Beatlebone Read Online Free PDF

blood and smoke on the air. Cornelius fills the kettle and sets it to boil. He is strangely mothering in his movements. As in men who live alone. He arranges everything neatly and flips the slices of pudding over and John’s mouth cannot but water.
    You know I don’t eat this stuff?
    Never?
    Not for fucking years.
    He smiles and sets a place with care and plates the food and serves it with slices of bread cut thickly from the pan and a soft butter spread over.
    Now for you, he says.
    Jesus Christ, John says.
    He eats the food. The spiciness, the mealiness, the animal waft—it’s all there in the history of his mouth, and he is near to fucking tears again. The tea is strong and sweet and tastes of Liverpool.
    Would you believe, John, that my father lived in this house till he was eighty-seven years of age?
    How’d you get to be eighty-seven up a wet hill in Mayo?
    He neither drank nor smoked.
    I’m packing away all that myself.
    I drink, John. I smoke. And I tup women.
    Oh?
    When I get the chance.
    Cornelius slowly teases out the knuckles of one hand and then the other.
    But you see what my father had was great intelligence.
    That would help.
    Oh he was a wiley man, John.
    He was fucking what?
    He was wiley.
    What the fuck is wiley?
    He was full of wiles, John.
    He was full of fucking what?
    He had a wiliness.
    Oh…Like in he was canny?
    Exactly so.
    Okay. So now I have it. But tell me this, won’t you—how can you have a windy fucking moor that’s wiley?
    Hah?
    How can you have a wiley fucking moor?
    A wiley…
    He sings it for him in a witchy screech—
    Out on the…wiiiley…windy moors…
    What’s it you’re saying to me, John?
    The Kate bloody Bush song!
    Kate Bush?
    Cornelius shakes his head.
    I knew a Martin Bush, he says.
    Oh?
    Belmullet direction but long dead and God rest him, poor Martin.
    Any relation?
    To who?
    To Kate bloody Bush!
    I didn’t know a Kate. Could she have been a sister?
    She might well have been.
    No…I knew a Martin.
    And was he wiley?
    If there was one thing he wasn’t was wiley, John.
    Oh?
    Poor Martin was an inordinately stupid man. He could barely tie his shoelaces.
    A ha’penny short?
    Ah listen. Martin kept animals had more wile in them.
    What kind of animals?
    He’d sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they’d have been wind-bothered up that way.
    They’d have been…
    Bothered, John. By wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle.
    Unseat them?
    Cornelius lowers his sad eyes—
    In the mind.
    You mean you’d have a cow’d take a turn?
    Cornelius squares his jaw.
    Do you realise you’re looking at a man who’s seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? Purposefully.
    On account of?
    Wind coming easterly. That’s the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you’d get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn’t be right after it.
    John pushes back his plate and sups the last of his tea and idly twirls the rind of the black pudding about the dull silver of the tines of his fork.
    Cornelius?
    Yes, John?
    Am I alive and not dreaming?
    He taps once and sharply the fork on the edge of the table for tune—it rings cleanly.
    ———
    He walks a circuit of the O’Grady yard. He is high anxious again. His fucking jailyard. He circles and twists like an aggravated goose. Energy is the difficulty always. Too much of. An excess of. Flick out these fingers and they might shoot beads of fire. One neurotic foot in front of the other, and circling—what you do is you keep moving. He limps and he stumbles—no stack-heeled Harlem glide is this—and his bones ache; the sky above is grey and the wind moves