Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

John flicks his half-smoked fag. He leans his arms on the bars and his chin on his skinny arms.

JOHN Here’s an odd question, Charlie. Is it, in effect, some kind of occult fucking jazz thing?

CHARLIE That’s definitely a way of looking at it, John.

Morning climbs the white-blue sky. The sound engineer Charlie Haimes wishes that he was at home, in the farmhouse, with Dora, and the nippers, having a spliff and thinking about getting his tomatoes in. There isn’t much Charlie Haimes needs telling about tomatoes.

CHARLIE At least we’ve binned the Irishy bits.

JOHN There is that. That fucking fiddler?

They have a laugh about the fiddler again. This cuts the tension. The fiddler was five foot nothing and smelt of whiskey and had the eyes of a haggard masturbator. John reckoned he’d been sneaking in the loo to have one off the handle.

JOHN Used to play with Van Morrison, apparently.

John, hawk-faced, spluttering, one traumatised 4 a.m., had said: Right then! We’re done with the fucking fiddles! And I mean in-fucking-toto, Charlie!

JOHN Maybe I’m not whacked out enough anymore, Charlie. Maybe I’m not as far out my own self as the fucking record is supposed to be.

There isn’t a great deal Charlie Haimes can say to that. The sun comes through the backs of the buildings across the way. John’s skin is night-work pale in the morning light.

JOHN What I heard in that cave, Charlie?

CHARLIE Oh yeah?

JOHN I’m not even going to say how good it could have been.

John reaches over the rail now and he looks down below. He sighs in long suffering. He slides to a sitting position.

JOHN I do think that’s where they’re at, you know? The dead ones. I think they get together out on the water. Else how can you explain all the lonely mopers stood about on the shore?

This is heading into odd country is the view of Charlie Haimes. Though there was the time in Llandudno he’d had a weep about his nan.

CHARLIE I had a weep about me dead nan in Llandudno one time. On the promenade.

JOHN Oh?

CHARLIE I think it was a Sunday. I found myself stood on the prom and bawling out the tears.

JOHN You were close to your old nan, Charlie?

CHARLIE That’s the odd thing about it, John. I never liked the old witch. She was the tightest woman in Douglas. Which is saying bloody something. She gave me four sausage rolls when I done my Holy Communion.

JOHN Moony types get drawn to bodies of water, Charlie. They always have done.

CHARLIE Is what it is.

JOHN If you wanted me to be fucking French about it?

CHARLIE Go on.

JOHN It’s because when you look out to sea, you’re looking at a fucking infinitude.

CHARLIE Of?

John joins his hands to make a seashell — a conch? — and blows inside and opens his hands again — puff — as though to free a dove.

JOHN An infinitude, Charlie, of nothingness.

CHARLIE Heroin, John.

JOHN At the very fucking least, Charlie.

CHARLIE You want to go back in?

He doesn’t answer. The silence that holds is easier now and London is pinkly waking. They’ve been through a lot together. The rattling of the bones; the squalls and the screeching; the occult shimmers; the lonely airs; the sudden madcap waltzes; the hollowed voices; the sibilant hiss; the asylum screams; the wretched moans; the violence, love, and tenderness — beatlebone. The first of the buses goes past at a sprightly chug.

JOHN Have you ever Screamed, Charlie?

CHARLIE I have a bit. So happens. In my day.

JOHN And what did you find, Charlie? When you went inside?

CHARLIE Not a whole lot to write home about, John. As it turns out.

Charlie Haimes could be enjoying the slow life. He could be tending his veggies and having his puff. But the call came in. Have you anything in the book, Charlie? Not till Kate Bush in October. Well, John’s in town. John? John. Do you mean John-John? The same.

JOHN Are we going to make a record then?

CHARLIE I daresay we’re going to make something.

John pockets his fags; Charlie watches closely.

JOHN Do you ever think about being a kid, Charlie?

CHARLIE Sometimes. You see things in your own and it makes you think back.

JOHN When were you happiest in your life?

CHARLIE Probably right now.

JOHN You mean this minute? That’s very kind, Charles.

CHARLIE I mean where I am right now.

JOHN Wales, isn’t it?

CHARLIE That’s right.

JOHN Doesn’t Roger Daltrey keep a trout farm there?

CHARLIE I believe he does.

JOHN I tried the countryside. I went off my fucking bean. I tried the city. I can take it or fucking leave it.

CHARLIE What about this island then?

JOHN Turns out the thought of it’s the thing, Charlie. The reality is slippery rocks and freezing fucking sea and creamy fucking gull shit. Not to mention the banshee fucking wind.

A summer day gets up and about itself. It’s going to be a meat-spoiler. It’s going to be pig heat in this old, old habitation. He’s got the faraway look on. He — John — has gone off to the vaults of darkness again. As if all of it can make no difference, as if each time he opens his mouth it’s just a scream to pierce the moment against the darkness that’s coming, the void.

CHARLIE QPR are a lovely young side. They could go well this year. Is my feeling. A very capable young side. Do you follow the football, John?

JOHN I went to art college, Charlie.

The sound engineer has been around a share of these type blokes in his day. What it is, if you ask Charlie Haimes, is a case of arrested development.

JOHN You never get past what happens to you when you’re seventeen.

Charlie Haimes tries to remember when he was seventeen. 1961? Not bloody yesterday. He was possibly already in Brum by then. Which wasn’t without its excitements for a Charlie Haimes, seventeen, fresh fish out of Dudley.

JOHN I’d be coming down Bold Street. Is the feeling that I get. And I was that fucking sharp, Charlie, you know?

The morning is tight as a drum now. The first of the traffic sends out its snarls. The air becomes heavier and tastes of oil and poppers.

CHARLIE There’s always the possibility you’re breaking new ground here, John.

This goes down very well.

JOHN As in maybe this thing is ahead of its fucking time?

CHARLIE Careful, but.

JOHN It’s a very pretty thought.

John stands up and stretches. He groans from his years — he groans from deep inside.

JOHN I’m getting old, Charlie. And I think I might be getting a bit fat again.

There’s no odds in engaging here, thinks Charlie Haimes.

CHARLIE Italian caff won’t be long opening. We could get a couple of sausage sarnies in?

JOHN Ooh…

John looks wearily now towards the studio door. The drear fucking repetition of it all. It’s never a picnic, this.

JOHN Maybe a trout farm in Wales is the way to fucking go.

CHARLIE They get lice, trout.

JOHN Which is neither here nor there, Charlie.

In the studio a tape spools and resets and comes to life again — a sudden squall, a half-rhythm.

JOHN The fuck?

CHARLIE I dunno how that’s come on.

John stands up to listen; Charlie sits and listens. It’s got a low slithering thread, a half-rhythm with a chanted beat, an arcane air.

JOHN Charlie?

CHARLIE I know.

JOHN You hearing this?

CHARLIE I think I fucking am.

And now the beaten hollows of a chest, and a theremin’s loops, and the squall of a fuzzbox, and there are white horses riding the sea. John fishes out his box of fags and he pops one with a squeeze of the box and he lights it. A peregrine falcon crosses the sky.