That Old Country Music. Кевин Барри

it seemed to me it was the same thing, over and over, and I couldn’t help but . . .’

      ‘If only you could sleep,’ she said.

      ‘I couldn’t help but record it.’

      ‘You . . .’

      ‘With the phone. I know, yeah. And I had it translated.’

      ‘By who?’

      ‘By an app.’

      ‘What have I been saying?’

      ‘That you’ll die if ever I leave you.’

      ‘Oh Jesus God.’ She held her face in embarrassment.

      ‘At least I think you’re talking about me,’ he said.

      ‘Who else would I be talking about?’ she said.

      *

      Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome. As the summer aged he became unseated by her trust of him and by her apparent want for him. What kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me, he wondered. The question was unanswerable and terrifying. When she lay in his arms after they had made love, his breath caught jaggedly in his throat and he felt as if he might choke. To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it. As she lay sleeping in the night his mind now began to work up new scenarios. These played out variations around a single narrative line – the way that it would all cave in, the way that it would end, the way that he would be crushed beneath the rubble of his broken heart. Katherine coughing blood in the sink one morning, and then the quick raging of her demise – an illness like a wild animal tearing through her – and the way she would die a bag of bones in his arms. Jesus Christ. Or . . . Katherine leaving without a word, absconding on the Dublin train from Carrick station, returning to Poland and the lumpen embrace of some previous, unnamed love, some steelworker fucker with a head on him like a thirty-kilo kettlebell. Or . . . Katherine stumbled upon in a dark corner of a late-autumn field, at evening, blowing a young farmer. Or . . . an old farmer. So rancid did his night scenarios become that Seamie Ferris stumbled from the bed to the bathroom and gargled with Listerine. In the morning, still sleepless, he watched her carefully over their yogurt and fruit.

      ‘They say you can tell by the chin,’ he said.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘You know full well, I’d say. The way a liar can be made out by the set of the chin.’

      ‘Seamus?’

      ‘Shay-moos,’ he mimicked. ‘Who were you with before me?’

      ‘This is ridiculous. Why are you so jealous?’

      ‘Because you have me fucken destroyed,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry, Katherine. I just don’t know that I’m fit for you.’

      ‘Ah, please,’ she said.

      ‘Or for anybody,’ he said, and he stood up and walked out of the house.

      *

      The summer gave way without complaint. The light was thickening over the river now before eight. The long draw was well advanced. On Dromord Hill the colours of heartbreak came through. She had left him at the end of August. She moved back to the same apartment complex on the Cortober side. For almost the whole month of September Seamie Ferris slept like the dead. He would be up out of the bed for no more than an hour at a time, often much less. He had refused happiness when it was presented to him in the haughty form that he had always craved. What kind of a fucken fool was he? He drank milk from the carton by the light of the fridge in the middle of the night – never before in his life had he drunk from the lip of the carton. His skin itched and he had a whistling pain out the left lung. He believed that he might die. The two of them together could have made a small aloof republic on Dromord Hill – they could have written the rules for it. October. November. He hardly saw the town. He shopped at the Lidl on the Cortober side when he knew she’d be at work. On a dank winter morning he was trying to retrieve his coin from the trolley when a mullocker from the café came by, her face softening at the sorrowful sight of him.

      ‘Did you hear at all?’ she said, twisting the knife. ‘Did you hear Katherine went back?’

      *

      But now out of the winter-grey sky the soft magic again descended and he knew that the extent of his feeling was beyond the ordinary realm. He came to believe again that they were in telepathic contact with each other. Distance was no object to it. He sent mental messages down Dromord Hill and across the midland plain and across all the seas and the cities until at last the city of Stalowa Wola presented itself. The message he received back was that he must come to her and quickly.

      He flew on a Ryanair to Wrocław and took a bus, a train, and then another bus until he found the place. It was a new-looking city with vast white fields opening everywhere in the distance. He walked the freezing afternoon away. He had no idea how to find her. He had to trust that he would be steered. There was a Tesco on the outskirts that made the place oddly familiar. He might well be mad, but what of it? He must find her.

      An icy rain came across his face as he walked on. In an empty bar in what appeared to be the centre of the city, he drank a glass of red wine and tapped into his phone the wifi code. He went to the first place he always went – her Instagram account. It was fourteen minutes since she had at last posted a seventh image. It showed a detail of Dromord Hill – a whitethorn bank – in an evening sun flare. Her accompanying caption read, ‘Mam na mysli lato.’

      Google Translate: ‘I am thinking of summer.’

      Beneath her profile on the post was the place from which it had been sent – Kafé Komputery. He showed this name to the barman, and was directed to it. It was two lefts and a right, a five-minute walk. It must have been the last internet café in Europe. Its dim lights were cinema against the falling dark. Katherine, paler, still lovely, was at a terminal – all the others were unoccupied.

      She turned at once at the scraping of the door as he entered.

      ‘Oh, thanks be to fuck,’ she said.