Dark Lies the Island (5 page)

‘I’m only sayin’,’ he said.

He sullenly turned back to his stout. The people of this part of north Galway are oversexed. That is my belief. I had found a level of ribaldry that bordered on the paganistic. It goes back, of course. They lick it up off the crooked rocks. Thackeray, indeed, remarked on the corset-less dress of rural Irish women, and the fact that they kissed perfect strangers in greeting, their vast bosoms swinging.

‘It’s not,’ John Murphy said, ‘like I’m goin’ to take a lep at the little bitch. My leppin’ days are long fuckin’ over.’

A notion came: if I sold the place for even three-quarters of what I paid for it, I could buy half of Cambodia and do a Colonel fucking Kurtz on it altogether. Lovely, cold-hearted Nadia came running from the kitchen. She was as white as the fallen dead.

‘Is otter!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is otter in kitchen!’ she said.

He was eating soup when I got there. Carrot and coriander from a ten-gallon pot. Normally, they are terribly skittish, otters, but this fellow was languorous as a surfer. Nervously, I shooed him towards the back door. He took his own sweet time about heading there. Once outside, he aimed not for the tide-line rocks, where the otters all lived, but for the higher ground, south.

I looked out towards the harbour. The harbour wall was
disappearing
beneath spilling sheets of water. I came back into the lounge.

‘A fucking otter is right,’ I said.

They looked at me, the locals, in quiet disgust, as if I could expect no less than otters in the kitchen, the way I was after letting things go.

I pointed to the harbour.

‘Will it flood?’ I asked, and there was a quake in my tone.

‘You’d make good time coming out of Sligo, normally,’ Bill Knott said. ‘Unless you had a Thursday on your hands. But of course them fuckers have any amount of road under them since McSharry was minister.’

‘I said will it flood, Bill? Will it flood? Are you even listening to me?’

A grey silence swelled briefly.

‘Hasn’t in sixteen years,’ he said. ‘Won’t now.’

I spent all my waking hours keeping the Water’s Edge on the go. I was short-breathed, tense, out of whack. I was at roughly the midpoint of what, for poets, would be termed ‘a long silence’ – five years had passed since my last collection. Anytime I sat down to page or screen, I felt as if I might weep, and I didn’t always resist the temptation. Mountain bleakness, the lapidary rhythms of the water, the vast schizophrenic skies: these weren’t inspiring poetry in me; they were inspiring hopeless lust and negative thought patterns. Again and again, the truth was confronting me – I was a born townie, and I had made a dreadful mistake in coming here. I set down a fresh Bushmills for Bill Knott.

‘This place your crowd are from,’ he said. ‘Belarus?’

‘Yes, Bill?’

‘What way’d they be for road out there?’

‘When you think,’ Vivien Harty said, ‘of what this country went through for the sake of Europe, when we went on our hands and fuckin’ knees before Brussels, to be given the lick of a fuckin’ butter voucher, and as soon as we have ourselves even halfways right, these bastards from the back end of nowhere decide they can move in wherever they like and take our fuckin’ jobs?’

On the Killary hillsides the dogs howled again in fright-night sequence, one curdling scream giving way to another; they were even louder now than before.

‘Mother of Jesus,’ John Murphy said.

The dogs were so loud now as to be unignorable. We all went to the windows. The roadway between hotel and harbour wall had in recent moments disappeared. The last of the evening light was an unreal throb of Kermit green. The dogs howled. The rain continued.

‘The roads,’ Bill Knott said, at last impressed, ‘will be unpassable.’

Mick Harty’s hands slipped down over the backs of Vivien’s thighs. The rain came in great, unstoppable drifts on a high westerly from the Atlantic.

‘That ain’t quittin’ anytime soon,’ I said, stating the blindingly obvious.

‘Water’s up to the second step,’ Vivien Harty noted.

Four old stone steps led up to the inn’s front porch.

‘And rising,’ Mick Harty said.

‘I haven’t seen rain the likes of that,’ John Murphy said, ‘since Castlebar, the March of ’seventy-three.’

‘What’d we be talkin’ about for Castlebar?’ Bill Knott said. ‘Forty-five minutes on a light road?’

