Beatlebone (6 page)

He stands by the doorway and smokes and looks out to the tall pines that shimmy and flex in the wind and to the dark lake's water as it laps. A pale youth stands beside him, a brightly eager type with his head inclined gently for questions.

This place around here is called the Highwood then?

No, Ken.

Oh?

The pub is called the Highwood.

So the place is named after the pub?

You could look at it that way.

Cornelius swings a great dog-faced laugh as he passes by. He seems to bark as he moves. The radio goes off again and everybody roars for a while and Cornelius is on the verge of tears he is so happy to see everybody.

Silence is requested and a shimmer goes through the room—is it Ray Lynam that's in? But no, there is no country singer, it is just a young girl that sings out to the tips of her black hair, and the night folds in around him.

Too much.

He goes outside for a while. It is starless now and black and the sky is breathing. The tips of her song vibrate and strain to fill the room back there—he closes his eyes to hear it.

Well it's been building up inside of me

for oh, I don't know how long.

The past opens to him as starlessly and dark. He walks from it and towards the water. He goes for a while into the feeling of being lovelorn and younger. That green envy, that deathly swoon inside, and say it's the year that you're seventeen.

If he can hold the feeling, maybe he can work from it again and write again.

He talks to a very old man. He says that age can come and go in your life, can't it?

Well, the old man says. I'm eighty-seven years of age now but I looked worse when I was seventy-three.

That's exactly what I mean.

There are some people, the old man says, who are not only old at forty but they're bitter aul' cunts, too. Do you know what I mean?

I surely do.

But there's no worry in that because they'll all get the fucken cancer.

He drinks some more. He smokes what is passed to him. The young dark girl sings again and he sits tightly in the corner and he listens to her sing and he settles to the belief of himself as an unknown and safe here, in the Highwood, as this soft-voiced Ken, with his old-fashioned hair and his milk-bottle eyes, and a suit that sweats and itches and smells of dogs, rain and coalsmoke.

He drinks a white spirit that is passed to him—by the fiery bead it goes down—and Cornelius swings by, madly grinning and able—

Cornelius in a burly fast Cornelius-type rush

—and he says hush! He says hush now, everybody, hush, for the love and honour of Jesus. Ah for Godsake hush! I think Kenneth might have a song for us?

And the remarkable thing is, Cornelius says, he don't stammer even the one time when he sings.

He is accused of stealing fags by a farmer.

The Gitanes!

They're me own fucking Gitanes!

You're only a stoaty cunt, the farmer says.

He is pinned to the wall—the farmer's great knuckly paw presses hard against a reedy art college chest.

You're only a long yella fucken stoaty cunt!

He shucks from the paw and screams—

Who's ever heard of a sheep farmer smoking fucking Gitanes?

The farmer falls to one knee like an old crooner and shows his palms in a gesture of injured righteousness just like Levi Stubbs out of the Four Tops and goes oddly falsetto—

I do smoke the fucken Gitanes! he cries on the high note.

And Levi Stubbs' tears run down his face.

Beyond the high window the sky moves its clouds and now clearly the night by the silver of its starlight shows—

The sceptred tops of the moving pine.

The shadow of a mountain as it reaches darkly for the sky.

He is called a stoaty cunt and a lying cross-eyed cunt and a Jew-nosed cunt and an English cunt, an English cunt, an English cunt.

The night folds in.

He drinks the white spirit and he smokes and he sings.

And now he is among the trees. He believes that he can talk to her across the night and trees. He tells her that he loves her. He says that he sees her sometimes in faces that pass by. He says that when he is near the sea he thinks of her most of all. He tells her what has become of him and I wonder can you see, he says, what might have become of us together. He says that he misses her still and badly and that he will miss her always. He says you were younger then than I am now. He says that he thinks of her as a girl still

my blue-veined love, my Julia.

Nausea sends him to his knees like a green-faced lout. He throws up in hot, angry retches. He lies on the bonnet of a car for a while and he looks to the sky above the hills. He feels the cool night around him as a second skin. He hears two men speak—the North-of-England is in their voices. He cannot see but can feel the way the men lean against the wall and smoke and talk and the way their voices gather thickly in the dark—

Kenneth? one says. Don't think so.

