Homesickness by Colin Barrett

Author:Colin Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2022-04-04T14:04:36+00:00

ANHEDONIA, HERE I COME

Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, ­knee-­length mackintosh, and balefully frail demeanour of a poet, or so he believed, as he pursued a lavishly wayward course across the mangy municipal parks, median strips and depressed residential quadrangles of his quarter of the city on another blustery October afternoon. One hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked and made rapid, furtive motions with his lips, as if in intense, collusive conversation with himself. Bobby was a poet.

He lived in a dilapidated apartment block on the ­south-­side inner city, a block so populated with retirees and pensioners that ­visitors – of which Bobby had absolutely ­none – often mistook it for a state retirement home. Bobby was certain he was the only resident under the age of sixty. The block’s ­corridors – the ­sour-­cream walls lit by ­low-­wattage sconces downy with dust; the furred, blue, perpetually damp carpeting in which ­shoe-­print impressions dolefully ­lingered – evoked for Bobby a budget version of the afterlife. It was, at least, a peaceful place, no noise but the ­late-­night dysphagic judders of the lift’s recurringly jammed doors.

Bobby walked six miles every day. He did so because a lengthy walk helped oxygenate the creative capacities as well as ­pre-­emptively dispel the oppressive sense of cabin fever that would consume him if he did not regularly remove himself from the tiny tomb of his ­one-­bedroom apartment. Also, there was a ­shopping-­centre car park three miles from his building where he bought weed from a schoolgirl on a ­near-­daily basis.

The city was bound on this side by a canal, and Bobby’s peregrinations tended to bring him, as now, into intermittent contact with this body of water. He noted the tarry density of its bilious murk, the tidemark of pearlescent scum bearding the ­centuries-­old brickwork as the canal subsided towards the stark quays and the notional sea beyond. Bobby traversed the back lane of a housing estate and detoured through a brushy interval that served as one of the numerous pickup sites scattered across this side of the ­city – with a grin he registered the dangling lobe of a used condom snagged on the branch of a bush like a dismal festive decoration. He stopped at a McDonald’s ­drive-­through, inhaled three ­one-­euro hamburgers, a fries and a Coke, and took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle bathed in the ­purple-­blue glow of ­anti-­injection UV lighting.

In the bathroom mirror Bobby studied himself.

With his cheeks flocked with old acne scars, the sebum gleam of his forehead, his significant but gracefully tapering nose (his favourite feature), inexpiably seedy smile, and untameable squall of dark curls, Bobby, at ­twenty-­nine, resembled a not unhandsome but grotesquely ancient teenager, a physical template he considered not unsuitable for a poet. Adolescence was the stage of human development at which nostalgia (that is, the awareness of mortality) first becomes fatally possible, and was the reft, the fracture, out of which poetry grows. The greatest poets, so Bobby believed,

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