Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

Joe Director aims for a basement stair—

There’s more where that brandy’s come from.

He pauses, a bright notion—

Would you like to burn off some cocaine, John?

And from upstairs a sky-opening Scream.

Did I not tell you? They are your own kind precisely, John.

——

Frank and Sue?

He’s a stunned-looking beanpole with matted blond hair in fag-ash ropes — a honky Rastafari. There is something canine or wolfish. As though born to the dog star. She’s tiny and elf-eyed with busy, travelling tits. Attractive, a-gleam, but distant — an undiscovered star. North-of-England, the pair of them, but they are posher than Joe. There are pockets of coke burn on the air — bitter-grey and teasing — but the Amethyst Hotel more generally has the stale eggy waft of a fuckery. He sits down on the stairs with these kids and they have an earnest chinwag there.

You’re on way to your island then?

That I am.

How big’s it?

It’s nineteen acres.

That’s a spread is that.

Nineteen acres of rocks and bloody rabbit holes.

Not to mention the banshee fucking wind — he lights a fag. He has a sip of nettle tea. He has sworn off the lizard brandy and he has refused the base cocaine. He feels strong, wise, avuncular and glad.

This is it then?

How’d you mean?

Just the three of you here?

There are others that come and go.

I bet there are.

You sound a bit worried, John.

This was Frank.

Why should I be worried?

Sounds like you got the fear in.

Why should I have the fear?

I’m playing with you.

You’re playing with me ?

Sue darts a lizard tongue to lick at her tidy, full lips; Sue beams hard the elf lamps—

Why’s it you’ve come here? she says.

I guess I’m running away, too.

From what? Frank says.

From who? Sue says.

From myself, he says. I’m gonna be the first in human history that manages to outrun his own fucking shadow.

They look at each other — he’s dark, she’s distant; their grins are way the fuck off.

What’s it you pair are running from?

I was always going to come here, she says.

And me, Frank says.

It draws you in, she says.

It’s got an air, he says.

Little runaways, John says.

You sound different, she says.

Different how?

Different older.

Well I’m thirty bloody seven, aren’t I?

Posh kids gone west for dope and fucking and screeching — he knows their kind long since.

How’s it you’ve found this Joe?

Their eyes go down at mention of Director.

You go at it hard around here, don’t you?

She looks at the boy — he smiles, nods: they turn to kiss quickly and hard. And now she turns back to John and it is regretful, her smile, as though to say you will never know this taste.

Sue flicks the elf lamps; then—

We get the rants on, John.

——

There is no true dark in the Maytime on Achill — it might be an isle of Norway. He moves about the small dead hotel. There is a haze of blue light in the evening windows still. Frank and Sue weep loudly in a room upstairs; Joe Director is in the kitchen tending with homicidal cheer to a goat curry. John has entered the swim of family life at the Amethyst Hotel. That sweet clamminess. Cornelius has returned to the mainland to fight back the press dogs. There are statements daubed on the walls at the Amethyst Hotel — statements about the id, statements about tide of Capricorn. The carpets squelch underfoot and give off the stale aniseed waft of seawater. He is so many fucking miles from love and home. There are fiendish midges on the air and they swarm to attack his blood. Get it at the neck, get it at the font. He slaps the tiny Nazi fuckers away. Evidence of life, at least. He smokes, sighs. He stands in the doorway porch of the Amethyst Hotel, slapping lazily at the bugs, and he looks out to the half-lit night. Joe Director comes along to link arms, companionably. Joe Director has odd charisma. There is a blush of heat rising beneath the collar of his antique shirt.

Did you know that Mars is about, John?

Well that’s all I fucking need, isn’t it?

It is a dull fire in the eastern sky and now the past in a dark sliver returns: it was here they saw the women dressed in black walk into the sea.

——

Scared but even so he goes for a turn in the half-a-night’s air. Now it is Sue that comes to follow and watch. She is tiny as a faerie that could walk the leaves and not bend a stem but weirdly big up top with those giddy tits and she wears a Victorian brocade number for a blouse and she has her sexy smile on — hasn’t she? — and she sits in the garden and tunes into the far-out stations.

Alright, Sue, love?

A smile, an elf’s — she picks at the flowers. The half-a-night smells of salt and flowers. He watches the sheep for a bit. They drift this way and that across the crooked track that comes up the hills to the Amethyst, and loose sand moves in strange drifts and sings — a grainsong — and he’s emotional — just a bit — and he walks the haunted hotel garden — he wants to get away from the freaky elf-eyes, from the North-of-England girl Sue — and now he is entirely unseen — or so he believes — and he looks down and trips out for a while on the slow-moving waves — birdsong, breath-of-sea — and he watches the salty Dummkopf sheep as they come and go, the way they move like slow daft thoughts, and his go to his old dad again. A flitter in the head and he is back in that place again. The way that he sneaks up sometimes unawares, the way he just appears—

Alright, Freddie? Alright, kid?

And always it’s as a kid, he sees him as a kid in the faraway twenties — Little Freddie, of the Bluecoat orphanage, a gimp, he comes hop-a-long — and he sits on a rusted iron bench by the briars and the beads of the berries of the haunted island garden — treesong, breeze in the leaves, his blues, a midnight yearn — but what he feels beneath the pads of his feet are the stones of the city of Liverpool — as was, Mariners Parade, Fazakerley Street, Hackins Hey — and he watches the city and the world take all its strange forms and shapes through his father’s eyes, and how it must have been for him, and how great the miracle, the zillion-to-one shot that his eyes should fall and catch on a slender girl, his blue-veined love, his Julia.

Dead love stories are what make us.

——

Well.

He’s all stirred up.
Just fucking leave it, John, he says.

By night the old garden is sweet as incense and hollow as a church. There is a great heaviness here. Tang on the air of the summer-come-soon, and with it the years are coming back — windy beaches, freckled youth, the thin reddish-brown limbs of a north-western summer; the summer of his lost anonymous England; Tropic of Lancashire. He speaks now in his old true voice. Feeling lurches; feeling shrieks. He cannot think about his father easily. It causes too much commotion. He’ll have a fag and a brandy instead — tamp all that stuff down. That way you can keep the past locked in. He goes inside again. Sue comes along to follow and watch.

Okay, Sue?

In the lobby he falls into an old armchair. Damp green the velvet, like mosses, as if the world is creeping up through its stones and into the Amethyst again. He feels like a very senior citizen. Sue eyes him darkly as she comes past — like a strange breeze she moves past — and he knows now that maybe he is scared a little of button-pretty Sue.

So where’d you hook up with this lot then?

One minute I’m at Saint Hilary’s, she says.

Saint fucking Hilary’s?

And the next? I’ve met this bloke on the train.

Blokes on trains? Never a good idea, sweetheart.