Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

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