There Are Little Kingdoms (20 page)

There is no sign of rescue. There is no movement at all on the white horizon. There is no signal in billowing smoke. Now I feel it creep over the tundra, I know that it will quickly be among us and it is. And death, it turns out, is a complete B-movie ham. Death is cold fingers lightly placed on the back of the scalp. Death is cheesy as a ghost train.

‘Emily Bronte was always very weak, even as a child. Reading a book, she’d fall into the fireplace.’

‘Says, you gonna grow this business? I look asshole in the eye, I say yes sir I am! Says, you don’t know diddly about growing no business. I say, you fuck! You shit for brains!’

‘Then I had a chipper for a while, this was in Clonmel.’

The light fades and we continue to circle. We put away brandy miniatures, whisky miniatures, gin miniatures. The vodka is about done already. There has been a run on the vodka. Mel is shitfaced. Mel is giving it some to the French hottie with the tiny feet.

‘Very cocktaily, very cha-cha-cha? With those outdoor heaters you know what I’m saying? So you can like sit on the sidewalk in winter even. If that is what you want to do.’

‘How many more years do you think you’re going to entertain me by imitating television comedians, Paul?’

‘Apparently it was one of the worst credit ratings ever recorded in the northwest.’

‘I’m not even supposed to be on an aeroplane. Fact!’

‘How’d you pitch this? Nobody would believe this shit! They’d be, like, get the fuck out of here asshole!’

‘So what you’re saying is you’re one of these high-functioning alcoholics, basically?’

‘I know that! Who do you think you’re talking to here? I know the phrase “prose poem” has certain connotations. But bear with me, please.’

‘I think you’re a very attractive woman. For your age. And I don’t mean that in a catty way. Age is only time. And what’s time? I’m reading a lot of cosmology at the moment. Your idea of time might be completely different to mine, which is going to be completely different again to what the goat farmer in the Andes is thinking. I mean what’s a day? What’s a year? Who’s to say everybody doesn’t have a different idea of a minute? But then I think, should we even think about this stuff?’

‘It’s a condition called ductalsis. It’s a morbid compulsion to weep. They’re after isolating a gene for it.’

‘When I’m making bread, I’m not just kneading dough, ‘kay? What I’m doing, I’m puttin’ the love in.’

‘This is nothing. One time I was flying from Ukraine? You know like Kiev? On this piece of crap Aeroflot plane? And they’re saying we got to make a stop in like Belarus? I’m, like, Belarus?’

‘When your time is up your time is up.’

‘Everything is predestined.’

‘Jesus’ love never failed me yet.’

Night-time comes and the talk fades. We continue to circle as we eat the crackers and pretzels that are the last of the food and we drink the last of the miniatures. Alvin leaves us. I comfort Rose, or try to at least. She says, don’t be sorry, it was a very gentle thing. The sky is enormous with many stars. The aurora borealis shows up and does its thing—superior discothéque—and everybody is wowed. An army of snowmobiles arrives from Upernavik, buzzing over the snow like some kind of giant sleek ice beetles. They are in pastel colours and the atmosphere they make is festive, like an adventure snow weekend. We are all congratulated because two dead (a young Italian man, also) is an amazing result. Everybody is pretty drunk. Alvin and the Italian lie in bodybags on the ice. Rose is making sound use of the bagful of pills. Rose is seeing the lights.

Later, a fresh plane. We cut down past the Scottish isles, we can see the green boxed fields and great swathes of the bleak cities. And then it’s rainy London, finally, in its shockingly humdrum morning. There is a sense of hush and terrific pride. We open the doors. We give the signal. We keep on smiling. We say: Thank you! You have a great trip now! Thank you!

Everybody is hungover and newborn. Fear climbs in fearless ascent but always it fades, it breaks up like jet trail in the air. Now everybody is greenlighted. Now everybody is bulletproof.

Kevin Barry won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for
There Are Little Kingdoms
, his debut collection of stories. His novel,
City of Bohane
, won the 2011 Authors’ Club First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Costa First Novel Award. His most recent collection,
Dark Lies the Island
, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and includes stories published in the
New Yorker
and
Best European Fiction
as well as the winning story of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award; it is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013. He also works as a screenwriter and a playwright. He lives in County Sligo, Ireland.