ONE OF NPR''S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 • INSTANT IRISH TIMES #1 BESTSELLER • ONE OF “A master class in building suspense…Walsh manages a deft balance between adolescent angst and ecstasy -- discoveries bringing horror, sorrow and joy -- and the more deliberate, often elegiac reflections of adulthood, reckoning with the promises of the past." -- In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. Helen, Joe, and Mushwere part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot center. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now it’s fifteen years later. Helen has reluctantly returned to Ireland for her father’s wedding; Joe is a world-famous musician, newly back in town; and Mush has never left, too scared to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café. But human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance. Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its own secrets, in a story that builds from a smolder to a stunning climax, <Kala< brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.

Autorentext

Colin Walsh

Leseprobe
Mush

I’m the wrong side of thirty and I still love it when summer bursts over this town. That school holiday vibe. First hint of suncream or cut grass hits the air, and I get the tingly bellyflut feeling. It’s always a surprise, like. As if every year I forget those smells exist, and bam! The world’s young again. Then it’s the stretch in the evenings, the drone of the bees, all that good shite.

After close-up I sit by the window of the caf with a six-pack of Tuborg on the counter. I knock the cans back as I watch Kinlough melt into a glisten, parading itself up and down Fox Street, being pure fabulous. People look the most alive they’ve been all year, like. Their smiles that bit wider. This type of heat makes shite out of everyone—people are lobster red and delirious by the end of the first week of it—but no one gives a fuck, cos Kinlough’s being a giddy carnival of itself, all saturated colours. Mams with prams, pizza-faced young bucks messing, young wans smoking, all shimmering and exaggerated movements. For a few weeks a year, Kinlough gets to be the place it really wants to be.

Last summer, when I still smoked, I used to duck out the caf every couple of hours, telling Mam I was out for a rollie. But what I really wanted was a few minutes’ peace to let summer flow over myself, and I could linger and merge with it.

No chance of that this year. I glance out the window whenever I can, but there’s no let-up. Town’s surging. You can smell the money. People come into the caf and make their orders in hysterical voices, sweat beading off them the second they hit the air conditioning. It’s a pain in the hoop. Mam loves it, of course. She has the chats with the punters, shouting over the scream of the bean grinder, handing out compliments with every coffee. I keep my back to her and the punters as I prepare the orders, throwing an eye to the madness of town outside. I’m like a dog in a hot car. Hard to even daydream when it’s this busy.

All the while, the queue’s getting longer, but Mam coos at babies, tells young fellas they’re filling out nicely—“Oh, you’ll break a few hearts!” that sort of bollocks—and she knocks a bit of craic out of little kids too. Leans over the counter and they look up at her, all moon-eyed next to their mothers. Mam insists on calling me away from my jobs to offer them some of the crumbled bits of brownie that we keep in a little basket by the till. I hold the basket out like some sort of medieval beggar. Mam gets all excited about the exchange, like it’s a real moment. She says, “That’s Mush’s Brilliant Brownie! Mush makes that every week, for good girls and boys like you!” The kids just paw at their mouths with the cake, in a world of pure chocolate. Then the mothers say stuff like, “What do you say to the nice man?” and the kids thank me in that vacant, haunted way kids have. I keep my face turned from them. Some mothers make a big hoo-ha of how grateful they are for Mush’s Brilliant Brownie, eager to show that my face doesn’t bother them. Others look uncomfortable, alarm in their eyes, despite themselves, and I can respect the honesty in that, even if it does send red blotches pattering up my neck. I mumble some thanks and get back to making the coffees with a towel thrown over my shoulder, head low, glancing out the window, counting down the hours till closing, when everyone will finally fuck off and I can crank up the sound system and have my few cans at the window, watch town do its thing for a bit, float into the beer buzz like a kite cutting its own strings.

It’s not easy. People are hyped. You’d like to think it’s cos of the Races, and the Festival with the parade, all that. Well, it’s not. There was a body found down the woods last week. By the lake. Human remains, that’s what they’re calling it. No one knows who it is. Was. Punters look around as they mutter about it. Human remains, they go, whispering loud enough to be heard, desperate to appear like they might have secret information.

Mam’s as bad as any of them. When Auntie Pauline came in earlier, I assumed it was to talk about her upcoming wedding. But the chat immediately swerved off the road into the ditch of human remains. Human remains, the pair of them said, eating each other’s words, delighted something’s happening, something you might read about in the paper.

People are as ghoulish, like.

Everyone’s got a theory about it. Even me. Some dark part of me immediately thought it’d be Kala. I didn’t want to think that, but sure you can spend your life wanting your brain to work one way and not another, walking around trying to control your thoughts like some fucking Rain Man. No use. The brain does what it wants. People mention human remains and a switch gets flicked in my skull and I see limbs lying in the mulch of the lake like the severed hands in Jaws, spilling with claw-clicking crabs. Only suddenly it’s not limbs, it’s Kala and she’s my friend and we’re still fifteen and she’s looking at me like I can still help, and it’s horrible.

So I kept quiet today, even as Mam and Auntie Pauline gossiped about it. Then they started going at me about getting my hair cut for the wedding. Mam said I’d a head on me like something dragged through a hedge. She wouldn’t leave me alone till I agreed to get a clip, just so they’d give me a bit of peace. Turned away from them and focused on things to look forward to.

My few cans of Tuborg. I’ve had them cooling in the fridge all day.

And now it’s only me and the sound system. I’ve counted the register, mopped the floor, wiped down the tables. I’m almost at the point where I can take my spot at the window.

I’m stacking the last of the chairs when the bell on the door tinkles and the twins come in doing their imperious little march to their favourite booth. Auntie Pauline named the twins Donna and Marie, after the Osmonds. Donna has her hair rowed into these knackery braids, and she’s wearing her I’m-sixteen-and-this-world’s-brutal puss …