Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

And as bleak as you’d meet one. You know you’ve a night of it put down when you wake up in a small wet field.

There seems to be an amount of that around here.

Why would you think that is?

I don’t know.

Because the fields are possessed, John.

You say this matter-of-factly, Cornelius.

Well.

——

Cornelius cuts the motor — the boat coasts by the sea road. There are voices in the night. There is a car on the stones of a small beach. There are men talking in a pod of smoke and carlight. They are very close but the boat moves unseen and silently by stealth through the water.

Pressmen, Cornelius says.

A voice comes clearly for a moment as they pass—

If she goes on me again it’ll be the last time she goes. Thirty pound that exhaust.

Steepish, Cornelius says.

The world’s about, John says.

——

Home bites at him for a bit. But he will not go back there. The days of England are done for now. What the fuck is England good for? Sausages and beer and pale gawpy faces. He sits in the boat and he fucking well bails. On white porcelain cups in railway cafés the lipstick traces. The boat moves on its slow-boom beat and it dips and scoops and cuts through the water. His gut is all over the shop. His heart aches for old England. The dark sky growls; in the near low mountains there are rumbles.

Mother of fuck, Cornelius says.

I’ve made a misery of your father’s suit, John says, bailing.

It’s not much good to him where he is now.

Do you ever think about where that might be?

I do, actually.

I thought you might.

I would see it as a falling field that runs down to the sea, John. It is not a bad old day there at all. Maybe it’s much the same as now, the Maytime. From the field you can look across the sea or at least across a wide clean pacified bay. It’s calm as glass. You walk in this field but of course by your nature you make no shade. The sun is through the white clouds in the sky but there is not much heat in it. By the edge of the field, by the shadow of the ditch, it feels very cold. You walk but your step doesn’t land. You are at an elevation in the air just a fraction above the thistles and the heads of the flowers. You are no more than a few inches in the air but it puts a lovely ease into the motion. You are stepping through the air. Your eyes are speckled in the way that a young fox’s are, greenishly. There is a particular type of saltiness on the air and it’s of the sex. Your whole body from head to toe is weightless and trembles with delight. The breeze off the bay is a light one but plenty all the same to move you around the place. You travel the field hither and back again. Everything is very funny. The way a sheep looks up at the sky. The way the wren darts from a hole in the stone wall on its happy bouncing rear. The fucken hilarity of it all. The world has no sorrows. The world is nothing but a long comfortable sighing. The field runs down to the sea. The blood still pulses as in the best days of rude fucken youth. Certainly, John, it is in the west of Ireland.

——

They move out across the bay. The weather turns. With each moment the bay becomes rougher. There are sentimental forces at work. Also there is deathhauntedness — it is written across the sky. Cornelius steers with a blithe hand to the tiller. His eyes are vague and cheerful. The sky is moving above us now and ever so darkly. John is losing track of himself again. Which may be the purpose. Trouble is a cloak that I choose to wear. The boat moves; the past is about. Old England has him again, as it always will — he’s a Second War kid. He screamed to life in the tinpot metropolis and a thousand nazi bombs came down to mark the occasion. There was sexy Adolf in his dancing boots. There were death planes on the English skies. Now the gulls wheel in sudden calm above Clew Bay and the bay pacifies but just for a beat and there is a sharp, hard slap of water and everything giddies and turns again and he thinks: what’s the worst that can happen us out here? Plenty the fucking worst.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

What I’m thinking now is fuck it, you know, the first island we come to?

I’m thinking the same way.

With these words it sails into view. It is not his island but another. The boat tilts deftly for it. The boat scalps froth from the water. The small island sits waiting in the wind and wild rain; it sits infinitely in grey patience. This island has at once a maudlin or a mawkish air. He has not put his foot to its stones and he’s come over solemn and searching again—

After a while, Cornelius, do you get to wondering?

About, John?

What’s it we’re here for?

You mean in the middle of Clew Bay on as miserable a fucken Sunday as you’d meet?

Or more generally.

Ah Jesus, John. Are you having feelings again?

I know.

These large sad warmish feelings, John? The best thing you can do is ignore the fucken things.

I wish that I could. I wish I could think of nothing but the happy things. The kid and love and home and all the rest of it. I wish I could think about the fucking money. But then I get thrown back in again. I’m into the past and the murky things. I am not in control, Cornelius, of the way my fucking brain turns. You know where I’m at sometimes? Just by way of hysterical fucking example? I’m in nineteen twenty fucking dot. I’m in the Bluecoat orphanage. How fucking cruel and how fucking lonely? To lie awake at night in the middle of the city. No brothers here, no sisters. A kid awake in the city and lonely. It’s the winter and deep in. This gimpy fucking kid in the corner bed. This snotfaced raggedy limpy kid. The best part of you’s dripped down your dad’s leg, hasn’t it, Freddie?

Ah, John.

And I will not wipe these tears away. My old man? He was like me without the spark plug in. I could have been a fucking disaster as easy. It’s like aunt always said — I’m just the idiot that got lucky.

Can you not go easy on yourself the one time, John?

No I fucking cannot.

——

The island is as drab as its first glance suggested. They push through the misery of its weather across the stones of a shingle beach. The wind is that stiff it raises the eyebrows. Weather that outrages. The stones slide and click eerily beneath their feet as they go. The click and fall of the old Chinamen’s dominoes, on Berry Street, in the Liverpool afternoons — it’s the same note and bone sound precisely. Throwing the bones they called it in the Liverpool pubs.

Cornelius as he ploughs into the weather is happiness itself, is native to the murk, rain and shifting wind.

Above us, John, are you watching?

His words come cupped in a pocket of the wind. The remnants of a cottage sit on a rise above the shoreline. It is huddled sourly among the rocks there. They climb to it. The half-crumbled walls stand about like bewildered soldiers. He steps inside the roofless hollow; Cornelius steps in after. They lean back against the walls of the place. The walls and the men hold each other up. Throwing the bones — doesn’t it mean also to read the future? They are out of the wind here at least. They consider each other coolly.

What was your plan, John?

Fuck off, Cornelius.

——

The way the sky is squared off by the half-fallen walls. Nothing between them and the heavens now. Snipes of wind get through the gaps with fast enquiries but they’re away again as quick. The wind about the bay and the rain make arbitrary music. I wanted to be stood out in the world and here I fucking well am. Here I am on this commanded journey. The sky moves and it is dark and light at once. Size of the place? You’d hardly have kept a family here. Though people were smaller, a world of full-growns five foot two, the kids like elves. The stones that are blackened still must be the last of the fireplace. He lights a fag. So the fireplace was just there, and maybe the huddled sleepers there — a family — and were their limbs entwined, for warmth and love, against the wind and island night?