I guessed she was talking about the Devil, but I didn’t say anything.
‘You’d never think someone who’d seen as many souls up close would be interested in acquiring his own. It’s like a pest exterminator deciding he wants to live in an anthill.’ After a moment she added glumly, ‘And bring me with him.’
‘He says he wants to get out of the game,’ I said.
‘The game is all he has.’
‘He’s in love with you.’
She laughed exotically, twists of smoke interbraiding with the writhing of her tail. ‘Love! You know he practically invented that? With the help of your friends there.’ She nodded at the book on the desk.
‘I know it sounds crazy,’ I persisted. ‘But he seems serious about it. He says he’s ready to make a real commitment.’
‘Commitment,’ she repeated. ‘Settling down. Holidays in Ireland, dinners in unimaginative, middle-of-the-road restaurants – do you think he’d actually enjoy any of that?’
‘Well, if he got out of his contract he might,’ I said. ‘Because there wouldn’t be that clause, stopping him from enjoying things.’
‘The clause?’ she repeated, smiling at me.
I gazed back at her stupidly.
‘Have you ever heard the famous paradox,’ she said conversationally, ‘Everything I say to you is a lie? Imagine if you were that person. Imagine how hard it would be to work out what you wanted. But I know what he wants. He’s like any other man. They think they want love. But really they’re all banging on Daddy’s door, begging to be let back in.’
She extinguished her cigarette in the palm of her hand. ‘A girl picks things up after ten billion years,’ she said.
‘Couldn’t you try it, at least? Just to see? How could it hurt?’
‘How could it hurt?’ she repeated to herself. She rose to her feet. She towered over me. She caressed my cheek with a talon. ‘Little boys,’ she said. Then, soundlessly, she turned to smoke, and hurtled up the chimney.
It was some months later that a parcel arrived from Switzerland with a brief, unusually effusive letter from the Devil inside, thanking me for making him ‘a very happy man’. He said that he and Baphomet were renting an apartment together in Lausanne; she was working freelance for the Paris fashion monthlies, while he pursued a trade in carpentry, a long-time hobby of his. There was a photo of the two of them by the lakeside, the Devil smiling goofily with his arm around his girlfriend, she staring coolly into the camera. Also enclosed was a spice rack he had built, a reward for my small part in bringing them together.
By that time I’d graduated from college and started interning at a publishing house; this is where I met Christine, who is now my wife. Voltaire – another sometime resident of Lausanne – called marriage ‘the only adventure open to the cowardly’. It’s certainly provided all the excitement I could need, and more. We have two children, Lucy and Tom: watching them grow up fascinates me, the transformation from helpless pink blobs into mysterious and complex personalities they’ve made up all by themselves.
Baphomet was right: this wasn’t the kind of adventure the Devil was looking for. The two of them split up after less than a year and threw themselves with redoubled vigour into their former careers. Having got what he wanted, he no longer wanted it: it was an old story, one he’d traded on for thousands of years. The mystery was that he’d expected anything different. Maybe he simply wanted to be on the other side of the bargain for once – to be the dope signing away his soul for a grand illusion, instead of the guy who knew the ugly truth. Maybe he just wanted to want, like people do.
It must be hard not to procrastinate when you’re immortal; it must be hard not to put off the lessons life’s trying to teach you for some other time when you’re more in the mood. After Baphomet, he embarked on a string of tempestuous affairs – with a well-known Hollywood actress, a Slavic princess-contortionist, and latterly a sweet-hearted girl composed entirely of mercury from the spiral nebula of Andromeda.
Sometimes, in between girlfriends, he’ll come and stay with us. He likes it here: he gets on well with Christine, as he does with all women, and he loves playing with the kids, who share his anarchic spirit and boundless capacity for destruction. He makes no secret of his loneliness: he is always quoting self-aggrandising bits of Paradise Lost to me—
In solitude
What happiness, who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find?
But when I try to talk him round – suggest, for example, that he could have this life, if he were willing to accept the compromises – he will merely grimace, or make a smart remark: ‘When you’re a cow, I’m sure that grass tastes pretty good.’
I can see his point. Why keep to one corner of the field when you can be the whole sky over it? Why be content with a single life when you can dictate the dreams of a multitude? Why tie yourself to a person or place that will finally fail you when you can live for the moment, endlessly changing, endlessly interesting, forever taking on irresistible new shapes? But the moment tends only to have room for one.
He’s in the house right now, for Lucy’s sixth birthday party. In the living room they’re playing musical chairs. If I listen closely, I can hear his hoof beats mixed up with the feet of the children as they dance in a circle, round and round. The song is Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of My Tears, the same one he played repeatedly in the rainy cottage all those years ago. I wonder if he remembers, if the memory will catch him off guard as he’s planning how best to cheat. The music freezes, a moment out of time; I picture the kids charging for the chairs, and the Devil lost in the scramble, out of the game again.
About the Authors
COLIN BARRETT is from Mayo. In 2009 he completed his MA in Creative Writing in University College Dublin (UCD) and was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. He has received Arts Council bursaries, and his fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, the anthology Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails and in the Harper Perennial 52 Stories online series. The story ‘The Clancy Kid’ was shortlisted for the 2011 Bridport Prize. A collection of his stories is forthcoming from Stinging Fly Press.
