Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

Now in the cave he has all of its words and all of its noise and all of its squall.

He sees the broad sweep — he sees the tiny detail. This is the one that will settle every score. This is pure expression of scorched ego and burning soul.

The title comes through with first light. He makes carefully with a finger the letters of the word in the white sand

b e a t l e b o n e

and this is what he knows for sure:

Heard once it will haunt you fucking always.

——

The morning comes higher to make a bone-white sky. It takes away his manic joy and slips the anxiety back in. Because this is how it fucking is and this is how it fucking goes.

He is so tired. He hasn’t slept a wink. He has tried so hard this long while to be at home in the world. Baking the bread. Swinging in a papoose the baby. Cosy-as-the-fucking-womb stuff. Captain fucking Domestic. Doing all the voices. Doing down the days. But his mind will go to other places. He cannot hold the moment. It is the moment itself that contains all riches. Maybe on his own island he will finally learn to hold the moment. He needs to get to his own island. He has been drawn there again for a reason. He is on the wrong fucking island. He needs to make the trip whole now.

He stands and shakes out his limbs.

Alright then, he says.

He tastes the sea and the salt, the sexiness, the early morning air.

He steps from the cave.

——

They’ll call it another crack-up album. Fucking press. Fucking pigs with typewriters. Fucking typing with their fucking toes. Tappety-fucking-tap-tap. With their stubby little piggie fucking toes and their fags in their piggie little gobs and their fat little mugs of honey-brown ale. Feed their fat fucking faces. Fat typing piggie bastards.

Well, okay: crack-up album is just fine with him—

Where it all breaks loose.

Where it all comes down.

Where he breaks the fucking line.

He wants to break the line and he wants to sing his black fucking heart out and speak at last his own true mind.

World be wary, world be brave: John’s about.

He walks, and he is so brave now, and he no longer listens for the voices — if the Amethyst throwbacks come at him he will rip their fucking eyes out and piss in the sockets.

He walks—

Clew Bay is laid out before him in the morning sun.

Clew Bay is where paranoia comes true.

——

He has a natter with the gulls. He explains the benefits of capitalism. He has a little sing. He finds that he has a throb on, of all things, and he’d fuck anything now, he’d fuck a clump of seaweed. He feels brave and guided; he feels clairvoyant and strong. He stops up — he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.

Now he has a spring in his monkey step.

The sun bleeds gold from the water.

——

He kicks off his dead sneakers. Fuck you, pal, and fuck you, too. Now his feet are cut by the stones as he walks, and he bleeds, and it isn’t too much of a stretch from here to a bleeding Jesus, is it?

All he needs the cross for his back.

All he needs the tears in the garden.

The tiny islands are beaded through the fields of Clew Bay. His is down there, somewhere: a fortress in the sea. All he needs is a boat to bring him to his island.

With every step he turns up another version of himself.

He walks on.

The past seeps again — the past is hidden on the dark side of every moment, just there — and it takes him to Achill when they came before; it’s nine years since.

——

They walked for a while on the beach. They scrambled over the rocks. The last of the summer day was down the rockpools in its colours. There were tiny carnivals down there. They sat for a while but it was chilly; they wouldn’t sit for long. He took her hand and showed his palm and he ran the tip of her finger along the lines of his palm.

Go on, he said. What’s it you see there?

They went across the rocks and heard a screeching. He took it for a squall of birds. But he saw the figures on the tideline then.

They stayed hidden among the rocks. They looked on down the beach. There were shades on the tideline. There were some women there. He counted — there were nine of them, but they were bunched together and moving as one, and they were dressed in black and as though from a faraway time.

The fuck? he said.

The women went among the waves, and they watched — rapt — as the women’s screams bled out the sky, and the women kept walking until they were hip-high, until they were chest-high, until the waves broke on their pale white throats — there were nine of them in a line, their heads leant back—

Jesus fuck, he said.

— and their black clothes floated on the water, and their Screams came up to a high pitch, and died.

The women shook out their limbs against the sky.

They began to hiss and caw at each other.

They began to beat at each other.

Fucking hell, he said.

She put a finger to her lips — he wanted to pull away but she would not let him go.

Ghosts, she said.

——

He walks the length of the day. He walks on his blistering Jesus-type feet. He makes it onto a fucking road at last. Again the light is fading. He doesn’t know east from west, south from north, land from sky, day from night. But he knows the van’s growl as it turns a curve and comes at him fast and headlong and now it brakes hard.

Here’s Cornelius—

the sorrowful little wave of the hand,

the humorous, the woeful eyes,

the sad rolling-down of the window.

This is madness, John, he says.

This is buck fucken madness, John, he says.

There is no call for this under the sun nor fucken stars, John, he says.

——

A word rolls slowly in his mouth—

Dumb-foun-ded.

Transmitted from who-knows-where, and John just sits there, and the van moves, and Cornelius talks sensibly as he steers—

People go strange out here, John. You wouldn’t be the first and you won’t be the last. This place has a bad fucken air about it.

Those people wanted to hurt me, Cornelius.

Nonsense, John. Those are lovely, warm, decent-hearted people. It was all in your mind.

The deep-boom beat and the lapping of the water; the van’s spluttering motor; his wretched heart.

You’re saying that I’m fucking paranoid?

Now that, John, is the man precisely.

The van moves; the road is taken.

What have you been doing, John?

I’ve been working, Cornelius.

How so?

By empathising with the common man and his everyday tragedies and his common fucking despair.

Where was this?

In a cave.

Now, Cornelius says, and he flaps a paw gracefully — it’s as though the world entirely is at its ease.

Anyway there are developments, John.

Oh?

You see the way it is out here is that things can move slow enough for a long while. It’s all slow, slow, slow. And then? Quick! Out of nowhere, John? Quick. All of a sudden things moving at a savage fucken pelt and the wind behind them.

He wants her so badly, he wants her touch so badly; he is so many miles from love and home.

I was worried about you, John. I won’t tell a word of a lie. You could have gone over on an ankle. You could have gone over a fucken cliff. You could have been found at the bottom of it stone dead or halfways there. You could have been left a vegetable, John.

Cornelius?

But the time you were lost did us a power of good. Westport town is clear as day. Mulranny is clear. Newport is clear. The newspaper men have decided you were no more than an apparition. Clew Bay has been left entirely open to us. We have played this game sweet. Everything is just right for the excursion.