[Quote][indent][color=gray]Now they became obsessed with the idea that they had fallen into bad luck. They took heroin against the idea. The measured quantities that had distinguished their previous habits as models of noble restraint went out the fucking window. Now they were horsing into it. And the aura of bad luck was at once everywhere. It was around them like a nervous village. The stone hills spoke out the rumour of the bad luck. The wind blew the rumour in swirls about their feet. Bad luck, bad luck—the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven. The build was a disaster from the get-go. A young fella from Sneem, as broad as he was long, broke his leg on the first morning of construction. Word of the accident was around the fishwives of Berehaven like a fast fucking fire. Up on the wind-blown site, there was a sense that morning of fatalism, unhingedness, morbid introspection. Day two some fucking eejit with a kango hammer nearly took the marriage prospects off himself. Day five a thirty-two-year-old man from Glengarriff had a mini-stroke while he was mixing bags of sand and gravel. The builder Murphy was by now having trouble keeping his numbers up, and he was depressed and drinking heavily the length of the slow evenings in the West End Bar. Maurice drove into Cork city on Thursday mornings to meet the first Dublin train on which was ferried their week’s supply of heroin. The tenth morning of the build—a Friday—they were aware that the week’s supply had been badly cut and were raging about it, and just then Charlie Redmond phoned from Spain to say a speedboat containing a half-tonne of their Moroccan hashish had been taken by the Guardia Civil just as it came into La Línea de la Concepción. Bad luck, bad luck. The boat had been spotted at Ceuta, it seemed, but what were you going to do? Charlie Redmond was affecting a note of blithe indifference which Maurice Hearne was in no fucking form for. Putting foundations in the rocks of the hills above Berehaven was dreadful work. The rocks screamed and whined dangerously as they were drilled into. The children of the rocks cried out. We are making marks here that we have no right to make. We’ll answer for it. Bad luck, bad luck. He was starting to wonder if Cynthia had a thing for the builder Murphy, who was a big handsome uncouth motherfucker, but with dainty touches for the ladies, and his black depression perhaps lent a poetical air. Maurice drove alone above the site and looked down on the construction and masturbated sorrowfully about the girl who worked in the West End Bar in the afternoons. With Cynthia he mixed the cut heroin with cocaine to make speedballs, and they shot them up and fucked each other and then they’d have a fight after it. Bad luck, bad luck. The guards were driving past the site daily with interested little smiles. Another labourer spat blood copiously the first morning of the third week as the trench of foundations edged towards the fairy mound and he was never seen again. Half the builders on site by now were Spanish fishermen beached off the trawlers and good for nothing as they were lacerated by the weather. It had turned into a wet April and it was so cold in the sea-damp and Maurice Hearne was hearing old voices in the night. But they stuck at it. There was such a thing as bullheadedness. The houses started to break out across the hill—a crescent of nine houses to be named Ard na Croí. A boatload of cocaine worth two million pounds was taken a few miles down the coast, and Maurice was brought in and questioned. It was a Wednesday night. That he knew nothing was soon evident. As he left the stationhouse, the detective said—you’ll want an early start in the morning, Moss, get in and meet that Dublin train. He wanted to leave the place again but was rooted to it now. Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.[/color][/indent][/quote]
[indent][indent]— Kevin Barry, [i]Night Boat to Tangier[/i][/indent][/indent]