Kala

by Colin Walsh

The window of the bus. My forehead, rattling against the window of the bus. Beyond the glass, the world already turning into Kinlough. I know this, because of the weird evening light threading the sky, the sudden strangeness of the trees, the hot churn in my viscera. Soon I will have to get off the bus. Soon I will arrive where I already am. Kinlough.

Facebook was how we kept in touch, for a while. Gradually the fake-casual online chats died down, and we politely liked one another’s photos. This illusion of communication. People have always relied on certain excuses to explain why they lose contact—lost addresses, incorrect phone numbers. The internet simply removes those old justifications. Eventually I deleted my social media. Since then my relationship with Dad and Theresa has been a couple of emails per year. Which is fine by me. Last night Theresa and I arranged to meet at the bus station. She said she was looking forward to seeing me. That was kind of her. I said, me too. That was kind of me.

The bus station has changed. It used to be a giant shed with rotten pigeons surveying everything from the rusted beams, shitting on the tiled floor. Young guys in hoodies phlegming into the puddles between their runners and a rickety kiosk where they would sell fags without asking how old you were.

Bus stations, unlike airports, are never happy places. Just down the street, on the corner that leads into town, there is a person wearing a heavy black hoodie with the hood pulled tight around his skull, despite the heat, or because of the heat. He is standing like he has been struck by lightning. A petrified shadow. This is the natural citizen of the bus station. A hovering lunatic.

He’d tape mad stuff off the TV which ye’d watch at sleepovers above his mam’s café. Stuff with boobs in it and everything. Half the time ye didn’t understand the films at all. But ye’d watch them and know that ye were reaching out to something bigger than Kinlough—touching the Other Place, a world that was realer and more romantic than life—and sometimes the movie would linger in the room afterwards like an echo of the future and ye’d sit by the window of his mam’s flat and stare out over Fox Street saying nothing.

“Well, would you look,” another man said. He had a cudgelled face, like a heap of salted meat. Forehead ridged and folded like a brain. He was rolling a cigarette in giant shovel hands. “You’ve gotten very mature, Helen.”

As the lads came upstairs you caught your reflection in the mirror. You looked like a lad who’d been holding in a cough for years.

The girls cooed over me like I was their doll. They laughed, but they weren’t making fun of me or nothing. It was more like they were having fun with me. It wasn’t like laughing with lads: they weren’t going to attack me, or put me down. There was something soft inside the laughs, even as they got hyper. I started laughing too, cos laughter catches that way, maybe, but it was like I was opening to the whole room, and the room—with the girls, the laughter, the candles, all of it—was swelling me up, making me bigger than I was. And it was weird, but. I don’t know. I was in serious danger of enjoying myself.

Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.

Every article leads with the photo from the missing posters. I took this photo. Kala’s eyes, flared at what was happening beyond the camera. Her bloodpunch mouth opening into the start of a laugh. The giddiness. I once loved this photo, before it acquired its eeriness.

She’s ranting away on my arm but I know this is her way of saying, “I’m broken-hearted, Mush. I’m devastated.” It’s just Helen can’t come out and say that. She has to dress up her emotions in attitude, the way I dress up mine in quiet. But she knows I know that about her, and she knows that about me, too. So we’re having this whole other, deeper conversation between us, right now, without needing to speak it, cos it’s always been this way with us. Some people you can just know.

“Sentimentality is for people who want the luxury of an emotion without paying any price for it.” “Oh, that’s clever, Helen,” you say. “That’s Oscar Wilde, Joe.” “Terrible to be cynical.” “I’m cynical?” she says. “This country invents a fake past, packages it for tourists as a product, and then cons itself into believing that somehow it’s all real. When the reality of this place—”

even come close to actual introspection?” “Heleeen,” Mush drones playfully. “Heleeeen.” Mush gets her in a headlock and she starts to punch him in the side. They squabble like that, like siblings, rolling over on their sides. Helen starts laughing. “Heeeeleeeeeen,” Mush shouts. The blondes are bewildered. More flustered by the happy violence between Helen and Mush than anything Helen has said.

So on days when I look out on Fox Street and I don’t see any goodness to the world, I try and catch myself, cos I know it’s there, and if I can’t see it, it’s my own fault. My brain’s just focusing on reasons to feel depressed about shit. If you can’t get one laugh out of every day, you’re fucked.

Get to know anyone and that’s what happens; they shed one layer of mystery after another, the dismal burlesque towards their inevitable ordinariness. There’s a reason the surface of things is so appealing: it’s the same reason we don’t see what’s going on inside us all the time. Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they’re fucking ugly.

yours is the music the world chooses to accompany such false moments, because the people who engineer such moments recognize your music as being fit for this, and you sold them your music for this, and this is who you are, and how you will be remembered, if you are remembered, till you are forgotten, like all things are forgotten, like Aidan on this canal bank is forgotten, but you remember, and you drink.

The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction.