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Also by Kevin Barry
There Are Little Kingdoms
City of Bohane
Dark Lies the Island
Beatlebone
Night Boat to Tangier
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Kevin Barry, 2020
The right of Kevin Barry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Versions of some of these stories have been published as follows: ‘The Coast of Leitrim’, ‘Deer Season’ and ‘Ox Mountain Death Song’ appeared in the New Yorker. ‘Old Stock’ appeared in Winter Papers and in the South Carolina Review. ‘Toronto and the State of Grace’ appeared in Sex & Death (Faber). ‘Who’s-Dead McCarthy’ appeared in Being Various (Faber) and in the Irish Times. ‘Roma Kid’ appeared in the New Statesman and in the Berlin Quarterly. ‘Extremadura (Until Night Falls)’ appeared in A Kind of Compass (Tramp Press). ‘Roethke in the Bughouse’ appeared in the Irish Times.
Excerpt from The Piano © Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger, 1994, Zed Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 621 9
eISBN 978 1 78211 622 6
CONTENTS
Toronto and the State of Grace
Extremadura (Until Night Falls)
For Lucy Luck and Declan Meade
‘I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it’s not part of a sensible way of living. It’s a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it’s a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.’
Jane Campion
THE COAST OF LEITRIM
Living alone in his dead uncle’s cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick. He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he’d exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.
‘It’s like France,’ he said to her one sunny morning in June.
And it was true that the fields of the mountain had all the week idled in what seemed a Continental languor, and the lower hills east were a Provençal blue in the haze, and the lake when he lowered himself into it was so warm by the evening it didn’t even make his midge bites sting.
‘The heat,’ he tried again. ‘Makes the place seem like France. We wouldn’t be used to it. Passing out from it. Ambulance on standby.’
His words blurted at the burn of her brown-eyed stare. She didn’t lose the run of herself by way of a response but she said yes, it is very hot, and he believed that something at least cousinly to a smile softened her mouth and moved across her eyes. He had learned already by listening in the café that her name was Katherine, which was not what you’d expect for a Polish woman but lovely.
At thirty-five years of age, Seamus Ferris was by no means setting the night on fire at the damp old pebbledash cottage on Dromord Hill, but he had no mortgage nor rent to pay, and there was money from when the father died, a bit more again when the mother went to join him, also the redundancy payment from Rel-Tech, and some dole. He had neither sister nor brother and was a little stunned at this relatively young age to find himself on a solo run through life. He had pulled back from his friends, too, which wasn’t much of a job, for he had never had close ones. He had worked for eight years at Rel-Tech, but more and more he had found the banter of the other men there a trial, the endless football talk, the foolishness and bragging about drink and women, and in truth he was relieved when the chance of a redundancy came up. He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feeling. He drank wine rather than beer and favoured French films. Such an oddity this made him in the district that he might as well have had three heads up on Dromord Hill.
He believed that Katherine, too, had sensitivity. She had a dreamy, distracted air, and there was no question but that she seemed at a remove from the other mulluckers who worked in the café. The way she made the short walk home in the evenings to the apartments across the river in Cortober again named a sensitivity – she always slowed a little to look out and over the water, maybe to see what the weather was doing, perhaps she even read the river light, as Seamus did, fastidiously. He could keep track of her route home if he parked down by the boathouse, see the slender woman with brown hair slow and turn to look over the water, and it was only with a weight of reluctance that she moved on