He sits in the corner of the pub and holds himself tightly. Time is not fixed down at all. He might be anywhere in life. He might be down the art school. He might be down the boozer—Ye Cracke. Or in Hamburg where the brassers grin from the windows and wear army boots and black knickers and fire at him from toy machine guns as he goes past, turning the hoarse creaking rattles on the machine guns, rat-a-tat-tat. He smokes what is passed to him. The night stretches out its voices and yelps.

Keep it f-fucking down! he cries.

Kenneth, Cornelius says, would often take a sour turn late on in the evening. But there is no violent harm in him whatsoever.

A North-of-England voice is close by again; there is something darker here.

If you need a quiet place, John? Well there is a place called the Amethyst Hotel.

He walks through the trees for a while. He listens hard. There have been hangings from these trees. He can tell. He can hear the creaking rope and slowly now it swings. He listens to the voices that move through the trees. He can hear them clearly. There is a world unseen just beyond us here but he is not frightened at all. The voice of a girl moves through the trees by the Highwood and it is a long time ago but he can hear her still and her sex is a tiny, distant star—

my cold-lighted love.

The first of the morning comes across the trees. The lake hardens with new light. He wakes to a head throb—it hurts even to think. He cannot place himself, quite. It hurts especially to fucking think. He lies on his belly on the smooth stones by the edge of the lake. He feels great age down the reptile length of himself. He lies still and cold and listens to the water of the lake as it moves. He retches again. He has a pinhole in the centre of his forehead and all of the world's pain screams through. He is sweating fucking bullets. A flicker comes from the night at last. He turns painfully onto his back and sits—he sees the empty boarded pub, a grave jury of trees, the morning patrol of skinhead crows. Accusation in the yellow of their pin-bright eyes; he retches. Accusation in the black gloss of their coats; he retches. The night in flitters and rags comes back to him; he groans. Arrows of light are flung through the pines. He hears nearby a deep bovine suffering. He turns to find the van with its side door halfways open and a pair of boots stuck out at odd angles. He goes on his fours across the stones. He retches as he crawls and by slow evolution of the species at length brings himself to an upright stance and walks. He sets one monkey foot in front of the other until the van is reached. He pokes his head in back to find Cornelius red-eyed, purple-faced and lowing.

Cornelius raises the heavy solid head a martyr's inch and he looks with the most sorrowful eyes in the universe at his charge.

Fucken disaster, John, he says.

But of course another way of looking at it, says Cornelius O'Grady, is that things could not have turned out one jot better.

The O'Grady parlour room: Cornelius considers with happy eyes a mess of duck eggs.

The word'll spread quicker now that you're around the place again. That'll bring the whole game to a head, John. It might be the best thing could have happened us.

He reaches a hank of brown bread to the yolk of an egg. He chews, takes a swig of tea, chuckles.

Because what the fuckers don't know yet is that Cornelius O'Grady is running this game.

A sly grin; a wink.

Topping, he says.

John sits wretchedly by the fireplace; he shivers.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

Did I really sing?

Cornelius widens his eyes to show fondness and awe; he whispers—

You were like a bird.

What fucking day is it?

The Friday.

I'm not even three days gone?

And doesn't it have the lovely hopeful air of a Friday?

Cornelius?

Things are looking good for the island, John.

He goes outside to the yard. He throws up again. It's the most extravagant gesture he's capable of. The day has come up wretchedly to a hot sun. The sun feels like jealousy on his skin. Cornelius comes and throws a pail of water to wash the sick away. Now there is a decorous or priestly air.

High up, on a clear day, and all of Clew Bay is presented. The knuckle of the holy mountain is far side. All of the islands are down there and waiting.

Cornelius sets beside him a mug of strong tea.

I've no willpower either, John. But I'm not going to give out to myself over it. God or whatever you want to call him puts these kinds of nights in our paths to test us sometimes. We failed the fucken test. But do you know the best of it? We'll be forgiven yet.

He is in busy whistling form as he marches about his business.

Cornelius? The last thing I'm in a condition to do right now is go sit on a fucking boat.

Drink the tea, John. You won't know yourself from Gandhi.

Though of course why you might want to go out to a mean little rock of an island is no one's business but your own. I'm only here to oblige you. We have always been an obliging breed of people, the O'Gradys.

Cornelius emerges from the house with a small, brown leather suitcase.

Supplies, he says. And if you don't mind me asking, John, what did you pay for the island? No mind. Your own business and no one else's. John is away to have a good long chat with himself outside on a wet fucken rock.

