Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

My afternoon routine was to have coffee at the FACT cinema near the top of Bold Street and then shop at Matta’s Middle Eastern deli about halfways along. I walked daily the roll of the street, and very often I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu , because for all its vibrancy there is an air of otherness or of past times about the street, too. I was not yet aware that Bold Street is the site of more reported paranormal activity than anywhere else in Britain.

——

A time slip occurs on the street. It is usually documented as happening in the vicinity of the old Lyceum post office, by the side entrance to Central station and opposite Waterstones bookstore. A typical report, from 2002, carried in the Liverpool Daily Post , came from a former policeman who went shopping on the street with his wife one Saturday afternoon. They emerged from Central station. He met a friend and stopped to talk for a moment. His wife went ahead to Waterstones. When he went to follow, he saw the name “Cripps” above the bookstore, and he jumped back at the honking of a motor horn from an old-fashioned van with the name “Cardin’s” on its side. Everywhere on the street the women wore full skirts and had permed hair; the men wore mackintoshes and hats. He crossed the street and the window of the store contained not books but old-fashioned women’s shoes, umbrellas, handbags. He felt panicked and he asked a lady beside him, who wore contemporary dress, if this store didn’t sell books. Equally bemused, she said that she thought it did, too, and she turned away. He entered the store and there was his wife among the stacked paperbacks, and he looked outside and the street had returned to the moment again.

There have been more than a hundred similiar reports over the years. Almost all of them relate to the area around the Lyceum post office on Bold Street. All the reports suggest that the time slip that occurs leads into the 1950s.

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I was removed from Dorinish Island in a state of distress. The fish-farmer brought me back to Murrisk Pier and to the same pub that Sid Rawle had been taken to and in much the same condition. Though I had lasted a day and a half as opposed to a year and a half. I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and five glasses of red wine. Weak as a kitten, I felt in no condition to cycle back to Westport, and so I phoned a friend there and asked her to drive out and collect me. When she arrived and saw the state that I was in, she actually shuddered .

How do I look? I said.

Shook, she said.

Very shook, she said.

What the fuck happened you? she said.

I don’t know if I can go into it, I said.

——

By the next morning, however, I felt greatly restored, and I decided to light out for Achill again. I had the sense — perhaps hysterically — that the fibres of the story were starting to knit together. I cycled from Westport to Newport, skirting once more the edges of Clew Bay. Here and there between the trees a view opened up across the water to the knuckle of Croagh Patrick and each time it appeared I raised a knuckle of my own in ritual salute. I hummed little songs as I pedalled along. I stopped for a while in Newport. Anytime I’ve been through the town I’ve entered it in sadness and left in something close to happiness — its trapped feeling or reverb, plainly, is a benevolent one.

There was a café tucked away in a corner of the square. I went and sat there for a while. I made some notes about what might be seen from the attic floor of the hotel in the square. A pair of old farmers came into the café and made their order at the counter. They took a table and talked quietly together; they seemed so easy in their skins. They made light work of enormous sandwiches stuffed with ham and coleslaw and lettuce and there were pots of tea and cream cakes to follow. Then one of them looked over at me and rather sternly said—

Wouldn’t you enjoy your life?

I left the café and aimed the bike due west for Achill Sound. As I cycled along I heard a train that had not passed this way for years, the rhythm of its heavy clanking along the ruts and ribs of the earth, and I imagined all the faces at the windows, in a blur as they went by, and their tiny sadnesses, and all of them were lost again to the years since they’d passed.

The mountains to the north were hardfounded against grey light.

A thin rain descended on the day in slow drifts and sang.

I came at last on a view of Achill Sound — I got off the bike and stood for a while in the drizzle and watched the whitecaps break and each wave as it gave out was the ghost-trace of some lost feeling and a shiver in the blood.

The water moved beneath and slapped against the stakes of the bridge as I cycled across. The streets of the village at Achill Sound were empty as if the world had been about for a while but had moved on again. I took the road by the water and I climbed the mountain by the road and after something less than an hour the road crested and I looked down on the bay at Keel and it was filled darkly as though with blood.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I came to the beach at Keel. I walked it for a long while. I sat on the rocks and was mesmerised by the water. My breath slowed to almost nothing. I saw the women as they crept out of the air in their cloaks of black and waded, and moved out, and screamed their grief to the sky and sea. The shapes of their heavy thighs showed under the wet black of their clothes in the saltwater and the wrack. They screamed and turned finally to face me in their stepped generations and each of them wore my own face—

Lah-de-dah

Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.

——

He believed that the force of a cataclysmic event could smash past a creative block. If such an event placed one in mortal danger and was accompanied by a tremendous crack-up, so much the better.

In the summer of 1980, after heavy weather had sent all of her crew to their bunks with nausea, he was left to sail single-handedly a yacht called the Megan Jaye from Rhode Island to Bermuda. He attributed his even and settled stomach to his macrobiotic diet.

The storm grew more ferocious as the night passed and it looked like the end for a while — the Atlantic was grabbing from all sides — and he was panicked and tearful and screamed for God to come take him because he didn’t fucking care no more anyhow, and then he lost his mind for a long stretch of sea, and he grew frantic and giddy as the seas raved and the skies opened, and he sang his old songs — he belted them out from his lungs as charms — and he Screamed, and after a long hard night fraught with death-fear and the odd hilarity of disasters he made it at last to calm waters and a placid morning — Bermuda — and he believed that it was this event or passage that cleared his mind and allowed him, after four barren years, to create new material and work again.

——

At the small hotel in Keel, I managed to arrange a room and get through the accompanying small talk without mentioning anything about the unsettling vision on the beach. I was watchful of my tone, however — never in itself a good sign — and I worried that I may have been acting overly cheerful or hearty. The young lady at reception was pleasant and told me about some nearby walking and cycling routes. I said I’d see what the old legs had left to give, and I tried to keep the exclamation marks out of my speech. She said I was in room number nine and smiled quietly as she handed over the key. She asked me did I care to dine at the hotel that evening and I said well, certainly, yes, a reservation for one, please, and now I worried that my diction was becoming too formal, in a kind of weirdly over-comma’d Victorian way. Basically, I was all over the shop, and I was anxious again to the pit of my gut: I decided this meant that the story was starting to come together.