Beatlebone. Kevin Barry

many more times are they going to ask me 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.

      He does not answer to his name as it calls across the night and air.

      *

      It is such a clear night and warm. He walks into the fields until he is a good distance from the road. He can speak her name across the sky. Feel its lights again in his mouth. Fucking hell. He is so weary, and fucked, and Scouse – a sentimentalist. The ground’s soft give beneath his feet is luxurious. He wants to lie down into the soft rich cake of it and does. It is everything that he needs. He turns onto his belly and lies face down in the dirt and digs his nails in hard –

      Cling the fuck on, John.

      The sphere of the night turns by its tiny increments. The last of the night swings across its arches and greys. He can do anything he wants to do. He can live in a Spanish castle; he can run with the tides of the moon. He turns his face to settle his cheek on the dirt. He rests for a while. Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky. He lies for a long calm while until the hills are woken and the birds come to flirt and call and he feels clairvoyant now and newly made.

      John lies saddled on the warm earth and he listens to its bones.

      *

      He’s been coming loose of himself since early in the spring. He knows all the signs of it. One minute he’s lost in the past and the next he’s shot back to the now. There is no future in it. The year is on the turn and greening and everything is too fucking alive again.

      And he has been haunted by his own self for such a long while, he has been endlessly fascinated by his own black self this long while – he is aching, he is godhead, he is a right bloody monster – but now he is thirty-seven –

      I mean thirty fucking seven?

      – and he wants at last to be over himself – he’s all grown – and he looks out and into the world and he can see it clearly and true for the kip it is and the shithole it is and the sweet heaven – the mons – of love and sex and sleep it is, or can be, and he is scabrous (there’s a word) and tender – he is both – and there’s a whole wealth of fucking motherlove – even still – being the sentimental Scouse – her death’s gleam his dark star – and the old town that was coal-black and majestic – wasn’t it? – or at least on its day and the way it was giddy by its night – alewaft and fagsmoke, peel of church bell – and a rut down an alleyway – wasn’t there? – midnight by church bell, cuntsmell –

      oh my sweet my paleskin my soft-lipped girlie

      – and now he’s got a throb on, and he’s coming down Bold Street, and it’s the city of Liverpool, and he’s seventeen years old, and he’s a North-of-England honky with spud-Irish blood and that is what he is and that is all that he is and inside him, deep down – listen – the way the drunken notes stir.

      *

      He sits up in the field. He looks around himself warily. Jesus fuck. He sits in the raw grey light and the cold damp air. He has inarguably placed himself in fucking Ireland again. He has a think about this and he has a fag. A whip of cold wind comes across the field and the tall grasses flex and sway – he sneezes. They say that your soul stops, don’t they? Or at least fucks off for a bit. He stands up for a coughing fit. His poor lungs, those tired soldiers. He proceeds on walkabout. Listen for a song beneath the skin of the earth. Seeing as he cannot fucking find one elsewhere. He aims back for the road again. Panicky, yes, but you just keep on walking. And maybe in this way, John, you can leave the past behind.

      *

      He finds his own trace back through the long grass. He crosses the bridge in wet light. A sombre friend, a heron, stands greyly and still and what’s-the-fucking-word by the edge of the river and town. He walks on up the town. Sentinel is the word. His words are fucked and all over. Weeks of half-sleep. Weeks of night sweats and hilarity. Except this time with no fucking songs in tow. The little town is deserted as a wartime beach. He sits down on a bench in the empty square. Have a breather,