Читать книгу There Are Little Kingdoms - Кевин Барри - Страница 10

See The Tree, How Big It’s Grown

He turned to check his reflection in the window of the Expressway bus and some old quarehawk turned to look back at him. He appeared to be a man of about fifty. He did not appear to have set the world on fire. He looked beyond himself, and it had the look of South Tipp out there, lush and damp-seeming, with good-sized hills rising to the east, which would be the Comeraghs. He knew more about the hills than he knew about himself, but lush, yes, as if it was May, a savage growth that made each small copse of trees livid with bunched ferocity. The face seen dully in the window was a sad face, certainly, with a downcast mouth and emotional eyes, but it was strangely calm too. He took a glance south and found he was wearing an anorak long past its day, a pair of jeans with diesel stains caked into them and shoes straight off an evidence table. There was a bag, he noticed, in the rack overhead and he reached to take it down, breathing heavily. It was a Reebok holdall, scuffed and torn, and by no means a classy piece of luggage. He sat on the Expressway as it motored north through Tipperary this afternoon in the apparent summer with the bag in his lap. What kind of condition are you in at all, he wondered, when you wake up on a bus in the middle of countryside and you have no idea of who you are, or what your name is even?

The bus was quiet, with just a handful of sad cases thrown here and there, the elderly and the infirm, the free-pass brigade with their jaunty afflictions. He hefted the holdall, tested its weight. Come on now, what could be inside there? The head of John the Baptist? He opened it and with relief found just a sweatshirt and another pair of jeans. There was a box of fags, Bensons, and a yellow plastic lighter in a pocket of the jeans. There was a wallet in the other pocket, it held six hundred euro in cash and a scrap of paper folded over twice. The scrap of paper said ‘Rooney’s Auctioneers, 5pm.’ It was at this point that he got the first of the tremors. This is what he would come to call them: the tremors. A tremor was when a flash of something came to him. The nature of this was visceral, more a feeling than a thought, and this first tremor came in the form of music, a snatch of music, five sad slow notes played on a recorder.

‘Of course,’ said an old fella in the seat opposite, looking across. ‘I have the bus pass myself, I’d be going up and down the country on a regular basis.’

‘Is that right?’ he said, and his own voice was a surprise to him, a husky baritone.

‘Oh yes. I do be bulling for road, you see. And I find that the B&Bs these days are excellent value for money. They serve you a powerful breakfast. And at this stage, most of the rooms have tea and coffee making facilities. And the cable as well. You can be watching Sky News.’

‘I see.’

‘And where’ll you stay above?’

‘The chances are,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in a B&B myself.’

‘Very good!’ said the old fella, as if this was the best decision a man could ever hope to make.

There were certain pieces of information available. He knew, for example, that the course of Irish history was besmirched with treacheries and suppressions. He knew this because in some foggy classroom at the back of his mind he had been made to read it aloud to the rest of the children, despite or maybe even because of his terrible stammer. T-t-t-the course of I-I-Irish history is b-b-b-besmirched… You wouldn’t likely forget the treacheries and suppressions after that.

The old boy looked over again, with rheumy eyes and gummy mouth, and he winked:

‘Listen, there’s every chance now we’ll get in before five. You’ll be able to get down to Rooney’s, get a hold of them keys.’

‘Do you reckon?’ he said, and there was more than a sliver of fear in him.

‘Ah we’ll be in before five easy.’

A childish notion came. He thought that maybe he had died, and was in limbo, and that this old boy was some manner of gatekeeper. He shucked himself free of this sensation as best as he could, looked out the window: gloom floated down from morbid hills. The Expressway passed through a village, really more of a crossroads than a village, just a collision of a few byways and houses, a shop and, finally, a pub. As the bus passed by this establishment, the eyes nearly came out of his head. Was this, he wondered, a clue as to the character of the individual? He swivelled in his seat and looked desperately back down the road as the pub went out of view again. The throat was after going pure dry. He straightened himself and cast a wary glance across the aisle.

‘He’s making good time today,’ said the old fella.

‘He is.’

A bigger town announced itself with garden centres and D-I-Y warehouses and a large sign in the middle of a new roundabout that read:

BULMER’S CIDER WELCOMES YOU TO CLONMEL

‘He’s sucking diesel today,’ said the old fella. ‘Twenty to five!’

