There Are Little Kingdoms. Kevin Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ ritual, you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s the ritual of the thing you admire?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘And what about yourself, Mr Tobin?’ he says. ‘Do you have beliefs?’

      ‘I don’t know, really. I mean if you’re asking me do I believe in miracles and walking on water and bread and fishes, I couldn’t look you in the face and say oh I do, yeah. But if you’re asking me when we’re dead do we just lie around and rot in the ground like cabbage, well, I don’t know that I believe that either.’

      ‘And what about you, Richard?’

      ‘Oh don’t be asking him,’ says the Da. ‘Richie’s a fucking pagan.’

      He put a mop to the floor of the chipper. There was some relief in laying the suds down, squeezing the mop out in the wringer of the bucket, taking the suds up again. The day had arrived into Clonmel like a morbid neighbour, dour and overcast, the sky was low and dense, it was close in. As he swung the mop back and forth across the linoleum, things started to come apart altogether. He would begin to get a clear image, then somebody would drop a rock into the middle of the pool. Tremors queued up.

      ‘Ah stop it for fuck sake,’ he said.

      But it’s the Ummera Wood, he’s fifteen years old and pustular, a hank of hair and hormones, and Denis is a year or two older. They’re bush drinking—naggins of vodka. They sneak up on her quiet and she freaks out and screams, then laughs with relief ’cause she knows them—Denis and Richie. The three of them sit around drinking, and she’s slagging them off because they’re younger than she is. They drink the vodka. Denis gets quiet and moon-faced for a while, then he strikes up, he says Linda would you snog Richie, would yuh? Fuck off, she says, he’s only a baby! Snog me so, he says. Nah, she says, you’re too fucking ugly! And he has her by the hair then and she’s down on the ground. What are yuh crying for, he says, we’re only having a mess? And he’s on top trying to screw her and Richie kneels down and puts his in her face and he says b-bite me and I’ll fucking b-b-bate yuh.

      He peeled spuds. He made batter for the burgers. He rolled out the potato cakes. He filleted the fish. He wondered where Denis had got to, and then he saw him: he was on his back underneath a Subaru Legacy at a garage outside a small town on a trunk road to Cork. He was covered in oil and diesel, there was junk everywhere, tarpaulin piles, dead Fiestas, tyres and wrenches, scrap iron, and Denis found that life was very hard sometimes because you cannot take a spanner to it.

      (And love is very hard to do.)

      Richie locked up the chipper for a while and he walked through the town to clear his head of all the crap that was building. He would stay in Clonmel for a time at least, nobody seemed to know him here—they say God looks after drunks and children. He walked to the town’s far edge and there in the small garden of a house on a new-build estate, he saw a boy and a girl holding hands and crying and he went to them. He said, what’s the matter? The dog is dead, she told him, and he asked the dog’s name and she said the dog was called Honey, we had to bury Honey. He said I know a song about Honey and he sang the old Bobby Goldsboro number. A mother appeared at the front door, arms folded, thin smile, and he made a move back towards the centre of the town.

      It was coming to life just then. Trim old ladies busied along towards the shops. Men were going into the ESB to talk about bills and easi-payment plans. He hummed to it all as he walked and then he thought that maybe if you tried hard enough you could transmit the thing itself out into the world and each time he passed somebody new he said lightly under his breath just the single word ‘love’, he said it to the postman and he said it to the guard, he said it to the old ladies and to the cats on the walls. The sun was making a good effort to come through the low banks of cloud; traffic streamed down for the new roundabout. Five sad slow notes played on a recorder. It was turning into June.

       Animal Needs

      Meadowsweet Farm is perhaps not the place you have prepared for. There is no waft of harvest to perfume the air. There is no contented lowing from the fields. These are not happy acres. Meadowsweet Farm is put together out of breeze blocks, barbed wire and galvanised tin. The land is flat and featureless. There are sawn-off barrels filled with rancid rainwater. A snapped cable cracks like a whip and lifts sparks from a dismal concrete yard—the electrics are haywire. The septic tank is backed up. The poultry shed is the secret torture facility of a Third World regime, long rumoured by shivering peasants in the mountain night. Desperation reigns, and we hear it as a croaky bayou howl. There is a general sensation of slurry.

      John Martin stalks the ground, with a five-litre tub of white paint spattering a trail behind him. He pulls up short and considers a gate and decides to give it a quick undercoat, and does so. He nods to himself, acknowledgement of a job at least begun. There was an offer on the five-litre tubs, and hasty streaks of white are showing up all over Meadowsweet Farm this morning. He is painting gates and fences and breeze-block walls, barrels, sheds, pallets—if it stands still, he paints it. This is a brilliant white that will glow eerily after dark. It’s as though he’s preparing for an airlift evacuation. He fetches his tool box from the 4x4 and storms the poultry shed. He takes out a screwdriver and has another go at the fuseboard and suffers a mild shock. It leaves a silvery tingle all down his right arm, and to shake this feeling he rotates the arm several times through the air: a rock star guitarist, with an audience of fowl. He goes outside again and puts three lengths of ply across a muddy pathway. He paints another bit of wall. He fetches the hard-wire sweeping brush and goes through the yards, grimly janitorial. You’d swear that royalty was coming and in a sense, it is: the woman from the Organic Certification Board is on her way. He gets a cloth and a basin of water and goes out to the road, where the Meadowsweet Farm signage has lately been erected—cheerful yellows and reds, a cock crowing against a blue Iowan sky—and he wipes it down. He drags some fertiliser bags out of a ditch and piles them for a bonfire. He goes up to the house and into the kitchen and he eyeballs his wife and he says:

      ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’

      This is no rosy-cheeked farmer. This is a gaunt and sallow man, long-armed, with livid, electric hair.

      ‘Fuck off,’ says Mary.

      He stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, with his feet planted for strength, and his neck warily hunched. He is watchful and tense, five foot eleven of peeled nerves.

      ‘All I’m saying is get it out in the open. Can’t we talk about it now, while she’s at playschool? How many times, Mary? I swear I won’t hold it against you.’

      She looks up from the computer. She scrunches her eyes tightly shut and then opens them again hopefully, as if by mercy he might have disappeared. It all reduces down to this thin sour broth: you open your eyes and there’s a nutjob on the floor in front of you.

      ‘Why are you doing this? Haven’t you enough to be doing outside? Do this much for me, John, okay? Turn around. And fuck off.’

      Wounded, his mouth a grey slit, John Martin goes again into the weather, and a filthy breeze has worked itself up, and he retreats to the shelter of the chicken shed. Poultry management is no joke at the best of times. You would be amazed what can go wrong. At present, it is the heating. He has not been able to regulate the heat for five days, and the shed is like Zaire. Unaccustomed to the luxury of such warmth, the chickens have been unpleasantly lively but this seems to be subsiding now to a kind of rattled exhaustion. They screech and gasp in a terrible, grating way.

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