Beatlebone Read Online Free Page A

a woman down there has a home to go to.
    A woman?
    That does the breakfasts.
    Oh, he says. Her with the brass band.
    She has the mother bad. The mother is left with half a lung to her name. The other half is not viable. Or so they’re saying. All I know is she’d want to be gone home to the mother an hour since or the mother’ll be gone out the blasted window. Again.
    To be honest, love, I’m not big on brekkie. A Pepsi and a fag’ll do me. Mothers out windows?
    That wouldn’t be the worst of it, she says. But you’d want to come down anyway—I have a Mr. O’Grady waiting on you.
    As she says his name, she fixes her hair and works her lips to an unseemly fullness.
    He says you’ve a man here called McCarthy? I says, well! I says I think I have anyhow.
    ———
    Mother Mary of Jesus is sat up the dining room wall, blue and weeping, her long glance so loving—a tear of blood rolls.
    Cornelius O’Grady is sat just beneath—his hair is greased and fixed like a ducktail joint.
    Would you mind sitting down, John, he says. You’re making me dizzy.
    Daylight shows Cornelius in high fettle. There is vim and spark and big vitality. He considers John at length and silently; he shakes his head in amused suffering.
    The problem, he says, is they’d probably know you alright.
    He returns woefully to his breakfasts. He has two fried breakfasts laid out on the white linen. He moves the great boulder of a head in slow swoops over the plates as though by the arm of a crane. He slices daintily into the meats and chews and smiles grimly.
    But all we can do is fucken try, he says.
    A powerful chewer: the way his massive chin swings side to side and churns—they are handing out the chins around here. He mops a hunk of bread across the yellow of the egg yolks, and there is the smell of burnt fat and greasy cloy.
    Have you not et? he says.
    I’m fine, Cornelius. I’ll have a fag in a bit.
    Humorous eyes; a shaking of the head. He zips from plate to plate and back again. He is very neat about his work, slicing a rasher here, a sausage there, having a chew and half a grilled tomato, a soft chuckling, a little sigh of thanks.
    Black pudding? John says.
    Yes?
    Congealed blood is what it is.
    You wouldn’t eat a bit?
    Me? I’m macrobiotic.
    Which means you ate what, fleas?
    Hatchet-Face comes to work around the edges of the room, tidying and settling away, but really just the better to observe Cornelius and his great handsome bull’s head: we are in the presence of legend.
    About my situation, Mr. O’Grady?
    Yes?
    I really don’t need a fucking circus right now. The most important thing is no one knows I’m out here.
    Cornelius fills his mug from a silver pot and runs his eyes about the room.
    John, he says, half the newspapermen in Dublin are after piling onto the Westport train.
    Oh for fucksake!
    But we aren’t beat yet. The train’s an hour till it’s in. We’ll throw a shape lively.
    He’s bigger sat down than he is stood up. Short-legged, squat, the giant head rolls cockily as they move, and Cornelius aims a wave for Hatchet-Face—she flutters as though for a sexy saint.
    All I want is to get to my island.
    Which is it is yours?
    It’s called Dorinish.
    You’d say it Durn-ish.
    You know the one?
    There are maps but I’d pay no mind to them. Wait for me at the back door and I’ll swing the van around.
    The van?
    Is right.
    What’s happened our Merc?
    That wasn’t my car at all, John.
    And where are we headed exactly?
    Cornelius sends up his sighs. He looks at his pale charge sadly, as though at a tiny injured bird, and he jerks a black thumb over his shoulder.
    West, he says.
    ———
    The van’s a bone-rattler, a money-shaker, all rust and lung disease, and it screeches for death as it revs up pace for the sudden turns and the gut-heaving drops: see now how the land falls away. There is mist on the hills; he can see reaching for the crags and granite tops the wispy fingers of the mist on the hills, and