The following is an excerpt from The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow the debut novel from Irish author Danny Denton.
Down past sodden riverside shanty towns they travelled, and down past towered towns too. Through jungles of tufted sedge and willow forests, parting lagoons of duckweed and bladderwort. They saw rubbish heaps ablaze, and factories pumping smoke into the rain. They saw wild fireworks, and shimmering elevated rail lines, and lights on hilltops.
/What would you have?/ he wondered as the child moaned.
He’d bought cola, and chocolate, and an orange. Kids liked cola and chocolate. In a plastic container he’d found pieces of soft potato and so he bought those also. He’d put cola in a bottle he found in the babba bag and fed it to the child. The child had winced, drank, winced and drank. She had cried out. Her face was soft and round and swollen and her cheeks pink. Snot burst in bubbles from her nose and he squeezed the snot away between his finger and his thumb.
Then he crushed the pieces of soft potato in his free hand and held them up to the babba’s face. The babba only cried and pulled her head away. Then the cola came back out the babba’s mouth, only more oily, and she sicked it down her babba clothes and the kid’s skins. So, cursing, the kid took the babba out to the rail again and held her out now from his skins over the ferry’s wake.
Churning, thrashing, the wake below consumed the babba’s brown strings of vomit. The rain on the dark river came thin and slow, in snaking waves, and the waves and the firmness of them gave everything a rhythm like music. They called that kind of snaky rain the Shiv’ring. It was a mystical rain, and such it was on this night, the world shifting aft and afore in sound and vision. Even at his arms’ length his child seemed lost in that Shiv’ring.
While she wailed and vomited, wailed and vomited, he noticed from the stern a view of a town above jungle leaves that flapped. The lights were orange and gentle and spread about like the galaxies he’d seen on the TeleVisio. Like the stars of old they hovered, watching over the people of the town. They were friendly lights, though he could not imagine a friendly town.
/Why won’t you fukken hold anything down?/ he asked her, when she was nestled in his skins again.
He kissed her cold harsh cheek and with a small dirty towel he stroked her wet head and back and legs. For only a moment more his eyes were given to the town lights and then they were lost and there was only the steady Shiv’ring, dark foliage, the echoes of waves and engines on the river, and the electric transmissions of ghostly machines unseen.
/Let’s try again/ he whispered to her, and so, waves and nightcalls lost to them, they stepped back into the ferryboat bar and under hanging lights began to tack back and forth across the muggy heat and the mansweat stench of the room, finding their seat in the corner still unoccupied.
The febrile tremors of the engines he felt still below the accordion music. It was deep night at this stage and people were flootered and starting to roar. The accordion spiralled up and down all the while in the background of the shouting and laughing and scolding and the old river pushing against the helm and the engine chugging away as the night turned its own wheel.
/I feel one hundred years old this night/ he said to his daughter, who was falling under the spell of the boat’s rhythm as the poetry of a thousand voices careered around them in slurs and spats and vicious prayer, foam of beer spinning back and forth over the laughter, threats and protestations. He wondered what the smells of gargle and meat would mean to his child.
For she seemed to be making her own investigations all the time, and this strange person who held on to her, his only significance was that he got in her way, pulled her back from carrying out all sorts of worldly studies. And her eyes. He felt like they were ancient in some way. Like everything about those eyes was in him from the day he too was a babba, before that even, and so what happened to him could only happen her, and then he was thinking, oh my girl, my girl, my girl!
The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton is out now and published by Granta. Priced £12.99
Read our interview with the author here.
Words: Danny Denton
Artwork Credits: Dan Stiles
