Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

‘Cappuccino is a breakfast drink,’ I said. ‘You’re not supposed to drink it after a meal.’

I was not well liked out in Killary. I was considered ‘superior’. Of course I was fucking superior. I ate at least five portions of fruit and veg daily. I had Omega 3 from oily fish coming out my ears. I limited myself to twenty-one units of alcohol a week. I hadn’t written two consecutive lines of a poem in eight months. I was becoming versed, instead, in the strange, illicit practices of the hill country.

‘Fuckers are washin’ diesel up there again,’ John Murphy said. ‘The Hourigans? Of course, they’d a father a diesel-washer before ’em, didn’t they? Cunts to a man.’

‘Cunts,’ Bill Knott confirmed.

Outside, the rain continued to hammer away at our dismal little world, and the sky had shucked the last of its evening grey to take on an intense purplish tone that was ominous, close-in, biblical.

‘Sky is weirdin’ up like I don’t know fucking what,’ I said.

John Murphy grabbed my elbow as I passed along the bar — he was aggressive, always, once the third pint was downed — and he said, ‘I s’pose you know that possessed fuckin’ she-devil above in the house will put me in the ground?’

‘John,’ I said, ‘I really don’t want to hear about it.’

‘I mean literally, Caoimhin! She’ll fuckin’ do for me!’

‘John, your marriage is your own private business.’

‘She’s fuckin’ poisoning me! I swear to bleedin’ fuckin’ Jesus! I can taste it off the tea, Caoimh!’

‘Would you go again, John?’ I indicated his emptied stout glass.

‘Oh, please,’ he said.

They were all nutjobs. This is what it came down to. This is the thing you learn about habitual country drinkers.

‘Mick’s a man of sixty,’ Vivien Harty said, awed at the persistence of her husband’s desire, ‘and he’d still get up on a cracked fuckin’ plate.’

Just then a cacophony erupted:

From the hillsides, everywhere, came the aggravated howls of dogs. These were amped to an unnatural degree. The talk in the lounge bar stalled for a moment in response but, as abruptly, it resumed.

‘The tiramisu?’ Mick Harty said. ‘You wouldn’t know whether to eat it or smear it all over yourself.’

Nadia, one of my Belarusians, came through from the supper room and sullenly collected some glasses.

‘The arse on that,’ John Murphy said.

‘Please, John,’ I said.

‘Two apples in a hankie,’ he said.

I believed all nine of my staff to be in varying degrees of sexual contact with one another. I housed them in the dreary, viewless rooms at the back of the hotel, where I myself lived during what I will laughably describe as high season (the innocence), and my sleepless nights were filled with the sound of their rotating passions.

‘Thank you, Nadia,’ I said.

She scowled at me as she placed the glasses in the dishwasher. I was never allowed to forget that I was paying minimum wage.

The dogs had stopped; the rain continued.

It was by now an hysterical downpour, with great sheets of water streaming down from Mweelrea, and the harbour roared in the fattening light. Visibility was reduced to fourteen feet. This all signalled that the west of Ireland holiday season had begun.

‘He was thrun down,’ John Murphy said, speaking of a man he had lately buried. ‘He went into himself. He didn’t talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a burnt rasher. You’d visit and he’d say nothin’ to you but he’d know you were there all right. The little eyes would follow you around the room.’

‘Age was he when he went, John?’

‘Forty-two.’

‘Youngish?’

‘Arra. He was better off out of it.’

My first weeks out at the Water’s Edge I had kept a surreptitious notebook under the bar. The likes of ‘thrun down’ would get a delighted entry. I would guess at the likely etymology — from ‘thrown down’, as in ‘laid low’? But I had quickly had my fill of these maudlin bastards.

This, by the way, was the Monday of the May bank holiday weekend. Killary was en fête . Local opinion, cheerfully, was that it had been among the wettest bank holidays ever witnessed. The few deluded hillwalkers and cyclists who had shown up had departed early, in wordless outrage, and in the library room of the Water’s Edge there was just a pair of elderly couples still enjoying the open fire. I left the bar and took a pass through the library to smile at them, throw on a few sods of turf, and to make sure they hadn’t died on the premises.

They stared into the flames.

‘That’s some evening?’ I tried, but there was no response.

Both couples held hands and appeared significantly tranquillised. Coming through the lobby again, I looked out through the doors and I saw a pair of minks creep over the harbour wall. They crossed the road, in perfect tandem, and headed for the rising fields beyond the hotel. I went back into the bar. I had an odd nausea developing.

‘They can cut out that particular gland,’ Bill Knott said, ‘but if the wound goes septic after?’

He shook his head hopelessly.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is when the fun and games start.’

Mine was one of four licensed premises in a scattered district of three-hundred-odd souls. This is a brutal scarcity, by Irish ratios, so there was enough trade to keep us all tunnelling towards oblivion. The bar was another of the elements that had sold the place to me. It was pleasant, certainly, with an old-fashioned mahogany finish, zinc-topped low tables, and some prints of photo finishes from fabled race meetings at Ballybrit. I always tended bar in the evenings. I’d had a deranged notion that this would establish me as a kind of charming-innkeeper figure. This was despite the fact that not one but two ex-girlfriends (both of them, admittedly, sharp-tongued academics) had described my manner as ‘funereal’.

The bar-side babble continued unchecked:

Bill Knott was now reckoning the distance to Derry if you were to go via Enniskillen. Vivien Harty was telling John Murphy that that wasn’t tuppence worth of a coat his wife had on the Tuesday gone, that he was looking after her all the same, and that no woman deserved it more, given what she’d been through with the botched hysterectomy. Mick Harty talked of the cross-border trade in stallions and looked faintly murderous. ‘Our horses the fuckers are after now,’ he said.

Nadia, meantime, was singing weird Belarusian pop beneath her breath as she got up on the footstool to polish the optics. A seep of vomit rose in my gullet. I was soul sick. I was failing spectacularly at this whole mine-host lark. I quietly leaned on the bar by the till. I looked out the small window. Watery, it was.

‘Seriously, lads, we haven’t seen a tide that high, surely? Have we?’

It was lapping by now at the top of the harbour wall. The estate agent had assured me that the place never flooded. I’d looked the slithery old fuck in the eye and believed him. I had suspected, I had hoped, that the life I found out here would eventually do something for my work. Something would gestate in me. I’d be able to move away from all that obtuse, arrhythmic stuff about the sex heat of cities that had made me mildly famous in provincial English departments. My poetry was known of but was not a difficulty for the Killary locals — there had never been a shortage of poets out there. Every last crooked rock of the place had at some point seated the bony arse of some hypochondriacal epiphany-seeker. Some fucker who’d forever be giving out about his lungs.

‘You’d do jail time for that,’ John Murphy said.

He was eyeing once more the rear quarters of Nadia as she headed for the kitchen.