He shakes his head in wry humour and passes a bottle of Powers whiskey; it tastes like health.

The best of luck to you with it all. You're going to come away from Durnish in three days' time and do you know what?

A loving gaze—

You won't know yourself.

The van drones and judders and turns now to show the glints of a grey sea. The sea is lazier than before. The knuckle of the mountain juts across the bay—

The holy mountain, he says.

Indeed, Cornelius says, and isn't generation upon end of decent Irish people after trotting up the cunt in their bare feet with their tongues hanging out of their heads and wind taking skin off them and rain coming hard and mud and shite and heart attacks and strokes being took by the new time and would you hear a single word of complaint from those dear pilgrims, John?

Eyes raised in soft questioning—

You would not, he says.

The van stops on the coast road.

Ho-ho, Cornelius says.

Cornelius? Please. Let's just get to the fucking island.

Patience a small while.

Cornelius kills the engine. He climbs from the van. The wind comes harder now from the sea. He gestures for John to follow; he does. They walk the scalp of a hill together, descending.

You're not to be afraid, John.

They approach a great fall-away to the sea; far below, it flashes its green teeth, the ever-welcoming sea.

Right, Cornelius says.

He steps up to the edge; the fall is sheer—it's a great distance to fall and to a certain ending there.

Come on, John.

He steps with Cornelius to the edge of the sheer fall; the wind pulses hard against them.

Lean into it, Cornelius says. Like so.

He does and he is held there.

Fucking hell…

Be fierce, John.

The wind comes hard and Cornelius leans in closer again to its great force; he is held there.

Cornelius?

Now, John.

John tips his toes up close to the edge and closer again to the sheer fall and closer.

Cornelius?

Go on.

He leans over the edge and the wind holds him perfectly there.

Do you see, John?

Maybe.

Do you see the trick of it, John?

I think so.

No fear.

The suitcase is ancient. It could be out of Lime Street station in 1925. Leather and belted; a stout little general. He wears the dead father's suit over his high-top purple trainers. The sun is psychedelic in hot streaks across the water. He looks back at himself from the water's surface. His eyes are glazed with shell-shock and paracetamol. The suitcase is by his feet and contains all of his supplies and somehow his aspirations. He worries a bit about this brown leather suitcase. Open it up and the past might tip out—

on rum parade.

I'm sorry, John?

Nothing, Cornelius. My mind is tipping out my mouth.

That would often be the way. Rum I never drank.

Cornelius rocks the boat free of its berth and aims it over the stones. He mutters blackly beneath his breath and swears vengeance against the waves and world. He pushes the boat out to the water. He works at the ropes and works at the motor—

Bastarin' fucken thing!

The seabirds hover watchfully with their mad eyes, all wing-span and homicide. He doesn't know the names for birds. Which is neither here nor there. He kneels down by the water to find his face come closer—

fuck me.

The shock of the age that's gone in. He looks older than Father fucking Time. Anxiety and fear and weight-of-love—these are the lines of his face.

Cornelius works the boat.

The motor catches and the rope unspools.

John climbs in and he almost falls but rights himself again—he's awkward as a duck.

The boat puts out to the water.

Tell me again, John.

Okay.

You're going out to this little island to scream?

I may well Scream.

You mean you're going to be roaring out of you?

It's certainly on the cards, Cornelius.

Like the crowd on Achill.

Oh?

But what's it all about, John?

Primal scream therapy was devised by Dr. Arthur Janov.

I never heard of him.

He lives in California. He has a clinic there. I spent three months with Dr. Janov. He taught me how to Scream.

What's it you'll be screaming about?

It's a technique for getting at buried pain and childhood trauma.

Why would you want to do that?

Because it weights you down.

And you want to be lighter on your feet?

Exactly so.

How light do you want to be?

How'd you mean?

What if you took off into the fucken sky?

You're stuck in your ways, Cornelius. You don't want to have your little world opened up.

My world's about as far a ways open as I can fucken handle. What kind of pain have you buried?

Same kind we all have.

On account of being a child?

Well…

We were all children, John.

I lost my father. He went away.

We all lost our fucken fathers.

I lost my mother. She went and died.

We all have the dead fucken mothers.

So tell me how you get by, Cornelius!

It's simple, John. I listen to what's around me.

Okay…

And then?

Yeah?

I react.

You listen. And you react.

Because everything you need in the world is there to be heard.

