That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today—from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier.

With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

Release date: January 12, 2021

Publisher: Anchor

Print pages: 208

Sample

The Coast of Leitrim

 

Living alone in his dead uncle’s cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick. He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he’d exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.

 

“It’s like France,” he said to her one sunny morning in June. 

 

And it was true that the fields of the mountain had all the week idled in what seemed a Continental languor, and the lower hills east were a Provençal blue in the haze, and the lake when he lowered himself into it was so warm by the evening it didn’t even make his midge bites sting. 

 

“The heat,” he tried again. “Makes the place seem like France. We wouldn’t be used to it. Passing out from it. Ambulance on standby.”

 

His words blurted at the burn of her brown-eyed stare. She didn’t lose the run of herself by way of a response but she said yes, it is very hot, and he believed that something at least cousinly to a smile softened her mouth and moved across her eyes. He had learned already by listening in the café that her name was Katherine, which was not what you’d expect for a Polish woman but lovely.

 

At thirty-five years of age, Seamus Ferris was by no means setting the night on fire at the damp old pebbledash cottage on Dromord Hill, but he had no mortgage nor rent to pay, and there was money from when the father died, a bit more again when the mother went to join him, also the redundancy payment from Rel-Tech, and some dole. He had neither sister nor brother and was a little stunned at this relatively young age to find himself on a solo run through life. He had pulled back from his friends, too, which wasn’t much of a job, for he had never had close ones. He had worked for eight years at Rel-Tech, but more and more he had found the banter of the other men there a trial, the endless football talk, the foolishness and bragging about drink and women, and in truth he was relieved when the chance of a redundancy came up. He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feeling. He drank wine rather than beer and favoured French films. Such an oddity this made him in the district that he might as well have had three heads up on Dromord Hill. 

 

He believed that Katherine, too, had sensitivity. She had a dreamy, distracted air, and there was no question but that she seemed at a remove from the other mulluckers who worked in the café. The way she made the short walk home in the evenings to the apartments across the river in Cortober again named a sensitivity—she always slowed a little to look out and over the water, maybe to see what the weather was doing, perhaps she even read the river light, as Seamus did, fastidiously. He could keep track of her route home if he parked down by the boathouse, see the slender woman with brown hair slow and turn to look over the water, and it was only with a weight of reluctance that she moved on again for home.

 

In the sleepless nights of the early summer his mind ran dangerously across her contours. He played out many scenarios that might occur in the café, or around town, or maybe on a Sunday walk through the fields by the lake. It was a more than slightly different version of himself that acted his part in these happy scenes: Seamus as a confident and blithe man, but also warm and generous, and possessed of a bedroom manner suave enough to ensure that the previously reticent Polish girl concluded his reveries roaring the head off herself in gales of sexual transport. Each morning when he awoke once more in an aroused state—there was no mercy—it was of Katherine from the café that he thought. She was pretty but by no means a supermodel, not like some of the Eastern Europeans, with their cheekbones like blades, and as Seamus was not himself hideous, he felt he might have a chance in forgiving light. All he had to do was string out the few words right in his mouth. 

 

He was in the café by now four or five times a week, and she was almost always on. The once or twice she hadn’t been were occasions of crushing disappointment, and he’d glared hard at the mulluckers, as they bickered and barked like seals over the trays of buns and cakes. Even the hissing spout of the coffee machine was an intense annoyance when Katherine wasn’t there. Along with its delicacy, Seamus’s mind had, too, a criminal tendency—this is often the way—a kind of native sneakiness, though he would have been surprised to have been told this. The café’s toilet was located right by the kitchen, and Seamus could not but notice what looked like a rota pinned to the back of the kitchen door. Catching his breath one Monday morning, he reached in with his phone and took a photograph, and in this way he had her hours for the week got. Also, her full name.

 

 

 

Katherine Zielinski she was called, and he wasn’t back in the van before he had it googled—it might be unusual enough inside quote marks to give quick results, and indeed within seconds he was poring over an Instagram account in her name. The lovely profile picture confirmed her identity—it was his Katherine all right, with her fourteen followers. She had posted only six times, six images, going back to the January previous, and relief flooded through him like an opiate when he found no photos of a boyfriend nor of a baby. It was something more intense than an opiate that went through him when he studied the most recent post, which was from the weekend just gone. It was of Katherine’s right hand resting on the bare thighs revealed by her shortish denim skirt, and in the hand she clutched a slim box set—it was “Tales of the Four Seasons,” four films by Éric Rohmer. Her accompanying caption read, “Goracy weekend.”

 

It was a swift job to go to Google Translate with that and find that it meant, merely, “Hot weekend.” She had humour as well as taste, it appeared, though in truth Seamie Ferris wouldn’t be putting Rohmer at the top of the league in terms of the French directors; he would in fact rate him no more than highish in the second division, but at least he might be able to argue to her a rationale for this. Her knees were lovely and brown, though possibly a little thickset, but as it was a case of mother fist and her five daughters up in the pebbledash cottage, this was not a deal-breaker.

 

He spent time with the other images. He tried to decipher them or, more exactly, to decipher from them something of her character. Her only other personal appearance was in a blurry selfie that showed her reflection in a rain-spattered windowpane and that was suggestive, somehow, of Katherine as a solitary. There was a poor vista of the river from the bridge at evening. The rest of the images were reposted from other accounts—someone’s pencil drawing of Sufjan Stevens; a cityscape that might have been of the Polish winter, its streetlights a cold amber; and, finally, a live shot of Beyoncé at a concert in Brazil in the stance of some new and utterly undefeatable sexual warrior. These images spoke to Seamus Ferris, in a low, insistent drone, of a yearning he recognised, and he felt that now he should end his playacting and confide his feelings to the woman.