‘Faith, he is,’ he said.

Taking the Reebok holdall, he stood as the bus eased into the bleak station and he made a whistling attempt at nonchalance.

‘Listen to me,’ said the old fella, ‘the best of luck to you now with everything. Something tells me you might have done a good deal here. And don’t mind what the crowd below are saying.’

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, and he stepped off the Expressway and into the mysteries of Clonmel.

He wasn’t long getting directions to Rooney’s—Davitt Street, first left—and he wasn’t long noticing that it was beside a small pub name of The Dew Drop Inn. He had a few minutes to spare, and there was a strange draw from this place, a magnet drag. The next thing he knew, he was inside at the counter, in the dank half-light, throwing the holdall down to his feet and putting his elbows up on the bar.

‘What’ll it be?’ said the young one behind the bar.

‘Pint b-bottle of B-Bulmer’s,’ he said, ‘and a b-b-baby Powers.’

It appeared that he knew full well what he was doing in this type of situation. There was a bottle put down in front of him, and a pint glass filled with ice, and the small whiskey appeared as a cheerful companion. He made short work of this order, and he started to feel somewhat philosophical. What, after all, he said to himself, is an identity? Surely it is only a means of marking yourself out in time. And what is time in itself, only an arbitrary and entirely illusory system designed to remind us of death? To separate us from the eternal present enjoyed by the beasts of the fields. So why need you bother with either one, when you have the bones of six hundred euro in your fist, and a fag lit in the corner of your mouth? The five o’clock news came on the radio. It said Orla was missing since March 14th and the one clue for investigators was a red baseball cap.

‘That’ll be me,’ he said to the young one, and she responded with a lazy smile and a stretching movement like a cat would make. There might be sport to be had in this place yet.

He strode in the door of Rooney’s like a man who owned the rights to the whole of love. There was another young lady there, neat behind her desk, with a poignant mouth and agreeable knees.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I had an appointment for five?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It must be Mr Tobin, is it?’

‘Correct.’

‘Mr Tobin,’ she explained, ‘Mr Rooney is actually out at present. He is showing a pig operation in the direction of Knockbawn, but listen now, I have the keys and the lease here for you.’

‘Outstanding.’

‘The money has cleared. Everything is ready to go. All you have to do is sign your name. So if you’d like to take a seat, you can have a quick read through and make sure everything is in order.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the w-weight off my feet.’

He felt that he was doing very well. His manner was charming, and if he didn’t look exactly dapper, than at least he had a benevolent aura. Unfortunately, he noted, there was a smell of drink off him, which was something he would have to watch, but still and all he was presented with the necessary document. The lease shook a little as he read through it. It turned out he was after buying a chipper in Clonmel.

With the keys swinging, he set off into a most pleasant evening: the town swooned with glow, like a back-lit ale. He searched out No. 15a McDermott Street, which turned out to be no more than a hundred yards around the corner from Rooney’s. After some trial and error with the keys, he managed to get the shutters up and the door opened and he crossed the threshold into a new era for both himself—Mr R.K. Tobin, apparently—and for the Uptown Grill.

So what do you do? What do you do when you wake up on a bus in South Tipp, and you don’t know who you are, or where you’re going, and the next thing you’re inside in an auctioneers being presented with keys and then you’re stood in the Uptown Grill, which is fourteen foot long by ten wide and contains a large deep fat fryer, a griddle, a glass-doored fridge, a full stock of supplies, a counter and a cash register? What do you do?

You start peeling spuds.

*

It quickly became clear that R.K. Tobin was not without some experience in the catering trade. The operation of the Uptown Grill didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. He wasn’t in the door a half hour and he had wire baskets of nicely cut chips waiting for the fryer, he had the burgers battered, he had the haddock in breadcrumbs, and the potato cakes rolled, he had a griddle full of onions frying up nice and slow, releasing their sweetness to the air. Everything was waiting for the off, and as he worked he whistled a selection of show tunes from the early 1950s: ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d A Baked A Cake’, ‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White’, ‘Moon River’. His domestic arrangements, as it turned out, were all to hand, for he had climbed a greasy stairway out back and found a room above the chipper, same size, with a sink, a couch, a half bottle of Cork gin and a selection of golf magazines. He felt utterly alive with entrepreneurial swagger, and who was to say he wouldn’t be taking up the golf himself? He brought the gin down with him as he prepared to open up for the teatime crowd. It just seemed like the thing to do.

