone walls …

Yes. It would all do to make a new man of me. Of course, I hadn’t counted on having to listen to my summer staff, a pack of energetic young Belarusians, fucking each other at all angles of the clock.

And the ocean turned out to gibber rather than murmur.

Gibber gibber — whoosh. Gibber gibber — whoosh.

Down the far end of the bar, Mick Harty, distributor of bull semen for the vicinity, was molesting his enormously fat wife, Vivien.

‘We’re after a meal at the place run by the Dutch faggots,’ he said. ‘Oysters for a starter … They have me gone fuckin’ bananas!’

Vivien slapped and roared at him as he stroked her massive haunches. She reddened and chortled as he twisted her around and pulled her vast rear side into his crotch area. Nobody apart from me paid a blind bit of attention to the spectacle. And even as she suffered a pretend butt-rape from her cackling husband, she turned to me and informed me, precisely, what they had paid for the meal at the Dutch couple’s restaurant.

‘Two starters, two mains, we shared a dessert, two bottles of wine, two cappuccinos,’ she said, as Mick grinded slowly behind her, hoarsely yodelling an Alicia Keys love ballad. ‘Hundred thirty-six euro, even — not cheap, Caoimhin.’