Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

——

Joe Director pads softly across the lobby in his flowing garb. He positively fucking wafts across the lobby. He has a little Moroccan teapot held daintily in the one paw and a small cine camera in the other. He’ll want to watch himself with that fucking camera. He sighs even as he walks, and there is something that changes on the air as he comes across. He has an odd weight on the air, as a ghost has weight.

John-kid, he says. A toppener?

We will sit over our nettle tea together. There is no want out the Amethyst Hotel for nettle fucking tea. We will sit and primly sip our tea in this spell of midnight pleasantness. Joe Director stretches and yawns; he lifts his fat little feet and he kicks them out into the air for a bit and he lets them drop again, wearily.

You’re tired, Joe?

Wall-fallin’, he says.

John can feel his stomach contract. There is something in the tone or note. There is something in the waddling Northern vowels. There is something off. We will sit parked in the lobby like a pair of very deranged guests. Joe places the camera significantly on the floor between them and slowly now he tells a version of himself. He tells of all the mad sisters and all the feral brothers, all packed together like ferrets in a sack, and this was in a nothing house, and this was on a nothing street, and this was under the coalsmoke and Lancashire sky and

— nettle tea, a careful sip; on he drones—

the rancid squats in London town — someplace horrid, wasn’t it Ealing? — and the camp in Spain, and the dogs and the junk and the lizard women, and the babies with stars for eyes

— I beg your pardon, Joe?—

and a black-sand beach for a winter — all the junk — and a lost-time in Morocco — medina whispers — and if any of it is true or not, John does not care, all he wants is to hear the telling, having an interest, as he does, in such arrogant freaks.

We are what we pretend to be, aren’t we, Joe? For a finish?

He does not like this — his smile is thin, grey, cattish.

You’ve been out here for a while have you, Joe?

Been here for years now.

The smile warms; there’s a flip of the wrist.

Feels like nothing, he says. So long as you’re keeping busy.

You know about my island, Joe?

I knew some of the people you had on it for a bit.

The Diggers?

Same as.

I heard there was a fire out there.

I heard as much, John.

He takes out a lighter and wraps a wiry strand of his hair around a fat thumb; he sets fire to the end of the strand.

The high note of its bitter scent flashes on the air.

Joe?

He takes up the camera, and trains it, and sets it with a flick of the thumb to its whirring.

No thanks, John says — he raises a palm against it.

Not even a quick hello, John?

Put the fucking thing down.

——

And might it be out there still — or up there — somewhere, in an old freak’s effects, or on the spidering web, just a few seconds at the end of a reel as the tall man, gaunt with tiredness, holds a palm against the lens and pushes it away firmly, angrily, and the hog-like man chuckles, and it is past midnight at the Amethyst Hotel — are there witches moving on the beach? — and all the stars are out, and Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky.

——

They settle again to their sipping; they settle again to their talk.

I’ve had some luck in my life, John. I’ve had an angel’s share. But for you to show up at our little place here? Well that’s something very special indeed.

There’s an arrogance to him, and the hoggish smile, and the query comes now just as expected—

Do you want to come up the room, John?

He says—

Joe?

Yeah?

Have you any idea how long it’ll be before Cornelius gets back?

——

Sometimes he’ll walk the streets on the biblical afternoons when a great downpour hits the avenues and it rains frogs and cats and dogs and the people all become strange twisted birds in the hot wind from the tunnels and get sucked down the black maws of the subways and the taxi cabs move through the yellow blur and vapours of the streets and the rain washes the colours of the streets and smears them and he comes down from his eyrie and walks the streets for a while and he is that happy in his old raincoat with the fisherman’s hat pulled down over his eyes — the hat a yellow oilskin makes him look like a cartoon duck — and he roams for a while around the seabed of the city and he has a natter with the crustaceans — hello? — and he goes among the pools of the streets and the mad things — the hat he’s had for three bucks off a Chinese dude that keeps a stall in the park — among the crabs and the mad — he talked to a Turkish boy once who had only the one yellow snaggle tooth and a mouth that’d been opened with a hatchet apparently and a T-shirt that read Galatasary —and for a while it feels like his very own town and place and maybe he can work again and breathe again and write again, and not be locked to the fucking past — that he might play again — not locked to the past — that he can write again — not locked to the past and its same old song—

Lah-de-dah

Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.

——

At table—

There’s Frank.

There’s Sue.

There’s Joe Director.

It is two in the morning. It is early in the Maytime. It is a whispery old dining room. There is a vat of goat curry and a giant wooden bowl of spiced chickpeas with mint and parsley and there are bottles of cold Madeiran wine. Into the grain of the wooden table the words

B L A C K

A T L A N T I S

are carved and from a hi-fi the boozy sitars waft — a dozen years he’s been trying to outrun the fucking sitars. Spoon up the curry from the antique delft. It’s tasty as hell.

Kid, says Joe. Tender as such.

Drink the cold sweet wine — it’s a very nice old wine. Let the night drift out a little. Get looser. The delft shows a little Dutch kid. The finger-in-the-dyke kid. What’s-his-face? Outside the pale night is stretched across the sky.

Black Atlantis, Joe?

Joe Director nods sombrely.

It’s outside the window, John.

Joe Director is a forest hog.

Frank is a wolf.

Sue, an elf.

And John?

I have made my own shell—

I am the clam,

the barnacle,

the brittlestar.

——

Do you want to come up the room, John?

No, I don’t.

Do you want to get the rants on, John?

No, I fucking don’t actually because what I realise right now I’m sat here is I don’t need to scream no more and I don’t need to rant neither because I know who I am and what I am and what I am is I’m a full-grown fucking man. I don’t need to do that stuff anymore.

Come on, John…

Look, he says. After a while you’ve gone and opened yourself up plenty. And you can just let it fucking lie. But you lot do whatever you need to do to get yourselves through the night. Don’t let me stop you.

You want to make a circle, John?

I’m good but thanks.

You want to get the rants on, John?

I’ve said no! I don’t want to get the fucking rants on!

Do nothing you don’t want to do, John-kid.

Well that’s just fucking fine then.

——

He drinks a bit and smokes a bit and drifts. The light of the moon comes through in witchy rays. He thinks—

What if we were to run away for real? Say to Buenos Aires to a secret compound behind high gates with Hector on security detail with his machine gun and his ’tache. Or make it a tiny fiefdom in a jungle someplace — a Kurtz. Or make for the desert. Or what about Berlin in an old factory packed with hypodermic flunkies. Or what about Budapest. Or what about fucking Barnsley. Or say he goes upriver, or say he goes underground, or say he’s a shepherd in Patagonia — of course you’ve got your Welsh down there, bloody Taffs, they get everywhere — or say he just clings to a rock out in the middle of the black fucking ocean