Business came in fits and starts but overall it didn’t seem a bad trade. It was steady enough through to seven o’clock, then you had lads late from work coming in for feeds, then a good crew around half-nine or ten in severe need of soakage. Quiet moments, he took a hit of gin from under the counter, looked out the door, saw the town fall away down the slate rooftops of terraces, turn into farmland and fields, melancholy hills. The light was pleasing—a softness to it—and there was an amount of birds, though he did not know the names of birds.

How much did he know? You could say he had the broad strokes of things. He was only too well aware that he was an Irishman. He had a fair idea about the kind of lads who were coming in for burgers and chips: ordinary fellas, big eaters, red in the face from wind, hands like the buckets off JCBs, you’d imagine pulmonary disorders, midnight visitations. They were polite enough, made a certain amount of small talk. Nobody questioned or made direct comment on the fact of a new proprietor at the Uptown, but they were not unwelcoming of the stranger. One chap left a newspaper on the counter, which let him know he had a Tuesday on his hands. Somehow, this came as no great surprise. He had a quick look through the paper: odd, as if he knew things and at the same time, did not know. The way that a cow looks at you in the moonlight. A cow will incline its head to one side, and it’ll stare at you with big wet eyes, as if it is sure it has seen you somewhere before but can’t quite place you. This is the way he was reading the paper. Captains of industry, streels of girls at dinner dances, young lads hurling, planning applications, weddings, births, deaths. All of it was strange but familiar.

According to a notice on the door, the Uptown closed early on week nights, at eleven bells, and stayed late the weekends. He wasn’t going to argue with that and at eleven o’clock, he closed up and took to the quiet streets for a breath of fresh air. There was a spit of misty rain falling, which was nice after the heat of the fryer, and even at eleven o’clock there were still some flecks of daylight in the far western sky. It was May, alright, he’d been bang on the money there. He stood smoking outside a department store, cool as a breeze but when he looked in at the window display, he was hit by another tremor, and this one nearly laid him out. It was the mannequin of a lady that did it, she was got up in the latest gear, some kind of suede outfit, and the way the mannequin’s face was set was kind of… off, kind of twisted. It was set in a kind of drunken leer. The brown, wavy hair falling to the shoulders just so, the green belligerent eyes, the suede jacket, the leer—he had seen this look before. It was the mother.

They are walking down College Road. It’s the night-time. She is still a young woman, with a child on either side of her. He would be the younger by a year or two, he might be seven years old. He has her by one hand and the other child, it has to be Denis, he has her by the other. She can barely get along the street, she lurches, drags them towards the railings. It’s late, on a summer’s night, and he has a bag of groceries in his hand. They mustn’t have had the tea yet. The woman can’t walk, she’s crying, then she’s laughing. She has a large brown bag with chips wedged under her arm, the vinegar is oiling the paper, and she almost drops it on the pavement as she misses her step.

‘Mam,’ he says, ‘would you m-mind the chips, would yuh?’

The tremor passed on its way—down over the terraces of the town it went, away into the melancholy hills—and he bolted for the first pub he could find. By luck, it was quite a pleasant lounge bar and a hand-written notice on the door shakily announced that a pass-the-mike session was in progress. Pint bottle of Bulmers, b-b-b-baby Powers, times two, times three, and suddenly it was past midnight, and he was in flying form. There was a chap had a Casio keyboard and he was playing accompaniment to anybody who’d sing. A mike was passed around the dim-lit lounge, left and right, left and right, now who has the bar of a song for us? A woman called Mairead got up and smoothed down her good blouse and did an outstanding version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. The landlord, a man called Johnny—big sentimental face on him—came out over the bar and launched into ‘The Day Billie Joe McAllister Jumped Off The Tallahatchie Bridge’.

‘You’ll learn a new one yet, Johnny!’ somebody shouted, and everybody laughed.

Pint b-bottle, please. Someone called Bob sang ‘The Black Hills Of Dakota’, and wasn’t asked to do another. After a while it got maudlin. A lad called Michael Russell was asked to sing, and he sang ‘The Summer Wind’, because that was some man called Coughlan’s song and half of the place couldn’t handle this at all, the man of the Coughlans was only a month in the ground.

‘Fifty-two years of age!’ cried Mairead.

