Dark Lies the Island
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Kevin Barry
Dedication
Title Page
Across the Rooftops
Wifey Redux
Fjord of Killary
A Cruelty
Beer Trip to Llandudno
Ernestine and Kit
The Mainland Campaign
Wistful England
Doctor Sot
The Girls and the Dogs
White Hitachi
Dark Lies the Island
Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer
Copyright
About the Book
A kiss that just won’t happen. A disco at the end of the world. A teenage goth on a terror mission. And OAP kiddie-snatchers, and scouse real-ale enthusiasts, and occult weirdness in the backwoods…
Dark Lies the Island is a collection of unpredictable stories about love and cruelty, crimes, desperation, and hope from the man Irvine Welsh has described as ‘the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’. Every page is shot through with the riotous humour, sympathy and blistering language that mark Kevin Barry as a pure entertainer and a unique teller of tales.
About the Author
Kevin Barry’s debut story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize in 2007. His first novel, City of Bohane, was published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year and the Costa First Novel Award. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, in publications such as Best European Fiction, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story and the New Yorker.
ALSO BY KEVIN BARRY
There Are Little Kingdoms
City of Bohane
for Josie and Christy
ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS
EARLY ONE SUMMER morning, I sat with her among the rooftops of the city and the fat white clouds moved slowly above us – it was so early as to be a city lost in sleep, and she was really very near to me. My want for her was intense and long-standing – three months, at least; an eternity – and I was close enough to see the opaque down of her bare arms, each strand curling like a comma at its tip, and the tiny scratched flecks of dark against the hazel of her eyes. She was just a stretch and a clasp away. The city beneath was lost to the peaceful empty moments of 5 a.m. – it might be a perfect Saturday of July. All I had to do was make the move.
Nor was it my imagination that her shoulder inclined just slightly towards me, that there was a dip in the way she held it, the shoulder bare also beneath the strap of her vest top. The shoulder’s dip must signal an opening.
‘Now I don’t want to sound painfully cool here?’ I said.
‘I believe you,’ she said.
‘But you may be looking at the man who introduced Detroit techno to the savages of Cork city.’
We talked about the music and the clothes and the pills and the hours we had spent together – the nightclub, and then the party at the flat that was rented by friends, all of whom were panned out inside now, asleep or halfways there, and we had climbed onto the rooftop to smoke a joint and see the day come through. Every line had the dry inflected drag of irony – feeling was unmentionable. We talked about everything except the space between us.