KEVIN BARRY (editor) has written two story collections and a novel. He has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best European Fiction, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. He lives in County Sligo.
GREG BAXTER is the author of A Preparation for Death and The Apartment. He was born in Texas in 1974. From 2003 to 2011, he lived in Dublin. He now lives in Berlin, where he writes and translates.
MARY COSTELLO, originally from Galway, lives in Dublin. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled The China Factory, was published in 2012 by Stinging Fly Press and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
JULIAN GOUGH sang on four albums by Toasted Heretic. He is the author of three novels, Juno & Juliet, Jude in Ireland and Jude in London, and a poetry collection, Free Sex Chocolate. He has won the BBC National Short Story Award and has been shortlisted, twice, for the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize. In 2011, he wrote the ending to Minecraft, Time Magazine’s computer game of the year.
MICHAEL HARDING is an author and playwright. His creative chronicle of ordinary life in the Irish midlands is published as a weekly column in the Irish Times. He has published three novels, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion and Bird in the Snow. His memoir of love, melancholy and magical thinking, Staring at Lakes, is published this year.
DERMOT HEALY was born in Finea, County Westmeath, in 1947. He has written poems, plays, screenplays, novels, short stories and a memoir. His works include the novels Long Time No See, Sudden Times and A Goat’s Song, the memoir The Bend for Home and the story collection Banished Misfortune. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Ballyconnell West in County Sligo.
DESMOND HOGAN was born i
n east Galway in 1950 and lives in Dublin. He has won many prizes, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. The Ikon Maker (1976), his first novel of many, has lately been reissued by the Lilliput Press. His work has recently appeared in Princeton University Chronicle, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, American Short Fiction, Cyphers and Best European Fiction 2012.
PAT MCCABE was born in Monaghan in 1955. His novels include The Dead School, The Butcher Boy and Winter Wood. He has written for screen and stage and is currently working on a novel and a book of short stories. His latest book, Goodbye Mr Fish/Hello Mr Rat is due from Quercus in September this year.
MOLLY MCCLOSKEY was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Ireland since 1989. She is the author of three works of fiction and, most recently, a memoir, Circles Around the Sun, which concerns her brother’s descent into schizophrenia. She is the writer-in-residence at UCD for 2013.
MIKE MCCORMACK is the author of two collections of short stories, Getting It in the Head and Forensic Songs, and two novels, Crowe’s Requiem and Notes from a Coma. Awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1996, Getting It in the Head was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2006, Notes from a Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. He was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in 2007. He lives in Galway.
NEASA MCHALE was born in Dublin in 1984. She studied History and English in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, and is now studying for a Masters in Library and Information Studies in UCD. ‘While You Were Working’ is her first published story.
LISA MCINERNEY is the author of award-winning blog Arse End of Ireland, a columnist for TheJournal.ie and editor of online magazine Ramp.ie. She’s spoken at literary events both at home and in the USA about new media, its effect on traditional publishing and its possibilities for writers. She lives in Galway.
ANDREW MEEHAN was, until recently, the Head of Development at the Irish Film Board. During this time he was the winner of the Cúirt International Literary Festival’s New Writing Award, and his short fiction appeared in The Stinging Fly as well as other journals. Now, he mainly writes screenplays.
PAUL MURRAY is the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Skippy Dies. He lives in Dublin.
NUALA NÍ CHONCHÚIR was born in Dublin in 1970. Her fourth short-story collection, Mother America, was published by New Island in 2012; the Irish Times said of it: ‘Ní Chonchúir’s precisely made but deliciously sensual stories mark her as a carrier of Edna O’Brien’s flame.’ Her debut novel, You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a gem’ by the Irish Examiner.
ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE was born in Dublin. She has written eight novels, six collections of short stories, several books for children, plays and non-fiction work. Her most recent collection of short stories is The Shelter of Neighbours (Blackstaff, 2012). She has won many literary awards, and her stories are widely anthologised and translated. Éilís is Writer Fellow in UCD where she teaches on the MA and MFA in Creative Writing. She is a member of Aosdána.
SHEILA PURDY was born in Dublin and studied at UCD, King’s Inns and the University of Ulster. Working in industry she travelled worldwide. On her return to study at UCD, she was conferred with a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing in 2011. She is writing a debut collection of short stories.
KEITH RIDGWAY is from Dublin. He is the author of The Long Falling (Faber, 1998), The Parts (Faber, 2003), Animals (Fourth Estate, 2007) and Hawthorn & Child (Granta Books, 2012). His short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, The Stinging Fly and others.
EIMEAR RYAN was born in 1986 and grew up in Tipperary. Her stories have appeared in New Irish Writing, The Stinging Fly and the Irish Times. She is a recipient of the Hennessy Award for First Fiction and an Arts Council bursary. She holds an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College and is writing her first novel.
WILLIAM WALL was born in Cork in 1955 and is the author of four novels, one collection of short fiction and three collections of poetry. This Is the Country was nominated for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He has won many prizes for fiction and poetry. His most recent book is Ghost Estate, a collection of poetry. Explore his website www.williamwall.net
First published in 2013
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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This anthology © Kevin Barry, 2013
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ISBN 978–0–571–29705–4
Kevin Barry, Town and Country
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