Kevin Barry: Beatlebone

He sets out for the place as an animal might, as though on some fated migration. There is nothing rational about it nor even entirely sane and this is the great attraction. He’s been travelling half the night east and nobody has seen him — if you keep your eyes down, they can’t see you. Across the strung-out skies and through the eerie airports and now he sits in the back of the old Mercedes. His brain feels like a city centre and there is a strange tingling in the bones of his monkey feet. Fuck it. He will deal with it. The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night. There’s something monkeyish, isn’t there, about his feet? Also his gums are bleeding. But he won’t worry about that now — he’ll worry about it in a bit. Save one for later. Trees and fields pass by in the grainy night. Monkeys on the fucking brain lately as a matter of fact. Anxiety? He hears a blue yonderly note from somewhere, perhaps it’s from within. Now the driver’s sombre eyes show up in the rearview—

It’s arranged, he says. There should be no bother whatsoever. But we could be talking an hour yet to the hotel out there?

Driver has a very smooth timbre, deep and trustworthy like a newscaster, the bass note and brown velvet of his voice, or the corduroy of it, and the great chunky old Merc cuts the air quiet as money as they move.

John is tired but not for sleeping.

No fucking pressmen, he says. And no fucking photogs.

In the near dark there is the sense of trees and fields and hills combining. The way that you can feel a world form around you on a lucky night in the springtime. He rolls the window an inch. He takes a lungful of cool starlight for a straightener. Blue and gasses. That’s lovely. He is tired as fuck but he cannot get his head down. It’s the Maytime — the air is thick with and tastes of it — and he’s all stirred up again.

Where the fuck are we, driver?

It’d be very hard to say.

He quite likes this driver. He stretches out his monkey toes. It’s the middle of the night and fucking nowhere. He sighs heavily — this starts out well enough but it turns quickly to a dull moaning. Not a handsome development. Driver’s up the rearview again. As though to say gather yourself. For a moment they watch each other gravely; the night moves. The driver has a high purple colour — madness or eczema — and his nose looks dead and he speaks now in a scolding hush:

That’s going to get you nowhere.

Driver tips the wheel, a soft glance; the road is turned. They are moving fast and west. Mountains climb the night sky. The cold stars travel. They are getting higher. The air changes all the while. By a scatter of woods there is a medieval scent. By a deserted house on a sudden turn there is an occult air. How to explain these fucking things? They come at last by the black gleaming sea and this place is so haunted

or at least it is for me

and there is a sadness, too, close in, like a damp and second skin. Out here the trees have been twisted and shaped by the wind into strange new guises — he can see witches, ghouls, creatures-of-nightwood, pouting banshees, cackling hoods.

It’s a night for the fucking bats, he says.

I beg your pardon?

What I mean to say is I’m going off my fucking bean back here.

I’m sorry?

That’s all you can be.

He lies back in his seat, pale and wakeful, chalk-white comedian; his sore bones and age. No peace, no sleep, no meaning. And the sea is out there and moving. He hears it drag on its cables — a slow, rusted swooning. Which is poetical, to a man in the dark hours, in his denim, and lonely — it moves him.

Driver turns, smiling sadly—

You’ve the look of a poor fella who’s caught up in himself.

Oh?

What’s it’s on your mind?

Not easy to say.

Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick — these are the things on his mind.

Also—

How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?

I just want to get to my island, he says.

He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks. That he might scream his fucking lungs out and scream the days into nights and scream to the stars by night — if stars there are and the stars come through.

——

The moon browses the fields and onwards through the night they move — the moon is up over the fields and trees for badness’ sake but he cannot even raise a howl.

Radio?

Go on then.

Will we chance a bit of Luxembourg?

Yeah, let’s try a little Luxy.

But they are playing Kate Bush away on her wiley, windy fucking moors.

Question, he says.

Yes?

What the fuck is wiley?

Does she not say winding?

She says wiley.

Well…

Turn it off, he says.

Witchy fucking screeching. The hills fall away and the darkness tumbles. Now in the distance a town is held in the palm of its own lights — a little kingdom there — and after a long, vague while — he is breathing but not much alive — they come to an old bridge and he asks to stop a moment by the river and have a listen.

Here?

Yeah, just here.

It’s four in the morning — the motor idles at a low hum — and the trees have voices, and the river has voices, and they are very old.

Driver turns—

Hotel’s the far side of the town just another few miles.

But John looks outside and he listens very hard and he settles to his course.

You can leave me here, he says.

——

He planned to live out on his island for a bit but he never did. He bought it when he was twenty-seven in the middle of a dream. But now it’s the Maytime again and he’s come over a bit strange and dippy again — the hatches to the underworld are opening — and he needs to sit on his island again just for a short while and alone and look out on the bay and the fat knuckle of the holy mountain across the bay and have a natter with the bunnies and get down with the starfish and lick the salt off his chops and waggle his head like a dog after rain and Scream and let nobody come find him.

The black Mercedes sits idling and lit by the bridge that spans the talking river.

John walks from the car in a slow measured reverse — one foot backwards and then the other.

He is so many miles from love now and home.

This is the story of his strangest trip.

——

And the season is at its hinge. The moment soon will drop its weight to summer. The river is a rush of voices over its ruts and tunnels into the soft black flesh of the night and woods, and the driver leans at rest against the bonnet of the car — casually, unworried, his arms folded, if anything amused — and as the door is open, the car is lit against the dark and the stonework of the old bridge and the small town that rises beyond by its chimney pots and vaulting gables. John steps another foot back, and another, and he laughs aloud but not snidely — the driver is getting smaller; still he watches amusedly — and the town and the river and bridge and the Mercedes by stepped degrees recede and became smaller

what if I keep going without seeing where I’m going

what if I keep going into the last of the night and trees

and he steps off the road and into a ditch and his footing gives and he stumbles and falls onto his backside and into the black cold shock of ditchwater. He laughs again and rights himself and he turns now and walks into the field and quickens.