There Are Little Kingdoms (7 page)

He winds the rope gently but firmly around John Martin’s thin waist, around and around, and he knots it quickly and precisely. He takes a clean, ironed tea towel from a drawer and presents it to the bound farmer.

‘I want you to use this as a gag, John,’ he says. ‘It’ll stop you swallowing your tongue.’

‘And what, am… what am… precisely?’

‘What I’m going to do, John, is I’m going to dislocate your shoulder. It’ll give you something to remember the day by.’

Sometimes, in the slow drag of winter, terrible sounds will pierce the calm of the midlands air, and we look up, and our brows gather in knit nervous folds, but we persuade ourselves that it is otherwise, that these are not the cries of humankind. But we know! In our hearts, we know.

John Martin comes back across the bottom fields, walks with a drop-shouldered jerk, and he’s had thumps in the mouth as well, and they took teeth with them. Oh the terrible spittle of revenge that formed on the grey lips of big weeping Jim Flaherty! But he must leave it go. The woman from the O.C.B. is due ten minutes since. He gets back to the 4x4. De Valera is gone apeshit on the K-9 Serenity.

‘I swear to God to you, John, I didn’t! Not at all. Not even close.’

‘How many times, Mary?’

Half eleven in the morning, the Sunday after the Saturday, and she stood there, and she lied to him! He was sat in the kitchen trying to eat a sausage sandwich. And there is no bite to eat he likes better in the week than the sausage sandwich of a Sunday morning. And he couldn’t eat it.

‘No, honest to Jesus,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t the same. It was just… different. All I wanted was to be back at our usual auld thing. Never again!’

He tried to believe her. He gripped himself inside and squeezed hard, and he felt a little better. He took a bite out of the sausage sandwich, chewed it, remorsefully, and shook another lash of brown sauce into it. He was man and boy a martyr to the brown sauce. His head wouldn’t let him be.

‘I’ll ask you again,’ he said. ‘Did you come, Mary?’

He does not believe that his wife is a malicious woman. He is no fool and he knows that there are women who have malicious streaks. His mother, now, was a malicious woman, you could even say an evil woman. He would never forget the night he went into her room after she’d unbeknownst to him been with O’Donnell and the way she was lying on her stomach and the way she turned around to him and the way she kind of…
writhed
, is the only word, like a serpent, and the look that was on her face. Pure hate. But Mary, no, he didn’t think she had that streak in her.

He had to believe her, somehow. There were walls in the house painted more often than Mary came, and he wanted to be sure it was her, not him.

He didn’t know how he finished that sausage sandwich but by Jesus he finished it. Then he went out to the chickens. He walked through the yard. A Sunday, and he gave an impression of slitheriness, like a stoat.

Driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder is no picnic, not when the white sear of the pain waters your eyes and blurs your vision. But it is nothing at all compared to driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder while a manic-depressive spaniel, in manic phase, answerable only to the tides of the moon, makes repeated assaults upon the area of your crotch. Blood streaming down his face, raging against it all, tears streaming from the sheer physical agony, spitting teeth—it is in this state that John Martin pulls into the yard of Meadowsweet Farm. He is awaited there by his wife, and by the woman from the O.C.B.

Mary comes running.

‘Oh Jesus!’ she cries. ‘Oh Christ! Oh Dev! Are you okay?’

‘Hello there!’ calls John Martin, and staggers from the jeep, and falls to his knees. ‘I’m afraid I got caught up in the town. I’d a bit of am… a bit of an auld am… whatchacallit.’

The woman from the O.C.B., a tall, thin matron in a green wax jacket, takes a couple of nervous steps back.

‘Bastard!’ cries Mary Martin, and she runs screaming to the house, with the small howling dog in her arms.

The worst of it was that he had crushed two Valium into hot milk and then poured it into his crying child to conk her out. It was Madge’s idea, and they were her tablets, but what kind of a father would do that? And for what turned out to be a five-minute special. And Madge lay there, for the rest of the night, yapping nonsense out of her, smoking her fags.

‘That young miss will sleep now sweet as a dream for you, John, you have nothing to worry about there. These are the English Valium, you see, these are the Valium we used get all along. Until they starts making them below in Clonmel. Clonmel! They’re not the same at all and I’m not the only one that’s saying it. Honest to God, John, you might as well be eating Smarties. But I have an arrangement about the English Valiums with the man in the chemist, the man of the McCaffertys. Have you ever noticed, John, the way every single last one of the McCaffertys has the big teeth?’