*

We moved back from the windows. Our movement had become curiously choreographed. Quiet calls were made on mobiles. We spoke now in whispers.

All along the fjord, word quickly had it, the waters had risen and had breached the harbour walls. The emergency services had been alerted. There was talk – a little late for it – of sandbagging. We were joined in the lounge bar by six of the nine Belarusians – the other three had gone to the cineplex in Westport, fate having put on a Dan Brown adaptation – and by the two elderly couples, who had managed not to die off in the library.

I said, ‘A round of drinks on the house, folks. We may be out here for some time.’

Applause greeted this. I felt suddenly that I was growing into the mine-host role. There was a conviviality in the bar now, the type that is said to come always with threatened disaster.

Great howls of wind echoed down the Doo Lough Valley, and they were answered in volleyed sequence by the howls of the Killary dogs.

Four of the six Belarusians wore love bites on their necks as they sipped at their complimentary bottled Heinekens. They were apparently feasting delightedly on each other in my back rooms.

The elderlies introduced themselves.

We met Alan and Norah Fettle from Limerick, and Jimmy and Janey McAllister from Limavady. They were the least scared among us, the least awed.

‘Yon wind’s changing,’ Jimmy Mac said. ‘Yon wind’s shiftin’ easterly so ’tis.’

‘I wouldn’t like the sounds of that,’ John Murphy said.
‘Not
much good will come ever out of a swappin’ wind. You’d hear that said.’

It was said also in Killary that an easterly wind unseated the mind.

I shot a glance outside, and on a low branch of the may tree hanging over the water a black-backed gull had apparently killed its mate and was starting to eat it. This didn’t seem like news that anybody wanted to hear, so I kept it to myself.

Alexei, the conspicuously wall-eyed Belarusian, had gone to survey the scene from an upstairs window and he returned to report that the car park beside the hotel was flooded completely.

‘Insurance will cover any damage,’ Bill Knott soothed.

‘It’s going to be one of those fuckin’ news clips,’ John Murphy said. ‘Some fuckin’ ape sailin’ down the street on a tea tray.’

‘Jesus Christ what’s that gull doing?’ Norah Fettle said.

It was an inopportune moment to draw attention to the gull situation. The black-back had just at that instant managed to prise its partner’s head off, and was flailing it about. Janey McAllister passed out cold on the floor. There was no getting away from the fact that we were being sucked into the deeps of an emergency.

I was getting happy notions. I was thinking, the place gets wiped out, I claim the insurance, and it’s Cambodia here I come.

Norah Fettle and Vivien Harty tended to Janey McAllister. She was frothing a little, and moaning softly. They called for brandy. Bill Knott signalled for a fresh Bushmills, John Murphy for a pint of stout.

We all looked out the windows.

The water had passed the fourth step and was sweeping over the porch. We were on some vague level aware that house lights still burned on the far side of the harbour, along the mountainside of Mweelrea. Then, at once, the lights over there cut out.

‘Good night, Irene,’ Bill Knott said.

The worst of the news was that the emergency appeared to be localised. The fjord of Killary was flooding when no other place was flooding. The rest of the country was going about its humdrum Monday-night business – watching football matches, or Dan Brown adaptations, putting out the bins, or putting up with their marriages – while the people of our vicinity prepared for watery graves.

I felt the worst possible course would be to close the bar. There was a kind of hilarity to the proceedings still, and this would not be maintained if I stopped serving booze. The pace of the drinking, if anything, quickened now that the waters were rising. You never know when you are going to lift your last.

‘Would we want to be making south?’ Mick Harty wondered.

Vivien rubbed at his wrist so tenderly I found myself welling up.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush it, babes.’

‘If we went up past Lough Fee and swung around the far side of her,’ Bill Knott said, ‘we’d nearly make it to the N59.’

The Belarusians carted boxloads of old curtains from the attic to use as sops against the doorways but the moment the last boxload reached the bottom of the stairs the doors popped and the waters of Killary entered.

I moved everybody upstairs. There was a function room up there that I used for the occasional wedding. It had a fully stocked bar and operational disco lights. We weren’t a moment too soon. As I trailed up the stairs, keeping to the rear of all my locals and Belarusians, I cast an eye back over my shoulder. It had the look of death’s dateless night out there.

