Beatlebone Read online

  ALSO BY KEVIN BARRY

  City of Bohane

  Dark Lies the Island

  There Are Little Kingdoms

  Copyright © 2015 by Kevin Barry

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd., in 2015.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design and illustration by Emily Mahon

  Beatlebone / Kevin Barry. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-54029-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-54030-8 (eBook)

  1. Lennon, John, 1940–1980—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6102.A7833B43 2015

  823'.92—dc23

  2015035098

  eBook ISBN 9780385540308

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kevin Barry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: John Moves 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

  About the Author

  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 prick—these are the things on his mind.

  Also—

  How many more times are they going to ask me to 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 facedown 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, Missus Alderton. He has a look around. Okay. He must look like one half of a Pete-and-Dudley routine. Why exactly is he here in this nothing town in this nowhere place and on the wrong side of the ocean and so far from those that he loves and home? Maybe he knows that out here he can be alone.

  It’s the earliest of the morning and still but for the leaves. He walks the edges of the square under the moving leaves. He goes by the sleeping grocery and the sleeping church and there’s a smug little infirmary, too—he thinks, that’ll be me. His empathy—to be old and sick, how would that be? Stout matron smells of talc and jam tarts. A last shimmer in the throb department? Ah but forlornly, yes. Okay. Move along, John. Keep it fucking cheerful, let’s. Random words appear on his lips as he walks the few and empty streets of the early morning town. Here’s a new entry—woebegone. But that’s quite lovely, actually. He doubles back to the square again. Senses a half-movement down below: the heron, as it turns its regal clockwork head to watch him now from its place by the river. Bead of eye from one to the other. News for me, at all? Nothing good, I expect. The metallic gleam of its grey coat in the cold sun. Otherworldly, the sense of it—something alien there. Walk the fuck on again. He sees a fat old dog having a snooze down a sideway. Ah sweetness. He watches for a moment and he gets a bit teary, in fact, about the juddery little sighs of the dog’s breathing—he is out in the world now—and his fat sleeping belly and he can see his doggy dreams of bones and cats and flirty poodles smoking Gitanes and perking their high tight poodle asses in the air.

  The air is thick and salty. You could bite a chunk off. Sniff out the sea-bite’s hint-of-vulva, John, mummy-smell. He has a tricky five minutes but he comes through. He turns up a display board for tourists. The board has a map on and now all the names from nine years past—his last visit—come rattling again. Newport, Mulranny, Achill Island and there’s the great jaggedy bay, Clew Bay, with all its tiny islands. There are tens and dozens and hundreds of these islands. He reads that there are three hundred and sixty-five islands all told; there is an island for every day of the fucking year—

  So how will he tell which island is his?

  There are rustles and movements. He is alone but not—he can hear the shifting of the town ghosts. Clocking off from the night shift. He blinks three times to make those fuckers disappear. He has his ritual things. He has a fag and listens. He inhales deep, holds it, and his heart thumps; he exhales slow. He wants to make a connect
ion with you now. He is thirty-seven years along the road—the slow-quick, slow-quick road—and he lives in a great fortress high above the plain where the fearsome injuns roam—those bold Manhattoes—and now if he whispers it, very very softly—a particular word—and if you listen for it—very very carefully—

  Do you think you can hear him still?

  ———

  The fat old dog moseys out from the sideway. There is evidence here of great male bewilderment. It’s in the poor bugger’s walk; it’s in his carry. He looks down the length of the town and shakes his head against it. He looks on up the town—the same. He does not appear to notice yet the presence of a stranger. He sniffs at the gutter—it’s not good. He has a long, slow rub off the grocer’s wall—it’s still there, and the pebbledash gets at the awkward bits nicely. He edges onto the square on morning patrol but he’s hassled-looking, weary, and the fleshy haunches roll slowly as he goes. He stops up in the middle of the square, now in a devout or philosophical hold, as the breeze brings news to twitch the bristles of his snout, and he growls halfheartedly, and turns to find the line of scent and a tatty man in denims on the bench.

  Good morning, John says.

  The dog raises an eye in wariness—he is careful, an old-stager. He comes across but cautiously and he looks soul-deep into John’s eyes and groans.

  I know exactly how you feel, John says.

  And now the fat old dog rests its chin on his knee, and he places a palm on the breathing warmth of the dog’s flank, and they share a moment’s sighing grace.

  Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.

  The dog lies down to settle by his feet and sets a drooly chin on the toe of a fresh purple sneaker.

  Those are not long from the bloody box, John says.

  He reaches down and lifts the dog’s chin with a finger and he finds such a sweet sadness there and a very particular handsomeness, a kind of gooey handsomeness, and at once he names the dog—