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Back Homesickness Save as PDF
Chapters (16)
  1. Homesickness
  2. Also by Colin Barrett
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. For
  6. Contents
  7. A SHOOTING IN RATHREEDANE
  8. THE WAYS
  9. THE ALPS
  10. WHOEVER IS THERE, COME ON THROUGH
  11. THE SILVER COAST
  12. ANHEDONIA, HERE I COME
  13. THE LOW, SHIMMERING BLACK DRONE
  14. THE 10
  15. Acknowledgements
  16. Back Cover

The fibres of the carpet pricked like tiny, finite flames against his face. After a while he had to get up, to relieve the pressure building between his temples. Gerry stood, and, as the blood descended from his head, flurries of ­bright-­yellow and purple spots multiplied in the dark in front of his eyes. Five minutes ago, he had felt exhausted, ripe only for the pillow, but now he was electrically wakeful. He held the pad in his hand and watched the blinking spots fade away. In the dark, on the screen, the question remained.

DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?

THE ALPS

A Hitachi Hiace with piebald panelling, singing suspension and a reg from the last millennium rolled into the car park of the Swinford Gaels football club late on a Friday evening. The Hiace belonged to Rory Hughes, the eldest of the three brothers known as the Alps, and the Alps travelled everywhere together in it. The brothers stepped out and, with a decisive slam of the van’s side door, moved off across the moonscape of the car park in the order of their conceptions, Rory on point, the middle brother Eustace close behind, and the youngest, Bimbo, in dawdling tow.

The Alps, weary after a week of work, did not speak. They listened to the chunked slippage of the gravel under their workboots. On the floodlit pitch a pheasant groomed itself beneath the sagging diagonals of the goalmouth netting. The night air was close and cloudless, sultry with the stink of silage coming off the surrounding fields.

Asleep almost on his feet, Bimbo noticed a light moving up in the sky. A shining point, minuscule as a star or a transatlantic plane, but moving far too nimbly and erratically to be either. Bimbo roused. He watched the point descend at an angle, shoot back up at ninety degrees, then stop and wobble in place. A spaceship, Bimbo fancifully thought, for the point’s motion, however clumsy, seemed purposeful. Then Bimbo noted the patch of land the pip of light was bobbing above and figured it out.

‘See that,’ he said.

‘Hah?’ grunted Eustace.

‘What I’m looking at,’ said Bimbo. His older brothers turned to Bimbo, then faced back in the direction he was looking.

‘Which would be?’ said Rory.

‘See,’ said Bimbo, focusing his attention on the point. As if by telepathy the older two duly clocked the light.

‘What in the Christ is that when it’s at home?’ said Rory.

‘It’s a drone,’ said Bimbo. ‘Them acres over there belong to Marcus Landry, right? I heard he was sourcing the ­highest-­spec drones he could get his hands on to keep track of his herds. He’s rakes of livestock and animals and they do be regularly going missing on him,’ Bimbo said. ‘The surmise is some intrepid bollocks is poaching them.’

‘That would be the surmise, all right,’ said Rory.

‘Drones,’ said Eustace, ‘would you be well?’