Left and right, left and right, pass the mike.

‘What about this gentleman here? What’s your own name, sir?’

‘Am… R-R-Richard,’ he said.

‘Will you sing one for us, Rich?’

‘Ah stop!’

‘Ah come on now, Richie!’

Where it came from, he did not know but he took that mike and he stood up square and he closed his eyes. He wasn’t sweet—you couldn’t say that—or melodic, no, but he was as big-voiced as they come, pure loud, a most powerful set of lungs. He sang ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles.

‘… cloh-ose yur eyes… gimme yur hand… darlin’… do you feel mah heart beat-iin’… do you unnerstan’… do you feel the PAAIIINN… am I own-lee dreeeamin’… or is this BURNIN’… an ee-ternal FLAME…’

There were people up off their stools howling for more. He pulled out a big one and let it rip—‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison. He made a fair reach for the high notes even. From the corner of his good eye, he threw a shine in the direction of the lady Mairead. There didn’t seem to be a husband in tow.

‘It’s hard to unnn-erstan’… how the touuuuccch of yur haaan’… can star’ me cryin’… cry-aye-ah-han… an’ now ahm ohhh-furrrr yuh-hooooooo…’

There was no doubt about it but he had a big future ahead of him at the pass-the-mike session in Keogh’s Lounge Bar on Clancy Street of a Tuesday night. They asked him to do a third one, but he said no, no, firmly. You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.

And yes, one good eye. He was only walking away from Keogh’s when it struck him that he was half-blind. Leftie was firing blanks. He had a look up at the moon to be sure and he realised that the peripheries were indeed mightily skewed. So. The clues were starting to come in. He was an R.K. Tobin, call him Richie. He had the lease of a chipper in Clonmel. He’d had a mother a demon drunk, and a brother by the name of Denis. He was half blind, and something told him there had been an accident, and he had got money from it, which was now down to less than six hundred euro. He knew his way around the inside of a deep-fat fryer and home, for now, was a small unkempt room with a couch and a sink.

When he got there, he unscrewed the bottle of Cork gin and got good and familiar with it. He had the broad strokes of things and he knew that he had been drunk many thousands of times, mostly on account of the heebie jeebies. It was through no fault of his own but he was simply not the sort of man who was comfortable in the night-time. He was familiar with the motions of alcohol. The elevations of mood were no news to him, nor the sudden dips. He knew what it was like to drink big in small towns—it was hard work sometimes, you had to have the same good time over and over again.

He picked up a golf magazine, then another, then noticed a magazine near the bottom of the pile that did not seem to be in any way, shape or form about golf. It was in fact a pornographic title and as he flicked through it, sipping at the gin, he discovered its theme. It was about women who dressed up by wearing animal tails. There was mail order, even, where you could send off for a horse’s tail attached to a belt. Now maybe he was an innocent man for fifty, but this was news to him and there in the grim room, at two in the morning, it became an intense agitation. He got up off the couch and began to pace.

‘Is this what it’s all about now?’ he shouted. ‘Is that what’s supposed to be going on around the place? Somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter? Hah? Going around a kitchen in a horse’s tail? Stood over a pan of sausages? Hah?’

He caught sight of the old quarehawk reflected in the window, pacing and ranting, and that shut him up lively. He turned off the light and lay down on the couch. He drew the malodorous anorak over his head. An unquiet sleep came. There were images full of dark portent, images of mountains and still water. It was an enormous relief when he woke to grey light in the window. He went immediately downstairs—though it was just gone five in the morning—and he got busy sorting out the grease traps. He looked out onto the street and it was familiar but odd, as if streets were running into the wrong streets, as if the hills were wrong, and the sky at a crooked slant, it was the amalgam place of a dream out there. A tremor arrived with the rise of the morning.

This student has been coming around Wednesdays for three or four weeks now. He is doing a project about low-income families. Richie think it’s a disgrace, this fella is just a snoop, but his mother and father put up with it because they’re bored, is what it is, because they’re on the wagon, and they’ll talk to just about anybody to escape the monotony. The student has all these daft bloody questions. Tonight it’s about God and Mass and all that.

‘Do you go to Mass yourself, Mrs Tobin?’

‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘Not that I believe that much in Jesus and stuff but it’s just lovely sometimes, you know, if there’s a choir and the way things are said.’

‘The 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.