Beatlebone. Kevin Barry

      

      Also by Kevin Barry

      City of Bohane

      Dark Lies the Island

      There Are Little Kingdoms

      Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Kevin Barry, 2015

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      Extract from ‘An Island Race’ in Love of the World: Essays

      © Estate of John McGahern and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

      Extract from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas is reproduced with the permission of The Trustees for the Copyright of Dylan Thomas.

      Don’t Worry Baby

      Words and Music by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian

      Copyright © 1964 Irving Music, Inc. and Universal Music –

      Careers for the USA. Copyright Renewed.

      All rights outside the USA Controlled by Irving Music, Inc.

      All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

      Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 613 4

      Export ISBN 978 1 78211 614 1

      eISBN 978 1 78211 615 8

      Typeset in Goudy 11/15pt by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

      Falkirk, Stirlingshire

      CONTENTS

       Part One: Johnmoves by Engine of Melancholy – 1978

       Part Two: Lady Narcosis (Sweet Country Music)

       Part Three: Every Day is a Holiday at the Amethyst Hotel

       Part Four: The Rants

       Part Five: Black Atlantis

       Part Six: Eleven Eleven Eleven – Dakota

       Part Seven: Slip Inside this House

       Part Eight: The Great Lost Beatlebone Tape

       Part Nine: The Carnival is Over

      For Eugene, Joan, Majella, Mary

      ‘. . . the most elusive island of all, the first person singular.’

      John McGahern

      PART ONE

      JOHN MOVES BY ENGINE OF MELANCHOLY – 1978

      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