Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘John, I’ve warned you about this,’ I said.

‘I’m only sayin’,’ he said.

He sullenly turned back to his stout. The people of this part of north Galway are oversexed. That is my belief. I had found a level of ribaldry that bordered on the paganistic. It goes back, of course. They lick it up off the crooked rocks. Thackeray, indeed, remarked on the corset-less dress of rural Irish women, and the fact that they kissed perfect strangers in greeting, their vast bosoms swinging.

‘It’s not,’ John Murphy said, ‘like I’m goin’ to take a lep at the little bitch. My leppin’ days are long fuckin’ over.’

A notion came: if I sold the place for even three-quarters of what I paid for it, I could buy half of Cambodia and do a Colonel fucking Kurtz on it altogether. Lovely, cold-hearted Nadia came running from the kitchen. She was as white as the fallen dead.

‘Is otter!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is otter in kitchen!’ she said.

He was eating soup when I got there. Carrot and coriander from a ten-gallon pot. Normally, they are terribly skittish, otters, but this fellow was languorous as a surfer. Nervously, I shooed him towards the back door. He took his own sweet time about heading there. Once outside, he aimed not for the tide-line rocks, where the otters all lived, but for the higher ground, south.

I looked out towards the harbour. The harbour wall was disappearing beneath spilling sheets of water. I came back into the lounge.

‘A fucking otter is right,’ I said.

They looked at me, the locals, in quiet disgust, as if I could expect no less than otters in the kitchen, the way I was after letting things go.

I pointed to the harbour.

‘Will it flood?’ I asked, and there was a quake in my tone.

‘You’d make good time coming out of Sligo, normally,’ Bill Knott said. ‘Unless you had a Thursday on your hands. But of course them fuckers have any amount of road under them since McSharry was minister.’

‘I said will it flood, Bill? Will it flood? Are you even listening to me?’

A grey silence swelled briefly.

‘Hasn’t in sixteen years,’ he said. ‘Won’t now.’

I spent all my waking hours keeping the Water’s Edge on the go. I was short-breathed, tense, out of whack. I was at roughly the midpoint of what, for poets, would be termed ‘a long silence’ — five years had passed since my last collection. Anytime I sat down to page or screen, I felt as if I might weep, and I didn’t always resist the temptation. Mountain bleakness, the lapidary rhythms of the water, the vast schizophrenic skies: these weren’t inspiring poetry in me; they were inspiring hopeless lust and negative thought patterns. Again and again, the truth was confronting me — I was a born townie, and I had made a dreadful mistake in coming here. I set down a fresh Bushmills for Bill Knott.

‘This place your crowd are from,’ he said. ‘Belarus?’

‘Yes, Bill?’

‘What way’d they be for road out there?’

‘When you think,’ Vivien Harty said, ‘of what this country went through for the sake of Europe, when we went on our hands and fuckin’ knees before Brussels, to be given the lick of a fuckin’ butter voucher, and as soon as we have ourselves even halfways right, these bastards from the back end of nowhere decide they can move in wherever they like and take our fuckin’ jobs?’

On the Killary hillsides the dogs howled again in fright-night sequence, one curdling scream giving way to another; they were even louder now than before.

‘Mother of Jesus,’ John Murphy said.

The dogs were so loud now as to be unignorable. We all went to the windows. The roadway between hotel and harbour wall had in recent moments disappeared. The last of the evening light was an unreal throb of Kermit green. The dogs howled. The rain continued.

‘The roads,’ Bill Knott said, at last impressed, ‘will be unpassable.’

Mick Harty’s hands slipped down over the backs of Vivien’s thighs. The rain came in great, unstoppable drifts on a high westerly from the Atlantic.

‘That ain’t quittin’ anytime soon,’ I said, stating the blindingly obvious.

‘Water’s up to the second step,’ Vivien Harty noted.

Four old stone steps led up to the inn’s front porch.

‘And rising,’ Mick Harty said.

‘I haven’t seen rain the likes of that,’ John Murphy said, ‘since Castlebar, the March of ’seventy-three.’

‘What’d we be talkin’ about for Castlebar?’ Bill Knott said. ‘Forty-five minutes on a light road?’

*

We moved back from the windows. Our movement had become curiously choreographed. Quiet calls were made on mobiles. We spoke now in whispers.

All along the fjord, word quickly had it, the waters had risen and had breached the harbour walls. The emergency services had been alerted. There was talk — a little late for it — of sandbagging. We were joined in the lounge bar by six of the nine Belarusians — the other three had gone to the cineplex in Westport, fate having put on a Dan Brown adaptation — and by the two elderly couples, who had managed not to die off in the library.

I said, ‘A round of drinks on the house, folks. We may be out here for some time.’

Applause greeted this. I felt suddenly that I was growing into the mine-host role. There was a conviviality in the bar now, the type that is said to come always with threatened disaster.

Great howls of wind echoed down the Doo Lough Valley, and they were answered in volleyed sequence by the howls of the Killary dogs.

Four of the six Belarusians wore love bites on their necks as they sipped at their complimentary bottled Heinekens. They were apparently feasting delightedly on each other in my back rooms.

The elderlies introduced themselves.

We met Alan and Norah Fettle from Limerick, and Jimmy and Janey McAllister from Limavady. They were the least scared among us, the least awed.

‘Yon wind’s changing,’ Jimmy Mac said. ‘Yon wind’s shiftin’ easterly so ’tis.’

‘I wouldn’t like the sounds of that,’ John Murphy said. ‘Not much good will come ever out of a swappin’ wind. You’d hear that said.’

It was said also in Killary that an easterly wind unseated the mind.

I shot a glance outside, and on a low branch of the may tree hanging over the water a black-backed gull had apparently killed its mate and was starting to eat it. This didn’t seem like news that anybody wanted to hear, so I kept it to myself.

Alexei, the conspicuously wall-eyed Belarusian, had gone to survey the scene from an upstairs window and he returned to report that the car park beside the hotel was flooded completely.

‘Insurance will cover any damage,’ Bill Knott soothed.

‘It’s going to be one of those fuckin’ news clips,’ John Murphy said. ‘Some fuckin’ ape sailin’ down the street on a tea tray.’

‘Jesus Christ what’s that gull doing?’ Norah Fettle said.

It was an inopportune moment to draw attention to the gull situation. The black-back had just at that instant managed to prise its partner’s head off, and was flailing it about. Janey McAllister passed out cold on the floor. There was no getting away from the fact that we were being sucked into the deeps of an emergency.

I was getting happy notions. I was thinking, the place gets wiped out, I claim the insurance, and it’s Cambodia here I come.

Norah Fettle and Vivien Harty tended to Janey McAllister. She was frothing a little, and moaning softly. They called for brandy. Bill Knott signalled for a fresh Bushmills, John Murphy for a pint of stout.

We all looked out the windows.

The water had passed the fourth step and was sweeping over the porch. We were on some vague level aware that house lights still burned on the far side of the harbour, along the mountainside of Mweelrea. Then, at once, the lights over there cut out.