Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

His voice is tired and hollow.

The candle spits and gutters.

JOE Did you hate her for fucking about? Or hate him for taking off?

JOHN Oh who cares anymore? It’s dead history! And what can people do about them-fucking-selves? In the end? I mean it’s the fucking blood and it’s fucking fate and it’s all laid down in advance.

JOE There’s Irish.

JOHN And there’s no fucking escape.

JOE There’s very Irish. How’d they mark you, John?

JOHN They made me choose between them.

Joe Director watches carefully the moment — he weighs it in his graven palm.

JOE Why are you here, John?

John rises and goes to the window and looks out…

JOE What are you hiding from, John?

… to the oblivious sea that holds in its palm the island of Achill and the sky with…

JOE What are you scared of, John?

…its first fade in the east. He turns and looks at them coldly now.

JOHN I can see how you operate out here, Joe. You just take these daft fucking kids and play with their fuck juices, don’t you? You put your daft thoughts in their daft fucking heads and in their daft fucking bits and it’s all too easy, isn’t it, Joe?

JOE And what’s it you’ve been up to for twenty years?

JOHN You’re just a fucking user. It’s all too easy, Joe. Too easy to make it a little kingdom out here and you’re the fucking despot and you’re king of the heap with your cocaine and your daft fucking clobber and I couldn’t care less what you’ve been up to in the Amethyst fucking Hotel…

JOE This is a paranoid thought pattern, John.

JOHN …coz I’m here to tell you what you fucking are, pal, and what you are is a pig. You’re going to die and rot and no one’ll give a fucking toss anyhow. Maybe these two fucking halfwits have some hope. Maybe they’re young enough…

He starts to walk from the room.

JOE John-kid?

JOHN I need to sleep.

SUE It’s not too late, John.

JOHN I want to know as soon as Cornelius gets back.

FRANK Did you know that Mars is about, John?

——

He goes to the room marked nine. He closes the door after. He sits on the bare mattress. The world takes its shapes outside but greyly. He can hear their voices down the hallway still.

By the breath of the sea the morning comes closer. He becomes certain that he is in danger. It will be too late to move once the brightness comes through.

He lies on the bed and tries to swat the fear away but cannot and he listens and after a while the voices come nearer but fade again.

A quietness settles — is it the sound of their waiting?

He lies in the stew of his fear and sour thoughts.

He lies almost without breathing — are there voices again?

He waits until a true silence holds about the old hotel and he rises from the bed and goes to the door and opens it by the inch and the inch again — there are no voices — and he moves along the hallway, so quietly, and he hardly takes a breath as he moves — no voices, no footsteps — and he comes down the stair and through the lobby and he walks out of the Amethyst and into the world.

He sits in the cave. He listens for their voices but all he can hear is the slow release of the sea — a dissolve, or hissing. His mind is on the blink. His heart pumps the fear. His lips make words madly. Words that are set to run backwards. Words that run off in all directions. He has a set of nerves on like a sack of fucking snakes. He names himself backwards — Nhoj. A Bedouin in a tent? Under the starry cold desert sky. He sits in the cave. He listens very hard but there are no voices. He is way off the beam now. He is a fucking halfwit for even thinking he could walk out in the world still.

Outside, the sea moves. There is a foul hypnosis to it. There is a terrible queasiness to it. Vast creatures moan in the sea’s great room. He listens so hard that his tongue lolls. There is a new, odd, unlovely music on his brain—

He can hear squalling accordions and the manic trembles of timpani.

He can hear the white noise of a migraine feedback.

He can hear madhouse screeches and sawblade whines.

Well I’m in some kind of hell out here, aren’t I?

He tries to slow each breath as it passes through. He is scared but lit by a strange excitement, also. He feels that he is close to the edge of something new.

That gull’s cry sounds just like a lost child mewling.

——

He hides all day in the cave. He has put down some difficult days in his time and here’s another for the fucking annals. It is the movement of the water that works after a long while to calm him. There is an aching sound deep down in the rocks. He hears it as something close to a human sound.

He listens for their voices. The night creeps into the cave like a quiet animal — there are no voices.

Half-dark the May night cloaks the island again and the sea — he is so very far from home and love.

A fish jumps to break the surface of the water and his heart pops loose of its box and the fish is gone again but he is alive on the silver of its skin.

There is an opening-up inside. His mind turns again on its rusty old motors. Despite it fucking all. He feels that giddiness and he feels that grandeur.

An elegant, a dark gothical seabird appears and moves its slow-beat-steady wings across and just inches above the water.

First streaks of nightgreen run the sky.

Nobody can find him out here. He is safe here for a while at least. He digs his monkey toes into the sand and feels the tiny grains as they roll the crevices of the skin and slowed by his clamminess they cake. There have been other animals in this cave before. There have been other animals among these rocks before. He can feel them here still. In the sand deeply buried their chalk-white and brittle bones—

Elkbone.

Wolfbone.

Sealbone.

The words bring a dark turn. How might it be never to leave this place? To open a vein into the fine white sand. His lips sting hard with salt as though he’s had a feed of chips. The rocks pitch their aching — maybe he will never escape this place — and the way the oil and vinegar soak the brown paper of the bag to translucence.

Blow a ring of the breath on each chip to cool it off—

Hoff!

The hunger pang tells him that he is alive and not for leaving.

The slivers of an odd tune come right inside — it sounds like it comes from the future, or else it comes from deep in the past.

The slivers fade as quick but what you do is you just wait—

Slowtime; cavetime; the silver of the sea-night.

——

Sometimes when his nerves are in rags it does some good to recite the numbers of the Liverpool buses—

The sixteen for Princes Park.

The forty-two for Mount Vernon and Edge Hill.

The seventeen — Kirkdale; the nine — Dingle.

Buses for Crosby, Walton, Anfield Road, and the rainsome air and the steam of a caff — an egg and chip, a mug of tea you’d walk your boots across — and the yellow of the yellow of the egg yolks — so queasy and vibrant — and the long flirtations over frothy coffees — it’s from a good convent you get the better quim, the cheeky skirt, the turned-up noses and try-me eyes — and as he dreams his heart begins to slow again, and ease.

Cavetime.

He opens his eyes. He watches over the water. He listens carefully in the gaps between the wind. There is never a silence on the island that is true. There is always something that is out there, and moving.

——

He stands in the dark vault of the cave.