We're celebrating Irish Book Week (which runs 18th - 25th October) with a series of choice extracts from outstanding new Irish titles - read an extract from Brendan Mac Evilly's debut novel Deep Burn below.
Deep Burn is a frenetic tale of art and the value of obsession; fame and the price of envy; friendship and the uncertainty of love...
Prologue
It was Martha Knox's personal tragedy – so-called – that brought her initial fame. Not real fame. More at the local level – the second-glance-from-a-stranger – out shopping or at the pub. Glances usually followed by whispers. 'Isn’t that your one from the newspapers? Your man’s wife?’
It was a second tragedy, on a larger scale, that brought her international fame. Art-world fame. A tragedy embodied in a single photograph, of a human figure staggering about a field in West Kerry engulfed in flames. Scaled up to twice life-size, it hung on the back wall of the L-shaped gallery at IMMA. The entire exhibition had already toured to MOMA, Crèvecoeur, The Serpentine, and Tang Contemporary. In each city, the photograph at its centre was preceded by the controversy of its taking.
In the photo, it is night-time. The background is pitch black; the foreground is dark green. Flecks of grass are illuminated by a halo of light that shines from the subject at its centre. The figure. A human figure. Their chest already alight, the fire devouring the shirt’s cloth, creeping higher, beginning to sear the taut-skinned neck. Entering the long gallery and viewing the photo from a distance, the figure appears to flicker like a candle in a window on a stormy night, drawing you toward sanctuary. But up close, the face is clear and distinct, the chin glowing orange, jutting away from the flames, stretching into side profile. The one visible eye is squeezed shut and the jaw is gurning in agony, or perhaps still awaiting pain. Not yet feeling it. As with any pain, there’s always that slight delay. That brief moment between cause and effect; between impact and sensation.
Chapter 1
Martha rolled out of bed just before sunrise, not having slept in any case. The screen’s glare hurt her eyes as she googled times for early buses leaving Dublin. The hours that followed were a blur: the taxi, the station, the monotonous motorway flow. She got off at the station in Limerick, threw her phone in a bin, then hitched the next hundred miles, heading vaguely south-west.
It felt good to travel on autopilot. To feel not much at all, really. Switch off. Unsure how. Exhaustion probably. Still in a daze from the night before. In her mind, a picture appeared. Herself as a blue dot drifting across a digital map of the country, as far away from her starting point as possible. Slowly and peacefully drifting. She didn’t care where exactly. The other side. The far edge.
Last night, her husband had left her. It had been a mistake, he’d said. She could blame him (yes, she did!) but if the relationship wasn’t going to work, it was best to part ways before they hit their first anniversary (arbitrary!) It was nothing to do with her (of course it was). He had always been unsure about marriage (true, but also true of most of his decisions). If he did meet someone else in future (had he already?), he didn’t even know if he’d want kids (he definitely did). Maybe he was too old in any case (both of them were late thirties). And their recent discovery, that she couldn’t have kids (short of a miracle), had nothing to do with it. It absolutely did. She nearly laughed. Nearly.
Last night, her husband had left her, which was probably why she was on a bus now, leaving him. The shame of being the one cast off. Compounded by the reason behind it. And the fact that she’d hadn’t seen it coming. The shock of discovering she had married someone who, despite all the love he’d ever professed, could drop her so easily, so suddenly.
Around noon, she stopped for a break at a roadside garage, paid in cash for coffee and a sandwich. She caught sight of herself in the bathroom window. Standing the same five foot two she’d ever stood. Small, though she’d never felt it. Feeling it now, mind. And alone. Lonely, even. She continued on foot for another hour until the colour below the horizon turned from the dark green of distant hills to the blue of the ocean. The first hints of a seaside village appeared. With the summer sun at its highest and hottest, a cottage came into view. Outside was a hand-painted sign on a rotting piece of plywood:
‘ARTISTS GALLERY & STUDIO’
It hung from a rusty gate between two stone pillars. Was an apostrophe missing? Was there one artist or multiple? It was so poorly painted, so unloved, that she nearly kept walking, but then she peered over the hedgerow. The walls of the cottage were lime-plastered and white-washed, with soft-edged windows and a yellow Dutch door at its centre – a rural idyll beyond her wildest, clichéd dreams. Inhabited by an artist of all people. The romance of it brought her back to life. Woke her. Its scream of home. The balls of her feet were burning. She could feel blisters forming on the outsides of her baby toes. She stepped toward the granite slab lintel, then knocked and waited.
A moment later the half door swung open. The man who answered was tall, broad and healthy-looking. His face was faintly scarred from acne, like the rough carapace of a spider crab. Not a bad face, she thought. Strong and dignified. She’d have taken him for a farmer if she’d passed him on the road in his dowdy plaid shirt. His head was large, squarish, and still held most of its hair, though his nose was one an artist might prefer to paint than possess. She watched the look of surprise on his face turn abruptly to suspicion.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘who sent you?’
He managed to deliver the line with enough singsong to avoid insulting her, but still, she was confused.
‘Are you not open to the public? The sign?’ she pointed back.
‘Oh. You’re here for that?’
After another once-over, he opened the bottom half of the door.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you’re just not the usual type.’
He led her down a short, dark hallway and through to a brighter kitchen. A large window over the sink looked out to the hills above. Why else did people call here?
‘What’s the usual type?’ she asked.
‘More… I don’t know… touristy. You don’t look on holidays.’
How did she look? To him. She’d meant to do her face at the station. Regretted now not bothering. And then suddenly remembered the new fact of herself. Her singledom. Singlehood? Both terms unfamiliar. Both felt wrong.
Deep Burn is published by Marrowbone Books - find out more here