He had never put down a night like it.

He came from a town himself, it wasn’t as if he had background in poultry management. It was not a pleasant setup, not by any stretch, not when a smother of them would go on you, all the disease. There was a young fella in town wore one of the long coats with the badges and he was forever buttonholing John Martin with rants about cruelty. What about the quality of life, he’d say, getting himself all worked up. What about my quality of life, said John Martin. Do you think I’m outside in a palace?

The poultry shed was bad now. It was bad. But he had mixed feelings about the poultry shed. He had mixed feelings because it was the one place his daughter was calm, it was the one place she never cried out or skittered. She would pull at him to take her there and he’d go. She’d sit there on a pail in her red coat and it was like she was in a chapel.

He couldn’t get it out of his mind all the following week. Slugging around the place, trying to look after chickens, and it haunting him. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. Madge was handsome but crazy, and he didn’t need any more distractions. There was already the situation with Noreen. There was also the situation with Kelli Carmody at the sports centre, though that was most definitely over. Kelli was nineteen, for Christ’s sake, and they are unpredictable as snakes at that age. He had changed the hours of his workouts to avoid her, and he fully intended to continue doing so. There is only so much a man’s heart can take. He was still getting over Jenna. He knew whenever he saw her at the till in Lidl that he wasn’t fully over her yet. And Yvonne, too, Yvonne Troy was a heartbreaker. So no, there would be no more messing, there would be no situation with Madge. Even if she did have legs that went up to Armagh.

The woman from the O.C.B. is polite but firm.

‘No way, John. I mean, seriously,’ and she half laughs. ‘You’re not even in the ballpark here. We have to maintain standards, you know?’

‘I realise,’ he says, through gritted teeth, because the pain is if anything increasing, ‘that there needs to be an improvement in the poultry shed.’

The woman from the O.C.B. climbs into her jeep. She sits for a moment with her feet held out the door, and yanks off her Wellingtons, one then the other, and flexes her toes in the stockinged feet, then reaches in for the driving shoes. A slight colour comes into her cheeks from the exertion of this.

‘I realise,’ he says, ‘that I need to regulate the heat and get a decent run marked off. I realise I need to invigorate the feed.’

She wears streaks in her hair and the faintest trace of lipstick and her left eye turns in slightly to regard a haughty nose. She isn’t bad at all.

‘John,’ she says. ‘This isn’t really about the chickens.’

The child is home from school. She is at the upstairs window, utterly blank-faced, looking out at it all. She pulls the heavy curtain shut, tottering with the weight, and the room becomes dark as night. The heels of her trainers light up as she crosses to the bed. She climbs in and pulls the covers over her head to thicken the dark. She flashes her torch, on and off, again and again. It is night-time in a secret world. There are dancing bears on a frosty rooftop as the happy music plays. She walks the twinkling streets. The good witch waves from a high window. The postman cycles across the sky. She turns up the music still louder. A bulldog barks a yard of stars.

Last Days Of The Buffalo

A
n indisputable fact: our towns are sexed. Look around you. It’s easy enough tell one from the other. Foley’s town, for example, is most certainly a woman—just take in the salt of her estuarine air—but she’s not a notably well-mannered or delicate woman. She is in fact a belligerent old bitch. You wouldn’t know what kind of mood you’d find her in. And so he storms out, every afternoon, and slams the door after himself.

He walks the trace of a creek that takes him into countryside. Today the creek is particularly foul, there is either something very rotten in there or something very alive. Foley walks by and sniffs at it but he has no great interest. This is an enormous, distracted, heavy-footed creature we’re dealing with. He’s jawing on his thoughts. He’s remembering the knockdown fights with his father in the street.

These are the dog days of summer. The country feels heavy. There’s a lethal amount of growth and he’s pollen-sick from it, Foley, the last of August pulses in his throat. He can see across the estuary to the malevolent hills of Clare. Do hills brood, as they say? Oh they sure do. Foley’s massive hands are dug into the pockets of his outsized jeans and the hedgerows tremble with birds. Foley’s eyes are watery, emotional, a scratched blue, and they follow the caked dry mud of the pathway. Along the verges there are wild flowers—pipewort, harebell, birdsfoot trefoil, grass of Parnassus, all so melodious sounding it would turn your stomach—and they bloom and shimmer for Foley but he won’t give them the satisfaction.

