Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

‘Good night, Irene,’ Bill Knott said.

The worst of the news was that the emergency appeared to be localised. The fjord of Killary was flooding when no other place was flooding. The rest of the country was going about its humdrum Monday-night business — watching football matches, or Dan Brown adaptations, putting out the bins, or putting up with their marriages — while the people of our vicinity prepared for watery graves.

I felt the worst possible course would be to close the bar. There was a kind of hilarity to the proceedings still, and this would not be maintained if I stopped serving booze. The pace of the drinking, if anything, quickened now that the waters were rising. You never know when you are going to lift your last.

‘Would we want to be making south?’ Mick Harty wondered.

Vivien rubbed at his wrist so tenderly I found myself welling up.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush it, babes.’

‘If we went up past Lough Fee and swung around the far side of her,’ Bill Knott said, ‘we’d nearly make it to the N59.’

The Belarusians carted boxloads of old curtains from the attic to use as sops against the doorways but the moment the last boxload reached the bottom of the stairs the doors popped and the waters of Killary entered.

I moved everybody upstairs. There was a function room up there that I used for the occasional wedding. It had a fully stocked bar and operational disco lights. We weren’t a moment too soon. As I trailed up the stairs, keeping to the rear of all my locals and Belarusians, I cast an eye back over my shoulder. It had the look of death’s dateless night out there.

‘Hup, people!’ I cried. ‘Hup for Jesus’ sake!’

More calls were made on mobiles. We were promised that the emergency services were being moved out. I turned off the harsh strip lighting overhead and switched to the mood lighting, which moved in lovely, dreamy, disco swirls. Even yet the rain hammered down on my old hotel at Killary. I opened the bar, and the locals weren’t shy about stepping up to it.

We drank.

We whispered.

We laughed like cats.

Bill Knott reckoned the distance to Clare Island oversea, if it should come to it.

‘Of course, it would not be the first time,’ he said, ‘that the likes of us would be sent hoppin’ for the small boats.’

Vivien Harty whispered to Janey McAllister. Janey’s colour was returning with frequent nips of my brandy. Vivien swirled it in the glass and fed it to the old lady; her tiny grey head she cradled on a vast lap.

Thackeray, on visiting the backwoods of Ireland, bemoaned the ‘choking peat smoke’ and the ‘obstreperous cider’ and the diet of ‘raw ducks, raw pease’ and also a particular inn: ‘No pen can describe that establishment, as no English imagination could have conceived it.’

John Murphy told us, loudly, that he loved his wife.

‘She still excites me,’ he said. ‘It’s been twenty-eight years, and I still get a horn on me when I see that bitch climb a stairs.’

I went to the landing outside the function room. I looked down the road. It was a waterway; the hotel porch had disappeared, and dozens of cormorants were approaching in formation across the water. It was like the attack on Dresden. I rushed back to the function room just as the cormorants landed on the kitchen roof out back, and a weeping Mick Harty was confessing to Vivien an affair of fifteen years’ standing. With her sister.

‘All the auld filth starts to come out,’ Alan Fettle said.

Vivien approached her husband, and embraced him, and planted a light kiss on his neck as they held each other against the darkness. Then she bit him on the neck. Blood came in great, angry spurts. I vomited, briefly, and decided to put on some music.

I looked out the landing window as I dashed along the corridor to get some CDs from my room — this was a bad move:

Seven sheep in a rowing boat were being bobbed about on the vicious waters of Killary. The sheep appeared strangely calm.

I picked lots of old familiars: Abba, The Pretenders, Bryan Adams.

I pelted back to the function room.

‘We’re here!’ I cried. ‘We might as well have a disco!’

Oh, and we danced the night away out on the fjord of Killary. We danced to ‘Chiquitita’, slowly and sensuously; we danced in great, wet-eyed nostalgia to ‘Brass in Pocket’, and we had all the old steps still, as if 1979 was only yesterday; we punched the air madly to ‘Summer of ’69’.

I went out to the landing to find the six Belarusians sitting on the top step of the stairs. The waters of Killary were halfway up the stairs. Footstools sailed by in the lobby below, toilet rolls, place mats, phone books. But what could I do?

I returned to the function room and served out pints hand over fist.

All mobile signals were down.

There appeared on the horizon no saviours in hi-viz clothing.

The waters were rising yet.

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realised that, at forty, one must learn the rigours of acceptance. Capitalise it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me — be it a watery grave in Ireland’s only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its greyer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.

Electrified, I searched for a notebook.

Bill Knott danced. John Murphy danced. The McAllisters and the Fettles waltzed. The Belarusians dry-humped one another in the function room’s dark corners. The Hartys were in deep, emotional conversation in a booth — Mick held to his bleeding neck a wad of napkins. I myself took to the floor, swivelling slowly on my feet, and I closed my eyes against the swirling lights. The pink backs of my eyelids became twin screens for flashing apparitions of my childhood pets.

‘Are ye enjoyin’ yereselves, lads?’

‘What would we be talkin’ about for Loughrea, would you say?’

‘Didn’t I come back from that place one lung half the size of the other?’

‘That’s England for you.’

I ran out to the landing for a spot check on the flood, and was met there by Alexei, the wall-eyed Belarusian. He indicated with a happy jerk of his thumb the water level on the stairs. It had dropped a couple of steps. I patted his back, and winked just the once, and returned to the disco.

1648 was a year shy of Cromwell’s landing in Ireland, and already the inn at Killary fjord was in business — it would see out this disaster, too. Now random phrases and images came at me — the sudden quick-fire assaults that signal a new idea — and I knew that they would come in sequence soon enough, their predestined rhythms would assert. I felt a new, quiet ecstasy take hold.

The gloom of youth had at last lifted.

HE CLIMBS THE twenty-three steps of the metal traverse bridge at 9.25 a.m., and not an instant before. Boyle station, a grey and blowy summer’s day. He counts each step as he climbs, the ancient rusted girders of the bridge clamped secure with enormous bolts, and the way the roll of his step is a fast plimsoll shuffle as he crosses — the stride is determined, the arms are swinging — and he counts off the twenty-three steps that descend again to the far-side platform. The clanky bamp of the last metal step gives way to a softer footfall on the platform’s smooth aged stone, and the surge of the Dublin — Sligo train comes distantly, but now closer, and now at a great building roar along the track — the satisfaction of timing it just right — and the train’s hot breeze unsettles his hair. The train eases to a halt, and his hair fixes; the doors beep three times and airily hiss open: an expectant gasp. He takes his usual place in carriage A. There is no question of a ticket being needed but the inspector sticks his head into the carriage anyway to bid a good morning.