Kevin Barry: Beatlebone

You’d better come in!

It’s Hatchet-Face, his favourite crone, and she’s on the warpath—

Great spouts of steam gush from her hairy ears.

Her pinned eyes are livid and searching.

Her mouth contorts to a twisted O.

Who’s dead? he says.

She runs a filthy look around the room.

She sniffs the air as if he’s pissed the bed.

Do you realise, she says, that it’s hapist ten in the morning?

Hapist? he says. Already?

There are people, she says, with half a day put down.

Best thing you can do with days.

She eyes him — an owl for a mouse — and sucks her teeth. There is dark auntly suspicion in the glance, as if he’s been having a sneaky one off the handle. A clamminess, as of families. He has been drawn back into something here. The clock runs backwards. He holds the covers boyishly against his chest.

Had I better make a move, love?

You’d better, she says. There’s a woman down there has a home to go to.

A woman?

That does the breakfasts.

Oh, he says. Her with the brass band.

She has the mother bad. The mother is left with half a lung to her name. The other half is not viable. Or so they’re saying. All I know is she’d want to be gone home to the mother an hour since or the mother’ll be gone out the blasted window. Again.

To be honest, love, I’m not big on brekkie. A Pepsi and a fag’ll do me. Mothers out windows?

That wouldn’t be the worst of it, she says. But you’d want to come down anyway — I have a Mr. O’Grady waiting on you.

As she says his name, she fixes her hair and works her lips to an unseemly fullness.

He says you’ve a man here called McCarthy? I says, well! I says I think I have anyhow.

——

Mother Mary of Jesus is sat up the dining room wall, blue and weeping, her long glance so loving — a tear of blood rolls.

Cornelius O’Grady is sat just beneath — his hair is greased and fixed like a ducktail joint.

Would you mind sitting down, John, he says. You’re making me dizzy.

Daylight shows Cornelius in high fettle. There is vim and spark and big vitality. He considers John at length and silently; he shakes his head in amused suffering.

The problem, he says, is they’d probably know you alright.

He returns woefully to his breakfasts. He has two fried breakfasts laid out on the white linen. He moves the great boulder of a head in slow swoops over the plates as though by the arm of a crane. He slices daintily into the meats and chews and smiles grimly.

But all we can do is fucken try, he says.

A powerful chewer: the way his massive chin swings side to side and churns — they are handing out the chins around here. He mops a hunk of bread across the yellow of the egg yolks, and there is the smell of burnt fat and greasy cloy.

Have you not et? he says.

I’m fine, Cornelius. I’ll have a fag in a bit.

Humorous eyes; a shaking of the head. He zips from plate to plate and back again. He is very neat about his work, slicing a rasher here, a sausage there, having a chew and half a grilled tomato, a soft chuckling, a little sigh of thanks.

Black pudding? John says.

Yes?

Congealed blood is what it is.

You wouldn’t eat a bit?

Me? I’m macrobiotic.

Which means you ate what, fleas?

Hatchet-Face comes to work around the edges of the room, tidying and settling away, but really just the better to observe Cornelius and his great handsome bull’s head: we are in the presence of legend.

About my situation, Mr. O’Grady?

Yes?

I really don’t need a fucking circus right now. The most important thing is no one knows I’m out here.

Cornelius fills his mug from a silver pot and runs his eyes about the room.

John, he says, half the newspapermen in Dublin are after piling onto the Westport train.

Oh for fucksake!

But we aren’t beat yet. The train’s an hour till it’s in. We’ll throw a shape lively.

He’s bigger sat down than he is stood up. Short-legged, squat, the giant head rolls cockily as they move, and Cornelius aims a wave for Hatchet-Face — she flutters as though for a sexy saint.

All I want is to get to my island.

Which is it is yours?

It’s called Dorinish.

You’d say it Durn-ish.

You know the one?

There are maps but I’d pay no mind to them. Wait for me at the back door and I’ll swing the van around.

The van?

Is right.

What’s happened our Merc?

That wasn’t my car at all, John.

And where are we headed exactly?

Cornelius sends up his sighs. He looks at his pale charge sadly, as though at a tiny injured bird, and he jerks a black thumb over his shoulder.

West, he says.

——

The van’s a bone-rattler, a money-shaker, all rust and lung disease, and it screeches for death as it revs up pace for the sudden turns and the gut-heaving drops: see now how the land falls away. There is mist on the hills; he can see reaching for the crags and granite tops the wispy fingers of the mist on the hills, and Cornelius’s blue eyes are set to a high murderous burn — his hilarity — and John is on the lam and loves it although he has a sad stretch, about home, but just for a half-mile or so — it passes — and the van screams and barks and it smells of the other Monday’s fish: John’s stomach lurches and his soul groans. He lights another fag, an evil Gitane.

There’s one day I’d be after mackerel, Cornelius says. There’s another day I’d be dosing sheep. Another again? I’d be playing the chauffeur. And only last Thursday gone? I dug a grave for a man that took a sudden stroke…Sixty-two years of age and he only trying to watch a bit of television. God rest him.

Cornelius quickens the van for a blind turn. He accelerates again to come out of the bend. He plays at full volume a vile country music all twangy hoedowns and cry-it-to-the-moon laments but in awful, reaching, sobbing, spud-Irish voices.

John eyeballs the fucker hard—

Cornelius?

— but he is paid no mind.

He slaps eject to pop the cassette but Cornelius slaps it back to play again.

Ray Lynam, he says. That’s one powerful fucken singer.

Keep the dogs at bay. This is the most important thing. Keep the hissing pack at bay and get me to my fucking island. His new friend whistles jauntily as he steers the van.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

You do realise it’s extremely fucking important that no one knows I’m out here?

I do of course.

Because it would ruin everything, Cornelius. It would defeat the whole fucking purpose.

I understand, John. But I’ve a feeling the fuckers aren’t far off our trail.

How can you tell?

From the way the air is settling around us.

His eyes shoot to the rearview, to the wings.

Do you understand what I mean by that?

I’ve no fucking idea.

The ground can be kind of thin around here, John.

Thin?

Which means all you’ve to do is listen.

The van spins into the mist. Cornelius taps time on the wheel. John is not used to the company of males anymore. All the musk and hilarity and contest. Slate-grey to sea-green, the hills fall away. Melancholy, too, can gleam, jewel-like — as in the rain’s sheen that blackens stone — and Cornelius steers blithely, and he beats time with his thumbs, and he turns happily—

Tell me just the one thing, John.

Yes?

Why’s it you want to go to this little island?

Because I want to be that fucking lonely I’ll want to fucking die.

Cornelius jaws on this for a bit and winces, and he nods it through — he is at length satisfied.

I have you now, he says.

The blue-bleak hills. The veiling of the fog.

This is just what I’m after, John says.