You have my interest, Cornelius.

You can see very little in this world, John. But you can hear fucken everything.

He lies down on the boards of the boat as it edges out and moves. He fixes the suitcase for a pillow. He falls back into the grey-blue sky and the day augments itself by patches of cloud and patches of blue as the boat moves out across the bay.

Abroad in the fucking world.

Beg your pardon, John?

He closes his eyes and listens hard—the world is full of hollows—and he is sixteen again and coming down Bold Street—or maybe he's seventeen—and he wants to fuck everything that moves but he's in a fat phase and bevvied and he's headed for the last train at Central station and he bounces off every shop window—a staggering John—and he stumbles and falls into a doorway—Cripps department store—and the sky above the rooftops shows the woozy stars and he heaves and pukes and laughs like a dog as he wipes the sick away and weeps.

He opens his eyes.

The sky rolls out and moves.

He is left to his own private woes and the weaving of his miseries—he's an expert. Cornelius discreetly averts as John looks out and away, across the islands and the bay, and the boat dips and rises, and the engine judders, and the knuckle of the holy mountain jabs at the sky and the tiny islands are thrown about in all directions. He picks up a piece of dark wood like a baton and turns it—the way it feels snug and murderous in his hand.

The priest, Cornelius says.

For killing the fishies.

Or anything else might come at you.

Everywhere he looks there is another island but not his. All are familiar but none just right—

Well? says Cornelius.

No.

—because maybe the rocks are thrown about wrong or the way a hill runs at the sky is off. They pass another island and he sees a fast blur against the grey of the rocks and the movement is a quickness, a shiver, a silvering of the blood: the hare. They move farther out and the wind comes harder and in whippety slaps and he tunes into the slow boom and drift. The boat draws a curve around the tip of an island and comes on an open stretch of water. Across the colours of the bay they move and the way that his mood has lifted—now he's beaming and in tremendous good heart, it must have been the hare. He is coming close in.

This feels right.

But in the near distance another boat moves on the water, and draws closer, and there are dark figures in a blur, crouching.

I can see lenses.

Down, John.

He lies flat to the boards of the boat.

Fuckers. Stay down, John.

Cornelius works slowly to turn the boat—it drifts again.

Stay down.

He lies hardly breathing on the boards of the boat.

There's only one thing for it.

Yeah?

We'll have to go and see our friends on Achill.

Paranoia drifts in white smoke across the sky.

The boat moves.

And here's Cornelius—

his back to the May sun,

his face dark in shade,

his voice hoarse with soft cajole.

We should have headed here in the first place, John. There are no two ways about it. The Amethyst Hotel would be the very best place for you to wait out the assault.

The fucking where?

The Amethyst, John. On Achill.

Amethyst again? What the fuck is the Amethyst?

Sweet Joe's place.

Who the fuck is Sweet fucking Joe?

Now on Achill Island generally, John, you'll find the people are mean-spirited and small-minded and very aggressive. Tough nuggety foreheads on them. Hard lines to their faces. Tight little mouths. But of course this is no surprise in the wide earthly world…

He spits.

…because they've been jawing rocks at the side of the fucken road since the Lord Jesus was a bare-arsed child. We'll have nothing whatsoever to do with the Achill people, John. That's a promise to you and faithful. But the people where we're headed are not Achill by the blood. No indeed. They are your own kind.

The boards of the boat groan and sing.

The cliffs of Achill rise up ahead.

Paranoia races its squadron gulls.

Who exactly are these people, Cornelius?

The people, he says, who have taken over the Amethyst Hotel.

Something odd, something familiar—Amethyst?

Cornelius works the boat between the rocks. The motor cuts; the boat is tied off. He is helped from the boat by a great knuckly paw. Which makes him feel lady-like and fey and just shy the parasol. They come from the water and climb. They walk an old track hemmed in by singing hedges in the breeze. The feeling near and near-abouts is medieval. The growth everywhere is very fucking alive—it makes a sore pulsing in his throat. On Achill there is the throb of big summer coming and everything breathes. In the Maytime we are untethered and time is not fixed. Or so he believes. The world is in a high, sexy mood. Tiny fists of dread are bunched beneath his skin. He is on Achill Island again—a bad-trip place—and the light is harsh and he is cold with fear.

I've been here before, he says.

We've all been here before, John.

I'm not talking philosophic. I mean this fucking place. I've been here before.

