Free There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry Page A

passes between them. It’s the feeling in the hazel switch when it divines water, and it’s the feeling that comes at night when a tendon in the calf muscle has a twitched memory of a falling step, and it’s there too, somehow, in the great confluence of starlings, when they spiral and twist like smoke in the evening sky. Foley holds the boy’s hand and the feeling sustains for a single necessary moment.
    ‘You were born the fourth son in a lay-by outside Tarbert,’ he says, ‘and you’ll die a wet afternoon in the coming May. The way I’m seeing it, a white van will go off the road at a T-junction. A Hitachi, if I’m seeing it right. And I can tell you this much, Bud—it ain’t gonna be pretty.’
    ‘What you sayin’ to me? What you sayin’ to me you fat fuckin’ freak?’
    The leader shucks his hand free and takes a step back, and the others step back too. Foley, arrogant now, draws a swipe through the air, as though he’s swatting flies, and he walks on through. For a while the traveller boys follow and they taunt him from a distance but he knows they will not make the decision.
    The creek dwindles to its outflow, and the estuary has an egginess, a pungency. The lethargy of swamp gives way to the slow momentum of the Shannon. From across the water, the hills of Clare look on unimpressed. You would be a long time impressing the hills of Clare. A path branches off from the creek and from here you can follow the river back into town and it’s a weary Foley that turns onto the branching. Sweat pours from his armpits and stains the number seven shirt that says ‘Cantona’ on the back. Oystercatchers work the rocks, most efficiently, and the lapwings are up and gregarious, but Foley doesn’t want to know. He limits his thoughts to each step as it falls. His heavy head lifts up now and then to find the town come closer, and still closer.
    It is more difficult to look back. At the way Foley Snr would come home in the evening, take off his workboots, slap his fleshy paws together and do the hucklebuck in the middle of the floor. Twist the hips and pout the lips: ladies and gentlemen, a big hand now for the west of Ireland’s answer to Mr Jerry Lee Lewis. He’d manhandle the missus. He’d make slurping noises at his supper. He’d bounce the big child on a giant’s round knee.
    ‘Is the water on? Have you the water on at all? How am I supposed to get washed?’
    ‘Where you going, Dan?’
    ‘Out! I’m headin’ for the plains, Betsy. I’m gonna make me a home where the buffalo roam.’
    Later she’d throw plates into the sink with such venom they’d sometimes smash. She’d smoke a fag, have a long chew on the bottom lip, then get on the phone and give out yards to a sister. Later she’d roar at the child and her brow would crease up as she plotted an escape. Later she’d weep like a crone because she was lonely. Dan’d be down the Dock Road, doing a string of bars and getting knee tremblers off fast girls in behind chip shop walls. Dan’d be going to dances out Drumkeen and swinging them around the floor, making husky promises beneath the candy-coloured lights. He’d sing ‘Are The Stars Out Tonight?’ as he walked them home. He’d play Russian hands and Roman fingers.
    But the way it happens sometimes is that pain becomes a feed for courage, a nutrient for it: when pain drips steadily, it can embolden. She worked up the courage and left him, and left the young fella, too. It was a Halloween she went—Foley was dunking for apples. He was near enough reared, and he was the head off his father. She moved to Tipp town, or was it Nenagh, and fell in love with a bookmaker there and died a happy woman. The lights went down on the Foley boys. They didn’t get on. Violent confrontation was the daily norm and the worst of it, like in a country song, was when Foley started to win.
    He hits the suburbs of the town and takes the Dock Road into the heart of the place. He steps away from the water and