His father sang ‘Sean South of Garryowen’. His father sang ‘Dropkick Me Jesus’. His father sang ‘The Broad Black Brimmer Of The IRA’. A roof-lifting tenor the old fucker had and unquestionably a way with the ladies.

Dogs somewhere, and the bored drone of motorway traffic, distant, like the sound of a dull dream, also chainsaws.

And he walks the trace of the water, Foley, and he comes within the shadow of the cement factory. The grasses and reeds are dusted grey from the factory’s discharge. This is the type of country that would redden your eye and Foley knows it all too well. He spent seventeen years at the Texaco out here—it was, for a time, an ideal confluence of beast and task.

At the start, it was just two pumps beside a dirty little kiosk for the till. Midwestern rain hammered down on the plastic roof. Electric fire, a kettle, a crossword and Foley might have been in the womb he was so cosy. He near filled the kiosk. He was prince of the forecourt. He knew the customers by name: the boys from the cement plant, the Raheen businessmen, the odd few locals. Foley was pure gab in those days. He’d talk shock absorbers, chest infections, four-four-two. He’d talk controversial incidents in the small parallelogram the Sunday gone. But word came through and there was quickly great change. Statoil bought out Texaco and the kiosk was bulldozed. An air-conditioned, glass-fronted store went up, with automatic doors and cooler units. Foley found himself with colleagues. The next thing they were squeezing him into a uniform and sticking a bright red hat up top. Then they started fucking about with croissants. Then they put in a flower stall and started selling disposable underwater cameras—the better, presumably, to document the coral reefs of the Shannon. Foley went to the supervisor.

‘Come here I want you,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘I want to get one thing clear,’ he said. ‘Just for my own information.’

‘Yes?’

‘Are we a petrol station? Or are we an amusement arcade?’

‘I must say your tone is slightly…’

‘Don’t mind tone. Are we a supermarket?’

‘Now listen…’

‘What the fuck are we?’ cried Foley. ‘Are we Crazy Prices?’

‘There’s no need for your tone, I find it…’

‘I’ll give you tone!’

He lunged for him and that was that. Don’t come around here no more, they told Foley, and it was the end of the seventeen years.

Foley was six foot five on the morning of his fourteenth birthday and half as wide again. This is the original brick shithouse we’re talking about. He was a clown of a child. His father informed him daily he was fit for Fossett’s. There wasn’t a school jumper could be got in the town to fit him. The best his father could do was a chandlers on the Dock Road that stocked a heavy-duty v-neck designed for vast trawlermen sent to face the wrath of the Irish Box. Foley at fourteen wore it to face the Brothers. In cold weather, the rad in the classroom would seize up and to free its workings it needed to be hit a wallop and this became Foley’s job. The teacher would roar down in a hoarse, booze-scratched voice:

‘Foley! Hit that rad an auld slap, boy. You’re good for something anyway, you big eejit.’

And he’d slug across the floor, Foley, and the other boys would do the Jaws music—dah-duh, daaaah-duh, daaaaaaah-duh—and he’d wind up the shoulder, take a swing at the thing with an opened palm and it’d gurgle back to life from the pure shock of force.

Quiet awe would swell in the classroom.

The shovelers call from the reedbeds but they could stand up on tippy-toes and sing Merle Haggard and Foley wouldn’t pay the blindest bit of attention. He’s thinking about the time he had the fucker down and a knee on his throat and he could have closed that windpipe lively but no, what possessed him but he let the bastard go.

He has been told he should try accentuate the positives. And certainly, it hasn’t been Crapsville all the way. He has had small blessings. He has never, for example, had to journey through the regions of romance. That would have been on the rich side. Of course there are sugary men who will croon that love, at length, shines on each and all of us—woo-oooh! woo-oooh!—but no, thanks be to God, love never came next nor near Foley. Not that till he was twenty-six or twenty-seven, and six foot ten in the full of his growth, the big ape, not that he didn’t maintain a glimmer of hope: maybe, oh just maybe… This was a young man listening to enough country and western music to believe just about anything. But he never tried to foretell the detail of it. He never tried to picture it actually come true. Was she really going to float down from the starry sky and put in an appearance on O’Connell Street some Saturday? Walk up to the big tank called Foley and tap him on the shoulder? Settle down and raise enormous children? It wasn’t going to happen, and it never did, and it was sweet relief to give up on even the notion.