They climb a bit and then some more. They come in quick time to the Amethyst Hotel. It's a strange hacienda in the Maytime sun. There are armies of insects on the island's air. And there are voices—listen?

The voices are high, wired, freaky.

I think I've been to the Amethyst fucking Hotel and all.

He steps through the pools of a lost dream now—it's been nine years since.

They pass through an old garden once formal but gone to seed and wild again and there is the feeling of things unseen travelling behind the hedges.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, is the gentleman that runs the Amethyst nowadays and I'd have to say he's an outstanding individual.

John is worried.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, would mind a mouse for you on Piccadilly Circus.

I thought we'd said no hotels?

Amethyst is not open to the public anymore, John. As such. It is for Joe and his friends' use only at this moment in time.

His friends?

The voices come up again. They are loud and desperate. He can hear unwellness and rage. He knows these voices at once and right off for what they are.

They'll know to expect us, John. We spoke last night. They know we might be stuck. These are your own style of people precisely.

It's true there are some old familiars on the air—

He can smell the fucking and the freebase.

He can smell the mania.

He can smell the freaks.

When he sees high the red letters raised

A M E T H Y S T

on the white gable wall, it comes back to him for sure: he has definitely been here before. It's the nine years since. Some actors had it back then. They kept a very nice white wine. They had some quite good pot. They made us a picnic here. It was just a sweet nothing day. It was early in our life together.

The picnic was brought to the hills. The hills were scratchy with heather and nettles about the ankles and they sat for a while on a Scotch blanket and looked down on the slow-moving green-into-blue of the bay and ate tiny triangle sandwiches of cheese and pickle and drank the cold white wine—

didn't we?

—until the rain came in a sudden attack from a very irksome old god and they scurried away again as the sky changed colour quick as love can change and there was rain in their faces and everything was giddy as hell and they were collapsing with love.

There's another we'll never have back, he says to himself, being the sentimental Scouse.

Inside. The air of the strange hotel is humid and trapped. There are voices upstairs. They are going at it fucking hard. There are footsteps now and a figure at the top of the stair—a dark shade there.

Dips his head for a view—

Sweet Joe, Cornelius says.

The beast grins down the stair beneath a cloud or an aura of bushy auburn hair. He has tiny yellowish pisshole-in-the-snow-type eyes. But otherwise this is a most graceful fatman on the move. The way that he bounces on the balls of his feet as he turns the stair.

Fucking hell, John says.

The way that he has the look of an enormous forest hog—a creature only rumoured, never seen. He wears a flowy Victorian shirt that billows poetically and some kind of breeches—
fucking breeches?
—and his skin has a high, healthful, vivacious glow. He is terribly fucking alive. He whispers these decorous words—

How absolutely proper it feels to have you here, John.

His voice?

North-of-England.

Are you a little cold, John?

His voice—the North-of-England, the wheeze, the husk and Burnley of it.

I'm fine, thanks.

They sit in the hotel kitchen over a brew of nettle tea and fags.

We can get that chill in Maytime yet, the evenings.

There is something old-timey about his voice, as if transmitted from the days long since; there is a static on the coils of it. His face is alive with tics and nervy flutters as if there are small desperate birds trapped beneath the skin.

You'd need your cup of tea, he says.

Common-sensical, also, the tone, like a fucking busman, and there are arcane symbols daubed on the kitchen walls—

Black Sun,

Pentacle,

Evil Eye.

There are voices upstairs—young, unsettled, roaring.

Frank and Sue, he says. They're in the thick of it just now.

Oh yeah?

They've gone deepish, he says. We'd best not disturb Frank and Sue just now.

A rueful, confiding grin, and the words again are whispered—

They've been weeks getting to where they are now, Frank and Sue.

One minute they're roaring at each other, Cornelius says. The next they're riding each other like dogs.

It could go either way yet, Joe says, for Frank and Sue.

The voices above are pitched high and sorely and break at times to screeches, at other times to screams—John is back in a freakhouse again. It's been a stretch of time. He sips not unhappily at his nettle tea.

How's it you've ended up out here, Joe?

Oh it's hardly an ending, really, is it?

A flush creeps up the fatman's neck.

You can really listen out here, he says. I mean if it's a Mesmeric you're after.

Now, Cornelius says, and he tips a measure of Spanish brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

That'll keep the blood moving, Joe says.