Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

I’ve been here before, he says.

We’ve all been here before, John.

I’m not talking philosophic. I mean this fucking place. I’ve been here before.

They climb a bit and then some more. They come in quick time to the Amethyst Hotel. It’s a strange hacienda in the Maytime sun. There are armies of insects on the island’s air. And there are voices — listen?

The voices are high, wired, freaky.

I think I’ve been to the Amethyst fucking Hotel and all.

He steps through the pools of a lost dream now — it’s been nine years since.

They pass through an old garden once formal but gone to seed and wild again and there is the feeling of things unseen travelling behind the hedges.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, is the gentleman that runs the Amethyst nowadays and I’d have to say he’s an outstanding individual.

John is worried.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, would mind a mouse for you on Piccadilly Circus.

I thought we’d said no hotels?

Amethyst is not open to the public anymore, John. As such. It is for Joe and his friends’ use only at this moment in time.

His friends?

The voices come up again. They are loud and desperate. He can hear unwellness and rage. He knows these voices at once and right off for what they are.

They’ll know to expect us, John. We spoke last night. They know we might be stuck. These are your own style of people precisely.

It’s true there are some old familiars on the air—

He can smell the fucking and the freebase.

He can smell the mania.

He can smell the freaks.

——

When he sees high the red letters raised

A M E T H Y S T

on the white gable wall, it comes back to him for sure: he has definitely been here before. It’s the nine years since. Some actors had it back then. They kept a very nice white wine. They had some quite good pot. They made us a picnic here. It was just a sweet nothing day. It was early in our life together.

The picnic was brought to the hills. The hills were scratchy with heather and nettles about the ankles and they sat for a while on a Scotch blanket and looked down on the slow-moving green-into-blue of the bay and ate tiny triangle sandwiches of cheese and pickle and drank the cold white wine—

didn’t we?

— until the rain came in a sudden attack from a very irksome old god and they scurried away again as the sky changed colour quick as love can change and there was rain in their faces and everything was giddy as hell and they were collapsing with love.

There’s another we’ll never have back, he says to himself, being the sentimental Scouse.

——

Inside. The air of the strange hotel is humid and trapped. There are voices upstairs. They are going at it fucking hard. There are footsteps now and a figure at the top of the stair — a dark shade there.

Dips his head for a view—

Sweet Joe, Cornelius says.

The beast grins down the stair beneath a cloud or an aura of bushy auburn hair. He has tiny yellowish pisshole-in-the-snow-type eyes. But otherwise this is a most graceful fatman on the move. The way that he bounces on the balls of his feet as he turns the stair.

Fucking hell, John says.

The way that he has the look of an enormous forest hog — a creature only rumoured, never seen. He wears a flowy Victorian shirt that billows poetically and some kind of breeches— fucking breeches? — and his skin has a high, healthful, vivacious glow. He is terribly fucking alive. He whispers these decorous words—

How absolutely proper it feels to have you here, John.

His voice?

North-of-England.

——

Are you a little cold, John?

His voice — the North-of-England, the wheeze, the husk and Burnley of it.

I’m fine, thanks.

They sit in the hotel kitchen over a brew of nettle tea and fags.

We can get that chill in Maytime yet, the evenings.

There is something old-timey about his voice, as if transmitted from the days long since; there is a static on the coils of it. His face is alive with tics and nervy flutters as if there are small desperate birds trapped beneath the skin.

You’d need your cup of tea, he says.

Common-sensical, also, the tone, like a fucking busman, and there are arcane symbols daubed on the kitchen walls—

Black Sun,

Pentacle,

Evil Eye.

There are voices upstairs — young, unsettled, roaring.

Frank and Sue, he says. They’re in the thick of it just now.

Oh yeah?

They’ve gone deepish, he says. We’d best not disturb Frank and Sue just now.

A rueful, confiding grin, and the words again are whispered—

They’ve been weeks getting to where they are now, Frank and Sue.

One minute they’re roaring at each other, Cornelius says. The next they’re riding each other like dogs.

It could go either way yet, Joe says, for Frank and Sue.

The voices above are pitched high and sorely and break at times to screeches, at other times to screams — John is back in a freakhouse again. It’s been a stretch of time. He sips not unhappily at his nettle tea.

How’s it you’ve ended up out here, Joe?

Oh it’s hardly an ending, really, is it?

A flush creeps up the fatman’s neck.

You can really listen out here, he says. I mean if it’s a Mesmeric you’re after.

Now, Cornelius says, and he tips a measure of Spanish brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

That’ll keep the blood moving, Joe says.

Common-sensical, which is the true note of a madman, or so Peter Sellers said one time, and he’d have known.

Joe moves lightly on his feet to look out the window. He considers the Maytime in the island’s gleeful light. He nods and turns.

It was magic last night, John, he says. You were there and you were not there.

Okay.

And you sang quite beautifully, actually.

I did?

But what a very strange song it was.

A song?

It was odd, Cornelius says, but it was lovely.

Okay, John says.

The night will not come back except in slivers and scraps and dark shapes that hover but will not hold.

On the walls—

the Hexagram,

the Ankh,

the Eye of Providence.

He is here and he is not here; he throws his palms down to slap his thighs, as though jauntily, but in fact for confirmation of flesh and bone, here on a hardback chair, in the kitchen of the strange hotel, in the month of May — how merry, how merry — in 1978.

How do you pass the days out here, Joe?

Exploration, he says. We dig in.

Oh yeah?

They’d be hammering each other, Cornelius says.

It has been there all the while but only now is he aware of Moroccan-type music on a hi-fi but faintly, a sitar, soft padded drums, and Joe smiles and shimmies his fat hips.

We go in hard at the Amethyst, John.

He sips his nettle tea and the brandy’s warm kick comes through; he lights a fag for a prop. It’s 1978, he’s a bloody dad again, and he’s away in a fucking freakhouse?

Where’s it you’re from, Joe? Originally?

Knowleston way.

Where?

But Joe just waddles a grin about his face and moves his fleshy hips to the desert music — languid, his fat rhythm. He looks at John calmly and evenly—

They call me Joe Director, he says.

He smiles, hog-like, and shows the graven palms—

Daft kids, he says.

There are no directors out here, he says.

We are very much a community out here, he says.

Oh yeah, John says, a community?

The Community of the Black Atlanteans.

Of the fucking what?

Upstairs, by now, the noises are unmistakably sex noises—

Hot shrieks.

Chocolate moans.

Livid whelps.

Frank and Sue, says Joe. They’re young still and they have the blood for it, John.