Free There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry Page B

enters the grid of her streets, and his mood improves. He has before him the consolations of routine. He will go to the shade and dampness of the basement flat, where mushrooms have been known to grow from the walls. It is not much of a place to lay your head, no, but it is near the bar where they are used to him sitting in the shadows. (Lou Ferringo, they call him there, but not to his face.) It’s near the place he buys the fish. It’s where he braces himself for the afternoon walks by the creek, and we all have our creeks. He will put eight mackerel in two frying pans and fourteen potatoes in the big pot. He will turn on the television and go to page two-two-zero of the text to check on the football news. He will sigh then and stretch and take the keys of the car from the saucer by the door. At eight o’clock, precisely, he will turn the key in the ignition, put his size seventeen to the floor and he’ll switch on the two-way radio.
    ‘Fourteen here, base. I’m just heading out.’
    And Alice at the base will say:
    ‘Okay, Tom, can you pick up in Thomondgate for me? The Gateway Bar. Sullivan.’
    ‘Uh-oh. What kind of a way is he?’
    ‘He doesn’t sound great, Tommy.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    And for eight hours he’ll pinball all over town—Thomondgate and Kileely, Prospect, Monaleen—and there is a sort of calmness in this and calmness accrues, it builds up like equity.
    Maybe Foley will pick you up some night. You’ve had a few at The Gateway, or you’ve taken a hammering at the dogs, or you’re stood in the rain with bags at your feet outside the Roxboro Tesco.
    ‘Busy tonight?’
    ‘Ah, we’re kept going, you know? It’s busy enough for a Monday.’
    And you’ll take him for an easeful man, a serene giant at the wheel of a gliding Nissan. Sometimes even the briefest touch is enough: you hand him the fare and he hands back the change and you feel the strange quiver, its coldness. He can tell precisely, in each case but his own. The town will lie flat and desolate and open to all weathers.

Ideal Homes
    I t was among the last bucolic fantasies of the village that Mr Delahunty, the blind shopkeeper, was secure against chancers and thieves. He could almost believe it himself, as cheerful villagers sang out the items they’d placed before him and his lively thin fingers danced across the register’s keys. Mr Delahunty kept a mental ledger containing every last price in his shop and to locate a price, he simply rolled the eyes up into the top of his head. When they came down again, they were wet smears, unpleasantly viscous, like the albumen of half-boiled eggs, but they had the price got. Omo, the large, a woman would say, and the eyes of Delahunty would roll up quickly and as quickly return. Two forty-eight, he’d say, and rack it on the reg: the figures would roll.
    This was as close as the village got to an attraction. The village was an unimpressive tangle of a dozen streets. There was a main street and a square, one as drab as the other, and a woeful few streets subsidiary to these. There was an insignificant river, brown and slow, and granite hills beyond—these, it was said, gave the place a scenic charm but in truth, it was forlorn. The people were terraced in neat rows and roofed in with grey slates and were themselves forlorn, but they wouldn’t easily have said why.
    Delahunty—his remaining senses sharpened—wasn’t crazy about the way things were shaping up. Sometimes, on these quiet evenings, when the streets had emptied out, and the traffic had exhausted itself, and when the twins, Donna and Dee, moved swiftly through his aisles, the eyes of Delahunty rolled up not to search out a price but with suspicion and fear. The blind man could tell bad girls by smell.
    ‘Just having a quick gawk, Mr Delahunty,’ called Dee, the blonde, as she rifled the cooler for sugary drinks.
    ‘Any sign at all of that new Smash Hits ?’ called Donna, the brunette, who daily skinned the