A gypsy child leaves ‘the chalets of the asylum park’ next to one of the frantic arteries that serve Dublin and she walks and trains across Ireland until she is taken in by a strange anchorite, a ‘ferny, mossy, twisted old thing’ who takes her with him into his trailer in the woods. Barry’s language, as always, is astounding, his grasp of concision and of what is best to leave unsaid is exemplary. Something bad is going to happen here, you’ll be thinking, and your nerves will be tautened, zinging, waiting for that badness to come down. Does it? Well, on finishing this story, my beam could’ve been seen from space. I hovered three feet off the ground.
First published in The New Statesman, then The Berlin Quarterly, and collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020
A Personal Anthology 