‘Hup, people!’ I cried. ‘Hup for Jesus’ sake!’

More calls were made on mobiles. We were promised that the emergency services were being moved out. I turned off the harsh strip lighting overhead and switched to the mood lighting, which moved in lovely, dreamy, disco swirls. Even yet the rain hammered down on my old hotel at Killary. I opened the bar, and the locals weren’t shy about stepping up to it.

We drank.

We whispered.

We laughed like cats.

Bill Knott reckoned the distance to Clare Island oversea, if it should come to it.

‘Of course, it would not be the first time,’ he said, ‘that the likes of us would be sent hoppin’ for the small boats.’

Vivien Harty whispered to Janey McAllister. Janey’s colour was returning with frequent nips of my brandy. Vivien swirled it in the glass and fed it to the old lady; her tiny grey head she cradled on a vast lap.

Thackeray, on visiting the backwoods of Ireland, bemoaned the ‘choking peat smoke’ and the ‘obstreperous cider’ and the diet of ‘raw ducks, raw pease’ and also a particular inn: ‘No pen can describe that establishment, as no English imagination could have conceived it.’

John Murphy told us, loudly, that he loved his wife.

‘She still excites me,’ he said. ‘It’s been twenty-eight years, and I still get a horn on me when I see that bitch climb a stairs.’

I went to the landing outside the function room. I looked down the road. It was a waterway; the hotel porch had disappeared, and dozens of cormorants were approaching in formation across the water. It was like the attack on Dresden. I rushed back to the function room just as the cormorants landed on the kitchen roof out back, and a weeping Mick Harty was confessing to Vivien an affair of fifteen years’ standing. With her sister.

‘All the auld filth starts to come out,’ Alan Fettle said.

Vivien approached her husband, and embraced him, and planted a light kiss on his neck as they held each other against the darkness. Then she bit him on the neck. Blood came in great, angry spurts. I vomited, briefly, and decided to put on some music.

I looked out the landing window as I dashed along the corridor to get some CDs from my room – this was a bad move:

Seven sheep in a rowing boat were being bobbed about on the vicious waters of Killary. The sheep appeared strangely calm.

I picked lots of old familiars: Abba, The Pretenders, Bryan Adams.

I pelted back to the function room.

‘We’re here!’ I cried. ‘We might as well have a disco!’

Oh, and we danced the night away out on the fjord of Killary. We danced to ‘Chiquitita’, slowly and sensuously; we danced in great, wet-eyed nostalgia to ‘Brass in Pocket’,
and
we had all the old steps still, as if 1979 was only yesterday; we punched the air madly to ‘Summer of ’69’.

I went out to the landing to find the six Belarusians sitting on the top step of the stairs. The waters of Killary were halfway up the stairs. Footstools sailed by in the lobby below, toilet rolls, place mats, phone books. But what could I do?

I returned to the function room and served out pints hand over fist.

All mobile signals were down.

There appeared on the horizon no saviours in hi-viz clothing.

The waters were rising yet.

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realised that, at forty, one must learn the rigours of acceptance. Capitalise it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me – be it a watery grave in Ireland’s only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its greyer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.

Electrified, I searched for a notebook.

Bill Knott danced. John Murphy danced. The McAllisters and the Fettles waltzed. The Belarusians dry-humped one another in the function room’s dark corners. The Hartys were in deep, emotional conversation in a booth – Mick held to his bleeding neck a wad of napkins. I myself took to the floor, swivelling slowly on my feet, and I closed my eyes against the swirling lights. The pink backs of my eyelids became twin screens for flashing apparitions of my childhood pets.

‘Are ye enjoyin’ yereselves, lads?’

‘What would we be talkin’ about for Loughrea, would you say?’

‘Didn’t I come back from that place one lung half the size of the other?’

‘That’s England for you.’

I ran out to the landing for a spot check on the flood, and was met there by Alexei, the wall-eyed Belarusian. He indicated with a happy jerk of his thumb the water level on the stairs. It had dropped a couple of steps. I patted his back, and winked just the once, and returned to the disco.